‘And he admits he intended to go to London and ask the girl again?’
‘Yes, when she’d had time to reflect on her situation, that was his way of thinking. He was confident, I believe, in her change of heart. After she had spent some time looking after an invalid lady, and a very elderly one, who might die at any time and leave her without a place, well, she’d be very pleased to be Mrs Anderson with her own home. Plus, as Anderson put it, as much pin money as she pleased.’
‘So he’d be furious if she had turned him down a second time! Is he our man, Ross?’
‘I am sorry to tell you we have to rule him out. He wasn’t able to go to London and ask her again because he broke his ankle on a Sunday two weeks ago. That would be the day we believe Emily died. He was most careful to tell me that before I had been five minutes in his presence.’
‘So he could not be in London at the time, putting his renewed offer of marriage to Miss Devray!’ said Dunn drily. ‘Nor could he be there to react violently to a second refusal. How did he manage this convenient accident?’
‘He claims he fell down his own staircase, after stumbling on a dark landing. Well, to be sure, it is a gloomy house. My guess is that he was also drink-fuddled; though he declared he wasn’t drunk or hungover. It’s feasible enough. The house is as gloomy as a mausoleum and stacked to the rafters with a couple of centuries’ worth of clutter. He was probably fortunate not to break his neck.’
I realised what I’d said and stopped short in embarrassment.
‘Like the girl, eh?’ said Dunn.
I hurried on. ‘He mentioned the surgeon coming to attend to the injury. The lower leg and ankle are in plaster. So, if asked, I am sure the surgeon will confirm it.’
‘Huh!’ muttered Dunn. ‘I can’t say he sounds the sort of fellow I’d like to see any daughter of mine married to.’
‘He is Mrs Waterfield’s nephew and heir,’ I reminded him, ‘so I can see how she and Anderson thought it a good idea. But they went about it all the wrong way. Mind you, I’m inclined to agree with you that he wouldn’t be an easy man for a young woman to share her life with.’
Dunn was silent for a while, then remarked, ‘It is a pity about that broken ankle. We should not rule him out, Ross, even so. Anderson, as you describe him, is a man of influence in his district, a man with friends. No doubt the surgeon is an old acquaintance. Perhaps, for friendship’s sake, he was willing to slap a whole lot of plaster round an ankle, having declared it broken. As a police officer I have learned to be wary of men with influence, especially in rural areas.’
* * *
Eventually, after all of this travelling to and fro, I got home to my own fireside that evening. Lizzie listened to all I had to say and agreed that Mrs Waterfield’s plan had been poorly executed.
‘Just to produce Anderson from out of the blue, and suggest Emily marry him, what could she have expected?’
‘I gave some thought to that,’ I admitted, ‘during my train journey back to London. You’ve spoken of your late father a couple of times, during this investigation of mine. Tell me, did he ever have occasion to let a patient know he was dying?’
‘Not so bluntly, I hope!’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘But people do need time to put their affairs in order, so occasionally he had to suggest that it might be a good idea, just a precaution, to give thought to such things.’
‘Exactly!’ I told her. ‘I fancy that Mrs Waterfield’s medical man had just such a conversation with her. Her heart was weak; she knew that. Anderson told me so. She’d made a will some time earlier. That’s the will Anderson mentioned in which his aunt had left Emily quite well provided for. But now, with perhaps less time that she’d thought she might have, Mrs Waterfield panicked. Possibly her doctor had dropped a hint or two. She began to review the dispositions she’d made and to worry about Emily. The girl was young. She was unworldly. According to Anderson, Emily always had her head in a book.’
Lizzie was looking thoughtful and a little sad. ‘I can see how that might happen. But still, to suppose Emily would accept a man of fifty-seven who lived a rural life in the North of England, when Emily had spent her time in Salisbury…’
‘She had visited Ridge House,’ I reminded her.
‘Well, yes, when she was twelve years old! From your description of the place, I suppose it was much the same when Emily saw it. It wouldn’t have appealed to a twelve-year-old. She must have thought it a fusty old museum of a house, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, where to pay a simple social call on a neighbour would require at least a pony and trap.’
