Bruce Alexander - [Sir John Fielding 01]

by Alexander, Bruce

“You may do so whenever you like,” said he. “But tell me, what do you plan to announce as the cause of death? Foul murder? Homicide?”

  “Do you dare to make light of this? Why need I make anything of how he died?”

  “It is customary, and it will soon out. The servants will talk, if they have not already.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, making fists of her hands and stamping her foot in frustration. Then: “I want only to be done with this and back at Grandhill.”

  “Grandhill, Lady Goodhope?”

  “Our residence in Lancashire. That is my home. I have a son to raise. He is but eight years of age and will be the next Lord Good-hope when he reaches his majority.”

  “I understand the need you feel,” said Sir John, “but thinking of the boy, there is much to be done here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you taken my advice and had Lord Goodhope’s accounts examined?”

  “No, but you urged that when you were convinced he was a suicide.”

  “It would be a necessary step in any case. Who was your husband’s banker? His solicitor?”

  “I have no idea. I’m sure it’s among the papers in his desk.”

  “But you have not yet looked?”

  “No.” There was both anger and resignation in her voice.

  Sir John sighed, took a step toward her, and spoke in a quieter tone, hardly more than a whisper: “If he was not a suicide, then he was murdered. We agree on that?”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “Who would wish to kill your husband. Lady Goodhope?”

  “My husband had political enemies, I suppose. He was active in Parliament and known at court.”

  “Quite. I can make inquiries.”

  “And no doubt there were many who would have been happy to see him dead for other reasons, as well.”

  “Who would they be?”

  She said nothing for a moment. But then, casting her eyes about, she looked for the first time directly at me. At last she had noticed me. “Who is this boy who is always at your side. Sir John?”

  “Jeremy Proctor, mum,” said I with a bow, before Sir John could answer.

  “That is who he is,” said Sir John. “As to what he is, we may call him my helper.”

  I liked that even better than “my charge.”

  “Well,” she said, “be rid of him for a bit, and we’ll discuss the matter of who in my sitting room.”

  He nodded his agreement, perhaps a little reluctantly. He then said to me, “Jeremy, go into the library and prepare things for me. I shall be questioning the servants there shortly.”

  I sulked a bit for having been sent away as a child (which of course I then was), though I could not fault Sir John for his handling of the matter. Furthermore, to be named by him as his “helper”: that was very heaven. If he had called me such, then that I determined to be. I would do all I was told to do, of course, as now I set about to arrange the room as he had asked: set two chairs facing in the middle of the room, the more comfortable intended for him. But more, I would help him to see. If my unknowing observation on the condition of the victim’s hands had proved to Sir John such an important matter, then I would be ever watchful for such discrepancies and those details he judged to be of great importance.

  He was not occupied long with Lady Goodhope, and when he entered the library, he had Ebenezer Tepper in tow. Bidding the young footman sit down, he took me aside and said in a voice so quiet the intended subject of his interrogation could not hear, “Jeremy, I should like you to go over every bit of this room and look for places that a full-sized man might hide: an alcove, a closet, even a chest. For at the present, the best interpretation I can give to this odd sequence of events is that whoever it was fired the pistol into Lord Goodhope’s face did then hide himself until the single door was opened by force; waited further until at last the room had cleared out, as eventually it did; and then clandestinely made his exit through the only door available to him.”

  I nodded and whispered eagerly, “Yes, it could have been exactly so!”

  “But then,” said he, more to himself than to me, “we are left with another problem.”

  “And what is that. Sir John?”

  “How did our man get into the room in the first place?”

  He turned from me then, shaking his head, puzzling, and I guided him into the chair I had set out for him.

  Then said he to the young man directly opposite him, “Your name, as I recall, is Ebenezer Tepper.”

  “Aye, sor, ‘tis,” said Ebenezer with a sober nod of his head.

  Sir John leaned forward with sudden, keen interest. “You’d be from Lancashire, would you not?” asked he.

