The Murderer's Apprentice

by The Murderer's Apprentice (retail) (epub)

  ‘Well, I never!’ said Louisa. ‘Deaf? Who’d have thought it? Poor young lady. I suppose her papa means well. She’s drawn pictures of all of us? Me and Tompkins, too?’

  ‘Yes, and the pot man, and the pie man, and the brewer’s dray with the horses. She has drawn me and Bessie, coming here to visit Miss Eldon.’

  ‘And she’s French? Well, there’s a thing. I’d never have guessed any of it! I declare, it’s like one of those novels.’ Louisa rose to her feet in a rustle of bottle-green taffeta, that being the gown of the day. ‘I’ll go down and tell Tompkins all about it.’

  ‘You go downstairs, too, Bessie,’ I told our maid. ‘I need to have a word with Miss Eldon.’

  When Miss Eldon and I were alone, Ruby, who had sat silent throughout my narrative, stirred and said, ‘I am very much obliged to you, Mrs Ross. I also owe you an apology. On my behalf you undertook a task that could have turned out very unpleasantly. Mr Bernard might have received you with hostility and abuse. I had no right to expect any such heroism from you. But I am very, very pleased to know the young lady is in no danger. I am very sad, of course, for her situation. But it is so much better, far, far more, than I had feared.’ She looked down at her mittened hands and added in some embarrassment, ‘You will say I have been foolish and let my imagination run away with me!’

  ‘No, you saw something that puzzled and worried you. You felt you should do something about it. There is no shame in that.’

  Miss Eldon sighed and nodded. Now I sprang my surprise.

  ‘I am invited to call again, the day after tomorrow, and to bring you with me to meet Miss Rose Bernard.’

  Miss Eldon looked up, startled, and for a moment unable to reply. Then she gasped, ‘I am to meet her, the young girl I’ve seen so often?’

  ‘Yes, and it will put your mind at rest. Yes, she is lonely and I believe her father understands that. But he does not know what to do about it. There is the double problem, you see, her deafness and her lack of English. Do you know some French, Miss Eldon?’

  I was fairly sure she must have had a young lady’s education and been taught at least one language, other than her native English.

  ‘Oh, yes, I had lessons, of course, when I was a child. Oh, dear!’ She clasped her mittened hands as if in prayer. ‘Shall I remember it all?’

  ‘I am sure you will remember enough and I shall be there to help out.’

  ‘My goodness,’ said Miss Eldon, letting her hands fall to her lap. ‘I am sure I shall not sleep a wink now until the time of our visit comes!’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Inspector Ben Ross

  Since coming to London from Derbyshire as a young man I had had but one occasion to travel back north. By chance, that had also been to Harrogate to pursue some inquiries there into another case, that of Thomas Tapley. Now I took the train to the spa town once more, this time not to stay, but to make my way onward across the moors to Ridge House. I was looking forward to the possibility of meeting Inspector Barnes, the local man, again. He had been of great help to me on the previous occasion and he and his wife and had made me welcome at their dinner table.

  When I arrived in Harrogate, sure enough, there was the considerable bulk of Barnes, waiting to meet me and pump my hand until I felt the fingers would never function properly again.

  ‘Will you need me to come with you this time, Ross?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘but I want to make my call on Anderson appear as informal as can be. Is there anything you can tell me of him before I go?’

  Barnes nodded. ‘As informal as possible is probably best. Officialdom wouldn’t impress him. He’s a respected man, a judge at livestock shows, and at one time a magistrate. He owns a fair amount of land, most of it let out to tenant farmers. There is also a home farm, of course, attached to Ridge House. I believe he takes a great interest in that. Something of a gentleman farmer, as they say. He doesn’t do much except ride round his estate but likes to keep everyone there on their toes.’

  He steered me outside to a waiting pony and trap. ‘Here’s your conveyance. This is Herbert, your driver. The roads outside the town are a little rutted with ice at this time of the year, but Herbert will keep you safe. You won’t want to be upturned and it’s easily done. Oh, when you get back, my wife and I hope we shall see you at our table again? And I’ve taken a room for you, as before, at the Commercial Hotel. It was all right last time, was it?’

