The Curse Of The House Of Foskett (The Gower Street Detective Series) Page 4

  S. G. BRATHWAITE ESQ,

  LICENSIATE OF DENTAL SURGERY,

  ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS,

  DENTAL PHYSISIAN AND SURGEON.

  ‘I hope his work is better than his spelling,’ I commented as Sidney Grice sounded the bell.

  ‘The trouble is no man with an education would waste it on becoming a sign writer.’ He blew his nose. ‘You would not credit the number of ways Gower can be spelt by card printers touting for business.’

  A very smart young maid answered our summons and my guardian gave her his card. She had blonde hair clipped under a crisply starched hat and wore a spotless white apron over a simple black dress.

  ‘How was your departed father’s flour mill destroyed?’ Sidney Grice asked as she admitted us to the hall and the maid started in astonishment.

  ‘Why it was burnt down, sir. But how do you know about that?’ She took our hats and overcoats.

  ‘Millers test their stones every morning with a pinch of grain, do they not?’ my guardian enquired.

  ‘Yes, sir, but—’

  ‘The daily abrasion leads to a wearing and eventual thickening of the digital dermis,’ he pronounced, ‘a condition most imaginatively known as miller’s thumb.’

  The maid looked at her right hand as if seeing the hard pad for the first time.

  ‘Why, sir,’ she said, ‘you should be on the stage.’ She led us to the waiting room – five baggily upholstered armchairs and a mahogany table piled with old copies of Household Management. ‘I shall let Mr Braithwaite know you are here.’

  ‘I thought you did not do party tricks,’ I said when she had gone, and Sidney Grice pulled the net curtain aside to look on to the square.

  ‘Nor do I,’ he confirmed, ‘but that girl could be a witness and it is important to assess her reliability. If she had been what the vermin of Fleet Street refer to as on the run she would have been flustered at having her past life exposed.’

  A wasp was crawling over the mantelpiece and I flattened it with a copy of The Strand.

  ‘How lightly girls kill,’ my guardian observed.

  ‘But how did you know it was her father’s mill?’ I asked.

  ‘Flour mills are invariably a family concern,’ he explained, ‘and it would have taken many years of work there to develop that condition, so she could not have married recently into the business.’

  I picked up another magazine and the middle fell out of the cover. ‘And you knew he was dead because…?’

  ‘No prosperous father would allow his daughter to go into service while he was alive.’

  ‘How do you know their mill was prosperous?’

  He prodded a cigar butt on the floor with his cane. ‘Cuban,’ he postulated before replying. ‘Her speech is well modulated for a south-west Shropshire girl. She has had elocution lessons, which are not cheap. A struggling miller would not bother with such things.’

  ‘And the destruction?’

  ‘If the mill were viable she would be running it. She carries herself with a pride and dignity that you would do well to imitate, March.’

  I flung the torn journal down and asked, ‘Do you never get tired of being right?’ Sidney Grice opened his mouth. ‘Do not answer that,’ I said.

  ‘Note the smell of nitrous oxide.’

  ‘Which I noticed on Mr Green,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I have a slight case of Molly’s cold.’ He coughed as footsteps came down the hallway towards us.

  ‘Mr Braithwaite will see you now.’ The maid turned and led us to the back of the house and into another room.

  The surgery was small and cluttered. A complicated anaesthetic machine stood with its twin gas cylinders, dials, taps and rubber tubing, at the head of a brown-leather and iron chair with its foot pump and dumbbell-shaped headrest. The work surfaces were covered with glass bottles and pottery jars. A stainless-steel tray was piled high with forceps. A small man, with unnaturally sable hair dragged sideways and plastered in oiled strings over his peeling dome, was slouched on a wooden stool browsing through a catalogue. He did not look up or offer his hand and, remembering that he spent the day with his fingers in saliva, I did not offer mine.

  ‘Take a seat, Mr Grease.’ He pointed without raising his head.

  ‘Grice… and I have come on a business matter.’

  ‘Quite so, but we might as well give the old grinders a quick survey while you’re here.’ He indicated the chair again but Sidney Grice remained resolutely standing.

