[The Victorian Detectives 08] - Fame & Fortune

by Carol Hedges

  “The evidence I have observed suggests that he was actually hauled off his feet by the rope after it was tied round his neck. The level of tightening of the ligature is always higher and more vertical with a hanging than with a case of self-strangulation. Also, suicides tend to jump, which causes the rope to break the neck. I have examined the body and there is no break.

  “Another observation I might make is that the ligature employed by a man committing suicide tends to twist, as it is hard for a man to strangle himself. The rope in this case, was not twisted in the slightest degree. Ergo, homicide, not suicide. I also refer you to the deep bruising on both wrists, and the abrasions on the sides of his hands, which would suggest some sort of a defensive struggle.”

  “Lachlan would agree with your conclusions,” Stride says.

  “Indeed, why should he not? I have observed he is an individual of some sagacity. I shall now proceed further with my examination, just in case there are mitigating matters that I have not noticed. It could be that the strangulation was accidental after all, as in the infamous 1839 case of Elizabeth Kenchan ~ do I need to remind you? I see I do.

  “The female in question went to bed intoxicated, with her bonnet on and was found next morning strangled in its strings. She had fallen out of bed, her bonnet becoming fixed between the bedstead and the wall, and was too drunk to loosen the strings.”

  Robertson recounts this gruesome incident with his usual cheerful relish.

  “So, somebody deliberately strung up this man, while he was still alive,” Stride muses thoughtfully, shaking his head. “It hardly bears thinking about.”

  “Well, detective inspector, Homo homini lupus as the saying goes.”

  “Plautus: Man is a wolf to his fellow man,” the assistant says, not even bothering to look up from the leg he is studying.

  Robertson claps his hands. “Well done, Mr. Baker! I can see you will be a great asset. For far too long I have been wasting my erudition upon the desert air. Now, if you would kindly pass me the large serrated knife on the bench, I shall commence upon an examination of this man’s stomach and its contents. I doubt the detective inspector will wish to observe, so I shall bid him farewell with the promise that I will favour him with my report in due time.”

  Stride takes the hint.

  It was bad enough when it was just Robertson, he thinks ruefully as he heads back to the ‘desert air’ of the main building. Now there are two of them, it is going to become even more unbearable. For a moment he contemplates returning to his cramped office and the piles of unread files. Then he dismisses the idea. It is never too early for an early luncheon. Especially after a visit to the police mortuary. He heads for the street.

  ****

  Detective Sergeant Jack Cully regards the individual sitting on the other side of the desk with polite curiosity. The man has the air of an aesthete: pale, thin, with an unhealthy indoor complexion. He wears a black frock coat and crumpled white linen shirt. He is carelessly shaven, with a top hat and lank dark hair, worn slightly too long at the sides. His white hands with long delicate fingers have clearly never done any clerkish or other kind of work. He wears a couple of gold rings with big stones that Cully guesses are probably priceless.

  Behind the owlish spectacles, the visitor also has the shiny, staring eyes of a fanatic, and there is something fussily over-refined about the way he produced a handkerchief and carefully dusted the chair before seating himself on it, although as this is Detective Inspector Stride’s room, borrowed for the occasion, Cully has some sympathy.

  “Will the senior detective be much longer?” the man asks, biting his underlip. He had arrived in the outer office some time earlier, demanding to see ‘the senior detective’ about a matter of great urgency, and had been asked to wait on the Anxious Bench, where he had been left to his own devices while the desk constable dealt with a brawling fracas on the front step.

  “My colleague is engaged on official business, so it is impossible to say for certain when he might return,” Cully replies. Privately he is pretty sure that Stride, having braved the police mortuary, has gone to Sally’s Chop House for an early lunch.

  Sally’s Chop House is not a place he feels he could recommend to the visitor, who is currently glancing about the cramped paper-strewn office with an expression of fastidious alarm. He does not look as if he dines on the sort of fare offered at Sally’s (‘meat from known animal species’). Mind you, Cully thinks, given the visitor’s rake thin body and pallid features, he doesn’t look as if he dines on anything nourishing at all.

