Anatomy of Murder

by Imogen Robertson

  After a pause of some minutes he gave a little nod and tapped the page with his forefinger.

  “Ah, yes. Here it is. My friend has been traveling on the continent and made the acquaintance of an apothecary called Alexis Duchâteau. He has been experimenting with porcelain for false teeth rather than ivory or wood. His experiments have not become particularly commercial as yet, though my friend says he had supplied some people with sets by way of experiment. Apparently he tries to give them to the great and good, or their friends, to try and build their popularity.” Gillis looked up at them and blinked.

  “And where is Mr. Alexis Duchâteau’s shop? Is he resident in Italy?” Crowther asked, a little impatient.

  Gillis smothered a yawn. “Dear Lord, no. Why would you think that? The French are the experts in this area. These teeth came from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. Nowhere else.”

  7

  Mr. Palmer found that his thoughts turned over better in his head when he could move rather than stare at the walls of his office at the Admiralty. He knew the ways well enough to walk without paying much attention to his immediate surroundings, instead thinking over his various stratagems and those he suspected might be in play against himself and his masters. He was just returning to the building and deciding how best to arrange a private meeting with Mrs. Westerman and Mr. Crowther when he realized he was about to trip over a small and very pale-faced lad who was looking fearfully up at the building’s imposing frontage.

  “Can I help you, boy?”

  The boy started. “I’m looking for the Admiralty Board. The head clerk.” He reached into the waistband of his breeches and pulled out a piece of paper, only slightly crumpled. “I’ve got a note.” He then noticed the paper was bent and began to try and smooth it against his thin chest. Mr. Palmer thought this treatment might do it more harm than good and put out his hand.

  “That’s Mr. Jacobs, I shall give it to him.” Once he had hold of the paper he flicked it open. The wife of one of the clerks had died suddenly and the man was requesting a half-day to bury her on the morrow. “Very well. Tell Mr. Mitchell he has the permission.” He reached into his purse and pulled out a shilling and put it into the boy’s hand. His fingers shut over it smartly and he turned to hurry out into the road again. Mr. Palmer frowned.

  “Boy!” The lad turned again and came back with great reluctance. When he had got close enough he opened his palm and offered the coin up again.

  “I knew you didn’t mean to give me a whole shilling.” His face was so sorry Mr. Palmer couldn’t fully conceal a smile.

  “No, boy. You may keep the coin. I just wanted to ask how his wife died. Was she with child?”

  “Broke her skull,” the boy said rather miserably. “So he says, anyway.”

  Mr. Palmer, his head full of Fitzraven, simply nodded. “Indeed. Convey our regrets and sympathies,” and when the boy looked entirely blank: “I mean tell him the gentlemen here say they are sorry for his loss.”

  The clouds on the boy’s face cleared and he trotted out into the road.

  8

  Mrs. Westerman had been oddly subdued on their journey back to Berkeley Square, and had retired to her room as soon as the household had dined, complaining of a headache. Crowther shut himself in the library in an ill humor and wondered briefly if she had been thinking of her husband again.

  Mrs. Westerman was very rarely ill, but since her husband had returned she had suffered headaches with greater frequency. It irritated Crowther that she was now unavailable at times when he wished for her company, and he hoped that as her husband’s health improved, her own would do the same. Her indisposition was not the only reason for his souring mood, however. The discovery that Fitzraven had been strangled rather than drowned had been a professional disappointment. It would have been of interest to add to the literature on the state of a body after drowning, to see if the pink foam in the throat he had observed in some animal experiments was present, for example, but a throttling was ordinary. Equally, an active investigation into a death ran counter to his habits of solitary study. It put him out among people far more than he liked, or was used to. However, he had agreed to help Mr. Palmer and serve his king, so with a slight growl in his own throat he went to work composing and sending a large number of notes, then awaiting their replies in the comfort of the library. Thus he avoided at least the perils of conversation for some hours. If he realized the inconvenience he caused in Graves’s household by sending off its staff to several corners of the city bearing his requests, he gave no sign of it. He had enough left of those habits of command that he had developed in his youth to ignore completely what it did not suit him to see, and his rather brittle mood made him even less likely to consider the convenience of others than usual.

  His activities caused enough upset in the house for the housekeeper, Mrs. Martin, to be more than a little shocked when she came back from her half-day and found her domain downstairs to be in nothing like its usual order.

  “It’s no good frowning at me, Mrs. Martin,” said the cook over her shoulder as she tried to assemble a nursery tea in a battlefield of unwashed crockery and the wreckage from the preparation and serving of dinner. “Mr. Crowther’s been sending ’em out one after the other since we cleared table, and you know what they’re like. They’re all, ‘Ooh, we’re helping solve a murder, Cook!’ as if they are heroes and heroines in a storybook. Alice and Cecily sent themselves into hysterics imagining they might be carrying a letter of accusation to the killer himself, but when I told them they should wait till Philip or Gregory got back and let them do the carrying of notes, if they were that nervous, they looked daggers at me and rushed out of the place so fast they hardly had time to fasten their cloaks.”

