Scarper Jack and the Bloodstained Room

by Christopher Russell

  When he had gone, Jack quickly unhooked the grapnel and descended by the drainpipe.

  ‘You were right. It was Erskine,’ he said as he slipped into Rupert’s room.

  ‘He didn’t see you, did he?’ asked Rupert, worried for Jack but for himself too. This was developing into a bit too much excitement so close to home.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Jack wasn’t sure but there was nothing he could do about it. He changed the subject.

  ‘D’you believe us now about the grapnel?’ he asked. ‘And can you see how the murderer got to the window?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rupert nodded.

  ‘Good. But what I can’t see,’ said Jack, ‘is how he got in through the window. And out again.’

  Rupert was rather glad. It seemed it hadn’t all been worked out without him after all.

  ‘But that’s why April’s here,’ continued Jack. He turned to where she was sitting on the newspaper.

  April stared silently back at him, a slight, challenging smile on her pinched face.

  ‘You can’t expect a share of the reward if you don’t help,’ said Jack determinedly.

  ‘What reward?’ asked Rupert.

  April looked defiantly up at him. ‘I’ll need a cheese wire,’ she said. ‘One with a bit of cheese on it would be nice.’

  Rupert frowned at her then left the room and crept downstairs. His parents were in the drawing room. Cook, he knew, would be in her own room now, which left Elizabeth in the kitchen. He rang the bell in the front parlour then darted out and hid in the passage until Elizabeth, summoned by the bell, hurried by. Rupert emerged, ran to the kitchen, grabbed the cheeseboard from the larder and dodged out again before Elizabeth, muttering under her breath, returned.

  April consumed a large piece of cheddar before saying another word. Then she unfastened the cheese wire from its retaining screw on the board and stood up.

  ‘We need a window,’ she said, then nodded at Jack. ‘And you’ll have to go outside again, of course.’

  Rupert led the way up the attic stairs, lit the gas lamp in the attic room and closed the door behind them. Jack hurried to the window that had refused to open for him earlier and, grasping the brass finger holds at the bottom, tried to lift it. It moved only the merest fraction, and instantly he saw why. Screwed to the window sill was a short metal post with a horizontal bar on top. The bar, which pivoted on its post, had been pushed right across towards the glass and was now wedged on top of the window frame itself. The window was securely locked.

  ‘It’s a bit rusty,’ observed April critically. ‘Does it open?’

  She seized the brass knob on top of the bar and pulled it. The bar swivelled away from the window frame. April slid the sash easily upwards and cool night air flowed into the room. ‘Well, that’s a start,’ she said.

  Both boys watched intently while April deftly looped the cheese wire round the brass knob on the locking bar, then trailed both ends out over the sill and left them dangling outside.

  ‘Go outside, close the window then pull both the wires,’ she said to Jack.

  ‘Pull them?’

  April nodded. ‘Gently. Don’t tug till it’s tight, then tug one end hard. Only one end.’

  Jack left the other two in the attic room and went out on to the fire escape. The window was a long way to his left. It wasn’t going to be easy to reach it without the grapnel and rope, but using those would mean making more noise and he knew they’d made enough already. He climbed on to the sloping handrail of the fire escape and, with hands spread on the house wall, edged sideways as close as he could get to the window. Bracing himself, and trying not to think of the long drop to the basement if he should slip, he stretched up, clawed at the bottom of the window sash and pulled it down shut. Now he had to grope around on the sill for the gossamer-thin strands of cheese wire. He wound both ends round his fingers and pulled gently. At first, nothing happened, but as he maintained the gentle pressure he felt resistance on the other side of the window. The wire looped round the knob was pulling the bar back towards the glass. He pulled harder and heard a click.

  Above him, April loomed inside the window, gesturing with her hands, but Jack didn’t need telling what to do. He let go of one end of the wire and tugged the other end hard. The wire slid silently out from under the window frame.

  Inside, Rupert stared open-mouthed at the disappearing cheese wire.