‘All right, all right!’ I placated her. ‘Mrs Waterfield was foolish and Anderson was overoptimistic. It explains how Emily came to be living with Lady Temple and acting as her nurse-companion, but it doesn’t help me much in discovering how she died. Anderson broke his ankle that same weekend. Dunn is sceptical, but I feel forced to accept it as true. Anderson isn’t a suspect. But, if I rule him out, then I have nowhere else to look, unless it is in Lady Temple’s own house.’
‘You suspect George Temple?’
‘I can suspect him as much as I like!’ I muttered. ‘It gets me nowhere.’ I realised that I had been so wrapped up in my own narration I had forgotten that Lizzie also had had plans. ‘Tell me, did you reconsider your idea to visit the banker fellow, Bernard? I hope so…’
Even as I spoke I saw that I hoped in vain. Lizzie’s cheeks were flushed a little more than could be caused by the fire. Her attitude had gained some defiance. But also, I fancied, there was a spark of triumph in her eyes. ‘Go on,’ I said, resigned to hearing the worst. ‘Tell me what you have done.’
‘I don’t see why you should think it should all have been such a disaster!’ my wife declared robustly. ‘As it happened, it all turned out rather well.’
She then embarked on a long explanation of her day and her success. I was forced to agree she had achieved a good deal. But the past couple of days had been strenuous, the fireside was warm, and I have to admit that towards the end of Lizzie’s story, I fell asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
When I awoke the following morning it was to a curious silence. Lizzie still slept peacefully alongside me. I slid carefully out of the covers so as not to disturb her and stood in my bare feet listening for sounds from the kitchen, indicating Bessie was down there, clanging pots around ahead of breakfast. Nothing. The room was cold. It would be colder outside. I went to the window and drew back the curtains.
My hearing was as smothered as was my vision. If there was anything outside in the street, I could neither see nor near it; any view cut off by a grey-white blanket, tinged here and there with pale orange patches. The house was no longer part of a material world. We were cocooned in a cotton-wool silence, so eerie and so isolated that I did wonder, for a moment only, if perhaps we’d all died in the night and floated through some celestial ether. It was, of course, the fog. It had been thinner these past few days. Now it had returned with a vengeance, creeping upriver during the night, reaching out its damp, cold arms, and drawing us all into its maw. So might the whale have swallowed the luckless Jonah.
There was a sound at last from below. The back door slammed. Bessie had been out to the privy in the yard. Within a few minutes I heard her clumping her way up the stairs. There was a knock on the door and it opened to admit her small, sturdy form, carrying a jug of hot water.
Unbothered by finding me standing before her barefoot in my nightshirt, she marched across to the washstand, deposited the jug, turned and announced, ‘Here, you can shave. And it’s something awful out there. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. I don’t know how you’re going to get to work.’ With this depressing news, she marched out again. Lizzie stirred and peered over the blankets. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ I told her. ‘Only Bessie. The fog is back.’
Lizzie groaned and flung back the sheets, reaching for her wrap. So another day started in the Ross household.
Getting to work
proved as difficult as Bessie had foreseen. Fires had been kindled in houses all around, the smoke from the chimneys mingling with the river mist and producing an odorous, suffocating soup, through which I felt my way. There could have been no greater contrast between this and the clear, cold air of the Yorkshire moors I had quitted only yesterday. Even my sense of direction was confused. I listened for the traffic ahead, but the sounds I heard I could not place. When I reached the great rail terminus at Waterloo Bridge, the smoke from the locomotives was added to the mix. Even to draw breath was difficult. Unwarily, I opened my mouth to gasp for air, and swallowed a mouthful. The taste was foul. I coughed and spluttered, hearing, though not seeing, other early-morning Londoners all around me. We cannoned into one another, muttered apologies, and stumbled onward. As I crossed the bridge I heard, but could not see, the river traffic below my feet. Hooters and foghorns played a melancholy symphony. A clip-clop of hooves and the groan of wheels gave warning of an approaching vehicle, proceeding at a walking pace only. I pressed myself against the parapet and a dark shape loomed up. A hansom cab was taking a traveller and his luggage to the station. I smelt the acrid odour of horse, heard the cabbie swear, and glimpsed the pale face of his fare peering out anxiously, wondering if he would catch his train. Silently I wished him luck.
