The Curse Of The House Of Foskett (The Gower Street Detective Series) Read online

  ‘My father brought me here once,’ he said dreamily.

  ‘And did he buy you a bun?’

  Sidney Grice blinked and his eyes misted over. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘This was a land agent’s office at the time. He had come to evict some tenants who were too idle to pay their rents.’

  I poured us both some tea. ‘Is your father still alive?’

  ‘Sadly…’ my guardian’s face clouded, ‘he is.’ He sliced his bun carefully into ten exactly equal pieces. ‘So what did you make of our trip to the dentist?’

  ‘I did not care for him,’ I said, ‘but I do not think he killed Horatio Green.’

  ‘For once’ – my guardian picked up a stray morsel of his bun and wafted it under his nose as a French chef might a truffle – ‘we are in complete accord. On what do you base your presumption of innocence?’

  ‘Well, he was obviously taken aback by the news of Mr Green’s death.’

  Sidney Grice carefully replaced his piece of bun as if trying to reassemble it.

  ‘Oh, March,’ he said wearily. ‘March, March, March. When will you begin to activate that lump of gristle in your head? In the short time I have so selflessly mollycoddled you I could name a brace of killers who you believed to be as blameless as suckling babes because they seemed nice. I could take you down Drury Lane and show you a man on stage who manages to convince hundreds of people that he is Othello, six nights a week and twice on Saturdays, but I assure you he is not. Nobody is ever clearly anything on the basis of their demeanour.’

  I put my knife down and said, ‘Very well. Why have you decided he is not guilty?’

  ‘The evidence,’ my guardian said, rolling a raisin around his plate with the tip of his first finger, ‘was under your very nose. Why do you think I took such an interest in Mr Braithwaite’s floor?’

  I covered my mouth to hide the large piece I had pushed into it. ‘Because you are eccentric,’ I said.

  ‘I hope I am.’ He blew his nose. ‘A centric mind spins on the spot, going nowhere and only succeeding in making itself dizzy. The eccentric travels unpredictably but often towards the inspired. No, March, I got down on the floor to smell it. The room is poorly ventilated – hence the damp I detected. And hydrogen cyanide – to give prussic acid its chemical nomenclature – is heavier than air. If Silas Braithwaite had been using it in his surgery that morning there would have been a lingering odour on or just above the floor, and the linoleum would have prevented the gas from seeping through the boards. Even with my nasal congestion I would have detected it. There was no such aroma. And since Mr Braithwaite had not left his surgery the entire day…’

  I swallowed the cake. It was very good, sweet and moist. ‘How on earth can you know that?’

  ‘By scrutinizing’ – Sidney Grice had a crumb on his upper lip – ‘the soles of his shoes.’ The tip of his tongue darted out to dab the crumb away.

  I waited for him to eat another piece and said, ‘Please elucidate, dear guardian.’

  He picked up his napkin. ‘I am in the process of writing a study entitled A Brief Introduction to the Basic Elements of the Study of the Undersurfaces of European Footwear. It will be published in three volumes over the next five years.’

  ‘Just what every child will want for Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘It is not primarily aimed at juveniles,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘but they could do a great deal worse. There is a serious dearth of improving material in the nonsense peddled by publishers these days.’

  ‘And what did you discover under Mr Braithwaite’s boots?’

  ‘The floor, as even your untrained eyes will have noticed, was covered in…? ’ He looked at me over his teacup.

  ‘Dirt,’ I said.

  ‘What sort of dirt?’

  ‘Just dirt.’ I had another piece of sugary dough.

  ‘There is no such thing as just dirt,’ he told me, ‘any more than there is just a leaf or a stain, and I have devoted most of one volume to the topic. Dirt consists of innumerable things: mud, of which there are several types; hair, both human and animal; excrement; squashed insects with and without wings; particles of food, et cetera, et cetera. The dirt on the floor of a dentist’s surgery – to which I have set aside a particularly entertaining chapter – is unique. It contains substances in combinations and proportions not to be found elsewhere – plaster of Paris, tooth fragments, blood, mercury and its amalgamations, and porcelain, to name but a few of its ingredients. Vulcanite dust is becoming more prevalent.’

