Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  ‘Of course, everyone is so uncommonly polite when a man kills himself,’ Captain McTurk said. ‘Well, here is another letter from that man who lived next to him saying that Happerton drove him to it.’

  ‘Should you like me to go Lincolnshire?’ Mr Masterson asked, when he had read the letter, but Captain McTurk shook his head.

  ‘I think not. The fellow who half-killed Robinson on his doorstep with the butler a yard behind the door is to be tried in a week, and I particularly want a conviction. No, I think I shall go and see Mr Gresham. It was his daughter Happerton married. No doubt I can find out a good deal more from him than could be got by asking Happerton questions which he mightn’t like to answer.’

  Of course Captain McTurk knew Mr Gresham. How he could not know him? Everyone knows everyone else. The butler in one house nods to the butler in the next as he passes him on the street. The Mayor of Norwich knows the Mayor of Ipswich and bows to him at municipal dinners. General Smith of the Buffs knows Colonel Jones of the Blues, for they were at school together. It took Captain McTurk ten minutes to think of some legal point on which he needed Mr Gresham’s opinion, to have a letter written and a messenger ordered to take it round to Belgrave Square. It was then quite late on Monday evening and so the letter, although received by the butler, was not given to Mr Gresham until breakfast time on the Tuesday morning. Here, as might be expected, it was generally discussed by those present – Mr Gresham, Mr Happerton and his wife.

  ‘It is from Captain McTurk,’ Mr Gresham said, putting on his spectacles, the better to read the note.

  ‘Oh indeed’ (Mr Happerton). ‘There is nothing amiss, I hope?’

  ‘There is a Chancery case he wants my opinion on. Though why he should come to me when there are a dozen Home Office lawyers to advise him, I can’t imagine.’ Mr Gresham had never thought very much of the Home Office.

  ‘You would hardly like to receive him in your current state of health I think, Papa,’ said Mrs Happerton impartially.

  Mr Gresham was certainly rather frail. It was a bright early summer morning, but he sat huddled in a dressing gown and complained of cold. Though pressed by his daughter to eat, he had managed only half a cup of tea and the end of a roll. His infirmity, such as it was, had lately begun to declare itself as a kind of vagueness. When brought downstairs he would sit looking out of the window or drowsing over the newspaper. Once, emerging from one of these stupors, he had mistaken his daughter for her mother. The awareness of this mistake, when it was brought home to him, had been very painful. But he was interested in Captain McTurk’s letter, and his hand shook less as he held it up in front of his spectacles.

  ‘I have heard of Captain McTurk,’ said Mr Happerton, who was eating kidneys as if he had been half-starved. They had been very lightly cooked, and spots of blood dripped from the end of his knife. ‘Wasn’t he the man who took Morley the cracksman in full view at Shoreditch Station?’

  ‘If you like, Papa, I shall write to Captain McTurk and say that you are not well enough to see him,’ Mrs Happerton volunteered.

  ‘And such a busy time, too,’ Mr Happerton said, in the most genial way. ‘I wonder Captain McTurk has the leisure to pay calls in Belgrave Square.’

  But Mr Gresham thought that he would like to see Captain McTurk, and could not be gainsaid. And so a letter was written by Mrs Happerton inviting him to call. I am afraid that my father is distinctly unwell, Mrs Happerton wrote in a codicil that Mr Gresham never saw, and we greatly fear that such a visit would not repay your trouble. Nevertheless, Captain McTurk said that he would call, and such was his enthusiasm that he arrived on the very next afternoon.

  There were a great many visitors to the house in Belgrave Square these days, among whom Captain McTurk did not perhaps seem so very significant. Horsey-looking gentlemen came to confer with Mr Happerton. Emissaries from livery stables and the sporting press were regularly entertained in the servants’ quarters. Major Hubbins had been twice to dinner, stepping very cautiously on his injured knee (he hoped, he said, that the weather would keep up and they should have a nice, bright day of it, as had been the case in ’43 when he had done great things – but not, alas, the greatest thing of all – on Lord Emley’s Kingfisher). The only absentee from this cavalcade of pundits, hay chandlers and horsebox proprietors, curiously enough, was Captain Raff, but Mr Happerton, though puzzled by his disappearance – when a man decides that another man shall be dropped, it is generally he that wants to do the dropping – and his disregard of a message or two sent to Ryder Street, did not particularly regret this desertion. He had had enough of Captain Raff. If Captain Raff wished to vanish into the ether, then that was up to Captain Raff. At the back of his mind was the fact that Captain Raff knew certain things about him that he would not wish to be made public knowledge, but at the same time he could think of no reason why Captain Raff should betray him. In the meantime he was very busy – Tiberius was now at some stables near Cheam and required daily visits – and, like Captain McTurk, the mystery of Captain Raff’s disappearance did not loom so very large as it might have done.