  “However, I am quite capable of dealing with whatever has brought you to Scotland Yard,” he continues, drawing a piece of paper towards him and selecting a pen. Cully dips the pen into the inkwell and regards the visitor expectantly.

  “It is private matter of some delicacy,” the man begins hesitantly. “I was recommended to apply to Scotland Yard, as your known discretion will be imperative.”

  He’s being blackmailed by some woman, is Cully’s immediate thought. Then he dismisses it. There is something about the man that precludes any suggestion of an emotional entanglement. Any emotional entanglement.

  “My name is Gerald Daubney, detective,” the man informs him stiffly, “I am a collector of small Japanese carvings, china and such, and the matter upon which I wish to consult Scotland Yard concerns certain valuable items that have gone missing from my private collection ~ items that I now fear may have been stolen by my manservant. I discovered the theft yesterday morning.”

  Cully proceeds to head up the piece of paper with the man’s name, nature of crime, time of discovery, and information about the suspect.

  “What items were taken?” he asks.

  Daubney stares off. Frowns. Swallows. Takes a deep breath. Falters. His reaction is as if a member of his family has disappeared.

  “My entire collection of Japanese netsuke,” he says, staring down at his hands.

  Cully hesitates, pen poised over his notebook. He hasn’t a clue what a netsuke is, let alone how to spell it. Daubney sighs gently, then patiently spells out the word.

  “Netsuke are small ornaments of animals, fruit or people. They are carved out of wood or ivory and are small enough to hold in your hand.”

  “They are toys?”

  Daubney frowns. “Not toys, no. Ornaments. In Japan, men carry them tied into their sashes. There are certain craftsmen who specialise in specific forms ~ for instance, I have … I had,” he corrects himself, “several rats, that were made by an artist in the north of the country. They are just beautiful. And very rare.”

  His face suddenly twists, as if somebody has stabbed him with a knife. Cully tries to feel sympathy for his plight, but truthfully, there are enough real rats running around the streets and back-alleys biting children and spreading disease. The idea that anybody in their right mind would want to make little wooden models of them, let alone collect little wooden models of them, is beyond his comprehension.

  “Has anybody other than yourself visited the room where the robbery took place?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then I will arrange for myself and another officer to visit you later today so that we can make an assessment of the situation.”

  Once again, the same wrenched expression crosses the man’s face.

  “Is that completely necessary, detective?”

  “It is certainly usual.”

  Daubney seems to be engaged in an inner struggle that goes on for some time. Cully sits back and waits for him to reconnect. Eventually, the man nods, albeit reluctantly.

  “So be it. I agree to your request. I can offer you and your colleague a brief visit shortly after 4 o’clock. You must understand, I am somewhat of a solitary disposition and I maintain a strict regimen. The loss of my collection has affected me extremely badly. I will show you the broken glass and the display case, and I can also give you a list of the netsuke, if you really believe it will help you find the thief.”

  Cully
is strongly tempted to tell him that if this is how he feels, then he and his colleagues in the detective division have plenty of other work they could be getting on with, including a brutal murder, but something in the man’s air of nervous wretchedness halts him in his tracks.

  “I assure you, we will disturb you as little as possible,” he says. “It is always necessary to see the actual place where a crime was committed. We are trained to pick up clues that a lay person might miss, which can lead us to uncover the perpetrator. We will be with you shortly after four, as you request. Please do not enter the room, nor touch anything in the immediate area.”

  Cully stands, to indicate that the interview is over. Daubney immediately gets to his feet with a sigh, offers a limp hand, and is accompanied to the main entrance, where he is shown out to the street. Thoughtfully, Cully watches him depart. He decides to see if Detective Inspector Lachlan Greig can accompany him. Detective Inspector Stride might be a little too abrasive for Mr. Daubney’s delicate nerves.

