The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 3 (The Mammoth Book Series)
Page 54
“Mr Leather sends his respects to Mr Ludlow and wonders if he could assist in the matter of a young woman who has done a murder.”
Harry Leather’s laborious writing dinted the page like hoofprints in mud. His note arrived on a windy afternoon in the April of 1867 at the offices of the newspaper where I was earning my blameless living as a subeditor. The messenger who brought it to my desk had the air of a man who’d rather not be responsible for a communication smeared with mud and various other stains that included, from the smell, neat’s-foot oil and strong porter. The wonders of the penny post had made no impression at all on Harry Leather. A man who, without blinking, would bid fifty guineas he hadn’t got for a horse he fancied, grudged expenditure on stamps. A groom taking a cob to market might hand his message to a carrier who’d pass it to a gentleman’s coachman whose second cousin delivered turnips to Covent Garden and so, in the fullness of time, it would get to me. The address at the top of the note was a livery stables in Buckinghamshire. Luckily, several men in the subeditors’ room owed me favours, so by the following afternoon I was walking from the railway station along an avenue of budding elm trees, with an assurance from the porter that I couldn’t miss the stables.
It was pleasant country and, although no more than twenty miles from London, the spring seemed to be coming in earlier and more softly there. Blackbirds sang and primroses gleamed as bright as pieces of china in the grass by the roadside. After a mile of road muddy enough to make me wish I’d worn stouter boots I came to a public house called The Woodman’s Rest and a knot of cottages. Between the public house and one of the cottages was the entrance to a driveway, flanked by stone pillars with gates of elaborate ironwork closed across it. Squire’s place, I thought, but not your hospitable hail-fellow country squire of the old school. Those firmly closed gates said that visitors were not welcome and the entrance to the drive, which you’d expect to be churned up with carriage tracks, looked as if no hoof or foot had fallen on it for weeks. On the opposite side of the road a board advertising horses kept at livery and hacks for hire marked my destination and my friend’s latest place of business. Harry is a groom, horse breaker, jockey, dealer – anything you care to name to do with horses, with a few chances on the side to earn an extra guinea that doesn’t necessarily have the word honest attached to it, and he seldom stays in one place for more than six months at a time. He was at me as soon as I’d set foot in the yard.
“What’s been keeping you Mr Ludlow? This rate, they’ll have her sentenced and hanged before you get a look in.”
He led the way through the tack room to a smaller room crammed with sacks and feed bins, dusted off the top of a bin with his handkerchief, and invited me to take a seat, then settled himself on another bin, empty pipe in his hand.
“Why the hurry? If this young woman who’s done a murder is going to be hanged in any case, I don’t see why they need my help to do it.”
Harry knew very well that my amateur interest was in cases that had a flavour of the extraordinary about them. I was annoyed to be classed with the sort of ghoul who’d come to witness the downfall of some hapless country girl.
“It’s not your help in getting her hanged that’s wanted. It’s getting her off being hanged.”
“But you said in your note she’d done a murder.”
He nodded.
“And you want me to get her off? Why?”
“Because she’s not a bad young woman and the one she killed was as spoiled and cussed a creature as you’d find in a long day at a bad market.”
A ray of sunshine, flecked with motes of bran, shone through the window on Harry’s lined and weather-beaten face. I knew that his morality seldom coincided with a preacher’s, but this was a staggerer even from him.
“If I understand you aright, you’re asking me to be an accessory in perverting the course of justice.”
He looked at the ceiling. “I knew a racehorse once named Course of Justice. Never won anything to speak of.”
The story he told me had its origins in the big house behind the locked gates. I’d been right in thinking it was the local squire’s mansion, also that its squire was not of the old sporting kind.
“Mr Haslem. He’s thirty or so, but the sort that’s never been young. Thin, fidgety kind of a man. Plenty of money from his father, but leaves the estate work to a bailiff. They say he’s writing a book about something in Latin. Goodness knows how he came to marry her, except I suppose she wasn’t a bad-looking woman on her good days, but a temper on her like an army mule in a thistle patch.”
“Are we talking about the person who was murdered?”
“Yes, we are. Veronica, her name was.”
“You met her?”
He sucked on his pipe.
“I quarrelled with her.”
“Over a horse, I suppose.”
“What else? One day at the start of March, about two weeks before it happened, she came down the drive in her victoria, going visiting. Two bays she had to pull it. I was outside the gate here and I could see one of the bays was lame. Her coachman knows me, so he pulled up without asking her first and said would I have a look at it, see what was wrong. Well, madam sticks her head out of the window and starts screeching at him for stopping without her permission. I take no notice of her and start feeling the bay’s leg. Off fore, swollen like a puffball and hot as a boiling kettle. I say to the coachman he shouldn’t be driving a horse in this state, and he looks back over his shoulder at her and whispers to me that she insisted because she had to go visiting. So I take my hat off and go up to her and say, civil enough, that the horse isn’t fit to be driven and I’ll hire her another. She curses me up hill and down dale and tells the coachman to drive on or she’ll dismiss him on the spot. So off they go with the bay limping like a man with a wooden leg. I’d have taken the whip to her first, but the coachman’s got a family to feed.”
