Jack, Knave and Fool

by Alexander, Bruce

  “I must go,” said I.

  “Well, then, goodbye,” said she.

  “You must return now to the room above.”

  “Oh, pooh, do let me at least finish my cup of tea. It’s rather good. Few men can brew tea — none in my experience.”

  I sighed. “Well … all right, but once done you must go upstairs.”

  “Once done, I shall.”

  Reluctantly, I left. It seemed to me as I trudged out into Bow Street and turned directly toward the post letter office that the missive that awaited me there was almost certainly one from the Warwick magistrate; Sir John had expected its arrival this day. Had Clarissa Roundtree known its particular nature and its importance in the matter of her father, she might well have wished it were a letter from Lichfield. While hurrying along, I wondered again at the strange concatenation of circumstances which had brought Thomas Round-tree to us, and with him his daughter. More than that, I wondered at their fate.

  The letter was indeed the one expected by Sir John. Once I had it in my pocket, I hurried even faster back to Bow Street. I near burst with curiosity as to its contents. It occurred to me that it would suit me well if the Warwick magistrate reported that George Bradbury was there still, attending his ailing father. I rued the day that Bunkins had brought me to St. Andrew’s Churchyard; I regretted taking him to Mr. Donnelly’s surgery for a second look at that repulsive head floating in the jar of alcohol. All in all, I should easily have believed that this was all a great mistake — Bunkins had never claimed to have made an absolutely certain identification—were it not for the involvement of Jackie Carver. That one was a killer; I knew it well, for he would certainly have killed me some weeks past.

  And so I came to Number 4 Bow Street, where I saw a small crowd filing out the door; many of their faces were familiar to me —layabouts and idle women of the streets who received their midday’s entertainment at Sir John’s court. Their exit told me that the day’s session was done. Waiting impatiently until the crowd had dispersed, I entered, taking the inner door to the right which led down the long hall, past the strong room where prisoners were held, and beyond Mr. Marsden’s place of business with its imposing files and high scrivener’s writing table, directly to Sir John’s private domain. His door stood half open; he was at the moment just seating himself at his desk. I knocked before I entered.

  “Jeremy, is it?” He often amazed me with his preternatural feats of sightless recognition.

  “Yes, Sir John, and I have the letter from Warwick with me.”

  “Come in, lad. Open it by all means and read it me.”

  I needed no further encouragement. I strode into his chambers, broke the seal on the letter, and not even bothering to seat myself, began reading.

  “‘To Sir John Fielding, Magistrate, Bow Street Court, Cities of London and Westminster. Dear Sir,’” I read.

  “Tn response to your query as to the presence of George Bradbury in our city, I have made inquiries, the results of which I now put before you. He came here three weeks past when his father, William Bradbury, a man of some eighty years, still lingered at death’s door. Indeed he did not linger long, for the day following his son’s arrival he died. Old Mr. Bradbury, a man much liked and well honored here, was buried the next day with little ceremony. There was some general resentment at this haste, for it deprived many who would have liked the opportunity of paying last respects and attending the funeral. Nevertheless, George Bradbury, the only surviving member of the family, prevailed: the father was buried; the will was read; the son inherited all. The fortune that was passed on to him consisted for the most part of property— house and surrounding lands, fields which brought in good rents, et cetera. He posted notices all about the shire and auctioned off everything— with one exception. House, furniture, his father’s personal effects, lands, and fields were put on the block and sold. George Bradbury wanted only cash. The single exception to which I referred was his father’s horse, a mare big as any stallion, and white as snow. She would have brought a pretty price, yet the son wished to ride her back to London in triumph. He left as soon as his business here in Warwick was completed two weeks ago, perhaps more accurately ten to twelve days ago. He had no friends here to bid farewell, so the exact day of his departure is difficult to fix.

  ” ‘You may have perceived from what I have written thus far that George Bradbury was no great favorite hereabouts. Indeed he was not. Before he left for London a score of years past, or near that, he had been party to a number of questionable business matters, and in fact had appeared before me twice.