  He did not altogether like those visits to Cheam. Some of the people in the streets and the public houses knew who he was and saluted him, and the recognition pleased him and he returned the salutes. But going into the stables where the rival horses were kept – he did this incognito, standing at the back of the crowd with a newspaper held up to his hat-brim – a serious look came over his face. He thought Mr Abernethy’s Pendragon an absurd horse, that a Tiberius without the encumbrance of Major Hubbins on his back would beat by the length of the finishing straight, and that Lord Trumpington’s Septuagint had not been properly trained up and would suffer for it. And the odds, which he saw each day in the sporting papers or surreptitiously chalked up in the doorways of such public houses that had reached an accommodation with the police – Tiberius was at eight now, and you could get five on Baldino – made him shake with vexation. At these times he would go to Tiberius’ stable and stare at him as he stood in his stall, think that he was a true Arab, unlike these hybrid monstrosities that the world now favoured, and that it was a shame he could not have his due.

  And so the afternoon of Captain McTurk’s visit came. If he had hoped to have a private conversation with Mr Gresham he was not disappointed: Mr Happerton, clad in his brightest pair of top-boots and with a carriage waiting in the square, was on his way to Cheam and, meeting Captain McTurk as he passed through the hall, merely shook his hand and remarked on the fineness of the weather; there was no sign of Mr Gresham’s daughter, and Mr Gresham was alone in the drawing room. In fact, Captain McTurk had no such end in mind. His object in coming to Belgrave Square was merely to look about him, examine the world in which Mr Happerton moved, and try to establish what kind of man he was. Here he proved unexpectedly successful.

  The questions which Captain McTurk had brought for Mr Gresham took a minute to ask and twice that time to answer, after which the talk lapsed into pleasantries. ‘Heavens how these old men fall away,’ Captain McTurk said to himself as he helped Mr Gresham arrange himself upon his cushions and fill his tea cup.

  ‘You’re not very well, I believe?’ he said. It was the same question he had asked Mr File, but put with considerably more grace.

  ‘Well no, I suppose I’m not. Do you know, I never had a day’s illness in my life before, and now I feel as if I could sleep the whole afternoon?’

  ‘And yet you’re well looked after, I hope?’

  ‘Oh certainly. Why, I sometimes think I should have no visitors at all if it were left to my daughter, she is so solicitous of my health.’

  Meanwhile, Captain McTurk was looking around him. There was not, in truth, a great deal to see, one gentleman’s drawing room in Belgravia being much like another’s, but he noticed the picture of Tiberius, which now hung above the mantelpiece, and one or two other horsey items, including a copy of Post and Paddock left open at a very flaring article about the Derby.

  ‘I see your s
on-in-law is set to distinguish himself in the great race,’ he said, meaning to be polite.

