The Curse Of The House Of Foskett (The Gower Street Detective Series) Page 19

  ‘It is unlikely to have belonged to the vicar,’ he concurred, ‘and anyone who was not in an extreme hurry would have paused to retrieve it. The branch was only four feet-three inches from the ground, but then…’ He looked at me quizzically.

  ‘People bend as they run.’

  ‘Precisely.’ He slapped the leaf irritably.

  A waitress appeared with our tea in a white china pot with matching cups. ‘Shall I hang that up for you, sir?’ She viewed the hat with distaste.

  ‘Leave it alone,’ he snapped. ‘It is not my hat.’

  She hurried away and I picked it up. ‘The wearer had black hair not pomaded,’ I observed, picking out a strand from the lining.

  ‘Or red hair.’ Mr G pointed to a few on the underside of the peak.

  ‘One of the men working on the road had red hair and he was not wearing a hat,’ I commented.

  ‘And how do you think he got round the back and into the church in the time available?’ He rammed the leaf away but it sprang back. ‘Plus there would have been mud everywhere from his boots and clothes.’

  ‘I did not say he did,’ I defended myself. ‘I merely observed—’

  ‘Leave the observations to me.’ Mr G leaned back and snapped the leaf off.

  ‘Are you going to show me your intangible clue?’ I joked weakly and he huffed.

  ‘I went out through the back gate to the toy fair and, except for Trumpington darting about like a confused whippet, not a soul had noticed anything at all.’

  ‘That is disappointing.’ I poured, thinking that I would rather have had another brandy – anything to dull the sights and sounds that crowded through my brain.

  ‘On the contrary.’ Sidney Grice stirred his milkless, sugarless tea vigorously clockwise. ‘It is one of the most important clues I have discovered so far.’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  A look of alarm came over Sidney Grice’s face and his hand shot in the air. ‘Waitress. I ordered tea, not last week’s pencil shavings.’

  *

  I went to see Inspector Pound. He was still unconscious but his breathing was stronger and steadier. The younger nurse came and wiped his face with a damp flannel.

  ‘He came round a bit this morning,’ she told me, ‘and said something about the robin on the card and his uncle, but it didn’t make much sense.’

  ‘It was just a silly joke. His uncle was a mounted Bow Street Runner,’ I told her, ‘and they wore red waistcoats.’ I touched Inspector Pound’s brow. ‘His temperature has gone down,’ I observed. ‘Thank you for tending to him.’

  The nurse bowed her head. ‘He’s a good sort, the inspector,’ she told me. ‘He arrested my brother once and didn’t even beat him up.’

  38

  Slapped Faces and Torn Remains

  We did not have to wait for the morning. The evening papers were full of the news.

  HORRIBLE MURDER OF THE REVEREND ENOCH JACKAMAN, LATE VICAR OF ST JEROME’S CHURCH

  But worse was to follow.

  THE CURSE OF GRICE STRIKES AGAIN

  And:

  SIDNEY GRICE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE, WITNESSES TERRIBLE MURDER OF HIS OWN CLIENT

  ‘Personal, personal, personal,’ Sidney Grice chanted. ‘I am a personal detective. There is nothing remotely private about my work at the moment.’

  We read them over tea in the study.

  ‘Your new friend devotes a whole column to you, March,’ my guardian said quietly and handed me a copy of the Evening Standard.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT SIDNEY GRICE FROM HIS COMPANION

  On the afternoon of the murder while the body of the Reverend Jackaman still hung crucified, dark-haired and dark-eyed Miss March Middletone took our young reporter to one of the many public houses she frequents where she smoked tobacco and consumed great quantities of strong liquor. Only when she was in what we can only refer to as a condition which no lady should be did she consent to give him an interview. Miss Middletone would not comment upon her relationship with Mr Grice at whose address she resides.

  ‘That is disgusting,’ I said. ‘I shall sue.’

  Sidney Grice looked severe. ‘What has he said that was untrue?’

