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

  My guardian sighed. ‘It will have to be French polished.’

  He pulled on the bell rope and sat down but I hovered. ‘It does not seem right to use the chair after what has happened.’

  Sidney Grice skimmed his hand over the armrest and said, ‘Molly clearly thinks like you. Female brains are simple mechanisms but surprisingly often attuned. She has swapped the chairs round.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘You think I do not know my own chair?’

  I sat gingerly and said, ‘Inspector Quigley seems very quick to form a conclusion.’

  He picked a copy of The Lancet from the satinwood lowboy at his side. ‘One of the best minds in the force,’ he said. ‘Not that he has much competition.’

  ‘But in both cases today he has reached the wrong conclusion.’

  Sidney Grice leafed through his magazine. ‘In seven weeks’ time Chief Inspector Newburgh will be retiring. He is going to breed cattle in the desolate hinterlands of Surrey, I believe. The post will fall vacant and our friend Quigley is hotly tipped to fill it, but he is unlikely to gain promotion if, over the next few weeks, he has a string of unsolved murders on his books.’

  Molly came in with a tray. ‘Cook says begging your pardon, sir, but this is her second-best teapot and please can you not break it.’

  ‘Tell Cook I shall try to restrain myself.’ Her employer went back to his journal but I could not let the matter rest.

  ‘So anyone may commit any crime with impunity for the next two months if Inspector Quigley is on the case,’ I said.

  ‘Unless he can make an arrest on the spot.’ He flipped a page impatiently. ‘Obviously, solving cases instantly improves his career prospects.’

  ‘Even if he gets the wrong person?’

  ‘As long as he gets a conviction…’ Sidney Grice flapped a hand and went back to his reading.

  I poured the tea. ‘What about Inspector Pound?’ It was a lovely Regency tea set – fine white china with rosy periwinkles and a deep-pink scalloped border on the rims of the cups.

  My guardian closed the cover wearily. ‘A man would get more peace in Billingsgate Fish Market on a Friday morning,’ he said. ‘If you want to know whether Pound would let a guilty man go or convict the wrong one to enhance his career prospects, the answer is no. Pound has as good a mind as Quigley, if not better, but he lacks that ruthless streak which lifts the scum from the dregs.’

  ‘How cynical you are.’

  ‘If you mean I am sceptical of other people’s motives, I would be foolish not to be, in my profession.’

  He turned back to his journal but I pressed on. ‘Do you have any more theories about how Horatio Green was poisoned?’

  My guardian tested the teapot with the back of his fingers and something like approval flashed over his face.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘and please do not annoy me with any of yours.’

  ‘I have one thought,’ I said and he dropped his Lancet into his lap. ‘What if Mr Green was sucking on a lozenge?’

  ‘He was not. I would have observed it in the way he spoke.’

  ‘He could have had it in his cheek pouch.’

  ‘Prussic acid, as the name might suggest even to your sluggish mental processes, is an acid. It would have burnt the cheek membranes. I did not observe any ulceration anterior to the oropharynx and, if I do not observe something, it is not there to be observed.’

  My guardian popped his eye out and massaged around his socket vigorously.

  ‘Does your eye hurt?’

  ‘My eye is buried in Charlottenburg Cemetery.’

  I put the upright chair back at the round table in the middle of the room. ‘You had a funeral service for your eye?’

  He slid open a drawer and took out a rosewood box. ‘The eye was in the throat of a Prussian colonel. He choked to death on it.’ He produced a green bottle, clearly not interested in pursuing the subject.

  ‘What do you suppose has happened to Inspector Pound?’

  ‘I do not suppose anything has happened to him that is any of our concern.’ Sidney Grice pulled out the cork. ‘If anything had he would have told me.’ He upended the bottle in a ball of cotton wool.

  ‘Perhaps he cannot. Perhaps he has been hurt or—’

  ‘What? He has been kidnapped by fairies or press-ganged by pirates?’ He put the wad to his socket and winced. ‘Really, March, you should write shilling shockers for a living. They would sell like saints’ fingers in a Roman bazaar.’