  ‘Happerton? Yes, I suppose he is. I am afraid I hear very little about it,’ said Mr Gresham, who very soon afterwards fell fast asleep. Another visitor would perhaps have pulled the bell-rope and taken his leave, but Captain McTurk seemed disposed to linger. He spent a moment or two examining the line of invitation cards upon the mantelpiece, in which Mr and Mrs G. Happerton were bidden to evening parties and operatic recitals and Lady Fantail’s fête champêtre at Ponders End, looked at a bookcase in which Sir Walter Scott’s novels, their pages mostly uncut, very much predominated, and then proceeded by degrees to a sideboard covered with small pieces of china and other ornaments. Here Captain McTurk stopped and stood on his heels. There on the sideboard lay a silver salver on which two or three letters, clearly intended for the late afternoon post, stood awaiting collection by a domestic. Captain McTurk stared at them without much interest, switched his gaze to a painting of some Yorkshire scenery (Fauntleroy, RA) and then, almost without comprehending the instinct that drew him back, found himself staring at one of the letters again. Something in the superscription nagged at him, but he could not for the life of him determine what it was. A snore from the armchair made him raise his head, but Mr Gresham slept on. Again he looked at the writing on the first envelope, which was unorthodox and irregular, but somehow distinctive and familiar. Where had he seen it before? Then, like a lightning bolt falling out of a clear sky, the answer occurred to him: on the scrap of paper found on the floor of the poulterer’s cellar in Cornhill! There was a sound of movement beyond the doorway, rustling silks, a patter of footsteps, and in the split second left to him Captain McTurk picked up the letter and stuck it in the inner pocket of his coat. Then he turned on his heel, just as Mrs Happerton came into the room.

  ‘You must excuse me,’ Captain McTurk said – his hand was still in the pocket of his coat. ‘But your father has fallen fast asleep. I was about to take my leave.’

  ‘He is not very well,’ Mrs Happerton said, with what might have passed for a smile. ‘It is unfortunate that he had to be disturbed.’

  ‘He seemed pleased to see me,’ Captain McTurk said in mitigation.

  ‘Papa is pleased to see anyone.’

  If Captain McTurk remembered Mrs Rebecca, it was as a pale girl scarcely out of the schoolroom. Now, looking at her as she stood in the doorway, he was startled by the passage of the years. Her hair was sandier than ever and her green eyes blazed. He thought she was a fine-looking woman, but that Mr Happerton was welcome to her.

  ‘You will give him my compliments, perhaps, when he wakes?’

  ‘Oh certainly,’ Mrs Happerton said, with what to Captain McTurk sounded complete indifference.

  And Captain McTurk went back to Northumberland Street, steamed open the letter he had brought with him (which was a reply to a corn chandler’s bill and of no interest whatever) and satisfied himself that the man who had written it, and the man who had written the letter found on the cellar floor in Cornhill, were the same person, and that this person was undoubtedly Mr Happerton.

  *

  Captain McTurk sat in his room looking out over the grey stone yard, where the same lugubrious ostler was shovelling up the same pile of dung, while Mr Masterson lingered in the doorway.

  ‘We cannot arrest a man because his handwriting looks like the writing found on a sheet of paper at the scene of a burglary. Do you imagine Happerton robbed Gallentin’s shop?’

  ‘I cannot think that he did it himself,’ Mr Masterson said. ‘But it is perfectly possible that he employed someone else.’

  ‘And who was that, I wonder? Here we are racking our brains to find that man Pardew – there are half a dozen men wandering around Richmond as I speak – and yet he may be entirely innocent. Of this particular crime, I mean. You had better have Happerton watched. He will be down in Surrey, I dare say, before the race. Have someone see what he does. Do we know whom he associates with?’

  ‘Racing people of course,’ Mr Masterson said, who had already done his researches in this area. ‘There is that new club in Thavies Inn – the Blue Riband. They call it a new club, but they began with the Megatherium’s subscription list, I believe, and the dust hangs there just the same. I gather he is there pretty regularly with a Captain Raff.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever heard of Captain Raff.’

  ‘I believe he sold out of the Rifles. It is all very discreditable. You remember that affair of ——?’ And here Mr Masteron whispered a little failing or two of Captain Raff’s, over which Captain McTurk half-humorously shook his head.

  ‘Well, let us talk to Captain Raff in a friendly way. That, at any rate, can do no harm. Another specimen of Happerton’s handwriting would be a great thing to have, but I don’t suppose this Captain Raff carries them in his notecase. As for Pardew, you might let the papers know we have him in mind. We cannot drive him further from us than he is already, and it may prompt someone to recollect him. Have them put out his likeness, if you can.’

  Mr Masterson went off to execute these commissions, leaving Captain McTurk seated in his chair. For all his caution with Mr Masterson he was quite convinced, first, that Mr Pardew had robbed Mr Gallentin’s safe of its contents, and, second, that there was at any rate some connection between the robber and Mr Happerton. At the same time he could, as yet, see no way of proving this connection. The piece of paper found on the cellar floor had said nothing about Mr Gallentin’s jewellery. Though the handwriting might be shown to be Mr Happerton’s, it could not be proved that he had dropped it there, that it had been addressed to Mr Pardew, or that Mr Pardew had dropped it there himself. As so often, the evidence that Captain McTurk had before him was thoroughly suggestive, but inexact.

