His first impression was of a heavy and dusty silence. Even the view of Portman Square from the windows, the cypress grove and beech trees railed in on the broad lawn, surrounded by the cobbled thoroughfare and the houses on the four sides, seemed mute and remote, as though he had indeed passed from the world of the living to the mansions of the dead. A warm stillness, the faint sickliness of dead flowers not cleared from their vases, gave strength to the impression. The apartment consisted of a large drawing-room in front divided from a smaller back room by folding doors. It was furnished in the style of twenty years earlier, the furniture and decorations of Louis Philippe.
Ormolu tables and boule cabinets were ranged about the rooms, each bearing its small bronze statuette or ornament. Above the gilded tables, the walls were hung with brackets and watercolour drawings. Over the cabinets, glass-shades and picture-frames there hung an oppressive sense of gloomy richness.
Looking about him, Verity could scarcely decide what it was that he was expected to do. If these rooms represented Lord Henry's collection of worldly goods, then he could have owned little which bore his personal mark upon it more specifically than a stick of furniture. Nowhere was there any sign of family or personal correspondence, the accounts of Portman Square or Bole Warren. Walking ponderously about the rooms, Verity examined the little tables. Two of them had drawers which opened and revealed no more than notes of the most cursory kind written to Lord Henry by men who could or could not attend his party and would or would not make up a group for a battue at Bole Warren. In the rear drawing-room, where the furniture was more varied, a Chippendale bureau stood, immaculate and inviting. Verity went through it, drawer by drawer, sifting the trivia of the dead man's life. Little bills and receipts, hastily-scrawled notes with half incomprehensible jokes and exclamations intended only for the eyes of a near friend who understood them, a tiny miniature of a girl's face, and lockets bearing the likenesses of Lord Samuel Jervis and his wife. There was a locket of female hair, which might have belonged to a young beauty of the past century as easily as the present. Verity felt a great sadness overcoming him at this glimpse of the loved and loving details of the Jervis family. And it was all for nothing.
On such occasions, there was no cure for melancholy but in work. "The square of four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever proportionate to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy,' someone had once said to him. It rang true to Verity that work gave a man a sure hold of something outside his own uncertain emotions. When the drawers of the bureau yielded nothing further, he turned his professional suspicion upon the structure of the polished furniture. With half his mind dwelling on other things, he tapped and felt, sliding a hand under a ledge of a drawer-opening or running his fingers along an elegant piece of beading in search of some concealed lever.
Such pieces as the bureau were mere toys. No self-respecting criminal would have entrusted his treasure or his confidences to their so-called 'secret drawers'. Why, thought Verity, anyone with an eye for it soon got to seeing where the places were which no other drawer or cubby-hole occupied. Then it was only a matter of tapping to find the hollow sound. And when that happened, a thief would carve his way with a chisel, never stopping to try the genteel method of searching for a hidden spring. It was at that moment that his own finger-tips struck a hollowness beneath the polished surface. He had the flap of the bureau down and was facing the little drawers and pigeon-holes inside. Between two sets of drawers there was a narrow, inlaid panel, four inches across and about eight inches tall. He tapped it again and heard the hollowness once more.
'Ah!' he said with faint satisfaction, 'so that's it!'
There was no sign of a catch, no place where a catch might be concealed nor a knife blade could enter. Verity patiently opened the drawers on either side of the panel, drew them from their recesses and searched methodically in the wooden frame. At last he found the thin strip of springy metal and thumbed it back. Suddenly the entire section behind the panel came free so that he drew it out like an open box, four inches by eight and about a foot long.
At first he expected it to be empty but there were several items in it. He drew out a book, printed in some foreign language which he assumed to be French. The paper was thick and greyish, the cover no more than marbled paper pasted on cheap board. There was another volume, bound in stained and rubbed grey boards with a dingy white spine whose lettering had faded to invisibility. Two more small and recently-printed volumes accompanied these. Verity opened the first at random.
After dismissing the eunuchs, I again drew the couch close to her, and without further ceremony lifted up her clothes. How lovely white was her round belly and ivory delicate-formed thighs! The mount of love, just above the temple of Venus, covered with beautiful black hair. . . .
