by Robin Paige
“I wanted to see them run,” Charles said mildly, restoring the cage to the barrow. “They’re very fast, aren’t they?”
The boy looked down at the coins and quickly recovered himself. “Oh, ’deed they are, sir,” he said, “an’ fierce as kin be wiv rats.” Shaking his head at the inexplicable whims and whimsies of gentlemen, he pocketed the coins, picked up his barrow, and turned with alacrity into the passageway on the other side of the street.
“Well, then, Murray,” Charles said, dusting his hands, “suppose we go around to the back and see if this man Sobersides will answer our ring.”
Jack Murray said not a word about the vanished ferrets. Instead, he went ahead of Charles around the building, past a derelict row of dustbins, to a narrow wooden stoop at the back. A calico cat was sitting on the top step but as the men approached, it jumped down with an annoyed meow and disappeared into the straggly bushes that filled the narrow yard.
Murray climbed the steps. A bell hung beside the door, and he pulled a dirty string, ringing it loudly. After a moment, he rang it again, and then again. From the bushes, the calico cat renewed its complaint.
“It doesn’t seem, sir,” the investigator said, looking down at Charles, “that there’s anybody here.”
“Well, then,” Charles said reasonably, “I suggest that we try the door. If it’s locked—”
It was. But Murray, a man of many talents, took a ring of keys from his pocket and, on the third try, unlocked the door. The hinges creaked when he pushed it open and he hallooed loudly, waited a moment, listening, then hallooed again.
“Doesn’t seem to be anyone here, sir,” he said, and Charles followed him into the gloomy interior.
They had entered a dark, narrow hallway. There was a closed door on the right, with a sign that said Office, Private and another at the end of the hall, standing open. Charles stepped past Murray, through the open door and into a spacious room, quite elegantly furnished: the Newmarket headquarters of Alfred Day, Bookmaker.
Murray entered behind Charles. “Well,” he remarked, “this is a bit of all right, wouldn’t you say, sir? Badger’s done quite well for himself.”
On the way to St. James Street, Murray had told Charles what he had learned about Alfred Day, with whom the investigator had been slightly acquainted before he retired from the Yard. Badger had been variously employed before he transformed himself into a bookmaker, most of his business being conducted on the shady side of the law. Day’s father and brother had been Newmarket pawnbrokers, and Badger had started in that business, opening a pawnshop of his own in London. It wasn’t long before the enterprising young fellow had branched out into the fencing of stolen goods and occasionally into outright theft. But Badger was also clever, and although he was occasionally picked up for questioning, he managed to keep himself from prosecution. He was adept at gaming, too, and regularly frequented the Hotel Metropole, where the smart and sporting sets gathered in the casino and billiards room. He won and lost a great deal of money there, on the fringes of several substantial frauds.
But after a number of years in London, Badger seemed to have determined on a different course. He returned to Newmarket, married a draper’s widow with a bit of money of her own, and set himself up as a bookmaker, catering to the fashionable crowd while making himself available to all sorts. The competition was challenging, since there were already a great many established bookmakers in town, but he had immediately flourished, quickly expanding his business to include a variety of wagering activities. Within three years of leaving London, Alfred Day was accounted one of the three or four leading bookmakers in Newmarket.
When Charles expressed surprise at Mr. Day’s speedy success, Murray offered the opinion that it was partly due to his reputation for honesty—that is, he was not known to have welshed on a bet—and partly to his having taken on as his partner a certain Eddie Baggs, from Brighton. Baggs, who apparently knew a very great deal about horses, proved to have a genius for numbers and understood the mechanics of making book to show a profit. While Badger might have been somewhat less gifted than Baggs in the fine art of making book, he had proved to be an astute businessman, demonstrating a great skill in manipulating his competitors. The partnership had proved to be a success. Within the first year Badger and Baggs had bought up the businesses of several of their smaller competitors, adding that custom to their own. By the second year, they had established a second office in London—and neither were hole-in-the-corner affairs, either, where fugitive betting was carried out by weasel-faced clerks. These were fashionable offices, located in areas frequented by smart people, where the swells could gather, smoke their cigars, and exchange racing tips and tidbits.
