The Dead Woman of Deptford: Inspector Ben Ross mystery 6

by Granger, Ann

  ‘You are a police officer, not a butler, Biddle,’ I told him testily. ‘Do you mean a member of the public or one of the Wellings family? Not Mr Carterton, I hope?’

  ‘No, sir, a member of the public, sir.’ Biddle cleared his throat. ‘His name is Smart, sir, Joseph Smart. He is in business as a pawnbroker, sir, in Greenwich.’

  ‘Then show him in, Biddle.’

  A pawnbroker? Had Mrs Clifford’s watch and jewellery turned up at last?

  Smart was an elderly man wearing a pale-grey frock coat over pepper-and-salt tweed trousers. Because of the cold weather he had swathed his neck in a woollen muffler, twice wrapped around and then knotted in front; so that his head sat atop it with no visible neck. He had the wan complexion of someone who spends most of his time indoors, much of it by artificial light. Now that he had emerged into the day, he sat blinking at me. But his eyes were sharp. I felt I was being ‘sized up’, assessed for likely value as security for a loan or as goods for sale. I almost expected him to name a price.

  He leaned forward slightly, but with his shoulders only, as if his shop counter stood between us. In a curiously soft voice he said, ‘I deal in quite a bit of jewellery.’ This sentence might have been some secret code, for he then looked at me with the air of one waiting for a prearranged response.

  I found his manner and his presence unsettling; and had to force myself to be brisk and businesslike. After all, he had come to me. I was not about to offer him my watch or wedding ring.

  ‘I imagine that you do, Mr Smart.’ I didn’t know if this was the right reply. It sounded weak to my ears. But he accepted it with a little nod.

  ‘Some of it is what you might call run-of-the-mill,’ he went on in that soft tone. ‘Very little actual value. Gold, of course,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘that always has a value, depending on the degree of purity. Stones, now, they vary a lot. Some people know very little about their own jewellery. Some get it absolutely wrong. You would be surprised, Inspector Ross, how many people come in to my shop and tell me they have a diamond ring, for example, and offer it as security against an exorbitant sum. They think a diamond must be of great value.’

  He uttered a curious sound I couldn’t quite identify and then, with a quiver of distaste, I realised he was laughing.

  ‘But there are diamonds, Mr Ross, and there are diamonds, eh? And then, again, things aren’t always what they appear to be. I’m speaking of paste. A lot of them bring me paste jewels. They don’t like it when I tell them. They don’t want to believe me. They can turn quite nasty and accuse me of trying to cheat them. I tell them straight away, you go elsewhere. See what another pawnbroker will tell you. Sometimes they do, you know.’

  When Biddle had told me a pawnbroker was waiting to see me, with information, I had felt a surge of excitement and hope that the missing items had at last surfaced. Now I just wanted this man out of my office as quickly as possible.

  ‘I am a busy man, Mr Smart,’ I said. ‘As I am sure you are, too. What has brought you to me today?’

  He searched in the inside pocket of his coat and produced a sheet of cheap printed paper. ‘This,’ he said simply, and placed the paper, lettering uppermost, on my desk so that it was the right way up for me to read. I saw that it was one of the leaflets we had had printed and distributed, showing Britannia Scroggs’s drawings of the missing valuables, with the description she had given us.

  Trying to keep my voice from betraying my excitement, I asked, ‘You have been offered some of these items?’

  Mr Smart rubbed his hands together, the palms making a dry rustling noise. ‘Ah, now, that’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Have I or haven’t I? That’s the question, isn’t it, as the Bard wrote?’

  The unexpected foray into Shakespeare disconcerted me. ‘Which?’ I asked sharply.

  Mr Smart was not disconcerted. ‘Just so,’ he said, and nodded.

  I realised that he had not been making idle conversation about the jewellery. He had brought me something – but there was a problem.

  ‘Here’s a constable,’ said Smart.

  I thought for a moment he meant Biddle, but it was his way of telling his tale, setting the scene and introducing the dramatis personae. Perhaps Mr Smart did like to attend theatrical performances.

