Murder's Sad Tale

by Joan Smith

  “I couldn’t figure out what the deuce he was looking for that night, but that could be it.”

  “If Cooper is telling the truth, whoever planted the hat on him must have got it from Russell's flat. Was it there the day you and Corrie visited?”

  “No, the cupboard was pretty close to bare. I’d have noticed it.”

  “That soi-disant brother of Russell’s was there before you. I wonder if he managed to get it out past the woman who was looking after the place.”

  “She was pretty sharp-eyed,” Coffen said.

  “But you managed to snitch those bills and IOU’s,” Corinne reminded him.

  “True, he might’ve snatched it from the closet when she wasn’t looking and let on it was his own. But I’m pretty sure Cooper is the one who let on he was the brother, or how did he know about the IOU’s? He mentioned them.”

  After a frowning pause, Luten said, “Since he took such an overweaning interest in Russell, is it possible he’d been in the flat earlier, while Russell was still alive but not home?”

  “He can’t have been an adept at picking locks or he wouldn’t have had to break the window the next time,” Prance suggested.

  “However he knew about the IOU’s, I think it’s safe to assume Cooper didn’t take the hat, then break a window to return it. So who did it, then?” Luten asked, “And why? The likeliest thing is just what Cooper said, that someone wanted to make him look guilty. Neither Mrs. Ballard nor Miss Barker think any of the other gentlemen in the group had a romantic interest in Miss Fenwick. That suggests the murderer is someone else who did it to deflect suspicion from himself.”

  ‘Which makes Cooper a red herring,” Coffen said with satisfaction. “I don’t think myself he’s the murdering kind.”

  Luten said, “The other thing is, how did the person get into Cooper’s flat to plant the hat there? Was a window broken, or a lock picked?”

  “No, but it’s one of them cheap locks that could be opened with a toothpick,” Coffen said. “I had a look, and there were scratches around the lock. Cooper says the hat wasn’t there when he went to work that morning. It was there at night when he got home, so someone broke in in broad daylight. I might sniff around and see if anyone saw anything.”

  “You do that,” Luten said.

  “I will. His story makes sense all right. I stopped at the tavern on my way home and had a wet with the fellows Cooper’d been drinking with. It came out Cooper had a real bee in his bonnet about Russell. Threatened to ‘get him,’ whatever that means. The fellows didn’t think he’d do more than talk, though. Called him a windbag.”

  “He set himself up as a likely suspect, in other words,” Luten said. “I wonder how the real murderer knew that. How could we find out more about the mysterious lady in the case? The one who called on Russell, and possibly the one he was badgering on Bond Street, the one he called Polly. I think our best clue is Bedford. One of us should go there with that picture you copied, Prance. Ask around at the hatters. Pity Cooper didn’t get the name of the tailor on the jacket. If there aren’t too many, you could make enquiries. Take the hat along. It would be helpful if you could get a home address for Russell and talk to the neighbors. If he managed to make such a dangerous enemy in London within a couple of months, it stands to reason he had enemies wherever he came from. Perhaps bad enough enemies that he had to leave.”

  “Bad enough that someone came after him and killed him, you mean?” Corinne asked.

  “That was my meaning. Any volunteers to go check it out?”

  “You mean to Bedford, in the winter?” Prance cried in horror.

  “It’s only a day away,” Luten said.

  “Byron,” Coffen said.

  “You think Byron should go?” Corinne said, blinking in astonishment.

  “No, no. I mean Byron’s going to call on Prance. He won’t want to leave.”

  “It has nothing to do with Byron,” Prance said hotly. “You forget I’m working on my novel.”

  “Not much chance of letting us forget it. So the actual work is up to me, as usual,” Coffen said, with more satisfaction than annoyance.

  “It would be a great help, Coffen,” Luten said. “We always seem to depend on you.” He didn’t look at Prance, but Prance felt a sting all the same. It was true he took very little interest in this case. He just couldn’t work up much interest in a lowlife like Russell. Coffen was much better at hounding after Cooper in low taverns, and Miss Barker with her rustic ways.

