The Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Said money,’ Grand poured for them both, ‘being tied up in the tea business …’

  ‘… the trustees of which can’t release the money, even to get her released from captivity, always assuming she is held captive.’

  ‘The person or persons unknown have sent ransom notes to her husband, but no one has seen them arrive. And now, one to said trustees, possibly delivered by a woman.’

  ‘Emilia was last seen,’ Grand said, taking his glass from Batchelor, ‘as she left Eastbourne, where she had been visiting an aunt in the company of her maid.’

  ‘Miss Moriarty being the aunt, Molly the maid,’ Batchelor added. ‘But there’s a problem with that.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Grand murmured.

  ‘Well, we don’t know for certain whether she actually got on the train at all, do we? I mean, we know from Byng that she never arrived in London, at least not on the train he met. And people can’t just disappear from a moving train, can they? Unless …’

  ‘Unless she got off at any of the stations in between,’ Grand nodded. ‘How many is that? You’re the local.’

  Batchelor shrugged; he wondered when Grand would acclimatize to the size of England as opposed to the great outdoors that was America. In Grand’s head, local was anything within about five hundred miles. In Batchelor’s experience, in London local was only within the borough or, in certain cases, the tenement. ‘I’d have to check Bradshaw,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of variables, such as whether she caught a stopping train, a fast, semi-fast.’

  ‘Semi-fast?’ Grand wasn’t sure he would ever completely understand this country.

  ‘That’s a—’

  Grand held up his hand; he didn’t really want to know. ‘However many it is,’ he said, sipping his brandy, ‘we don’t have the resources to check them all out. Nor to go house to house in Eastbourne, for that matter. And there’s the little matter of the maid,’ he continued. ‘We know she got to London, because I had the pleasure of bumping into her in the canal basin one very dark night. I’m still trying to forget.’

  ‘Sans hands and feet,’ Batchelor nodded. ‘Now, why would anyone do that? I mean, the other woman was well and truly disarticulated. Virtually nothing about her is recognizable. Yet Molly’s face, surely the most recognizable thing about a person, was intact.’

  ‘The finger,’ Grand said. ‘Emilia Byng’s finger, complete with wedding ring. What if the finger isn’t Emilia’s at all, but Molly’s?’

  ‘So the ring is the real thing, but the finger is somebody else’s. That would square with Kempster’s opinion, that the ring hadn’t been worn by the finger for very long. But why?’

  Grand leaned back again, his eyes flicking from Gladstone to Disraeli, but there was no hint of help from either of them. ‘What if our kidnapper’s getting cold feet?’ he asked.

  Batchelor looked at him sidelong. ‘Is that a joke, Matthew? If so, it is in remarkably poor taste.’

  ‘Dick Knowes has no information and if rumours are true, he knows every confidence trick and piece of skulduggery going on across the country at any one moment.’

  ‘So?’ Batchelor wasn’t following.

  ‘So, what if it’s an amateur? Somebody who’s never done this before? All right, Emilia Byng is in line for a fortune, but it’s not a fortune by Knowes’s standards – it’s penny-ante. Also, Knowes will know that she hasn’t got it yet, not by a long chalk – he’s bound to be in with every banker in London, and I use the word advisedly. If he had done this, he wouldn’t have done it, if you follow. He’s far too professional.’

  Batchelor clicked his fingers. ‘So, the kidnapper’s rattled. He’s out of his depth – and that’s not a joke either. Perhaps he saw it as some sort of game, get a few thousand from Byng and then go on his way. He may even be a friend, acquaintance, neighbour – someone who would know there was money, but not how tightly it was tied up. But now, it’s serious.’

  ‘Perhaps it got serious at Eastbourne Station, when he realized, late in the day, that Emilia had a maid in tow.’

  ‘Or at Waterloo – we still don’t know where he snatched them from.’

  ‘If it was a snatch – he might have just persuaded Emilia he was there to pick her up …’ Grand was putting his ducks in a row and could almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, mixing his metaphors as only a West-Pointer can. ‘But he has two women on his hands, not one.’

  ‘Not a problem if it’s a gang,’ Batchelor pointed out.

