The Secrets of Gaslight Lane

by M. R. C. Kasasian

*

  Veronique readily agreed to go with Cherry, and Molly went up to pack a bag, the French maid being too terrified to go back into her bedroom. Hesketh was determined to stay and look after the house. They’d had sensation seekers try to break in after Nathan’s death when they thought the house was empty and – after much vacillation – Easterly decided that he would stay too, but only if he could sleep in the same room as the valet and on the first floor. Hesketh accompanied Easterly to check for ghosts and help carry his things down.

  ‘The dead cannot hurt you,’ I reassured the footman, relieved that Molly was not present to contradict me with one of the stories I had made up for her, which she was adamant must be true.

  Sidney Grice and I saw Cherry and her maid off.

  ‘You go home with Molly,’ he said, ‘and have a bath. You look even more of a disaster than usual.’

  ‘And you look like a chimney sweep,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, really?’ He perked up inquisitively. ‘Which one? I do not think Joe Brindley exhibits much similarity to me. He is stout and has a broken nose.’

  ‘I only meant…’ I tried, but he was lost in considering his own question.

  ‘I suppose Fred Woggle from behind at a great distance might bear a fleeting resemblance, but it would not be striking.’

  A cab was approaching. I put my fingers between my teeth and blew.

  91

  ✥

  Pan Troglodytes

  EASTERLY ADMITTED US the next morning. He was still smartly attired in his uniform, so presumably Hesketh had sewn up his sleeve for him.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ I asked.

  ‘Hardly a decent topic for a young lady to introduce to a man,’ Mr G scolded.

  ‘Not very, miss,’ Easterly admitted. ‘Hesketh snores, but every time Hi fell asleep he woke me hup to tell me Hi did.’ He stifled a yawn. ‘And Hi kept thinking about what was hup there.’ His eyes rose fearfully as if he were expecting to see Angelina Innocenti’s body come through the ceiling imminently.

  Hesketh appeared, looking just as exhausted.

  ‘We have prepared tea in the sitting room,’ he greeted us.

  ‘We?’ The footman drew himself up indignantly. ‘Mr Hesketh rinsed the pot.’

  ‘A valuable contribution,’ my guardian declared. ‘If Rory McMack’s wife had done the same, he might not have choked to death on a live cockroach.’

  ‘Why did he not see it in the strainer?’ I gave my cloak to Easterly.

  ‘He is one of those appalling people who do not essay to filter their tea.’ Sidney Grice’s cheek ticked in revulsion. ‘The ear-eaters of Potziland have better manners.’

  ‘Where on earth is Potziland?’ I took off my scarf.

  ‘Where is it not?’ he answered enigmatically. ‘But you were right to assume that it is on this ridiculous planet.’

  We went through and, even though I knew she was not there, I almost expected to see Cherry rise from her chair to greet us.

  ‘We will gather round the octagonal table.’ Mr G sat to face the door and I to his right, facing the window, with Easterly to my right and Hesketh between him and my guardian.

  ‘Shall I serve, miss?’ Easterly offered and I gratefully accepted. Normally the task fell to me, for my godfather would never pour tea for anyone other than himself.

  ‘But can you manage?’

  ‘Ho yes, miss.’ He wedged his clawed hand into the pot handle with a napkin.

  Mr G took a deep breath. ‘How many people could have killed Nathan Roptine Mortlock?’ he bellowed, and Easterly spilled tea in my saucer.

  ‘Hi am so sorry, miss. Shall Hi get ha cloth?’

  ‘What?’ Sidney Grice rumbled. ‘And have us risk you sawing through the bars, and clambering up the side of the house like a liveried Pan Troglodytes, the common chimpanzee?’

  ‘Hindeed not, sir.’ Easterly slopped more tea on the tray.

  ‘Do you seriously expect Miss Middleton to shimmy up drainpipes after you in her ridiculous and unattractive clothes?’ Mr G fulminated.

  ‘It is all right, Easterly,’ I put a hand on his arm as he was about to try again. ‘I shall do it.’

  ‘Touching servants.’ My guardian looked nauseous. ‘Whatever next? No wonder we are on the brink of revolution. But your ingenious subterfuge will not deflect the arrow of my interrogation in its unerring flight towards exactitude. Answer the question, Sou’ Easterly Gale Nutter, and answer it now.’

