Death at Hungerford Stairs

by J C Briggs

  Sam’s bag had been packed by Elizabeth who had reassured him that the madcap journey he had described to her was not folly. She had listened to his fears and had reached the conclusion that Dickens had, though not in the same wild flight of words. He felt better – and Rogers, solid and dependable, had promised to keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the house in Rose Street and to send Feak to the church in Golden Square. If they found any information then Rogers was to pursue it. Sam had also apprised Inspector Grove of his intentions and that equally dependable officer had assured him of his vigilance. The fears of the night before had receded, though he would not be wholly happy until he was back – perhaps with the murderer in handcuffs.

  He saw Dickens approaching, looking at him anxiously. ‘I was worried that you might change your mind. I saw how concerned you were last night. I wondered if you might think it too reckless a scheme.’

  ‘You were right. I did have doubts but Rogers – and Elizabeth, of course – assured me that I should follow your lead. Rogers said, “You can trust, Mr Dickens, sir, ’e’s got a nose for these things – could ’ave bin a detective.” Praise, indeed. And here I am.’

  ‘I am obliged to Mr Rogers, indeed I am.’

  ‘I have told him that we intend to return tomorrow night.’

  ‘You are sure?’ asked Dickens, still anxious.

  ‘I am – well, as sure as we can be in this case full of uncertainties.’

  ‘No sign of them, I suppose.’

  ‘I have watched as many as I could – I don’t think Mademoiselle Victorine is here though I can’t swear that our young man is not – short of apprehending every slim young man, I do not think I could do more than simply observe.’

  They waited for as long as they could, scrutinising the passengers. They were as certain as they could be that Mademoiselle Victorine was not there. There were plenty of young men – it was impossible to say whether any one of them was the man they wanted. The descriptions were so vague.

  The guard blew his whistle. Clouds of steam came from the gasping engine; there was a heaving, grinding and snorting as of a dragon stirring. A young man dashed to a carriage further down the train. They should be boarding but they watched. The young man’s hat blew off and, as he bent down to pick it up, they saw his laughing face. He flourished the hat at someone waiting by the carriage door and leapt on. Not him. Not the face of a murderer. The whistle shrieked again. The dragon emitted another burst of steam. It was ready to move.

  ‘First-cladge tickets,’ said Dickens in the manner of Mrs Gamp. ‘Sammy, why not go to Paris for a day, bring your constitootion up. Your mind is too strong for you and ’ere you are drove about like a brute animal – let us aboard this ingein.’

  Sam laughed and allowed himself to be bustled aboard into a carriage occupied already by two other passengers, a man and a woman. The first-class carriage was comfortably furnished with cushioned seats and tables between. They had hardly sat down when the door was flung open and in came another passenger, a stout red-faced man with an infinity of luggage, no end of cloaks, plaids and pilot coats, and a brass-bound dressing case – enough for a trip to the North Pole. Dickens wondered if he had come aboard the wrong train. Perhaps an explorer who had lost his way. The man sank into the seat opposite and wiped his perspiring brow. He eyed them suspiciously, daring them to laugh at the pile of coats which had slipped to the floor. Dickens leant down to assist in the gathering up of the coats. The portly man nodded his thanks and took refuge in the furthest corner of the carriage where he wrapped himself up so tightly that he resembled nothing more than a very large baby in woollen swaddling clothes.

  The two other passengers were now concealed behind their newspapers. Dickens settled back into his seat. ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs …’ he murmured.

  ‘Let us not for goodness’ sake. I have Sam Weller in my pocket – I need cheering up.’

  ‘It is worritted you are, Samivel, don’t denige it – thank Evans I ’ave a nice bottle of stout in that there bag.’

  Sam chuckled. Dickens’s mouth had suddenly collapsed, and there was Mrs Gamp again, almost in the flesh, but he kept a straight face, ‘Mrs Gamp is in the second-class carriage, I believe.’

  ‘So she is. Punch for me, then.’