  She pulled open the bread drawer and began to attack the loaf she found there with a sharp knife. She was an experienced cutter, but Crowther might have questioned the delicacy of her movements. “I’m sorry this Mr. Fitzraven fellow is dead, but I wish he had just got stupid drunk and fallen in the river like a decent man. I have no idea what I am feeding those little kiddies with this evening, and if Mr. Graves and Mrs. Service want to give supper to their guests tonight, we’ll have to send to the chophouse. There’s not a clean pan left to roast in anywhere in the kitchen, and Mary should have been mending this evening, not setting fires.”

  Mrs. Martin did not reply, but put on her apron. The vigor with which she began to scrub the half-empty dishes was eloquent enough. She had been very pleased to gain her position at Berkeley Square, since she was still rather young to have such responsibility, and most would have thought her a little delicate in her appearance for such a role. However, Graves had liked her, Mrs. Service was pleased with her references, and her generous pay meant her only child could be comfortably boarded in Putney. Yet things had changed. The household she presided over was now twice the size it had been, and up and down the streets around Berkeley Square the talk was all Mrs. Westerman and Crowther and murder. Biting her lip, she picked up another dish, which, albeit very elegant, seemed designed only to catch brown scraps of gravy in its corners and nurse them.

  The young people’s tea was a great success, fortunately, and Lord Thornleigh, his sister and their friends spent much of it in debate trying to think what good deed they had done to deserve their bread and butter being cut so thick.

  Crowther had been lucky in Graves’s choice of servants. Each one of his messengers returned with communications, written and verbal, for which he thanked them sincerely. They then resumed their duties with a certain energy—enough to make Mrs. Service remark when she put her head around the door that Crowther had managed to do them all a power of good. He had looked at her with surprise. She did not try to explain, but withdrew to go about her own business and that of the children with a smile of her own.

  When Harriet found him out as the evening deepened and the candles settled coins of light around them, he was seated behind Graves’s desk with a number of pieces of paper arrayed about
him, a frown of concentration on his face.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “I heard from Daniel Clode yesterday. Things seem to go well without us in Sussex. I left Graves with his head bent over the new plans for the works at Thornleigh, I have seen the accounts after the harvest at Caveley, and Michaels sends us his regards.”

  Crowther nodded but did not reply. She walked up to the desk and peered at the sheets in front of him, trying to read his thin high script upside down. “But what have you been about this afternoon, Crowther? You seem to have spilled a quantity of ink. To what purpose?”

  Her tone rankled, and he punished her for it by making her wait while he gathered his papers and tapped them straight before he replied.

  “It has been spilled usefully, I think. We shall call on Mr. Manzerotti tomorrow morning. It appears he is in residence at Lord Carmichael’s.”

  “Is he, indeed? How interesting! I wonder how that came to pass.”

  Crowther answered with a drawl. “Lord Carmichael has traveled extensively on the continent and has a reputation as a music lover. I would not be surprised if he made Manzerotti’s acquaintance there. Whoever gave Fitzraven an introduction to Carmichael was probably also someone he knew from his time there.” Harriet looked as if she were about to ask something further, but Crowther continued: “And later in the day I have an appointment to meet Mr. Bywater at the British Museum.”

  Harriet raised her eyebrows. “Why there?”

  “Apparently Bywater has tickets for admittance and hopes I might enjoy looking at old pots.”

  She sighed and took a seat in front of the fire, settling deeply into the armchair like a child. “I cannot imagine he phrased it so.”

  “He did not, but his own rather florid rhetoric drives me toward the demotic.”

  “And how am I to spend my time, pray, while you are admiring the antiquities?”

  Crowther did not look at her when he replied, “If your health allows it, madam, Lord Carmichael will be at the Foundling Hospital between the middle of the day and when he returns home to dine. He would be happy to have some conversation with you then.” She was silent and he knew she would be looking at him now, concerned and seeking.

  “I have never seen you scared of meeting another man, Crowther.”

  “It is not fear, Mrs. Westerman,” he said, with a slight snap of annoyance. He could hear the tap of her fingers against the cloth of her satin sleeves; it was a sound like rain on canvas.

  “Did that man have some involvement in your father’s murder?” she asked finally.

  He was conscious of relief that he had not needed to be more direct with her, and gratitude that she knew him well enough to reach this conclusion so swiftly, but more than anything he was aware of the regularity with which the past kept reaching forward across a passage of thirty years and placing its cold, wet palms on his throat.

  “The motive for my father’s murder by my brother was financial, Mrs. Westerman. He was not well-disciplined; had run through his allowance and collected a large number of debts. My father was not the sort of man to be forgiving in such situations.”

  Harriet did not respond. He knew she was allowing him to speak in his own time, and could not decide in the strange mist of emotion his memories dragged through him, if he was pleased or a little humiliated by her unusual tact.

  “Lord Carmichael was a friend of my brother’s—or so my brother thought,” he continued. “The man was poor then himself, but used my brother’s money to fund his own debauches and then led him into a way of life that destroyed him. I would say that, more than any other man, he is responsible for the deaths in my family. He since married money. That is the source of his current wealth though his wife died some years ago.”

