by Granger, Ann
‘No, she doesn’t go in for them photographs,’ said Britannia.
‘How about children? Had she any?’
‘Not that she’s ever mentioned. She could’ve had some and they died,’ offered Britannia as a practical explanation. ‘Ma had seven of us and now there’s only me left to look after her. My eldest brother, Billy, went to sea when he was fifteen. We haven’t seen him since, nor heard from him in twenty years, so he’s probably drowned. My sister, Maria, she died with her first baby, childbed fever. My younger brother, Eddie, he died in an accident, under the wheels of the coalman’s cart. The other ones all died when they were really little, of the diphtheria. They all three died in one week. So there’s only me left.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear it,’ I said, touched by this tragic tale and the no-nonsense way Britannia told it.
‘Ma was really upset about Eddie,’ she said. ‘But it was his own fault. He was hanging on the side of the cart, hitching a ride, you know, like boys do. Only the horse set off suddenly, and Eddie lost his grip.’
I should have been concentrating on the case, but I heard myself ask, ‘What about your father?’
‘Accident in the dockyard,’ she said briefly.
I didn’t want to hear any more of the disasters afflicting the Scroggs family, and wished I hadn’t asked. ‘Now then,’ I said, ‘was your mistress wearing any jewellery when you last saw her, yesterday evening? Does she own some favourite pieces that she always wears?’
‘Wedding ring,’ said Britannia promptly, ‘and her watch, pinned to her bodice.’ She paused in thought. ‘Earrings,’ she added, ‘nice ones, gold with rubies in them. I reckon they’re real stones, not paste.’
Full marks to Dr Carmichael. ‘She wore these items yesterday?’ I asked.
Britannia said Mrs Clifford wore them every day. I suggested she go into the kitchen, accompanied by Morris, and write down a list, describing the pieces as well as she could, even, in the case of the earrings, sketching them, if she could.
‘And then,’ I said to Morris, ‘take her over to the mortuary and ask her if she can identify the body. It appears there are no family members.’
Morris went with Britannia to the kitchen. Before the kitchen door closed on them, I heard Britannia protest, ‘What? Now I got to go and look at a dead body?’ She sounded more annoyed at the inconvenience than distressed.
Phipps looked at me and said: ‘The Clifford woman never married. She styled herself “Mrs” for respectability, mark my words. They’re very particular about things like that, around here.’
I saw through the window that a sizeable crowd had now gathered in front of the house. When I went to the front door and opened it, the beleaguered Barrett appeared relieved to see me.
‘They won’t disperse, sir.’
‘Go to your homes!’ I shouted at them. ‘You are hindering a police investigation!’
‘Ah!’ went up a collective murmur of satisfaction. So there was a crime.
‘Go on, now!’ I ordered.
Some of them began to move away.
Back in the parlour, Morris had returned. He handed me a sheet of paper on which Britannia had listed the items of jewellery her mistress had been wearing when last seen. She had sketched both the fob watch and the earrings, and done it with a confident hand. She hovered nearby with an air of someone expecting praise.
‘I was always good at drawing,’ she said complacently when duly complimented. ‘They give us paper and wax crayons at the Sunday school so we could draw Bible scenes. I was good at drawing donkeys ’cos my uncle kept one to pull his cart. He was a costermonger, my uncle. The teacher said I had an eye.’ Britannia frowned. ‘She meant I drew good pictures, not that I didn’t have two good eyes.’
‘Perhaps you’d now go with the sergeant, Miss Scroggs. He will take you to view the body.’
Britannia sulked and now decided to object. ‘Who’s going to be here, watching you lot?’ she muttered. ‘I’m responsible for the house, when she’s not here.’
‘Come on,’ ordered Morris, taking her arm.
‘You let me go!’ she ordered him. ‘I ain’t your prisoner and we ain’t sweethearts, neither.’
But she left.
‘Well, at least now we have something more specific to show the pawnbrokers!’ I said to Phipps. I waved Britannia’s drawing.
‘That girl,’ said Phipps, ‘has altogether too much to say. But none of it is what we’d want to know, if you take my meaning! There’s a lot she could tell us, but she doesn’t.’ He paused. ‘Not until she has to.’
