The Home Secretary smiled complacently. ‘We have already considered that possibility and have resolved the dilemma,’ he said. ‘Would you care to hear the solution we have arrived at?’
‘Very much so,’ Blackstone said.
‘Until the Jubilee celebrations are over, none of the servants will be allowed to leave the house.’
‘There’ll be tradesmen making deliveries all the time,’ Blackstone pointed out. ‘It only needs one of the servants to drop an indiscreet word and—’
‘The butler—who is a very sound man indeed—will make certain that no tradesman has a conversation with any of the servants which goes beyond the transaction of business,’ the Home Secretary countered.
A sudden look of irritation came to his face, as if he had just realized that he had been justifying himself to a mere inspector.
‘At any rate, these details are none of your concern,’ he continued. ‘We have only told you as much as we have so that you will appreciate the amount of finesse that will he necessary as you conduct your inquiry.’
‘So I’m to try and catch Charles Montcliffe’s murderer without telling anybody he’s dead, am I, sir?’ Blackstone asked the Commissioner.
Sir Edward Bradford nodded gravely. ‘Yes, Inspector,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid that’s exactly what you’ve got to do.’
Five
The house on Park Lane had four storeys above ground level, and one below. It might have been built in what they called the Regency style, Blackstone thought, looking at it from across the street. Then again, it might not be Regency at all, because the self-improvement course he’d mapped out for himself when he’d left the Army had not included architecture. But whatever style it was in, he was sure of one thing—it could easily have accommodated the residents of his entire street in considerably more comfort than they knew now.
‘Nice place,’ said Sergeant Patterson, without even the slightest trace of irony in his voice.
‘Very nice,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘I might have made Earl Montcliffe an offer for it if it hadn’t been so far from the Yard.’ He paused. ‘Do you know what’s bothering me about this case, Sergeant?’
Patterson shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
‘It’s bothering me that Sherlock Blackstone and his faithful assistant, Dr Patterson, are still on it.’
The sergeant frowned. ‘How d’ you mean, sir?’
‘When we were given this job, none of the top brass knew who the dead man was,’ Blackstone explained. ‘But now they do. They know he was the son of an earl—and that makes him important. So I say again, why are a couple of small fry like us still on the case?’
Patterson looked offended. ‘We’re good detectives, sir. Very good detectives.’
‘We’re good at solving the kinds of murders we normally come across,’ Blackstone contradicted him. ‘This is different. We’re out of our depth here.’
‘Most of the Force would be out of its depth.’
‘But not all,’ Blackstone pointed out. ‘There are a couple of senior officers with aristocratic connections, and if they don’t want to actually conduct the case themselves, they should at least be directing us. But that’s not happening. I get a ten-minute chat with the Commissioner and the Home Secretary, in which I’m told to be discreet, then we’re pretty much left to our own devices. Nobody else in the whole Yard seems to have any interest in this murder.’
‘And why’s that, sir?’
Blackstone sighed. ‘I’ve no idea.’
But he had. The uneasy feeling he’d had from the start was deepening with every hour that passed. If the brass were keeping out of it, it was because they didn’t want the case solved. Or—and this was even worse—they saw the dangers and pitfalls in such an investigation and were more than willing to put somebody else’s neck in the noose, rather than risk their own.
Still, there was no point in worrying Patterson with thoughts like that. Better to let the lad live in blissful ignorance until everything came crashing down around them.
‘Should we be making a move, sir?’ Patterson asked.
Yes, they should. But in doing so, they would already be encountering their first problem, Blackstone thought. And that problem was which door they should use! Should they enter by the elegant teak one that stood at the top of three polished steps? Or the one that lay below the level of the iron railings? To knock on the former and be directed to the latter would be a humiliation. On the other hand, wasn’t going directly to the servants’ entrance an admission of his lowly status, even though he was in charge of a murder investigation?
‘At what time do we have our appointment with the Earl, Sergeant?’ the Inspector asked.
