by J C Briggs
‘Stolen goods,’ Jones said.
Rarx nodded and indicated a door to the side through which Dickens and Jones followed to find themselves in a narrow corridor from which various closed doors could be seen. No doubt the rooms in which private business was transacted by those who wanted — or needed — discretion.
Rarx opened one of the doors and Jones stepped in. Dickens remained at the door. Rarx’s eyes had passed over him without interest, but it was better to remain in the shadows.
‘Robert Peel, otherwise known as Peely, and his son, Micky — I have reason to believe that they may have brought stolen items here — a chain, watches, silver —’ Jones had no idea what he was looking for or indeed if anything had been stolen, but Rarx was not to know that.
Something in his tone seemed to convince Rarx, who took some keys from his pocket and opened a drawer beneath the counter on which he placed a necklace and a ring.
‘Lad brought these. Said Peely found ’em.’
‘So, he did — on a corpse.’ Not quite true, but it gave Jones the right to recover the property.
Rarx made no sign. He merely croaked, ‘Take ’em.’
The raven is hoarse, thought Dickens.
Jones scooped up the jewels and they went out by the side door.
‘Doesn’t say much, does he?’ observed Dickens.
‘No, but there’s depths. He’s quite capable of knocking a man down or shooting at him. Peely may well pay for this. Rarx has no feelings except for his money. He not only looks like a vulture, he is one. Rich as Croesus, they say, and doesn’t spend a penny. Same with that old witch, the mother.’
Dickens felt better about Magpie — Rarx deserved to lose some of his stock if Magpie were prepared to risk the blunderbuss. Dangerous, though, but then Magpie was clearly a man who enjoyed risk.
Stemp joined them and under the gas lamp they looked at the jewellery. The ring was gold with a little ruby set in it — a woman’s ring. The necklace was made up of gold and red glass beads linked by a golden chain which was broken.
‘It looks like a rosary,’ Dickens said, looking at the jewelled chain glinting in Jones’s hand. ‘There’s a cross on the end of it.’ The cross was gold in colour, but tarnished.
‘So there is. I wonder, was our victim Catholic?’
Dickens took it and looked more closely. ‘Murano glass beads — like the waistcoat button. From Venice.’
‘Well, my next stop is St John’s Wood — I need to see the Reverend Anguish. He might recognise these and the button. Do you want to come?’
‘Imagine the anguish of my soul if I do not — to miss the chance of seeing the man with that name!’
9: Anguish
Inside the cab which took them to St. John’s Wood, Jones regarded an unusually silent Dickens.
‘You’re very quiet.’
‘Could a person be strangled by a chain with those beads?’
‘Possibly, but strangling doesn’t break the bones. That would be caused by someone exerting force, say with an arm under the chin and a twisting of the neck as it happens in hanging — the weight of the body after the drop can lead to —’
‘No more, Sam — hanging’s a hideous business.’
‘So, it is, but in the case of Flora Lambert, I suppose her neck being especially fragile might have been broken by the pressure of the chain. What’s on your mind?’
‘I was thinking of something I saw once when I was in Venice — something I thought I saw. I was never sure if it was real…’
‘Venice does seem to keep cropping up — the glass beads, the button. What else?’
Dickens told him about what he had seen all those years ago and how a girl had been found drowned, thought to have been strangled by her own rosary.
‘Good Lord, Charles, the things that happen to you.’
‘I know — extraordinary, ain’t it? I came home with a head full of dead lovers and ghosts. I thought it would make a good story, but somehow I never got round to it.’
‘It wasn’t murder, then?’
‘I don’t know — Venice was like a dream, especially in the darkness, all flickering lights and sudden gleams of water and so quiet it was eerie at times. Afterwards, seeing the boarded-up palace, I did think I’d imagined it, but then I read about the drowned girl and I wondered, but now I think about a chain wrapped round a slender neck and pulled tight.’
‘I suppose it could happen — the strangling I mean, though it would be unusual. Rope, cord, handkerchiefs, stocks, even apron strings and stay laces — I’ve heard of all those as means of strangulation. The number of cases where some folk try to strangle themselves and in the cells, too. It happened last year. A woman called Catherine Larry tried it with her shawl — horrible business.’