  ‘I have come about a Mr Horatio Green,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes? Recommended me to you, did he? Well, don’t you fret, Mr Grease, I can see from here what the problem is. You have effeminate teeth.’

  ‘The name is Grice and I most certainly—’

  ‘And are embarrassed to show them,’ our host pressed on smoothly. His shoulder was littered with flakes of dead scalp. ‘Does your husband ever smile, madam?’

  ‘I have never known him to.’

  Sidney Grice huffed. ‘There would be precious little to smile about if you were my wife.’

  Silas Braithwaite closed a drawer. ‘Or laugh?’

  ‘Never,’ I said.

  The dentist got up in an oddly mechanical manner, as if he were hinged.

  ‘This is all most amusing,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘but to return to the subject of Mr Green—’

  ‘The trouble, Mr Grease, is that your teeth are too small, but don’t you worry about that.’ He took a dental mirror from his breast pocket. ‘We can soon whip them out under a whiff of gas and fit you with a lovely set of walrus ivory dentures, so natural that no one could ever tell.’

  ‘Except perhaps another walrus,’ I put in and Mr Braithwaite tittered uncertainly. His teeth, I noticed, were crumbled and black, and I was about to ask why he had not filled his own mouth with carved tusks but my guardian had had enough.

  ‘Mr Horatio Green,’ he said firmly. ‘How long has he been a patient of yours?’

  Silas Braithwaite inserted his middle finger into his right ear. ‘Such information is confidential.’ He puggled about in his ear hole.

  ‘If you had the intellectual capacity to decipher the Roman alphabetical symbols on my calling card you would have deduced that I am a personal detective,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘Any information you give me will be treated with the utmost discretion.’

  ‘Why not ask him yourself?’ He inspected his fingertip. ‘Or is he in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘Why would he be?’ I asked.

  Silas Braithwaite sniggered. ‘Bit of a card, Horatio. Always playing practical jokes. Pretended to be blind once at King’s Cross Station and got someone to walk him to St Pancras. Then he got somebody else to guide him back again. They bumped into the first man on the return and Horatio had to pretend to be’ – he could hardly get the words out now – ‘his own… identical… twin.’

  ‘How intensely irritating,’ Sidney Grice said.

  ‘A group of us followed at a distance to witness the jest. We were utterly incapacitated with mirth.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that,’ my guardian said. ‘Now—’

  ‘A great character,’ Silas Braithwaite chuckled. ‘But we always said he would get into trouble one day. What is he up to now?’

  ‘He—’ I began.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sidney Grice interrupted.

  ‘Has he sent you to dispute his bill? He did that once to embarrass his doctor. I know my charges lean towards the high end of the scale but, in light of my overheads, they are hardly criminal. Why are you looking through my appointment book, madam?’

  I closed the book. It had very few entries. ‘To see if Lady Constance has made an appointment yet.’

  Silas Braithwaite dropped his mirror on the floor. ‘Lady Constance?’

  ‘You are too clever for us, Mr Braithwaite,’ I said.

  ‘I have met cleverer cadavers,’ Sidney Grice muttered but I pressed on. ‘You have seen through our subterfuge, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well
, of course.’ Silas Braithwaite shifted his feet.

  ‘Mr Green did not recommend you to us, but to Lady Constance who asked us to check your professional standards first. She requires a great deal of extremely expensive work on her teeth.’

  Sidney Grice cocked his head as if listening to something else and brought out his watch.

  Silas Braithwaite kicked the mirror under a cabinet. ‘Then she will be coming to the right man. My standards are, as you can see’ – his arms encompassed the chaos of his surgery – ‘of the very highest.’

  My guardian crouched, his knees clicking in unison. ‘The spoor of Mus Musculus,’ he pronounced as he clipped on his pince-nez. ‘House-mouse droppings.’

  ‘Lady Constance’s greatest concern is for her privacy,’ I said as Sidney Grice dropped on to all fours. ‘You have already allayed her first concern, that you might divulge information about a patient to a third party.’

  My guardian was snuffling along the floor like a beagle. ‘You have rising damp,’ he said, ‘and Lepisma saccharina.’ He took what looked like a gold cigarette case from his inside pocket and flipped it open but, instead of Virginians, a variety of keys and lockpicks were fixed inside. ‘Silverfish infestations to you.’ He scratched at the side of the dentist’s trousers with a fine pick, holding the open lid to catch his scrapings.