‘Five o’clock, sir.’
Blackstone checked his pocket watch. They had a quarter of an hour to spare. Perhaps from that fact, he could pull out some face-saving device.
‘Before we see him, let’s have a word with the servants,’ he said, turning towards the basement stairs.
The young woman who opened the door of the tradesmen’s entrance was wearing a long black dress, white apron and maid’s cap. It was plain from the cursory glance she gave the new arrivals that they did not impress her.
‘Yes?’ she said, standing squarely in the centre of the doorway, as if she thought the two men might make a sudden dash for the bowels of the house.
‘We’re from the police,’ Blackstone told her. ‘Could we come inside, please, miss?’
The girl hesitated. ‘Well, I don’t know, really. Yer see, I ain’t ’ad no orders about no coppers.’
‘Let us in, then go and fetch whoever’s in charge of matters below stairs,’ the Inspector said firmly.
The girl’s hesitation lasted for another few seconds, then she said, ‘I suppose that’ll be all right.’
She led them down a succession of narrow corridors with the ease of one used to negotiating a maze. Finally, she stopped at a door indistinguishable from all the others they’d passed, and said, ‘You can wait in there.’
Blackstone opened the door and found himself in a room that was dominated by a massive, scrubbed table.
‘Servants’ hall,’ said Patterson, knowledgeably.
‘Is it indeed?’ Blackstone said, taking a seat that gave him a view of the door.
‘Course, in an establishment this size, probably only the downstairs servants will eat here,’ Patterson continued. ‘The “upper” servants—the butler, valets and people like that—will have their own dining room.’
‘For a humble detective sergeant, you seem to know a good deal about it,’ Blackstone said.
Patterson grinned. ‘My auntie was a lady’s maid,’ he explained. ‘She was always telling me stories about life in the Big House. Said they used to have a right old time of it, them “upper” servants. They dress up for dinner, just like the toffs—“demi-toilette” I think Auntie called it—and they get exactly the same to eat as the quality upstairs has.’
Blackstone shook his head in wonder. They were servants and he was a police inspector, yet he was willing to bet that most of them had a far better time of it than he did. Not for them the bubble and squeak his landlady served up at least once a week. They lived off the fat of the land—or rather, off the fat of the Montcliffes.
The door opened, and the maid who had shown them in appeared again.
‘Mr Hoskins,’ she announced, then stood aside to let a middle-aged man in tails sweep into the room.
The butler looked at the two detectives and frowned, as if he considered it an impertinence that they’d sat down. ‘You’re early,’ he said.
‘I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk to some of your staff,’ Blackstone told him.
The butler’s frown deepened. ‘I have received no instructions from the master on that particular matter.’
‘I don’t need your master’s permission to talk to them,’ Blackstone said.
‘I think you’ll find that you do,’ the butler replied.
To
hear him, you’d never think he was addressing two detectives who carried the weight of the law behind them, Blackstone told himself. To hear him, you’d think I was some kind of tinker trying to sell ribbons and silvered teaspoons to his staff.
The butler consulted his watch. ‘His lordship is expecting us in exactly three minutes. So if you will follow me, Inspector...’
Both Blackstone and Patterson rose to their feet, but the butler signalled Patterson to sit down again.
‘His lordship has instructed me that he and the family are prepared to grant the Inspector an interview,’ he said. ‘No mention was made of an assistant also being present.’
‘But I always—’ Patterson began.
‘You will wait here,’ the butler interrupted.
Patterson glanced at his boss for guidance. Blackstone shook his head. There was no point in fighting a battle you couldn’t win, the Inspector thought. But despite his best efforts to control his own emotions, he found that he was getting annoyed. Annoyed with aristocrats who saw him at their convenience, rather than at his. Annoyed at servants, so secure in the mantle of their master’s power that they felt they could be as high-handed as they liked.
