Death Descends On Saturn Villa (The Gower Street Detective Series)

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘The grains are swollen from absorbing atmospheric humidity.’ Mr G flicked some from my left sleeve with the tip of his pencil on to a blank page of his notebook. ‘Whereas these,’ he picked a few off my right sleeve, ‘are hotter, smaller, crisper, blacker and therefore fresher. The old grains are not all burnt either as would happen if they had been in a bullet.’

  ‘Uncle Tolly blew them on me,’ I explained. ‘I thought it was pounce. He threw the cardboard box with the rest of it into the fire.’

  ‘And you did not think it odd he stored his pounce in such a container rather than a pot?’

  ‘He was a strange man.’

  Mr G grunted. ‘You will relate eight illustrations of similar behaviour to me when I have exhausted all other possibilities for mental stimulation. It is low-grade powder and contains non-ignited particles. Did you not notice the flare and sulphurous aromas?’

  ‘I did, but I did not think anything of it,’ I replied.

  My guardian rolled his eye. ‘I have spoken to you before about not thinking anything of things. Kindly commence thinking something of things at your earliest convenience. That was not a question. Do not respond.’

  ‘Why are you wasting time listening to this?’ Colwyn railed at Constable Sedgemoor. The valet was striding about the room.

  ‘Because I want to find out the truth and Mr Grice seems to be getting there,’ Sedgemoor responded, then added, ‘In the meantime, you shall stand still and be quiet, or I shall put word about that you have taken an interest in the wife of Gipsy James Mace.’

  ‘The prizefighter’s wife? I’ve never even met her,’ Colwyn protested.

  ‘The very words of Harry Napoli as they carried his broken body out of the Flying Horse,’ the constable recollected and Colwyn closed his mouth.

  ‘And you, Miss Middleton, shall stay there.’ Mr G limped slowly back to the map table and peered round it. Constable Sedgemoor got up and followed.

  Mr G hummed loudly as he cast his eye over the scene. ‘I am delighted to note that a great many things have been disturbed. One gets so tired of solving crimes at a glance.’ He stood at Uncle Tolly’s feet. ‘It is obvious that Miss Middleton kneeled pointlessly beside the cadaver in a futile attempt to detect a pulse and that the hitherto pleasant valet who glories in the name of Colwyn walked round and kneeled beside it afterwards, but which of you rolled it from its left side on to its back and removed the revolver from the right hand? I have strong reasons for supposing it was the masculine party that did so in both cases.’

  Colwyn crooked his lip contemptuously but did not reply.

  ‘You may answer,’ my guardian told me just as I was about to anyway.

  ‘Colwyn,’ I cleared my throat, ‘though I told him not to.’

  ‘That was stupid, even for a servant.’ Mr G jumped twice on the spot, dashed sideways, put his ear to the oak door and scratched at it like a dog wanting to be let out.

  Colwyn rounded on him angrily. ‘It was a question of respect.’

  ‘To the deceased or his murderer?’ Constable Sedgemoor enquired.

  ‘I have no respect for her,’ Colwyn spat and I bit my tongue.

  My guardian folded his arms behind his back and leaned so far over the body that I feared he would topple on to it, clipped on his pince-nez and crouched to peer under the table. He got up almost reluctantly, then ran round to the other side and tilted his upper half to view the body over the table. Mr G exhaled longer and harder than seemed humanly possible.

  ‘How humdrum,’ he pronounced at last. ‘He shot himself.’ His shoulders sagged with disappointment.

  Colwyn let out a cry of disbelief. ‘Himself? You are all in this together. You killed him and you can’t pin the blame on me so—’

  ‘If I chose,’ Mr G stated flatly, ‘I could have you convicted and strung up for this before you had a chance to snivel, but, fortunately for you, I value the truth more than the pleasure I would get from seeing you hang. This absurd little man killed himself.’

  Constable Sedgemoor fiddled with his baton. ‘How can you decide that so quickly?’

  ‘Consider where the blood is,’ Sidney Grice insisted.

  ‘It is everywhere,’ Colwyn said and Mr G snapped his fingers.

