by T E Kinsey
‘I say,’ she said, struggling to stand. ‘Well done, you.’
The window was filthy and its frame faded and peeling, but through the dust and grime we could see the street below and I was shocked to realize that I recognized it. Barely visible below us was the street where I had lost sight of Lurker on the previous evening, and I could see the church with its archway onto Broad Street.
‘We’re on Quay Street,’ I said. ‘Just round the corner from the tramway terminus.’
‘Good lord,’ she said, looking out. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said. ‘Now give me a hand and let’s see if we can get this window open.’
‘All right, dear,’ she said dubiously. ‘But what good will that do us?’
‘I’ll know that once we’ve got it open and had a look.’
We had to be careful not to make too much noise, so it took another quarter of an hour to prise the recalcitrant window open. I tentatively poked my head out.
We were on the top floor of an old, neglected building. The window ledge was of very robust stone and looking up I could see a rugged iron gutter and a gently sloping slate roof. The street was three stories below and it seemed to me that our best route would be upwards. I ducked back into the room and turned to tell Lady Bickle my plan.
‘I think we can get to the roof,’ I said. ‘And from there… well, I don’t know where we can get to from there, but it’s got to be better than sitting here waiting for them to get scared enough to shoot us. Are you game?’
‘I should jolly well say so,’ she said with girlish enthusiasm. ‘Lead the way.’
‘Actually, I think it might be better if you went first, my lady,’ I said. ‘I’ll boost you up and then try to cover our tracks a little.’
‘I think it might be a little obvious where we’ve gone, dear,’ she said with a giggle. ‘And do please call me Georgie. My own servants can call me “my lady”, but I think I could stand to be on more familiar terms with the wonderful woman who rescued me.’
‘Righto, my lady,’ I said automatically. We both laughed and then set about working out the mechanics of our escape.
By lifting the bottom sash Lady Bickle was able to sit on the sill, and from there she was able to shuffle to one side where a drainpipe offered her the opportunity to clamber upwards. To my absolute astonishment, she scrambled up the wall like a seasoned mountaineer, going hand-over-hand up the pipe and with her expensive boots finding tiny toeholds in the uneven stone wall. She reached the roof and clung to the chimney so that she could lean down and talk to me.
‘Easy as pie,’ she said. ‘Come on, Flo.’
I gaped.
‘You look like a codfish, dear,’ she said. ‘I've one a little mountaineering in my time, that's all. Nothing to it. Hurry, or they’ll be on to us.’
With a fair amount of fiddling and a good quantity of very unladylike swearing I was able to pull the shutters closed behind me and tried my best to copy her skillful scramble up the drainpipe. As I neared the top I saw a delicate hand reaching down towards me so I grabbed it and allowed her to pull me up.
‘Now what?’ she said, obviously exhilarated.
‘Now we head that way,’ I said, nodding towards the lower roofs farther down the street, ‘and look for a way down. We need to–’
The sound of the gunshot was shockingly loud and I flinched away from the chimney.
‘We need to get moving, that’s what we need to do,’ said Lady Bickle and led the way up to the ridge of the roof and down the other side. As we scrambled along I could hear the sounds of shouting from the street and the clanking of boots and hands on the drainpipe as one of our captors gave chase.
We had a good head start on him and had reached the end of the block before there was any actual sign of him. There was a gap between the two buildings and we hesitated as we contemplated the jump.
‘If we can get onto that roof,’ said Lady Bickle, ‘we might be able to smash our way through that skylight and get down to the street that way.’
‘It’s better than staying here to be shot at,’ I said, and just at that moment, another shot rang out and I heard the whizzing ping of the bullet as it scudded off the roof tiles beside us.
‘I’ll go first,’ she said. ‘Just do as I do and you’ll be fine.’
She took a couple of steps back and then ran towards the edge of the roof, launching herself across the gap and landing, catlike, on the adjacent roof below. I was less confident, but it was a straightforward jump and I’d done much more dangerous things in my time. I took my run-up and kicked off from the edge of the roof.
Years of training and practice in the Chinese arts had given me an excellent sense of balance and I landed on the lower roof with a grace and elegance that would have made Chen Ping Bo proud, even though I do say so myself. Sadly, I had never thought to train the soles of my boots and, despite the beauty of my landing, they had other ideas about what ought to happen next. A smooth leather sole and a slate roof were never destined to be firm friends, and I immediately began sliding down the steeply gabled roof towards the back of the building.
I scrabbled to grasp the gutter as I shot past but only succeeded in slowing, not completely arresting, my fall. The last thing I remember is the sound of Lady Bickle desperately shouting my name, interrupted by the shrill blast of a police whistle.
I awoke, groggy, befuddled, and in some considerable pain in an unfamiliar, but blissfully comfortable, bed. This wasn’t at all what I had anticipated. As I had fallen, part of me had doubted ever waking up at all, but even the optimist within had imagined coming to on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance while a concerned attendant tried to reassure me that everything would be all right. A feather bed in a high-ceilinged Regency bedroom hadn’t featured in even the most outrageously positive possibilities.
The door opened and a familiar face peered round it into the room.
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘How wonderful. How are you feeling, pet?’