He half-hoped that one of the illustrious group waiting upstairs would turn out to he the murderer. Then he realized gloomily that if that did happen to be the case, the guilty party would probably he allowed to wriggle out of it.
Blackstone followed the butler up the broad staircase. Quite a contrast to the narrow steps that led up from the servants’ hall, he thought.
The butler stopped in front of a polished oak door, and knocked twice. Then he turned the handle and stepped inside.
‘Inspector Blackstone, my Lord,’ he announced, moving to one side to allow Blackstone to enter the room.
The family was sitting in a semicircle around an inlaid rosewood coffee table. On the edge of the group sat Lady Emily, her face pinched and her eyes red from crying. Next to her was her fiancé, Lord Dalton. Dalton was holding Lady Emily’s hand in his, as if he’d been doing his best to comfort her.
But it was the rest of the group that interested Blackstone. At the centre of the arc sat a tall, grey-haired man. He had a face like those that Blackstone had seen on his self-improvement visits to the National Portrait Gallery—the face of a man who is used to his orders being obeyed without question.
The woman sitting next to him—presumably the Countess—was handsome rather than beautiful. Like her daughter, she appeared to have been crying—though, in her case, face powder had been applied in an attempt to disguise the fact.
The last member of the group, at the far end of the arc, was a youngish man who, apart from his youth, was almost a carbon copy of the Earl.
Earl Montcliffe ran his eyes up and down the Inspector as if he were considering hiring him as a gamekeeper.
‘You’re Blackstone?’ he asked.
‘Yes, my Lord.’
The Earl nodded. ‘Your superiors have a high opinion of you. If they did not, we would not now be having this meeting.’
‘I’m grateful for any praise they might have given me,’ Blackstone said, but he was thinking: This is like nothing so much as a bad play at the Tank Theatre, Islington.
‘You’ve already met my daughter and Lord Dalton,’ the Earl continued.
Blackstone remembered how worried Lady Emily had been that her father would find out she’d visited Scotland Yard—and how he’d assured her that the Earl wouldn’t.
‘I...er...’ he began.
‘My daughter has already confessed to me that she has been in contact with you,’ the Earl said. ‘I am sure that she felt herself to he doing the proper thing at the time.’ He inclined his head towards the two people sitting to his right. ‘This is my wife, Lady Margaret, and my son, Viscount Montcliffe. My other two sons are serving Her Majesty in the colonies.’
My other two sons, Blackstone repeated silently to himself. The way the Earl had said it, it was almost as if he’d only ever had two other sons—almost as if, now Charles was dead, they could pretend he had never existed.
‘As you may or may not be aware, Her Majesty has graciously instructed me to play a significant role in the Jubilee celebrations,’ the Earl continued, ‘and so, as you can imagine, my time is extremely limited. However,’ he added generously, ‘I suppose I can spare you ten minutes if it will help to clear this unpleasant matter up. What do you wish to know?’
Blackstone shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. This was not going to be easy.
‘I was wondering if any of you might know of a reason why someone might kill your son?’ he said.
Earl Montcliffe looked briefly at all the others, who shook their heads.
‘It came as a great shock to us,’ he said. ‘No one in this family has been murdered since the fourteenth century.’
‘Perhaps it might help if I knew who he associated with,’ Blackstone suggested. ‘Who were his friends?’
The eldest son, Viscount Montcliffe, snorted. ‘His friends?’ he repeated. ‘Charles didn’t have any friends.’
‘He didn’t share the interests of most people in society,’ Lady Emily explained, almost apologetically. ‘His pursuits were more of an...er...private nature.’
‘Readin’!’ the Viscount said with disgust. ‘Shuttin’ himself up all day, when it was perfectly good huntin’ weather outside.’
‘He wasn’t really robust enough for hunting,’ the Countess said, in her dead son’s defence. ‘He was rather a delicate child and—’
‘Delicate!’ the Earl interrupted her. ‘Balderdash. Sickly was what he was—the runt of the litter. Isn’t that the truth, Margaret?’