  He ran his fingers down the edges of his papers, though they were already straight. “He also let it be known in town he could have seduced my sister out of the schoolroom, and would have done had he not been persuaded there was no immediate profit in it.”

  There was a rustle of fabric on leather as Mrs. Westerman drew herself straight.

  “You have a sister, Crowther? Is she living?”

  He looked up to see her staring at him, her lips slightly parted and a blush of surprise on her face.

  “I do. She is. She married a gentleman from Austria and has lived abroad since my father’s death.”

  “Crowther,” Harriet sighed, “you never fail to astonish. You, who know so much of all of my household, announce that you have a sister—and seem to think it strange I am amazed by the revelation.” She paused, and the firelight caught the red in her hair. “Though why I should be surprised, I do not know. After all, you have never even told me your brother’s name.”

  Crowther dropped his gaze back to the tabletop. “It was Adair. Lucius Adair, more formally, but my mother only ever called him Addie. My sister has a son, but lives apart from her husband. I have never had a wife or children. Is that biography sufficient to you?”

  “Adair. Is that not an Irish name?”

  “It is. My mother was Irish.”

  She was quiet again, and Crowther looked sideways at her profile, trying to see if she were angry with him. She seemed only calm and thoughtful, however.

  “I can understand why you might think it more politic for me to meet with Carmichael alone, but do you not fear encountering him when we see Manzerotti?”

  “My lord expects to be at cards all night, and will not rise till he must to travel to the Foundling Hospital.”

  Harriet slumped again in her chair, and with the appearance of brisk good humor, said, “You have our itinerary for the day mapped out. I thank you. Any other information gained?”

  Crowther felt some muscle around his throat relax and began to speak more easily. The memory of the lightness Miss Marin had achieved with her narrative passed like a breeze through his mind.

  “The main points are these,” he said. “Mr. Fitzraven’s last employment at His Majesty’s Theatre was supervising the copying of parts for the band for the new duet on Wednesday afternoon, as we know. He was seen about the opera house on Thursday morning. Mrs. Girdle was visiting her sister in Clapham on Thursday, so when he returned to his lodgings, and for what purpose, we cannot say.”

  “Anything further?”

  Crowther cleared his throat. “I have the correct and relevant information as to the movement of the tides on the Thames. It is likely the body was weighted and thrown into the river at high tide, and that would be roughly halfway between midnight and dawn on Saturday, according to the boatmen at Westminster.”

  Harriet leaned forward and put her chin in her hands. “So where are we at, Crowther? Here is Fitzraven, a deeply unpleasant character, possibly a traitor, who abandoned his daughter then found her again when there was profit in it; who has managed, we know not how, to continue his employment at His Majesty’s Theatre despite being disliked there, and insinuate his way into the graces of a peer.” She glanced up at Crowther, then back to the fire with a smile. “You must resist the temptation to sneer whenever Lord Carmichael is mentioned, Crowther. It does not become you. We also believe that he spent some time in Paris, collecting teeth and Lord knows what else, when he was supposed to be only in Milan, that he loved the opera for all the wrong reasons, and suggested to people he knew its secrets. We know too that he had more money in his pocket since the performers arrived in London, though Miss Marin says she did not give him that, and someone has recently found it convenient to throttle him. Have I everything clear so far?”

  Crowther leaned back in his own chair. “You do, madam. Though I have one more fact and one more conjecture to offer you.”

  “You proffer them like sweetmeats to a baby. Say on, sir.”

  “The main performers of the serious opera arrived three weeks ago; the players of the comic opera and the ballet master arrived only earlier this week, so it seems unlikely that any of them paid Fitzraven, though he may in that time have given them reason to throttle him . . .”<
br />
  Harriet nodded. “And your conjecture?”

  “I was thinking again of the papers in Fitzraven’s bedchamber. The letters from Isabella were well-concealed: we would not have thought to examine the case but for your moment of musical whimsy, but there were no others. He must have had other correspondence, yet no sign of it remained, nor were there any records of his income, which, given that he was so careful to note his expenses, seems unusual.”

  Harriet frowned. “You are suggesting, I think, that someone other than Fitzraven . . .”

  “I am wondering, Mrs. Westerman, if we were not the first to search Fitzraven’s room, and what those missing letters might have contained.”

  As Harriet sprang to her feet again, Crowther wondered vaguely if she had ever managed to keep her seat for more than ten minutes at a time.

  “It would certainly explain the lack of ready money, or any note of where Fitzraven’s newfound wealth came from,” she said. “And it would seem to suggest that my liking of Miss Marin is well-founded. She would not have left her own letters there and removed his pocketbook, only to return for them later. Perhaps Mr. Tompkins from the rooms below will be better able to tell us of the comings and goings in the house.”

  She turned to him and smiled. He thought perhaps her looks were beginning to improve a little.

  “But I must visit the children. I hear the day has been full of spectacular military victories and Anne has learned to say ‘cake.’ I am the mother of prodigies.”

  Crowther expected her to leave at once, but instead she paused and with an unusual hesitation in her manner turned back to him. He placed his papers flat on the desk and gave her his full attention.

  “Crowther, Dr. Trevelyan has suggested I take the children to see James, and I am afraid.”