  I assured him I had been very comfortable at the Commercial Hotel and looked forward to renewing my acquaintance with Mrs Barnes. I had not forgotten the excellent table she kept. Barnes beamed at this and clapped me on the shoulder, nearly dislocating it.

  When I set out in the trap, driven by Herbert, and we had left Harrogate behind, I soon felt I was in another world. The bright clean air was wonderful to breathe after London’s stinking fogs. What I had not perhaps considered properly was the legacy of the heavy winter snows, still much in evidence. In London we had suffered fog. In Yorkshire, Herbert confirmed, they had suffered heavy snowfall that winter.

  ‘Out there…’ He waved his whip at the open moor. ‘You’d have thought you were sailing on a white ocean! Trees poking up bare arms like drowning men calling for help. Some buildings half buried. You could see the chimneys sticking up like markers. That’s how you knew where houses were.’

  Even now, only the top tiers of the stone walls could be seen, and the sheep, poor creatures, they huddled in what poor shelter they could find.

  Barnes’s warning that the roads were ‘a little rutted with ice’ had been an understatement. Ruts there were aplenty, but in other places, Herbert’s sea of snow had been replaced with a slough of frozen mud. The strips of firm going were so narrow the trap could often only proceed at walking pace. Several times hidden rocks jolted and shook us severely, making the trap bounce up in the air on one side or another. Then I had to grasp anything I could and hang on, for fear of being thrown out. I wondered more than once whether we’d be flipped over. Yet Herbert knew his business, and, though he gave me a sardonic glance or two when he saw how grimly I was clinging on, we made a steady progress.

  Herbert himself so closely resembled William, the driver on my previous visit, I wondered if they were brothers. He seemed slightly perplexed at my presence; and even more perplexed by my having come up from London. After our initial brief exchange, he did not speak again for a while, but then his curiosity overcame him.

  ‘You’ll have visited Ridge House before, then?’ he bawled at me from beneath the brim of his bowler hat. It was tied on his head with a woollen muffler to keep it in place in the sharp wind; and to protect his ears from frostbite.

  ‘No!’ I returned, huddled in my greatcoat.

  ‘It’s a fine place!’

  This was followed by another fifteen minutes of silence. Then Herbert resumed.

  ‘London, eh? That’s where you hail from?’

  ‘I live there now, but I’m a Derbyshire man by birth and upbringing.’

  ‘What are you doing in London, then?’

  There was an echo here of my conversation with Miss Eldon when I had met her behind Bellini’s restaurant.

  ‘I went there, like Dick Whittington, to make my fortune!’ I dared to joke.

  ‘And did you make it, then, this fortune?’

  ‘Not exactly. I joined the police force.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ said Herbert. ‘You could have joined the police here, you know. We’re quite up to date.’

  ‘Well, I was a youngster you know, and I had a fancy to see London.’

  ‘There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose,’ replied Herbert. After that he did not speak again and I felt I had blotted my copybook, as they say. At last, however, he drew rein, and pointed with his whip across the landscape.

  ‘There you are, that’s Ridge House.’

  It was only about a quarter of a mile away but I would have missed it if Herbert hadn’t drawn my attention to it, even though it topped
a rise in the land that had given the house its name. The wind buffeted it on all sides. Smoke spiralling from it chimneys immediately evaporated in the wind. The simple, elegant, but sturdy lines of the house suggested it had been built in the reign of their Majesties William and Mary. The outer walls were plastered and painted white. This did not help in the prevailing conditions. Herbert turned us off the main track on to another one. Ahead of us now, Ridge House formed a more solid bulk, the tall, regularly spaced windows and a pillared portico to the main door being the most noticeable of its features.

  Herbert drew up before the door. A boy ran out from somewhere and took the horse’s head. The main door opened and a butler appeared.

  He descended the portico steps with dignity and approached us. ‘Inspector Ross?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him. I clambered down as best I could, since I was stiff and aching from the drive.

  ‘I trust you had a safe journey, sir. Mr Anderson is waiting for you. If you would kindly follow me?’

