Jewel of the Thames (A Portia Adams Adventure)

by Misri, Angela

  “Judge Barclay’s food was poisoned by his own child, that much is clear, but how did you and Elaine Barclay come to get poisoned?” Michaels said. “Did she make a mistake? Or did she realize that you saw her administering the poison and somehow poison you as well?”

  “It was a mistake, one the killer tried to correct,” I said, “because they needed me very much alive.”

  I tried to stand and pace but didn’t quite have my balance back yet, so I sat back down next to Brian. “The books you see all over the floor — if you examine them, you will see that each has been meticulously poisoned,” I explained, pointing at the books littering the floor. “All except the plays — the Shakespeare, the Henry James, the Greek tragedies — those are untouched.”

  “Poisoned?” repeated Michaels. “How do you poison a book?”

  “By applying a liquefied version of the poison to the tops of the pages with a brush, I suspect,” I suggested. “If you knew that your intended victim had the habit of licking their finger and turning the page, it would be a reasonable way to deliver poison.”

  “A reasonable way to…” Sergeant Michaels repeated again. “We already have a ‘reasonable’ way, Miss Adams. Judge Barclay’s food was being poisoned by his daughter, using that very glass vial that you identified!”

  “Yes, that is what I was meant to discover, was it not, Mr. Barclay?” I said, looking at my classmate. “You hired me as an unwitting accomplice to help frame your sister for murder.”

  The room went silent at my words, Sergeant Michaels looking back and forth between us, Dr. Joyce and the other officers looking shocked, but I had eyes only for James Barclay. Brian stood up and stalked over to the man’s side, taking hold of his upper arm.

  “Answer Miss Adams,” he commanded, his lip curled in an expression I had never seen before.

  Barclay said nothing, only stood there, as if in shock.

  “But Miss Adams,” said Dr. Joyce, “it was Elaine Barclay who barred my colleagues and I from examining her father, not James. If not for Elaine, one of us would have discovered that the man was being poisoned, and we could have saved Marcus’s life!”

  “Yes, and when Miss Barclay is made aware of that, it will likely haunt her for the rest of her life,” I admitted. “But her crime was gullibility, influenced by her brother’s actions, and fear brought on by months of poisoning. Not premeditated murder.”

  I glanced again at Mr. James Barclay, but he remained silent, even with Brian and now Sergeant Michaels looking at him with accusing eyes.

  “I will admit that this plan was very bold, but if you examine these books, you will find the evidence I described. I have never taken a meal or even a drink in this house. These books were the only opportunity to poison me, and I contend it was a mistake. If you will allow me to at least demonstrate Miss Barclay’s innocence, I will make an attempt,” I said, standing finally.

  Sergeant Michaels had opened his mouth, probably to deny me, but Constable Dawes spoke up. “If you could coax Miss Barclay out of her rooms without violence, that would be helpful to us, Miss Adams.”

  He winked at me from behind the sergeant’s back, though not in amusement. I could see how hard he was gripping Barclay’s arm, and when Michaels whirled to glare at him, I winked back. Michaels instructed the two other officers to hold James Barclay in this room, and then followed my lead with Dr. Joyce and Constable Dawes in tow. We stopped at the door, where I whispered in Brian’s ear and he nodded.

  I re-entered the anteroom and proceeded straight to the locked door as Dawes pulled closed all the drapes in the room.

  “Are you sure you know what you are doing?” whispered Dawes as he returned to my side, his words for my ears only.

  “No,” was my unreassuring whispered response.

  I knocked on the door. “Miss Barclay, it is Portia Adams again. We have brought your father’s body back up here so that you can say goodbye.”

  “Impossible! No, Portia! No tricks! I will not come out!” she said from her side of the door. “My brother was here a few moments ago, and he admitted that he hired you to spy on me! I know it all now!”

  I gritted my teeth and would have glared at James Barclay had he had the temerity to follow me in here. “Miss Barclay, at the very least, you must take this antidote from Dr. Joyce. You and I have been poisoned, just like your father … please let us in?”