“And two weeks after that she was dead?”
“Yes, two weeks after that she was dying of convulsions in the house of a lady she was visiting, after she’d stepped out of that very same victoria she cursed at me from.”
“And from that incident, you conclude that Mrs Veronica Haslem deserved murdering.”
“There’s a curse on the man or woman that drives a lame horse. It says so in the Bible.”
I’d heard him quote that text before but have never met the Biblical scholar who could find it anywhere from Genesis to Revelation. But to tell that to Harry would make a very atheist out of the man, and the swarm of sins clustering round his head is black enough without that. Instead I asked him to tell me more about Mrs Haslem’s death.
“She was going to pay an afternoon call on a lady that lives a good two hours’ drive away. She has her lunch in her room, changes into her costume for paying calls, and gets into her victoria with the hood up and my friend driving from the box, as usual.”
“Travelling alone?”
“Yes. The coachman swears that they didn’t stop anywhere along the way, nobody got in with her and she never called out to him or said anything the whole journey.”
“What was the weather like?”
“Nasty biting wind. She was all wrapped up in rugs, of course, so she was all right, at least she should have been. Anyway, they arrive at the house, the coachman draws up and goes to help her out. He notices she seems a bit unsteady on her feet and her voice is croaky but there’s nothing new about that. He watches her go up the steps to the door, the butler opens it, and she goes inside. The coachman drives round to the stables, sees to the horses, then goes into the kitchen for a cup of tea. But he’s no more than taken a gulp of it when there’s this confloption upstairs and a maid comes flying in to say get the doctor because Mrs Haslem’s taken ill in the drawing room.”
“What were the symptoms?”
“She said she felt her throat burning and asked for water but she couldn’t keep it down. She was groaning and clutching at her stomach and shouting out that she’d been poison
ed. All this in the drawing room with a lot of other ladies there.”
“Did she say who she thought had poisoned her?”
“She did, several times over. She said Miss Thorn had put poison in her travelling flask because she wanted to get rid of her and marry her husband.”
“Miss Thorn being . . . ?”
“The governess. Anyway, they carried her up to the bedroom. The doctor was out on his rounds, and by the time he got there she was in convulsions. She was dead before they could get word to her husband.”
“Where was he?”
“Up in London all day, buying books.”
“Was there any evidence for this business about poison in the travelling flask?”
He looked ill at ease.
“Well, there was a flask and Miss Thorn did have it in her hands. There’s no getting away from it.”
I said he’d better tell me the worst of it and get it over. On that cold March afternoon, at two o’clock, the victoria was drawn up and waiting at the front door. Mrs Haslem came down the steps. Behind her Miss Thorn, holding the Haslems’ eight-year-old son by the hand. The boy, she said, wanted to see his mother driving away. The coachman settled Mrs Haslem in the victoria, positioning the foot warmer for her, tucking a blanket round her. While this was going on, the boy was on one side, talking to his mother, Miss Thorn on the other.
“The coachman’s just getting up on the box, ready to drive off, when Mrs Haslem says, quite sharply, ‘Have you taken my flask, Miss Thorn?’ At first the governess looks as if she wants to deny it, but Mrs Haslem says, ‘Don’t try to lie to me. You’ve got it there behind your back.’ ”
“And had she?”
“She had. So she has to hand it over, looking shamefaced.”
“What sort of flask?”
“Flat silver one. The sort a gentleman would carry in his pocket out hunting.”
“Did the coachman see Miss Thorn put anything into it?”
“No.”
“She’d have had a chance, though, wouldn’t she, while Mrs Haslem was talking to the boy?”
“She’d have had to be quick about it, but yes, I suppose she would.”
“What did Mrs Haslem have in the flask? I suppose it would be something to keep out the cold on a long journey.”
“Short or long journey, summer or winter, it was all the same to her. Brandy.”
“In other words, Mrs Haslem was a habitual drinker?”
“Habitual! She drank the way a horse eats grass. That time I had that argument with her, I could smell the brandy coming off her breath.”
“Did anybody else touch the flask?”
“There was only the boy and the coachman there. The coachman says he didn’t, and I don’t suppose the boy would poison his mother.”
“And you’ve told me they didn’t stop on the journey. Where did the brandy in the flask come from?”
“Mrs Haslem’s own bottle she kept in her room. She’d sent her maid to buy a couple of bottles the day before.”
“Why did she have to do that? Surely her husband would keep brandy in the house.”
“Only under lock and key. He was driven distracted by her drinking.”
“You say she had lunch in her room?”
“Chicken in aspic, bread and butter, China tea. And in case you’re thinking the poison might be in that, she didn’t finish her lunch so the maid did after she’d gone and she was as fit as a flea.”
“It looks like an open-and-shut case against Miss Thorn. What happened at the inquest?”
“Open verdict.”
