The Hidden Man

by Robin Blake

  ‘That is very possible,’ I said. ‘But how can I tell which it is, love or hate?’

  ‘Ask Miss Peel.’

  ‘She may not choose to say. She can be a very – imperious woman.’

  ‘What precisely was Mr Pimbo’s bequest?’

  ‘His four-acre orchard, and beehives.’

  And now Elizabeth was laughing as she clattered the plates into the stone sink.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Don’t you see?’

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘She was being made to play the part of Eve, Titus. He’s given her a garden to be hers alone, just so long as she does not sin against him. But if she should sin – well, then she is cast out for ever and ever, Amen.’

  ‘He was playing God?’

  ‘Yes, the God of the Pentateuch. The God who devises tests. The Jealous God. There was something between them, Titus, and it seems to me you will have to find out what it was.’

  * * *

  After supper Luke Fidelis came to my house and we walked together to our favourite coffee house, the Turk’s Head. As we went along he told how he had fared taking Amity Thorn home.

  ‘I found her on the road and took her up to ride rump. We got on very well but compared to yesterday, when I first met her, she didn’t say much.’

  ‘What happened yesterday? You had better give me every detail. If Thorn dies he will have to be inquested.’

  So Fidelis gave me the exact course of his previous day’s bedside visit to Adam Thorn, of the man’s state and of the silver apostle spoon that he’d advised Amity to get valued, all of which I’ve related in my first chapter.

  ‘She didn’t get much luck with the spoon this morning, though,’ I said. ‘The pawnshop’s closed for business and who knows when it will reopen?’

  ‘After she left this morning she was showing it around town hoping for a buyer. She has it polished up since yesterday and very handsome it looks too with its saint perched on the end. But people she showed it to were wary and there were no takers, yet it looks to be very good genuine silver, even though it’s old.’

  ‘People might be right to be suspicious. Pimbo’s journeyman Ambler, for one, thinks one of the Thorns stole it.’

  ‘Well, from the state of it I’d say it had been lying some time in the open, which would argue that it was just found. But we will see if an owner comes forward.’

  We entered the Turk’s Head, an establishment well kept by Noah Plumtree. As Plumtree’s own character was marked above all by geniality, so was his coffee house and, this being a Friday night, the room was even more than usually full of coffee drinkers and wine bibbers standing and sitting in groups, their voices raised in toasts and laughter. In one part of the room a pleasant argument was in progress; in another, a boisterous card game; and in a third a good tenor voice had launched into a ballad. Every now and then a group of men would fall into attentive silence while one related a story, the climax of which they greeted with an explosion of hilarity and back-slapping.

  I ordered wine and pipes and, finding a table bay empty, we settled there in a fair measure of seclusion.

  ‘The death of Pimbo has occupied me all afternoon,’ I told my friend, ‘though I’m no nearer to knowing why he is dead. And now I am in double duty, having been appointed his executor. This means that if as Coroner I find the man murdered himself, I must as executor surrender all his worldly goods to the Crown.’

  ‘You may rest easy on that point. I do not believe that he murdered himself.’

  ‘Every circumstance of that room says that he did. You had better explain.’

  Fidelis took a long draught of wine and replaced his glass carefully on the table before him.

  ‘Very well. It’s quite true that there was just the one way to leave that fatal room, and that it was found locked on the inside. And yet I feel someone else was in the room when Pimbo died.’

  ‘You are not reverting to this business of his wig, Luke. Surely it’s a minor detail.’

  ‘In the case of inexplicable death, no detail can be said to be minor. There is also the dog. That dog was reputedly always with him.’

  ‘That is so. His housekeeper confirmed it to me only this morning.’

  ‘So why not at the hour of his death?’

  I put a flaming spill to my pipe-bowl.

  ‘Here’s why not,’ I retorted, when I had set the tobacco nicely smouldering. ‘Having determined to shoot himself, Pimbo himself put the dog out of doors, to spare him the sight of it.’

