by Joan Lock
Smith’s eyes shot open, then snapped shut again, blinded by the strong morning light. Squinting and blinking, he forced them open again, pulled himself up into a sitting position and gazed around bewildered. Where was he?
Slowly it all came back: grand staircase, beautiful marble floors, statue. Good grief, of course, he was in the Great Hall of Euston Railway Station! Realization set in as he sat there, head in hands, trying to come to terms with the situation. Eventually, he lifted his head and glanced blearily at the hall clock. A quarter past five. Oh God! He was really done for now.
The hall was empty, save for a lone porter trundling and rumbling his iron-wheeled luggage chariot across the wide concourse – the horse and cart of his nightmare.
A weary young couple, dragging three reluctant children, came through the south entrance, then two workmen who hurried by without a glance, their hobnailed footsteps clattering and ringing on the marble floor.
How was he going to explain this? He’d sped from the murder scene, to the displeasure of the local police, when perhaps he should have remained. All because he’d got an idea in his head. Some whim, some ridiculous certainty that he needed to keep on the trail of Alice before it faded away and she disappeared beyond reach. Then what had he done? Fallen asleep with the job half done, that’s what.
His mouth tasted foul, his bones ached, he felt seedy and unwashed but, most of all, sick to his stomach in the certain knowledge that his career, his whole life, was tumbling down around him.
No more being a detective. Probably no more being a policeman after he’d been dragged up to answer a charge of dereliction of duty. What could he do instead? He was trained for nothing else and now he would have no character either.
He tried to fathom how Best would have handled this situation. The inspector had always advised him, that if he was caught out in some petty infringement, he should admit to what he was obviously guilty of but think of another, better reason why he had done the deed. Learn from the villains, in fact. Caught with their hands in the till they’d be ‘Just returning some money. They gave me too much change, guv’nor’.
Trouble was, Smith would think of no good reason for going to sleep on a bench in a railway terminus while on urgent duty – only the real one which was that he had been exhausted. But he knew that wouldn’t do He felt he’d let Best down twice over.
More rumbling from two more luggage barrows trundling by. He watched dazedly, realizing that he was only putting off the moment when he would have to take action; hand himself over, confess his sins and begin the end of his present life.
Well, he thought defiantly, that could wait until he’d pulled himself together a little. Might as well do the deed in as dignified a manner as possible. Besides, he wanted a pee first.
The scene grew a little livelier. A small rush of hurrying passengers and a porter, trying to get speed up, but thwarted by the heaviness of his load. Maybe he could do something like that. Become a luggage porter. He sighed; at least he was fit and strong. But wouldn’t he need a character, even for that?
Trailing behind the overloaded barrow was a small woman with abundant flaxen hair drawn back into fashionable, sweeping, dove-like wings.
She must be going a long way, Smith thought idly, to necessitate such an early start with so much luggage. Probably catching a connection to Fishguard and maybe on to Dublin, or going up to the Scottish Isles via Glasgow. All places which Smith had never seen, and was unlikely to now that he would no longer have the chance to go on escort duty, collecting or delivering prisoners and suspects.
The young woman did not seem overjoyed with her privileged life. She was keeping her head down and her eyes averted. Perhaps she imagined he was one of those white slave traffickers?
No she’s a bit too old for that, he realized as his eyes followed her now retreating form, despite the impression given by the hair. There was a staidness about her gait, and her carriage was not erect and lively enough.
He stared disbelievingly. There was something very familiar about the figure, now hurrying through the archway.
Smith leaped to his feet and began to run as though his life depended on it.
Once through the arch he could see no sign of her. Had she gone to the ladies’ rest room? For refreshment? Or was she already on a train?
He kept running, glancing feverishly along each platform, hoping for a glimpse of her or the luggage. Suddenly, he spotted the trunks being loaded into the guards’ van at the far end of an express which was belching start-up steam. There was no sign of the woman.
The indicator board said: Departure time five twenty. Two minutes away!