  ‘True, but if he is a loner. If he’s green, unsure of himself …’

  ‘… Emilia may have worked on him.’ Batchelor was refreshing their drinks. ‘Come all doe-eyed and sobbed about her loving husband, her dear old mum, her fluffy little kitten …’

  ‘So he relents,’ Grand sipped his brandy. ‘Not to the extent of letting her go, of course, but by cutting off the maid’s finger, not hers.’

  ‘And putting Emilia’s ring on it, just to show he means business.’

  ‘But why kill the maid?’ Grand mused. ‘I can’t imagine that Emilia would be in agreement with that. They’ve been together a long while, according to Auntie Moriarty; everyone says she is a kind woman. The Westmoreland brothers seemed very fond of her, for example.’

  ‘Perhaps he had to,’ Batchelor said. ‘Or perhaps she died.’

  Grand waved a hand across his throat. ‘Strangled,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm, yes … perhaps she was screaming. I know I would scream the place down if someone chopped my finger off.’

  Grand, who had seen far more than fingers chopped off without the soldier in question making a sound, forbore to comment, but Batchelor did have a point. ‘And there’d be blood, as well.’

  ‘Yes. True. So he kills her and dumps her in the river, to shut her up or for whatever reason. Perhaps she tried to escape …’

  ‘You’re being a bit too much of a journalist now, James. Let’s just go with the facts. He sees the news of the dismembered bits in the river and thinks why not add one more.’ Grand’s cigar had gone out through neglect and he relit it. ‘I wonder what Bliss is going to do?’

  ‘About what, in particular?’

  ‘Well, thanks to us, he now knows who Molly was. He’s identified one of his floating bodies.’

  ‘We had to tell him, Matthew. We’ve always said …’

  ‘… that if a serious crime has been committed, we must inform the police.’ Grand finished the sentence for him. ‘Yes, I know. But we must try our best to stop him pestering Selwyn Byng. Because once he gets involved in that, we can say goodbye to ever finding Emilia alive. If we’re right about our amateur kidnapper, he’ll panic. Emilia will become a third body in the Thames.’

  ‘We owe it to Byng to tell him,’ Batchelor said. ‘And now we have an address from Miss Moriarty, we should go round. It’s not fair to anyone to let them get bad news from Bliss. There is one thing we can be sure of, though,’ Batchelor stubbed out the remains of his cigar. ‘Daddy Bliss won’t be sharing this information with any of his Metropolitan colleagues. He’ll want this collar for himself. And that’ll slow him down. He’s given us till the morning, but I reckon it’ll be at least tomorrow afternoon before he gets round to it. After all, he’s only got six blokes and one of them just makes the tea and does the ironing …’

  ‘Now, James,’ Grand wagged a disapproving finger at him. ‘I won’t have you taking the rise out of Lloyd Brandon.’

  ‘… and six miles of river to police. I’m prepared to bet the machinery of Daddy Bliss grinds slow.’

  Every fibre of Inspector Bliss’s body told him not to do it. All his years of experience, of rubbing shoulders with coppers great and small, of going head-to-head with the riff-raff of London, told him, ‘Don’t sent Lloyd Brandon out.’

  But the boy had turned his doe eyes on him and had looked so pitiful and Gosling and Crossland had argued his case so persuasively, that the inspector had relented and given him the red port-lantern.

  ‘Watch the ti
de, Brandon,’ Bliss had said, his face grim, his eyes hard.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The young man’s excitement was bubbling over. At last he’d be in a skiff of his own, the only Bluebottle on his stretch of the river. His old mum would be so proud. And he couldn’t wait to tell her.

  ‘And watch the wind,’ Bliss called as the constable reached the bottom stair. ‘Keep away from the sluice at Woolwich – there’s things in the water there’ll kill you.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Brandon was up on deck now, looking upstream where the Tower stood, dark and brooding under its turrets. And downstream, where the tall spars of the clippers kissed the sky. The river had never looked – or smelled – so lovely as on this October morning. And he didn’t see the green, grey rolling fog at all. All he saw then was the skiff roped to the Royalist’s hull, bobbing on the dark waters below him. He clattered down the steps and swung out onto the ropes, lowering himself too fast as it turned out and burning his hands. He winced in pain and blew on them before casting off and hauling on his left oar. For a while, he went around in a complete circle, then remembered to use his right and pulled away from the stern of the Abode of Bliss.