  ‘An officer of the law,’ he continued, just to make things quite clear. ‘He comes into my shop. Now then, when that happens, it’s very likely that he’ll be asking about stolen items. A pawnbroker has to be very careful, you know. You get to judge a customer up, very quick. When they’ll settle for the first sum of money you offer, and want to be in and out the door at once, that’s a bad sign. I send that sort away! And, sure enough, the constable has this sheet of paper here,’ he tapped the leaflet, ‘with a nice set of drawings and description. Earrings, see . . .’ Smart reached out and rested his forefinger on the earrings illustrated by Britannia. His hands were very small and neat. ‘Rubies, gold setting, pendant style, stolen goods. So I tell the constable, I’ll watch out.

  ‘Now then, sometimes my wife helps me out in the shop. After the officer had left, she came in to the front. She’d been busy in the back, see, but she’d been listening. She always listens out, in case there’s trouble. I don’t get a lot of trouble. Not in Greenwich. But you never know, do you? So in she comes. I show her that leaflet. “I took in a pair of earrings like those,” she says, straight off. ‘Just the other day. I showed them to you,” she says.

  ‘“But, my dear,” I says to her, “they were not rubies, as those illustrated here. They were sapphires.” And indeed they were and very nice stones, too.

  ‘“Joseph!” says she. “Perhaps the stones are different, but the earrings, they’re the same!” And, Mr Ross, you can see for yourself, the setting is identical. My wife, Mr Ross, is a woman of very fine judgement.’

  With that he foraged in his pocket again and produced a small velvet bag. He shook it over the leaflet and a pair of earrings slid out. ‘If you would care to examine them,’ he said politely, as if I might make an offer for them.

  Then he cleared his throat, delved in his pocket again and produced a small powerful magnifying glass of the type used by jewellers and generally called a loupe. He handed it to me.

  I straightened the earrings, side by side, and examined them carefully. Then I took a long careful look at Britannia’s sketches. I fancied my heart beat more quickly. The settings were identical to the maid’s drawings. Surely, they had to be the missing earrings?

  ‘These are good quality, you say?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘Very good, oh, my, yes. Made, I would say, in a workshop in India, and by a skilled man.’ Smart, satisfied he had my interest, leaned back in his chair and folded his hands.

  ‘They are oriental? You can tell? Of course, I suppose you can.’

  ‘I might be wrong,’ said Mr Smart with the calm air of someone who knows that he isn’t. ‘But there is a distinct style to pieces made in the Orient, you know. The colour of the gold, too. The gold in these is twenty-two carat. That is very high quality, as you will know. I think,’ Smart nodded, ‘yes, I fancy they represented an investment on the part of their owner. I don’t mean the fellow who brought them to my place of business. I mean, their original owner.’

  I thought it, too. Clifford had laid out her money shrewdly. Perhaps she had not altogether trusted banks. I picked up the little black velvet bag. ‘And they came in this bag?’

  He shook his head regretfully. ‘Ah, no. They came loose, that is, wrapped in a bit of paper. I put them in that bag to protect them. Besides, you should respect a good stone. You don’t go wrapping it up in a piece of paper like you would a cod’s head!’

  I realised that Mr Smart was not without a sense of humour – of a type.

  ‘Biddle!’ I called out. ‘Just step along to Mr Dunn’s office and give him my compliments. Tell him, I’d be obliged, if he has a few minutes, if he’d come and look at these. Oh, and if you see Sergeant Morris, ask him to come along, as well.�
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  It made for quite a crowd in my small office when both Dunn and Morris arrived, and Biddle squeezed in to observe.

  ‘Well,’ said Dunn, when he had also examined the earrings. ‘They do resemble the items in this illustration, to a remarkable degree, in fact. But the stones are wrong.’ He placed the loupe on the drawing and turned to Joseph Smart, who had sat watching us complacently. ‘Now then, Mr Smart,’ said Dunn. ‘Do you have a name and address for the customer who brought these to you? If he pawned them, you must have the details.’

  ‘But he didn’t pawn them, Superintendent,’ said Smart in that same soft voice. ‘No, no, he wanted to sell.’

  ‘And you asked for no name or address?’

