A Gentleman's Murder

by Christopher Huang

  “Aldershott?” thundered Saxon.

  “Edward?” Martha Aldershott’s hoarse choke carried over Saxon’s angry bellow.

  “I owed Parker my life,” Aldershott replied stiffly.

  “What would you have done?” Bradshaw erupted. “He couldn’t see Parker hang—we couldn’t see Parker hang. Parker wasn’t responsible, and he’d saved too many other lives to be doomed for the loss of one. Yes, I was there, and you’re not to blame Aldershott for what we did. It was my idea.” He was looking at Mrs. Aldershott as he said this; his words were for her benefit. Mrs. Aldershott looked away from her husband and set her eyes steadily forwards, at Eric.

  “I know,” said Eric. “But I also know what Benson had discovered: that the scene you found was staged. Parker didn’t kill Emily. Covering up her murder has resulted in two things. First, Parker’s lived for the past six years believing himself guilty, and paying his own price for a crime he didn’t actually commit. Second, the actual killer got away free and has done two more murders.”

  Bradshaw said, “That’s not possible. I know what I saw that day.”

  Eric turned to Saxon for the answer, and Saxon said, “Emily never stabbed anyone with those scissors, least of all Parker, and Parker never attacked her. He came at me with a poker, and I defended myself with this.” He flicked open his pen-release. “I gave him that scar he’s got now. Emily gave him a sedative, and the last I saw of them, she was getting ready to apply bandages.”

  Wolfe stared, fascinated, at Saxon. “So you were the spy! Parker showed me—”

  “I was not a spy!” Saxon shouted, rounding angrily on Wolfe. “I was working for British military intelligence!”

  Wolfe just smirked, and Saxon finally settled down, grumbling to himself.

  Eric continued, “Benson had been sorting through Sir Andrew Sotheby’s old files, and he realised that the report did not match what he thought he knew about it. The long, slim single blade of a knife leaves a very different sort of cut from the short, thick double blades of a pair of scissors. You wouldn’t have thought he’d been wounded with the scissors unless there was blood on them, so how did that blood get there? It had to have been put there deliberately by someone intending to frame Parker. Was there supporting evidence for Parker’s innocence? Had Benson continued in his investigations, he might have learnt that Emily made the rounds of the quarantine ward afterwards, and that she even stayed to discuss Bible passages with Wolfe.” He turned to Mrs. Aldershott. “I ask you, would Emily, a trained nurse, leave Parker alone after he’d been violent, unless she were certain he was no longer a threat to himself or others?”

  Mrs. Aldershott said, “She might, if it were absolutely unavoidable, but she’d stay on the alert. I certainly don’t see her sitting down for a friendly chat with anyone.” Her answer was almost mechanical, coolness prevailing over sentiment.

  Eric nodded. “Exactly. So Parker was no longer a threat. The sedative had taken effect, and he was fast asleep. But he believed what he was told about Emily. He believed he’d killed her in a blackout induced by shell shock. When Benson came to the Britannia, it was not to expose Parker, but to clear his name—to save him from his burden of unwarranted guilt. That’s why he collected the evidence he did and put it together in his vault box: the photograph showing Parker at Sotheby Manor on the day of Emily’s disappearance; the medical report explaining the nature of his facial wound; the surgical scissors which were supposed to have inflicted that wound but were ill-designed to do so; and the hypodermic kit, whose significance we’ll come to later. That’s why he was hesitant about entering into the bet. That’s why he decided at the last minute to spend the night in the club. And that’s why he was murdered.”

  Eric looked around. The others were silent. He’d been worried about Aldershott and Bradshaw, but the prospect of clearing Parker’s name seemed to have glued them to their seats.

  “Benson’s murder was less than a fortnight ago,” Eric continued. “You know what happened. On Friday night, Wolfe made a bet that he’d be able to break into the vault and extract something from Benson’s box. The next day, we found Benson in the vault with Aldershott’s letter opener in his neck. Aldershott’s office had been broken into and ransacked. I went up with Old Faithful to secure Benson’s room, and here’s what I found inside: the window open, and the covers thrown up on the near side of the bed. Benson had leapt out of bed on the far side, which is a narrow space of about a foot, to look out the window. He’d been concerned about the bet, and I think he left the window open, in spite of the temperature, because he guessed that Wolfe would attempt to enter via the back entrance, and he hoped to catch him at it. But, Wolfe, you’d been perfectly silent, hadn’t you?”