  Silence from the other side of the door, then: “Another trick, Portia? There was no poison! I saw to all my father’s meals, I ate the same food, there was no poison!”

  “Miss Barclay, I assure you Miss Adams was poisoned. I administered an antidote to her not a half-hour ago,” Dr. Joyce called out. “If this is also what ails you, I beg you to let me treat you, child!”

  Miss Barclay began to cry again at his entreaties, and my heart went out to her.

  “You cannot cure me, doctor, no more than you could my father,” she said through her tears. “I tried to treat us both. I tried to keep all of you safe…”

  Suddenly I felt another click in my brain and wondered if perhaps … no … it was too simple … and too far-fetched … wasn’t it?

  Sergeant Michaels was straightening his tie, a sign that he had given up on this verbal negotiation and had already decided on a more aggressive course of action.

  “Miss Barclay,” I said through the door, following my instinct, no matter how implausible. “The small glass vial I saw you applying to your father’s food, what was in it?”

  Silence from the other side of the door.

  “Was it garlic powder, Miss Barclay?” I asked, and was answered immediately by a loud gasp from her side of the door.

  “Garlic powder?” repeated Dr. Joyce.

  “Sunlight, garlic, burns in daylight, pale skin and blood on the lips,” I listed, and saw a spark of understanding come into Constable Dawes’ eyes.

  I smiled and whispered to Michaels, and then turned back to the door. “We are going to leave, Miss Barclay. Your father’s body is here on your bed, and I’ve closed all the drapes again. Please come out and say your goodbyes at least.”

  I then directed the men to hide behind the drapes in the total darkness and closed the outer door, slipping behind the drapes where Dawes hid.

  Minutes went by and I began to fear that Elaine Barclay’s paranoia could not allow her to trust me, when finally she peeked out the door hesitantly. Seeing the room exactly as I had told her it would be, she blindly rushed to the bed where Michaels lay and was seized.

  Elaine screamed as she was grabbed, and we whipped open the drapes to see her struggling for her life with the man who held her captive.

  She twisted her head toward me, red-rimmed eyes accusing. “You have killed me, Portia Adams!”

  “No.” I sadly shook my head, feeling none of the triumph I should. “I have not, Miss Barclay, I swear. Look at yourself. You do not burn in the sunlight. You remain, like any of us, whole and unscathed!”

  “Well, of course she remains!” Sergeant Michaels said, almost losing his grip as his previously struggling victim stopped moving suddenly.

  Hesitantly, Elaine Barclay looked up into the sunlight streaming into the room, squinting with wonder. The bags under her eyes were so pronounced and purple that she looked as though she had been boxing with Bruiser Jenkins. The skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones and she had taken to biting her lips so much that tiny scars could be seen on that delicate skin.

  “Please, take this antidote from Dr. Joyce, Elaine,” I said as kindly as I could. “And I swear, I will explain everything.”

  “Explain it to me first, Miss Adams,” Sergeant Michaels ordered as we stood aside for Dr. Joyce to do his work.

  I sighed but nodded. “I believe that if you look into James Barclay’s finances, you will find a man who is heavily in debt despite his inheritance, because of habits that promise only more debt, not less. You will also find a man who stood at odds with his highly successful father, and whose leanings towards the
theater and gambling caused a great deal of tension in this household.”

  “Exactly true, Miss Adams,” admitted Dr. Joyce as he stood. “But Marcus was a very proud, very private man, so how did you discover all this?”

  “My first conversation with James Barclay told me his ambitions were not toward law, but toward performance and acting, and then the placement of his books in the family library — at the very lowest level, hidden almost — speaks of where his interests lay in the hierarchy of his father’s support.”

  Michaels gestured for me to continue.

  “I am guessing that James’s habits and Judge Barclay’s tolerance of them came to a head within the last year, resulting in James conceiving of this plan,” I said, pacing. “His father would never accept his lifestyle, but James needed his financial support, if not emotional, so the poor man was marked for death. But as a younger sibling, his elder sister and her husband would inherit, and James would simply be trading like-minded masters — for Mr. Ridley and Miss Barclay seem much more like Judge Barclay in sensibility than like James.”