  “Aye, sor, ‘am.”

  “Tibbie Valley?”

  Ebenezer smiled broadly, pleased to be recognized. “Aye, sor.”

  “Well,” said Sir John, “this should be interesting. Tell me, Ebenezer, what do you remember of last night’s events?”

  “Aye. T’lady, oo called me in t’hus hard seven …”

  I shall not press this attempt at mimicry further. I have neither the skill nor the memory for it, and you, reader, doubtless lack the taste. You may gather that I understood little of what Ebenezer conveyed to Sir John. I could scarce believe the fellow was speaking English, yet he was understood. The magistrate nodded wisely and put questions to him in decent English at appropriate intervals. He seemed to have no more difficulty with the footman than he had had earlier with Mr. Bailey, though he seemed to enjoy himself far more.

  Perhaps, indeed, it was just as well that I was discouraged from eavesdropping on their conversation, for it put me to the task Sir John had assigned me. I did as he directed, covering each foot of the library, searching for hiding places of any sort. To give the late Lord Goodhope credit, his was indeed a true library. There were books of all sorts in shelves against the walls, some of which detained me on my tour. And while there were indeed alcoves of a sort, where the bookshelves left off and the windows intruded, none seemed sufficient to hide a man. The thick curtains, which may have been shut, were close against the windows. What was not visible of these alcoves from the door was visible from the desk where Lord Good-hope’s corpus had been found. It seemed unlikely that these supposed alcoves would have hidden the murderer.

  Yet so careful was my search (and, I admit, so frequent were the interruptions to browse the more tempting books on the shelves) that I was but half done when Sir John dismissed Ebenezer Tepper and asked him to send in Potter.

  Then he called to me, “How goes your inspection, Jeremy?”

  “I’ve found nothing so far.”

  “Well, carry on with your search. You may turn up something.”

  “Sir John, if I might have a word with you!”

  The last speaker was not Potter but rather Mr. Donnelly. He came striding into the room and made directly for the magistrate.

  “You may have as many words as you like, Mr. Donnelly,” said Sir John, rising from his chair.

  I could not resist sidling close to them to hear what those words might be.

  The surgeon spoke urgently to the magistrate: “I have a request that may seem a bit out of the ordinary.”

  “And what is that, pray?”

  “I should like to remove the corpus of Lord Goodhope to my surgery for further examination.”

  “Oh?” said Sir John, who seemed to be caught off guard a bit by the request. “Is the wound so difficult to read?”

  “No, the wound presents no problems. It is remarkably as you described it at my cousin’s. The conclusions you drew are,, I think, correct. It was not self-inflicted.”

  “What then?”

  “There is another matter,” said the surgeon, “a discoloration of the tongue that I find most curious.”

  “What would it mean?”

  “I hesitate to say. Sir John, until I have examined the corpus further.”

  “And why can you not attend to that here?”
>
  “It would be, well, awkward, I’m afraid.” The surgeon sighed. “What I propose is what in my Vienna studies was called an obduktion.”

  “You must speak plain, Mr. Donnelly,” said Sir John, somewhat in exasperation. “I have a little Latin, less French, and no German at all.”

  “I wish to perform an autopsy.”

  “You mean that in the medical sense? You wish, in other words, to cut open Lord Goodhope’s body and examine his inwards and organs?” He thumped his walking stick on the rug, not as I thought at first in anger, but rather to give sharp emphasis to what he next said: “That is not something to which I can give a yea or nay. To be honest, if it were the corpus of some poor soul picked up off the pavement at Seven Dials, I would have no objection to you cutting at will. But damn, sir! Lord Goodhope is Lord Goodhope, after all. It’s not entirely up to me, it may not be up to me at all, to give permission. This must be Lady Goodhope’s decision, and I doubt, frankly, that she will look favorably on your proposal.”