  Silas Braithwaite pulled his leg away. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My job. Hold still.’ Two more scrapes and he slipped his pick away.

  I struggled to carry on. ‘Her second concern is that you might be writing information of a personal nature in your patients’ notes. She is most concerned that, when she recommends you to her wealthy and titled friends, they might glimpse some intimate details of her life in your records.’

  Silas Braithwaite scratched his nose and straightened indignantly.

  ‘My interest in my patients is purely clinical and financial.’ He stepped over Sidney Grice’s leg to his filing cabinet, which was almost empty. ‘I am sure Horatio will not mind. There you are – nothing but the bare essentials.’ He thrust a white card at me.

  ‘She will also be pleased to know that you write in a code,’ I said and Silas Braithwaite looked baffled.

  My guardian shut his case, got up, laid the case on a shelf and peered over my shoulder. ‘I have written an unpublished paper on the handwriting of dentists, physicians, surgeons and veterinary practitioners,’ he said. ‘Let me see. Ah yes. Two fillings. Two guineas. Dated today.’ He let the card drop on to the desk. ‘What poisons do you stock?’

  ‘Several.’ Silas Braithwaite opened a drawer of stoppered bottles, many of them leaking into sticky rings on the brown paper lining. ‘We use arsenic to kill the nerves in teeth; sulphuric acid to whiten them – the ladies like me to apply that before their weddings. Tincture of aconite – now there is a deadly one – we use that for inflamed wisdom teeth. Let me think—’

  ‘I do not expect to live long enough for that process to begin,’ Sidney Grice said.

  ‘Well, of all the…’ Silas Braithwaite was lost for words.

  ‘What about prussic acid?’ I enquired and Silas Braithwaite stuck a yellowed finger out at me.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t advise the use of that.’ He scraped under his thumbnail with a sickle-shaped scaler. ‘Your husband would smell it. No, I should stick to aconite if I were you. It has a bitter taste which is difficult to mask but its effects are immediate and irreversible.’

  ‘Do you stock prussic acid?’ I asked.

  Sidney Grice picked up a glass jar full of extracted teeth, lifted the lid and closed it promptly.

  ‘I have no need for it.’ Silas Braithwaite chucked the scaler back into a drawer. ‘Why are we talking about poisons?’

  My guardian put down the jar and wiped his hands on a white handkerchief. ‘Are you in the habit of murdering your patients, Mr Braithwaite?’ He snatched up the catalogue and thumbed through it.

  Silas Braithwaite sniggered again. ‘You might think so from the fuss some of them make… Oh, you are not joking… But why…’

  ‘Because Horatio Green was poisoned this morning,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh.’ Silas Braithwaite sat heavily on the arm of his chair. He rubbed the back of his head. ‘Poor Horatio. Is he very ill?’

  ‘Dead.’ Sidney Grice slapped the catalogue down on the stool.

  ‘Oh.’ Silas Braithwaite blinked several times rapidly. ‘A joke gone wrong?’

  ‘I do not think so,’ I said and Silas Braithwaite pinched the end of his nose. ‘It would seem I have lost a friend and a patient in one fell swoop, and I am not sure which I have the fewer of now.’

  My guardian looked at him severely. ‘A man has died, Mr Braithwaite. He will never see the sun set or pat an infant on the head again. Is that all you care about – your profits?’

  The word hypocrite came to mind as Mr Braithwaite rocked backwards. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘But it is difficult not to worry with my low returns. All the servants have left except Jenny, the maid, and she has not been paid for three months.’

  ‘Which might explain why she left the house’ – Sidney Grice produced his watch – ‘six and a half minutes ago.’

  Silas Braithwaite’s eyes flickered. ‘She probably went to fetch something.’

  ‘She was dragging a leather suitcase.’

  ‘How do you know it was leather?’

  ‘I heard it creak and I am able to distinguish twenty-four different types of creak with complete confidence – over a hundred with slightly less than absolute certainty.’

