Death Makes No Distinction

by Lucienne Boyce

  “Why – I – I – yes, I was asking that very question before you arrived.”

  Dan swung round and looked at Townsend, who ignored him and continued, “Yes, it’s what you might call a quandary. Howsomever, that’s a question we can settle when the villain is in custody. To my mind, following the diamonds is the best way to go.”

  “Well, you know best,” George said. “And now, I had better get back to Lady Jersey. She will be growing impatient, and you know what a termagant she is when that happens. Be sure to keep me informed of progress.”

  “Your Royal Highness,” Townsend said, bounding forward to open the door for the Prince.

  Chapter Seven

  “Can I be of further assistance, Mr Townsend?” Agnes Taylor asked when he came stomping back a few moments later. “There are the – the arrangements to consider.”

  “Of course, ma’am,” Townsend muttered, hardly noticing her going.

  “We should ask her if she knows who’s mentioned in the memoirs and who might have a reason to stop their publication,” Dan said when they were alone.

  “We are not going to waste time on the damned book.”

  “But the Prince seems to think it’s important.”

  “Never you mind what the Prince thinks. In any case, find the diamonds and we’ll find the book. If it hasn’t ended up down somebody’s privy as bum fodder by then, and I don’t see how I can prevent that, though God knows I’ll do my best for him.”

  “The Prince wants us to find it?”

  “It’s nothing to do with you what the Prince wants. Like I said, I want you to question the servants.”

  “Why does he want the book, if he’s sure he’s not in it?”

  “Because he does.” Townsend glowered at Dan, then relented. “He thinks it might contain information that could be useful to him. He wants us to find it and give it to him. Discreetly. You understand, Foster?”

  “He hopes Miss Parmeter’s revelations might give him something to use against political enemies.”

  “What he hopes is none of your business. I’m going to Jermyn Street to speak to the jeweller. I’ll join you back here later and you can make your report.” Townsend stalked out of the room.

  “Fool,” Dan muttered.

  Townsend was right about one thing. Find the diamonds and the book would not be far away. The question remained, though: which had the killer come for?

  Dan looked at the huddled body. Louise Parmeter couldn’t answer his questions for him. Starting with the servants wasn’t such a bad idea.

  He went down to the basement where he found two constables standing at the open door of the servants’ dining room. Inside, the servants were gathered around the table, drinking coffee and talking in subdued voices. In answer to Dan’s query, the younger of the two officers suggested that the butler’s pantry would be a suitable place to hold the interviews. As Townsend had directed before the Prince arrived, Dan sent the other man to pair up with his colleague in the hall and go and make enquiries along the lane at the back of the house.

  The butler’s pantry was a combination of storage, work and office space. There was a deep sink with a wooden draining board on which stood a tray of decanters and wine glasses waiting to be cleaned. Above it a barred window looked out on to the area railings. The walls were lined with shelves of cleaning materials. A brown apron hung inside the door. At the side of the room, a heavy iron door fitted with one of Bramah’s unpickable locks led to the strongroom where the jewellery, household plate and cash were stored.

  Dan piled the account books and receipts on the desk to one side to make space for his notes and sat down. Two sets of footsteps sounded on the flagged passageway. The young constable knocked and brought in Dan’s first witness, and what was even more welcome: a cup of coffee. Here was a man with a bright future in the police service, Dan thought, sending the constable back to the servants in the dining room.

  The newcomer frowned at the disarranged desk. “I am Mr Parkes, the butler.”

  Admittedly, Dan did not have much experience of butlers, but he had thought they were chosen to look impressive at their employers’ glittering tables. There was no faulting Parkes in the matter of dress, but he was narrow-chested and spindly-legged and had a sallow, bony face that must look like a death’s head at the feast.

  Dan motioned him to a chair. “Who has the key to the safe?”

  “I keep the only one. It is on my person at all times.”

  “And the house keys?”

  “The housekeeper has the indoor keys. I have all the outer ones.”

  “Including the key to the gate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does anyone else have one?”

  Parkes hesitated.

  “If anyone else has a key, you need to tell me. Otherwise I might have to think that it was you who opened the gate.”

  The butler sucked his lower lip, finally brought himself to answer, “Miss Parmeter had a key.”

  “I didn’t find one in her study. Where did she keep it?”

  “You will have to ask Miss Dean, her lady’s maid.”

  Dan made a note. “So Miss Parmeter could have opened the gate herself and admitted a visitor without anyone else knowing about it.”

  “My mistress is – was – entitled to her privacy. For years she was the subject of scurrilous and malicious gossip.”

  Hardly surprising given her history, Dan thought.

  “Was she expecting someone this morning?”

  “That I do not know.”

  “But if she was, would you have any idea who?”

  “No. Again, that is a question for Miss Dean.”

  “Where were you this morning?”

  Dan noted down a lengthy account of consultations with the cook about the evening’s dinner arrangements; trips to the cellars; correspondence with the vintner; work at the accounts here in his room; the issue of instructions to the footmen; and a host of other mundane duties.

  “What will you do now? Seek another position?”