Verity put the volume down and, picking up the other, glanced at its title: Venus Schoolmistress: or, Birchen Sports. He shook his head thoughtfully.
'Poor young gentleman,' he said aloud. There was something loathsome in the duty of dredging the furtive, trivial lusts of the dead in this manner. However, the four books had occupied the greater part of the concealed compartment in the bureau. They were unremarkable in themselves, the broken-down little shops of Holywell Street, just north of the Strand, thrived on such editions of aged erotica. Yet it saddened Verity to think that the books might in some way sully the reputation of the dead Lord Henry Jervis with his unrealized ambition to take Holy Orders.
Beside the books there were four glass-plate photographs, positive prints of a kind which required a sheet of white paper behind them to see them clearly, and an envelope containing what would no doubt be an old love-letter. Verity picked up the four glass plates with care. They were all chipped or broken in some way. Two of them had had a strip of glass sheared away, converting the oblong to a square, a third had lost a triangle at one comer. The fourth was accidentally chipped but the image appeared complete. Verity drew a sheet of white paper from one of the bureau pigeon-holes and slid it behind the first plate.
His heart sank. It was all to be worse than ever he or Richard Jervis could have expected. There were two figures in the picture, the man naked and flat on his back, his neck and head missing where the end of the plate had been sheared away. The girl who knelt astride his legs was petite, trimly-rounded and olive-skinned, her tawny blonde hair worn down her back with the aid of a comb. Her head was lowered to her partner's loins, eyes closed and lips pouting, while she spread her thighs for the man's fingers with their two distinctive rings. The man himself was distinguished by a white forked streak where his left thigh and belly joined. It might be a scar or a blemish on the plate. Of the girl's identity there could be no doubt.
'Simona!' said Verity softly, and looked again. In the background was a blurred oval shape. Blurred it might be, but he knew it for the finishing bath in Charley Wag's private apartment at Ramiro's. As for the man in the picture, Verity had seen the Wag naked and knew that the pale, undeveloped body was not Charley's. But it must have been a most important client for Charley to have made both his private bath and his own girl available.
The second plate confirmed his suspicions. Simona and Stefania, the latter with paler body and shock of dark hair, lay naked, nuzzling one another's mouths. They seemed to be on a low divan, a man standing over them, his head and shoulders missing again where the end of the plate had been broken off. But the white fork at the join of left thigh and belly was there again, confirming it as the scar of an old injury.
The third plate had suffered no more than an accidental chip. It seemed to Verity the most mysterious of all. There was no man in it, merely a girl who was fully dressed in a theatrical costume which suggested the part of a page to a knight errant in some mock-tournament. He studied the snub-nosed, narrow-eyed insolence of her expression, the sturdy figure of a fifteen-year-old tomboy, fair hair spread loose across her shoulders.
'Now her I have seen,' he said gently. 'Youngest doxy in Ned Roper's
flash 'ouse a year or two back. Name of Miss Elaine.'
He studied the picture again. There was little in it that even the Vice Society could have taken exception to. Elaine was in three-quarter profile, though her head was turned towards the camera a little more. She wore a 'doublet' fashioned from a blouse. The lower part of her 'armour' consisted of very tight trousers in grey-blue material. From the style of the costume, Verity had no doubt that the girl formed part of a display which gulls and yokels paid willingly to watch. The plate showed her as a broad-hipped, sturdy-thighed youngster, the grey-blue trousers stretched smooth over her figure and nipped in narrowly at the waist. From the rear, Elaine's bottom appeared a near-perfect circle, the tight cloth creasing deeply under the full cheeks. It was unlikely, Verity thought, that many of the spectators were much interested in the finer points of jousting or the ways of ancient chivalry. He laid the third plate aside and took up the final one.
The composition was so crowded that at first it was difficult to distinguish the subject. Presently it appeared as something enacted on a stage or dais with a half circle of spectators on the far side. The faces of these men and women were represented in miniature but quite distinctly. They were a fashionably-dressed group in evening clothes, some laughing at what they saw, others staring in dismay. The four men on the dais were naked, as was the girl, all four of them wearing goat-masks, which the girl did not.