He flashed his warrant at the ticket collector and yelled, ‘Police. The woman with the trunks – which carriage?’
‘First class. Number seven, I think,’ the man shouted after him.
As Smith sped along the platform, clouds of steam billowed from the engine as it puffed up a warning of imminent departure. The ceremony of the closing of the carriage doors had begun. Not many, since there were few passengers.
Breathless with exertion, Smith leaped onto the step of number seven first-class carriage, shouting to a startled guard in passing, ‘Police! Stop the train!’
Smith burst in, just as the woman was reaching up to place her small red carpet bag on the overhead rack. He laid a restraining hand on her other arm and panted into her startled face, ‘Alice Harper, I am arresting you on suspicion of murdering Arthur Herring and Maud Forrest.’
‘Where are you going now?’ asked Mary Jane, glancing at his best waistcoat. ‘Somewhere special?’
‘Oh, no,’ he shrugged.
‘Where, then?’
He hesitated. He had avoided mentioning that he had bumped into Helen at the Alexandra Palace and now it had become too difficult to explain his further contact with her even though it had been quite innocent and accidental. In any case, why upset her unnecessarily?
But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her an outright lie.
‘I’m going to be an artist’s model,’ he grinned, inviting her to share the joke. ‘Posing for a painter!’
The look on her face told him that he should have thought up a more general truth, such as ‘I’m going to interview a suspect’, which he was. Had he not been in such a hurry, he might have.
‘With that Helen,’ she burst out, hurt in her eyes. ‘I knew you were seeing her again. I just knew.’
‘No, I’m not,’ he insisted. He tried to grasp her hand but she pulled it away and began to look tearful.
‘It’s work. I bumped into her on this enquiry quite by accident and she knows one of the Quicksilver suspects – and he is going to model for Bertrand today – so she just arranged …’ He spread his hands wide. ‘She just arranged for me to be there too.’
He grabbed his jacket. The tears were starting.
‘Look,’ he said, sighing, ‘if this model is Quicksilver, we can close this case and I’ll be home much more. Isn’t that what you want?’
He tried to kiss her goodbye but she turned her head away. He sighed with exasperation and left thinking, I’m too old for her. Later he was to wish he had tried harder.
‘Wood’s here,’ Helen assured Best, as she opened the door of Jacques Bertrand’s icing-sugar mansion in Holland Park.
That was good. Not a wasted journey then.
Bertrand was still at the family breakfast table. He jumped up at the sight of Best.
‘Ernest! How good to see you after all this time.’ He perused him head to foot. ‘Still as smart as paint and up to the minute in fashion,’ he commented, with obvious delight.
It was this directness, plus his sleekness and his tendency to touch, as he was doing now to Best’s arm as he shook his hand, that had put Best off at first. That, and the suspicion that Bertrand and Helen were on over-intimate terms for mere friends.
It transpired that Bertrand was, in fact, a devoted family man (apart from the odd dalliance with one of his models), who kep
t a fatherly eye on Helen and her sister after they had lost their parents. He also helped Helen obtain commissions.
That, and the terrible times Bertrand and Best had gone through together, when the girls were endangered in the canal murder case, had made them into brothers.
Best declined the offer of a cup of coffee in favour of getting started. His guise, it was decided, would not be as a fellow model, which would be too time-consuming in preparation and, perhaps, too deceitful.
Instead, he would be a pupil painter and assistant, before an easel set up alongside the master. Best had dabbled a little when undercover on the baby-farming case in Islington, so at least knew how to pretend to be an artist.
Bertrand’s other assistants had set up the scene: Wood begging, gaunt hand outstretched, beside a waiflike young woman holding a flower basket, both lit overhead by a street lamp.
The stench of oil and turpentine began to make Best feel quite sick and a bit giddy. He should have had some breakfast before he had dashed out this morning. Fortunately, the first break came sooner than expected; Bertrand, with a wink, pleading shoulder problems.