  ‘But he is your friend. Are you not even a little concerned?’

  ‘As we have already established, I have no friends.’ The cotton wool was stained blue. ‘And I doubt that he has either.’ It turned red around the edges. ‘The life of a criminologist is a lonely one – thank heavens.’ Sidney Grice deposited the cotton wool into his wastepaper bin. ‘I hope you have a more presentable dress than any I have seen you in so far.’ He recorked the bottle. ‘We have an appointment tomorrow morning in Kew.’

  ‘Baroness Foskett?’

  He wiped his hands with a stained cloth. ‘None other.’

  From somewhere in the house there was a scream. For a moment I hoped I had imagined it but then there was a second scream, louder and longer and higher.

  ‘If one of the servants is being murdered, I do hope it is Cook,’ my guardian said.

  Far away there was a crash followed by footsteps rushing up the hallway. I grabbed the coal tongs and raised them over my head as the door flew open. It was Molly – no hat, no apron, hair hanging loose and wild – with a look of utter terror.

  ‘Oh, sir, come quickly!’ She struggled for air. ‘It’s ’orrible.’ She forced herself to say the words. ‘That dratted cat from number 123 has brought an alive rat in.’ She looked at me, the tongs still raised high. ‘Oh, miss, if you wanted the fire made up you should’ve rung.’

  ‘Why am I troubled with these domestic matters? Call the rat catcher immediately.’ Sidney Grice touched his cheek and a thin violet tear trickled from his empty eye.

  *

  I said my prayers, as always, that night, wrote in my journals and opened my writing case. The scent of the sandalwood lining filled my senses and transported me once more.

  We rarely visited the city but, when my father had to go for supplies, it was too good an opportunity to miss. And, after he had finished his official duties, we had two spare hours before the train. My father took me to Caldebank’s cafe – a little piece of England tucked down a side street – for high tea: four different kinds of sandwiches and two of cake, fruit scones with butter and strawberry jam, though we decided not to risk the clotted cream. And afterwards we walked by the shops. It was a happy day. I admired the fabrics and my father invested in a new meerschaum pipe. And then I saw it – a writing box. We went in and had a look.

  The box was beautifully made, polished oak with a lovely grain and brass fittings and inlays, opening out to reveal the compartments for correspondence, stationery and pens. It had a folding-out, green leather writing slope with feathered gold edging and, of course, a ‘secret’ compartment.

  The shopkeeper was a little Frenchman with luxuriant moustaches. He raised his eyebrows politely when I pointed out how easy the compartment was to find. ‘Now find zee ozzer one,’ he challenged. I pressed every section with no success. My father tried too, turning it upside down and tapping it to no avail. The owner smiled. ‘Shall I show mademoiselle?’ He pressed the inkwell down and rotated it a quarter-turn, then there was a click and a drawer slid out from the side.

  I laughed. ‘I shall take it.’

  ‘You already have a serviceable one,’ my father pointed out.

  ‘Just as you have a dozen meerschaums,’ I countered. ‘Besides, it is not for me. It is Edward’s birthday next month.’

  My father frowned. ‘But can you afford it?’

  ‘Of course I can.’ I slipped my arm through his. ‘With a little help.’

  11

  The Spike and the Corpulen
t King

  We crossed the Thames but the narrow bridge was so chock-a-block that I could hardly see anything other than the railway bridge to one side and the slow-swaying masts of a clipper disappearing behind the smoking stacks of a paddle steamer on the other. Now and then I glimpsed the red-sailed barges scattered like rose petals on the water. It had been an early start and a long journey.

  The Prince of Wales was visiting the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and the roads were blocked with the carriages of the gentry. Landaus and barouches converged, while curious onlookers milled around the main entrance, queuing at a coffee stall or chewing ham sandwiches, and bunches of ragged children shouted ironic comments at the visitors making their way to the gate.