  ‘No one,’ Easterly replied in confusion.

  Mr G brought out a small pair of binoculars. ‘Was that a good or a bad answer?’

  ‘I fear you are confusing him, sir,’ Hesketh put in.

  ‘Your fears are achingly tedious to me at present.’ Sidney Grice adjusted the focus to scrutinize him. ‘Unless you are terrified of being exposed as a dominicide.’

  ‘If that means killing one’s master, I have nothing to be afraid of.’ Hesketh looked back at the lenses unblinkingly.

  ‘Then keep quiet until I address you,’ Mr G commanded. ‘Miss Middleton is no longer in the first flush of youth and does not wish to fritter her years of fading plainness listening to irrelevancies.’ He swung the binoculars towards the footman. ‘How could nobody have killed your master?’

  Easterly breathed deeply. ‘I only mean nobody that I can think of, sir.’

  ‘That was a better answer.’ Sidney Grice kept the binoculars trained on him. ‘Though not necessarily true. Let us all consider who, apart from your mistress, stood to gain by Nathan Mortlock’s death.’

  ‘I do not think he had any other relatives,’ Hesketh answered, and it was my turn to splosh tea.

  ‘Our dearest coz, Easterly,’ I remembered my godfather telling me when I was too distracted by watching Horwich pacing the pavement to listen. ‘Mrs Garstang referred to you as a cousin.’

  A spoon clattered into Easterly’s half-filled cup. ‘Only a very distant cousin.’ He mopped the tray distractedly with a napkin.

  ‘With so few family members that distance may not be unbridgeable by an inheritance.’ Mr G dipped his binoculars towards the footman’s chest. ‘Miss Mortlock has yet to be afflicted with progeny.’

  ‘Hi did not do it.’ Easterly swayed, on the brink of collapse.

  ‘If you did not, and do not fantasize for more than an instant that I accept your protestation –’ Sidney Grice cricked his neck back to examine the ceiling – ‘we must concentrate our enquiries upon who else was in the house at the time.’

  ‘Mrs Emmett could not have done it,’ I postulated. ‘She was already too disabled by her brain injury.’

  ‘Which is unlikely to be feigned since it killed her,’ Mr G conceded. ‘What about Mademoiselle Veronique Bonnay? You have an eye for the ladies, Easterly. Is she not pretty?’

  ‘Very,’ the footman agreed blushingly, ‘but that does not make her guilty.’

  ‘What if she went to Mr Mortlock’s room in the night and seduced him into opening the door?’ My guardian lowered his spyglasses.

  ‘Veronique is not that kind of a girl!’ Easterly raised his voice for the first time since I had met him.

  ‘Not for you, perhaps.’ Mr G put the glasses down. ‘But what a catch rich elderly Nathan Mortlock would have been for a girl of low breeding from the not very far-off shores of Normandy.’

  Easterly sprang to his feet. ‘You will take that back.’

  ‘Back where?’ Sidney Grice asked coolly. ‘Back to Inspector Norbot Stillith “Sly” Quigley? Perhaps I would not interrupt his interview next time.’

  Easterly pushed his chair away.

  ‘But you established that Veronique knew how to handle a razor properly,’ I reminded my guardian hurriedly.

  ‘But not that she chose to do so when she murdered her employer.’

  ‘Mr Grice, I really think—’ Hesketh put out an arm to restrain the footman.

  ‘Do you?’ My godfather raised his voice. ‘I want your thoughts no more than I wanted your fears, not four m
inutes ago. Send a telegram, Miss Middleton, to Marylebone Police Station, informing Quigley where Mademoiselle Bonnay can be run to ground.’

  And I was about to join the two men’s outrage when I felt a pressure on my left foot.

  ‘Certainly.’ I opened my handbag. ‘I have the address Cherry gave me here.’

  ‘You cannot hand her over to that… foul monster,’ Easterly raged, trying to push past Hesketh, who rose to fend him off.

  ‘Why not?’ Mr G leaned back casually. ‘There is only one other suspect and Mr Mortlock was unlikely to admit you to his room in the middle of the night.’

  ‘He did!’ Easterly cried out. ‘I admit it, Mr Grice.’ Easterly burst into tears. ‘I am so sorry, Mr Hesketh, but I killed Mr Mortlock.’