  “Fitz will never find it,” Corinne said. “You’d best take my groom.”

  “Thankee, I will.”

  “If that’s all...” Prance said, looking to Luten, who nodded dismissively. Was he imagining that sardonic glint in Luten’s cold gray eye? “Come along and I’ll get the miniature of Russell for you, Coffen,” he said, to remind Luten he had made that contribution, and it had taken hours.

  Prance found a note from Byron awaiting him when they entered. He tore it open eagerly, scanned it, and drew a sigh.

  “What’s the matter?” Coffen asked. “You look as if it was a death notice.”

  “Byron is ill,” he said. “So amusing, the way he says it. Says he caught my headache by long distance, and while en route it had the questionable taste to mate with a flu bug. He can make even illness amusing. He urges me not to call on him as he doesn’t want to pass the infection on to me.”

  “Then you can settle down to your scribbling without worrying about him. Just get me the picture of Russell and I’ll get to work.”

  That, too, sounded to Prance like a jibe at his lack of help in the case. Prance adored the prestige of being a member of the Berkeley Brigade. What if they should drop him? He really should take a day to think through how he was to rescue Lorraine from the evil Lord Malvain. It was the climax of his novel and he wanted it to be superb without straying into the realm of unreality. Coffen would have some down to earth ideas there.

  Prance wanted this book to be a popular sensation, not just something pored over by a few dusty intellectuals at universities like his Round Table Rondeaux, but a book that sat on every table, that was talked about at parties, like Byron’s Childe Harold. His was no heroic tale of derring-do like Byron’s work. It was cosier, its characters a sort of roster of Everyman.

  Lady Lorraine, despite her title, had been raised in a modest manner. The book required an uncommonly subtle treatment of common everyday reality to make it exciting, to stir the reader into caring so much about Lorraine that he was sitting on the edge of his seat, biting his nails. He wrote of what could happen to anyone, and Coffen was the very man to help him with the common touch.

  Bedford was only a day away. He enjoyed travel, stopping at inns and having a stroll through small towns, where the locals always turned to stare at his jackets. The weather was fine for February today, almost spring-like. No snow was in the forecast. He would go with Coffen! That would show them he was as interested in the case as any of them.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I believe I’ll go with you, Coffen,” Prance said, smiling in anticipation of the thrill he was giving his friend.

  “You needn’t bother, thankee all the same,” Coffen said, with no sign of delight. “I’ll work faster alone.”

  “Two heads are better than one, and two pairs of feet.”

  “There’s no such thing as one head and two pairs of feet, Reg, unless you’re talking about horses or dogs. You and Villier will take the morning to pack. You’d just be a milestone round my neck. I could be halfway there before you decided which jacket to wear. Just get me the picture of Russell and I’ll get on with it.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Prance said, stung at the slur. He liked his well-planned ensembles to be taken for spur of the moment inspiration. “I’ll be ready before my carriage gets here. You’d best cancel yours and tell Corrie you won’t be needing her groom.”

  Coffen muttered some aspersions and said, “Get a wiggle on, then.” He went next door to tell Corinne
the change of plan.

  “Prance going with you? What’s got into him?” Corinne asked. “I thought he looked rather embarrassed when you said you’d go to Bedford, and Luten looked at him, as if waiting for his offer to go with you.”

  “Nothing of the sort. That’d just be biting off his face to save his nose. Reason is, Byron’s sick and ain’t coming to see him. I daresay he’s come a cropper in his book and wants time to think about it. I hope he don’t do his thinking out loud. I’m sick to death of Lady Lorraine and I haven’t seen a single page yet. With luck he’ll stay in his room scribbling once we get there.”

  “His carriage is comfortable at least,” she said to console him. “He’ll have warm bricks for your feet and fur rugs and things to eat and drink while you drive along.”

  “That’s true.” Such amenities did much to alleviate the blight of Prance’s company. Coffen left and the trip began with less delay than he feared. All the promised amenities were in place. Comfortably ensconced in a draught-free, smoothly-running carriage with a team of four and a coachman who knew where he was going, Coffen’s irritation evaporated. Even the dreaded talk of Lady Lorraine took an unexpected but not unwelcome turn.