  Behind the protective cover of his magazine, Dickens was able surreptitiously to observe their fellow travellers. Sam, looking up from Pickwick Papers, knew exactly what he was doing. The red-faced man wore an expression of comical irritation. He had not quite heard what they had said but he was sure it was not polite – who the devil was that man whose face seemed to be contorted into the most grotesque expressions? Vulgar brute. Thank goodness he was now reading his magazine. Punch, forsooth, full of silly jokes and impertinent sallies against respectable people.

  The two other passengers at the far end of the carriage on the opposite side were as still as waxwork figures; the man held a newspaper in front of his face. What was he hiding? The woman had a large dark purple hat with a veil in front. Dickens looked. Yes, she was breathing. He could see the way the veil was sucked in slightly and swelled out again as she exhaled. Not a corpse then. He could not make out the features behind the grey veil, but he could tell she was too large to be Mademoiselle Victorine. Not that he had expected her to be found in a first-class compartment, but you never knew.

  By a quarter after ten o’clock they were at Folkestone where they had twenty minutes’ wait. The man with the red face, now more puce, unwrapped himself, suddenly alarmed that he might be left behind. He made what haste he could, encumbered as he was with his coats and his case. Dickens and Jones sat still, Sam imperturbably reading about Mr Pickwick’s meeting with Sam Weller’s father and his tribulations with the uncommon pleasant ‘wider’ whose change to a wife brought about a decidedly unpleasant transformation of her character. Dickens was reading his copy of Punch magazine, grinning to see a reference to Mr Dickens’s friend Micawber in a satirical piece about debt. Puce glared at them. Idle rogues. Always laughing – no work to do, he supposed. What business had they to get in his way? Did they not know that the steamer was about to depart for Paris?

  A genial station guard called out, ‘Refreshments in the waiting room, ladies and gentlemen. No hurry, ladies and gentlemen, for Paris. No hurry whatever.’

  The red-faced man’s face turned puce again, a kind of mottled purple, as he struggled with the door handle. Perhaps he was deaf, thought Dickens. He did not dare grin – the man might have a seizure. The door opened and out went Puce with a deal of huffing and puffing.The waxworks followed with considerably more decorum, holding the silence they had kept for the last two hours or so. Dickens and Jones collected their bags and descended.

  This was a chance to watch again – to make sure that she was not among the crowds that bore down on the refreshment room to eat their sausages, pork pies, jam tarts or cake. Dickens went into the buffet while Sam observed on the platform. Dickens chose a cup of tea and a jam tart, avoiding the cake which he knew always turned to sand in the mouth. The jam did taste like jam though it might have been raspberry-flavoured glue, and the pastry had that familiar cardboardish texture. Still, the tea was hot. He watched as he drank. The Frenchwomen seemed uncommonly elegant in their little hats and close-fitting travelling costumes or they were short and round, peering at the English refreshments suspiciously with little, shrewd black eyes. None resembled Mademoiselle Victorine, creeping like a snail. He recognised the cheerful young man who had almost lost his hat. He was part of a noisy group, off to taste the delights of Paris no doubt. He hoped they would enjoy themselves. Puce looked at them all disapprovingly while he chewed determinedly on a piece of cardboard. He had paid for it and he would damn well eat it. Dickens noticed the smear of jam on his cheek.

  Dickens went out to swap places with Sam who went for his cup of tea. ‘Avoid the jam tarts,’ he said, ‘and the cake, and the sandwiches – a sausage roll, perhaps, though I shouldn’t think there’s a sausa
ge in it.’ He pulled up his scarf, lowered his hat and put a pair of spectacles on his nose – the ones he had forgotten to give back to Zeb Scruggs. He watched the people coming and going but there was no sign of those they sought.

  Sam came out and, seeing Dickens, wondered if he could see anything at all so muffled up was he. He caught the glint of spectacle lenses – he hoped Dickens could see through them. Dickens the actor, he thought. He could play any part you wanted. Comical, tragical, pastoral, historical.

  Then it was down the pier and on to the waiting steamer for the two-hour crossing to Boulogne. The sea was calm and they stood on deck watching as England faded into the milky distance.

  Another train took them to Paris through a landscape of fields, windmills, fortifications, canals, a river, a cathedral. They changed at Longeau then stopped at the little station of Creil for ten minutes. Dickens could not resist stepping out on to the deserted platform. No one got off the train. A priest in a long black robe got on. The station cat yawned. On they went.

