‘Do you think that case could be linked to this one?’
‘I have no reason to suspect that it is or that it is not.’ He turned back to his book and I to mine, but Sergeant Troy’s showing off with his sword was starting to exasperate me and I was cross with Bathsheba for being aroused by it. I have always admired a man’s rapier mind more than his rapier.
‘Shall we go to the Crescent tomorrow?’ I asked.
My guardian bent a page at the corner. ‘If I had wanted constant chatter –’ he dropped his book on to the floor – ‘I would have taken in an over-stimulated monkey and given it strong coffee.’
‘It might have enjoyed the food more,’ I retorted, ‘but it could not have bathed your eye, nor tended you in your most recent attack of malaria.’
He started. ‘Was that you? I thought it was my mother.’
‘Your mother has never set foot in this house whilst I have lived here,’ I told him. ‘You were delirious.’
‘But I wrote to thank her and she replied that she had only done her duty.’ He moulded his stew into a square, banking the sides with wilted carrots.
‘She probably realized that you were hallucinating,’ I reassured him.
‘Or more likely she was befuddled with diamorphine.’ He took out his eye and polished it with his napkin. ‘She was so alarmed by having that headache last year that she takes it daily as a precaution.’
‘But that cannot be good for her.’
‘Nothing is good for my mother.’ He scooped up some more stew.
*
I went up to my room for a cigarette and a gin, and I read one of Edward’s letters, the first he ever sent me, in which he protested his love. His handwriting was awful – I found out later that he had given himself Dutch courage to write it – so bad that I thought he had expressed the hope that one day he might worry me.
I put the letter away and in that act I knew: it was time to stop living with my memories. There was no point wallowing in lost love while I had it now and almost within reach.
Sidney Grice was coming out of his room.
‘Why did you take me in?’ I asked, in the hope of catching him off-guard.
‘An interesting question.’ He started down the stairs. ‘And one which I have often asked myself.’
‘What really happened to my mother?’ I called after my guardian and he stopped.
‘He murdered her,’ a dead voice whispered in my ear, but we were still on the stairs when the doorbell rang.
14
✥
The Man in the Meat Safe and the Elephant in the Park
GEORGE POUND HAD not been to the house whilst I was there since I had returned his mother’s ring. And I had not seen him to speak to, except for polite greetings on chance meetings, since we had travelled back on that last train from Parbold.
‘I got your note,’ he told my guardian as he came into the hall.
‘Obviously.’ Sidney Grice shook his hand.
Inspector Pound rolled his eyes. ‘Good evening, Miss Middleton. I trust you are well.’
‘I am very well,’ I said, ‘and I only wish that you could truthfully say the same.’
‘You are straight to the point as usual.’ Inspector Pound handed Molly his hat.
‘Miss Middleton is always straight to disappoint,’ she confirmed, missing the hook and depositing his long russet overcoat on the floor.
Pound was grey. I knew that he’d had to take the best part of a month off at the end of the last year, and that his superiors were threatening him with early retirement if he did so again, but he was left with little choice. I had known men in the army with similar problems where a wound kept reinfecting and bursting open, and I did not think that his abdomen had ever fully healed.
‘What are you doing?’ Molly’s employer demanded as she wobbled slowly down.
Our maid paused mid-descent.
‘Ladies pick things up without bending their backs.’ She tipped sideways against the hall table. ‘It says so in that book on ekikette what Pruffelia lent me.’
Ophelia was a maid at number 123.
‘I shall restrict my rebuttal of those remarks to three refutations.’ Mr G checked his hair in the mirror. ‘First, you are not a lady and never shall be. Second, they do not. Third, they employ lumpen maids to pick things up for them. I shall now append my argument with two instructions, both of which you shall obey.’ He opened his hand one finger at a time to count off the number for her. ‘First, pick up that overcoat. Second, and more importantly, bring tea now.’
Molly heaved herself up and hung the overcoat on the rack.
‘I aintn’t not lumpy,’ she muttered as she scuttled off, ‘and, if I am, it’s his fault for being so kind and overfeeding me.’