  92

  ✥

  The Unexploded Bomb

  SIDNEY GRICE PICKED up his cup and drew back his arm.

  ‘Did you indeed?’ He hurled the cup at the footman and Easterly just managed to bat it away from his face, shattering it on his plaster cast. ‘Then why did you fend it off with your left hand?’

  ‘The murderer was right-handed.’ I lifted a cup handle out of the sugar.

  ‘So am Hi,’ Easterly vowed. ‘It was just my left hand was nearer my face.’

  ‘It was the other way round,’ I corrected him. ‘Your right hand was above the table and your left below it. Besides which, who would use their broken arm from preference unless it was a lifelong habit?’

  ‘Hi can use my right hand for a lot more than Hi let on,’ Easterly asserted desperately. ‘And Mr Grice is right, Hi am next in line for the hinheritance.’

  ‘Oh, Sou’ Easterly Gale Nutter,’ my guardian sighed. ‘Would you really have faced the hangman to save a woman’s honour?’

  All the thoughts in Easterly’s brain struggled with each other to show themselves. His face was in a turmoil.

  ‘I cannot put this more delicately,’ I said carefully. ‘Are you and Veronique lovers?’

  ‘No.’ He took a step back until his legs touched his chair again.

  ‘You will not shock me,’ I assured him. ‘And Mr Grice and Hesketh are men of the world.’ I considered briefly if they were. ‘And I have seen the way you look at her, Easterly.’

  ‘And she at you,’ my guardian added. ‘Miss Middleton might not have noticed that, for she does not understand women as I do.’

  Nobody I have ever met understood women in the way Sidney Grice did, but I resisted the temptation to point that out.

  ‘If she loves you too, she will not let you die for her reputation,’ I reasoned. ‘She will not even want to see you in Inspector Quigley’s hands. We will think none the worse of you.’

  ‘Why should we?’ Sidney Grice asked expansively, with a tolerance I had not witnessed in him before.

  ‘That is why you were able to hear what you thought was a ghost,’ I realized. ‘You could not possibly have heard scraping in the loft from the floor below.’ I hesitated. ‘Did you spend that night with Veronique, Easterly?’ I pressed gently.

  And the footman licked his lips. ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  ‘And you will both swear to that in court if needs be?’ I asked, hardly able to hear his reply as he looked down.

  ‘Yes.’

  I toyed with the cup handle.

  ‘Now I shall explain why I think none the worse of them,’ my guardian told me, ‘for the woman we know as Mademoiselle Bonnay is in fact the unfortunate bearer of the title of Mrs Sou’ Easterly Gale Nutter.’

  ‘The proud holder of that name,’ a wounded Easterly asserted. ‘But how did you guess, sir?’

  Easterly might have spat in Sidney Grice’s tea for the outrage that his question aroused.

  ‘I never guess,’ Mr G retorted. ‘I deduced it from a series of careful observations. My suspicions were aroused by the lingering and emetic ways that you surveyed each other, reinforced by detecting Veronique’s unusual and seductive scent in your bedroom and bolstered by the presence of identically patterned wedding bands pinned inside the frames of your chests of drawers.’

  The handle broke between my fingers.

  ‘But you said you found nothing surprising,’ I reminded him crossly.

  ‘And nor did I,’ he replied. ‘What is surprising about a young couple in love getting married and keeping their union secret from an employer who refuses to have married servants and has designs on the maid himself?’

  ‘He was a filthy swine,’ Easterly burst out.

  ‘Is that why you murdered him?’ I asked. ‘Did Veronique get him to open the door for you to kill him between you?’

  ‘And then hid the razor under her pillow?’ Sidney Grice batted my idea away with the back of his hand. ‘The French are a dull-witted nation – which is why they keep declaring republics – but even they are not quite that stupid. Besides which, Easterly is too much of a milksop to carry out such a task. Why, he swooned like a schoolgirl when he realized he had confessed to murder, and at the sight of that wretched woman.’

  ‘And they were genuine faints,’ I confirmed.

  ‘Which only leaves two other likely suspects.’ My guardian popped the binoculars away. ‘Hesketh...’

  Hesketh opened his mouth, closed it, then said, ‘I believe I have already proved that I was far away on that night, sir.’

  ‘There is only one difficulty with your alibi, Hesketh,’ I said. ‘On the night in question, the fourth of January, there was a problem with the line and the trains terminated before Nuneaton at Coventry.’