  Up on the deck, the inspector watched him go, shaking his head. ‘Above all,’ he said softly to himself, ‘don’t talk to any strange men.’

  The morning had gone quite well as Brandon rowed between the colliers. He heard the shouts of the lightermen and the scream of the gulls high overhead. He saw the tiny people, like ants, on both river banks, going about their lives with bustle and purpose. A sensitive soul was Lloyd Brandon and he knew that every one of those ants had a tale to tell, sorrows to bear, reasons to be cheerful. He was that rare kind of copper who sees a glass half full, not half empty; but perhaps that was because he was still only twenty-one years old and usually made the tea.

  He didn’t hear it at first. Something floated past the skiff and he prodded it with an oar. ‘Never let an object pass you by,’ he heard Daddy Bliss in his ear as he had for months now, even though the man himself was over a mile away on board the Royalist and the Royalist had disappeared around the bend. The thing in the water twisted at the sudden intrusion of his oar. It was a hessian sack, empty and stamped with a brand name he didn’t recognize and it seemed to be tied to something at one end. He was so busy trying to see what it was that he didn’t hear the shout from the south bank. When he did, he tried to pinpoint it. The river’s sounds played funny tricks at the best of times and along this stretch they were the oddest of all. He steadied the skiff, trying to make his limited horizon come into focus.

  There was a man waving to him from the bank, shouting, ‘Over here! Over here!’ over and over again. Daddy Bliss had dinned it into him – ‘They’ll come running to you, lad, because you’re wearing the blue; because you’ve got the metal letters on your jacket. Some of ’em will’ve lost their cat; some of ’em want to know the time. But some of ’em …’ and Daddy Bliss’s face had darkened and his voice dropped an octave, ‘will have been assaulted and raped. And it’s your job to listen to ’em all. Catch my drift?’

  Brandon turned the skiff, feeling the craft lurch under him as he hauled on the left oar and lifted the right clear. The figure on the shore, bobbing with the ebb-tide, was still shouting at him, ‘This way! Come on! Hurry!’ He looked like a lighterman by his clothing and he’d been joined by another. By the time Brandon’s skiff had crunched its blunt nose into the struts below Hope Wharf there was quite a crowd, all jostling each other.

  Brandon waited until someone had caught the prow and helped him onto the foreshore. He sank up to his ankles immediately and climbed out of the sucking mud with as much dignity as he could muster.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, remembering to keep his voice low and level. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘What are you?’ a docker asked him. ‘A bleedin’ doctor?’

  Brandon decided to take a leaf out of Daddy Bliss’s book. Nobody spoke to a Bluebottle like that. ‘No,’ he said, looking the oaf squarely in the face. ‘I am an officer of the Metropolitan Police. I’m going to have to ask you all to move along, gentlemen.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ said the docker. ‘When you’ve done something about this.’ He pointed to the ground as the little crowd backed away to give the nice constable room. Brandon followed the man’s finger and found himself looking at the body of a woman. It didn’t matter to Brandon that this one was at least in one piece and didn’t appear to be shy of any major part of her anatomy. Seconds after he had first clapped eyes on her, he was looking at nothing; he was just lying neatly alongside her on the foreshore below St Mary, Rotherhithe.

  ‘What did you say his name was?’ George Crossland was running his finger over the latest Met reports.

  ‘Who?’ Gosling asked.

  ‘The mad bloke, got out of Broadmoor.’

  ‘Bisgrove, Daddy said.’ Tom Gosling was making the tea, what with Lloyd Brandon lying in St Thomas’s with unspecified complications due to mud inhalation.

  ‘Killed a bloke somewhere in the West Country. Fight over a woman, apparently. Daddy was vague about it.’

  ‘What, the murder?’

  ‘No.’ Gosling passed the steaming mug to him as the Royalist swung in the morning tide. ‘How he came upon the case. Know what I think, George?’ The man settled himself down, elbows on the table.

  ‘In most matters, Tom, yes, but perhaps not on this occasion.’

  ‘Well, Daddy mentioned the name shortly after his return from Holloway. And you know what that means, don’t you?’

  A silence, punctuated by a sudden creak of the Royalist’s ropes. ‘I’m waiting to be enlightened, Tom,’ Crossland said.