  On one of these occasions I fixed a fine on him of ten guineas, which his father paid. It was shortly afterward that the son left for London with a goodly amount settled upon him by his father in order to start a business there. I, for one, did breathe a sigh of relief to be rid of him.

  “‘I know not the specific reason for your inquiry, sir, though good sense prompts that he is late in his return to London. Frankly, if that is the case, then I am not surprised. When I heard of his plan to return alone on horseback, I warned him against it. Though it is no great distance from here to your great city, the roads between are known to be infested by highwaymen. The horse he would ride alone would have been considered a prize to such as them. He dismissed my caution and said he intended to go well armed. Yet these highway robbers have their tricks. He may have been caught in some ambuscade and now lies in some shallow grave in a wood between here and there. He carried a great bag of money with him — sovereigns, guineas, and shillings —the proceeds of the auction. If a highwayman got it, he might well retire as a country squire in some distant corner of the realm. That would then be the last we would know of the matter. I understand Mr. Bradbury had a wife. (You see? I already speak of him in the past tense.) He boasted of her youth, her beauty, and her wit in business. Do not hold out to her much hope that her husband lives. Perhaps she will not grieve overmuch for him. I know I shall not.

  “‘If you require more than this, let me know, and I shall provide what I can, for I remain your humble and obedient servant, Matthew Tiverton, Magistrate, City of Warwick.”

  “Well, what do you think of that, Jeremy?” Sir John burst forth immediately I had finished.

  “I think it a good letter, sir, though it be plain from it that Mr. Tiverton has little use for George Bradbury.”

  “Little use indeed. Yet for our purposes, the letter is not near so helpful as it might be. I do wish the magistrate had been able to be more specific as to Bradbury’s day of departure. Even so, it is placed back far enough that there would have been time enough for the pawnbroker to arrive for his appointment with death here in London. And Mr… . what is his name? Tiverton? — he is quite right to say that our man took a great risk in riding off on his journey alone, no matter how well armed he might have been. If there were but some way to prove that Bradbury had arrived here … But at this point I know of none.”

  “Then what are we to do? Simply wait and watch and hope those you call the conspirators show themselves, make some mistake, or …”

  “Nooo,” said Sir John. “I think it time to take some action. I have formed a plan, not a very complicated one by any means, nor one which will demand the services of many constables. It will, however, require the help of your friend Jimmie Bunkins.”

  “Bunkins, sir?”

  “Yes, Jeremy. I wonder would you be good enough to fetch him? What I have in mind might make it necessary that he start his afternoon lessons a bit late. You should make this clear to his tutor. I have no doubt Mr. Burnham will cooperate in this.”

  “I’ll go immediately,” said I, already backing out of the room.

  “Yes, please do. And tell him, if you will, that if he has any old or dirty clothes, he is to wear them.”

  What a peculiar stipulation! I left Bow Street turning it round in my mind, trying to fix just what sort of activity he might have in mind for Bunkins that might require him to rough his clothes, perhaps dirty them.
I could have asked Sir John, of course, and he might have told me — and then again, he might not. I decided it was best to have done as I did — simply to do as he asked and trust that all would soon be revealed.

  I took my usual route to St. James Street, which led me along the Strand and on to Pall Mall. I had bare taken my turn onto that wide way when I heard the beat of a drum — or, as it turned out, two drummers beating together—and thought perhaps a parade was coming in my direction. And indeed it was a parade of sorts, but the drums were muffled and their rhythm was slow and solemn, a doleful, dreadful time; it was a funeral cortege come crawling along. Coaches pulled over and made room for the procession. Pedestrians along the way halted as the black-draped wagon bearing the coffin passed by; a few of the men around me had the courtesy to remove their hats from their heads, as I myself felt obliged to do.

  “Who has died?” I muttered to the man next me.

  “Lady Laningham,” said he. “It was ruled natural causes, but some say not.”