  We quit our hansom on Lichfield Road and pressed our way through. The royal coach was visible inside the grounds.

  ‘Oh, but we have missed him,’ I said.

  ‘We have missed nothing,’ Sidney Grice told me, ‘but a dull-witted, corpulent, ill-tempered libertine.’

  ‘You do not approve of him?’

  ‘I dislike him intensely.’ My guardian barged his way through a group of laundry women and I followed in his wake, trying to ignore their indignant glares. ‘And he sometimes treats me as if I were the royal dust collector. But he will make an excellent king if he outlives his bovine mother. Hold on to your impractical bag, March. Where there are crowds there are pickpockets.’

  The mass of people thinned out and we saw a tiny boy in a yellow jacket hold out his cap to a young man resplendent in a frock coat and highly brushed beaver-skin top hat. The young man ignored him but when the boy darted in front of him, he raised his cane without warning and whipped it across the child’s face. The boy yelped and fell to his knees. I ran over and crouched to look at him. A red weal ran from his mouth to his eye. I looked up.

  ‘If you were a man I would thrash you for that,’ I said and the man pulled his lips down.

  ‘I am a man.’ His voice was as high and thin as his aristocratic nose. ‘A gentleman.’

  ‘No,’ I said and got to my feet. ‘You are a sort of vermin.’

  He screwed a monocle into his eye to inspect me. ‘Have you any idea whom you are addwessing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A preening popinjay with the manners of a slattern. I hope your mother never gets to hear of your behaviour.’

  The young man inspected me with utter scorn. ‘My mother would not have you emptying her bedpan. She—’ He stopped abruptly, his face contorted, his monocle fell out and he screeched.

  ‘You will apologize to the lady,’ my guardian said as the young man screwed up his face in pain.

  ‘I see no lady.’

  ‘This instant will do.’

  I looked down and saw that Sidney Grice was grinding the end of his cane into the top of the young man’s highly polished soft shoe.

  ‘I am sowwy.’ The tears were rolling from his eyes.

  ‘Will that suffice?’ my guardian asked me.

  ‘I accept your apology,’ I said. ‘On condition that you give that child a sovereign.’

  ‘Anything.’ He reached into his trouser pocket. ‘But please stop.’

  ‘No need for the money,’ Sidney Grice said. There was blood oozing from the young man’s shoe. ‘That grubby rascal made off with your wallet nearly two minutes ago.’

  I laughed.

  ‘And your purse,’ Sidney Grice told me, and I looked in my bag to find it gone.

  My guardian removed his cane and I saw it had a sharp metal tip on the end. He retracted it by screwing the handle. ‘The Grice Patent Spike Stick,’ he announced as the young man hopped to a nearby plane tree to support himself and inspect his foot.

  ‘The child has more need of the money than I,’ I said and my guardian frowned.

  ‘It is a short tumbril ride from that philosophy to a guillotine in Trafalgar Square.’

  We walked away.

  ‘I will wememba you,’ the young man yelled. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘If there is a revolution it is men like him who will ignite it,’ I said.

  ‘I recoil from your mixed metaphor,’ Sidney Grice told me. The crowd died out as we emerged slightly crumpled into a quiet side street. ‘We have made a powerful enemy today.’

  ‘I would not want him for a fwend,’ I said and his mouth twitched faintly.

  ‘Nor I, but you must learn to stop interfering.’

  ‘What would Christ have done?’ I asked.

  ‘I dread to think.’ He gestured to a street sign. ‘Not far now.’

  The roads of Kew were wide and leafy and the air had lost the stench of factory fumes, though the sky was still strewn with ribbons of smoke from the city. Sidney Grice stopped and pointed with his cane. Through the treetops and a hundred yards away I could just make out a weathervane and the tip of a lead-sheeted turret.

  ‘There it is.’ His face fired with excitement.