  ‘That would be too delicate. If he really shot himself he’d have shot the dog first. The man that kills himself, first kills his dog – that’s a proverb in Ireland.’

  ‘I am not sure that bears the same interpretation as—’

  ‘Yes it does. Pimbo’s dog was not found shot in the room; consequently, I say, Pimbo did not kill himself.’

  I laughed at Fidelis’s obduracy.

  ‘He might have killed the dog elsewhere, and that’s why we haven’t found it.’

  Fidelis shook his head.

  ‘No, he would have done it in the room. He would have killed the dog, and then himself, in immediate succession.’

  ‘Do you know William of Ockham?’ I asked.

  Fidelis shrugged.

  ‘A wrestler?’

  As so often, I was astonished at Fidelis’s ignorance of the literary and the philosophical.

  ‘He was a philosopher who denounced those that cloud an argument with over-complication. He recommended the use of a razor to cut away obfuscations.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I propose we employ the razor and state the case simply: Phillip Pimbo was alone when he shot himself behind the locked door of his business room. It is perverse to look for ways for the case to be different.’

  Fidelis put his two elbows on the table between us and pressed his hands together, almost in an attitude of prayer.

  ‘Indulge me a little longer, Titus. Tell me again exactly what happened when you had the door of the room forced open and you went inside.’

  So I filled our glasses and indulged him. When I had finished he sat as if meditating, his wine untouched, and himself oblivious to the cheerful noise of the surrounding coffee house. I rose and went to the jakes.

  On my return, he snapped out of his reverie.

  ‘And you are certain the dog was not alive in the room?’

  ‘Certain. I knew that dog. It was a busybody dog. Had it been in the room, we would have had it chewing our shoe buckles.’

  ‘But your eyes were fixed upon the corpse lying across the desk. So were those of Hazelbury and the others who crushed into the room. Under such circumstances the dog might just have run out through the crowd all unnoticed. Is that not possible?’

  With a sigh I indulged him once more.

  ‘Very well. That might have happened. It’s possible.’

  ‘And, if a dog could escape in that way, then tell me why not a man? Why not a man, concealed inside the room, who simply mingled with the insurgent crowd, and made his escape unnoticed? As unnoticed as the dog. What was its name?’

  ‘Suez. But a man is much larger, Luke. A man would be seen.’

  ‘It was a large crowd of men that came in, all together. This hidden man left in their midst. And that man, I warrant you, was Phillip Pimbo’s killer.’

  ‘And who was this hidden man?’

  ‘Ah! That is the question, is it not?’

  He paused again for a moment of reflection, and then said, ‘Suez. It’s the perfect name for a dog. It makes me like Pimbo all the more, that he would think of it.’

  * * *

  ‘Things in themselves have, peradventure, their weight, measures and conditions; but when once we take them into us the soul forms them as she pleases.’

  I came across these words of Montaigne while reading later that same evening in my library. Having written up the events of the past week in my journal, as I did every Friday, I had turned to the Frenc
h Seigneur for some light philosophical amusement. Indeed he had been my almost constant companion ever since the day, a few weeks earlier, when I’d stood in Sweeting’s Church Gate bookshop, leafing through an edition of the Essays in a translation (so the good bookseller told me) by Charles Cotton, a literary gentleman of the last century.

  ‘I do assure you the sense is much easier to get than in old Florio’s fantastical language,’ Sweeting was saying. ‘Cotton turned Montaigne’s plain French into plain English, which is the reason that Cotton is preferred to Florio almost everywhere nowadays. Futhermore this is a new and much improved edition.’

  Although I had heard of Montaigne, I had never until that day read him. I turned a few pages, and at once noticed the extreme variety of subjects that came under his eye – ‘Of Sorrow’ … ‘Of Cannibals’ … ‘Of Smells’. Sweeting, who was notoriously cunning in matching a customer with a book, said:

  ‘If you’ve not read him before, I suspect you’ll find he suits you rather well, Titus. You and Michael de Montaigne might even be made for each other.’

