‘You do not thank me for insulting you.’ He viewed himself approvingly in the mirror.
I did not respond, unsure if he was trying to outdo my sarcasm, in which case he was winning hands down.
The next cab was unadorned and therefore acceptable.
‘I had a letter from Cherry Mortlock this morning,’ I announced over the hubbub of traffic and the family at number 119 practising on their kettledrums.
‘I know.’ Mr G put his satchel on his lap.
‘Did you see it?’
‘No.’
We both tried to outwait the other.
‘Then how did you know?’ As almost always, I caved in first.
‘I smelled it,’ he recounted. ‘Miss Mortlock wears an unusual combination of scents, which another man might find bewitching.’
‘But not you?’ We jolted into a poorly refilled trench where an electricity cable had been laid.
‘As I’m sure you are aware,’ Sidney Grice primped his necktie, ‘I am not the kind of man to be seduced by intoxicating perfumes, nor enchanted by a sweet delicate face as pale as the waning moon, a trim waist, soft black hair or eyes reminiscent of the sun coruscating on the Caspian Sea at dawn.’
‘No, indeed,’ I concurred, seeing his face sparkling like the evening star over the slag heaps of Wigan.
‘Nor dainty hands with long and slender fingers,’ he added dreamily.
‘She apologizes for treating Spirit so roughly,’ I told him.
A mongrel darted at our horse’s heels but a smart kick sent it rolling yelping away.
‘I knew she would.’ My guardian hugged his satchel.
‘But she has engaged the services of Mr Cochran.’
I awaited the explosion but Sidney Grice only smiled serenely. ‘She will come back to me.’ A girl jumped on to the running board with a posy. ‘They always do.’
‘Flowers for the lie-dee.’ She held them out enticingly.
‘Not today, thank you very much,’ he replied sweetly and poked her away with his cane.
43
✥
The Stationmaster, Whisky and the Rabid Cur
EUSTON STATION HAD been my introduction to London when I came to stay with my godfather in May of 1882, and I had returned there a number of times to meet my best friend, Harriet Fitzpatrick, and whenever I travelled to and from Parbold. It had always impressed me with its grandeur, but there was something about it I did not like. Perhaps it was the absurdly grandiose entrance arch or the great hall dominated by a monolithic George Stephenson, grasping his frock coat in one hand and some important plans in the other. But I think it was the grand stairway that irritated me most. Partway up it split in two, fanned out and rejoined itself for the final ascent. It looked marvellous until you had to trudge all the unnecessary extra distance.
Our appointment was on the upper floor and Sidney Grice, who loved to sprint up stairs, grudgingly acceded to my request for an arm.
‘I do not know why women dress so impractically,’ he complained as a telegram boy pushed past us on his way down.
‘Because men insist that we do,’ I retorted. ‘Would you allow me to wear trousers?’
My guardian looked nauseous. ‘What a repulsive idea.’ And he did not speak again until we reached the top.
The stationmaster’s office was an imposing affair that might have been better suited to the ruler of a central European state than someone whose job it was to run the trains on time. But Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly was definitely the person to occupy it. A man of majestic construction, he was enthroned behind a desk, the proportions of which could have housed a small family with livestock.
‘Mr Grice.’ His voice rang out like Hector’s challenge to Achilles by the walls of Troy. ‘This is indeed an honour.’
‘For whom?’ I wondered, unintentionally loudly.
The stationmaster rose massively, bewhiskered and mustachioed enough for a brigadier general, and bestrode the route round his desk to greet my godfather.
‘For me,’ he boomed, dwarfing Mr G as they shook hands. ‘Why, this man is a giant.’
I stifled a laugh with great difficulty and he eyed me with concern.
‘Do you need a glass of water, dear lady? I shall not insult you by tendering anything stronger.’
I rather wished he would but declined his kind offer.
‘Mr Grice is the man who rescued the royal train,’ Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly informed me, but Sidney Grice held up a hand.
‘Miss Middleton needs know nothing of that until she is twenty-nine.’
