The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  “Ah, what a nice lady!” exclaims the old woman. “Such a dridful thing as happened to her! Nice God-fearing widow woman like her. And no-one on hand to pay for a decent burial.” She shakes her head. “It’s not right, it’s not right at all.”

  “How long had she been living here before she was killed?”

  “Oh, not long. A week or two, no more. She said when she came it was just for a short while, until she found a new position. People like her, they get t’eir lodgings t’rown in. Not like t’e rest of us.”

  “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  “To be sure, I t’ought as you were a friend of hers? Mrs Cass was a nurse, wasn’t she—only t’e place she was working at let her go, and she had to find anot’er situation. I told her she might be better off going home, to her own people, but she said t’ere was no work to be had t’ereabouts, and in any case she had not lived t’ere for many years and had no family left to speak of. Apart from her brother, of course.”

  Charles has wandered to the window in the course of this, but turns now and stares at the old woman, who’s started to fiddle fretfully with the mismatched plates and cups stacked on the tiny chest of drawers.

  “Abigail Cass had a brother?”

  “Oh yes. Very nice man, if a bit rough round t’e edges for my taste. Came here a few mont’s a’ter she was killed but I couldn’t tell him anyt’ing he didn’t already know. Poor man, he’d only just found out she was dead—dead and buried in a pauper’s grave and too late for him to do anyt’ing about it. But t’en he was a fearsome long way away when it happened, and t’at’s the trut’.”

  The lad on the bed turns over heavily onto his back and starts snoring loudly. The old woman steps closer to Charles and looks up at him. “Seems Mrs Cass had written to him just before she died, only t’e letter was mislaid and he only got it weeks later. Poor man was cursing and crying and taking on so, it weren’t easy to follow what he were saying.” She sighs. “I’ve seen it take people t’at way before—t’ey lose a loved one unexpected and look for someone else to blame. Most often t’ere’s no trut’ in it, and I’m sure t’at’s what poor Mr Boscawen realised in t’e end.”

  Charles saw it coming, but only just, and it’s a shock all the same. The connexion he’s been searching for.

  He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out half a crown. It’s bright. New-minted. “This hospital where she worked—where did you say it was?”

  She flutters a mittened hand. “Oh I couldn’t tell you—I don’t t’ink Mrs Cass ever mentioned it. Or at least not in my hearing.”

  “And she said nothing about why she left?”

  “We-ell, not exactly—”

  The old woman turns away and starts to tinker with the crockery again. Charles moves a step closer. “Mrs O’Driscoll?”

  She glances up at him and then at the figure prone on the bed, but whatever it is she’s so hesitant—or so fearful—to confide, the sleeper is surely in no fit state to hear it.

  “I’m no listener at keyholes, sir, I can assure you, but t’e rooms here are so small and t’e walls so thin—”

  “I quite understand. I’m sure that if anyone raised their voice in here you could hear it the other side of the court.”

  “Ah, but t’at was just it. He didn’t raise his voice at all. Mrs Cass—she was quite distressed—angry even—but for all t’e noise he made you might’a been forgiven for t’inking she was talking to herself.”

  So much, thinks Charles, for not listening at keyholes. But he lets no trace of the thought appear on his face.

  “Was it an aristocratic voice? A gentleman’s voice?”

  “Oh I couldn’t tell you. It were too low. Little more t’an a whisper, but it was a strange one, t’at’s for sure. Sent cold shivers right down my back. I told Father Conor, it reminded me of what it says in t’e Bible about a voice ‘going like a serpent’. T’at’s what it sounded like, and no mistake. A serpent.”

  “But you didn’t hear what he was actually saying?”

  “No more than a word or two. Not’ing as made any sense. Mrs Cass, now, t’at was different. She was defending herself, t’at was clear enough. I remember t’ere was something about a girl having been cruelly used, and cruelly wronged. It had such a ring to it, it stuck in my mind. And t’en she said she knew what was going on, and all t’e noble rank and money in London would not be enough to conceal it, not if she had anything to do with it.”

  The expression is more eloquent, but the meaning is just the same: I naw what yow did. And I will make yow pay.