  I gave not a word in response to that, but once the black coach containing the Paltrow family had passed by, I returned hat to head and hurried on. Though I did not count the coaches, the procession was an impressively long one. My glimpse of Lord Laningham’s cortege a week before, though it gave no true comparison, did at least suggest that the number of mourners attending her had equaled his.

  I thought it strange that I had had to ask who it was had died. Here was I, after all, quite close to the Laningham residence in St. James Square whence the procession had made its start. And it had been but day before yesterday that the inquest had been held. This was proof how completely the putative murder of Bradbury, Roundtree’s suspected involvement in it, and Clarissa Roundtree’s illness had driven all else from my mind. I found it of great interest, too, that the man to whom I had put my query—an ordinary man of business, perhaps a tradesman or a shopkeeper of the more prosperous sort —had given voice to a general doubt regarding the finding of the jury at the coroner’s inquest. I was still thinking upon this when I turned up St. James Street and made my way to the Bilbo residence.

  In the interest of brevity, let me advance my narrative swiftly to a time quite near midnight that same day. I stood in the shadows of the dive across from George Bradbury’s pawnshop on Bedford Street in the company of Constable Brede. He, the most solitary of nature and least talkative of all the Bow Street Runners, had been silent as a post since we had taken our position five minutes before, nor had he spoken a word during our short walk from the livery stable at the corner of Half-Moon, just at the point where it narrows from a street to a tight passage.

  Sir John’s plan was simple enough. Since some days before Bunkins had, in my company, proposed to Mrs. Bradbury that she buy certain goods which he proposed to steal in a bold burglary of some great house, Sir John suggested to him that he and I return to her and inform her that the burglary would take place this very night. If she then proved as eager to accept stolen goods as she had on our first visit, we would return at midnight with a wagon covered over with sailcloth. Upon his arrival, Bunkins would inform her from which house the swag had been taken and demand a price from her — say, something on the order of a quarter of their value. They would come to an agreement, and he would then throw off the sailcloth to reveal not a great treasure of goods but two or three armed constables, who would then leap out and put all in sight under arrest.

  That was how it was planned, and that — save for a few changes improvised by Bunkins and me—was how it proceeded. He and I knew full well that I could not show my face again in the shop, for fear that Jackie Carver might be about and would, of course, immediately recognize me as one from Bow Street; nor could I ride along with him on the wagon box at midnight for the very same reason. (There was an awkward moment when Sir John had asked which of us was the better at driving a wagon. I said I was completely incapable. Bunkins surprised me by boasting that he could handle a team of four, for the driver of Mr. Bilbo’s coach had taught him well.) There were details to be attended to: I had to return to the livery stable to engage a wagon and team for later that night, and Sir John wished me to be present when he explained the plan to the Runners he had selected to implement it.

  When he had done with that, and the constable had left his chambers, I revealed my ignorance of his method by asking how we might prove murder by arresting the three “conspirators” as receivers of stolen goods.

  “We shall arrest them on the lesser charge, which can be easily proven/’ he had explained, “so that we may question them on the greater one. The important thing is to interrogate them singly and convince them that we know all there is to know about the murder of George Bradbury, that we accept it as fact and know these three to be the perpetrators of this heinous crime. I shall have a great deal of time to work on them, and I shall do so quite mercilessly.” Then did he leer fiendishly in a most theatrical manner. “Oh, for a pair of thumbscrews!” he exclaimed. “Had I such, I could have confessions from them immediately—if not sooner.”

  Could he be serious? Of course not. It was seldom he jested about such matters, though. That he would do so now suggested to me that he looked forward to the interviews as a game of wits and wills.

  And so we waited, Mr. Brede and I. He may have been silent, yet there was noise aplenty from within the grogshop outside which we stood. No doubt he would have had to shout to make himself heard. Since Mr. Brede never shouted, he said nothing at all. No, not even when the team and wagon at last appeared. I had been watching the pawnshop for any sign of light or movement when I felt a nudge at my arm, looked up, and saw the constable pointing down Bedford Street. There it was, revealed in the dim streetlamps; Bunkins sat high upon the wagon box, and behind him, beneath the sailcloth, were Mr. Perkins and Mr. Bailey, well armed, ready to leap out and take charge.