‘Why, that will be at least a decade away.’ I was not sure if the stationmaster was being gallant or insulting me, but decided to accept it as a compliment.
‘If not more,’ I said and he squinted through an embedded monocle.
‘I doubt that,’ he said gravely. ‘Scotch and soda is your tipple, I believe, Mr Grice.’
‘I shall not disabuse you,’ my guardian said as Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly trekked to a drinks cabinet just our side of the horizon, near a long high window overlooking the platforms, the mighty locomotives pulling in and out almost inaudibly through the glass except for the cheery farewells of their whistles. Busy people scurried by, some of them followed by porters struggling with cases or dragging trolleys, disappearing behind clouds of steam and smoke, the unmistakeable smell permeating everything.
The walls were of marble, lined with pillars and plinths bearing busts of Victoria and Albert, and many other men so important that I had no idea who they were. The stationmaster had his back to us, but I heard a clink or two and the syphon gurgling.
Sidney Grice leaned over and for a moment I thought he was going to blow in my ear. ‘For five reasons which I shall not divulge, he cannot know that I do not take alcohol,’ he whispered. ‘You must find a way to drink surreptitiously.’ He pulled away a fraction, embarrassed by our proximity. ‘You have had plenty of practice at that over the years.’
‘Practice?’ The stationmaster returned with two capacious tumblers philanthropically filled.
‘I am learning to play the bagpipes,’ I lied and Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly beamed with teeth big enough to carve epitaphs upon.
‘As is my wife. You must come for dinner and bring your instrument.’
‘It does not travel well,’ I said. ‘Shall I hold your drink, dear guardian?’
‘There is a table over there,’ the stationmaster pointed out.
‘I like to hold it for him,’ I insisted, snatching it off the tray and slopping some down my sleeve. ‘Tell me, Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly, who does that statue third from the left represent?’
‘Sir Ian Coverly,’ he told me, eyes fixed on my chest as if he had never seen one – or one quite like it – before.
‘And is that your pet mouse hiding behind it?’ I enquired.
‘What?’ He twisted his neck and I took a hasty quaff.
‘I believe I spoke distinctly,’ I said as he looked back
The stationmaster hurried over and I took another gulp. Whisky is not my tipple and he had hardly broken the surface with the squirt of soda but I struggled gamely on.
‘There is nothing here.’
I swallowed. ‘I must have meant the second one.’ The whisky must have been at least half a dozen of my gin measures, and I am not stingy.
‘Hurry up,’ Mr G urged and I downed the rest in one.
Edward would have been proud of me, just as he was when I won the yard of ale contest at ladies’ night in the officers’ mess. He would have been less proud when I broke into a coughing fit.
‘Dear me. I think you could do with something to settle your system.’ Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly spoke solicitously, dampening the base of a glass with water. ‘And let me top you up, Mr Grice. I cannot see any mice.’
‘A trick of the light,’ I suggested.
‘More likely your febrile girlish imagination.’ He handed me my glass and took Mr G’s empty one away. ‘Come,’ he barked in res
ponse to a knock, and the door swung open to reveal a tall, slim man with neatly trimmed moustaches and dressed in the dark blue uniform of a West Coast Main Line Railway guard.
The mighty Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly put his and my guardian’s tumblers down.
‘Enter.’
And the guard came in, looking about himself like a child in a fairytale castle.
‘Smith, this is Mr Grice.’
The newcomer took off his cap to reveal his short, light brown hair.
‘And Miss Middleton,’ I put in when it was obvious that nobody else thought it worthwhile. The whisky had gone straight from my empty stomach to my head, but I was pleased to note it had not affected my speech.
‘Good day to you, sir, miss.’ He was a quietly spoken man and I put his failure to make eye contact down to deference and diffidence rather than shiftiness.
‘What is your full name?’ Mr G asked sternly.
‘Just John Smith, sir.’
‘I do not like that name.’ Sidney Grice hurred on his pince-nez. ‘There are too many of you. A man might hide inside that name as a blade of grass might in a Shropshire meadow. Where were you born and what was your mother’s maiden name, assuming that you were of woman respectably born.’