I found Scotland Yard was emptier than it should have been at that hour, other than for a few tired-looking officers who should probably have gone off shift an hour earlier. I asked the officer at the front desk if anyone had been called out to a scene of crime. He replied that most had simply not arrived yet to take up the day shifts.
‘But Superintendent Dunn is here, sir,’ he informed me. ‘Came in twenty minutes ago.’
Just my luck! I thought crossly. Everyone else was held up, myself included, but Dunn, who had come in from St John’s Wood, a fair distance, had managed to arrive already.
‘Sergeant Morris?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Not yet, sir.’
A last desperate throw of the dice. ‘Constable Biddle?’
‘Can’t say I’ve seen him, sir.’
Just myself and Dunn, then, and a couple of constables near asleep on their feet. I climbed the stairs and first went along to the superintendent’s office, to let him know I, at least, was on the premises. I entered on a quite comfortable scene. A fire burned in the grate. Dunn sat in his chair at his ease; and was fortifying himself with a tumbler of something poured from a bottle of murky brownish liquid standing on his desk. It was an odd-shaped bottle, flattened not round, of medium height with a narrow neck. I had seen similar in dispensing chemists’ shops. Whatever the contents were, they were no kind of ale or any spirits I could identify. The liquid looked sticky in consistency, like something a maid might use to get scratch marks out of polished wood.
‘Good morning, sir,’ I greeted him. ‘You’re early.’
‘No, I’m not,’ returned Dunn. ‘I’m on time. You are late, Ross!’ He didn’t sound too put out about my tardiness. That was odd. Then he spluttered, coughed, and drained the tumbler. ‘Ah, that’s better! The congestion lingers in my chest, Ross.’
‘Such things are often slow to clear,’ I sympathised, venturing to add, ‘What is that mixture, sir?’ I had understood Dunn to be a member of some temperance society. What on earth was in that bottle?
‘It is Mrs Dunn’s preferred cough mixture,’ he told me. ‘She has the pharmacist make it up for her.’ He gave the bottle an affectionate tap. ‘It is excellent stuff. It got me through this last bout of illness, Ross. You should try it.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. A suspicion had entered my head. ‘You’ve been drinking it regularly, then, sir? Since you went down with that bad chest infection?’
‘It is the first thing Mrs Dunn reaches for,’ he assured me.
Could the mystery of the odd quirks of behaviour exhibited by Dunn of late be explained?
‘Just out of curiosity, sir,’ I asked, ‘it isn’t laudanum, is it? Or something like that?’
‘No idea,’ was the vague reply. ‘The pharmacist recommended it. I understand he sells a lot of it at this time of year.’
Probably at any time of year, I thought. I made my excuses and went to my office.
There, another surprise awaited me. As I approached the door I heard voices. One croaked – that meant Morris had arrived – and one had a Scottish burr. Indeed, Dr Mackay rose to his feet to greet me.
‘Good day to you, Inspector Ross,’ said Mackay apologetically. ‘Although it’s hardly that, I mean, the fog…’
‘Quite, Doctor,’ I said. To Morris I said, ‘Glad to see you, Sergeant!’
‘Sorry to be late, sir,’ returned Morris. ‘I found Dr Mackay here downstairs at the desk and took the liberty of bringing him up to see you.’
‘Certainly!’ I said heartily. ‘Always a pleasure to see you, Dr Mackay. You’re out and about early.’
‘I haven’t been home,’ confessed Mackay, ‘or not since yesterday. I was at Bart’s and, when the fog began to close in, I decided to stay there overnight. I sought out one of the cots used by the duty doctors, and slept on that.’
‘Dr Mackay,’ croaked Morris, ‘has kindly been giving me advice on my cold.’
‘Only commonsense, really, and some old traditional remedies,’ confessed Mackay. ‘Drink plenty of water. Herbal teas are often helpful: ginger tea was one my own granny swore by. Honey and lemon juice in boiling water also makes a helpful brew.’
‘A lot of housewives still swear by laudanum mixtures,’ I suggested mildly.
‘Well, I do not!’ was Mackay’s stern reply. ‘Laudanum can be very addictive.’