  I set off in the wake of the butler. As I did, from behind us, I heard Herbert call, ‘Of course he were safe, Isaac Gregson! He were driven by me!’

  The butler ignored this and continued with a stately tread ahead of me. He appeared oblivious of the sharp wind cutting through the air, so I had to appear as indifferent to it as he was. I would have preferred to cover the ground at twice the pace, to get indoors and find sanctuary. At last we passed through the open front door and the wind was left outside. But the temperature did not strike me as perceptibly warmer.

  The interior of the house was dark despite the large windows. Otherwise, it seemed as well built as its outer appearance suggested. The wind battered it in vain. Old family houses tend to be a repository of changing fashions and interests. The cavernous and gloomy hall contained a good deal of furniture serving no purpose but to make work for the maid who had to dust it. The walls were hung with what I guessed were family portraits. They bore a strong resemblance to one another, these Andersons. All of them looked as solid and defiant as the house. There was a large glass case containing some stuffed game birds and, on one wall, between the portrait of a red-faced Georgian squire and a very plain woman wearing some very fine jewellery, was another case with a large trout mounted against a painted background showing a riverbank. I suspected it of being a plaster reproduction of the original. It was dusty and flaking within its glass house. The case seals must have perished. But it wouldn’t occur to anyone here to take it down and throw it away. It belonged here as much as that long-case clock, ticking away time dolefully, and the table with the barley twist legs on which stood the box for letters to be taken to the Post Office in Harrogate, if there ever were any. To say nothing of assorted chairs that must each once have formed part of a dining set, but now jostled for space in case anyone should care to sit down in this dark museum. It struck me that the place lacked a woman’s touch.

  Isaac Gregson relieved me of my hat and coat and hung both on a rack. He then threw open a door and showed me into a large, equally cluttered room, inadequately heated by a single fireplace at the far end. A small dog of terrier type ran to meet me with a brief bark. It then sniffed at my boots and appeared satisfied. From its general appearance it was very old.

  ‘You’ll not need to worry about Sammy,’ said a voice. ‘He’ll not bite. He’s not got many teeth left that are any use.’

  The speaker was a burly man of perhaps five and fifty, wearing a thick tweed jacket and seated in a large armchair before the fire. He had bushy hair, worn collar-length, and still Nordic blond in colour, albeit with streaks of grey. Beneath it, his complexion was red. The crimson could not be from the heat in the room. That was minimal. A fondness for the bottle, possibly? Or wind-weathered from riding round his land, as described by Barnes? A man for whom the force of the storm, or the cold wet kiss of the snow, was to be endured and shrugged aside. A descendant of the Vikings! I thought. His left ankle was in a plaster cast, from which his toes protruded in a woollen sock. It was propped on a footstool. He whistled and the dog trotted back to sit beside his chair.

  ‘Mr Anderson?’ I bowed politely.

  ‘You’ll forgive me not standing to greet you, Inspector Ross,’ he replied. ‘I have broken my confounded ankle.’ There was a stout walking stick propped against his chair. As for his voice, it was deep and in its own way as weathered as his complexion. But he did not speak uncourteously.

  ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ I told him, wondering when he had broken it. I also made a quick estimation of how tall he would stand upright. A good six feet, I reckoned.

  ‘Had a good journey across the moor? Who drove you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Herbert Wainwright, sir.’ The butler, still behind me, had taken the last question as put to him. His reply came over my shoulder.

  ‘Good man, Wainwright.’ Anderson nodded and returned his attention to me. ‘You will be chilled to the bone, I dare say?’ he demanded of me, rather than inquired solicitously.

  ‘I confess I am,’ I told him.

  ‘Bound to be. Mind you, we’ve known worse winters, although it’s been bad enough. A lot of the farms were marooned until a couple of weeks ago, couldn’t get to or from them! One of the tenants had a wife in the family way and she decided to go and give birth to twins in that time. No one to help but her own old mother and she nearly eighty. Still, Yorkshire women are hardy stock. Gregson! Bring us a hot toddy apiece!’

  The butler withdrew and Anderson waved me to a chair by the fire near to his.