‘Such desperation. Lor’, Sam, it’s the last thing I’d want to do.’ It was a horror, Dickens thought. That sensation of choking, he knew himself at times of stress — sometimes he woke at night with what he described as a seizure of the throat. A terrifying sensation as if you couldn’t breathe. ‘Greenacre tried that, didn’t he?’
James Greenacre, the Edgeware Road murderer, had tried to strangle himself in his cell after he had been found guilty of the murder of his betrothed. The hangman had finished the job. Grim thought.
‘He did.’ Jones was silent for a while. ‘Now I think of it, there was a case when I was a constable — years ago — a prosperous lawyer strangled his wife with his gold Geneva watch chain. She was unfaithful, as I remember.’
‘But, Venice, Sam — my missing tutor’s father came from Venice according to St George Pierce — the man who told me the history and there’s the rosary —’
‘A bit of a leap, ain’t it? I’m not sure how your missing musician can be connected to a death that occurred years ago.’
Dickens grinned at him. ‘Yer niver knows, Samivel. Veels within veels.’
To which gnomic utterance, Samivel merely murmured, ‘Mr Weller,’ in reference to Mr Tony Weller, the original Sam Weller’s coachman parent.
The wheels of their cab slowed and the cab stopped and they were deposited in St John’s Wood Road. Hamilton terrace was just over the road. As they crossed, Jones started at the sound of a very loud harsh cry of a bird.
‘Heavens, what on earth’s that?’
‘Rarx followed us? No, it’s Landseer’s menagerie.’ The painter Edwin Landseer lived at number one St John’s Wood Road. ‘You’d be amazed at what he keeps in his garden. The painter, McIan, gave me an eagle once. I sent it to board with Landseer when I went to Italy and er — forgot — to get it back. I never liked the way it looked at me — or the children — measuring us for his dinner with a hungry eye.’
‘I hope that’s not it in the trees — looking to get its own back on you.’
Dickens laughed. ‘No, he keeps it chained to its perch.’
‘Poor thing,’ said Jones, imagining the great bird crying for its freedom.
‘He had a lion once.’
‘Dear Lord, these artists.’
‘It was dead — sent from the zoo. He wanted to paint it. Even Landseer shrank at the idea of a live one. I wonder if he knows anything about Agosto Sabatini, the music tutor’s father. Dead now, but he was an artist and quite successful, it seems, as a portraitist.’
‘You can ask, but in the meantime, here we are at the Reverend Anguish’s house.’
Number five Hamilton Terrace was part of a terrace of tall, narrow house built in the 1830s — a gentleman’s residence with an elegant white-pillared portico with steps up which Jones went to ring the bell.
An elderly maid of somewhat lugubrious visage answered the door. She looked worried when Jones announced that he was a policeman. Dickens saw that she wondered whether they should be let in or sent down the area steps. However, when Jones asked to see the Reverend Anguish, she said she would fetch the mistress, and they could wait in the hall. She went upstairs slowly.
After a few minutes, a tall, well-built w
oman with rather formidable shoulders appeared at the top of the stairs, dressed in severe black, relieved only by a white cap covering grey hair rolled in little curls like tight sausages. She regarded them with irritation.
‘Not a word,’ whispered Jones to Dickens.
The woman came slowly down. She looked at Jones with cold grey eyes, her steel brows knitted in a line across a broad forehead. His assistant was beneath her notice. ‘I am Miss Anguish. My brother is very ill at the moment and cannot be disturbed. You may state your business, though what my brother can have to do with the police, I do not know.’
‘I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Anguish. It is a matter of goods stolen from Mrs Wyatt’s house in South Crescent.’ Jones decided to tread carefully. It would not do to begin by mentioning the skeleton found in the water tank. He might not mention it at all in the circumstances.
‘You had better come into the drawing room.’
