‘I am walking.’ Mr G whipped out his patch like a circus act. ‘The rest cannot be literally true.’
‘I do not understand you.’ I stepped back. ‘I always believed that your hunt for the truth was implacable and ruthless, but you have let Horwich go free – I can accept that he was duped – and I know you are protecting Cherry, but Hesketh’s crime was cruel in the extreme. In heaven’s name!’ I slammed the door. ‘How can you let Cherry employ her father’s murderer?’
Sidney Grice tied the string behind his head. ‘Because there is no need to hang him.’ And went back to his study.
I went upstairs to visit my three friends – Spirit, who was sleeping on my pillow, a Turkish cigarette and a bottle of gin. I poured a tumbler and drank it in one and felt ill, but at least I felt something.
100
✥
Clockwork Soldiers and the Three Eyes of Sidney Grice
UNWILLING TO DISTURB Spirit, I had sat in my chair by the window, looking down into the courtyard garden with its tortured willow hanging over the bench.
I had only one picture of my mother, a miniature painted for her eighteenth birthday. She was a true beauty and I searched in vain for any resemblance between us. My father used to say I took after him, but I could never see it. You must have been bought from gypsies, my friend Barney used to tease me.
I thought I heard the front door close and then, a whole cigarette later, I heard it close again, and, before I had lit another, Molly clumped up and laid siege to the door in a series of thunderous blows.
‘Are you asleep, miss?’
I threw the door open. ‘No, but Spirit was.’
‘Oh, bless.’ Molly clasped her bosom. ‘She looks like you’ve startled her.’
Spirit arched her back.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘A cat.’ Molly rolled her eyes at my stupidity.
I knew better than to ask what she wanted. The last time I had done that, she had started with a list of presents and ended with what kind of prince she would prefer to marry.
‘What have you come to tell me?’
‘That Easily man is here and wishes to speak to you.’ She sucked her hair as if the memory were stored in there. ‘Hurgently, he said.’
‘What can he want?’ I wondered foolishly.
‘He wants a good woman, I should think,’ Molly replied as I brushed past her. ‘And a drop of Mr Grice’s mendical brandy by the look of him.’ Molly followed me down. ‘Oh, and Mr Grice said to tell you he has been called out for his mother’s funeral.’
I stopped on the first landing. ‘But he never said anything to me.’
‘He said it wasntn’t not worth bothering you about.’ She hopped round in front of me.
‘But his mother—’
‘Oh, she’s always having funerals,’ Molly said dismissively. ‘Last year, when you were mad as a clock, she had one for her pet crockingdile. This time it’s one of those birds that speaks – not a raving, a pirate.’
Easterly stood in the hall and, as Molly had intimated, he did not look well.
‘Oh, miss,’ he cried in his best Yorkshire, ‘I am so fretted. Mr ’Esketh gave me this ’ere note to give Mr Grice tomorrow, but he’s gone and shut ’imself away and won’t come out.’
‘Not even if you tickle him?’ Molly asked.
‘’E ’as locked the door.’ Easterly flapped his hands. ‘And I am sure he ’as been drinking, which is something Mr ’Esketh don’t never do.’
I snatched the letter off him.
‘It is confidential, for Mr Grice’s eyes only,’ Easterly protested.
‘Mr Grice has three eyes.’ I ripped the letter open. ‘And I am two of them.’
‘I ’ave kept a cab waiting,’ Easterly said anxiously.
And I read:
Dear Mr Grice
I do not know how to thank you and Miss Middleton for what you have done and I know that you have done it for the best of reasons but, the more I think about what I did, I was like a man possessed and now the demons have fled, leaving me with a void that can only be filled with horror and guilt.
How could I possibly serve Miss Charity, knowing what I have done and what kind of man I have become?
This is for the best and I can only proffer my gratitude for the great kindness you have both shown to me and my mistress.
With kind regards and the deepest respect,
Austin Hesketh
‘When Mr Grice returns, you must tell him we have gone to Gaslight Lane,’ I instructed Molly, who wrinkled her nose.