  “My problem, you see, is that I don’t want her to appear a silly girl, unaware of danger,” Prance explained. “And I don’t want to depend on coincidence — someone chancing along to save her. I have decided she must go to meet Lord Malvain alone, though she suspects he is evil. But I want her to take sensible precautions.”

  “Then she ought to take a gun with her,” Coffen said at once.

  “She has no access to a gun.”

  “Well, a stiff club or an axe, then.”

  Prance couldn’t repress a shudder at the image of his gentle Lorraine wielding an axe against her fellowman. “Would a strong young man not manage to get that away from her?” he asked.

  “I daresay he would really, but no need for him to in a book.”

  “But my aim is realism, so how could she protect herself in real life? What would you do?”

  “I ain’t a girl, but if I was, I wouldn’t go to meet him in the first place, and in the second place, I’d have someone hiding at the place I’m to meet him.”

  “I thought of that, but there is no one at the Abbey whom she trusts completely.”

  “Ain’t there a hero in the book? Couldn’t he suspect a trick? You’ve got to have hero, Reg. You wrecked your Rondeaux by leaving out the lady.”

  “There is indeed a hero. Malvain has him locked up in the dungeon, which is why Lorraine feels she must go to meet him.”

  “Good, that sounds like you’re on the right track this time with dungeons. You don’t want to make it too real, or no one would bother reading it. Well, if there’s no one she can take with her, and no weapon, she’ll have to depend on her dog.” Coffen pinned him with a bright eye. “You have given her a dog? People like that. Animals, you know, to lend a common touch.”

  “It would have to be a big dog.”

  “A wolfhound. That’d put the fear of the lord in any villain. I’d show somehow why the dog was especially faithful.”

  “Yes, excellent! You mean like Daniel and the lion.”

  “I thought we were talking about dogs. I mean make her rescue him, save his life or some such thing. You’ll know how to cross all your eyes and dot your knees to make it exciting.”

  “She has a kitten, Minou,” Prance said, suppressing the urge to comment on that frittering of the King’s English.

  Coffen felt the familiar rush of annoyance he so often felt when trying to talk to Prance. “Dash it, Reg, a kitten ain’t going to frighten a deep-dyed villain. You’ll have to change it to a big dog. Either that or change the kitten to a tiger,” he said, finishing on an unusual note of sarcasm.

  Not suspecting sarcasm from Coffen, Prance considered the suggestion a moment, then said, “You know, that just might work.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be real. I don’t know any ladies that keep a pet tiger.”

  “Ah, but Lorraine’s uncle is a nabob returned from India, bringing with him not only Indian servants and the usual load of Indian bric-a-brac but a youngish tiger. Thus far in the book Lorraine has been afraid of it, but I could begin with its being a mere cub. I could insert a passage in which she does it some service.”

  Coffen looked interested. “Wait, it’s on the tip of my head,” he said. “I’ve got it, she takes a thorn out of its paw.”

  “That sort of thing. Not precisely that, of course. Something original.”

  “Oh, right. God did that in the Bible. Could the tiger have stepped on a shard of glass?”

  “That’s too close to the thorn in the paw. She could feed it when whoever’s looking after it forgot to,” he said, warming to the tiger idea.

  “The best reason in the world for it to take a fancy to her,” Coffen said.

  “A wild animal would lend the story that exotic touch that had made Byron so popular, but be completely original in a gothic,” Prance continued. “And not impossible when one considers the nabob uncle. As you said, one doesn’t want it to be too every day. It could also lend an aural note of menace to the general background, perhaps roaring at night.”

  “That’s real enough. I feel like roaring myself when I wake up hungry in the night.”

  Prance fell into silence as he considered the alterations he would have to make to his story. No need to remove Minou, who served as the sounding board for Lorraine’s worries. He envisaged his novel as a stage play as he wrote, and used a good deal of dialogue, unlike Mrs. Radcliffe. As his heroine was so often alone she had either to talk to herself or to a dumb animal. She talked to Minou. Minou was an homage to his own brief flirtation with a kitten called Petruchio, whom he had to abandon due to the depredations on his furniture, and the littering of his jackets with white hairs.