‘I feel mildly doolally, my lady,’ I croaked. ‘And it’s surprisingly difficult to move my left leg.’
‘That’s what you get for going out drinking with the inspector. It’s that or falling from a roof and then being given large doses of morphine for the pain.’
‘Is the leg broken?’ I asked.
‘In two places,’ she said. ‘You don’t do things by halves, do you?’
‘I try always to do a thorough job, my lady,’ I said.
‘It’s only thanks to the efforts of a rather splendid apple tree growing in the back yard of that house that you survived at all; it broke your fall.’
‘We must write and thank it,’ I said, smiling weakly.
‘And drink a toast to it in cider. Or would that be in bad taste, do you think, to be drinking the fruit of one of its relatives? No matter. The main thing is that you’re alive and well and on the mend.’
I patted my leg through the bedclothes and found that it was encased in plaster all the way up to my thigh.
‘How long will I be like this?’ I said.
‘Five or six weeks according to the quack. It might slow you down a bit.’
‘I’m sure I’ll manage. How long have I been here? What happened at the house? Is Lady Bickle all right? And what about Inspector Sunderland?’
She laughed. ‘You've been here almost two days; we found you the day before last. Georgie Bickle is right as ninepence and sings your praises constantly. And the inspector is well on the mend. Someone in the street in Bedminster saw what happened when Ehrlichmann and his two thugs attacked you, and managed to get a doctor to the inspector before it was too late.’
‘Ehrlichmann?’ I said, struggling to sit up. Günther Ehrlichmann had killed Lady Hardcastle’s husband in China eleven years ago, and had returned from hiding last year to try to finish the job by killing the both of us as well. He had escaped our trap, leaving Lady Hardcastle with the bullet wound from which she was still recovering. We ha
d presumed he had fled home to Germany, but clearly he was back in England again.
‘Or Gerber or whatever his stupid name is,’ she said dismissively. ‘He’s been responsible for the majority of the unpleasantness, yes.’
‘But the inspector is all right?’
‘Fragile, but on the mend,’ she said reassuringly. ‘By the time I came to look for you both, he’d been whisked off to the BRI, but I was able to speak to him in the morning. He was able to tell us what had happened and to make sure everyone was on the lookout for you.’
‘Thank goodness it wasn’t worse.’
‘He’ll have a nasty scar and some nightmares, but he’ll be right as rain in no time. And then, you clever girl, you managed to get yourself and Georgie Bickle out of the window. She’s frightfully impressed by you, you know. Thinks you should patent your corset escape kit.’
I laughed.
‘Obviously once the idiots in the house started shooting at you, all hell broke loose and they were surrounded by armed policemen in no time.’
‘They were arrested?’ I said.
‘Smith and Jones were, but Ehrlichmann managed to slip away.’
‘He has a talent for that.’
‘Doesn’t he just,’ she said. ‘But the thugs didn’t see any profit in protecting him and told the police everything. He was the one who murdered Morry and planned the abduction of Georgie. His next great scheme was to nab the two of us, interrogate us to make sure no one was on to his masters and then leave our bodies in a ditch.’
‘Charming fellow,’ I said. ‘Did they know anything about his paymasters?’
‘Not a sausage. But whoever they are, they’re really not messing about if they hired a fiend like Ehrlichmann to do their dirty work.’
I groaned. ‘So we still know nothing.’
‘We know that they’re Autumn Wind,’ she said.
‘We knew that before, my lady,’ I said, reproachfully.
‘Well, yes. We know they’re on the council.’
‘Once again, we had surmised as much.’
‘We know that they’re connected with the Omnibus Company.’
‘Still old news,’ I said.
‘News,’ she said. ‘News. That’s the key, isn’t it.’
‘It is?’ I said. I was beginning to suspect that there was slightly more morphine still in my system than I had first suspected.
‘Who has been yapping at our heels at every step of all this?’ she said, beginning to pace about the room.
‘You’re going to have to help me,’ I said.
‘That dreadful Brookfield fellow. He was the one who was there to keep an eye on the Morry murder. He was the one who latched onto us to make sure we hadn’t seen anything. He was the one who–’
‘He was the one who persuaded us to investigate the affair, my lady,’ I pointed out.
‘Yes, pet, but he never actually helped us, did he? What if he was only keeping an eye on us so that he could make sure we were looking in the wrong direction? If it hadn’t been for Purcell from Section W we’d have just grown weary of the whiff of Brookfield’s red herrings and returned to our embroidery.’
‘You’ve never embroidered anything in your life,’ I said.
‘Whereas Brookfield has been embroidering a tapestry of misdirection worthy of the ladies of Bayeux.’
‘Leaving aside the technical differences between tapestry and embroidery,’ I said, ‘and the crumbling fragility of your metaphor – though I give you credit for accidentally noting that the Bayeux Tapestry is embroidered – how can we be certain that Brookfield is anything other than yet another incompetent scribbler?’
‘And how can we be certain that he’s a scribbler at all?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Well,’ she continued, ‘we’ve only his word for it that he’s a journalist at all. We’ve never checked up on him. Is there anything I can get you?’
‘No, my lady, I’m fine.’