  ‘Nothing, but he has implied…’

  ‘He will argue that it is only your depraved mind that imagines anything untoward in his article.’

  I read on. ‘Nor did she deny that his attentions were not always of a nature one might expect from a man purporting to be her guardian.’

  ‘I did not deny it because I was not asked,’ I said, ‘and what is this about purporting? You are my guardian.’

  ‘Not in law,’ Sidney Grice said softly. ‘There has never been a court order assigning you to my care.’

  ‘If ever I see that man again I shall slap his face.’

  ‘Oh, you will see him again,’ my guardian assured me, ‘and he would love you to assault him, the more publicly the better.’

  ‘And he has misspelled my name.’ I folded the paper. ‘I shall not read this filth.’

  ‘Read it later,’ he advised. ‘You cannot defend yourself from attacks if you do not know what they are.’

  I dropped the paper by my chair. ‘What kind of a man writes these things?’

  ‘The kind of man with whom you go drinking.’

  This seemed a good time to divert the topic.

  ‘How did you know that Reverend Jackaman was standing on a kneeler?’ I asked.

  ‘If you were paying attention, you will recall me telling you that I met Jackaman’s brother once on the crossing to Calais. He was an exporter of cat-o’-five-tails.’

  ‘Do you not mean nine tails?’

  ‘No. These were considered kinder for flogging children.’

  ‘How soft-hearted he must have been.’

  He carefully ripped a strip from his paper and put it on the table face down. ‘At present I am more concerned with his stature. He was five foot and three inches before his back was bent and he told me that he was the tallest member of his family, so Jackaman must have stood on something to peer out of the opening.’

  ‘Why not a chair?’

  ‘Because, unlike the rest of mankind, I use my senses. I heard wooden furniture being dragged. It was not as heavy as a pew and a chair would be too tall to stand on and too low for kneeling. It was obvious. A simpleton could have reached the same conclusion.’

  ‘But I did not.’

  My guardian allowed himself an ephemeral smile. ‘Precisely.’ He picked up the West London Recorder.

  ‘You seem very relaxed about all this,’ I commented.

  ‘I am rarely what I seem.’ Sidney Grice folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘for the first time in my life, I am too angry to be angry. I have come to expect slanders as a professional risk, along with death threats, assaults and damage to my property. But this man has made vile innuendos about a girl – a young woman – in my care and that is insufferable. If I know one thing for certain, Waterloo Trafalgar Trumpington shall rue the day he put his name to such foul falsehoods.’ He crunched the Recorder and his voice rose. ‘How many times do I have to tell them? I am not protecting these people.’ And the paper bunched up in his grasp. In a seemingly involuntary movement he ripped it apart. ‘Perhaps,’ he surveyed the torn remains, ‘I am not too angry to be angry after all.’

  I leafed through the Hampstead Times and did not have to go much further than an account of a mugging on the heath of an ebony dealer before I saw:

  THE AFFAIRS OF SIDNEY GRICE

  Our reporter has been privy to intimate details of a relationship between private detective, Mr Sidney Grice, and Dorna Berry, a married woman posing as a doctor in…

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  I handed the paper over and my guardian flushed. ‘In a jealous rage, Mr Grice’s present female companion revealed that he has developed strong feelings for Mrs Berry, which we have now reason to suspect are not,’ his voice rose, �
�reciprocated.’ He flung the paper down, strewing its pages across the tea tray. ‘Apparently I think she is wonderful but refuse to speak of her to you.’

  ‘More lies,’ I said, but there was nothing phlegmatic about Sidney Grice’s reaction to the papers now.

  ‘What exactly did you say to that scoriaceous, grubbing, truth-warping, word-twisting skunk?’

  ‘I only said that I think you like her.’

  ‘Like?’ He mouthed the word as if it were unclean. ‘Like? You told him I like her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You told that scabrous, excremental—’

  ‘I told him you like her and that was all I said.’

  ‘All?’ He scrabbled through the pages. ‘According to this, I think she is wonderful and beautiful. Explain away that, Miss Middletone.’