  Charles takes a deep breath; his heart is beating faster now. “But you have no idea who the man was?”

  “I never saw him. But t’ere was one thing that stuck in my mind. T’e door was a little ajar, and t’ere was a smell like baccy, only sweeter somehow.” She shakes her head almost wistfully, and pulls distractedly at her shawl. “Lovely it was—I’d never smelt anyt’ing like it before.”

  So, thinks Charles, she may not be able to identify a gentleman’s voice, but she can identify a gentleman’s tobacco all right.

  “And when was this, Mrs O’Driscoll?”

  “Last September. I remember exactly, because it was less than a week later t’at she was killed. Poor, poor lady.”

  “Did you tell the police about the man you heard?”

  She looks offended. “But of course I did! T’ere’s some round here as wouldn’t hold out a hand to a policeman to save him from drowning, but I’m not one of t’em. I told t’at nice Inspector everyt’ing I just told you and he said it was—what was the word, now—not relevant.” She folds her hands. “Not relevant to t’e investigation. T’at was his exact word. Not relevant.”

  How very interesting, muses Charles—what’s an Inspector doing coming round here, when there are any number of constables to take on such a menial task? He can make a pretty shrewd guess who it was, too, but he needs to be certain. Absolutely certain.

  “Do you remember the man’s name? The Inspector?”

  She beams at him. “To be sure! It were such an odd one, I could hardly forget. Didn’t sound like a real name, if you take my meaning. Bucket. T’at was his name. Inspector Bucket.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Attorney and Client

  WHEN HE EMERGES from the stairway Charles is unsurprised to see the crowd has dispersed and the court is empty of all but the four old men sitting on the kerb, still dealing their worn brown cards. Disputes among neighbours flare like summer storms round here—full of sound and fury, but not very enduring. At first he barely remarks the imposing carriage waiting at the junction with the main road, beyond noticing in a rather distracted way that it looks a little rustily old-fashioned in its heavy black accoutrements. That, in itself, could have been warning enough, but Charles’s observational skills have deserted him this time—so much so that when he draws level with the carriage and sees the man standing at the door he is completely unprepared.

  “Mr Maddox,” says Jeremiah Knox, touching his hat. “Good day to you.”

  Charles spins round, his eyes scanning the passers-by for someone he recognises—someone who might have been tracking his steps. A cluster of closed chary faces stares back at him—he knows none of them—has not, to his knowledge, seen a single one of them before, but that in itself proves nothing more than his adversary’s formidable powers. The fact remains that Tulkinghorn knew he was here, so how much more does he know? How long now has Charles’s every movement been followed? Only since the attack in the City Road—or was it before that? And if that’s the case, how in God’s name did he let himself be so deplorably careless?

  Knox, meanwhile, has opened the carriage door. Charles is seriously considering pushing him to the ground and taking to his heels, when there’s a movement out of the corner of his eye and he sees a figure descend from the groom’s seat at the back. He seems hardly much more than a boy, but he wears no livery, and his manner is cocky and insolent as he stands eyeing Charles with not
even the slightest suggestion of deference in his pale yellow eyes. Knox alone he could handle, but two of them will be harder to evade—not, at least, without creating a disturbance and attracting the attention of the constable giving directions to a well-dressed couple on the other side of the road. Charles hesitates, then steps quickly inside.

  The journey is scarce worth such a ponderous conveyance—indeed the traffic is so heavy Charles could have walked it quicker—but he’s only too aware that the purpose of the carriage is to guarantee his presence, not spare his feet. Barely fifteen minutes later he’s mounting the steps to the house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, followed hard by the silent but persistent Knox. Tulkinghorn’s room is much as it was, the disconcerting figure on the ceiling still cushioned in his flowers and his overgrown cherubs, and still gesturing, in his strangely unconvincing way, down from the clouds. And if, by some odd trick of perspective, that plump and insistent finger of his seems to be pointing now in Charles’s direction, then Charles does not see it. Mr Tulkinghorn, by contrast, has departed not only from his accustomed place, but from his customary demeanour. He has abandoned the station of honour behind the desk, and stands instead against the chimney-piece, where two candles in antique silver candlesticks are struggling to dispel the shadows from the shuttered and stuffy room.