‘I’d noticed that,’ I agreed. ‘I fancy she enjoys the public attention. She says her employer is a very private person. Miss Scroggs must have little opportunity to shine.’
We looked again around the gloomy parlour and by common instinct made for a writing desk in one corner. It had appeared to be locked but when we got closer we saw marks of the lock being forced.
‘Neatly done,’ said Phipps, peering at the scratches. ‘Whoever did this, he’s done it before.’
‘Did Mrs Clifford interrupt a burglar?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Does this property have a rear entrance?’
We went to investigate and found that behind the house was a small, narrow garden, some of it paved over. Another area was taken up with an outside privy, a washhouse and a large bin for coal. A wooden door in the rear wall opened out on to a narrow alley running behind the entire terrace of homes and exiting into a side street.
It was an arrangement similar to that at my own house. I made a mental note to fix a new and stronger bolt on our alley door, as soon as I had half an hour free for domestic odd jobs – whenever that might be.
Back in the kitchen I examined the lock on the back door carefully. ‘This has not been forced. No intruder came in this way.’
‘Unless he was admitted by an accomplice. That girl Scroggs must be questioned again,’ growled Phipps.
We had so far ignored the small dining room, situated between the front parlour and the kitchen. Now, we went to investigate. Nothing here had been touched, as far could be seen. The dining table was covered with a red chenille cloth to protect the surface. The sideboard contained dishes of various kinds, comprising a good quality china service. Something about the way they were stacked suggested they had not been taken out and used in a long while. The baize-lined drawers held cutlery and damask napkins yellowed with age and lack of boiling. I did not imagine Mrs Clifford held many dinner parties and I guessed this room, together with its contents, was largely unused. The air was fusty. We checked the window, giving a view of a side passage running along the kitchen wall before debouching into the backyard. No one had forced the sash.
We returned once more to the parlour, stepping carefully around the grisly stain on the carpet. I opened up the damaged lid of the desk, pulling down the flat writing surface.
Inside we saw the usual arrangement of pigeonholes and a larger space beneath containing several ledgers. But someone had been here before us. All the documents and scraps of paper had been pulled from the pigeonholes, apparently searched through in haste, and then stuffed back into the larger space, crammed in with the ledgers.
‘He was in a hurry,’ I said to Phipps. ‘I wonder what he was looking for?’
‘Money . . .’ muttered Phipps.
We took the ledgers to the table and opened them up to find rows of neatly entered dates. Against each was a symbol we could not understand. A code, I thought. In a third column were entered varying sums of money, some of them considerable.
Phipps turned a few pages and then straightened up. ‘Ross,’ he said to me in his clipped military way, ‘the woman was a moneylender, mark my words. No doubt about it!’
I pointed to the code of symbols. ‘The names of her clients?’
‘Probably, but if there is a key to them, she may well have kept it in her head.’
‘Come now,’ I said to him. ‘She would have demanded some acknowledgment of the money bor
rowed, a signature on an IOU, from any client. But she didn’t keep the proof in that desk. Perhaps she feared just such a break-in by a desperate debtor unable to pay. So, where?’
We returned to the desk and began to look carefully through the papers pulled from the pigeonholes. The first thing to take our notice was a letter with the heading of a well-known banking establishment, which I folded and put in my pocket.
‘We’ll look into this,’ I said. ‘If she was a moneylender there could be large sums banked.’
Phipps was subjecting the room to careful scrutiny. ‘Cashbox,’ he said elliptically.
‘Where?’ I looked round the room.
‘Can’t see one,’ said Phipps. ‘But if she was a moneylender I’d expect to find a cashbox with some money in it, here in the house. She might bank her profits, but she’d keep some cash here, either for emergency loans or monies paid back by a client; but not yet banked.’