  ‘Blood is never and can never be everywhere. None of it is daubed on the absurd structure of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, nor is any to be found bespattering the ugly hillsides of Provence, to give two of the uncountable examples. A lot of it is on the floor, especially that graphic misrepresentation of the lost colonies of the Americas.’ He swept his cane in the general direction. ‘And a great deal of that has been smeared about by you and my goddaughter, but most of it and that which was propelled from the thorax with the greatest effect is on the top of this vulgar reproduction of a mid-Jacobean map table.’ He tossed his head proudly.

  ‘So the fact that he bled more on the table than the floor shows that he pulled the trigger himself?’ Constable Sedgemoor summarized sceptically.

  ‘I like a man who listens.’ Mr G clapped his hands together once. ‘The first flow of blood from a ruptured thorax is always the greatest. The human body is not an inexhaustible source of gore. Its supply is generally depleted after a gallon at most. So each succeeding beat of the punctured heart expels less of its contents. Plus the heart itself does not enjoy being perforated and weakens with each succeeding contraction.’ He put his pince-nez away unused. ‘The late and surpassingly irritating Mr P. T. S. was standing facing the desk four inches away from it when the leaden projectile was introduced into his person, hence the lagoon of blood over the top and the cavitation produced in the poor-quality Canadian oak-wood panelling behind him by the escape of that ballistic device though his left scapula.’

  ‘His what?’ Colwyn was incredulous.

  ‘His shoulder blade,’ Constable Sedgemoor explained. ‘The bullet passed straight through him.’

  ‘Not perfectly straight,’ Mr G corrected him. ‘No doubt the skeletal structures diverted its journey a little, plus the rifling of that aged weapon would send any projectile on a highly erratic journey.’

  ‘I’ll get it dug out later,’ the constable declared and my guardian eyed him with almost paternal pride.

  ‘This table is approximately six foot and seven inches deep,’ Sidney Grice continued. ‘How could anybody – least of all Miss Middleton with her dwarfish proportions and stunted arms – reach across it and put the muzzle to his chest? The burns on his garish smoking jacket illustrate the latter point. She could not have climbed on to the desk as the ornamentations had not been disturbed at the time.’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’ Colwyn flapped his hands. ‘The ornaments are everywhere.’

  ‘Another inaccurate use of everywhere,’ Mr G reproved. ‘But leaving that aside – as I fear we must – they were all knocked over after Mr T. S. died. The blood sprayed on to what has become undersurfaces and sides now, and the spillage on the table top has been disturbed quite markedly on that side of the desk.’

  ‘Miss Middleton dived over it to get the gun,’ Constable Sedgemoor confirmed and Colwyn howled in frustration.

  ‘She killed him. I know she did.’

  ‘How?’ Mr G responded with interest. ‘There is no trapeze on which she could have propelled herself towards him. She could not have crawled under the table. The floor is too stacked with undisturbed geographical books and papers, a great many of which I possess or should like to possess copies of.’

  ‘Maybe she will let you read them when she inherits the place,’ the valet jeered.

  ‘A pleasant prospect,’ Mr G murmured. ‘But let us not permit it to divert us from the task in hand. Nobody else could have shot this tidily composed corpse, ergo the wound was self-inflicted.’

  ‘So it was suicide?’ Constable Sedgemoor clarified.

  ‘Suicide?’ Colwyn yelled in disbelief. ‘Then how come I heard my master calling out No, March, please do not kill me?’

  Mr G wiped his hands on a cloth from
his satchel. ‘Firstly, I do not know that he did.’

  ‘Miss Middleton admitted as much herself,’ the constable confirmed.

  ‘That is not quite true,’ I piped up and my guardian rolled his eye despairingly. ‘His exact words were No, please don’t shoot me, please, and then No, please. I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Did I ask you a question?’ Sidney Grice rubbed at a stain on his coat.

  ‘You did not.’ I rubbed my back and wondered if my left kidney were damaged.

  ‘Secondly,’ my guardian continued, ‘it is enough that I have determined what happened without troubling myself to wonder why.’

  ‘Yes, but I want to know.’ Colwyn slammed the side of his fist into the wall behind him, rattling the gas mantle so hard that the flame dipped momentarily and tossed a dark gauze across Uncle Tolly’s face.