  Dr. Joyce nodded again, passing Elaine a glass of water.

  “So the plan had to be extended to include framing the sister and ending the engagement,” I said, chewing my lip thoughtfully. “By then, I believe James had already decided to use poison. And that he had chosen a poison that could be administered slowly through the method I have already described.”

  “Knowing his father’s and his sister’s shared taste in books, and that they shared the habit of licking their finger to turn pages, his plan was simple. He would poison all the books in the family library except his. They never even looked at that poor bookshelf where his precious plays were condemned, and he could sit amongst them, reading his own books while they poisoned themselves.

  “He watched them sicken, night after night, licking their fingers as they turned page after fatal page,” I described, seeing the scene in my mind’s eye. “He knew that his father read far more than his sister, it being part of his job reviewing case law, and he also knew that one of the side effects of this particular poison was a slow descent into paranoia and hallucinations — a most helpful symptom for his purposes.”

  “To what end?” Sergeant Michaels asked, his brow furrowed, but looking decidedly less angry.

  “To convince Miss Barclay that she and her father had somehow been infected by vampirism,” I answered.

  Constable Dawes spoke up then. “It’s why the drapes were always drawn, why you ended your engagement, why you locked the doors and stopped going outside, is it not, Miss Barclay?”

  She looked up from her seat, and already the hectic look in her eyes had receded. “It all seems too fantastical now, I know, but all the signs were there! My brother started reading Dracula to my father when he first fell ill, and the more he read, the more I feared!”

  I nodded, encouraging her.

  “One morning, about a month after my father fell ill, and a week after I started to feel a little weak myself, I found … a mouse.” She shuddered. “It was drained of blood … and on my father’s lips… Oh, dear God, how that scared me! I told James about it directly, and he assured me it was just a story and threw the mouse away!

  “But then, two weeks later, my father and I were on our way to Dr. Joyce’s office when, I swear, his skin started to burn before our very eyes!” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks again. “Mr. Ridley was with us, and he too … he did not think it very important, but I made him take us straight home, and that was the last time I let my father out into the daylight!”

  “Your brother probably applied some kind of salve that was sensitive to light, Elaine,” I explained. “Perhaps some highly concentrated kerosene mixed with his hand cream?”

  “But why did you not speak of it to us, child? Or to Mr. Ridley?” Dr. Joyce exclaimed.

  Elaine Barclay shook her head, so I answered for her. “Because in her extreme paranoia, doctor, caused by and fed daily by her brother, she thought she was protecting all of us from the monsters she and her father had become.”

  Chapter Eight

  “But I don’t understand,” I said to Brian as we walked his dogs a few mornings later, taking a route through Regent’s Park, “how can all of your leads have dried up?”

  It was the first time I had been out of my apartment in days, only coaxed out by Brian’s promise of an update on our pursuit of Sherlock Holmes.

  He stooped to pick up some of the yellow leaves that had fallen and threw them before answering. The musty smell of fall permeated the cool air around us. “The officer who served under Inspector Lestrade, who sought Holmes out when he was keeping bees in the countryside — he’s not returning my calls anymore. I’m going to stop by his house tomorrow in Westminster.”

  “Interesting,” I replied, uncoiling the leashes as the dogs crossed each other’s paths. “You remember those society pages we found in The Daily’s archives with a few photos and mentions of my grandmother’s attendance in the captions beneath?”

  Brian nodded, so I continued. “Well, I managed to get copies of the images, but the photographers are both long dead, and the page is identified as having been written by ‘Staff of The Daily,’ so there’s nothing at the end of that lead either.”

  I pulled an envelope from my shoulder bag and in flipping through it passed over the two photos I was speaking of. The photos were composites, with several images in square boxes, a headline above and the article below. They were slightly blurry images, being almost fifty years old, but you could easily make out dancing couples in large ballrooms, a pair of women in gloves and feathered hats toasting champagne glasses with a man in a top hat and a caption beneath identifying some of the subjects.