  Each wrapped up in his own thoughts, they scarcely noticed the countryside. Handsome country seats surrounded by arable land nestled between the undulating hills. The valleys were mottled white and green, where the snow was melting. Charles Lamb, Prance remembered, had referred to Hertfordshire as “hearty, homely and loving.” Wonderful how Elia always got it dead right in the simplest phrases. Despite the old saying that “He who buys a house in Hertfordshire pays two years’ purchase for the air,” Prance felt they could keep their air during the winter months. They bore west and were in Bedfordshire for lunch. Coffen was in too much of a hurry to bother with sightseeing.

  They continues north and with a stop for dinner and a change of team, continued driving through the dark to Bedford. For convenience, they chose to put up for the night at the George, a quaint inn in the High Street. It seemed business was slow in the winter, for the proprietor welcomed them like royalty, made no demur to Coffen’s request for “a bite to eat” at such a late hour, and even found a decent bottle of wine for Prance. Prance disliked sharing a bedroom with Coffen, but at least there were two beds, and Coffen didn’t snore too loudly.

  The weather continued fair when they awoke the next morning. They took breakfast in the rustic, busy, noisy public room as the one private parlor was occupied. It didn’t bother either of them that the food was greasy and ill prepared. Prance never ate much and Coffen ate whatever was placed in front of him.

  By nine o’clock they were on the High Street, Coffen carrying the suspect hat and Prance with the miniature of Russell in his pocket. They had directions from the innkeeper to Brinks Hat Emporium and headed toward it. The sun was shining, the wind brisk but not cold, the locals impressed with Prance’s many-collared great coat. The street was busy with people hastening off to work. Shopkeepers stood in their doorways, shouting along the street to each other and to passersby and nodding to the two visitors.

  “A fellow called Bunyan must own this town,” Coffen said, as he noticed how often the name appeared on signs and businesses.

  “I believe the name refers to John Bunyan,” Prance informed him. “He spent time h
ere — in prison, if I recall, where he did much of his writing.”

  “Ah, a writer. That explains why you know him.”

  “Surely you know, the Pilgrim’s Progress”

  “I’ve heard of it. A holy book, isn’t it?”

  “A religious allegory. Vanity Fair, Slough of Despond — that sort of thing.”

  Coffen said what he always said when he lost track of a conversation. “Eh?”

  They were both saved further explanation by a sight of Brinks Hat Emporium. “Here we are,” Coffen said, lengthening his stride in his eagerness.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Brinks Hat Emporium was the old-fashioned sort of shop with its weathered wooden shingle hanging out front, creaking in the wind. It boasted no broad bow window displaying its wares or the fancy boxes they came in. Its door wore no shining brass hardware. By placing his eye against the narrow pane Coffen could see a counter backed by a row of shelves holding half a dozen plaster heads topped by gentlemen’s hats of various sorts. A bell jangled as they opened the door and entered. From a doorway at the rear a clerk came hurrying out, struggling into his jacket as he came towards them.

  He was a tall, long-limbed man in his forties with a thin faced and a wisp of brownish-gray hair trying without much success to cover his balding pate. He was afflicted with an excess of nose, long and thin, that bent down nearly touching his lips. But when he opened his mouth and greeted them, his smile and his manner made one forget his physical imperfections.

  His smile seemed to say there was no one he would rather see standing before him than these two fine gentlemen. His whole body took part in the welcome, as he weaved back and forth, drawing his hands together in a slow, silent clapping motion.

  “Ah, a fine day, is it not?” he said, “and entirely welcome after a long winter. Yes, spring is on its way. I feel it in my bones. I’m Mr. Brinks Junior, by the way, and happy to be of any help I can. You gentlemen are not from Bedford, I think? I haven’t seen a hat like that in town.” It was, of course, Prance whose hat received this commendation. “A very fine curled beaver it is, sir. And I know a little something about hats, if I know nothing else.” A tinny little laugh suggested what worlds of knowledge this joke covered.