  ‘Then find out.’ Mr G walked past the valet to where I sat and bent to pick up the revolver. The shadows skittered about before they went to rest.

  ‘Be careful,’ I warned. ‘The safety catch is faulty.’

  ‘It is not I who needs lectures on the handling of firearms,’ he remarked. ‘What you take to be the safety catch is an adjustment for the tension. You have it on what I believe is referred to in sensational novellas as a hair trigger.’

  ‘My God,’ Sedgemoor breathed, ‘and you squeezed it with the barrel to your head.’

  Sidney Grice put a finger to his eye. ‘Lucky there is nothing of use in there then,’ he said coolly, but his face was drained. ‘To continue…’ His right eye was watering badly. ‘I did not say it was suicide, merely that he shot himself.’

  ‘Now you are quibbling,’ the constable protested.

  ‘There are at least nine other possibilities.’ Mr G spun the bullet chamber. ‘Perhaps it was an accident. We know that the weapon is faulty. Perhaps he was under the illusion that his heart was on the other side of his body. Perhaps he thought his skin was harder than a bullet.’

  ‘Now you are being stupid,’ Colwyn complained.

  ‘The last time I counted I was one thousand, four hundred and nineteen different things. Stupid was not one of them.’ He broke the gun open. ‘You have no conception what strange ideas otherwise seemingly sane people can adopt.’ Mr G peered at him through the opened barrel. ‘Jeremy Noble, the respected astronomer, believed that he was made of paper and would rip or blow away in a breeze.’ He emptied the remaining four bullets into his palm. ‘Unsurprisingly, he did not.’

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ Colwyn shouted. ‘She kills a man and walks away, just because of who she is and who you are, and being such great pals with the police?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Sidney Grice clamped the revolver shut. ‘First—’

  ‘And don’t start all that first second stuff again.’ Colwyn was purple.

  ‘I am not pals with the police or anyone.’ Mr G aimed at the valet’s head. ‘I like nobody and nobody likes me.’ He cocked back the hammer.

  ‘I do a bit,’ I said. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And second—’

  Colwyn snarled.

  ‘Second…’ My guardian pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped home and Colwyn winced but stood his ground. ‘I believe,’ Mr G continued, ‘that Constable Sedgemoor has already arrested Miss Middleton and he must – as all men in uniform should but often do not – do his duty.’

  Not for the first time I wondered if Sidney Grice had gone mad, and the constable was visibly taken aback.

  ‘You are suggesting that I take your ward into custody for an offence you have just proved she could not have committed?’ He pulled his jacket straight and checked the button of his collar.

  ‘I am suggesting that you formally release her or she will still be under arrest.’ Mr G allowed himself a tiny smile. ‘Not that that worries me especially. It is just that, if I take her home I shall be harbouring a fugitive.’

  I went close to Sedgemoor and gazed up into his big brown eyes. ‘Go on then,’ I urged.

  ‘You are free to go without charge,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said and walked out of the room.

  52

  The Tortured Tree

  SIDNEY GRICE DID not speak as I scurried down the drive after him.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to his back and he grunted.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I added as we boarded a hansom, and he snorted.

  ‘I must congratulate you, March.’ He plucked at the fingers of his gloves to straighten the seams. ‘Apart from Delilah Swan, the untalented but reputedly attractive actress, you are the only woman I know who has stopped the traffic in central London – not that it was moving very fast.’

  I cupped my face in my hands and failed to work out what he meant. ‘How did I do that?’

  ‘Inspector Pound and I did it on your behalf.’ He rattled his flask hopefully. ‘Jane Dozer.’ He spoke the name as if it had mystical significance. ‘And before you ask who lays claim to that title, she is the odoriferous and diseased gutter child who lured you into the stable on Bentley Mews under the impression that it was a romantic tryst.’

  ‘So she told you I had been kidnapped.’ I resolved to reward her at the first opportunity.