‘Cantn’t not I come? I left some things there what I need.’
‘What?’ I looked at her miserable attempt at an appealing expression. ‘Oh, very well.’ I dashed to the study and scribbled Gone to Gethsemane, added Emergency, and rushed back.
Easterly had the front door open. ‘But you’ll never fit hin with hus, Molly.’ He reverted to his own accent.
‘’Course I will,’ Molly gave Easterly a nudge that nearly had him spilling down the steps, ‘if we snuggle up.’
I have always found that, in a squeeze, I am the one who gets squeezed the most and, with Molly’s bulk between us, this was no exception to that rule. My legs were numb and the breath had been forced out of me.
‘Well, that was cosy.’ Molly levered herself up with a hand to my breast and trampled over my legs.
‘Near bust me ’orse,’ the driver complained as I paid him with a generous tip, ‘and me axle.’
Easterly struggled out on the other side – both of us walking like clockwork soldiers as the blood flowed back into our limbs – and unlocked the door.
‘’E his hin ’ere.’ Easterly Nutter’s accent was lost somewhere between his mouth and Ilkley Moor as he touched the front sitting-room door.
‘Well,’ Molly perched her hands on her hips, ‘he will just have to hopen hup then.’ I prayed that she was not going to adopt Easterly’s way of talking permanently. ‘’Cause hall my stuff his hin there.’
She rattled the handle. ‘Come along, Mr Pesker, open up.’
‘Whoever you are, push off.’ I could hardly recognize the intoxicated slur as emanating from the dignified man I had known.
‘Hesketh,’ I called, ‘this is Miss Middleton.’
‘I told Easterly—’ Something unintelligible and then, ‘Why are you here? You are not meant to be here.’
‘We are worried about you.’
‘Shall Hi break the door down, miss?’ Easterly whispered.
‘I can do that,’ Molly said eagerly. ‘I aintn’t not never brokened a door down but I’m good at it.’ She bunched up ready for the charge.
‘You will not,’ I said sternly, and considered the matter. ‘There is no keyhole in the door and I do not remember any bolts.’
‘Hi believe he his using one hov those wedges,’ the footman told me.
‘Then run to the kitchen, Molly, quick as you can,’ I whispered, ‘and fetch the longest knife you can find.’
‘Why are you whispering about getting a knife?’ Molly boomed out. ‘Are you going to stab Mr Pesker to death like you did that dog woman when you were mad as an egg?’
‘I am not going to stab anyone,’ I rounded on her, ‘except, perhaps, you if you do not go and do as I say at once.’
I tapped on the porcelain fingerplate. ‘Are you all right, Hesketh?’
I heard a crash – an occasional table being knocked over, I decided – and then, ‘Is Mr Grice with you?’
‘No.’ I put my ear to the woodwork. ‘It is just me and Molly and Easterly. Mr Grice is away on other business.’
There were more grunts and I made out a glass clinking noisily.
‘I know you mean well, miss, but there is nothing you can do. Please leave me in peace.’
I turned the white porcelain handle a few degrees just in case Easterly and Molly were wrong. ‘You do not sound like a man at peace.’ The latch bolt clicked out of the strike plate.
‘You cannot get in,’ Hesket
h warned, ‘not without a battering ram.’
‘I have read your letter,’ I announced.
‘That was addressed to Mr Grice.’
‘Mr Grice has given me authority to open all his mail,’ I lied. ‘What do you intend to do, Hesketh?’
‘What I should have done the moment I killed my master,’ he replied hoarsely. ‘Join him in hell.’
‘Come out, Mr Hesketh,’ Easterly pleaded, ‘and we shall never speak of this again.’
‘Look after your mistress,’ the reply came gently, ‘for I cannot.’