  ‘Does the ankle mend well?’ I asked politely.

  Anderson regarded the affected limb with resentment. ‘Well enough, but too slow. The surgeon told me it could take up to six weeks for it to mend. Dashed inconvenient.’

  ‘An accident on the ice, perhaps?’

  ‘No,’ was the growled reply. ‘I fell down my own main staircase on a Sunday morning, two weeks ago. No good reason for it. I wasn’t suffering a drunken hangover. I just missed the step on a dark landing.’

  This meant the accident had occurred on the day of Emily’s murder in London. Was Anderson presenting his alibi early?

  He stared at me in a way that was direct but not offensive. ‘Come to talk to me about Emily, have you?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I have, if I may. I am anxious to establish the background to her murder. The more I know, the better I will be able to make some sense of it.’

  Anderson gave a shout of mirthless laughter. The dog looked up at him questioningly. He dropped his hand to touch the terrier’s head. Reassured, Sammy settled again. ‘Make sense of a murder, eh?’ Anderson’s look challenged me. ‘The murder of a young girl like that? Good luck to you, Ross.’

  ‘I am a police officer,’ I told him evenly, ‘but I am not insensitive. It is a dreadful business and I shall do everything possible to see Miss Devray has some justice, even in death.’

  Perhaps he thought my words carried some criticism hidden in them, some reference to the will, because he stared very hard at me.

  ‘Will you, now?’ he said. He studied me for a minute. Then he shifted in the chair and muttered, ‘Dashed inconvenient, this ankle!’

  The door opened and the butler brought in the hot toddies. Anderson raised his to me in a silent toast. I responded in like manner and we sat in silence, drinking. The fire of the whisky and the sweetness of the honey coursed through my veins and I did feel much more human. I had been even more chilled than I’d thought.

  I took the moment to look around the room. It was furnished much in the style of the main hall with assorted furniture, all of it very good, but much of it dating back to the beginning of the century, as was the discoloured wallpaper. There were more paintings hung around at different levels, but time and smoke from the hearth, and generations of candles, meant they were in sore need of cleaning. The nearest picture showed a man standing with proprietorial pride beside an enormous bull. Its huge solid rectangular body put me in mind of a railway engine. It hardly seemed possible that
its short legs could hold it up. A farm worker was at its head, holding a stick, which hooked through a ring in the brute’s nose. The proud owner wore knee-breeches and a low-crowned hat, and rested an outstretched hand nonchalantly on the beast’s rump. Dimly, through the grime, the landscape behind it appeared to contain a house in the distance, resembling the one in which I found myself.

  Anderson had marked my interest. ‘Achilles, that animal was named,’ he said. ‘And the man you see there is my grandfather.’

  I was a little embarrassed to realise he had been watching me so closely. He now set down his empty tumbler before I could think of a suitable comment, and changed the subject briskly. ‘Getting down to business’, he would have termed it himself, no doubt.

  ‘See here, Ross, I took the news of Emily’s death very much to heart. Who the devil would want to do such a thing to such a harmless little creature?’

  ‘You must have known her all her life,’ I suggested.

  ‘Naturally, I did! My Aunt and Uncle Waterfield took her in as an infant. The original intention was that it would be a temporary solution, you understand, until some relative of the Devrays could be found who would take over the responsibility for her. But none was ever found. Whenever I visited, Emily would be there, growing up, in the background. My uncle and aunt brought her with them when they came up here for a visit one summer. She would have been twelve years old then. It was just before my Uncle Waterfield died, lost at sea. He should have stayed on shore. There was no need for him to go sailing around the globe. He wasn’t a naval man. He traded in commodities.’

  ‘I would have expected him to live in London.’

  ‘He couldn’t stand the place and I don’t blame him. With the coming of the railway, there was no need for him to do so. He could travel up and down as needed.’

  ‘The Waterfields had no children of their own, I understand.’

  ‘None. No more have I!’ he added suddenly, fixing me with a direct look. ‘I am a widower. I have been so these last ten years. My wife and I had only one child and he was carried off by a fever when he was but two years old. Are you a married man, Ross?’