  “Of course. I’m insulted that you should even question it.”

  “I wondered, What could have awakened Benson and brought him down from his room? Then I remembered the open transom in Aldershott’s office. Whoever broke open Aldershott’s office door would have made some noise, and sound carries in the passage outside. It woke Benson up, and he hurried down, expecting to find Wolfe in the vault. He didn’t happen to look into Aldershott’s office as he passed, as that wasn’t his objective, but whoever was in there saw Benson hurry past. This person snatched up the letter opener, followed Benson down to the vault, and stabbed him.”

  “So it was a burglar,” Aldershott said. “Just as I surmised.” He almost looked as though he approved.

  “A burglar wouldn’t have seen the need to follow Benson anywhere, Aldershott. This was someone who had a reason to want Benson dead, and a reason to break into your office. So the question is, what do you have in your office that someone would want to break in there for?”

  “My papers, obviously.” The near approval on Aldershott’s face disappeared and was replaced by irritation. “They represent the investments of half the Britannia Club.”

  “Then why didn’t this burglar make off with them once Benson was dead? When all is said and done, he made off with only one item: the hypodermic kit from Benson’s box. Perhaps this was what he was after all along. If so, then the thing he wanted from your office was the memo containing the combination to the vault. As for the hypodermic kit, it was found later at Sotheby Manor, where it had been mangled and chucked into the heart of a fire. It was badly damaged, but not destroyed. Whatever its reason for being there, it ties the murders together: if Benson’s killer had taken the kit from the vault, then Benson’s killer was present at Sotheby Manor at the time of the fire, and was almost certainly responsible for Mrs. Benson’s death. This person was therefore someone familiar with both the Britannia Club and with Sotheby Manor—familiar enough to know how to bypass the servants and convince Mrs. Benson to join them for a nice cup of tea in the office.”

  “That’s nearly everyone in this room,” Wolfe said, looking around. “I’d have washed Saxon out, but he’s just admitted to having visited once with no one the wiser. Mrs. Aldershott?”

  “I’ve never been to Sotheby Manor,” Mrs. Aldershott said. “Emily always found some excuse when I visited Chichester.”

  “We need to consider the significance of that hypodermic kit,” Eric said. “Unlike the other items in Benson’s vault box, it doesn’t seem to have ties to Parker. Instead, it’s characterised by a distinctive monogram: a stylised S, like the one on Saxon’s pen-release.”

  Two—at least two—chairs scraped back as their occupants stifled their reactions. Eric turned to one of them. “Mrs. Aldershott, your maiden name was Saxon. You passed a great many of your belongings on to Emily over the years, including, you mentioned, the tools of your trade. That hypodermic kit used to be yours.”

  “And I gave it to Emily, yes.” Mrs. Aldershott grew pale. “I don’t know how it wound up in Benson’s possession, or in the fire at Sotheby Manor. The last time I saw it was before I went to Flanders for the War. That was nearly ten years ago.”

  “Those who worked with Emily at Sotheby Manor recognised it well e
nough. Benson must have. But others wouldn’t have. Your husband certainly didn’t; he’d kept it in his vault box for the last six months without realising what it was.”

  Aldershott frowned. “What are you talking about, Peterkin?”

  “Old Faithful told me about a package wrapped in brown paper that you put in your vault box the day after you were elected club president, and which you never took out. That was the hypodermic kit, wasn’t it? You’d forgotten about it until you decided to give your box to Benson, and then you gave the kit to him as well.”

  “Yes. So? It was a perfectly good hypodermic kit, and Benson had ideas of setting up Sotheby Manor as a rest home for addicts. He would have found it useful.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I took it … I got it from Norris.”

  Norris, who’d been ignored up to now, sat up in the sudden attention.