The Newmarket office was of this sort, Charles saw, as he looked around. The room was dark, but enough light filtered through the draperies over the front window to see that it was carpeted and furnished as a gentleman’s club, with large sofas and stuffed chairs, elegant mahogany breakfronts and bookcases, tables and chairs for gaming and other tables and chairs for catered meals. The walls were hung with gilt-framed paintings of horses and various landscapes and portraits, the high ceiling sparkled with crystal chandeliers, and the lingering odor of cigar smoke hung on the air. The whole interior spoke of gentlemanly leisure and luxury and good taste. Whatever the actual condition of his financial affairs, Mr. Alfred Day had at least succeeded in making a great show of success.
But the room was empty, and Charles could see there was nothing more to be learned beyond the general impression. Back in the hall, he tapped on the door marked Office. Hearing nothing, he opened it.
This room was far more utilitarian than the club room in the front. There was a large blackboard on one wall, scrawled with hierglyphics that Charles could not read; the other walls were papered with calendars of sporting events and announcements of various kinds. There was a desk, a wooden cabinet, and bookcase.
But these things were not what caught and held Charles’s attention. It was the litter of papers on the floor; the desk and cabinet drawers pulled out, and spilled; the books torn and tossed; the two overturned chairs; and the general chaos that had resulted from a violent and haphazard ransacking by someone who was bent on destruction.
Behind Charles, Jack Murray made a low, growling noise.
“Yes,” Charles said without turning. “It appears that someone was here before us.”
“D’you suppose Sobersides is up there?” Murray asked. He nodded toward a steep, open flight of stairs, almost like a ladder, at the back of the room. “Shall I have a quick look, sir? He might be dead.”
“He might be alive,” Charles said, “and armed. We’ll both go.” Carrying his stick, he climbed the stairs. At the top, he put his hat on the stick and lifted it just above the level of the opening in the floor. When nothing happened, he withdrew his hat and climbed up onto the second floor, which proved to be an open loft, with windows at either end.
There was no need for caution, he saw immediately, for the loft room had no human occupant, alive or dead. There was a bed in one corner, the covers flung back, and a square deal table by one window, in the center of which stood an unlit paraffin lamp with a dirty chimney. On the table were the remains of a shepherd’s pie and an empty bottle of ale.
Murray went to a wooden dresser and pulled open the drawers, revealing a jumble of shirts and stockings and underclothing, then to a makeshift corner closet, where he jerked aside the hanging sheet to reveal a well-worn black coat and two pairs of black trousers. An empty satchel and a pair of Wellingtons sat beneath.
“Doesn’t look like he took his clothes,” Murray remarked. “Either he left in a hurry, or he means to come back.”
Back downstairs, Charles poked around in the litter of papers and torn books. There was a small safe in the corner, gaping open. If it had once contained ledger books or the records of betting transactions, they had vanished.
Murray looked around with a frown. “I’d say, sir, that we’re left with a q
uestion or two. D’you suppose Badger was killed because he failed to pay up on a bet?”
“It’s possible,” Charles said. “It’s equally possible that he was killed because he wanted to collect. But I doubt if we’ll find any answers here.” He took out his watch. “I’m off to visit the doctor who has possession of Badger’s body. Why don’t you see what you can learn about Sobersides, and where he might have gone? Baggs, too—we’ll certainly want to have a word with him. And anything you might discover about how our victim spent his evening will no doubt be useful. I suppose we shall want to interview the widow.”
Murray nodded, agreeing. “I doubt if she knew much about his business, though. Women don’t, as a rule.”
Charles glanced at his watch. “Shall we say two o’clock, then? At the pub across from the clock tower?”
“Two o’clock,” Murray said. He was almost smiling. “Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Belowstairs at Regal Lodge
[James Todhunter Sloan] rode throughout the whole of the 1899 season in England, getting home 108 of his 345 mounts. . . . He often stayed the night at Regal Lodge, and it wasn’t one of the guest-rooms he slept in. Music-hall star Letty Lind sang a number which became famous as a saucy reference to Sloan’s affair with Lillie:
“Click, click, I’m a monkey up a stick,
And you must let me have my way.”