  Still I leafed through the pages: ‘Of Books’ … ‘Of Cruelty’ … ‘Of Thumbs’ … Of Thumbs? I closed the book and handed it to Sweeting.

  ‘I’ll try it,’ I said.

  ‘If it doesn’t suit, bring it back.’

  ‘I think it will. If a man can entertain a reader on thumbs, what great heights might he reach on sorrow, or cruelty?’

  As so often before, the bookseller had hit the mark. I found that Montaigne wrote as much good sense as any of my favourite English essay writers – those of the Spectator being highest in my esteem – but there was another quality in the Frenchman that I relished even more: a candour, and a sort of bluff courage in the face of his own human failings. This quite disarmed me. There are few that will address in print their own ignorance and fearfulness as bravely as Montaigne does. So, while he was an excellent guide and authority for thinking about difficult questions, I enjoyed him principally because he made me feel I was sitting in company with a witty, resourceful and admirable old uncle.

  On this night, reading Montaigne’s sentence about how facts are modified within each of us to suit our predilections, it struck me, with the force of a hammer on a nail, that Fidelis’s interpretation of Phillip Pimbo’s death was just the same case. My young friend’s knowledge of literature may have been faint, but he had a most analytical mind, and this, compounded with his medical knowledge, had many times been of help to my work as Coroner.

  On the other hand he had to be watched, with a view to taking a strop to Ockham’s razor. My friend rated the finding and solving of puzzles high among all life’s pleasures and this frequently led him to take normal sequences of fact and twist them quite perversely into Anglo-Saxon riddles or Euclidean equations. With Pimbo he was determined to make it a case of murder, but was faced with the seeming impossibility of it having been committed inside the locked room, and yet the murderer had escaped. So he arranged the facts in his head until he’d made such a murder possible, and the hypothesis of the hidden man was the result. It may have been ingenious, but it was wholly speculative, and I had no more need to believe it than in the cat and the fiddle.

  I had frequently observed Fidelis as he approached a dubious death from, as I considered it, the wrong direction. Physicians I suppose must always look for practical solutions, for ways to reverse a malady. They ask, how best must I proceed against it? But as a Coroner I know that I am concerned with not the causes but the consequences of evil and death – matters that cannot be so proceeded against, and certainly not reversed. In this work there is nothing to be gained by at once running off like a hare-hound in pursuit of ways, means and possible culprits. Thinking again of Montaigne’s remark, I understood that my own soul’s predilection, in contrast to Fidelis’s, was not to ask who killed, and how. It sought to explain the deeper causes of the death by examining what followed from it.

  It was late. I yawned, shut the book and placed the guard before the embers of the fire. It was time to go upstairs.

  * * *

  I found Elizabeth in bed, but still awake and with a book of her own. It was Mr Richardson’s Pamela, the craze that had arrived in Preston like an epidemic and was now at its peak, raging among the ladies with such intensity that it seemed they spoke of little else. I had bought my wife the novel at Sweeting’s only a few days before, but she was already more than half way to the end.

  ‘I am thinking I am on the wrong path with the Pimbo business,’ I mentioned to her, as I slipped off my shoes and began to unroll my stockings.

  I could not see Elizabeth’s face behind the book. She lay slightly curled, as if wrapped around it, her eyes held on a tight rein by the lines of print.

  ‘Fidelis is fixed like a fish on a hook by the idea that Pimbo was somehow murdered. Can you believe it?’

  There was still no response as Elizabeth read on. I unbuttoned my breeches, stepped out of them and, turning to the glass, addressed my stock. As I did so, she spoke.

  ‘I doubt that Pamela’s master would untie his stock with his legs bare.’

  I saw that she was peeping at me over the top of Pamela but, before I could reply, she gave a giggle and immersed herself again in the story. I tried twice more to interest her in my difficulties over Pimbo, to be ignored the first time and then be told:

  ‘Titus, dearest, I am reading!’