  ‘It’s locked!’ he exclaimed. ‘He locked it with the wire…’ He tapped excitedly on the window, peering out at Jack. ‘You pulled the lever across. Click!’ His exultant expression changed. ‘Jack! Are you all right?’

  Jack wasn’t all right. His feet were slipping and he was about to fall.

  The window flew up and Rupert leant out and seized an arm. Beside him, April managed to grab a handful of Jack’s shirt. Between them, they hauled him up over the window sill into the attic.

  April glanced out of the window then slid it shut. ‘You’d have made a real mess of the rose beds,’ she remarked.

  Jack got to his feet, feeling slightly annoyed at having needed the rescue.

  ‘That’s how the murderer did it then,’ he said, almost dismissively.

  April shrugged. ‘It’s how to get out of a window and leave no trace,’ she said calmly. ‘Or so I’ve heard.’ She paused. ‘But you can’t unlock a window from the outside.’

  She looked at Jack and her cool certainty sank into his heart. Mind your own business, his father had told him when Jack had asked about the heap of sovereigns on the pub bar. Was this where the money had come from? Had he been paid to leave a window unlocked?

  ‘What’s the matter, Jack?’ asked Rupert.

  Jack looked up miserably and shook his head.

  ‘Nothing.’

  5

  Suspects

  The journalist was shown into the Assistant Commissioner’s office. He was from the London News. He smiled a trifle smugly.

  Colonel Radcliffe didn’t much like journalists. Their interest in crime was purely financial. It sold newspapers. Whenever offering to help the police, they were invariably helping themselves. He wished he hadn’t agreed to the interview.

  ‘You’ll pardon me for calling on you so late, Colonel, but I wonder if you could tell us about Freda Barlow.’

  Colonel Radcliffe stared at the smiling journalist. It had been a long day and he was tired.

  ‘Freda Barlow?’ repeated his visitor. ‘Widow of Edwin Barlow? Fellow who hanged himself a few days ago. Up to his eyes in debt. It was in the newspapers.’

  ‘Everything is in the newspapers,’ remarked Colonel Radcliffe sourly. ‘Not all of it is true.’

  ‘Well, this is true enough, sir. Freda Barlow was seen by a dozen people shouting at Henry Featherstone yesterday.’

  Radcliffe looked blank and the journalist’s smile broadened. It was so sweet to be one up on the police.

  ‘At the Prince’s Bridge ceremony? She as good as threatened him for misleading investors. Her husband amongst them. You weren’t aware of this?’ He took out his notepad. ‘May I assume then that you haven’t followed it up?’

  Radcliffe looked at him sharply. ‘You may assume nothing.’

  The journalist was writing quickly as he spoke.

  ‘Have you asked the witness who saw a woman in Nunwell Street if he recognizes Mrs Barlow as that woman?’

  ‘The witness who claims to have seen a woman,’ corrected Colonel Radcliffe stiffly.

  ‘Of course.’ The journalist had sat down without being invited. He leant back in his chair and regarded the Colonel. ‘We, that is to say, the London News, being, unlike yourself, aware of Mrs Barlow’s views on Henry Featherstone, arranged for the witness to call at her house a short while ago.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘He positively identified her as the woman he saw in Nunwell Street. May we have a comment, sir, on this latest and significant development?’

  ∗

  Rupert was the proud owner of a magnifying glass. It had been a gift from his mo
ther, who had hoped to encourage in him an interest in natural history. She vaguely felt that if her son was to be absent from school so often, he might educate himself a little by studying insect life in the garden. This hadn’t worked, however, because nature was at its most abundant in summer and Rupert was then indoors with pretended hay fever.

  Rupert did like the idea, though, and fancied he looked rather intelligent, examining things through the glass and nodding. He was doing it now, in his room, where he and Jack and April were still secretly gathered. His subject was the grapnel.

  ‘You can see blood on this hook,’ he said. ‘And just a little hair.’

  He looked up consideringly at Jack, who was leaning beside him, then, without asking, reached up and tugged at Jack’s head.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rupert, not sounding it.