  ‘So you are investigating Horatio’s murder?’ Silas Braithwaite asked.

  My guardian stepped towards him. ‘Who said it was murder?’

  ‘Why, you did.’

  ‘I said he was poisoned.’

  ‘Then I jumped to that conclusion.’ Silas Braithwaite coiled a length of catgut thread round his forefinger.

  ‘What do you know of the Last Death Club?’ Sidney Grice challenged.

  ‘Nothing.’ A strand of Silas Braithwaite’s hair swung down over his eye. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You are hiding something from me.’ My guardian clambered on to a wooden chair and tapped the ceiling with the ferrule of his cane. A lonely shaving of plaster drifted away.

  Silas Braithwaite wound the catgut round his hand. ‘I hope you are not going to pry into my tax affairs – not that there is anything amiss with my accounts. It is just I am a year or two behind in completing them.’

  ‘Be quiet.’ Sidney Grice climbed down, retrieved his cigarette case, licked his first fingertip and picked something out. ‘What is this?’

  The dentist screwed up his eyes. ‘It looks like a dog hair.’

  ‘Do you keep a dog?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I hate them.’

  ‘That is something in your favour.’ Sidney Grice kept his eyes fixed on Silas Braithwaite. ‘What do you think, Miss Middleton?’

  ‘I do not know. It is very coarse and speckled, more like a bristle.’

  My guardian brought out an envelope. ‘I found it embedded in your right trouser leg at about ankle height, and it does not appear that you can give me a satisfactory explanation of what it is, nor where, how or when you acquired it.’ He dropped the bristle into an envelope.

  ‘It is only a hair.’

  ‘Nothing is only a hair,’ Sidney Grice barked and folded the envelope over. ‘Have no fear, Mr Silas Joseph Anthony Braithwaite. I shall find the answer to all those questions and I have small doubt and every hope that it will prove you guilty of something.’

  The dentist turned to me. ‘What is he talking about?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ my guardian admitted blithely. ‘But I do know a clue when I see one, though it may be a clue about something entirely irrelevant.’ He clipped his satchel shut and began to hum loudly.

  ‘So Lady Constance was just a pretext to gain information,’ Silas Braithwaite said.

  ‘I am afr
aid so,’ I told him.

  ‘She will not like it when she learns how you bandied her name about.’

  I looked at his crestfallen face. ‘I am sorry to tell you she is a fiction.’

  He tied his first three fingers together with an injured air. ‘That was unkind to give me false hope.’

  ‘I am sorry. I did not realize things were so bad.’ I felt as if I had kicked a lost child. ‘I think we had better go.’

  My guardian broke off from his humming. ‘I think so too. It is almost three hours since I last had a proper cup of tea.’

  We left Silas Braithwaite trying to untangle the thread.

  The maid’s hat and apron were neatly folded on the hall table when we took our hats and coats off the stand as we saw ourselves out.

  An omnibus went by, the five passengers on the roof pulling collars up and hats down against the chill breeze.

  8

  Chelsea Buns and the Soles of Men

  There was a cosy cafe just round the corner, which I had walked by before and hardly noticed, but Sidney Grice was clearly a regular customer for the waitress, in response to his hand raised like a papal blessing, brought a tray with a large, freshly steaming pot of tea almost before we had time to settle ourselves at a square table by the window.

  ‘Will you be indulging today, sir?’ she enquired.

  ‘We will both be indulging,’ he said.

  ‘In what?’ I asked and my guardian looked almost embarrassed.

  ‘I have a secret vice,’ he said and my mind raced. Was this what Molly had once referred to? Was there an opium den at the back of the building? I hoped so. He continued. ‘A weakness for Chelsea buns.’

  ‘How decadent.’

  ‘I am not proud of myself,’ he said, ‘but sometimes a craving comes upon me, especially when I am upset. And the manner of Mr Green’s death has affected me more than I like to admit.’

  ‘It was horrible,’ I agreed and he grimaced.

  ‘That rug was from Marie Antoinette’s anteroom in Versailles and a present to me from Emperor Napoleon III himself. I fear it is forever stained.’

  The waitress marched smartly back with two white plates. Each had a square spiral of dough dotted with raisins and glazed with sugar.