  Mr G wrinkled his brow. ‘If she did my memory is failing me. She called at the house demanding money. The vile urchin told Molly and when Pound called on some pretext – but really because you had missed an illicit assignation with him – Molly told him. He sent word to me. Luckily, I had finished giving evidence, and between us and a gang of twenty-four constables and three sergeants we brought the flow of vehicles to a halt whilst we searched every black van – and there are an astonishing number of them – for over an hour until I got bored, and two runners came simultaneously bearing the announcement that, not content with being abducted, you had butchered your exasperating relative in his own home.’ He shook a few drops into his tin cup. ‘Really, March, you have excelled yourself today.’

  ‘I did not know any of this would happen.’ I fought back my tears. ‘I was just going for a cup of tea with the inspector and I tried to help a little girl.’

  Sidney Grice drank his trickle of tea. ‘I have warned you before about being kind. These are not people like us, March. They are creatures of darkness who—’

  ‘For pity’s sake, they are children,’ I cried. ‘That girl was tricked into luring me there and did what she could to save me.’

  ‘In the expectation of a bounty,’ he said. ‘If somebody had offered her more not to let me know, she would never have set foot on my doorstep.’

  ‘Have you any idea what I have been through?’ I raged. ‘No, do not answer that. I cannot argue with you any more.’

  My guardian’s expression was fixed into one of mild puzzlement and he did not hum or tap his cane annoyingly as was his habit. At 125 Gower Street he disembarked, leaving me to pay the fare, and was knocking on the door before I reached the pavement, and hammering by the time I had joined him.

  ‘Oh, sir, it’s you.’ Molly flopped in relief. ‘From all that banging I thought it must be somebody important.’

  ‘Tea,’ he snapped and strode jerkily into his study.

  ‘I shall go and change,’ I announced, but he had shut the door before I finished.

  ‘I’ve just finished polishing Spirit’s claws,’ Molly declared as I mounted the stairs.

  Once in my room I took off my blood-caked dress and laid it on the floor. My lower legs were gouged and raw from being bound so tightly and there was a rope burn across the left side of my neck just above the chain, and the ring had dug into my breast. My face was not as badly marked as I had feared, but by using my hand mirror and the cheval I could see a large purple area on my lower back.

  Whilst the bath filled, I smoked a cigarette out of the window. The water was tepid as I completely immersed myself. I soaped all over, pulled the plug with my toe and let the bath drain, refilled it and lay still. The water was cold this time but I did not care. I drank a very large gin from my
father’s old hip flask and let the alcohol seep through me. I did not want to get out of that bath ever, but I was shivering so badly that I had no choice.

  If there was one luxury Sidney Grice never stinted on, it was towels. We always had a plentiful supply of fluffy Indian cotton bath sheets. I wrapped a big one around me and made a turban of a smaller, then went back to my room for another cigarette. I had left the window open. I leaned out and glanced down. My guardian was sitting on the little bench below the twisted cherry tree, one hand clawing around his empty socket, the other clutching his wounded shoulder.

  ‘Damn damn damn.’ His body contorted like a rabid beast tearing at itself.

  I could not call out. He would not have wanted me to see him like that and I could not bear to watch. I put on my light ochre dress and was tying up my hair when Molly came panting up.

  ‘’Spector Pound to see you,’ she announced, and I was past her and galloping down as fast as several yards of cloth would allow me.

  At the bottom of the stairs I composed myself and went into the study. Pound and Mr G were standing behind his desk scrutinizing something but, the moment I entered, the inspector started towards me. ‘Miss Middleton…’

  My guardian put down his brass magnifying glass. ‘I am going to do something in another room,’ he declaimed, as if reciting the lines of a play. ‘It will take me two minutes and fifty seconds.’

  He marched stiffly out of the room and Pound stood uncertainly for a moment. I rushed towards him.

  ‘Thank God you are safe.’ He turned up my face towards his. ‘I will hunt them down, March. I swear it.’

  ‘Just hold me,’ I said and he put his arms round me.

  ‘They didn’t…?’

  ‘No.’ I buried myself in him, breathing the coal tar and pipe tobacco which seemed as much a part of him as his voice or his strength. I rested my head on his breast, and he stroked my hair, his heart beating hard and steady.

  ‘Thank God,’ he whispered.

  ‘I saw little sign of him today.’ I closed my eyes to hold back the tears.