  “You confiscated it from Norris,” Eric said, “six months ago, when you discovered he was in the grip of a morphine addiction. You said you discarded the empty morphine bottle and put the rest away—meaning the kit. Then you shipped Norris off to the Bensons at Sotheby Manor for a rest cure.”

  “The so-called Italian tour!” Wolfe exclaimed. “I knew there was something fishy about that story. Not much of the Neapolitan sun at Sotheby, is there?”

  “We all make mistakes,” Norris protested, embarrassed. “That’s in the past, Peterkin. Honest. There’s no need to go into it, is there?” His tone was pleading, and it was for more than just the story of his past addiction.

  Eric said, “But if whoever killed Albert and Helen Benson had also killed Emily Ang, then the question before us is this: Why would anyone want Emily Ang dead? The only secret she had seems to have been a love affair, a secret lover who’d left her in the family way.”

  Of the people in the room with whom Eric had yet to discuss Emily’s pregnancy, only Bradshaw showed surprise at the news. Wolfe, of course, would never allow himself to express something so gauche as surprise.

  “Who was Emily’s secret lover?” Eric held up a photograph. “This photograph shows Norris in an upstairs window, with Sotheby Manor spread out in the background. Not in the house itself, then, but on the grounds. The groundskeeper’s cottage, in other words, which was reserved for nurses at the time, ‘women only.’ For Norris to have been there, he had to be let in by the person taking the photograph: Emily Ang. You were intimate with her, Norris.”

  “I get on quite well with most women,” Norris said. “That’s really no secret. Look, this isn’t because I’m getting sweet on your sister, is it? Whatever happened with Emily happened a long time ago. It’s not fair to hold these old mistakes against me.”

  “How did you come to possess Emily’s hypodermic kit, Norris?”

  “I … well, all right. I stole it. I’d got into the morphine, hadn’t I? Having my own hypodermic was more useful than you can imagine.”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt that you did. She did lose it for a time, but she wrote in her notebook the day before her death that she’d found it again. And it wasn’t just a tool: it was a gift from her sister, and she had no plans to let it out of her sight again.”

  Norris stood up. “This is ridiculous! If Benson got the kit from Aldershott, why aren’t you looking at him? He could have taken it from Emily himself.”

  “Norris! How dare you!” Aldershott’s spectacles flashed angrily in the light of the chandelier. He turned back to Eric. “I took that kit from Norris. That is God’s own truth, and I will swear to it on any number of Bibles.”

  Norris hesitated between sitting and running, and finally dropped into his seat again as Saxon moved to place himself in front of the sliding doors.

  “I believe you, Aldershott,” Eric said, “because Benson believed you. He knew you had no reason to lie. You could have taken anything from Emily after her death, and your possession of her kit would have been meaningless. Besides, I know you removed the photograph and the medical report from Benson’s vault box before Wolfe got there that night. As far as you were concerned, that saved Parker from inquiry, and you’d got what you wanted. You had no reason to kill Benson after that.”

  Saxon was glaring at Norris, and Mrs. Aldershott had risen to do the same. Bradshaw was leaning forwards in his chair, massaging his forehead with one hand as he stared down at the herringbone parquet.

  Eric turned to Norris and said, “The kit places you at the murder of Emily Ang. We all know you were right here in the Britannia when Benson was murdered. You were there for Mrs. Benson’s murder too. While waiting for your train back, you popped into the Green Elephant, beside the Chichester station, and passed the time playing your own composition on the standing piano there. Wolfe heard it, and recognised it later when you played it at Aldershott’s dinner party.

  “I told you I’d heard it before,” Wolfe said. But his face bore none of its usual smugness. It was as dead serious as everyone else’s.

  “You told me, quite insistently as I recall, that you’d spent that morning lost in a morphine-induced stupor at Brolly’s. Why would you lie about where you were that morning,” Eric asked Norris, “unless there were a worse reason for you to be in Chichester? Why bring it up at all?”

  Norris shook his head wordlessly.