  A short while later, Gerald Daubney lets himself back into the house. It is as silent as when he quitted it a few hours earlier. Eschewing the drawing room, as requested by the detective, he enters the front parlour. The blinds are down, as they are in the rest of the house, producing the soft restful light that is conducive to the profound seclusion that he enjoys.

  He sits down in one of the two highbacked crimson chairs. There is a chirrup, and Zanthe, his small white cat, named after a particular style of Japanese chrysanthemum pottery, appears from under the table. She twines her lithe body around his legs. He bends down and picks her up. The cat gently butts his chin with the top of her head.

  Suddenly, Daubney finds himself in a clean space where there is nothing but pain: the Edo cat has gone. He may never again hold its ivory body in the palm of his hand, run his fingers over its smooth creamy back, marvel at the little miracle of its perfection, the alert ears, the tiny pink tongue licking its flank, the intense preoccupied expression in its green eyes.

  He remembers building his collection. Each netsuke arrived in a wooden box, wrapped in a silk square, having been packed and crated and sent from Japan by the dealer he met once on his only visit to the strange exotic country. Thirty-eight of them; the tiger, the monkey, the elephant, the rats, the fruits and nuts, the two toads, the tiny squatting beggar, the Edo cat, and all the erotic ones that he did not remember ordering. Each was unwrapped, held in his hand and considered from all angles, then placed carefully on one of the velvet-lined shelves in the bow-fronted cabinet.

  He cannot pinpoint the moment when collecting the little carvings went from being an interest to an obsession. He only knows that his collection of netsuke, and this silent, curtained, unvisited house are the only things he loves in the world. Exhausted and heartbroken, he sits on, feeling his body tremble. He wonders whether this is what death from shock feels like, until it occurs to him that he has taken neither bite nor sup since he awoke.

  Having correctly diagnosed the symptoms of his distress, he decides to go in search of sustenance. Such matters were always the concern of his man, who, in some mysterious way, produced meals at regular intervals. Without his presence Daubney is as helpless as a shelled crab. He rises, scattering the cat who miaows plaintively. He guesses that she is hungry too. But what to give her? This too, was the province of his servant. Now it is his problem.

  Daubney makes his way to the kitchen, terra incognita as far as he is concerned. There he finds a stout woman in a cap, print gown and apron. She is setting tea things on a tray. A black kettle is coming to the boil. This is Cook, a formidable female who has been with the family ever since he was a boy, although he does not remember her name.

  He pauses on the threshold, uncertain whether to enter, what to say. He has never been down to the kitchen since the day his mother passed away. The woman lifts her head from the tray, regards him thoughtfully, then makes a slight bobbing motion that might be a curtsey.

  “Tea won’t be long, Master Gerald,” she says. “Will you be wanting anything to eat?”

  Daubney frowns. “Have you seen Flashley, Cook?”

  The cook shakes her head. “Not seen hide nor hair of him. Perhaps he is ill? He hasn’t been looking too well of late. I wondered whether it was the influenza. There’s a lot of it about. Had you noticed, Master Gerald?”

  Daubney tries to recall whether he has observed anything different about the manservant. It is a question he finds almost impossible to answer. Flashley is just somebody who is there on the margins of his life. He makes things easier. And now he is making things difficult by not being there.

  “I was thinking of bringing up your tray myself, if that’d be alright,” the cook says.

  He waves a languid hand.

  “Yes, yes, of course Mrs Err …. Cook. And if there is any of the … the seed cake, that would also be quite acceptable, thank you.”

  Daubney returns to the higher regions of the house to await his refreshments. Their arrival will coincide with that of the two detectives from Scotland Yard, thus requiring an additional two plates, cups and saucers, and adding to his already elevated level of unease.

  ****

  Eventually, having finished their initial investigatory visit, Greig and Cully find a quiet spot to consider what they have learned. Jack Cully’s thought processes are interrupted at intervals by a sneeze. He is allergic to cats, and had managed to sit close to what he’d thought at first was an example of rather good taxidermy, until it got up, stretched, yawned, and tried to sit on his lap.