  My guardian sneezed and I dived into the pause. ‘So how did this help you to reach your conclusion?’

  ‘Because,’ he informed me, ‘Silas Braithwaite’s soles were thick with this dirt and no other – plus there were faint footprints of it in the hall but none matching the shape of his boots. Ergo he had not left his surgery and, since no prussic acid had been used in the surgery that morning, he did not kill Horatio Green and we shall have to enjoy our decadent repast without the happy anticipation of sending him to the gallows.’

  ‘What will we do next then?’ I asked and Sidney Grice let his napkin fall to the floor.

  ‘Even the simplest of crimes is a labyrinth,’ he told me. ‘There are so many routes which lead nowhere and we must be careful not to follow too many of them. We shall go home and I shall look through my files. There are aspects of this case which I believe to be unique.’

  ‘And what shall I do?’

  ‘You can be of incalculable help to me.’

  A butcher’s boy ran past, waving a hockey stick, his blue-and-white striped apron flapping around his legs.

  ‘By keeping quiet and intermittently ringing for tea.’ He jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. ‘Come, March. We have work to do.’

  ‘The very thought of it exhausts me,’ I muttered as he paid the bill.

  *

  A wooden foot-ramp had been erected in Byng Place and the traffic was still bad, so we decided to walk. But we had got no further than re-entering Tavistock Square when a young woman came rushing out of the dental practice and straight towards us. Even without her uniform it was easy to recognize her as Jenny, the maid who had admitted us less than two hours ago. She was in a simple black dress and her hair was still tied back.

  ‘Oh, sir, I hoped it was you.’ She was red-faced and panting. ‘Come quickly, please. Something awful has happened.’

  ‘To your employer, I hope,’ my guardian said.

  She tugged at her sleeves in agitation. ‘Please, sir.’

  The front door was wide open and Sidney Grice paused to examine the lintel.

  ‘There is a very strong smell of nitrous oxide,’ I said.

  ‘Why, March’ – he tapped the wainscoting with his cane – ‘you are turning into a veritable bloodhound.’

  ‘Oh, miss, please make him come quickly.’

  ‘If, as I suspect, your employer is dead, there is no hurry whatsoever,’ he told her as he ambled down the hallway. He stopped and crouched, then ran his fingers over the parquet.

  ‘Oh, please,’ she said.

  ‘Interesting.’ He jumped up to look at the unlit gas mantle before following a distraught Jenny towards the surgery.

  The smell of gas was very strong by now and almost overpowering as we entered the room. Silas Braithwaite was slumped in his patients’ chair. The anaesthetic mask lay upturned in his left hand on his lap. I felt for a pulse.

  ‘I found him like this, sir,’ Jenny said and my guardian turned to me.

  ‘Looks dead to me,’ he commented. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think we should open the window,’ I replied and Jenny rushed over to do so. There was a welcome gust of cold air but whatever view there might have been was obscured by a mulberry bush thick with creepers.

  Sidney Grice was looking at a framed sepia photograph.

  I tapped the gas cylinder with a mirror handle and felt it with the back of my fingers. ‘It is ice-cold and empty,’ I said and examined the other cylinder. ‘But th
e oxygen is warm and almost full.’

  Sidney Grice went to the other side. ‘He who lives by the gas…’ He lifted Silas Braithwaite’s right hand, holding it like a fortune-teller, wiggled the fingers and replaced it on the arm of the chair. ‘Stupid man.’ And after a while he said to himself, ‘But who is doing this to me?’

  9

  Eagle Beaks and Opium

  Jenny was sent to fetch a policeman and found one almost immediately. He was a sturdy middle-aged man who I had seen before, clearing vagrants from the square. It was an offence to sleep out at night and so they were forced to walk the streets in darkness and sleep all day instead.

  The constable took one look and marched off to summon help.

  ‘Well, Miss Middleton, we might as well sit in the waiting room,’ my guardian said.

  ‘Are you not going to examine him?’