  “You obtained a bottle of morphine after the music hall show we both attended on Thursday night, then made your way to Sotheby Manor by the earliest train you could. You called on Mrs. Benson, bypassing the servants by using the west wing entry. She didn’t suspect a thing. You got her into the office on some pretext, drugged her tea with the morphine, then jumbled out anything you thought might incriminate you and set it on fire. When Penny remarked on your anxiety that afternoon, it was because you’d just done a murder, not because you were coming out of a morphine stupor.”

  “No,” Norris said, finally finding his voice. It was hoarse, as though he’d never used it before. “I’m not a killer, Peterkin. You know me. Even if Emily and I were lovers—”

  “I think you were afraid of being tied down by this new responsibility. It’s no fun worrying about a family, is it? Or perhaps you may even have been afraid of what it could mean for you socially. People talk about how brave my parents were to cross the racial divide, but my father was a colonel with enough social status that gossip and calumny couldn’t touch them. You didn’t have that. And while artists and musicians often manage unconventional lifestyles, you still had your name to make at the time. You urged Emily to get rid of the baby, but she came back from her outing that Saturday determined to keep it after all. So you fought. When she turned away, you snatched up the poker and struck her in a rage. Twice. I think you regretted it immediately, but now you had a dead woman on your hands. What to do? There was Parker, asleep and dead to the world. All you had to do was drag him out of bed, remove his bandages, and tear out the final page of Emily’s notebook where she’d noted down the administration of Parker’s sedative. Now it looked as though he’d killed Emily in a fit of shell shock.”

  Norris said, “I did no such thing. The only people there were Benson, Aldershott, and Bradshaw. Look at them, not me.”

  Aldershott grew even colder towards him. He turned to Eric. “Go on, Peterkin. Let’s hear the rest of it.” Mrs. Aldershott nodded her agreement, her face as grim as her husband’s.

  “Norris knew Benson was looking into the matter of Emily’s death, but he thought he was safe. Benson was focused, at the time, on clearing Parker. But on Friday night, Aldershott sat up late in his office, and he had company. There were two used glasses there the next morning. Aldershott, you were up with Norris, weren’t you?”

  “Aldershott—”

  “If you’re innocent, you’ll have nothing to hide,” roared Aldershott before turning to Eric. “Yes, Peterkin. I was up with Norris.”

  Eric asked, “And you talked about Benson and the bet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell Norris about giving the hypodermic kit to Benson?
”

  “Yes. I didn’t think anything of it.”

  Eric nodded. “And from that moment, Norris knew he had to get the kit out of Benson’s vault box. A poker might be sufficient to pry open the box compartment, or so he hoped, but he needed the combination to the vault door. After Aldershott left the office, Norris waited a bit to be sure no one was about, then broke in to find it. And the rest we already know.”

  The silence was absolute. Norris straightened up in his seat. The look he gave Eric was calm and devoid of his usual humour. He stood up, straighter than Eric had seen before, and said, “That’s all very entertaining, provided you’re not the one being accused of murder here. And what have you got, really? Words! Wild conjecture!”

  “It’s enough to get the police to start looking in the right places,” Eric said, “once I speak to them in the morning and show them what I have.” He held up an envelope that bulged in the middle with something hard and metallic. “This is Saxon’s key, which he used to keep hidden behind a loose brick over a window by the back door.”

  “My key.” Saxon started forward, his eyes blazing. Eric took a step back from him, but his rage was directed at Norris. “My key? You used my key to do all this?”

  Wolfe stood up. “Steady on, old man, you don’t want—”

  Saxon launched himself at Norris, and Wolfe was only just able to pull him back in time. Bradshaw stood up as well, and helped Wolfe wrestle Saxon down into a chair. Saxon glared, then spat on the carpet. “I’ll see him hanged,” he muttered. “Hanged!”

  Norris returned his gaze steadily, his eyes bright.

  Eric said to him, “Norris, you told me once about being awakened by someone rattling the dustbins outside the window at the Britannia. I think you looked out and saw it was Saxon retrieving or returning his key. Wolfe did exactly the same. That came in useful when you had to leave in secret to dispose of your bloodied clothing and the hypodermic kit. I wonder, though, if you remembered to wipe it off, or if you even thought it might be considered evidence.”