Verity examined her, the slender but well-shaped body, the profile and colouring of Eastern beauty tempered by a childhood in the mean streets of Ratcliffe or Wapping. The dark hair rose in an elegant coiffure from her delicately-shaped neck and ears, her cat-like almond eyes lighting the fine oriental mask of her beauty. She knelt on all fours, the four men standing over her, one on each side, one before and one behind. Her slim young shoulders curved down to the velveteen lustre of coppery skin in the small of her back, the smooth paler ovals of her bottom narrowing to firm thighs and trim calves. Lynx-eyed, she turned her head to the spectators, as though their excitement at what she was showing them somehow intensified her own.
'Jolly!' said Verity aloud. 'Wherever there's mischief. . . .'
He paused and looked at the four men. One of them, at the girl's head, bore the same white fork at the joining of belly and thigh. The hand with the bloodstone ring and the gold was hidden by the girl's head, the fingers lost in the dark hair as they guided her face back. Rings might alter, Verity thought, scars never.
There remained only the sheet of paper in its envelope, addressed to Lord Henry Jervis at Bole Warren. Verity drew out the sheet of paper.
Sir - Not many years ago, a great injury was done by you to a poor woman, in consequence of which she died. It was well for you had there been no witness to your cowardice and your folly, if all had perished as that poor soul. I trust to inform you there is one who saw your every act, from first to last, and who lives to publish to the world what you have done. Such an object as you are, so base a villain, must disgrace the dignity of revenge, but yet there is justice requires a forfeit paid. In token of what I might tell of you, receive this ring and recollect where last you saw it and missed it. It shall cost you dear and, never fear, the reckoning shall reach you when next you hear from your faithful correspondent, Anonyma.
For half an hour Verity searched the secret compartment, the papers, envelopes, bureau, and every likely hiding-place for the ring. There was no sign of it. But then, he reflected, it could be any ring. He might find a dozen belonging to Lord Henry and never know which was mentioned by the mysterious lady of the letter. He looked again at the glass plates of the photographs. He must, of course, ask Mrs Butcher tactfully about the rings the young man wore and where precisely the wound might be that Lord Henry sustained when a battery of mortars at the Redan spewed its lethal hail of iron among his infantry. Yes, he thought, the question must be asked, but the answer could hardly be in doubt. The next interview with Richard Jervis was likely to be a difficult one. Far from undermining the evidence of accidental death and establishing a case of murder against persons as yet entirely unknown and unsuspected, Lord Henry Jervis seemed likely to join that procession of the rich and the titled who had embraced violent death in the past eighteen months rather than face the public humiliation which awaited them. It was no ordinary humiliation, for Charley Wag and his minions were artists in blackmail. The revelations which he held in store were precisely those for which each particular victim would die rather than endure.
It seemed to Verity that he might as well inform Richard Jervis at once and close the investigation into Lord Henry's death as speedily and decently as possible. Then he picked up the otherwise innocent plate of the girl Elaine in her tournament costume. For several minutes he stood in silence.
"ang on a bit,' he said at last. 'This don't fit. There's a screw loose somewhere.'
6
'And so,' said Verity in a tone of great secrecy, 'they was obligated to show me into the private apartments. And there, in a secret drawer, was photographs and a letter, compromising the late Lord 'enry Jervis as a coward and debauched wretch!'
Sergeant Albert Samson, who had been crouched forward in expectation of what was to be revealed, sat back against the buttoned leather of the cab seat.
'Well!' he said thoughtfully.
'I had it from Mrs Butcher afterwards,' Verity continued, 'how the rings was Lord Henry's rings that never left his hand and how the white mark at the top of his leg was just the exact wound 'is Lordship sustained on the explosion of a mortar before Sebastopol.'
Samson thought about this too.
'Well!' he said again, more softly. The cab jolted a little as they crossed Westminster Bridge towards Lambeth, the river crowded with barges drifting lazily, their long sweeps splashing the water astern as the bargees guided them. Men and women, their pink dresses and parasols bright in the afternoon sun, strolled across the pavements or loitered in the shell-like alcoves placed above the piers. On the box of the cab, Stringfellow sat with whip held idly and tall hat askew. Lightning, the ancient horse, clopped slowly towards the Surrey shore.