  ‘William Jones,’ said the pawnbroker with a sad smile. ‘My wife did ask, even though he wanted to sell not pawn. We always ask when they come in off the street like that, poor folk but with a valuable to dispose of. I tell them it’s because I need to write it on the receipt. A tradesman needs to be careful! They always give an everyday name of that sort. It might be right or it might not. To tell you the truth, they are unlikely to give a correct name even if the deal is above board. It makes them nervous, you see, because they might owe money elsewhere; or they just don’t want neighbours to learn they are so hard up. In my experience, colours are very often given as the name. I’ve had Browns, Greens, Greys, Blacks and Whites come in to my establishment. I set no store by any name. But the address, now, was a different matter because it was one known to us. It is that of a lodging house for seamen. Nothing permanent about it, of course, so he didn’t mind giving that. They come and go at such rooming houses, sirs, come and go. Very likely he’s left by now.’

  ‘He was a seaman?’ I asked quickly, interrupting this account of the hazards of a pawnbroker’s life. ‘Did he tell your wife that he was? Or did your wife judge him a seafaring man?’

  ‘Indeed, she did, sirs. Otherwise, she might not have taken the items in. She didn’t care for the look of him, that’s a fact. She described him as a hulking, rough-looking fellow, though not badly dressed in the way seamen like to dress. He wore a thick pea coat, sirs, and a cap with a peak. He was not a naval man, not the Royal Navy, in a uniform. No, she judged him off a trading vessel. Some of those crewmen are a very tough sort of bullyboy, gentlemen. They need to be, for it’s a desperate hard life. They sail dangerous seas and put into all manner of wild foreign ports.’

  Morris had joined us to hear what the pawnbroker had to say and, at this description of the customer, I saw a sudden gleam in the sergeant’s eyes. But this was not the moment to inquire why.

  ‘Yet your wife was persuaded to accept the earrings? I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Or was she just afraid of him and did not dare to refuse?’

  The little pawnbroker appeared slightly embarrassed.

  ‘She saw they were of Indian manufacture, or somewhere in that part of the world,’ he explained, ‘and worth a fair bit. So she asked Jones, that being the name he gave her, where he got them. On the island of Ceylon, he told her. Well, gentlemen, Ceylon is a place renowned for sapphires, so my wife was encouraged. The man said he was there as deckhand on a tea clipper. He and some others sat gambling the whole of one night in the monsoon season. Raining like you can’t imagine it the whole time; and no one wanted to be out in the open. The way it went, when morning came, the game finally broke up and he was the winner. The other gamblers paid up, but the fellow who lost the most, he couldn’t pay, not cash or gold coins. But he offered these earrings, took them out of an inside pocket of his jacket, where he had them wrapped in a bit of silk. Jones saw they were good and he accepted them, though the scrap of silk wrapped around them got lost.

  ‘Now, gentlemen, you might think that’s a fanciful story. But seafarers, they bring back all sorts of trinkets and jewels from foreign parts, often of more value than they know. How they came by them, well, that’s not something you can verify, not as a pawnbroker. But it’s not an unlikely story. It could even been true – or very nearly.’

  ‘So how much did your wife give him for the earrings?’

  ‘Five pounds,’ said Smart defiantly. ‘It was a fair price because he had come in off the street. But my wife believed him when he said he was a sailor. It was not just because of his complexion, burned by the sun and wind, or his attire. When he reached out to push the earrings across the counter, the sleeve of his coat rode up . . .’ Smart paused and demonstrated, pushing up the sleeve of his own coat so that his forearm showed.

  ‘He wore no shirt, sirs, but a knitted jersey, and that rode up too, so she saw the skin – and the tattoo. Now, seafaring men are rare ones for a tattoo. This one was a heart and a name. They very often have a heart tattooed. Generally there’s a girl’s name to go with it, wife or sweetheart. This one, though, it was a bit different. Instead of a name, it just had the word “Ma”.’

  ‘Ma?’ Morris and I exclaimed in unison.

  ‘Yes, gentlemen. That seemed to indicate, so my wife thought, that he wasn’t such a bad fellow, not if he had a heart and a fond name for his mother tattooed on his arm.’

  ‘Sir?’ murmured Morris. I turned to him. ‘It strikes me, Mr Ross,’ Morris continued, ‘that Mr Smart’s description of his customer matches pretty well with that of the fellow I saw leaving Ma Scroggs’s home, when I took her daughter there.’

  ‘A seaman,’ I said, ‘Raggy Jeb’s son-in-law is a seaman and he’s ashore here at the moment because he gave Raggy a hand to move a drunken woman . . .’

  Morris and I gazed at one another. ‘Ma . . .’ I repeated, my voice sounding hoarse.

  ‘Well, I never!’ said Morris.