They went into a room which ran the length of the house to the back where the windows looked out over some desolate looking trees. There was a piano in that part of the room and in the part in which they stood there were sofas and chairs and a fire burning. Dickens noticed a Bible on the chair by the fire. A comfortable room, not luxurious, but homely, even a little shabby.
Miss Anguish motioned Jones to sit. Dickens remained near the door by a little table upon which he saw a desk portrait of a young woman — Flora Lambert? He looked at the face — a pale, rather long oval face with grey eyes and a thin mouth. Not exactly plain, but not exactly pretty, an ordinary face, though young, and rather touching for that. More so, he thought, if there were Flora Lambert’s bones in that disused cistern.
‘I wonder if you recognise these?’ Jones was saying, as he took from his pocket the ring, the button and the rosary which Miss Anguish took in her large capable hands and examined through a pair of spectacles which she took up from a table. She frowned over the rosary beads.
‘I have not seen these — er — beads before, or the button. But I know this ring. It was stolen you say?’
‘Yes, a labourer working at Mrs Wyatt’s former home is suspected of stealing these items which were recovered from a pawnbroker’s. To whom does the ring belong?’
‘It was Miss Lambert’s, Flora’s. She was companion to Mrs Wyatt. My brother gave the ring to Miss Lambert for her eighteenth birthday. I am surprised that she should leave it behind. She always wore it.’
‘And the beads are not hers?’
‘I hardly think so. My brother is a reverend gentleman of the Church of England.’ Miss Anguish sounded most offended.
‘Where is Miss Lambert now?’
‘She is dead, Superintendent. She died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium not long after Mrs Wyatt, my sister-in-law — in 1845.’
So, not the body in the water tank, thought Jones, and yet the year was possibly the same and the swollen bone had suggested tuberculosis to Doctor Symonds — a curious coincidence? But how to proceed? He needed to know more.
‘Did Miss Lambert leave South Crescent before Mrs Wyatt’s death?’
Miss Anguish looked at Jones impatiently, ‘No, it was a week or so after. Why do you wish to know? It looks as if she left the ring behind. It was stolen. Now you have recovered it. What else is there for you to know?’
Jones took the plunge. ‘The skeleton of a young woman was found in the empty water tank at South Crescent and we believe that the labourer took the jewellery from that. There is a little finger missing from the left hand.’
‘Miss Lambert possessed all her fingers — if not much else. It is impossible that it should be Flora Lambert. The doctor at the sanatorium sent a letter informing us of Miss Lambert’s death.’
‘Did you or your brother attend the funeral?’
‘No, we did not.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Really, Superintendent Jones, I do not see what business it is of yours. Flora Lambert died very suddenly. My brother has not enjoyed good health for some time — he had a stroke just before the death of Mrs Wyatt and so when the news of Miss Lambert’s death came, I was too much occupied with those things. The doctor wrote that he would see to the funeral and the burial. There was nothing I could do for Miss Lambert.’
Miss Anguish’s lips closed in a firm line. Dickens wondered if she had not liked Flora Lambert. “Not much else” was rather reproving. Her tone had been very brisk and it was clear that she did not want to say more. Would Sam dare?
Sam Jones dared. He changed tack. ‘Forgive me, Miss Anguish, but I must ask a few more questions. The discovery of the skeleton raises suspicions of foul play. There is evidence to suggest that which I may not divulge. You are the only person at the moment who can tell me anything about the household at South Crescent.’
‘Very well.’
‘I need to know if there was any female servant between the ages of sixteen and say twenty-two years who was employed at South Crescent.’
‘Mrs Wyatt employed a cook and a personal maid. The cook, Mrs Peartree, had been with her for many years and was certainly older. She was left a sum of money by Mrs Wyatt and retired to a house in Camden where she set up home with Miss Peach, Mrs Wyatt’s maid, again much beyond twenty-two years. They keep a lodging house — most respectable, I do not doubt.’
‘There would be a laundress, I suppose, and, perhaps, servants from time to time who came South Crescent to do heavy work?’
‘That is so, but I cannot tell you anything about them. Miss Lambert would have known. She ordered the household for Mrs Wyatt.’