  He held the couple of hairs he’d pulled from Jack’s scalp under the glass, close to the grapnel hook.

  ‘Same colour,’ he said confidently. ‘This is definitely what hit you. Unintentionally, I expect. I mean, if they’d seen you on the roof, they would hardly have drawn your attention by throwing the grapnel, would they? I think it was an accident. They didn’t know you were up there. They didn’t know they’d hit you. The grapnel clunked off your head then stuck fast in the gutter where they wanted it, so they just carried on as planned. Erskine might not have managed a roof but I bet he could manage a window – and so could his scaffolder, of course.’

  ‘Rupe? Why is your lamp still on?’

  Mrs Shorey’s voice was on the floor below but sounded likely to come rapidly closer.

  ‘Out! Out!’ whispered Rupert desperately. He shoved the grapnel into its sack and pushed it under his bed, then started scrabbling up newspaper from the floor.

  ‘Meet you again tomorrow?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Where, where?’

  ‘Come to Jevons’ yard, Redbarn Road. It’s safer. There’s a flat roof round the back – across the lane. Ten o’clock?’

  Rupert nodded. Jack and April darted out into the passage and headed for the fire escape.

  ‘D’you trust that Rupert?’ asked April as she and Jack hurried away from Calborn Gardens.

  She didn’t say much, so when she spoke Jack paid attention.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, surprised. ‘Why not?’

  April shrugged. ‘He’s rich.’

  ‘Not that rich, I don’t think,’ said Jack. ‘And what does it matter if he is? Doesn’t mean we can’t trust him.’

  ‘He kept the grapnel,’ said April. ‘It’s the only thing you’d got. The only evidence.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he lives next door to the artist man. The one you think you heard planning the murder. Perhaps they’re friends.’

  Jack didn’t speak for several seconds.

  ‘He’ll be at the meeting place tomorrow,’ he said at last. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  They parted and Jack made his way home, bracing himself for the questions he must ask about the window at the back of Nunwell Street. The window that someone must have left unlocked before the murderer arrived.

  His father was snoring loudly. Dead drunk. Unwakeable. When it came to it, Jack was relieved.

  Rupert had lain in bed awake all night, his mind spinning with grapnels and ropes and window locks. He’d got into minor trouble for the cheeseboard but his mother had found nothing else amiss.

  By breakfast time he was forming a plan. Since his Jack-inspired victory over the bullies, he thought of himself as a bolder person than before; capable of being resourceful in areas other than avoiding school. Before going downstairs to breakfast, he made his silent way towards his father’s library. History had always been his favoured subject but he knew there was also a whole shelf of weighty books on art.

  Fortunately, there was still some food left when he did reach the breakfast room.

  ‘Why aren’t you ready for school, sir?’

  The familiar question received an unfamiliar answer.

  ‘Holiday, Pa.’

  ‘Oh. Well, you get far too many.’ Mr Shorey grunted and returned his attention to his newspaper.

  Rupert didn’t say that if it hadn’t been a holiday he’d have been on his way by now, ready to seek out the bullies and give them another bashing. But there were other excitements in store today. He shovelled on the marmalade.

  ‘I see a woman’s been named,’ said his father. ‘A Mrs Barlow. Her husband hanged himself because of debt. Definitely identified as the woman seen in Nunwell Street. I told you it was someone who’d got their fingers burnt, didn’t I?’

  ‘Did you, dear?’ said Mrs Shorey. ‘Yes, I expect you did.’

  ‘Can I see, Pa?’ asked Rupert.

  ‘Certainly not,’ replied his father. He held the newspaper closer.

  Rupert returned to his heavily laden toast, but his overactive mind had been shooting off in all directions during the night. Regrettable suspicion was niggling at him again.

  ‘Pa,’ he asked, ‘could someone have climbed into Mr Featherstone’s office down the chimney? From the roof ?’

  ‘I can’t see a woman doing that,’ scoffed his father dismissively.

  Rupert didn’t mean a woman; he meant a skinny sweeping boy.