  Mr Masterson’s thoroughness, meanwhile, did him great credit. First he summoned an assistant, on whom he was accustomed to rely, and instructed him in the matter of Mr Happerton’s surveillance. Then he called the secretary who sat in the booth beyond Captain McTurk’s door and gave him the names of three or four newspaper editors who might be interested in a chronicle of Mr Pardew’s life and accomplishments. Finally, having consulted one or two files and a scrapbook that lay in a neat pile of such items on his desk, he put on his hat and walked across St James’s to Captain Raff’s lodgings in Ryder Street. It was a fine, bright afternoon, and one or two of the artists were about in the corridors – a model dressed as Charlemagne was being helped out of a cab as he arrived – but there was no sign of Captain Raff, nor anyone to answer his knock upon the door. And thinking that Captain Raff’s chambers looked very much as if no one lived in them, and that there were at least half a dozen messages written on villainous scraps of paper and stuffed under the foot of the door, Mr Masterston shook his head, gave one final, unanswered knock and went back the way he had come.

  XXIV

  Mount Street and beyond

  Who lives in Mount Street? Nobody knows. The directory may be full of the most distinguished names, it is just that none of them is ever at home there. It is, consequently, a shy place, full of maiden ladies in comfortable sequestration, noblemen’s mansions looked after by housekeepers while the family is away, and a quantity of young women whose business there can only be guessed at …

  The London Gazetteer (1868)

  ‘AND AM I to accompany you to Epsom?’

  The room in which this question was asked was a neat little feminine chamber on the first floor of a house in Mount Street. The person who asked it was a young woman of perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, fashionably dressed and with very white teeth. The person to whom it was addressed, sitting on a little sofa with his hat in his hand and a Pekinese dog sniffing round his ankles, was Mr Happerton. It was about three o’clock on a May afternoon, and from the open window, whose frame glowed picturesquely in the sunshine, came the sound of carriages rolling through Mayfair to the park.

  Did Mr Happerton look round the room with a faintly proprietorial
air? He certainly seemed at home there. It was one of those rooms that one sees a great deal in the illustrated papers, and over which fashionable decorators swarm. There was fresh paint on the door and new paper on the walls, and everything in it, the pair of lovebirds simpering in the cage by the window and perhaps even the young woman herself, looked as if it had been installed there only the other week. A bookcase by the far wall testified to somebody’s fondness for novels got from Mudie’s circulating library, and a round occasional table hard by confirmed that person’s interest in knick-knacks and ornaments of all kind. An arbiter of domestic fashions would have pronounced it ‘chaste’, but this was not perhaps an adjective that could have been applied to the young woman asking Mr Happerton if he would take her to Epsom. Was there something foreign about her? It was difficult to tell, and perhaps Mr Happerton had not gone into it. She was wearing a dress of watered silk from which the neatest little white slippers stuck out beneath, had very black hair and was as striking as one of Mr Leighton’s Attic portraits.

  ‘Am I to come with you?’ she asked again.

  Mr Happerton gave a half-smile, picked up the Pekinese in one hand and tried to place it on his lap, but got snapped at for his pains. He was looking at the heap of trinkets on the table – tiny bejewelled brooches in the shape of butterflies, little ivory fans from the St James’s arcade – and calculating how much he had paid for them. The smell coming in from the window was a horsey one, mingled with the scent of hay, and that reminded him of Tiberius and a dozen other things that pressed on his mind. Had he overreached himself? And was his presence here in the room in Mount Street, with the sound of the maidservant’s footsteps going down the stair and his feet sprawled out over a Turkey carpet that had come from Mr Delacroix’s shop in Bond Street, a part of that overreaching? Mr Happerton thought not. He was master of himself, and he would come and go as he pleased. But still he did not care to answer the question that had just been put to him. Instead he picked up his tea cup and looked squarely back at the black hair, the red mouth and the white teeth.