  Bunkins seemed to have a fair command of the two horses, a pair of old grays which looked not much healthier than the ghostly spavined nags which had pulled the Raker’s wagon as he went out bringing in the dead. Still, they proved stubborn. The single difficult maneuver Bunkins had to execute was to turn team and wagon into the dark, narrow passage beside the pawnshop which led to its rear. No doubt he had managed such a turn before with a larger coach and a team of four. Yet Mr. Bilbo’s horses were younger, better fed, and well trained to their task; no doubt, too, Mr. Bilbo’s driver had sat beside Bunkins and given him instruction through all difficult circumstances. In any case, whether the fault was Bunkins’s or no, the horses balked at the entrance to the passage. After a good deal of urging, which he alternated with a bit of pleading, Bunkins gave up, climbed down from his seat, taking the oil lamp with him, and after some tugging and pulling, managed to lead the horses down the passage, hallooing as he went. A light came on above the pawnshop.

  Mr. Brede signaled that he would now go across the street and cover the passage, should anyone be foolish enough to try to escape by running from the back of the shop to the street. We had agreed that I would cover the front door, the least likely escape exit, since I was no constable and was unarmed but for the club such as all the Beak Runners carry. The rest had pistols by their sides; Mr. Brede had a cutlass, as well. I, who had also crossed the street, was at the door but in a spot to one side of it where I could not be seen. I nodded to the constable across the space that separated us, no more than twenty feet. He nodded in return. We waited.

  On any night except one like this, chill and damp, dark and foggy, Bedford Street might well be crowded with footloose drunken men who, should they see a constable in wait, would think it great sport to shout out a warning to the malefactor. Yet not tonight. I looked the street up and down and saw no one. All of the roisterers and merrymakers were inside the grogshops and dives up and down the street, seeking to warm themselves inside and out. I found myself wishing that Roundtree was among them.

  Though we saw no one, within two or three minutes we began to hear voices from behind the shop. Indistinct they may
have been; nevertheless one I made out to be Bunkins’s, and the other — higher, whining one moment and hectoring the next —could only be that of Mrs. Bradbury. The two went on haggling in a most quarrelsome manner, until at last there was a pause of nearly a minute —then shouts, footsteps, a shot! The constables had made their appearance!

  My club was out and in my hand. A tall figure came running out the passage. Mr. Brede, just as tall and a good deal wider, caught him and wrestled him to the ground. It had to be Roundtree — and it was. At the same time, I heard a flurry of movement from within the shop. One of them was at the door, fumbling at the key in the lock. It had to be—yes, it was — Jackie Carver. I leapt aside as the door flew open. Once through the door, he started to run, and I might have missed him had he not turned in my direction. I jumped forward and hit him a stout blow with my club upon the back of the knee. I’d hoped to knock him down with it, but though it staggered him, it did not fell him. He regained his balance, turned, and faced me; in his hand glinted that object in which he placed such faith — his knife. I closed the distance between us. And then came a sudden look of recognition in his face, and from his lips issued a great howl of dismay.

  “You!”

  I expected him to leap at me, knife first. Instead did he turn and run. I had set myself for his charge, and it took me a moment to react properly —a moment too long, as it developed. For the shot that had been fired in the rear of the pawnshop turned out a great crowd from the grogshop across the street. There they were, still pouring forth from the entrance, yet they parted, making an avenue of escape for Jackie Carver. Nevertheless, a moment later — that moment too long—when I reached the crowd, that avenue was closed to me. I was pushed back by half a score of hands. He was one of their own, and they would permit no pursuit of him. I stood a moment, quite boiling with anger, slapping the club in an angry rhythm into the palm of my left hand. Then did I raise it above my head in a most threatening manner and make ready to charge, thinking I might beat my way through them. But behind me at that moment came a voice I knew well as that of Constable Perkins.