Jones slipped in another question. ‘What was her relationship to Mrs Wyatt?’
‘Flora was an orphan, the daughter of a cousin of Mr Wyatt. He died many years ago, but Mrs Wyatt corresponded with members of his family. They were a poor lot, but Mrs Wyatt pitied the girl and took her in. She was sixteen at the time. She was useful, though hardly grateful for her good fortune. Mrs Wyatt was kind to her and my brother was fond of her pretty ways. Those she showed only to him. He is too good a man to suspect artfulness.’
Now, thought Dickens, noting the bitterness in her tone, here’s the nub of it. Miss Anguish did not like Flora Lambert — indeed, it seemed that she did not trust her. She was ready to talk now — it was always the way. Even after five years, there was a spark of resentment which sprang into a blaze as if Jones had poked a slumbering fire.
‘She was dissatisfied?’ Jones asked.
‘She was. I think she hoped for more than keeping house for an elderly lady, though she was as poor as a church mouse and would have had to earn her living somehow. She was not educated to be a governess, too gently born to be a mere servant. My brother and Mrs Wyatt intended to provide for her in the event of Mrs Wyatt’s death. She might have married respectably then.’
Jones noted the word “Then”. Did that imply that Flora Lambert was intending to marry without respectability? Or something else? Now that Miss Anguish’s tongue had been loosened, he risked another question.
‘Did Miss Lambert wish to marry someone not quite respectable?’
Miss Anguish looked very sour at that question. ‘There was a young man — an artist of some kind, I believe, and foreign, so Temperance Peach thought. Flora had tried to persuade my brother that he should commission a painting — nonsense, I thought. My brother was hardly fit to have his portrait done. Miss Peach told me that he had been in the house — at night, drinking wine.’ Her face took on a reddish tint. ‘A lover — in the house. But Miss Peach and cook did not tell Mrs Wyatt. She was not strong enough to deal with that kind of thing.’
‘They told you.’
‘Naturally, it was their duty to do so — wine, forsooth. They had Mrs Wyatt to think of. It was my duty to speak to Miss Lambert. She denied it, of course, but I warned her that she was not to encourage any young men. Her duty was to care for Mrs Wyatt. I knew then that Mrs Wyatt would not live long. It seemed to me that Miss Lambert could wait.’
Duty, thought Dickens,
unbending duty, which made no room for the promptings of a girl’s heart. Pity Flora Lambert, poor as a church mouse and spied on by the two servants.
‘You did not know the name of the artist?’
‘I have no idea. Whoever he was, he was patently unsuitable.’
Dickens longed to ask if the artist were Italian, but Jones had told him to keep quiet. He had seen that Charles Dickens might well be a further irritant to Miss Anguish.
‘Would Miss Lambert have come to live here after Mrs Wyatt’s death? She would have needed care as she was ill.’
‘That was the arrangement — it was hardly suitable. I certainly do not need a companion. I really could not see how I was to look after a sick woman as well as my brother. I told my brother that she should go back to her relatives, but, of course, he is too kind. She was to come and I should have to bear it.’
‘How ill was she?’
‘She began to be ill about six months before Mrs Wyatt died. She had pain in her joints and in her left hand. Her doctor thought she was suffering from arthritis, but the physician from the sanatorium, Doctor Lucas, wrote in his letter that she had tuberculosis, though there had been none of the usual signs.’
‘How was it that she went to the sanatorium? Where was the hospital?’
‘She didn’t say. I saw her after Mrs Wyatt’s death. She was to supervise the closing of the house, but she told me that she felt so unwell that arrangements had been made for her to go to a hydropathic clinic — Manor Park, in Malvern. I assumed that Doctor Adam sent her — he was her doctor.’
‘You didn’t speak to Doctor Adam?’
‘I had enough to do to settle Mrs Wyatt’s affairs, and I was not well myself. I suffer, too, from pain in my joints — but I must bear it. That is my lot. Fortunately, I was able to rely on Mrs Peartree and Miss Peach to tidy up the house, and Mrs Wyatt’s solicitor sorted out the papers and the will.’