  12

  Cutteridge and the Key

  Mordent House stood on the corner enclosed by a high brick wall. We passed a rotting once-solid wooden gate.

  ‘That used to be for the gardeners, but Rupert and I used it once without permission,’ my guardian told me.

  ‘You devils,’ I said.

  ‘But it is sealed now. They welded a grid behind it after Rupert’s grandfather nearly escaped.’

  ‘Escaped?’

  But Sidney Grice was looking up beyond the rusting criss-crossed spikes that topped the wall. He stopped and pointed to a high chestnut tree overhanging the pavement.

  ‘I climbed that once,’ he said, ‘to check the accuracy of our trigonometrical calculations of its height.’

  ‘What larks.’

  We walked on and he flipped a twig on to the road with his cane. ‘We had underestimated by five eighths of an inch.’

  The wall stretched round another corner.

  ‘The extra climb must have been exhausting,’ I said and he stopped abruptly.

  ‘Why must you inject levity into every conversation?’

  I kept walking and called over my shoulder, ‘Why does everything have to be so serious?’ The brickwork was bulging quite badly here and supported by five S-shaped iron plates. ‘I am only trying to make life pleasant.’

  My guardian caught up with me. ‘You can try to mask the taste of a lemon’ – he sneezed – ‘but it will always be sour.’ We came to a break in the wall and a pair of tall wrought-iron gates. The pillars were topped by heraldic animals so eroded that I could not tell exactly what they represented. ‘The family crest,’ my guardian explained as he wrenched on a bell chain.

  ‘How sweet,’ I murmured.

  On either side stood a small lodge, both of which appeared to be deserted. The roof of one had collapsed and the other was missing several slates, with a sycamore escaping through its sloping hole.

  We waited. A robin hopped on the arrowhead tops of the gate. Through the bars I could just make out a gravel driveway thick with tall grass and dandelions. My guardian tutted. ‘These grounds were laid out by Simeon Gunwale.’

  ‘I have seen tidier jungles,’ I said as a skeletal grey-striped cat wandered across the path, followed by three kittens. ‘Shall I ring the bell again? It might not be working.’

  ‘It has worked.’ He touched a corroded point with his thumb. ‘Somebody will come.’ He put out his arm to hold me back. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The condition of these leaves.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ I said.

  The sun was high but it could not cast light into the garden. Copper beeches and silver birches battled each other for space.

  Perhaps five minutes passed.

  ‘Look.’ He pointed into the undergrowth but I could see nothing. ‘Follow my finger.’

  ‘I am trying.’

  ‘Use your tobacco-damped senses.’

  I screwed up my eyes and far away through the mass of vegetation something moved.

  ‘What is it?’

&
nbsp; A blackbird sang.

  ‘Cutteridge,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘the major-domo.’

  I watched intently, and the black shape grew and became a man walking slowly but steadily towards us. He disappeared behind a bush but reappeared a moment later, a tall man, shoulders curved by the mould of time, with a mass of white hair trained back behind his ears and a clean-shaven elongated face. He came to the gate carrying a hoop of keys.

  ‘Mr Grice.’ His voice rustled drily. ‘How nice to see you again.’ His manner was dignified and imposing but his eyes were crinkled with kindness.

  ‘I trust you have the dogs under control.’

  ‘Your trust is not misplaced, sir.’ Cutteridge selected a large intricate key, straining to turn it as the lock brattled stiffly back. He grasped the octagonal handle, twisted it and heaved, and the high gate squealed jerkily open.

  13

  Aquinas and the Viper

  The moment we entered what used to be the front garden the blackbird’s song changed to an urgent scolding clatter.

  ‘The cats or us?’ I wondered.

  ‘Neither.’ Sidney Grice directed my gaze to where a green-brown line was sliding along the trunk of a fallen ash tree. I saw the black zigzag on its back as the tongue whisked out from under its raised snout.

  ‘A viper,’ I said.

  ‘I saw an injured female blackbird this morning,’ Cutteridge told me. ