‘Work in progress.’ He unscrewed the handle of his cane.
‘I am talking about the way you marched out of that poor woman’s house before she even had a chance to tell you what had happened to her.’
‘First, I hardly marched,’ he protested. ‘If you can strain your memory all the way back to six and one third minutes ago, I actually crept from that frighteningly herbaceous vitreous construction through that revoltingly tasteful sitting room.’
‘That is not the point.’
‘Second, Miss Bocking did not give the impression of being poor – though she might be – and if you have information to that effect, perhaps you would like to divulge it. I do not have poor clients.’ He reinserted the handle upside down.
‘I meant poor in the sense of unfortunate.’
‘A strange interpretation,’ my godfather mused, ‘since the poor are not unfortunate.’ He clipped on his pince-nez to look at a dial in his modified stick. ‘They are lazy. Just as I thought.’
‘What?’
‘According to my new barometer, Grosvenor Square is one foot lower than marked on the 1879 Ordinance Survey map. We are sinking into the sea, March.’ His tone implied that he thought I might have something to do with it.
‘Thank heavens I invested in the Trafalgar Square Gondola Company,’ I quipped to a blank stare.
Mr G reassembled his cane. ‘I think we have waited long enough.’
‘For what?’
‘Look and listen.’
I did both. ‘What?’ I repeated when I became bored, which happened very quickly.
‘This is my city,’ he declaimed. ‘London in all its grandeur and its filth, this heaving heap of magnificent squalid stinking avarice that rules the world’s oceans and vast swathes of its unsatisfactory continents. Countless millions are in thrall to us, March, and what do you see?’
I surveyed the bustling traffic and watched a pigeon land on top of a policeman’s helmet. ‘Nothing unusual.’
‘Excellent.’ Sidney Grice clapped his gloved hands together. ‘I shall forge a detective yet from the shabby material with which you present me. And what do you make of your observation?’
The policeman shooed the pigeon away.
‘Nothing,’ I said, and he frowned.
‘You should always make something of everything, but, forgive me, I am overtaxing your feminine brain.’ He twirled round. ‘Look about you, March. We are not even being followed. Do you not find that rather strange?’
I stepped to the kerb and hailed a cab. ‘But to the best of my knowledge we have never been followed.’
The hansom pulled alongside.
‘Precisely.’ Mr G leaped aboard and held open the flap for me. ‘And what could be more normal than that? Yet it is in the ordinary that the most extraordinary events are to be discovered. That is Grice’s sixth law and therefore immutable.’ He raised his voice. ‘125 Gower Street, driver.’
‘Drop me off at Gosling Lane,’ I called.
Our driver was bareheaded and wore no coat or neckerchief, and I envied him that, and the breeze that he must be enjoying on his lofty perch.
‘Goslink?’ He tossed his hands. ‘That’s not on my way.’
‘It is now,’ I asserted and he yanked his horse’s head to the left.
‘Miss Hockaday?’ Sidney Grice enquired.
‘Yes,’ I replied, and he edged away from the rim of my new blue bonnet, which was brushing embarrassingly against that of his old soft felt hat.
13
Turkish Cigarettes on Gosling Lane
GOSLING LANE DID not live up to the rustic promise of its name. With not a goose to be seen, it was a short narrow thoroughfare north of Oxford Street and occupied by thin houses, many converted into sweatshops producing cheap shirts to be sold in the nearby bazaars. And I had hardly set foot on the befouled pavement before Sidney Grice tipped his head back. ‘Drive on.’
I was glad that he did not think the man sharpening a carving knife on the kerbstone presented a threat, but I could not help remembering how George Pound was stabbed once, and I was relieved when the door opened a crack.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Mrs Freval said and I resisted retorting, as Mr G might have, that I was already aware of that.
I could sympathize with Mrs Freval’s annoyance for none of her tenants ever responded to visitors. She lived on the ground floor alone but for a balding mongrel called Turndap because, she once told me, he just turndap on her doorstep.
‘I am sorry to disturb you.’
Turndap poked his speckled nose through the gap, sniffing eagerly, and I rummaged for thruppence in my purse.
‘I ain’t a bleedin’ doorman.’ She pulled back affronted.
I leaned over to scratch behind the dog’s ear and his back leg paddled the air. ‘A present for Turndap.’
Turndap drooled blissfully on to my hem.
‘’E could do wiv a noo cap,’ Mrs Freval conceded. ‘The uvva dogs larf attis old one.’
A black dot landed on the back of my hand but then, I was relieved to see, jumped straight back to rejoin its friends in the greasy coconut-matting that served Turndap as fur. I dropped the coin into an outstretched apron. Mrs Freval never touched money, being convinced that the wren on a farthing had given her glangula feeva twenty years ago. And Turndap slumped mournfully as I mounted the stairs.
Geraldine Hockaday and her brother Peter lived in the three-roomed attic of number 8. By local standards this was luxurious. The four lower floors were divided into single rooms, some of which housed entire families, and one old woman appeared to have set up home on the lower landing. She was sprawled out, slurping from a jam jar and dribbling some taupe coagulum down herself. I stepped carefully over her rag-bound feet.
Geraldine was knitting when I went to see her, a tiny pink sock suspended from her needles like a cocoon. She loved to make baby clothes and lay them between sheets of tissue paper in a pine chest at the foot of her bed.
We blew kisses in greeting, her lips puckering like a child trying to whistle.
The small sitting room was simply furnished with a plain wooden dining table on one side and two sagging armchairs facing a bricked-up fireplace on the other. Alongside the only possible source of heating permanently blocked, the floor gave little comfort, with draughts rising between the bare boards. I dreaded to think how cold that apartment would be in the winter.
‘I am well,’ she responded to my enquiry and she looked healthy enough, though pale from being housebound. But Geraldine’s bush-baby eyes flicked about, looking everywhere for the attack she constantly anticipated.
‘How did it go?’ she asked the moment I sat opposite her.
I drew a breath for I knew that Geraldine had high hopes that something would come of our meeting with Johnny Wallace.
‘I am sorry to say that our witness was murdered before he could tell us anything.’
Geraldine had a pointy pink nose and a pointy chin to match. She was a slight girl. I have often been described as scrawny, but being near her made me feel huge and ungainly.
‘But how?’ She mouthed the words in shock before she uttered them and I wished I could have sat beside her and taken her hand, but she disliked being touched by anybody. I had seen her inarticulate with terror when Peter had accidentally bumped into her once.
‘He was shot but his killer got away.’ I wished I could have told her something else, but I could not break a confidence by mentioning Lucy.
Geraldine went back to her knitting while she digested the news. ‘I cannot pretend to feel sorry for Mr Wallace,’ she decided, a whiteness floating to the surface of her cheeks, ‘for it was he who directed me down that alley.’ She shuddered as if being plunged through broken ice on a pond. ‘And blocked my escape, but he was the only one who knew.’
‘We have not given up,’ I vowed, but Geraldine did not seem to be listening. ‘Mr Grice will think of something,’ I tried, all too aware of how hollow my assurance sounded.
&
nbsp; The discs grew until her face was alabaster but still there was no response.
‘He always does,’ I said helplessly.
‘I learned a new stitch yesterday,’ she announced, and the needles whirled and clicked in a series of complicated manoeuvres, tucking her wool through and around itself. ‘See?’
She held her handiwork up for inspection.
‘Lovely,’ I said, though one stitch looked much like another to me.
Geraldine put her knitting in her lap with the exaggerated care of somebody who is not really aware of what they are doing. ‘Peter pawned his inheritance to pay Mr Grice’s fees -everything he had and ever expects to have.’
I watched the ball of wool fall off her knee and down her dress.
‘I know and I am sorry.’ The ball rolled over the floor to come to rest at my feet. ‘If you would like us to give up this case I will get Mr Grice to reimburse you.’
I knew that Sidney Grice would not consider paying her back. In his mind the case was still open and he did not like admitting defeat. But I was quite willing to refund his charges. It was difficult to pretend that we had achieved anything.
‘Is that what you want?’ Geraldine jumped as if I had sprung at her. ‘To desert me?’
‘No. I want to catch the man who did this to you.’