Marie brought in tea and sandwiches, so Best sat alongside Wood to eat his. Helen got into conversation with the girl by asking whether she might be available to pose as an invalid for a forthcoming picture.
At first, he and Wood merely munched gratefully and companionably, but as the edge of their hunger abated they fell into idle chat about the weather, the studio and painting.
Wood’s voice was surprisingly strong, but his bony hands shook and he shivered a little now and then, despite the warmth of the studio.
Best confessed to finding it difficult to make a living as a painter. To his surprise Wood laughed, before patting his hand in case he was offended.
‘I know the problem only too well, old man,’ he said. ‘I’m a painter too, you know?’
Best said he didn’t.
‘Well, I was, and I got a bit desperate and decided to do something about it – but it all went wrong in the end.’
Best was an expert winkler-out of secrets so it was not long before the full tale of Wood’s clever wheeze saw light of day.
‘It worked, too,’ he exclaimed with some pride.
Best said he thought it an inspired idea, which was true.
Wood nodded his acknowledgement.
‘You wouldn’t believe how many paintings we received.’ His pale face grew quite pink with pleasure at the memory. ‘But then,’ he shrugged, ‘the bluebottles got wind and it all went wrong.’
Further probing revealed that Wood was, indeed, bitter about his prison experiences, feeling that the severity of the sentence outweighed the seriousness of the crime.
‘These were all wealthy men, after all. Successful painters. Could afford to give a few away.’
He certainly harboured some hatred of the police, whom he thought could have treated it all more lightly.
‘I’d bet you’d like to get back at them?’ Best exclaimed sympathetically.
Wood thought about it, then shrugged. ‘Did at first, I suppose. Was consumed with the idea. Then, when I was right at the bottom, starving on the street after I got out, this copper gave me one of his sandwiches and some of his brew he’d heated up on top of the street lamp, like they do.’
He took a swig of his tea as if in memory, before reaching for a fourth sandwich. Best could see what Helen meant about him eating himself out of a job by filling out those hollow eyes and gaunt cheeks.
Wood ate quickly and looked about him nervously as he did so, as though fearful someone might snatch the food away.
‘This copper,’ he said, suddenly pausing and using his ham and lettuce sandwich as a pointer to his words, ‘told me I was too young to go down the drain. He got me into St Luke’s workhouse so I could pull myself together. Then Mr Bertrand came around looking for thin models. So you see, I owe something to the police after all. Well, at least one policeman.’
It could all have been a tall tale. The man might have guessed he was a policeman. But somehow Best didn’t think so. He decided that Eric Wood, of Wood, Dubois and Arbre, was not Quicksilver after all.
But he had been wrong before.
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘I didn’t mean to kill her,’ Alice said, wearily.
Smith stared at her across the interview room table.
‘You put cyanide in her capsules and you didn’t mean to kill her?’
She nodded. ‘Aye, man, I was really mad when I did that,’ she explained. ‘She treated me rotten over them potatoes, spoke to me like I was dirt!’ For a moment anger sparked in her tired eyes.
‘What potatoes?’
‘The ones I’d just got in.’
Smith sighed. ‘From where?’
‘The garden, of course. Just because she didn’t like the look of the potatoes we had in the rack, she sent me out in the rain to dig up some more. I got all muddy and soaking, then she went and threw out the ones I’d dug up. Said they were blighted.’ Her eyes were wet now and deeply sad. ‘But they weren’t. Not really.’
Smith sat forward with a puzzled expression on his youthful face. ‘But there isn’t a vegetable patch at Chilton House.’
‘I know that, man! This was up in Newcastle, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh.’ He paused, feeling his way. ‘So you filled her capsules with cyanide when you lived up north, but you didn’t use them when you were there?’ He hesitated, frowning, perplexed. ‘Did you try to?’
‘Oh no. Of course not!’ she exclaimed, as though this was another silly question he should have known the answer to. He was beginning to feel some sympathy for Maud. ‘I never meant to kill her at all, you see. Not really.’