We searched the house high and low, including the maid’s attic room, but we found no cashbox. In the house owner’s bedroom, however, we pulled a chest of drawers from its position against the wall in order to look at the back of it. This may seem a strange thing to do, but it is common enough for people to ‘hide’ something by taping it to the rear of a piece of furniture that would not normally be moved. There was no key or letter, the usual items concealed in that way. But when we went to push the chest back into place, Phipps noticed a loose floorboard by the skirting. It lifted easily, with the aid of a penknife, and beneath it was a small box. It was not the missing cashbox, but the sort of fruitwood container made for cigarettes. Inside, we found a heavy silver crucifix and chain and a man’s gold half-hunter watch.
‘Worth a bit, that,’ said Phipps, of the watch. ‘She hid it away behind this chest of drawers, so that maid wouldn’t find it.’
I examined the watchcase for an inscription, but there was none. ‘Is this,’ I mused, ‘a relic of the late Mr Clifford, and means he did once exist? Or was it taken as repayment of a loan in lieu of cash?’
Phipps had no trouble making up his mind on the subject. ‘I told you, I don’t believe the woman was ever married. Or never in a way the law would recognise. She took it in lieu of cash.’
I was curious enough to ask just what made him so certain. ‘I agree, women sometimes claim to be widows, when they are not – for the sake of social standing. But why are you so certain in this case?’
Phipps gave me an unexpected mirthless grin. With his sandy moustache and narrow features, it gave him an unsettling foxy appearance. ‘Money, Ross. The woman liked money. She knew how to make money. She did not need a husband to support her; and she would not have wanted any husband to control the money she made.’
He had a shrewd point. The law, generally speaking, gave the husband full control over any money a wife might have on marriage, or earn during it. There was much discussion about changing it; but so far that had come to nothing. A single woman, on the other hand, or a widow, controlled her own money. ‘Mrs’ Clifford might well have seen the benefit to herself in remaining single. The assumption of widowhood would then be purely for status.
‘Well, when Morris gets back with the maid, and if the girl has identified the body as that of her mistress, I’ll remove all those ledgers downstairs, and this watch and the silver cross, as evidence,’ I told him. ‘I will leave a receipt with the girl – and one with you, if you wish.’
‘I’d be obliged,’ said Phipps. ‘Someone might turn up and start asking about it.’
‘As to that, we’ll place an advertisement in the press, asking for relatives of the woman to come forward.’
‘We shall get a throng of people claiming to be close relatives, unaccountably out of touch with her, and all demanding to know if there is a will!’ warned Phipps.
‘Those we shall tell to go and find themselves a solicitor. We need someone who can give us detailed information about her. A murder victim about whom one knows nothing gives us no leads.’
We returned to the parlour where Phipps began speculating again about the theoretical cashbox. It was worrying me, too.
‘If there was an intruder, he could have taken it with him, if it was a small box,’ I pointed out to him. ‘Our failure to find one is not surprising, perhaps, and does indicate an intruder. We’ve examined the locks and they are untouched, but a window could have been left open?’
Phipps, however, was anxious to make life difficult for Britannia Scroggs. His own failure to get her whole story from her, before I arrived, still rankled with him.
‘How do we know that girl hasn’t taken it? She had plenty of time between establishing her mistress was missing, and coming to the police to report the disappearance. She could have used the time to spirit away a cashbox. If Mrs Clifford had one, Scroggs must have seen it at some time.’
‘I will keep her in mind,’ I said firmly. I wanted it clear I was in charge. Phipps had not wanted to be involved at first. He’d sent for the Yard immediately. Now that he appeared keen to recover the reins of the investigation, I wasn’t about to let him.
We had spent some time examining the papers in the desk until a commotion at the front door signalled the return of Morris with Britannia.
‘It’s ’er!’ shouted Britannia, erupting into the parlour with Morris vainly trying to restrain her. ‘Some villain has bashed in her head!’
‘Miss Scroggs identified the body as that of Mrs Stefanie Clifford,’ said Morris woodenly.
‘Miss Scroggs,’ I said to her. ‘Sit down there.’ I indicated a chair.
Britannia sat down, took out a handkerchief and blew her nose noisily. ‘She treated me all right,’ she mumbled. ‘She was a bit of a tartar but as long as I did things the way she wanted, and kept my mouth shut about her business, she was good to me.’
‘Was your employer a moneylender?’ I asked her bluntly. ‘We have reason to believe so.’