We went through to the study where we sat by the weakly shimmering fire, the inspector refusing my offer of my armchair to pull out an upright chair for himself.
‘Gaslight Lane,’ Mr G announced, as one might address a large meeting, and Pound nodded.
‘I thought it might be about that. A very nasty business, from what I’ve heard, but one of Inspector Quigley’s cases as I’m sure you know.’
‘You investigated the first deaths, I believe.’ I leaned over to stir the coals with the poker. ‘The Garstang Slaughters.’
Pound grimaced. ‘I was on that case,’ he agreed, ‘but Inspector Mulholland led the investigation.’
‘Mainly from the nearest saloon, if my memories of Snood Mulholland are anything to go by – which, of course, they are.’ Sidney Grice brought out his watch and flipped open the lid.
‘Mulholland was past his best by then,’ the inspector conceded.
I was sure that he had lost more weight.
Mr G wound his watch. ‘Some might say he never had a best.’
Inspector Pound did not take the bait, but he hated my godfather criticizing the force of which he was so proud.
‘Were you the first on the scene?’ I asked and he dissented grimly.
‘Not quite. It was Constable Hutching who saw Angelina Innocenti, the Spanish maid, standing in the front window covered in blood. She took one look at him and vanished. At first he thought she must have injured herself, but eventually, when nobody responded to his knocking, he stopped a lorry carrying a telegraph pole and persuaded a bunch of clerks to help him use it as a battering ram. It was a bit of a lark for them, but when he went into that front room and saw Angelina standing holding a cut-throat over the body of the kitchen maid—’
‘Kate Webb,’ I remembered.
‘That’s the one.’ His cup vibrated on the saucer. ‘Hutching took one look and summoned help, and the constable he alerted came to fetch me.’ George Pound rested his drink in his lap. ‘It was an awful business.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Probably the worst I have ever seen and I was only a young sergeant at the time.’ His eyes, once so penetratingly blue, were capillaried around the edges and they clouded with the memories. ‘That poor couple and their servants and their nephew.’ He rubbed his cheek. ‘So sad.’
‘Indeed.’ Mr G stretched his feet under the low table between us.
‘Were you able to rule out theft as a motive?’ I wished I could have offered him a real drink.
‘Unless you count a bit of curtain cord. Mrs Garstang was having the drapes replaced and there was a coil of it in a spare room. The murderer used about eight foot of it to tie up Lionel Engra, but the rest of it – about twenty foot – went missing,’ Pound replied. ‘But I can’t imagine anybody breaking in just to steal that.’
‘If the actions of criminals were limited by your imagination,’ Sidney Grice reached behind his chair, ‘I might be forced to commit a few crimes myself to give us both something interesting to solve.’
‘Perhaps the murderer took the rope to climb out of a window?’ I suggested.
‘All the windows were still locked from the inside,’ Pound informed me. ‘And if he had been thin enough to climb up a chimney there would
have been soot all over the hearth.’
‘Do you think Angelina Innocenti killed them?’ I asked.
The inspector breathed out heavily. ‘As God is my witness, I do not know.’ He lowered his head. ‘There was hardly any proof except that she was the only person left alive and the house was impregnable. We got Dippy Smiff, the housebreaker, to see if he could get in without forcing any locks. The chief promised to reduce a murder charge to manslaughter if he succeeded. He tried for six hours, including crawling all over the roof and nearly breaking his neck before the hangman had a chance, but Dippy couldn’t see how it could be done. In a real state he was, and then he died of gaol fever before he even got to trial.’
‘It is even more fortified now,’ I told him. ‘But there is something else.’ I knew that hesitancy in his manner all too well.
George Pound put a thumb and forefinger in his philtrum. ‘From the disarray of her nightdress and the bruising – quite apart from the knife wounds – I thought she had been… interfered with, but the doctor said not.’
Sidney Grice snorted. He had strong views on police surgeons, none of them favourable.
‘There was so much blood,’ George Pound struggled to whisper his next words and I could hardly hear them above Mr G’s throat clearing.