  Again, Mr. Donnelly sighed prettily, like some unhappy lover. “Well, Sir John, let me at least try her on the matter.”

  “I’ve nothing against it, and good luck to you. You’ll find her in the sitting room just off the street door. That, at least, was where I last encountered her.”

  Gabriel Donnelly turned and started from the room. I spied Potter at the door, intent upon all that transpired. He would have heard as easily as I.

  But then Sir John called after the surgeon: “Mr. Donnelly, two things I would make clear to her, if I were you.”

  “What are they, sir?”

  “First of all, that you are not some sawbones sort of barber-surgeon, but a doctor of physic with a diploma from Vienna. And second, that if she gives permission, your autopsy will be conducted for purposes of this investigation only and not before students or apprentices for their education.”

  Mr. Donnelly considered that for a moment, then said he, “Agreed. Thank you. Sir John, for your advice.” And then he walked through the still gaping and splintered doorway to the library, barely brushing the butler, Potter, as he walked out.

  The magistrate settled back into his chair facing opposite and called out, “You may enter now, Mr. Potter.”

  “Thank you, m’lord.”

  “A simple ‘sir’ will do. Now, if you will take this seat across from me, I have a few questions.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “But only a few. First of all, is there a plan to this house?”

  “A plan, sir?”

  “Yes, of course, an … architect’s map, a design, so to speak.”

  “Oh, I understand, sir. No, sir, none: none that I know of.”

  “Well, one must have existed.”

  “Oh, yes sir.”

  “It may still exist.”

  Potter thought on that for a moment. “Yes, sir.”

  “Find it.”

  “Sir?”

  “Find it, I say. Ask Lady Goodhope, though I daresay you’ll not get much from her. But you are the butler, are you not?”

  He pulled himself to his full height. “Indeed I am, sir.”

  “Then you know all the likely places such papers are likely to be kept. Go to them, look through the documents. Find the plan to the house.”

  “Uh, all right, sir.”

  “My next question,” said Sir John, “concerns the age of the house. When was it built?”

  “In the last century, sir, as I understand.”

  “Very good, but when in the last century.”

  Potter seemed troubled, almost vexed, by these questions of Sir John’s. Yet he answered meekly, in due respect to the magistrate’s position: “Well, it is difficult to be exact without the architect’s plan in hand, yet my understanding is that it was put up early in the reign of the first Charles.”

  “As you suggest. Potter, all this will be made clear when you find the plan.”

  “Uh, yes sir.”

  “Now, one last question. Has this house a garden?”

  “Oh, indeed, sir, and a lovely one it is, sir. Lady Goodhope takes a special interest in it.”

  “I’m sure,” said Sir John, “I’m sure it is. Now, Potter, if you will now conduct Master Proctor into the garden, so that he may view it, and be kind enough to answer any questions he might have.”

  ”Master Proctor?” The butler looked around the room as if I were not there.

  “Indeed. Master Proctor. Now, if you will be so good as to wait by the door, I would have a word with him.”

  I then left off my survey of the library, which in truth had not advanced far since Ebenezer Tepper’s departure, and went straight to Sir John’s side. Potter, as ordered, went to the door. There he pouted.

  Sir John groped forward and grasped me by the arm, pulling me close. “Jeremy,” he said in a whisper, “what you must do is observe this room from the outside. Look for any suspicious thickness in its walls at any point. Ask him anything you like, but try not to give out precisely what you are looking for. And be reasonably quick about it. I must be back to prepare for today’s court session. Understood?”

  “Understood, Sir John.”

  “Very well, I shall be waiting for you: probably in the hall, near the street door.”

  “I’ll not be long.”

  He released me then, and I went off to follow Potter through a door beneath the stairs Just beyond the one we had passed through the night before to reach the kitchen in the cellar. There were three steps down, leading to a door to the outside. Potter made a great show of producing a key from his pocket, not a ring of keys but a single key, and unlocking the door.