  ‘No, dear,’ said his mother calmly. ‘Not from outside. Chimney pots are far too narrow. And I believe there was a fire burning in the grate at the time of the murder.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rupert, suddenly ashamed. ‘Thanks, Ma.’

  Mr Shorey stared at his unexpectedly knowledgeable wife and kept his ignorance to himself.

  ‘Pa?’

  ‘Yes. What now?’

  ‘I’ve been reading a lot about paintings. You know: art. It’s awfully interesting. I was wondering, as we’ve got a real artist living next door at the moment, d’you think you could make an appointment for me to visit him and, well, discuss his work?’

  Mr Shorey laid aside his newspaper, stunned.

  ‘Discuss his work?’

  ‘Well, you know, at least look at it. I think it would be a fine opportunity for me. Frightfully educational.’

  There was a brief silence while Mrs Shorey smiled at her husband.

  ‘You see, Desmond?’ she said, as if vindicated in some long-standing argument. ‘You see?’

  And she beamed proudly at her knowledge-seeking son.

  ‘He’s looking at the windows,’ murmured Constable Adams.

  ‘I checked them,’ replied Constable Downing, not sure whether to be affronted or worried. ‘First thing I did yesterday. Told him so too.’

  ‘Well, he’s doing it again.’

  Colonel Radcliffe was indeed re-examining the windows. In particular, those at the back of the building. He peered at them all closely. None of them showed any sign whatsoever of having been prised open.

  Featherstone might conceivably have let in the murderer at the front door. But that door had been found locked and bolted. So Featherstone, or the murderer, must have locked and bolted it again from the inside. The murderer, then, must have left by a different route. The bolts on the small back door were welded in place by rust and had not been moved in years. That only left the windows. It had to be a window.

  In a small storeroom on the first floor, Colonel Radcliffe finally found what he was looking for. Minute examination of the brass window catch revealed equally minute scratch marks.

  ‘Downing,’ he called.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Take Adams with you and search the ground beneath this window.’

  ‘We already have, sir.’

  Colonel Radcliffe turned sharply. ‘Then do it a second time. With your noses and fingertips, if necessary.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Are we looking for something in particular?’

  ‘A thread of wire.’

  Colonel Radcliffe turned to the window again and smiled to himself. Pleased, relieved even. Now he would turn his attention to Mrs Barlow.

  Jack could
hear Mr Jevons coughing. He didn’t go and say hello, just climbed the rickety wooden stairs to the low flat roof.

  It was the only safe place for a secret meeting that Jack had been able to think of. Safe because the building underneath the flat roof was derelict. All the buildings on this side of the lane were derelict: Redbarn Road was to be widened and the owners and occupants of the poorly built factories and tenements had long since been required to leave. Only Jevons in his sweep’s yard was likely to discover Jack and his new friends here.

  He listened to Jevons talking to his horse as he harnessed it to the cart. More coughing. A lot more. Perhaps the sweep was really ill. Jack felt a sudden confusion of guilt and anger. He should be helping him, not trying to solve a crime, however dreadful. He wanted to talk to his old master, tell him what was happening, but he couldn’t: it would be even more of a burden on the sick man now. At least Jevons wouldn’t be worrying about him. He would assume Jack was with his father. He couldn’t know that Tony Tolchard had slammed out of the house at dawn without a word to his son about their supposed new life together, let alone about the murder.

  Jack determinedly told himself he had little enough to complain about, not compared to poor Richard Featherstone. And he resisted the temptation to just drop on to the sweep’s cart as it left the yard and pretend nothing at all had happened. But he was very relieved when April appeared. He wasn’t alone after all.

  ‘No Rupert?’ she observed, mildly sarcastic.

  ‘I don’t suppose he knows his way around the streets very well,’ said Jack.

  The nearest clock chimed ten and they sat in silence for a while.

  ‘Gran says thank you for the sovereign,’ announced April. ‘I never told her about you being sick and everything.’

  Jack shrugged. She was being gracious. He didn’t know what to say.

  April sprang up, hearing footsteps before Jack did.