‘In that case I shall go and ask Sir Benjamin to write a letter of introduction for us.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So that’s where I am.’
At Lady Bickle’s insistence, I spent the following week as an honoured guest, being pampered and cared for as never before. One morning, as I hobbled into the dining room on my crutches and sat down to yet another sumptuous breakfast, I tried once more to protest.
‘Really, my lady, this isn’t necessary at all. I’m quite better now and I don’t deserve all this lavish treatment.’
‘Nonsense, dear,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘If it weren’t for you I should be in a shallow grave on the Somerset Levels.’
‘I hardly think that’s true,’ I replied. ‘I got myself captured by a German psychopath and my clever escape plan resulted in my falling from a roof and breaking my leg. I could have got us both killed.’
‘Ah, but you didn’t, dear, did you? And you gave me hope that night; you let me know that people cared and that they were looking for me. I didn’t let on, but I was beginning to despair before you arrived. And your escape plan worked, did it not? Here we are, free as birds. Now shush and eat your horrors.’
I laughed at the old word, but far from being horrors, the sausages were delicious and I decided to say no more.
Lady Hardcastle had been invited to stay, too, and had been working with Sir Benjamin to uncover the truth about the recent carry on. Their progress was slow (being unable to tell him everything we knew about Autumn Wind didn't help) but he had written her a letter of introduction to Charles Tapscott, the editor of The Bristol News, and she had made an appointment for us both to visit him later that morning.
Lady Bickle and I were discussing, of all things, rock climbing techniques when Lady Hardcastle and Sir Benjamin entered the dining room, deep in a conversation of their own. He was a handsome man of middle years with greying hair and an air of quiet confidence.
Lady Hardcastle was mid-sentence as she sat down. ‘…crossed the room, put the blotting paper on the table and said, “And that, my dear, is why you should never let the Earl of Runcorn anywhere near an anvil.”’
I’d heard the story many times before and it never failed to get guffaws, though it had long since ceased to amuse me. But Sir Benjamin was one of those unfortunate gentlemen who laughs on the in-breath so that he sounded like a sea lion barking and I found his uninhibited joy to be thoroughly infectious. My own giggles set Lady Bickle off and we were soon all four of us helpless with mirth and quite unable to remember what we were laughing at.
‘Do excuse us,’ said Sir Benjamin when the laughter had finally subsided. ‘We didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation, but Emily does have such wonderful stories to tell.’
‘And at least a third of them are true,’ I said.
He laughed again.
‘I’ll deal with you later,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘But I’m pooooorly,’ I said, and pointed to my plastered leg. Our hosts weren’t in on the private joke, but it seemed to amuse them nonetheless.
‘What were you two talking about so earnestly, anyway?’ he asked.
‘Florence was asking about rock climbing techniques, and I was giving her the benefit of my considerable experience,’ said his wife.
‘Oh?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘How fascinating. When did you learn to climb?’
‘One of the few advantages of an outrageously expensive Swiss finishing school,’ replied Lady Bickle, ‘is that they tend to be in the mountains. I really wasn’t terribly interested in how to alight gracefully from a carriage or how properly to address the maiden aunt of a grand duchess, so I used to hop the wag and go into the village. I…’ she looked at her husband.
‘She met a handsome young Swiss boy who taught her to climb,’ he said, clearly unconcerned by his younger wife’s youthful dalliances.
She smiled fondly at him. ‘I did indeed. But as it turns out, the wilful wildness of my youth saved my life rather than ruining it as my parents feared.’
‘No one ever died from youthful wildness,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Well, maybe one or two, but not nearly so many as from falling from heights or being shot by thugs.’
Lady Bickle laughed. ‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to have a word with my father.’
‘Any time you like, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Point him in my direction and I’ll set him straight on a few things.’
Lady Bickle laughed again. ‘You’re a breath of fresh air, Emily; it’s so wonderful to have you both here. I do hope we can be friends – all our other friends are so frightfully staid and proper.’
‘I’m much in demand as a disreputable companion and general bad influence. Perhaps you’d both come and visit us for dinner one evening.’
‘We’d love that, wouldn’t we, Ben.’
‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘Be nice to get some country air.’
‘Then it’s settled. How about this weekend?’
‘This weekend?’ said Lady Bickle. ‘But…’
‘We really mustn’t impose upon your hospitality any further, dear. We must get home.’
‘But how will you cope?’ said Lady Bickle, forlornly. ‘With poor Florence laid-up, how will you manage? Really, you must stay here, I insist.’
‘Oh, we shall be fine,’ said Lady Hardcastle, breezily. ‘I’m quite the gourmet cook on the quiet, and a household of our size practically runs itself, doesn’t it, pet?’
She looked at me for confirmation but I merely raised my eyebrows.
‘You see?’ said Lady Bickle. ‘You’ve upset the poor woman by dismissing her contribution and it really would be no trouble to have you here a little longer. We shall have such fun.’
Lady Hardcastle looked as though she might protest further, but after a moment or two’s thought, she demurred. ‘Of course, dear,’ she said. ‘You’re right and you’re really very generous. Thank you. Thank you both.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Be good to have a chum about the place.’