Lady Margaret’s hands were suddenly bunched into fists, and for a moment Blackstone thought she was about to attack her husband. Then the hands unfurled and the Countess bowed her head in what could only be interpreted as a gesture of submission.
‘Isn’t it the truth?’ the Earl repeated.
‘Yes, Roderick,’ the Countess mumbled. ‘That’s the truth.’
It was almost as if they’d forgotten he was there, Blackstone thought. But given his lowly status that was only to be expected—servants were not noticed until they were needed.
The Inspector coughed discreetly. ‘Surely your son must at least have had some close acquaintances,’ he suggested.
‘Charles did know some journalists,’ Lady Emily said. ‘He wanted to become one himself.’
‘Journalists!’ her brother repeated scornfully. ‘Vermin is what I call ‘em. They’re forever stirrin’ up trouble, talkin’ about the rights of the common man, and goin’ on about how the trades unions should be made stronger. Well, if they’d been to Australia—as I have—an’ seen for themselves what damage strong trades unions can do, they’d soon drop that particular idea.’
‘I can see how it might have embarrassed you to have your son associating with such people, my Lord,’ Blackstone said to the Earl. ‘Do you happen to know the names of any of these journalists?’
‘Certainly not!’ the Earl replied. ‘Wouldn’t clutter my brain with their names. Even if I did know, I’d never sully my lips by sayin’ them out loud.’
‘One of them is a man called Scott,’ Lady Emily said. ‘He runs a magazine called The Radical.’
‘Government should have closed the damned thing down long ago,’ the Viscount said.
The Earl took an elegant case from his jacket pocket and extracted a cigarette from it. Blackstone almost expected a footman in full livery to appear with a lighted taper, but, in fact, Montcliffe produced a humble box of matches, and lit the cigarette himself.
The Inspector ran his eyes quickly over the family again. There was no doubt that both Lady Emily and her mother had taken the death of Charles very much to heart. It was different with the men—while they were not exactly glad he was dead, there was at least some sense of relief that now he was gone he could no longer damage the family name.
‘Lady
Emily told me your son was in the habit of disappearing overnight,’ the Inspector said.
Earl Montcliffe sucked on his cigarette, and blew smoke down his aristocratic nose.
‘That would indeed appear to have been the case,’ he agreed. ‘Though his mother and I had no knowledge of it until after his murder,’ he added, giving his daughter a censorious glance.
‘And you have absolutely no idea where he might have been spending his time when he was missing?’
The Earl shook his head, regretfully. ‘If the boy had had some spirit, I could have given you the names of some “establishments” he might have been usin’. But knowin’ him as I did, I doubt very much whether he’d...whether he’d...’
Montcliffe realized he was perhaps saying too much in the presence of ladies and let the words trail off into nothingness.
‘He was runnin’ around with his journalist friends, I shouldn’t wonder,’ the Viscount chipped in.
Was he trying to cover up his father’s gaffe? Blackstone wondered. Or was he so insensitive that he didn’t even comprehend that a gaffe had been made, and wanted merely to take the opportunity to reiterate his contempt for his younger brother’s activities?
Earl Montcliffe flicked the ash from the end of his cigarette on to the floor. ‘Well, if that’s all, Blackstone...’ he said dismissively.
‘There is one other thing, my Lord,’ the Inspector said. ‘I’d like your permission to question your servants.’
‘The servants?’ Montcliffe echoed incredulously. ‘What possible good could it do to talk to the servants? You surely don’t think that Charles, for all his faults, spent time gossipin’ with them, do you?’
‘No,’ Blackstone admitted. ‘But servants see more of what goes on than you sometimes might think. For instance, your son’s valet must have been aware his master was missing, even when other members of his family were not.’
Blackstone and the Rendezvous With Death (The Blackstone Detective Series Book 1 Page 4