‘Do you think it in any way possible that Nathan Mortlock committed the crime?’ I asked.
‘Well, he had the most to gain.’ Pound separated his fingers along the fringe of his moustaches. ‘But he had the perfect alibi.’
‘No alibi is perfect,’ Sidney Grice argued. ‘I could produce a dozen men of unimpeachable reputation, including a high court judge, who would swear under oath that I am presently employed breeding camels in Peru if I told them to.’
‘How?’ I challenged and my guardian clipped his watch shut.
‘Because I know enough to ruin them all.’ He smiled bleakly at the prospects.
‘Mortlock’s alibi was more solid than that.’ Pound shifted uncomfortably. ‘He was arrested the evening before the murders, charged and detained in cell one at Marylebone Police Station until the next morning. I myself saw him being taken to the magistrates’ court and it was definitely him – tubby little man with gingery hair.’
‘Who arrested him?’ I asked, and Pound wrinkled his brow before replying. ‘I think it was Constable Dutton – Mutton, as he was known. He left the force a few years ago, but it will still be in the records.’
‘Look it up,’ Mr G instructed and the inspector’s mouth tightened.
‘If you would not mind,’ I added hastily.
‘When I get the time.’ He glared at my godfather. ‘I know that Sergeant Horwich booked him in and out, and I think you have both seen enough of the cells to know that Mortlock could not have wandered off in the night.’
I could not argue with that, having had a highly unpleasant night in them myself. The cells were underground and very secure indeed.
‘Was Horwich a sergeant at the time?’ I asked and the inspector managed a slight twinkle.
‘Horwich was born a sergeant,’ he said. ‘He can be a bully and sometimes the men need that, but he is as honest as the day is long. If he wrote Mortlock in the station log, Mortlock was there. I would stake my career on it.’
‘I would be inclined to agree with you,’ Sidney Grice put his hands together in prayer, ‘if I were in an agreeable mood.’
‘I should like to see that,’ I remarked and George Pound chuckled. ‘Anyway, you can ask Horwich about it yourself now he’s back on duty.’
‘We saw him today,’ I said, ‘but I did not know he had been away.’
‘First day back.’ Pound puffed out his cheeks. ‘His daughters were run over by a carriage. The driver never stopped. The older died two days later on her fourteenth birthday and the younger is crippled and not expected to walk again.’
‘May I anticipate Miss Middleton informing us how awful that is by expressing the same sentiment myself,’ my godfather said with something approaching sensitivity.
‘Don’t tell him I told you,’ George Pound begged.
I mulled over what the inspector had said about Mr Mortlock. ‘So, if Nathan did not commit the murders, that would rule out any motive of revenge or retribution.’
‘Ah, there was a time when things were what they seemed,’ my guardian reflected dreamily. ‘I read about it in a children’s book.’
Molly staggered in with a laden tray. ‘Cook thought you might like some bread sandwiches,’ she announced, plunking it down, and Inspector Pound perked up.
‘Tell Cook that she may be as considerate as she likes, but neither of you will be having a half day on Thursday.’ Sidney Grice lifted the corner of a napkin to see what lay beneath. ‘No matter how much you want to see the invisible elephant trick in Hyde Park.’ He let the napkin fall.
‘Oh,’ Molly yelped, jumping back, almost physically stung.
‘It is not a real elephant, Molly.’ I tried to console her, but Molly was not fobbed off that easily.
‘’Course it is,’ she reasoned scornfully. ‘If it aintn’t not real how can it be in the park?’
I shrugged but could think of no reply that would satisfy her.
‘’Taintn’t not fair,’ she grumbled. ‘They get to see in invisual things all the time.’
‘If she slams that door—’ Mr G began but his next word was lost in the percussion.
I refreshed our cups.
‘I wouldn’t mind seeing that show,’ George Pound admitted.
There was a time I might have suggested going together, but I only gave us both some milk and said, ‘Tell us about the Garstangs.’
