by Granger, Ann
‘Elsewhere?’ Wellings shouted, jumping to his feet.
Biddle’s alarmed face appeared at the door. I signalled him to go away.
‘Sit down, Dr Wellings, and calm yourself. Mrs Clifford’s body was discovered late last night in a neglected spot called Skinner’s Yard. It is some distance from her house, about half a mile away.’
Wellings sat quietly for a short time. Then he said in a wounded tone, ‘You have not been open with me, Inspector Ross.’
‘I am investigating a murder, Dr Wellings. We are not chatting as friends.’
He flushed. ‘But you let me think I am suspected of her murder! Am I now to believe that after I left her, the woman quitted her house for some reason and – perhaps in a random act of violent robbery – met with her death in this yard? No, no,’ he corrected himself immediately. ‘Because you say you have good reason to believe she was attacked at home. Am I allowed to ask what makes you so sure of that?’
‘Bloodstains on the carpet, for one thing, among other indications,’ I told him. There was no reason to tell him about the ransacked desk.
‘Then I am in the clear!’ exclaimed Wellings with relief. ‘Why on earth did you make me dictate a long statement to that young constable?’
‘Because your account is evidence, Dr Wellings. You were at the house, you admit it. The maid saw you, as you know. You exchanged heated words with Mrs Clifford. I should stress that you are still a suspect. Don’t go away from here thinking otherwise. You are far from being “in the clear”, as you put it.’
But Wellings had regained confidence and, in a swing of mood, become angry. ‘Look here, I could hardly have thrown Clifford over my shoulder and carried her through the streets! I don’t know where this Skinner’s Yard is. Anyway, every person I met along the way would have seen me. Deptford is not a quiet spot, Ross.’
Wellings paused and frowned. ‘Let’s see, she may have been attacked at home. Symptoms – I mean clues – point to that, you say. But she couldn’t have been fatally wounded or she would not have been able to get to her feet, go out of the house – as she must have done – and make her way to the place where she died.’
I said nothing. Wellings studied me and, when he spoke, showed that he had put aside his earlier panic and had a cool head. Now he was the doctor faced with a difficult diagnosis.
‘Badly injured subjects are capable of considerable exertion. The hospital regularly sees accident cases arrive, having suffered serious injury to internal organs or other parts of the body. Yet the sufferers are able to walk into the casualty department on their own two feet. We had a man walk in, only last week, with a knife in his head.’
I was almost tempted to smile because Edgar Wellings appeared to have no sense of self-preservation. He had earlier insisted that he’d left the woman alive and therefore could not be her murderer. Now he was saying she could have walked out of the house, even if severely injured.
‘So, your medical opinion is that Mrs Clifford could have walked, bleeding from an extensive head wound, to the spot where she was found?’ I asked.
But Wellings was not such a fool – or was beginning to gather his wits. ‘One can understand an injured person seeking medical help. But if Clifford were so seriously injured and bleeding, she could not have travelled far unaided. Look here, Ross. You say her body was found in some yard. Was she – the corpse – was she dressed in outdoor clothing? Hat? Cloak? That sort of thing? It was a cold night.’
‘No, only what she would have worn in the house, her gown and so on,’ I told him. It was interesting to see how Wellings was torn between defending his own innocence and a desire to speculate.
‘She would not have walked out of the house bare-headed and without a shawl, at the very least,’ he muttered.
‘She might have done so if seeking help was her prime consideration,’ I pointed out.
‘True,’ he was kind enough to agree with me. ‘But would she not have simply gone to a neighbour . . .’
It was time to remind him that it was for me to ask the questions. ‘Can you remember, when you were talking to her earlier, whether she wore any jewellery?’
He looked surprised. ‘I wasn’t looking to see if she wore any. I was there to talk business. Oh, she had a little fob watch; I remember that, because she consulted it while I was trying to explain. I couldn’t swear to anything else.’
That caught my attention. ‘She looked at her watch? Was this near the beginning of your conversation with her? Or towards the end? Did you gain the impression she might have been waiting for another visitor that evening?’