Smith didn’t see. In fact he was totally bewildered.
He hadn’t wanted her to talk at all, just yet. They were still in the railway police office at Euston and he’d rather she’d waited until they were back at Wood Green, where she would be charged. But she had taken no notice of his requests to wait, so he had been obliged to give her a caution, pull out his notebook and write down as much as he could.
Once she’d recovered from the initial shock of capture, Alice had become quite calm, showing no fear. Seemed almost relieved, in fact. A not uncommon reaction. Trying to keep one step ahead of the law could be a weary and lonely business.
‘She’d been so nasty about it,’ Alice explained, ‘I thought to myself, I’ll show you, you bitch. There was some cyanide in the garden shed for killing rats so I went and got it and pinched some of her capsules and put it in.’
‘But you didn’t intend to poison her?’ asked Smith, disbelievingly.
She looked at him with a sad half-smile on her face. ‘Oh, no. Honestly, hinny. I just felt better after doing that – knowing that I could kill her if I wanted to.’
‘But you kept them. Just in case.’
‘Well, no. Not deliberately for that, man.’ She sought for the right words. “It was just that they were there and when I got mad at her I would take them out and look at them and feel better for knowing I could kill her, if I wanted to.’
Smith, who was loved by his family and enjoyed the friendship and camaraderie of his colleagues, tried to imagine how it would feel to be like this woman. No relative to care about her and no friend to confide in.
‘But you told us that people said you were like sisters,’ he broke in. ‘They couldn’t always tell who was the servant.’
‘Oh we were – in a way. But, believe me, I always knew who was the skivvy!’ Smouldering resentment accentuated the rising Tyneside inflexion. ‘She never let me forget that, did she? Mistresses always think you’re close, like sisters – when it suits them. When they want company. But you’ve always got to be nice all the time whether you want to or not. They don’t.’
‘You could have left.’
‘Oh, no, I couldn’t, hinny.’ She looked down at her smart moire dress, probably the nicest she had ever worn, and smoothed and patted it ab
sently. ‘I’d nowhere else to go, had I? I had no money of my own, she saw to that, and she’d not give me a character if I went.’
She sat up a little more proudly. ‘I did try once, you know. But she set the polis on me. Said I’d stolen money from her. But I’d only taken what was due.’
‘But you did poison her in the end, didn’t you?’ Smith reminded her, with a trace of exasperation.
Alice put her head on one side and gave him a rueful half-smile. ‘I know, hinny. I know.’
There was something almost childlike about the admission.
‘Why?’
‘She found out that I’d been selling some of the groceries to Arthur.’
Smith raised his eyebrows.
‘I had to!’ she exclaimed. ‘I had these terrible painful piles and I needed some money to buy ointment but she wouldn’t give me any. She kept me so short.’ She paused, then burst forth once more: ‘Said why did I need pocket money when she kept me and paid for everything?’
‘So you put the tablets in her pill box?’
‘Oh, no. It wasn’t just for that. No …’ She became thoughtful and a blush began creeping up her worn cheeks. ‘It was because of Arthur.’
‘He told you to?’ Ah, so she was going to blame him. He was dead so couldn’t deny it.
‘Oh, no. What it was, you see, was that he asked me out, and I thought my straw hat was too shabby and wanted to buy a new one. But she wouldn’t let me have an advance. She just laughed and said it was all vanity.’ Alice stopped, remembering.
She took a deep breath. ‘It was then I put the poisoned tablets in. I got so angry thinking as how I’d had no life of my own and this was my only chance – with Arthur.’ Her face was crumpling now and her voice cracking.
‘Almost right away I wished I hadn’t.’ She twisted her hands agitatedly, reliving the crisis. ‘I tried to get them back, but she came in the bathroom and I had to pretend I was looking for something else. After that, I kept watching her to see if she was about to take one. I was going to knock them out of her hand and pretend it was an accident.