  “So, it’s you, is it?” he says. “I have been to a great deal of trouble to find you, sir.”

  “So it appears.”

  “I recall, rather distinctly, that I instructed you to return Sir Julius’s letters to me, the last time we met in this room. Since you have not done so, I have been compelled—at some inconvenience—to dispatch my clerk to fetch the said correspondence. Indeed, he has called at Buckingham Street on, I believe, some four separate occasions, but to no avail. Each time he enquires, he is told you are not at home, you are engaged, you cannot be disturbed.”

  “That was quite true. I have been much pre-occupied with a case.”

  “You know quite as well as I do,” says the lawyer, tapping his ring of keys irritably against the marble mantel, “that that statement is a lie. You have been evading me, sir, and I am not accustomed to overlook such impertinence.”

  “And I,” counters Charles, moving a step or two farther into the room, his blue eyes darkening, “am not accustomed to being waylaid in the street, and set upon by a vicious ruffian. You might tell Sir Julius that, when next you see him. I am no more a man to cross than you are, Mr Tulkinghorn.”

  The lawyer looks at him warily. He has made, Charles notes, no reference at all to his conspicuously bandaged hand. “You were paid to undertake a particular task—”

  “Paid!” retorts Charles with derision. How he wishes, now, that he had kept those sovereigns, so that he could take them from his pocket and hurl them back in the lawyer’s face.

  “You were not paid,” continues Tulkinghorn, ignoring the interjection, “to meddle in matters that do not concern you. Since you have elected to do precisely that, you must accept the consequences.”

  “So you are not denying that I was attacked, and that this”—he holds up his disfigured hand—“is the result?”

  “I am neither denying nor confirming anything of the kind. I am, however, giving you a further warning. I had hoped that you possessed sufficient intelligence to render such a tiresome reiteration unnecessary, but I appear to have been mistaken. I repeat: You are interfering in matters you cannot possibly understand.”

  “Oh, but I do,” replies Charles, moving another step towards the lawyer. “I understand a good deal more than you realise. I know that you only hired me to find Boscawen so that you could have him silenced, just as you had already silenced his sister. I know you had Lizzie Miller killed—because there was something she might have told me, had she lived. And I know that you are prostituting your fine reputation to conceal the sordid secrets of a rich and powerful man.”

  Tulkinghorn is celebrated among his associates for his inscrutability, and he has never looked more impenetrable than he does now.

  “Let us consider then,” the lawyer says eventually, tapping the mantel once again with the key-ring and looking imperturbably at Charles all the while, “how the matter stands. You are determined, I take it, to continue in this extremely ill-advised course of action.”

  “There is nothing you can do to stop me.”

  “You intend to pursue your enquiries until you discover what—in your opinion—really lay behind William Boscawen’s monstrous persecution of my innocent client.”

  “It is not a case of my opinion, it is a case of the truth.”

  “And if and when you ascertain this ‘truth’ of yours, I imagine you will not let the matter lie idly by.”

  “You may collude in such repugnant concealment if you wish. I have no intention of doing so.”

  “And should such circumstances arise, I assume you would, therefore, consider that you had an obligation—a duty, even—to expose Sir Julius. In the newspapers, for instance.”

  Charles flushes, realising, suddenly and too late, that he has been put on the stand and there is no advocate in London who can compete in cross-examination with this lacklustre little man, with his dull black clothes, and his limp white frill.

  He lifts his chin, defiant. “There can be no higher cause than the truth, Mr Tulkinghorn.” Surely he’s heard words like that before, and recently? But he cannot for the moment remember where. “I would hope that you, as a bastion and mainstay of our great and much admired system of justice, would be the first to concur.”

  If a note of sarcasm has crept into his voice, we can perhaps forgive him for that. The lawyer, by contrast, persists in the same monotonous tone.

  “Very well. Then I am authorised to inform you that we will—with some reluctance—advance you the same sum as the one you have already received, on the strict condition that you return my client’s property to me forthwith, and cease at once and forever, from this outrageous pursuit. Consider well, Mr Maddox. I will not offer such leniency again.”