‘Good for the nerves, perhaps?’ I continued to play devil’s advocate.
‘Makes ’em happy, I suppose,’ agreed Mackay. ‘In the short term. But still not to be recommended!’
‘Thank you, Doctor, I will bear it in mind. Now then, have you had a chance to look at any bloodstains you may have found in the shed?’
‘I have and it is that which has brought me.’ Mackay cheered up. ‘I had to get down on my hands and knees. There is a well-marked trace of blood on the lower inside wall, certainly – well, at least, to my satisfaction. But also on a lawn-mower!’
‘The lawn-mower!’ I exclaimed.
‘Indeed. By my deductions, someone – I cannot, of course, say it was definitely the young woman – fell in the shed. Let us assume it was she. She struck her head on that sturdy metal contraption, bled from the wound to the back of her head, until it clotted; but died very quickly, due to her neck being broken. That happened, I suggest, because of the confined space. It meant the body did not sprawl but collapsed downwards, in a heap. The back of her head collided with the lawn-mower. This collision acted very much like a rabbit punch.’
‘And she remained there, in that garden shed, until the body was moved later, after a period of at least six to eight hours?’ I put in.
‘Resting against the wall, her head touching it at the point I found the bloodstain.’ Mackay nodded vigorously.
There was a silence while all three of us considered the situation. Morris cleared his throat. ‘Problem is, gentlemen, as I see it – with your permission, Mr Ross…’
‘Yes, yes, go on, Morris.’
‘A good defence barrister will seek to get the evidence of the blood thrown out. No disrespect, Doctor!’
‘Yes, he will, certainly if he is briefed by Pelham.’ I sighed. ‘I am sorry, Dr Mackay.’
‘Don’t apologise!’ Mackay told me. ‘I wish I could prove it in a manner that would convince a jury or a judge. Give me another year or two, and I’m confident I shall be able to do it.’
‘I am still extraordinarily grateful to you. Well, I had better go and tell all this to Mr Dunn. Will you come with me, Dr Mackay?’
‘Well, well, Dr Mackay,’ said Dunn when he had listened to us both. ‘We thank you, of course. However, Ross, although I dare say you’d like to go back to Lady Temple’s house and interrog
ate them all afresh, we cannot do so. But it seems that we are looking in the right place. Something else, Ross. There must be something else.’
‘Oh well,’ said Mackay. ‘I’ve done all I can and I’m obliged for the opportunity to add to my researches. I’ll take my leave of you and make my way back to the hospital.’
I decided to take my chance. ‘Dr Mackay,’ I said to Dunn, ‘has been kind enough to advise Sergeant Morris on his cough and sore throat.’
‘Really?’ asked Dunn, interested.
‘More than happy to oblige,’ said Mackay, ‘Although it is time rather than medication that will cure him. The symptoms can be alleviated. I advised plenty of fluids, and tea made with lemon juice, ginger, or oil of thyme. They are all very effective. I advised him against laudanum mixtures. I can’t recommend those, although they are popular. All these opiate-containing potions are so very addictive.’
‘Really?’ asked Dunn in surprise.
‘Oh, yes. An habitual user becomes as dependent on them as a drunkard does upon alcohol.’
Dunn looked first startled and then worried. ‘Really, Doctor?’
I showed Mackay out, leaving Dunn staring thoughtfully down at his desk.
I never again saw the bottle of Mrs Dunn’s cough mixture in his office. I can also report that following Dr Mackay’s visit Mr Dunn’s normal brusque manner returned within a few days.
Elizabeth Martin Ross
I looked out at the fog that morning in dismay. Did this mean I must defer my plans to collect Ruby Eldon and take her across the road to meet Rose Bernard?
‘It’s going to take a long time to get there,’ warned Bessie. ‘I can go out and find us a cab, but it will still take a good while. It’ll be dangerous on foot. You can’t see a hand in front of your face and that’s to say nothing of the risk of just getting lost. That’s what the fog does, isn’t it? It’s not just that you can’t see which way you’re going, you can’t tell, half the time, if you’re even going in the right direction!’ She eyed me thoughtfully. ‘You’re going to try, though, aren’t you, missis?’
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