Her nose crinkled like an inquisitive mouse. ‘This?’ she repeated uncertainly, as if I meant the room.
Geraldine picked up her needles and the sock fell off one of them.
‘I hope it does not unravel.’ I stooped to retrieve the ball.
‘It is all unravelled,’ she said simply.
14
Of Mice and Moustaches
MOLLY WAS ON her knees, scrubbing the hall floor, but she struggled to her feet, hauling herself up with a soapy hand on my sleeve when I went to see if she was all right. She had been moaning so loudly that I could hear her from my bedroom at the back of the house on the second floor.
‘Oh, miss.’ Her eyes were even more darkly under-bagged than usual. ‘I cantn’t not be all right, can I?’ She noticed the suds on my dress and gave them a quick rub with her raw wet hand. ‘Oh, what a night. I had a terrorable dream.’ She dropped her brush in the bucket, splattering my hem with dirty water, and folded her arms in preparation for her narration. ‘I was sitting in Mr G’s armchair with my feet up by the fire and him feeding me hot butter muffings, and you fetching me a big pot of tea and trying to curtsy like a proper lady’s maid, when I felted a scritch and heard restling noises on my head and, when I put my hand up, I undiscoverered a huge teensy mouse making its nest in my hairs and, when I pulled it out by the tail, it bit me.’
She held out her hand to show me two neat puncture marks on her right forefinger.
‘Oh, so it was not a dream then,’ I remarked, and Molly wrinkled her brow.
‘Not a dream when, miss?’ She poked her finger towards her eye.
‘Not a dream at all,’ I said, nearly as confused as she was, and Molly laughed.
‘Oh, miss, how can a dream not be a dream?’ She rotated the finger horizontally.
I tried again. ‘No, I meant the mouse.’
‘But...’ Molly licked her finger and thought about the taste of it. ‘How can a mouse be a dream anyway?’ She had another lick and smacked her lips. ‘When Mr Grice—’ Molly crossed herself—‘caught a mouse in his scrungulater, he didntn’t not say,’ Molly’s voice rose in an uncannily inaccurate imitation of her employer, ‘Oh by George, I has encaptured a dream?
I covered my mouth and pretended to cough. ‘So what happened to the mouse?’ I asked, still unclear as to whether it had existed outside Molly’s unusual brain.
Molly sniffed. ‘I thoughted you’d would of been more worried about what happened to me.’ She sniffed again.
I glanced at the grandmother clock and wondered if time were going backwards. ‘So what did happen to you?’ I asked reluctantly.
Molly made a noise that I can only describe as a snurkle. ‘Well, I swallowed it of course,’ she told me, it being inconceivable to her that anyone in their right mind would have done anything different.
‘Oh.’ I had been driven mad by drugs eighteen months ago and Molly was having much the same effect. ‘Is it still in your stomach?’
Molly made a sort of chundling sound. ‘Still? It aintn’t anything but still.’ She put a hand to her left bosom. ‘It’s running about in there like a—’ She struggled for the apposite word. ‘Gravestone.’
I went into the study where Sidney Grice was sifting through his mail.
‘An epistle from Pound,’ he announced. ‘He has wearied of dealing with Fenland creatures in uniform and taken a temporary posting in Limehouse.’
I adopted a casual pose by the fireplace. ‘When does he return?’
‘On Thursday.’
My guardian put the letter in the top drawer of his desk and my foolish heart turned over. I was so desperate and yet so afraid to meet George again, and I could not help but remember a time when he would have sent that message to me.
Molly answered the doorbell.
‘Probably two callers,’ Mr G murmured without glancing up.
‘How can you tell?’
‘By listening to the footfalls.’
‘They could be carrying a third person,’ I teased, as he filled his Grice Patent Fountain Pen from his Grice inkwell, which he had not patented as he wished to keep the design a secret.
‘I considered that possibility and dismissed it.’ He wiped the back of the nib on his blotting paper. ‘They would be dragging their boots more.’
‘Or in their stockinged feet.’
‘Which is why I said probably.’
Molly entered, bearing a tray and shutting the door, and Mr G inhaled.