  I turned to Superintendent Dunn, who was looking from me to Morris and back again, in surprise.

  ‘Billy Scroggs,’ I said simply. ‘Not William Jones but William Scroggs! Known to his family as Billy. He who, according to his sister, Britannia, went to sea twenty years ago and never reappeared. Supposed drowned.’

  ‘Well, it looks like he’s back now,’ said Morris.

  ‘He’s been coming back after every voyage to his own wife and children. Raggy Jeb, his father-in-law, has a handcart, Mr Dunn,’ I explained to the superintendent. ‘His little granddaughter told my wife how she had to wait in a pub while her grandfather and father “helped” a drunken woman who couldn’t walk. That is how Mrs Clifford’s body got to Skinner’s Yard!’

  Chapter Sixteen

  WE GAVE the pawnbroker, Smart, a receipt for the earrings, explaining we must hold them as possible evidence. They would be returned to him if that should not prove to be so. He looked doleful as he left us. Our thanks were poor compensation for his probably being out of pocket. I would suggest he be given some small reward, if they led us to the killer. It makes good sense to encourage such men as Smart to come forward. I didn’t doubt the earrings were worth far more than the five pounds Mrs Smart had given for them. Smart might easily have decided that, as the stones were not the rubies described in the police leaflet, he could safely keep them. It was probably fear that they would be traced to him somehow, if we captured Scroggs for example, that had induced him to come to us. We would mark him down as a fence for stolen property. Then we should be appearing on his doorstep regularly and his reputation be gone.

  ‘I will take Morris,’ I said to Dunn, ‘and go to the mother’s home. I don’t expect to find Billy there, but either his mother or his sister must know where he is. There is a possibility, of course, that he has signed on as crew on another ship and may even have sailed already.’

  ‘We must be very careful, Ross,’ warned Dunn, suddenly cautious. ‘These may not be the earrings that are missing. Yes, the setting looks the same but there remains the question of the stones. You say the maid, Scroggs’s sister, drew them for you. She, surely, would know that rubies are red. She would not have told you sapphire earrings were rubies, I can’t believe it. Is she simple?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said grimly, ‘I am beginning to think
that Britannia is pretty sharp. But we must interview Billy Scroggs, sir. At the very least, we must do that.’

  ‘If you are right, and he was the sailor who brought the earrings to the pawnbroker, we may have broken the case.’ Dunn shook his head in doubt. ‘But what, really, do we have? A tattoo, Ross, and a general description: that is all you have to go on by way of identification. All men have mothers, Ross. How many other seafarers have some sentimental tribute to their mothers tattooed on their arms? I would wager you several hundred of ’em. As for Morris’s sighting of a burly fellow in a pea coat and cap, leaving the home of Mrs Scroggs . . .’

  ‘Mr Dunn,’ I said firmly, ‘this has been a very strange case from the very beginning. Inspector Phipps has been inclined to disbelieve the maid from the start. I am very much afraid that it begins to look as though he may have been right, and I was wrong.’

  ‘Then Miss Scroggs has told us a very confused, contradictory and strange story,’ said Dunn.

  ‘She has indeed,’ I muttered.

  ‘Take a cab!’ said Dunn suddenly. ‘It will be allowed against expenses.’

  ‘You will allow me to express a view, sir?’ asked Morris, as we jolted towards the Scroggs abode.

  ‘Of course, go ahead, Sergeant.’

  Morris folded his hands, pressing the thumbs together. This, I had noticed before, signified Morris had been thinking. ‘That girl Britannia,’ said Morris, ‘is as artful as a cartload of monkeys, there’s no denying.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘But we’re like those oriental fortune-tellers you see in fairgrounds, sir. We’re tossing the evidence in the air, like they do with pebbles, or ivory sticks, and watching to see how they fall. We have earrings, but they are set with sapphires, and we have been told the missing ones are set with rubies. We have a seafaring man with a tattoo that reads “Ma”. I saw a bullyboy in a seaman’s coat and cap quitting the mother’s hovel. There is a tale told by a child of six to Mrs Ross, of a drunken woman loaded on to a handcart; and I don’t think a jury will place much reliance on that! What we don’t have, Mr Ross, is any real proof to convince a judge. Lots of theories tossed in the air– like the ivory sticks – and the only knowledge is what we read into them.’