  It was barely eight o’clock, snowing in Paris and bitterly cold. They were in a hackney carriage rattling over the pavements of Paris. Sam’s eyes were everywhere, looking at the crowds in the streets and the brightly lit shops and cafes, taking in the shimmering lamps, the trees, the theatres, the houses, all the brilliant life of the city aglow under the shining snow. He forgot for a moment why they were there, but soon they came to a halt outside the Prefecture where he must go in and state their business. Dickens stayed in the cab – no time for them to be distracted by recognition of the famous author. Sam glanced back to see him swathed in his scarf, peering through the spectacles into the snow.

  After about twenty minutes Sam came out – his courteous opposite number of the Paris police force would find out if there were a milliner’s or dressmaker’s by the name of Jolicoeur – it was, he agreed, an unusual name. It should not be too difficult. If there were no shop, he would find out the families who bore that name, and if Monsieur Le Superintendent had not enough time then, he, Monsieur Le Prefect, would institute a search of all Paris if necessary. The murderer must be caught and his accomplice, even though she was a woman, must be brought to justice.

  ‘Most obliging our French detective, Monsieur Dupin. If we cannot – what?’

  ‘And this shall be a sign,’ said Dickens.

  ‘What sign?’ Sam was baffled.

  ‘Monsieur Dupin is or was, I should say, a detective – a private one, granted, but one who solved his cases. In Poe’s book The Murders in the Rue Morgue … I met him –’

  ‘Who?’ Sam lost track.

  ‘Poe – in America. Odd man. Died last month. Strangely, he was wearing someone else’s clothes – a mystery. It sounded like something from one of his own tales. Still, I cannot help thinking that if we have your Monsieur Dupin on our side then we will not fail. So, let us screw our courage to the sticking point. A drum, a drum.’

  The Hotel Bonjour was small and a little shabby. No matter, the food was good. Sam had his steak and potatoes as did Dickens, along with a bottle of good French wine and some creamy brie cheese. They talked of tomorrow, hoping that Monsieur Dupin would find the Jolicoeur shop; and of what they would do if Victorine were there. With Monsieur Dupin’s support they would question her at the Prefecture and take her back to London. She was the key. She had to be. And if her brother were there then he must come too. The superintendent would arrest him on suspicion of murder.

  The word sobered them again. Paris was lovely under the snow. The fire was warm and the food comforting and filling, yet always there was that dark thread of memory like a trail of blood. They thought of the dead boys.

  ‘I hope he is here,’ said Sam. ‘Then I can stop thinking that he will do it again while I am not there.’

  ‘I have thought about that; I do not honestly believe that she or he will go back to that house. We felt it, did we not? – its emptiness, the sense that it was abandoned. It almost seemed as if it had been deserted long before we got there. And there is the hat pin – surely that is the weapon.’

  ‘It may well be,’ said the practical Sam, ‘but she will have had more than one hat pin. We cannot guarantee it.’

  ‘And there is the third boy. No mask as far as you could tell – perhaps there was not one, perhaps that murder was different. It must have been a shock to see that poor, maimed face – suppose that murder was committed in a different spirit altogether, a moment of revulsion and horror.’

  ‘You are trying to say that it may have stopped him in his tracks, that in a way it was a mistake, whereas the other murders were deliberate, the desire to end those lives – hatred, as you said before – hatred of their beauty.’

  ‘That is it entirely. I do not believe he will do it again. They have gone.’

  ‘To Paris?’ Sam smiled. He knew how determined Dickens could be.

  ‘I hope that they are here or that we find out something significant. And so to bed?’

  Dickens felt suddenly exhausted after the bustle and rattle of the train, the heave and swell of the sea and the dashing about in the cab. Sam looked weary too. They should sleep now. Sam would go to the Prefecture early and come back for Dickens.