  “The Earl of Shrewsbury raises a glass with renowned opera singer Irene Adler in attendance,” Brian read from one of the photos, turning wide eyes my way. “Is that not the same Irene Adler…”

  “I believe so, from the casebook Watson called “A Scandal in Bohemia”,” I answered with a rueful smile. “She certainly ran in the highest circles.”

  “As did your grandmother. Look at her here,” Brian replied, pointing to a photo identified as ‘Socialite Constance Adams takes a turn around the dance floor with the Earl of Effingham’.

  I took the photo from his hands to look again as he reached down to untwist the dogs’ leashes for the third time on this walk. With a frown, I realized Irene Adler was also in this shot, in profile, standing along the edge of the dancers near a window in the hall.

  With a start I felt a flash of recognition at that profile, at the nose and jaw, and even in the posture of the woman in the image. I raised my eyes from the photo, thinking about the casebook and notes back in my apartment. Adler was American, an opera singer, and a contemporary of my grandparents and my guardian. She was also a brilliant criminal — one of the very few to have escaped Holmes and Watson.

  Brian reached down to pick up a stick and throw it. The three dogs watched the stick as it arced through the air all the way to where it hit the ground, and then they all looked expectantly back at Brian.

  With perfect timing, he shrugged and said, “I wasn’t even throwing it for you scamps. It’s how I stay so fit. Throw a stick, pick it up … you know.”

  I gave a tiny smile at his joke as he went to retrieve the stick and quickly returned to my side, his long legs making short work of the distance.

  We walked in silence for a moment, my thoughts a thousand miles away, and then he said, “It still bothers you, doesn’t it … how close Barclay came to getting away with murder?”

  I clenched my jaw, staring straight ahead.

  “It’s all right to be bothered, Miss Adams,” he continued, throwing the stick again and getting the same response from the dogs. “But you have to know that he would have gotten away with it had you not figured out his motives and methodologies. You are why James Barclay is sitting in a jail cell while his sister recovers in hospital.”

  “I a
m also why Judge Barclay is not with his daughter on the same floor, but in the morgue three levels down,” I replied, for the first time voicing aloud why I had been sullen and withdrawn since solving the case.

  “Now,” he said, stopping to turn toward me, forcing me to do the same or trip on middle-aged dogs, “James Barclay killed the judge. No one else is to blame for that heinous murder but the son.”

  “But … he hired me to be his accomplice,” I replied, looking down at my gloved hands, determined not to cry. “And he escalated his timeline when he poisoned me by mistake and…”

  Brian put both his hands on my forearms, and even through his gloves and my coat I could feel the warmth radiating from them. “Miss Adams, if you had never been hired, if you had never gone into that house, would Mr. Barclay have ceased his murderous plan? Would he have given up trying to kill his father and frame his sister?”

  I shook my head, having drawn the same conclusion over sleepless nights. No, the man had spent months devising and implementing this plan. He was determined to kill his father and take his money.

  “Then what you have done is thwarted a villain who was stupid enough to underestimate you,” he said, using his gloved right hand to raise my chin so my eyes met his. “Forget James Barclay. Focus on your accomplishment.”

  “Our accomplishment,” I answered with a lopsided smile, still thinking about Adler and deciding this was not the right time to bring my startling suspicions before Brian.

  He laughed, dropping his arms and resuming his forward motion. “Fine then, our accomplishment, though the act I am most proud of is not punching the blighter in the nose in front of my sergeant.”

  We walked another few meters in silence, and then Brian asked, “So, was that all you found out?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You said that you had ‘almost’ no luck,” he reminded me. “That implies that you had at least a little…”

  “Oh, yes, one reporter at The Sunday Times claims to have spoken to Sherlock Holmes at Watson’s funeral,” I replied, nodding at Brian’s surprise before continuing. “His name is Richard Graft, and after finally convincing him that I wasn’t a competing reporter, he admitted that he had attended the funeral with that express ambition, sure that Watson’s old partner would attend. He says Holmes did attend, standing as far back from the group as possible, and was very rude when approached.”