‘Not long before I left. I have to say,’ Welling told me openly, ‘that I thought she was indicating to me that I was wasting her time, and she had nothing more to say to me.’
‘That’s possible, too,’ I mused. ‘Was she wearing earrings?’
He looked even more astonished at what he clearly thought a trivial line of questioning.
‘I told you, I can’t swear to anything other than the fob watch. I wasn’t in the mood to study her jewellery! Why on earth should that be of any interest to you?’
I wasn’t about to satisfy his curiosity.
‘Cast your mind back, go through it all slowly, playing it in your head,’ I invited. ‘See it as frozen images, if you can, like a magic lantern show.’
This suggestion of mine had a most unexpected reception. Wellings, who had clearly been thinking I was wasting his time and taking an unworthy pleasure in tormenting him, now smiled and grew enthusiastic.
‘Yes, yes, a magic lantern show! That is an excellent suggestion. I am very interested in the working of the human mind, you know,’ he continued earnestly. ‘Interested from a medical point of view, that is. What do we remember, really remember? And what do we only think we remember? It’s easy to muddle up random memories, isn’t it? But to put the disparate snatches of memory in some order, as a story told with the aid of magic lantern slides, yes, yes, excellent!’ He beamed at me. ‘I shall write a paper on it, mark my words. A first-class suggestion, Ross! Well, why did I never think of that?’
Now I was disconcerted. ‘I don’t want to muddle you, or for you to invent, or give flight to your imagination,’ I told him. ‘I have enough witnesses who do that in any case under investigation. Often they will swear to a thing, quite false, because they have persuaded themselves it is true.’
‘Yes, yes!’ Wellings leaned forward eagerly. ‘There is true memory and false. I believe, as you clearly do, that there is also buried memory. That is the sort you were trying for when you told me to imagine the scene as a set of magic lantern slides. The subject may know – or have seen – something that he’s forgotten. I also believe there is learned memory. The subject believes something, but it may never have happened.’
Welling appeared so happy to discuss his theories that he would now prattle on until I stopped him. Perhaps I had been unwise to send him, with his medical background, down this path. So I did stop him and draw him back.
‘Quite so. Let me ask a question. When you arrived outside the front door of the house, you took off your hat, so that she could see your face when she came to the window, after you’d tapped on the pane, is that right?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Did she seem surprised to see you? Angry? Disappointed?’
‘Annoyed,’ said Wellings. ‘But she only appeared for a moment. She pulled aside the lace curtain, stared out, recognised me, grimaced and then let fall the curtain. I wasn’t sure, to be honest, that she meant to let me in. But I waited. After a very short time she opened the front door. She whisked me inside and slammed the door behind me.’
‘Whisked you inside? Why would she hurry to get you indoors?’
‘So that the neighbours shouldn’t see me, I suppose,’ said Wellings.
That confirmed Britannia Scroggs’s statement that her mistress was a ‘very private person’.
He had nothing to add to his previous accoun
t. I let our young medical genius go home. I stressed that he must not discuss anything of this with anyone, particularly not with any of his fellow doctors. He must particularly not be tempted to discuss his theories on the working of the human brain. ‘And try,’ I asked, ‘not to discuss it with your uncle and aunt, the Pickfords, or with your fiancée. Or with my wife,’ I added.
‘I’ll have to say something,’ he told me, ‘above all, to my Uncle Pickford. And the ladies already know, well, know some of it.’
‘You must, of course, tell your uncle the basic facts. Beyond that, tell him you are under police instructions to keep silent.’ I added, ‘This may be a good time to confess that you have run into debt. I don’t see how you can avoid doing so.’
He sighed, got to his feet and put on his hat. ‘This is a damn awful business, and knowing I have got myself into the middle of it does not help. Yes, yes, I shall own up to Uncle Pickford and write to my father.’
I wondered whether he would; or whether it would be left to Patience to carry the message. Wellings was quite capable of asking his sister to be the bringer of his bad news.
When he had left, I went to see Superintendent Dunn and explain what had happened, taking with me Wellings’s statement.