'It ain't half a mess,' said Verity thoughtfully. 'I been hired by poor Mr Richard who swears Lord Henry never died accidental but was foully murdered. Rumer the keeper, Mr Somerville the gunsmith, and Dr Jamieson all swear there was no way of murder. Now to cap it all I must tell Mr Richard that indeed it mayn't be an accident a-cos his brother had some reason for self-destruction. I shouldn't wonder if he wasn't to go off with apoplexy!'
Samson sucked his teeth. He said,
'You never thought, my son, that they might be using you, did you?'
'Whatcher mean?'
'Suppose your Mr Richard and even Captain Ransome knew Lord Henry had made away with himself. How better to draw attention from it than by raising a cry of murder, so that all the wagging tongues say if it wasn't murder then it must be accident. The thought of him doing away with himself ain't to be entertained even by the scandalous. They never reckoned that you might find evidence.'
Verity nodded.
'I 'ad some such thoughts, Mr Samson. Charley Wag wouldn't have blackmailed a broken-down old captain like Jack Ransome. It wouldn't answer any purpose. But then I 'eard that Captain Jack swore he was only there acting for a gentleman who was being blackmailed but didn't care to be seen visiting Charley. And then I got to thinking who that other man might be, Captain Jack being a member of the Jervis household.'
Samson chuckled.
'And Mr Richard, that acts so touchy and flares up like a new wick, he never had the goodness to name the party he thought had murdered Lord Henry?'
'I ain't been favoured with such statement, Mr Samson.'
It was Verity's first half-day off, which he had hoped to spend with Bella in Paddington Green. Instead, in his perplexity, he had sought the advice of Sergeant Samson, producing a tracing he had made of part of the blackmail note written to Lord Henry Jervis by Anonyma. Samson, from his investigation of the general blackmail conspiracy,
had identified the writer as Miss Elaine who appeared in one of the photographs in tournament costume. Samson also swore that in the course of the afternoon the girl might be traced and questioned.
'You have no idea,' said Verity conversationally, 'how obliged I am to you, Mr Samson, for this. You and Mr Stringfellow, of course,' he concluded, glancing up at the box of the cab.
'I been watching Miss Elaine and a dozen little burners for months,' said Samson cheerily. 'It ain't no hardship to find her. 'owever, if you chose to return an obligation, you might go on telling what them girls was up to in the photographic plates.'
'I don't see 'ow they were done,' said Verity insistently, "ow all the parties was got to hold still for long enough to make an exposure. Two of 'em, with that Simona and that Stefania you was so sweet on, was at Charley Wag's baths. The other was odder still.'
'Jolly?' said Samson.
'Yes, in a place at night with a crowd looking on and four men in masks. Like sort of devil-worship. But 'ow did they do the picture in such conditions?'
'The way you go on about that little minx in the picture,' said Samson, smacking his lips at the thought of it. 'Them sly dark eyes and her gold skin, and that saucy bum stuck out I Wouldn't I give 'er turn and turn about!'
'That ain't the point, Mr Samson!' said Verity angrily.
'No,' said Samson. 'The point is them photographic plates ain't worth a Pandy's spit. It's Miss Elaine and her letter that might tell a tale.'
'Funny name,' said Verity.
'We don't know it is her name,' Samson confessed. 'Being a foundling, she had to take a name for her profession. Seems she took one out of a poetry book by Mr Tennyson, something of King Arthur, to please the quality. So Miss Elaine she is.'
They turned into the New Cut, Lambeth, and Stringfellow reined in the elderly horse. In the hot summer afternoon the pawnbrokers had turned the contents of their small stifling shops on to the pavement, in order to do business in the open. Tables, chairs and looking-glasses blocked the promenade with precarious pyramids of copper kettles and pans. The cheese-dealer in a blue apron stood before the marble slab of his open window with quarters and slices of cheese on stands at either side. White eggs on deal racks were placarded as 'fresh from the country', and large cuts of bacon, 'fine flavour', made up the rest of the ticketed display. Stringfellow drew up the cab outside the secondhand clothes store, where bereaved families came to sell the clothes of the dead. Corduroy jackets, vests and fustian trousers hung from the rows of brass rods under the awning.
Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments Page 10