  “I shall not remain in service. After working for Miss Parmeter, I could not work for anyone else. I have always had the ambition to set up as a grocer, selling to the quality, you understand. We shall bring our plans forward.”

  “We?”

  “Miss Evans, the first housemaid, and I plan to marry.”

  “Expensive, starting out in business. Not to mention getting married.”

  “She’s a capable woman, will be an asset to the business. And I have some money put by. And if I had not, I would not line my pocket by killing the best mistress a man ever had.” He paused, then said in a rush, “I knew her when she was a girl, working with her mother as a dresser in the theatre at Bristol. You’d never think she was going to turn into a beauty if you’d seen her then, so gawky as she was. No one was more surprised than I when I heard she’d become a fashionable figure in society. I was in desperate straits myself, had lost money on an investment in a Newfoundland fishery. I applied to her when all other sources of help had failed me. She remembered me and offered me work. I have been with her ever since.”

  “She didn’t mind that you knew about her humble background?”

  “She never denied it. So, no, she didn’t mind.”

  The housekeeper came in next. She was a quick, busy woman in her late thirties, with a manner as rigid as her whalebone casing. She confirmed what Parkes had said about the keys. Her morning had also been a productive one: sorting the linen cupboard with one of the housemaids; preparing the tradesmen’s weekly orders; checking that the housemaids had dusted furniture and polished grates to the required standard.

  “Will you look for similar work?” Dan asked.

  She smiled coyly. “I think not. I am expecting to go into the grocery business.”

  Dan glanced back through his notes.
He had definitely written that Parkes intended to marry Miss Evans, the first housemaid. Hastily, he brought the conversation to a close.

  The housekeeper was followed by Sarah Dean, the lady’s maid. She was an attractive, fashionable young woman, who would have spent more time with Louise Parmeter than any of the others. It had not lowered her opinion of her mistress and her grief seemed genuine. She told Dan she had spent the morning tidying Louise Parmeter’s wardrobe, added that her mistress was generous in the matter of cast-off petticoats and gowns.

  “You’d know a great deal about Miss Parmeter’s private affairs?”

  “If you mean affairs of the heart, of course.”

  “Was there one? An affair of the heart, one that she wanted kept secret?”

  Sarah regarded Dan for a moment before answering, “You think a lover killed her?”

  “I don’t think anything yet.”

  “Come now, Mr Foster, you think like a law officer. A lover murdered her and so she brought it on herself.”

  “I’ve never known a murder victim yet who was to blame for their own murder.”

  She arched her eyebrows. “Then perhaps you are in the wrong job.”

  “It will help me to find Miss Parmeter’s killer if you answer the question.”

  She considered this for a moment, then said, “She had recently been close to Mr Cruft of the banking family. Young Mr Cruft. But she had begun to find him tedious, since he asked her to marry him.”

  “He’s a rich man. It would have been a good marriage.”

  “It would have been, like all marriages, a prison. And why would Miss Parmeter shackle herself to a husband? She had money of her own, and independence.”

  “How did Cruft take his dismissal?”

  She smiled. “He tried to stab himself.”

  “You find that funny?”

  “So it was. He burst in on one of Miss Parmeter’s literary gatherings, produced a small knife, flung himself around the room declaring his love for her, then pinked himself in the arm. If he thought she was the sort to swoon over a drop of blood, he soon realised his mistake. When she had finished laughing, she told him he had a promising career in comedy and said she would recommend him to Mr Sheridan. The man’s a fool.”

  “Even fools have their pride.”

  “Considering how he howled over a tiny scratch, I doubt he has the courage to commit a murder. I’ve never seen such a nerveless creature.”

  The weak, Dan thought, could sometimes be surprisingly ferocious, if goaded sufficiently. If Cruft went to Berkeley Square to confront Louise and the conversation grew heated, rage got the better of him, the candlestick as murder weapon came easily to hand, the diamonds hastily snatched to make it look like an ordinary robbery, the memoirs removed for fear of embarrassing revelations…

  “Was it Mr Cruft she was expecting to pay a secret call this morning?”

  Sarah looked surprised. “She wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “But she did secretly receive visitors in the mornings?”

  “In the past, when circumstances demanded. But there has been no one for some time now. And there was nothing secret about the affair with Mr Cruft. Not all her lovers were so feeble, though. Lord Hawkhurst was very put out when she ended their affair. The man is a philanderer, has used and abandoned a score of women, but like all such creatures he cannot abide to be the one who is abandoned. He took to sending Miss Parmeter gifts: a pair of black mourning gloves; a black hatband; black ostrich feathers; a silver coffin plate engraved ‘Here Lies a Whore’. But it all stopped months ago.”

  “Did Miss Parmeter keep any of the gifts?”

  “Of course not. She threw them in the rubbish where they belonged.”

  “Where did she keep her key to the garden gate?”

  “In a jewellery box in her bedroom.”

  “Can you show me?”

  “Now?”

  Dan shut his notebook. “Yes, now.”