  Dickens fell asleep almost at once. He felt the motion of the train lulling him into a dream. Theo Outfin was in the carriage with him, dressed as a woman – he looked like his sister, but Dickens could not understand why he should be wearing an obviously false moustache. Theo – for it was he – was holding up a large hatpin. It might have been meant for a giant. He leant forward as if to confide in Dickens who saw then that his face was horribly disfigured. In the dream, Theo pointed the hatpin at him. It came dangerously close, and Theo was laughing with a mouth that was a hole. The train entered a tunnel. There was no escape. Dickens tried the door of the carriage but it was locked. The darkness was suffocating; the train travelled faster and faster. Dickens rattled the door. He was frantic to escape. He was falling into the dark hole. Then they were out of the tunnel. Theo turned into the veiled woman from the train. Her face loomed over his, and when she lifted the veil it was made of cobwebs, and the face was Victorine’s whose lenses were opaque so that he could not see her eyes, but the lenses grew larger and larger until there was nothing of her but great white eyes. The train shrieked like something demented.

  He woke sweating and conscious of a pain in his chest. Indigestion, he thought. Damn that cheese or was it the jam tart? The prosaic thought steadied him. God, he had felt terror then. Horrible. All the clocks in Paris seemed to be striking. Three o’clock. He lit the candle by his bed and walked over to the window sheathed in thick heavy lace that smelt of dust and cigar smoke.

  He looked out on to a white world silent under the glittering moon with its corona of ghostly green. ‘Queen of shadows, risen to blanch the world in its white sheen.’ He whispered the words of Lamartine, the French poet whom he had met and liked. Solitude, the poem was called – how apt. The snow muffled every sound. It was as though he were alone in the city. He looked down and saw in the street a set of footprints, a woman’s. He thought of Victorine’s closed face. Solitude. Was she alone now in this soundless city, a shadow in the shadows?

  The room was chill and he felt the twinge of indigestion. Lamartine was a vegetarian – he thought ruefully of that steak. Perhaps there was something in it – vegetarianism. Though Lamartine had looked a bit bloodless. Oh, well, too late now. He looked at the footprints again, and thought of some lonely woman with a pockmarked face and a torn dress, haunting the street like a gaunt cat. He shivered, watching the snowflakes hover and whirl in the still air. They came faster and soon the footprints were covered over. Whoever she was, she had gone now. He went back to bed.

  They breakfasted early on the hot rolls and coffee which Dickens had promised, then Sam went out into the white street to find a cab. Dickens poured himself another cup. He was thinking of Poe’s Dupin and his detecting methods. To observe attentively was the key. The analyst, as Poe
called him, makes a host of observations and inferences from which he draws his conclusions. Poe had used the analogy of the whist player who observes every external thing from his opponents’ glances at each other, at the cards in their hands, even to their method of holding their cards. By the end, he knows every throw of every card and can play his own with as much confidence as if he had seen his opponents’ cards face up. Now, thought Dickens, I have read and observed. Theo Outfin’s face for example was not the face of a murderer. Victorine’s face, he had thought first – and the first impression was important – was closed, cold, secret. He had been right, she had a secret. He and Sam had observed that silent house, and he felt that this was where Dupin’s method failed them. The bed – it did not look as if anyone had ever slept in it. And yet, the brother. If it were a story then they would have found a convenient tuft of hair just as Dupin had in Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue – behold the orang-u-tan! He laughed – what a mad tale. Too improbable.

  And he was puzzled by something else – something that did not fit, something he was trying to remember that he had noticed at the beginning, but whatever it was seemed irretrievable. He did not know into which pigeon-hole of his mind he had put it. He had an idea that it was connected with his dream of the night before, but all he had now was a confused impression of the train, Theo Outfin and Victorine merging into one and a terror of her huge, opaque lenses. The memory was like a shadow glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, but gone when one turned one’s gaze. Damn.

  Sam came back with a paper in his hand. An address?

  ‘Success?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Monsieur Dupin consulted the department which keeps records of businesses, markets, shops etcetera and there is a shop – a few streets way from here, in fact – a milliner’s which was owned by a Madame Jolicoeur, now taken over by Madame Manette. We will try there – someone might know about the Jolicoeur family. Monsieur Dupin has kindly provided a map, and he has provided a Sergeant de Ville to smooth our way.’