  ‘I said that I thought she has done wonderful things and that she was pretty.’

  ‘Hellfire and blast, March. Why did you not just come out and tell him I was having an illicit relationship with Dr Berry? You have taken that woman’s good name and rammed it into the dung heap.’

  ‘You did not mind so much when my honour was being impugned.’

  He caught his falling eye and clenched his fist around it. ‘If your name was sullied it was you who soiled it. I ordered you—’

  ‘Nobody orders me to do anything.’

  ‘And more is the pity for that. I told you not to talk to that puffed-up poseur and what did you do? You ran off with him to some sleazy den and confided in him what you salaciously imagined to be my private feelings.’

  ‘I only—’

  Sidney Grice stood up. I had never seen him so enraged. ‘No, March. You deliberately went behind my back with a man who is my sworn enemy and you smeared excrement over the name of an innocent woman who has done nothing but defend your appalling manners every time I complain about them.’

  ‘So it is all right for you to denigrate me?’

  ‘I wanted advice on how to deal with your waywardness and she suggested tolerance. Well, we see now how her kindness has been repaid. You have turned her life into a freak show for the pavement-scrapings of humanity to gawp at.’ His face twisted in pain. ‘What you have done to that woman is unforgiveable.’ He clutched at his socket and I went to him.

  ‘Is it very painful?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ he said. ‘It is only ingratitude that hurts me.’

  He could have slapped my face and wounded me less. ‘I have always been grateful to you for taking me in.’

  ‘And this is how you show it?’ He put his handkerchief to the socket and the cotton came away stained straw and red.

  ‘Shall I look at it?’

  He twisted his head away. ‘I do not want you to look at it and I do not want to look at you.’

  I stepped back.

  ‘Then I shall get out of your sight,’ I said as Sidney Grice bent and reeled to his desk.

  ‘Damn it,’ he said as I left the room and ran upstairs to my memories.

  They were fumigating your quarters – a monthly futile battle against the cockroaches, millipedes, columns of ants and innumerable other creatures that crawled into, under, out of and over every surface of every room. Our homes were all raised on wooden piles which helped a little and no one but a griffin – as newcomers were called – put down rugs for horrible things to breed beneath. I learned very early on to shake out my slippers before I put my feet into them. Even then I had a nasty sting from a tenacious scorpion on my great toe once and it was weeks before I could lace up my right boot properly again. But I was lucky, my father told me. The wife of one of the captains had got into a hipbath only for a snake to slither in after her.

  You brought a few things to our bungalow for safekeeping. The last time the fumigators had been in your room a penknife had gone missing. The workmen insisted you must have lost it, but you were certain you had left it on your bedside table and you were not usually careless with your things.

  Your writing box was slightly scratched and, while you were off on a pig-sticking expedition, I decided to polish it. The wax was fluid in the heat and some of it trickled between the folded doors. I was worried that it would run over your correspondence and spoil it so I opened the lid.

  I have always been inquisitive but not a sneaky person. I would never have searched your pockets or steamed open a letter. But it fell out on to the floor and, when I bent to pick it up, I could not help but notice the words.

  With regard to your proposed engagement your mother and I can only express our grievous dismay that you should choose to entangle yourself with a girl whom we have never met and of whose background we know so little. You cannot have forgotten Hester Sandler who waits so patiently and loyally for your return and with whom you have a long-established understanding. For your sake she has spurned all prospective suitors and it is only right that…

  I did not see what Edward’s father thought was right, but it was not difficult to guess. I put the letter back in the box and went to join my father at the hospital.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked but I did not reply.

  39

  Persian Slippers and Maudy Glass

  I went back to Parbold. The Grange had still not been let so Mr Warwick, the land agent, gave me the keys and I walked up the hill while George Carpenter, the old gamekeeper, drove my luggage with Onion, his ancient donkey, wheezing behind me. It was two miles and a steep climb, but we made it just in time to see the sun sink behind Ashurst Beacon with the Douglas Valley glowing in its embers.