Molly galloped back, holding a wicked-looking carver in her raised fist like a Mahdist warrior launching into battle. I put my finger to my lips and, for once, she understood and crept the last few steps at a pace that would have done her proud in a game of musical statues. I took the knife gingerly from her before she tripped and impaled me. As quietly as possible in several layers of rustling material, I got to my knees and peered under the door, but the slit was so narrow and the light so poor I could not make anything out. I slipped the blade through the gap near the jamb and inched it towards the other end.
‘What are you doing?’ Hesketh must have seen it.
I moved quickly now until I felt an obstruction, pulled the knife back, then along half an inch, and rammed. The wedge flew away. I felt it give and heard it skitter away as I struggled up.
‘Let me go first, miss.’ Easterly helped me to my feet.
Something struck the door. A chair?
‘He will not hurt me,’ I said, with greater aplomb than I felt, and turned the handle. ‘I am coming in, Hesketh. I mean you no harm.’
There were footfalls and hurried movements. I pushed on the door and a small piece of furniture fell away.
‘You will both stay here, until I summon you.’ I straightened my skirts and tucked a hanging tress behind my ear.
‘I hope he aintn’t not found my granddad’s old blundlebust that I brought to frighten ghosts,’ Molly said anxiously.
‘Don’t go in there, miss,’ Easterly pleaded.
But I opened the door fully, took a deep breath and stepped inside.
‘I am so sorry, miss, so very sorry,’ Hesketh croaked. ‘I am sorry, Mother.’ And I heard the snap of a hammer.
101
✥
His Last Bow
THE SHOCK SLAMMED into me, knocking the air out of my body and smothering me in smoke. Far away I coughed silently, choking on the acrid fumes. I banged my ear like a swimmer getting water out, but there was nothing except a dull thud.
The shutters swung apart.
Standing with his back to the jagged window was a man, but not a man – a mannequin in Hesketh’s uniform. A ragged stump jutted from the collar, still neatly encircled in a cravat, a small volcano spewing darkly from its core.
I walked though the clouds towards death and Hesketh made his last bow. He bent at the waist, his torn neck vomiting the final pump of his heart over me. I wiped my face on my sleeve and Hesketh crumpled, toppling, chest first at my feet, a bottomless lake of his life flowing over the rug and around my boots.
The knife fell – I had forgotten I had it – skewering the rug to a floorboard. It quivered.
There was an upright chair on its side. The tracery had been smashed out and the stock of a musket jammed between the vertical slats, its butt wedged against the seat and the barrel pointing outwards, which would have been upwards when the chair was on its legs. Greyness curled lazily out of its flared opening and settled like morning mist over the lake, the pale sun hovering on the surface, no more than reflection of the naked flame in the shattered mantle.
And all around – on ceiling, walls, floor and shards of glass, on the fallen chair, the saturated rug and the copper vase – was the hair, skin and splintered bone that had made the man I had known. And sprayed carelessly through this was the bloody pulped meat that had formed every thought, stored every memory, felt every sensation, known love and loathing, laughter and fear, and harboured every secret that made but finally destroyed Austin Hesketh.
I was aware of somebody touching my left arm and somebody else at my right, and I allowed myself to be led from what I knew to where I knew not, as if they thought that by turning me they could stop me seeing it or that by walking, dragged foot after dragged foot through the sticky liquid death, I could somehow leave it all behind.
Easterly enthroned me in his footman’s chair.
Molly was talking. ‘That was my granddad’s blundlebust,’ came through fuzzily. ‘I brought it to frighten ghosts.’
‘And now it has created one,’ I said or thought.
She was going back.
‘No!’ I heard myself. ‘Do not disturb the evidence.’ And she stopped and closed the door.
And I thought about it. Was that what the man who killed the master he loved had become? And what of his son and the household he had served all those years ago? Was that what they all were now – evidence?
*
‘I told you there was no need to hang him,’ Sidney Grice reminded me when I had given him an account of what happened. ‘Give me your handkerchief.’
‘You could not possibly have known.’
I handed it over and my guardian rubbed something from the tip of my nose.