  Cats always made a beeline for him. They knew a victim when they discovered one. He was lucky that his small daughter Violet’s rescued kitten had decided early on in its arrival to go and be rescued elsewhere.

  “A strange gentleman, our Mr. Gerald Daubney,” Greig remarks, “though that might be excused given recent events. It is clear he has been very vexed by the theft of his little wooden ornaments.”

  “It is also clear that whoever entered Mr. Daubney’s house was in possession of a key,” Cully says thoughtfully. “The front door showed no evidence of force being employed, nor were any ground floor windows broken. Either that, or the thief was a consummate picker of locks. But the absence of Mr. Flashley, the living-out manservant points strongly towards the former thesis. It looks like a simple case of ‘rob and run’ to me.”

  “And yet Mr. Daubney swore to the honesty of the man,” Greig murmurs. “It is a mystery why a loyal servant, with such an upright character, who has worked in the house for so many years, would suddenly turn around and steal from his master.”

  “We have his address,” Cully says. “I suggest we go there now. There’s always an advantage to arriving unannounced and unexpected. If he is lying low, we may catch him out.”

  Cully knew that the advantage of surprise had little to do with the innocence or guilt of the individual sought, but the element of surprise often spurred people towards the truth. They finish their discussion and pick up a cab at the corner. Some time later, they are dropped outside a row of lodging houses.

  They rap at the door of one, and wait patiently on the grubby step, until the door is opened a crack. A large-eyed sickly face peers up at them. It takes a second or so for both men to register that it belongs to a child, not a frail old woman.

  “Ma says not to open the door,” the child declares firmly. Cully squats down until his face is on the same level as the child’s. “She is quite right to say that,” he says. “Where is your mother?”

  The child runs claw-like fingers through its thin wispy hair. “D’liverin’ washing.”

  “And what is your name?” Cully asks.

  “Anna Pritchard, 3 Benson Street, London, England,” comes the prompt reply.

  “That’s a pretty name. My little girl is called Violet. Do you know, Anna, whether Mr. Flashley is at home?”

  The child frowns. “First floor back? No, he ain’t.”

  “Thank you, Anna. Would your mother mind if we cam
e in and waited for him? We need to speak to him about something. It is very important. Can you help us?”

  The child opens the door slightly. Now they see that she has a twisted back. One shoulder is markedly higher than the other. She is clad in an old-fashioned red dress that has been pinned to fit her awkward body. On her feet are a pair of men’s carpet slippers.

  “I promise you, we won’t be any trouble,” Cully smiles. “Indeed, we shall be as quiet as little mice.” He digs in his pocket and produces a small screw of paper. “Here, would you like a peppermint sweet? My Violet loves them.”

  The child’s face is suddenly alight with interest. She takes a sweet, studies it, licks it a few times, before putting it in her mouth. Cully and Greig seize the moment and enter the house. Cully puts his index finger to his lips. “Quiet as mice,” he whispers, as they mount the uncarpeted stairs to the first floor.

  “That was a good trick with the sweeties,” Greig says, as the two men stand on the landing outside the door to Flashley’s room.

  “Poor child,” Cully says, as they turn the handle of the door, and find it is unlocked. “I pity any little one who has to endure what she has. Life is hard enough without being a cripple.”

  They go into the room and glance around, seeking clues. They are immediately struck by the sense of order. Clothes hang on a rail. Shoes and a pair of overshoes are lined up underneath. Shaving tackle and hair oil are on the washstand, along with a cake of yellow soap and a neatly folded striped flannel. Everything is neat and tidy.

  “The curtains are drawn,” Greig observes. “And the bed hasn’t been slept in, which suggests to me he left here, but didn’t return. He was planning to return, that is quite clear.”

  Cully crosses the room and opens a drawer in the bedside table. He sees a notebook, a pencil. The notebook lists the man’s daily expenditure ~ food, coals, candles and rent, all neatly entered in weekly columns and balanced against his salary. Had he not been a valet, Mr. Flashley would have made an excellent accountant.