  For two days I wandered around the house and grounds, unable to settle. I sat in my father’s library, staring at his musty books, but could not bring myself even to open them.

  Maudy Glass came to stay. As children we had run down the Fairy Glen together or across the pastures to catch sticklebacks in Jackson’s pit, but Maudy was married now and heavy with her second child.

  ‘Do you think you will ever have children?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought so once,’ I said. ‘Shall we prepare dinner?’

  We cooked together on the ancient range – thick lamb steaks and boiled potatoes with mint from the tangle of my father’s old herb garden – and I found a bottle of wine in the cellar. But I remembered Sidney Grice’s insistence that animal flesh was no different from human and his account of the cannibals eating Rupert, and I could not put it in my mouth.

  We cleared and washed and dried and settled in our armchairs.

  Once, when we were sitting by that fireplace, I asked my father if he resented me for killing his wife and he told me that he had ‘for fully two minutes until I saw you – a scrunched-up magenta monster struggling to get out of your swaddling – and then what could I do but love you?’ He poked a log and the sparks flew into the night. ‘And I have never stopped.’

  ‘Not even when I accidentally set fire to my bedroom?’

  ‘Not even then.’ He patted my hand. ‘Besides, you did not kill your mother. A filthy slaughterer posing as a surgeon did that. I will not call it butchery. Butchery is a skill and he had none. If it had not been for you kicking and caterwauling in my arms I believe I would have beaten him to death.’

  ‘It must be terrifically exciting working with the famous Sidney Grice,’ Maudy said, and I rubbed my eyes wearily but she chattered on. ‘Remember when we were children? We used to go to the attic and play spies.’

  ‘We made cloaks from old curtains,’ I recalled, ‘and low-brimmed hats from lampshades. We must have looked ridiculous.’

  Maudy laughed and the shadows lit up for a moment. ‘And we used to leave each other secret messages in that hole in the old oak tree. It blew down in the gales last year – but why am I telling you that? You have only been away a few months, but it feels like half a lifetime. I don’t suppose I shall ever get away from Lancashire.’

  ‘I thought you were happy here.’

  Her face fell. ‘Jethro is a good man…’ Her voice tailed but then she picked it up again.
‘You must have had some very exciting adventures.’

  ‘Oh, Maudy, if you only knew… the things I have seen.’

  ‘You are so lucky.’

  ‘Such things,’ I whispered.

  Maudy Glass was sleepy now but she sat up in expectation of a thrilling yarn. I could not talk about watching Horatio Green die in the study or finding Silas Braithwaite dead, or lowering Rosie Flowers by the rope round her neck, or seeing Reverend Jackaman crucified, and so I told her about the Ashby case and how Eleanor Quarrel, so alive and so beautiful, had died – drowned when her ship went down and all because of me. I thought that talking might help to heal the wounds but it only burst them open.

  ‘But you acted from the best of motives,’ Maudy told me as I sipped my gin by the open fire. Maudy was not taking alcohol even though the doctor had told her she must. She said it made her feel sick, but I managed to persuade her to have a large sherry.

  ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ I said, or think I said, but Maudy was dozing by then, comfortable in the chair that my father had always occupied.

  ‘You would have liked Edward,’ I said softly, ‘and he would have liked you, Maudy. You would have made each other laugh. I have never told you about him. How could I?’

  She began to snore – quite loudly like Bobby, the old retriever we once had.

  ‘I lied to him, Maudy.’ I poured myself another drink, almost to the brim. ‘I lied without compunction. But I sent him to hell when I thought he had deceived me.’

  I raised my glass but the world looked no better through it.

  ‘I lied to everybody. It was my idea and my father went along with it. The army was reluctant to accept the presence of a girl as it was. They would never have accepted what was little more than a child.’ I finished my drink and put the glass down a little more heavily than I intended, and Maudy stirred but did not wake. ‘So when I met Edward I was sixteen and when we became engaged to be married I was seventeen, though he thought I was twenty and the lie became toxic. I never knew when it would strike my heart or if there would be an antidote. Only he could have told me that.’