‘Sedlescombe Road, sir, in Fulham. My mother was Mabel Lineker and my father was Alfred Smith.’
‘I did not ask for that last piece of information,’ my guardian said sternly, ‘but it may be of greater use to me than you or I or my female companion can conceive at present.’ He wrote the names in his notebook beside a symbol which looked like a child’s drawing of a ship. ‘Date of birth, if you know it?’
John Smith watched uneasily.
‘Nineteenth of April eighteen fifty-one, sir. Am I in some kind of trouble?’
‘It is not for you to ask me questions.’ Sidney Grice added a mast to his drawing but it became something that looked like a daisy.
‘You are not in trouble,’ I reassured the guard to his undisguised relief.
There was another knock at the door and a man in a frock coat came in to announce, ‘His Excellency’s train is pulling in, sir.’
‘But he was supposed to be on the quarter past.’ For the first time the stationmaster looked flustered. ‘You cannot bring him up here with all this going on.’
‘Do you have somewhere else we could use?’ I asked.
‘Three along,’ Mr Armstrong Bantam-Hoverly said hurriedly. ‘Thurber will show you.’
‘This way, please.’ The frock-coated man opened the door.
I had a bit of a taste for the whisky now and had hatched a plan to borrow the decanter on the way, but, before I knew it, the frock-coated man had shut us in a small office with hardly any view at all.
‘Do you mind if I ask what you are?’ the guard asked uneasily.
‘Yes.’ Mr G perched on the desk while Smith and I sat down.
‘We are investigating the murder of Mr Nathan Mortlock,’ I said.
‘Are you newspaper people?’ Smith put his peaked cap on his lap, the badge facing me like a third eye.
‘Why do you ask that?’ Mr G swung his leg to and fro.
‘Well, you ain’t peelers ’cause they don’t have women,’ Smith reasoned, ‘and the reporters ’ve already been sniffing about – no offence intended.’
‘We are personal detectives,’ I informed him and the guard perked up.
‘What – like that Charlemagne Cochran?’ he asked. ‘’E’s the Pope’s nose and no mistake.’ He became quite chirpy. ‘Work for him, do you? What a privilege. I’d love to meet him. What’s he like?’
I watched my guardian’s face go livid and then more livid.
‘I will tell you what he is like. He is like a loathsome thing creeping out from under my shadow to bask in my glory. He is like a rabid cur clipped and dyed to vaguely resemble a pedigree. He is like an imbecile dressed in an academic mortar and gown. He is like…’ He rustled his fingers though the air.
‘A wolf in sheep’s cloving?’ Smith suggested.
‘He is neither markedly lupine, nor is he specially ovine except in his intellectual qualities.’
‘I take it you do not work for him then?’ the guard asked ovinely.
‘Mr Grice works for himself,’ I explained and Smith looked deflated. ‘I believe you saw Austin Hesketh on the train to Nuneaton on the night that Nathan Mortlock was murdered.’
Sidney Grice emitted a groan. ‘Shall we just go home and conduct this interview between ourselves?’
John Smith looked at me in confusion.
‘Is any of what I said not true?’ I asked.
‘No, miss.’
‘How is it that you remembered seeing him?’ I tried to pretend that my chair was not rocking.
Smith put out a hand to steady it, but thought better of his actions.
‘’E got the night train up, miss, the ten thirty-five. I asked for ’is ticket and ’e couldn’t find it – went through all ’is pockets ’e did. I told ’im to look under ’is ’atband – lots of passengers tuck them in there – but it was no use. If it’d just been ’im I would’ve let it go. ’E was a nice quiet gent and ’e confided as ’ow ’is mother was bad but I’d already booked two men in the same carriage and they was cuttin’ up nasty enough as it was.’ Smith fiddled with his cap badge. ‘So I took all ’is details and went back to my van. About five mile from Nuneaton ’e comes up and says ’e’s really sorry but ’e just found it slipped into the side of ’is boot – an old ’abit from when ’e was a footman. ’E used to carry secret notes that way for his sweet’eart.’
The thought of Hesketh having a sweetheart was quite touching. I sniffed.