‘A well-to-do man and a woman,’ he declared, ‘to judge from the scents of expensive feminine perfume and masculine pomade, which even Molly cannot completely overpower.’
Molly brought the tray over. ‘I swallowed a—’ she began, forgetting that her employer was apparently able not just to hear a pin drop but – I sometimes suspected – a pin as it was falling.
‘Mouse.’ Mr G slid the cards off like a poker player.
‘Told you.’ Molly folded her arms triumphantly.
Sidney Grice titivated his perfectly pinned cravat. ‘Bring them in.’ He slipped the cards into one of his many waistcoat pockets.
‘Mr and Mrs Wright,’ Molly announced, to everyone’s apparent satisfaction. It was not like her to get even the simplest of names right.
Sidney Grice shook their hands and introduced me. They were a small couple, short and delicately boned, their faces grey and stretched with anxiety.
I ushered Mrs Wright towards my armchair, but she demurred and sat between me and her husband in one of the two upright chairs that he had dragged over, sitting beside Mr G so that we were all in a semicircle round the hearth.
‘Thank you for seeing us,’ Mrs Wright began.
‘The only gratitude I seek is of a monetary nature,’ he told her, so softly that he might have making a pleasantry.
‘I shall not beat about the bush,’ Mr Wright promised.
‘But you are already doing so,’ Mr G assured him, with an unnerving light smile upon his lips.
‘It is Albertoria, Mr Grice.’
‘What is?’ He tapped his own left knee to hurry things along and it was just as well that I did not make my guess, which was that they were referring to a monument, because Mrs Wright trembled and told us, ‘Albertoria is our daughter.’
‘Or was,’ Mr Wright whispered.
‘Do not—’ Mrs Wright sobbed and her husband took her hand.
‘I pray that I am wrong.’
Sidney Grice opened his mouth but, for once, he paid heed to my warning cough and glare that this was not the time to demonstrate his notorious lack of tact.
‘Is she missing?’ I asked.
Mr Wright tilted his head right back and his wife lowered he
rs miserably.
‘Since the night of Saturday the second of August,’ she said.
‘At what time and where did you last see her?’ I tried, though the date was horribly familiar and Mr G had perked up on hearing it.
‘She was a vexatious girl,’ Mr Wright burst out.
‘Not bad,’ his wife protested mildly. ‘Just high-spirited.’
‘I do not believe – because I have no reason to do so – that Miss Middleton’s interrogation incorporated a supplementary question regarding your incongruously labelled progeny’s character,’ Mr G remarked, the hand on his knee fluttering rapidly now. ‘Perhaps I could entice you to satisfy her curiosity.’
Mrs Wright put her hand into the small satin handbag on her lap. ‘At about nine o’clock that night,’ she told me, ‘she said her wisdom tooth was hurting and she wanted an early night.’
Mr Wright forced his head up as if his neck were rusty. ‘At about half past ten, I sent Ann-Jane, our maid, to check if Albertoria was asleep, only to be informed that she was not in her room and her bed had not been slept in.’
‘And how did the put-upon Ann-Jane ascertain that last allegation?’ My guardian’s hand stopped about four inches above his leg.
Mr Wright puzzled for a few seconds. ‘Because the sheets had not been disturbed.’
‘And your daughter could not possible have straightened them or plumped up a pillow?’ Mr G leaped in.
‘Well, I suppose—’
‘Suppositions are of slight use to me.’ Sidney Grice ignored my mouthed entreaties. ‘You must approach a greater degree of accuracy if you wish to avail yourself of some of my superlative powers.’
Mrs Wright withdrew a tiny square of white lace from her handbag and dabbed the corners of her eyes, and her husband’s jaw muscles bunched angrily.
‘Can you describe your daughter?’ I asked.
‘They would be even poorer parents than they seem if they could not,’ my guardian muttered.
‘Now see here.’ Mr Wright squared up to the detective.
‘I see everywhere that can be seen.’ Sidney Grice tossed his head.
‘Sixteen,’ Mrs Wright said, ‘about your height and build, but pretty – lovely auburn hair and beautiful green eyes.’
Dark Dawn Over Steep House Page 6