For several years . . . [Lillie Langtry] operated a betting-swindle, originally imparted to her by Tod Sloan, from Regal Lodge. She systematically received a flash from the course of a winner of a race the moment it passed the post, which enabled her to telegraph a big bet on the horse as if she had been on it before the off.
The Gilded Lily
Ernest Dudley
For Amelia, the occasions when Lady Charles went visiting were almost like a holiday. This morning, for instance, she had only to fetch tea and the Times upstairs, assist with her mistress’s toilette, and prepare the other outfits to be worn that day—an easy matter, since her ladyship liked to dress in the morning and change only for tea and dinner if necessary—two or at the most three changes of costume, rather than the four or five changes to which other ladies were accustomed. Once these slight chores were finished, Amelia might do as she liked until required to help her mistress bathe and dress.
After the servants’ supper the evening before, Amelia had chatted with Margaret until Mrs. Langtry rang and Margaret scurried upstairs to help her mistress dress for dinner at the Rothschilds’. Then Lady Charles left for the evening. With her ladyship’s permission, Amelia locked the bedroom door and spent the best part of an hour luxuriating in a hot bath, feeling like the Queen herself, then went off to her own tiny cubicle to read.
Amelia had grown quite proficient at reading in the last several years. Her ladyship encouraged all the servants at Bishop’s Keep to read in their spare hours, even providing newspapers and books—and not religious literature, either, as did Lady Kennilworth, Amelia’s cousin’s employer, who had taught her staff to read so that they could study the gospel tracts she pressed on them. No, the books Lady Charles left on the shelf in the servants’ hall were about faraway places and exotic customs, and sometimes even novels, a few of which her ladyship had actually written herself, under the name of Beryl Bardwell. When it was first whispered that Lady Charles indeed was Beryl Bardwell, the knowledge had caused a great stir in Dedham, and some concern among the servants who had early on discovered the author’s true identity and guarded it carefully. It was now a matter of pride, however, because Beryl Bardwell had actually become quite famous, and Lady Charles was the only authoress that any of them had ever known.
But Amelia had not been reading one of her mistress’s fictions last night. She had, instead, shed many tears over the final moving chapters of George Moore’s novel, Esther Waters. As a young woman, the heroine, Esther, worked in a household entirely given over to racing. Seduced and abandoned, she was forced to go to London to give birth and courageously raised her son alone, eventually marrying the child’s father. He had become a bookmaker and was sent to prison when he was convicted of taking wagers in his pub, leaving Esther alone once more. Esther’s plight reawakened in Amelia her unhappiness about her husband’s betting. For it wasn’t just the crown Lawrence had laid and lost on Gladiator at the Derby; he fancied himself a betting man, and Amelia sighed to think of the several lost crowns that might have otherwise gone to pay for Baby’s boots.
But this was too fine an occasion to spoil with sighing. The thought of Baby’s boots led to thoughts of Baby, safe at home with Amelia’s mother, and the thought of her precious daughter sweetly smiling in her sleep chased the more anxious thoughts from Amelia’s mind. She extinguished the light and smiled herself to sleep in the quiet darkness, awakening twice: once at her ladyship’s return at midnight from her evening with Lord Charles, when she got up to make sure that nothing was wanted; and again later, at the sound of a male voice, definitely not that of the Prince of Wales. Amelia had heard that voice at Easton Lodge, and she knew she would never forget it.
Now it was morning, and after her mistress had gone to breakfast, Amelia went down the back stairs to seek out Margaret, who was in the laundry, overseeing the ironing of Mrs. Langtry’s fresh sheets.
“I’ve got nothing to do,” Amelia said. “I’d be glad to ’elp.” She was rewarded with a grateful smile and an armload of fresh towels. Margaret brought the sheets, and the two women went back up the stairs to tidy Mrs. Langtry’s bedroom.
As they made the bed, Amelia said, with a little laugh, “It’s ’ard not to think ’oo slept ’ere last night.” She gave Margaret a significant glance. “I ’eard ’em talkin’ in the ’allway.”