  I landed my bombshell but it failed to detonate, for the valet only looked puzzled and said, ‘I am sorry, miss, but you must be mistaken. I went there directly myself and back again the next morning. I am sure the railway authorities will be able to confirm that the trains ran normally – that ticket inspector, for example.’

  ‘For somebody so practised at lying, Miss Middleton makes a poor fist of it,’ my godfather said.

  ‘Who is your second suspect?’ I tried not to look too mortified at my bluff being so easily called.

  ‘Why, the lovely Miss Charity Mortlock, of course.’ Sidney Grice bared his clean white teeth, but he was far from smiling.

  93

  ✥

  The Possession of Corpses

  HESKETH AND EASTERLY sat down together.

  There was a new steeliness in the valet’s manner. ‘But Miss Mortlock was not here and I have no doubt she can produce witnesses to prove it.’

  ‘Hi cannot believe my mistress would do hanything so cruel, hespecially to her own father.’ Easterly scratched the nape of his neck.

  ‘But how could she have done it?’ I objected.

  ‘Let us suppose that she hid in her father’s wardrobe before he went to bed. He hung his clothes over a chair at night, did he not, Austin Hesketh?’

  ‘He did,’ Hesketh confirmed. ‘But his wardrobe would have been full with clothes.’

  ‘Which she carried through to the next room,’ Sidney Grice postulated, ‘dropping a stocking, which the gimlet eye of Miss Middleton discovered.’

  ‘A dropped stocking is hardly proof of anything,’ I objected.

  ‘Not by itself.’ Mr G dipped into his satchel. ‘But this provides some evidence.’

  He held something red in his hand. At first I thought it was a neckerchief, but when he dropped the object on the table I saw that it was a silk glove.

  ‘And where did you find that?’ I asked coolly, for he had never shown it to me.

  ‘In Nathan Mortlock’s wardrobe,’ he replied. ‘Fallen behind a boot. Its counterpart was in his daughter’s room.’

  ‘That still proves nothing,’ Hesketh insisted. ‘Miss Charity may have had disagreements with her father, but she loved him.’

  ‘Under normal circumstances it would be difficult to secure a conviction against such a pretty and personable woman.’ Sidney Grice kept talking. ‘But when the jury find out she is living with an artist, their only dispute will be whether they need to l
isten to the whole case before they find her guilty. Nothing arouses the righteous indignation of an Englishman like seeing a beautiful woman giving herself out of wedlock to an oleaginous alien rather than to him.’

  ‘But Miss Mortlock does not even have a key,’ Hesketh objected.

  ‘Any one of you could have let her in,’ I proposed. ‘You probably did not even know what her intentions were. Perhaps she just said she had come to collect her things or that she was going to surprise her father. No court would convict you of being deceived by a fallen woman.’

  Hesketh brought the side of his fist down so hard that the table tilted. ‘You go too far, miss, sir.’

  ‘Shall we let Inspector Quigley decide?’ Mr G suggested. ‘I am sure he would love to meet Miss Mortlock on a more intimate level.’

  Hesketh unfurled his fist, but let it lie on the table, like a man with a pint of beer.

  ‘I believe, if I may be so impertinent, that I have the measure of you, sir. I think that you expect me or Easterly to confess to something we have not done in order to save our mistress.’ The hand contracted, squeezing that invisible ball again. ‘But you are a rare creature, Mr Grice – a man of honour. Are you really telling us that you would submit Miss Charity to such an ordeal?’

  ‘Fettered by my own truthfulness, I would not.’ My godfather tugged his right earlobe ruefully. ‘What happened to your upper-left incisor, Austin Anthony Hesketh, ageing, but not yet senile, retainer?’

  Hesketh ran a finger over the edge.

  ‘Gypsy James Mace saw to that for me,’ he replied. ‘I was lucky he did not knock it out.’

  ‘I’d give a month’s wages to have watched that fight,’ Easterly said wistfully.

  ‘I would not,’ Mr G said. ‘But what spellbinds me in some of my apparently idle moments is my observation that, although the edge has been chipped off, it is no shorter than its counterpart and so…’

  ‘It must have been longer to start with,’ I completed his sentence.

  ‘I suppose it was a bit,’ Hesketh admitted guardedly.