  Sidney Grice looked at me as if I were simple. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘To find out how he died?’

  ‘I know how he died and so do you, unless you have one of your bizarre theories,’ my guardian said.

  ‘But who do you think killed him?’ I asked.

  My guardian blinked. ‘I know I did not do it and I am confident that you did not. Possibly this maid did.’

  And Jenny jumped. ‘Not me, sir, honest. I just found him like this.’

  Sidney Grice waved an uninterested hand.

  ‘Mr Grice is not accusing you of anything, Jenny,’ I said. ‘But why did you come back?’

  Jenny’s eyes jumped about as if she were searching for an escape route. ‘He owed me four months’ wages and I came back to ask him for them. I thought if he realized he had no servants at all he might come to his senses. And I was going to threaten him…’

  My guardian put on his pince-nez and scrutinized a pair of eagle-beaked forceps.

  ‘Kindly do not make a confession,’ he told her. ‘I have better things to do than be called as a witness at your trial.’

  ‘What trial?’ Jenny reddened. ‘Why aren’t you looking for clues? I thought you was supposed to be a detective.’ And Sidney Grice piffed a little air between his lips.

  ‘I am not supposed to be a detective; I am the foremost detective in the British Empire. But I am a personal detective and not a public lackey. Your ex-employer was not a client of mine and so his death is no more than an inconvenience for me.’

  ‘Have you no heart?’ she asked.

  ‘Certainly.’ He prodded his chest with the forceps. ‘And it pumps blood to my unequalled brain but does not rule it.’

  I touched her shoulder. ‘How were you going to threaten him, Jenny?’

  She started to sniff. ‘Just with being blacklisted by the employment agencies. That’s all. You can’t expect a girl to work and play games for free.’

  ‘Note how she regresses into her native dialect when she is distressed,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘The elongated vowels and the burred r. I would place it somewhere between Craven Arms and Clun.’

  ‘Are you going to hang her for that?’ I asked and my guardian tapped a barometer on the wall.

  ‘It is a small point in her favour,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘Do they not murder people in that part of Shropshire? Have you no cases in your files?’

  Sidney Grice ran his finger under the edge of a shelf but did not examine it.

  ‘Several, including one of a wonderfully colourful nature involving a Serbian engineer.’ He wiped his hands on his handkerchief. ‘But in my experience people who are lying become more – and not less – careful about how they speak.’

  Jenny was crying now. ‘I didn’t do him no harm.’

  ‘Any harm,’ he corrected her absently as he opened and closed the forceps.

  ‘Could he really not pay you or was he just being mean?’ I asked.

  ‘He couldn’t pay no one for he never had no – any patients.’ She blew her nose. ‘The butcher wouldn’t give him any meat. Even the laundry wouldn’t let him have his clothes back ’cause he owed them six months.’

  ‘These forceps were designed with an almost complete ignorance of mechanics and human anatomy,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘The fulcrum is too high and the points are designed more to destroy the jawbone than cleanly extract a tooth. When I have the time I shall design a better pair. You,’ he told Jenny, ’will sit in the hallway.’ He carefully replaced the forceps, turning them so as to lie exactly as they had before he picked them up. ‘Come, March.’

  I looked at Silas Braithwaite. His skin was blue.

  ‘There is a red mark on his wrist,’ I observed.

  ‘No, there is not,’ my guardian called over his shoulder. ‘There are three such marks and not one of them is any of our concern.’

  I sat in the waiting room in a sagging armchair and Sidney Grice stood with his back to me, staring out of the window, humming the same tuneless few notes over and over again and tapping an erratic beat on the floorboards with his cane. I could see Jenny’s feet. They were motionless.

  ‘Stay there,’ he snapped without taking his eye off his view. ‘You do not work here now.’

  The bell rang. ‘See to it, Miss Middleton,’ he said without turning.

  I thought of telling him to do it himself, but it did not seem right to bicker when there was a dead man lying in the next room.

  ‘I see that girl detectives greet callers.’ Inspector Quigley stepped inside, leaving his constable to guard the step.

  ‘And I see your powers of observation have not deserted you – yet,’ I told him as my guardian came into the hall.