“Astounding! Didn’t it come out about Mrs Haslem accusing the governess?”
“Oh yes, it came out, in a manner of speaking. Only everybody round here knew the wicked tongue she had when the drink was in her. They felt sorry for her husband and anybody else who had to do with her.”
“What about the symptoms? What did the doctor say?”
“That she’d been very sick, had convulsions, and her heart had stopped – which it tends to do when you die.”
“Is this whole countryside in a conspiracy to protect the governess? It can only be a matter of time before she’s under lock and key.”
“You could think of something, though, couldn’t you, a gentleman of your experience? Just enough to give everyone an excuse for pretending to think she didn’t do it.”
His tone, soft as any sucking dove, was the one he used to get scared colts to come to his hand.
“Where is this paragon of a poisoner?”
“Still up at the hall.”
“What!”
“Mr Haslem has kept her on. After all, someone has to look after the boy.”
I sat and thought for a while.
“If you want me to take any part in this, you must arrange for me to speak to the governess. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Give me a few hours.”
“Mr Haslem too.”
“He’s not seeing people. Hasn’t been out of the house or had anyone calling since the inquest.”
“What about the doctor and the maid?”
“Dr Gaynor’s easy enough, he’s just up the road. The maid’s gone back to her parents ten miles away.”
“Didn’t Mr Haslem keep her on?”
“The fact is, she bolted straight after the funeral. The gossip from the hall is that some of Mrs Haslem’s diamonds had gone missing.”
“Is the maid suspected of stealing them?”
“I don’t know, because Mr Haslem wouldn’t have any inquiries made. I had that from the solicitor’s clerk.”
“But this is incomprehensible. The man’s wife is poisoned and he keeps the woman suspected of it in his household. Her jewellery’s stolen, he does nothing to recover it and lets the maid run away. Isn’t it more likely that the maid poisoned Mrs Haslem to save herself from being found out about the jewellery?”
“It wasn’t the maid she accused.”
“Accused or not, I want to speak to the maid before anyone else.”
He lent me a cob to ride and a boy on a pony to show me the way. As we trotted along together under the green leaves I thought it was a poor thing if I could only lift the noose from one young woman’s neck to drop it round another’s, but Harry as usual had me caught and bitted whether I liked it or not.
Susan was the maid’s name. When we got to the cottage, which looked as if it hadn’t had a lick of paint or dab of plaster since Queen Anne’s time, she was in the kitchen with her mother making pies. There was a clutch of children toddling, crawling, and bawling round the open door, scrawny hens pecking unhopefully, their skin pink and shiny in patches where feathers had been scratched away. For a daughter of such a place, the position of lady’s maid must have been a considerable prize. When I came to the door she was laughing at something one of the children had said, a pretty, plumpish girl in her twenties, neater than you’d expect from the confusion round her, her dark hair tucked under a clean white cap. The laughter died away when she saw me, turned to misery when I introduced myself and asked if I might have a word about the late Mrs Haslem.
“Would you come with me, sir, where we can be quiet.”
Mother, brothers, and sisters watched open-mouthed as she led the way up the stairs that rose straight from the kitchen, little better than a ladder. If I say we talked in her bedroom, I wouldn’t wish to impute to her a lack of propriety. The place was no more than a kind of open cabin at the top of the stairs with one wide bed that almost certainly accommodated several sisters as well as herself. All the time we talked I was half aware of her mother’s worried murmurs from below, trying to keep the children quiet. I asked her about the brandy.
“Every week, sir. She’d give me the money and I’d go into town without letting anyone know. Two bottles a week it was, three sometimes.”
“That last day, she had her lunch in her room?”
“Yes, sir, but she hadn’t much appetite. She never had these days.”
“Was there any sig
n that she was ill?”
“None at all, sir.”
“Did she fill the brandy flask while you were there?”
“Yes, sir. She rinsed it in the water from her ewer, then she opened the new bottle I’d bought from the shop and filled it up over the basin.”
“A new bottle, you’re sure of that?”
“Quite sure, sir. She had to break the wax seal on it.”
“And did she, or you, put anything else in that flask except brandy?”
“Oh no, sir.”
Her eyes met mine. Scared eyes, with tears beginning to wash over them but not, I thought, guileful.
“You know Mrs Haslem died, almost certainly, as a result of what was in that flask.”
She looked down at her lap and nodded.
“Have you any idea how poison might have been introduced into the flask?”
“No, sir. I know what was said, but I don’t think she would. She was always kind to me.”
“Miss Thorn?”
Another tearful nod. I didn’t care for the situation at all, but there was no going back.
“There’s another matter. Did you know that after Mrs Haslem’s death, some possessions of hers were found to be missing?”
An intake of breath. Her hands, which had been lying motionless in her lap, began twisting together.
“Do you know anything about them?”
She was crying in earnest now. Her hands came up to cover her face and a few muffled words squeezed out through her fingers.
“. . . didn’t mean any harm . . . gave them to me . . . for going to buy the brandy for her . . . because she didn’t need them any more.”