  Miss Parmeter’s body had been moved to her bedroom, where it was about to be washed and dressed by the two respectably aged women sent by the firm Agnes Taylor had employed to make the funeral arrangements. They had got as far as laying out bowls, towels and a shroud. Dan told them to wait outside.

  Sarah, averting her eyes from the figure lying on the bed and the paraphernalia surrounding it, opened a drawer in the dressing table and took out the key to a box decorated with Chinese scenes that stood on top of the table. Dan unlocked the casket. Inside, amongst what he assumed were her least valuable trinkets, lay a large key which he guessed fitted the garden gate. He pocketed it and he and Sarah left the room. Dan signalled to the women that they could return to their work.

  “What are your plans now, Miss Dean?” asked Dan.

  “Many women envied Miss Parmeter’s style and believe that if they employ her maid, they will be able to match it. I shall have to choose my next situation carefully. Even I cannot perform miracles.”

  He thanked her and let her go.

  Dan returned to the butler’s room. The questioning went on with the cook, two footmen, two housemaids (one of them Mr Parkes’s capable Miss Evans), and a scullery maid. They all had tales of Louise Parmeter’s generosity and kindness: help in time of sickness; an apprenticeship for a younger brother or sister; a pension for an aged relative. At the end of it all, Dan had a complicated schedule of alibis that put each of the servants in view of one or more of their colleagues between 9 a.m., when Louise Parmeter went into her study, and shortly after midday, when her body was discovered. No one had seen her during that time and her standing instructions were that she was not to be disturbed while she was working. From time to time one or other of the servants had crossed the hall as they went about their business, but none had heard any sounds coming from her room.

  Dan shuffled his notes together and put them in his pocket. The constables reported back from their canvass of the lane, which, apart from the stables, was occupied by small businesses serving the great houses in the square. No one had seen or heard anything. When Dan had dismissed them, he decided there should be enough daylight left to take a look outside. He went back up to the study.

  He opened the door into the garden, checked the ground inside and out for footprints and found none. Three steps from the terrace led down to a gravel path. Dan walked along it, past the wide flowerbed which lay between the path and the high outer wall. The garden looked bleak and empty, but here and there tightly furled buds gave early signs of spring.

  The garden ended in a small patch of woodland. It was dim and damp under the branches, the soil promisingly bare. Unfortunately, Townsend and the constables had already trampled the area around the gate, which was now locked. Dan tried Louise’s key and confirmed that it fitted.

  The wall was topped by broken glass, but that did not make it impossible for a determined person to scale. With the trees as cover, they would stand a good chance of not being seen from the house as they dropped down. Risky though, and they could not fail to attract attention in the busy lane on the other side. Townsend’s conclusion that someone in the house had let the killer in seemed the likeliest explanation at the moment.

  Dan heard a light tread on his right. There was someone creeping through the trees. He peered into the gloom, could just make out a shape drawing near. He stepped behind a trunk and waited.

  Chapter Eight

  A woman’s figure became more distinct as she moved through the dappled shade, head bent, a white handkerchief fluttering in her hand. Dan stepped forward and took off his hat.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Taylor.”

  “Mr Foster! I didn’t know you were there.”

  She wiped her face, made a brave attempt to stop crying, failed. “Oh dear, forgive me, it has all been so awful.”

  He held out his arm. “Why don’t you come and sit down? I saw a bench over there.�
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  “Yes, the rustic seat.” She placed her hand on his sleeve, let him guide her to the tiny glade with its carefully fashioned rough arbour. Dan settled her on the bench and sat down next to her.

  “You are so kind. It’s just that I don’t know what’s to become of me now Miss Parmeter has gone. I know I shouldn’t be thinking of myself, but I don’t know where I shall go, what I shall do.”

  “There, Miss Taylor, it’s natural you should be worried about your future. There isn’t a servant in the house who doesn’t feel the same way.”

  She stiffened. “I’m not a servant.”

  “I know. You’re Miss Parmeter’s protégée. Which means what, exactly?”

  “She has been my guide and mentor, and has helped me to make good the deficiencies of my education. As if it could have been anything but deficient, when I was constrained to devote all my energies to the sordid business of obtaining the necessities of life. Sometimes, Mr Foster, I have thought the Muses must be very cruel to visit someone in my position.”

  “What was your position?”

  “I worked in my mother’s millinery business. She had no choice but to go into trade after Father died. Of course, this meant I had less time to dedicate to my literary studies and I had all but given up hope of ever joining the pantheon of poets until one day Mother told me to bring some hats to Miss Parmeter. Mother, of course, had no idea who she was, but I had read all her work. I brought the hats, and I brought one of my poems with them. A pastoral… The shining hill where Flora springs, / Where wafts the southern breeze, / The woodland grove where warblers sing, / Where sigh the ancient trees—”

  “Very pretty,” Dan said, wondering how anyone could stand such stuff. The only verses he ever read were those printed in The Sporting Magazine, with refrains such as “A boxing we will go, will go.”

  She smiled. “Do you think so?”

  She was not so plain as her blotched face had suggested. She was not dazzling, but pretty enough in an unassuming way. Perhaps if her dress were more flattering, she would even be a beauty.