  ‘Well, Mr Grice,’ the inspector said, ‘I am beginning to think the papers are right. Death follows you like a shadow, according to last night’s Evening News.’

  ‘If the press are to be believed man will fly in an engine-powered machine one day,’ my guardian retorted. ‘No, Inspector, I follow death. I learn his secrets; I sometimes forestall him but even my brilliant powers cannot thwart him for ever.’

  ‘So what happened here then?’

  ‘We were called in by this servant.’ Sidney Grice indicated Jenny, now on her feet and smoothing down her dress. ‘And came in to find her ex-employer, Mr Silas Braithwaite, dead in his dental chair and his surgery filled with nitrous oxide.’

  ‘Laughing gas?’ Inspector Quigley asked.

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Well, let’s take a look then.’ The inspector held up his hand in a halt sign to Jenny, who was still standing beside her chair. ‘Wait there.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ she protested and the inspector smiled bleakly.

  ‘If I say you have, you have. If I say you haven’t, you haven’t,’ he said. ‘I will let you know in five minutes. In the meantime sit there.’ Quigley marched on past me. The smell of nitrous oxide was fainter but still strong. ‘I hate dentists,’ he said as he stepped into the surgery.

  ‘Well, here is one fewer for you to loathe,’ Sidney Grice said as the inspector stood at the foot of the chair.

  ‘Any theories, Mr Grice?’

  My guardian opened the filing cabinet and rifled through its contents.

  ‘None whatsoever.’ He picked the husk of a spider out by one leg. ‘Pardosa amentata or the spotted wolf spider, so named because it does not build a web but tracks its prey and hunts it down.’ He let it fall. ‘I am sure you have a solution already, Inspector.’

  ‘Indeed I have,’ Quigley said. ‘No point in dawdling over these things. Accidental death.’

  ‘How have you decided that?’ I asked and Sidney Grice groaned.

  ‘I shall keep this simple for you,’ the inspector promised.

  ‘And please try to speak slowly,’ I entreated, and he gazed at me as one might a dead rodent.

  ‘Have you ever heard of laughing-gas parties?’

  I had attended one in Cabool but I said, ‘I think so.’ And Inspector Quigley put his hands together and explained, ‘Degenerate people, particularly university undergraduates
, artists who can’t paint and poets who won’t rhyme sometimes gather secretly for the purposes of inhaling nitrogen oxide, which by all accounts has a stimulating and intoxicating effect.’

  I resisted the urge to ask him to explain what intoxicating meant and said, ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘What these allegedly intelligent people do not realize is that all drugs can lead to an irresistible hunger for more, what we professionals call an addiction.’

  ‘Does that include opium?’ I asked.

  ‘Even opium,’ the inspector told me. ‘There is a dark and terrible underworld based around that seemingly harmless household medicine, which I trust you will never encounter. But, to continue, these misguided youths soon find themselves unable to resist its effects. They start to crave it but their cravings can never be satisfied. This man may have gone to such parties but more likely the amount of gas he inhaled in the course of his work turned him into a laughing-gas fiend. He administered the gas to himself and, in his confused state, forgot to turn on the oxygen. The gas filled his lungs and so he had no air and suffocated himself to death.’

  ‘A neat theory.’ Sidney Grice clapped his hands together. ‘Now, Inspector, if you have no further need for us we will be about our business.’

  Jenny looked up anxiously as we came back into the hall.

  ‘Prepare your soul to meet its maker,’ my guardian told her as he passed by.

  I turned back to reassure her but she had fainted on to the floor.

  ‘I suppose you think that was funny,’ I said as I waved my blue vial of sal volatile under her nose, and her eyelids fluttered.

  Sidney Grice considered the matter. ‘Do you know, March,’ he said, ‘I do not believe it was.’

  10

  French Polish and the Second-best Teapot

  The study at 125 Gower Street had been tidied while we were away and Horatio Green’s body had been removed, as had the rug. The chair he had died in – my usual chair – had been pushed back into place. The smashed crockery was gone and the table wiped clean.