‘Is that it?’ Sidney Grice pouted in disappointment.
Smith polished his badge on his sleeve. ‘Not quite, sir. I saw ’im again the next morning, just past Nuneaton, and for a minute ’e pretended ’e’d lost it again. We ’ad a good laugh about that. ’E was ’appy ’cause ’is mum was better than ’e’d thought and ’e would be back in time to do ’is duties.’
‘What a pity,’ Mr G said.
‘Were there any other passengers in the compartment that time?’ I asked.
My chair was getting most annoying now. The front left and back right legs must have both been too short.
Smith turned his cap upside down and looked into it like an old actor reading his lines. ‘There was a well-to-do lady what was trying to smuggle her dog under the seat for free. I’d ’ave let that go too only she was so high and mighty, calling me ’er man.’
‘I see.’ Sidney Grice jumped off the desk. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Is that it?’ Smith asked.
‘Yes,’ my guardian said.
Smith put on his cap.
‘I don’t suppose you could get me a signed photograph.’ He paused in the doorway. ‘Of Mr Cochran, I mean.’
‘Go,’ Mr G fumed. ‘And you, Miss Middleton, will return to Gower Street. I have other railway employees to interrogate.’
And it was only when I stood up that I realized it was not my chair that was unsteady; it was me.
44
✥
The Man Outside
COOK WAS TRYING a new recipe.
‘I do not know what possessed her,’ Sidney Grice grumbled. ‘Food should be hot or cold and nothing else, but this…’ he raised a piece on his fork, ‘has got ingredients.’
It was a foul night. The rain battered the windowpanes and the wind yowled down the chimneys.
‘It is an omelette.’ I sprinkled some pepper on mine.
‘I know what it is,’ he rumbled.
‘And you like eggs. You eat them every day.’
‘Not when I had the fever,’ he corrected me. ‘Yes, of course I like eggs, but these have got things in them. I do not open my boiled egg and find vegetables inside, so why should I want them in my scrambled eggs?’
I cut mine open and tried a thin slice. It was a bit overdone and rubbery but otherwise quite tasty by Gow
er Street standards.
‘It is just mushrooms and tomatoes and you like them too.’ I tried a bit more. There was a fragment of shell but otherwise it was not bad.
‘I like prune juice and I like tea, but I do not want them mixed together.’
‘Try it,’ I urged.
‘And these things.’ He raked through his dinner, looking for clues. ‘What are they meant to be?’
‘Herbs.’ I washed mine down with some water. I had refrained from my usual pre-dinner gin and the effects of the whisky had long worn off. ‘What did you make of John Smith’s statement?’
‘Oh, it was Smith’s statement, was it?’ He sowed salt in lines up and down his plate. ‘I rather thought you had made it for him.’
‘Perhaps you should not get me intoxicated while we are working,’ I retaliated. ‘And why could you not just tell him you do not drink alcohol?’
‘It is too simple to explain.’ My guardian cut his omelette into a square, and nibbled at a trimmed-off margin. ‘But, in response to your previous question, the least and most we have discovered is that an allegedly independent, allegedly reliable employee of the West Coast Railway has corroborated Hesketh’s claim to have been on that train and that he went at least as far as Nuneaton on both occasions.’ He sampled some more. ‘I shall consume this without further complaint,’ he decided.
‘Thank heavens for that.’ I was quite enjoying mine. Mr G opened his book. ‘More snails?’
‘A little light reading this evening,’ he confessed. ‘A brief history of Joseph Hudson’s quest to find the right sort of pea to put into police whistles. You might enjoy it.’
‘I would prefer to see the dramatized version.’ I had another mouthful. ‘Do you think there is something odd about Hesketh’s alibi?’ I asked. ‘It sounds as though he was going out of his way to be noticed on both occasions.’
‘One certainly gained that impression,’ he agreed, ‘though it gives even greater credence to his claim to have been on those trains.’
‘Could he possibly have come back to London and returned in time to catch the train back?’ I proposed.
Sidney Grice took off his pince-nez and popped out his eye.
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 20