  Nightshirted by now, I rolled into bed and lay still. The only sounds were those of passers-by outside our window on Cheapside, of Elizabeth’s fingers turning Mr Richardson’s pages, and of her mouth giving out an occasional ‘Oh! Ha!’ of surprise or pleasure at some twist in the tale. After five minutes of this, I blew out the candle on my side of the bed and composed myself to sleep.

  Chapter Five

  SHORTLY AFTER NINE on the next morning, Luke Fidelis and I stood at the door of Cadley Place.

  ‘The patient you come to see this morning will interest you, Luke,’ I had told him as we rode across the Moor. ‘Miss Peel has brains and striking beauty, yet she hasn’t married. I wonder why.’

  ‘Many men would rather eat thistles than marry an intelligent wife.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Oh no, Titus. I run the other way. I would favour rank ugliness over gross stupidity.’

  ‘While hoping to avoid either.’

  ‘Naturally. Anyway I am in no position to marry. I must establish myself first. There are still four medical men in Preston with bigger practices than me. I shall marry when I have the largest.’

  ‘But do you not feel the want of being with a woman?’

  He looked at me with a faint smile.

  ‘As much as any man. But I know how to supply the want, Titus – though naturally not in this town of gossips.’

  Don’t imagine from this exchange that Luke Fidelis had an adamantine heart, indifferent to sentiment. There had been a time not long ago when his heart had been much battered, if not quite broken, by a girl who’d come to Preston but had proved beyond his reach.

  ‘Did I mention I shall be in Liverpool tomorrow night?’ he said carelessly, after our horses had taken a few more paces. ‘It occurs to me that you must wish to communicate with the Liverpool scrivener that Pimbo talked about, Zadok Moon. May I be of service in that respect?’

  I did not ask for details of what he would be doing in Mayor Grimshaw’s cesspit of vice. I said instead that, yes, I would be obliged it he would carry a letter to Moon.

  * * *

  Our ring on the door was answered by the same little maid as I had met before. This time she took us straight to the housekeeper’s parlour, where Miss Peel stood at her table shortening the stems of some crimson roses. Having just the one working arm she could not use scissors, and so had laid the stems on a board and was hacking off the ends with a knife.

  I introduced the doctor who asked if she permitted him to examine her arm. With that half smile of hers she nodded her head, at which point it was my part
to withdraw. I suggested I might be allowed access to the contents of Mr Pimbo’s desk during her conference with the doctor. She rang a handbell and the little servant appeared.

  ‘Peggy will show you to the master’s study. The desk is unlocked. I do not know what’s in it.’

  The study into which the maid showed me was on the ground floor, and stood next to the salon in which I had met old Mrs Pimbo. Its window looked out of the side of the house over a dusty path, a lawn and a clump of bushes, or what the up-to-date Mr Pimbo would have called a shrubbery.

  ‘This is sad news about your master, Peggy,’ I remarked as she showed me in.

  ‘Yes, Sir. We are shocked, Sir.’

  ‘Had the servants noticed anything that might explain it? I wonder if Mr Pimbo had recently changed in his manner.’

  She shrugged her thin shoulders.

  ‘There’s only one thing they’re saying in kitchen, Sir. That he’d gone off his food. In two days he’d not ate a proper meal but only piddled it round his plate. That’s what cook said, not me, Sir. I never saw it. I’m only three weeks here, and I’m not let in to wait table just yet.’

  ‘Have you been told anything of how you are all situated? About what the future may now bring?’

  ‘No, Sir. Nothing. But if I am going home I shall not mind.’

  ‘You have not been happy here?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Sir.’

  But I could tell it was true. I felt the whole household to be locked in unhappiness, but without a key to the secret it was not possible to know why.

  This thought reminded me that one of my tasks this day was to find a more tangible key. I dismissed Peggy, and made a quick survey of the room to see where a man might keep one – a large brass key to match that which I had yesterday seen in Hazelbury’s hand. There was no hook-board of the kind on which keys are hung. Two small vases stood at each end of the mantel, both empty, and a flat matching dish between them on which lay a clay pipe and nothing more. On a side table there was a snuff barrel, half full, from which I took a pinch and enjoyed a sneeze.