  “Keep your money, Tulkinghorn. I despise it almost as much as I despise you.”

  “You surprise me, my friend,” the lawyer observes composedly. “I hardly thought a man in your precarious circumstances could afford to turn money away in such a cavalier fashion.”

  “My finances may be precarious, but my integrity is not. You, it seems, suffer from exactly the opposite predicament. I know which of the two I prefer.”

  “So you will not desist.”

  “I will not.”

  Tulkinghorn nods slowly. “Very well. And if I were to tell you that I have it in my command, by the stroke of my pen, to have you dragged from your bed this very night and hauled naked through the streets to a prison cell, what would you say to that?”

  “I think,” Charles replies coolly, “that you should save your threats for the sort of pitiful wretch likely to be intimidated by them.”

  “You may think that if you choose,” returns Mr. Tulkinghorn, taking out his handkerchief and blowing his nose. “But it alters nothing.”

  “You are bluffing. You cannot terrify me.”

  “Clearly not,” says the lawyer, “but I can make good on my threat all the same.”

  “You have no cause. I have done nothing wrong. Unlike your despicable client.”

  “Ah,” says Tulkinghorn with a smile, “but it can, regrettably, be the way with our great and justly admired system of justice that one does not have to commit a crime, to be hanged for one. As a former member of the constabulary I need hardly, I am sure, tell you that. The name Silas Boone, for instance, will not I think be unfamiliar to you.”

  He puts away his handkerchief and adjusts his frill, then looks Charles straight in the eye, for very possibly the first time.

  “Let us be clear, once and for all. If I hear word that you are continuing with this investigation of yours, I will see to it that you are shut up in jail under hard discipline. There is a treadmill, sir, in Coldbath Fields where the inmates s
tand and grind for eight hours a day. And an iron crank requiring ten thousand daily turns. A man with an injury such as yours would scarce last a week under such a regimen. I will give you no further warning,” he concludes, a rare spot of colour appearing in both cheeks. “And be assured of this: Cross me again, and I will not flinch. For I make no threat I have not the will and the power to accomplish, and to the utmost extremity.”

  Charles nods. “You have been admirably clear. Now let me be so.” He crosses the three feet that still separate them in one stride and takes Tulkinghorn’s flaccid throat hard in his hand. “This conversation is the last—the very last—time you will seek to impede my enquiries. If I am hindered again in any way—whether by violence or otherwise—you will live to regret it. Do you understand?” he whispers, his breath hot on the lawyer’s papery flesh. “However well you bolt your door, however strong you think the key, I will come here, in the night, in the dark, when you least expect it, and you will discover to your cost that I, too, have never yet made an idle threat, and I, too, will not flinch.”

  He stares in the lawyer’s watery eyes for a long moment, then pushes him against the wall, and turns and leaves without looking back. He does not, therefore, see the clerk Knox emerge from where he has been standing behind the door and make a few notes in a small leather pocket-book, before going quickly to his master, who has staggered to his heavy mahogany chair and thrown his head back against it, and is now lying there gasping, staring sightlessly at the inscrutable figure of Allegory above him, whose finger points now even more insistently, from the flowers, and the pillars, and the painted clouds.

  NINETEEN

  Perspective

  FOR ALL CHARLES’S bravado, the next few days mark a pause. Or perhaps a recul pour mieux sauter. I’m not at all sure even Charles knows, fully, what he intends to do but I do know that he spends the best part of two days in the Buckingham Street house, venturing out only to meet briefly with Sam Wheeler over lamb chops to check on progress with the Miller case (none), and to practise (three times) at the shooting range off Leicester Square. It’s on one of these occasions that he arrives to find an unaccustomed throng of people at the far end of the gallery—or rather, if we are being strictly accurate, a gathering of unaccustomed people, for the figures he can see standing with the trooper by one of the little cabins are very far indeed from the establishment’s usual clientele. There is a little plump bald man with a shining head and a clump of untidy black hair who seems familiar to Charles from somewhere, though he’s clearly never held a gun in his life, and beside him a tall dark young man with sunburnt skin and a calm but troubled face. The gallery is—other than these—quite empty of custom.