‘Between you and me, Ross,’ said Dunn, ‘I am ready to believe that fellow Phipps at Deptford, when he says he was so quick to call us in because he was short-handed. But when that girl Britannia Scroggs arrived today to report her employer missing, you can be sure Phipps recognised the name Clifford. A moneylender operating her business in his division? Yes, he will know about that! It would have made him doubly anxious not to be the investigating officer; and to await your arrival, let you hear the girl’s story. He does not know to whom she lent money and he would be afraid to disturb the drawing rooms of some outwardly very respectable people.’
‘Indeed, that is just what has happened. She lent money to Wellings. That young man was there the night the woman was attacked. He doesn’t deny it. As the maid has identified him, he has little choice but admit it. Worryingly, Wellings’s sister is engaged to a Member of Parliament.’
Dunn leaned back in his chair and made a steeple of his stubby fingertips. ‘See here, Ross, that same MP is known to your wife. The young lady, Patience you say her name is, also knows Mrs Ross. This is not going to be an obstacle in your investigation of the case, eh?’
‘No, sir,’ I said firmly. ‘And if I thought it would become one, I would tell you.’
‘I would then have to take you off the case and replace you with someone else. Perhaps I should do so, anyway. On the other hand, with your family connections, Mr Frank Carterton MP cannot say he is too busy to see you; and neither Dr Wellings nor any of his family can object to your asking personal questions, either. There is just one other thing . . .’
Dunn peered at me over his fingertips. ‘You will forgive my asking, but past experience has made me wary. Mrs Ross isn’t going to be playing detective in this, is she? She has done so before in other cases. I admire Mrs Ross’s intuition and her tenacity, but it won’t do to have her meddling. You must make it clear to her, Ross.’
‘Yes, sir, I’ll tell her that.’ I’d tell her, certainly, but whether Lizzie would listen was another matter. ‘As regards Inspector Phipps, sir,’ I went on. ‘I do believe he is torn between not wanting to be responsible and a natural urge to be in charge in his own division. He is furious with Britannia Scroggs because she didn’t tell him of the blood-stained rug – or more accurately, he gave her no chance to tell him.’
Dunn unsteepled his hands and slapped his palms on the desk. ‘Then he shouldn’t have shillyshallied about! Either he calls in the Yard and lets us do the job. Or he keeps quiet and takes our instructions.’
He shook his head of wiry hair. ‘At worst, we should have to let Phipps get on with it and investigate the case himself, whether he wants to or not.’ He chuckled but immediately grew serious again. ‘But we cannot. We must oversee it here, at the Yard. We are indeed going to trample over the drawing-room carpets of some influential people!’
Some time later Morris returned, red-faced and weary, from his task of escorting Britannia to her mother’s home and making sure that Mrs Scroggs understood her daughter must stay there.
‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ I suggested. ‘Let me know how you got on. Britannia safely delivered into her mamma’s keeping?’
‘You could say that,’ returned Morris, subsiding gratefully on to a wooden chair, rather small for his solid frame. ‘Well, Mr Ross, it went like this.’
The report of Sergeant Frederick Morris
‘I don’t think that maid stopped talking all the way there. When I say talking, perhaps I should say shouting. Everyone around us could hear what she had to say. Of course, that’s what she wanted! Besides, they could see by just looking at me that I was an officer of the law. So they reckoned she’d been arrested. Word spread. Every loiterer passed it on. People kept demanding to know what she’d done. They came running out of the shops and public houses. We had a pack of street urchins at our heels all the way. It all served to slow us down and it was nearly an hour before we got to the house.
‘I was surprised to see it must once have been a nice little place, old, you know. It must have been built a hundred years ago, when there were market gardens around there, and is more in the way of a cottage than a house. The building is in a sorry state now, too many people living in it, I dare say. You know how the landlords crowd them in, a family to a room. As we came to it, with all our followers whistling and making a hullaballoo behind us, a big fellow came out of the front door, a real bruiser of a chap with a cap pulled down over his ears and the top of his face. Funny thing, sir, but despite all the fuss, he never even glanced in our direction. He set off smartly down the street away from us.’