  ‘Bridie O’Hara,’ Gosling leaned back, arms folded, as if he had solved a murder all by himself.

  ‘What?’ Crossland’s eyes widened. ‘The ex-Mummy Bliss? Before the current one, I mean.’

  ‘Well, technically, she was never actually Mrs Bliss. He jilted her.’

  ‘The beast!’

  Gosling nodded sagely and sipped his tea. He looked reminiscently back into the past, when Bridie O’Hara had been a red-headed heartbreaker who had caught the eye of Daddy Bliss and many another copper. ‘She was … well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed. Any more than Daddy did, or so they say.’

  Crossland looked suitably impressed. He hadn’t seen Daddy as a Lothario. He must look more closely next time he was on board.

  ‘So, we’re supposed to be on the look-out for this wandering lunatic, are we? Like we haven’t got enough on the river as it is.’

  Matthew Grand trusted James Batchelor to find even an obscure street in London, but he trusted a cabbie more. Despite Batchelor’s insistence that a nice walk through Green Park and up Constitution Hill would be splendid on this crisp autumn morning, the American had his hand in the air before the Englishman had finished speaking. The cabbie passing on the other side of the road pulled in his hack and they were soon bowling along west towards Milner Street. Batchelor was right; a brisk canter through Green Park was indeed bracing, but Grand preferred it that legs other than his own were doing the work.

  ‘I always thought you army men were keen on walking, hiking, that kind of thing,’ Batchelor observed.

  ‘Yes, I would say we are.’ Grand sank back against the leather worn thin over the years by the backsides of various fares. ‘I like a walk as well as the next man, I would say.’

  ‘And yet, here we are.’ Batchelor spread an expressive arm.

  Grand was puzzled. ‘A week-long hike in the Adirondacks, yes,’ he said. ‘A summer spent walking through the Appalachians, I have no problem with that. But a forty-five-minute stroll on sidewalks; that, I can do without. And anyway, as you say,’ he said, his timing perfect, ‘here we are.’ He gave the cabbie the fare and a lavish tip, as always. Batchelor had learned over the years not to bother asking for a receipt; petty cash reconciliation was something that happened to other people as far as M
atthew Grand was concerned. He knew about money, true; but only when it had a fair few zeros.

  Eight Milner Street was a very pleasant house indeed, separated from the pavement by a basement area, reached by narrow winding steps; the main door was set a half a storey above street level. The steps to reach this door were wide and white, scrubbed daily by a tweenie and then rubbed over with a stone to keep them in the peak of gleam. The door itself was painted a deep, cherry red and the knocker and other door furniture almost hurt the eyes, they were so burnished and bright. Crisp curtains framed the windows on either side of the door and high above their heads, a maid was working hard, if the feather duster being shaken out of the window was any guide.

  Grand and Batchelor stood on the pavement and looked up. This was not what they had expected. They had begun to form the opinion that the Byngs lived a fairly humdrum life, not exactly in a suburban villa, perhaps, but in some mews, with no room to swing a cat but with pretensions to gentility. Byng senior in a house like this, yes; they could picture that. But the Byngs junior – it stretched credibility. Perhaps Miss Moriarty had got it wrong.

  ‘No point in just staring at the place,’ Grand said. ‘Let’s see if he’s in.’

  They bounded up the steps and instinctively looked behind them to make sure they hadn’t left footmarks – it would have been a travesty. But no, the steps still gleamed. Batchelor rapped smartly on the knocker and they both stepped back to wait for the answer.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Batchelor asked. ‘Maid?’

  Grand looked along the façade. ‘No. I reckon a butler.’

  Batchelor nodded. ‘Could be,’ he mused. ‘Could be a butler.’

  The word was still on his lips when the door swung open on perfectly balanced hinges and the man himself stood there, tall and stately, perfect from his Macassared hair to his patent shoes, by way of a striped waistcoat and cutaway tails.

  ‘Yes?’ he intoned, his voice a mellifluous hum. ‘May I help you, gentlemen?’

  Batchelor felt awkward. He knew his shoes needed a proper clean, not just the Maisieing they received when she remembered. His trousers, likewise, were crumpled and in definite concertinas behind his knees. His waistcoat lacked a button and his collar had seen better days. He shuffled slightly and felt himself blush.