Britannia raised reddened eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said sullenly.
‘Did she keep a cashbox of any sort on the premises?’
‘Brown box with a brass handle atop,’ said Britannia. ‘It’s in that desk.’ She pointed to the forced writing desk and seemed to see its disturbed contents for the first time. ‘Here!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who did that? Did you? She never kept it like that. She was regular neat and tidy, was Mrs Clifford. I knew I should’ve stayed here with you lot. Police or not, you’ve got no right to go round damaging people’s property!’
‘So,’ I said, ignoring her protest, ‘you knew she was a moneylender. You knew she kept money in that desk.’
Britannia was quick to catch the drift of these questions. She bridled. ‘Oy!’ she snapped. ‘I never took it. I never messed up that desk, either! I worked for her for five years. She trusted me.’
‘Someone took it,’ I pointed out.
‘Then he did!’ shouted Britannia.
‘Who is he?’ I was shouting myself now.
Britannia grew quiet and sullen. ‘She had a visitor yesterday evening. He come about eight o’clock or a bit before. They had an argument. I didn’t see him leave.’
‘What?’ yelled Phipps and I in unison.
I forced myself to be calm. ‘Britannia, why must you dole out information in little scraps? Why don’t you tell us the whole story at once?’
‘Because it was her business!’ Britannia defended herself stoutly. ‘I didn’t know she was dead until I saw her laid out on that slab. I couldn’t go telling you everything, could I? She might’ve come back. I couldn’t go telling her business, not to you nor to no one!’
‘Britannia Scroggs,’ began Phipps in a manner suggesting he was about to seize the reins again and arrest her, ‘I put it to you there was no visitor and you’ve just invented him.’
I signalled him urgently to silence. ‘Listen to me, Britannia. If there is anything else, anything at all, do you hear me? You must tell us now.’
‘Nothing else,’ muttered Britannia, again disposed to sulk. ‘And there wa
s a fellow came to see her. I’m not lying.’
‘Did she often receive late visits?’
‘Yes.’ Britannia gave me a shrewd look. ‘She was a moneylender. People don’t want anyone knowing they’ve gone to a moneylender, do they? Otherwise everyone would know their credit is no good. So they often came quite late at night. She let them in herself. Perhaps she didn’t want me to see them. Anyway, I was usually upstairs in my room, up the top in the attic, when she had late visitors.’
‘But you could hear them?’
‘Depends how much noise they made and how late they came!’ snapped Miss Scroggs. ‘Otherwise, it wasn’t my business. It was her business and, like I told you already, she didn’t like anyone knowing it. That went for me, as well. She didn’t tell me anything and I didn’t snoop. She wouldn’t have put up with it.’
I pictured the façade of the house, and the attic window overlooking the street. ‘Very well. But did you ever chance to see a visitor, from your window in the attic? Did you see the person who came last night? Is that what makes you so sure someone was here? Did you look out?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Britannia, ‘as it happens, I did. I just happened to look outside, and I saw a bloke standing under the gas lamp. He was looking at the house, and he was just taking off his hat. He tucked it under his arm.’ She mimed the action. ‘I didn’t know who he was. I mean, I don’t know his name or anything But it was a top hat and he was dressed quite the gent.’
I seized eagerly on her equivocation. ‘Had you seen him here before?’
‘I might’ve done,’ admitted Britannia cautiously. ‘Handsome fellow, he was, young, bit of a dandy. That’s all I know.’
At that moment there came a rumble of wheels outside and a vehicle drew up before the door. Shortly after, we heard Constable Barrett arguing with someone who wanted admittance.
I left the room, strode down the narrow hall, and pulled open the front door. A small group of people in the forecourt exchanged lively conversation with the doughty Barrett. It appeared they were demanding entry. Behind them, in the street, the audience of neighbours had reconvened and, also, grown. Word had reached the streets around that ‘something was happening’. Young and old, they were there, from young children to an old fellow in a bath chair pushed by an eager girl in a maid’s uniform, complete with frilled cap. All watched, agog with curiosity. In the distance, new figures hurried to catch the activity before it was too late.