  “Was this door locked last night?” I asked, making my youthful voice as deep as possible.

  “Of course it was, boy!” said Potter to me rudely. Clearly, he did not fancy being guide to a thirteen-year-old.

  However, he told no less than the truth when he called the garden lovely. Indeed it was lovely. There were blooms of every sort in abundance in every corner. They mocked the rich disorder of nature, laid out not in sections but rather in a gay, scattered profusion in which colors and varieties mixed in a way I had not seen before. A path led through this array. Potter stood aside and allowed me to look as I liked. I took the path and walked to where it ended at a high privet hedge as Potter trailed behind. There was a gate, which I tried. It was locked.

  “And where does this gate lead?” I asked, maintaining my serious demeanor.

  “To a narrow mews between the houses,” said he, snappish as any snapping turtle.

  “And was it locked last night?” “Of course!”

  “Do you now have the key?”

  “No, I do not.”

  “Will you fetch it, please, Mr. Potter?” Even I was amazed at my coolness in these circumstances. For his part, Potter was quite shocked at my request. I read his face as he fought back the impulse to strike me for my presumption, or at least to refuse me. Yet in the end he thought better of it, doubtless remembering that I was there in the garden as the agent of Sir John Fielding, no less.

  And so he had no choice but to turn around and stalk off to the house, calling over his shoulder that he would be back in a moment.

  That moment was all it took for me to make the inspection I’d been charged to make. I darted to the house and looked around it to the right, looking for any extension or protrusion from the walls, anything at all that seemed amiss.

  But no, there was nothing.

  Then I walked along the library windows at the rear of the house, looking up, checking below. There were two, separated by the chimney which accommodated the fireplace in the library that stood directly behind the desk where I first saw the corpus of Lord Good-hope seated. All was just as I supposed it should have been from having looked over the room so carefully from the inside.

  Or was it?

  I backed up the garden path away from the house, continuing to study the rear of the library, feeling there was something there to be seen
: if I could but see it.

  We were together in the hackney, Sir John and I, before he at last spoke to me of what I had seen, or not seen, from the outside of the house. He seemed still a bit disturbed by what he had learned from Mr. Donnelly.

  As I had approached him in the hall, he had been occupied in animated conversation with the surgeon. They were discussing details pertaining to the transport of Lord Goodhope’s corpus. Mr. Donnelly was assuring Sir John that he need not concern himself with the details of the removal: The surgeon would attend to them himself.

  “You alone, sir?” Sir John had asked.

  “I and members of the household staff,” replied the other. “A simple coffin arrived this morning. A dray wagon will be made available.”

  “Then, you have got what you wanted, and I congratulate you, though I confess I am surprised.”

  “She was very gracious.”

  “And you, evidently, very persuasive.” He had then cocked his head in my direction. “Jeremy? Was that you who just arrived?”

  “Yes, Sir John.”

  “Then let’s be off to Bow Street.”

  Thus it was that we began our short journey in silence. Had not the black ribbon covering his eyes and the tricorn hat he wore virtually obscured his brow, I would have been sure he was frowning. As it was, I could only guess that to be so.

  We were many streets beyond St. James when he spoke at last: “So, Jeremy, tell me, did you discover anything from the garden?”

  “I’m not sure. Sir John,” said I in all truth.

  “Not sure? Come, boy, you’ve a keen eye. You’ve proved that already.”

  “But I saw nothing to make me certain.”

  “At this point,” said Sir John, “you need not be certain, you need only be suspicious. Now what, exactly, has made you suspicious?”

  “The chimney,” said I. “It’s an odd shape.”

  “The chimney? Hmm, well, that’s a possibility, isn’t it? As I recall, from your own and Mr. Bailey’s careful description of the room last night, the fireplace it serves lies just behind the desk where Lord Goodhope was found. Is that correct?”

  “Yes sir, correct.”

  “How did it look from outside the house? Built out to surprising depth? A bit too capacious?”