“Well,” Margaret said tartly, “if ye’r thinkin’ it wuz ’Is Nibs ye ’eard, ye kin think agin. ’E don’t just come an’ go when ’e comes—’e comes and stays, ’im and ’is flock of servants, all proud as peacocks and just about as useless. So it wuzn’t ’im, ’cause none of ’em was ’ere to breakfast.”
Taking her place on the opposite side of the bed, Amelia arranged her face in a creditable imitation of bewilderment. “Oh, my,” she said. “You don’t mean, she ’as another—” She stopped, to give Margaret the opportunity to finish her sentence.
Margaret obliged. “That’s eggsac’ly wot I mean,” she said grimly. “And not just one, but lots. Why, last night at nine o’clock, on ’er way to dinner wiv the Prince, she ’ad a ren-dez-vooz wiv another man, in ’er carriage. Would yer believe it? Three in one night!” She flapped the sheet in Amelia’s direction, stern disapproval written in every line of her face.
“Another man?” Amelia asked, widening her eyes in disbelief. She grasped the sheet, clean and sweet-smelling, and straightened it across the bed. “But ’oo? I mean, ’oo’s important enough to put before the Prince?”
“ ’Er bookmaker, that’s ’oo,” Margaret said, tossing her head disdainfully. “The one she cheats.” She grasped the end of the sheet and raised one corner of the mattress at the foot of the bed. “Come now, tuck it in.”
While Amelia tucked in the sheet on her side of the bed, she frowned, thinking of poor Esther Waters, who had married a bookmaker. “ ’Ow does she cheat?”
Margaret picked up the heavy gold and purple coverlet and tossed it onto the bed. “She’s got one of those newfangled telly-phones in the drawing room. Just when a race is finished, somebody at the course phones ’er with the winner. She gives ’er bet to a boy ’oo rides ’is bicycle straight to the bookie wiv it, like she’d laid it on before the off. Or sometimes she telegraphs ’er bet to London. Either way, it’s a cheat.”
Pulling the spread even on both sides, the two women tucked it under and over the pillows. “But doesn’t the bookmaker get onto ’er?” Amelia asked, straightening up. “Seems like any ninny could figure it out.” She turned to the fireplace, where the cinders of last night’s fire remained in the grate. “Would you like me to do the fireplace, Marg�
��ret?”
“That’ud be a ’elp.” Margaret picked up the feather duster and went to the dressing tables. “I s’pose she doesn’t get found out ’cause she doesn’t do it so very often to the same bookie.” She flicked the duster lightly over the surface. “I know ’ow it’s done,” she added, “ ’cause I ’eard ’er talking on the ’phone, and then to the boy.”
Amelia began to shovel cinders and ashes into the ash bucket. “That’s clever.” She paused. There was a piece of crumpled paper lying loose among the cinders, the edges scorched. It had apparently been saved from burning by virtue of having had wine spilled on it. Quick as thought, Amelia scooped it into the pocket of her apron.
“Clever? Mebbee.” Margaret’s voice was thick with scorn. “But she wa’n’t clever enough to think it up. That American jockey ’oo sleeps ’ere sometimes—’ee showed ’er ’ow to do it. Americans are smart when it comes to cheatin’.” She went to dust the other dressing table.
Amelia cocked her head. “I wonder why she was meeting ’er bookmaker last night. D’ye think she wanted to lay a bet?”
“Don’t be a goose,” Margaret said, picking up the towels and going into the bathroom. “If ye ask me, she ’ad other business with ’im, and it wa’n’t wagers.”
Amelia finished cleaning out the fireplace and swept the hearth. She set the bucket outside the door and went into the bathroom, where Margaret was polishing the faucets with a towel. “I just don’t see,” she said, frowning, “ ’ow any woman ’ud be daft enough to fancy a bookmaker before the Prince.”
“It’s true,” Margaret said shortly. She gave the faucet one last disgusted swipe and threw the towel on the damp heap on the floor. “She sent ’im a note by Richard, the footman, askin’ ’im to meet ’er at nine in St. Mary’s Square. I know, ’cause Richard read the note and told me about it.” Shaking her head, she hissed through her teeth. “The goin’s-on in this ’ouse are enough to make a good Christian girl ’ang ’er ’ead in shame, Amelia. And ’er a parson’s daughter, too.”