‘Not anxious to meet a police officer, plain-clothes or not,’ I broke in to comment.
‘My mind exactly, Mr Ross. He must have a bad conscience, was my thought. Well, in we went and the crowd hung about outside. Mrs Scroggs has one little room on the ground floor to herself, as her daughter told us. If she’s there on her own, she has more space and privacy than others. The room has an open, old-fashioned hearth in it. A miserable sort of fire smouldered there, under an iron pot on a trivet. I don’t know what was cooking in the pot, but the smell was something horrible and I wouldn’t have fancied eating it. Along the shelf over the hearth the old woman keeps her crockery and utensils. There was a little rickety table, one Welsh chair with arms and a three-legged stool. In the corner was a bed made up on a rickety bedframe. It was a very narrow bed and Scroggs will have to sleep on the floor. That was it for furnishings. There was a rope tied across the room from one side to the other and some wet washing hung on it, a man’s shirt, by the looks of it. There was also a petticoat. All the wash was dripping on to the floor, making for a damp and unhealthy atmosphere. The old woman’s cloak hung on a hook behind the door and it looked as if, apart from that and the wet petticoat, she’d only the clothes she wore on her back.
‘You can imagine what happened when I appeared with the maid. To begin with, news of our approach had gone ahead of us. Someone had recognised Britannia with me, and run ahead to tell the old woman that her daughter was taken in charge. So Ma Scroggs was in a fair state of panic by the time we arrived. She kept screeching, “What’s she done?” She followed that with, “She’s a good girl and she’s not done nothing!”
‘Britannia told her to calm down, as she’d not been arrested. But she’d had to leave her place, and come home, as her mistress had been murdered. Well, that made things worse.
‘“What?” yells the mother. “How do you mean, murdered? You mean, you ain’t got no place of work? How are you going to get another, with living in and all found, like you was with Mrs Clifford? How shall I manage here without the couple of shillings a week you give me?”
‘She then sank down on to the floor and put her apron over her head. She rocked b
ack and forth, moaning and lamenting, while Britannia tried to get her to stand up. In the end, I ordered her to do so. So she did scramble to her feet, hanging on to Britannia’s arm. She then seemed to see, for the first time, Britannia’s bundle of belongings.
‘“You can’t stay here!” she shouted. “I got no room for you.”
‘“I got to come here, Ma,” says Britannia. “The rozzers say so.”
‘“What d’ya mean, they say so? ’Oo? That one there?” She pointed at me. “Who’s he to say I got to take you in?”
‘“They need to be able to find me, Ma, if they want me. I can’t stay at Mrs Clifford’s house, ’cos she’s a goner, I told you,” explained Britannia.
‘Now then, Inspector Ross, sir, there is one thing the poor fear more than anything and that is the workhouse. It’s not just the place itself, you understand, but the shame of it. If you’ve nothing else, then keeping yourself off the parish is the last thing you cling to before you tumble into destitution. So, when I saw that Ma Scroggs was inclined to be awkward, I spoke up.
‘“If it is inconvenient for you to give her a bed, madam, then I can take your daughter to the casual ward for tonight. Then, tomorrow she can apply to be taken into the workhouse itself. That is, if you can’t let her stay here a couple of nights, that is, until she gets herself a bed somewhere and a new job.”
‘“It’s going to be bad enough trying to find someone to employ me, coming from a house where murder’s been done!” snaps Britannia. “Without I’d spent the night before in the casual ward. Have you seen what sort they take in there for the night? Drunks, beggars and sick people and such. Fine thing it would be for me to tell any employer! As for applying to be taken in by the parish, you can forget it. I’m not going to any workhouse. They’d put me to work picking oakum, they would. That’s what the workhouse would do!”
‘My suggestion did the trick. The old woman stopped moaning and declared, “No one in this family is going to any workhouse! Not unless I ends up going there myself, which is likely, if you don’t get a new place, Britannia, and can let me have some money. What you give me pays my rent here. But no Scroggs has ever gone on the parish! We’re respectable people.”