‘It is only necessary to know three things to know a man.’ He shaped my handkerchief into a cone. ‘And I know fourteen about Hesketh.’ Sidney Grice placed his creation on the hearth. ‘You write people’s words for them. I write their deaths.’ My handkerchief toppled over and the cone came apart. ‘Well, that was a napkin-folding lesson wasted,’ he said.
102
✥
The Wants of Women
OTTORLEY CRITCHELY LET me in reluctantly and I noted with a twinge of guilt that the ornamental pottery pedestal was still missing its vase.
‘Have you come to return my stolen property?’ he inquired without conviction.
‘If I were to give that journal to anyone it ought to be the police,’ I told him, and the doctor buried the fingers of his left hand in the grizzled confusion on top of his head.
‘A patient’s records are confidential,’ he protested weakly.
‘It is a criminal offence for anyone, even a doctor, to conceal a criminal offence,’ I told him as sternly as I could, fully aware that I was committing exactly the same crime myself.
‘They were dreams.’ His fingers worked through his hair as if searching for wildlife.
‘Remarkably detailed dreams.’ I sat down uninvited.
‘People can imagine all sorts of things under the influence of opiate medication.’ Critchely massaged his scalp. ‘And survivors often feel guilty and blame themselves. It happens all the time after shipwrecks.’
I did not tell him that I had had personal experience of poppy dreams in the dens of Cabool.
‘You knew that those so-called dreams were based on fact, Dr Critchely,’ I argued. ‘They had far too much detail in them.’ He was making me feel itchy. ‘How you must have revelled in having a patient who might one day become notorious.’
My host set to work with his right hand. ‘I could have dragged the study of nervous diseases into the nineteenth century,’ he declared, but with a curious lack of fire. He mopped his brow with his sleeve and peered at me from under his arm. ‘Women always want something, Miss Middleton. What do you want?’
‘For you to make recompense.’ I straightened a crease in the rug with my feet and wondered if I were turning into my godfather. ‘The Jews’ Deaf and Dumb Home in Burton Crescent is looking for a doctor who will give his services for free.’
Critchely extracted his fingers. ‘I suppose I could spare a morning a month.’
‘Two days a week,’ I said firmly.
‘Two?’ he shrieked, staring into his hands as if they held his innards. ‘With deaf Jews?’
‘Three,’ I said, ‘and do not provoke me to insist on four.’
‘I would be ruined.’
�
�Not as much as a spell in one of Her Majesty’s—’
‘Stop.’ He crinkled up. ‘You will return my notes?’
‘We most certainly will,’ I assured him, ‘not.’
‘You will at least destroy the journal?’
‘I never do things at least,’ I responded, not quite sure what I meant but satisfied with its Gricean ring. ‘But it shall be kept confidential for so long as you infest this world.’
‘Infest.’ He repeated the word as if it comforted him.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ I burst out. ‘Did you really think he would have let you live, with everything you know?’
103
✥
The Unity of Death
I PAID CREPOLIUS snushall a visit. He was not pleased to see me either and even less so when I explained that I had never promised not to talk to my Fleet Street friend Traf Trumpington, but would hold my tongue on one condition: Daniel Filbert was to be reburied in a new plot along with Angelina Innocenti, his mother, and Austin Hesketh, his father, and with a headstone of my choosing.
Inspector Pound came to the funeral.
‘I had a soft spot for Hesketh,’ he admitted.
‘You had one for me once.’ I watched the long-bladed spades plunge into the mound of clay.
He touched my sleeve. ‘This is not the time, March.’
‘This is exactly the time.’ I heard earth thump on the oak lids. ‘They spent their lives apart but at least they are united now. If you have your way, we will not even have that small mercy.’
‘It is not that simple, March.’ Pound’s voice dropped urgently. ‘And people are listening.’ He had a hold of my wrist.
‘If only you were one of them.’ I tried to jerk my arm away but his grip tightened. ‘You shed your life’s blood for me and mine runs through your veins. Did it poison you?’
I was fully aware that I was making a spectacle of myself but I was past caring. I twisted round and took his face in my left hand. It felt so big and I felt so tiny.
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 44