15
✥
Yellow Oceans and Pernicious Distillations
THE CITY LAY submerged in fog the next morning – choking, soaking yellow oceans of it. At nine o’clock it might as well have been night, for not a ray of sunlight could penetrate the smothering murk. It even sneaked into the house, for the drapes felt damp and the windows ran with condensation as I tried to peer out through them. There was no hope of our green flag being spotted in such conditions, so I went to the door and whistled between my thumb and first finger.
Sidney Grice recoiled. ‘No lady should ever make such a cacophony.’
‘She should if she wants a hansom,’ I responded as a dull clopping came to a halt close by.
‘Have a care, miss,’ Molly warned as she gave me my hat. ‘One of my sort-of cousins went out in the fog and he wasn’t not never seen again.’
‘Oh dear, when was that?’
‘Ten days short of a forthnight ago.’
‘Well, I hope they find him,’ I commiserated.
‘Oh, I hope not, miss. He slippened off from a work party at Dirtmoor.’
‘Dartmoor Prison?’ I checked my hat and marvelled at the sales technique of the girl who had convinced me that I needed it. ‘What on earth was he sent there for?’
‘He is a warden.’ Mr G ushered me outside.
Our cab crept along, jolting wildly, as the driver could not spot any craters to avoid them. The two lamps at the front were no more than blurred balls of orange in the saturated air. A sinister quiet had settled on the street, even the careful clump of our horse’s hooves on the cobbles was scarcely audible, and there was only the muffled rattle of a few other vehicles and the faint coughs of choking pedestrians breaking through. I wrapped my scarf over my mouth and nose, but it made little difference to the filth I was inhaling.
‘How can he possibly know where he is going?’ I coughed on a strand of wool.
‘He does not,’ Mr G asserted cheerfully and called up, ‘Left here, Driver.’
We swung round and I steadied myself on the window frame.
The cab rocked and I trod on his foot. ‘But how can you tell?’
Our seats tipped violently as the inside wheel hit the kerb, almost throwing my guardian into my lap.
‘God, or so the Bible tells us, gave us senses.’ He struggled up and st
raightened his hat. ‘But I appear to be the only person who can use them. There is a cross-breeze where the roads intersect. See how the droplets drift to our right?’
‘If you say so.’ I could hardly see anything and it was an effort even to keep my eyes open; the acid fumes of a million coal fires, trapped in the clouds, stung them so much. ‘Therefore we must be in Gordon Street.’
He pulled out the bung from his flask and sipped his tea straight from it. We were being jostled far too much for him to attempt to use his cup.
‘As far as I can make out, the air is swirling randomly in every direction now,’ I said.
‘It gives every appearance of such behaviour,’ he agreed, ‘though nothing is truly random. It is just that the pattern is too complex for us to rationalize it.’ He pushed the cork back into his flask and, for a while, was lost in thought, but then he raised his cane and tapped twice on the roof. ‘We are passing Christ the King.’
‘So the road bends,’ the cabby acknowledged.
‘I cannot hear any bells,’ I said.
‘That is because none are ringing.’ Mr G grabbed hold of the strap. ‘But if you listen, you will hear a choir attempting to disturb the being they blame for making them.’
I strained my ears and perhaps made out the fading rumble of an organ, but the only voice was the hopeless unseen call of ‘Buy my fresh hens’ eggs noo lay, noo lay too-day.’
Something banged into the side of us and I glimpsed a horse, wild-eyed and frothing, as it strained to turn its invisible cargo away from our cab.
‘Bleedin’ bleeders,’ the voice above us cursed.
‘Ladies,’ my guardian warned as an omnibus overtook us.
‘Nearly ’ad us over, that one did,’ the driver complained. ‘Where the ’ell are we now? ’Dilly Circus?’
‘Tavistock Square,’ Mr G shouted over the triumphant hoots of the omnibus passengers. ‘Straight on.’
A man had died in Tavistock Square. I did not like him but I still imagine him standing forlornly at his window every time I pass number 2. Every death haunts me, for even the most cruel of men was an innocent child once.
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 7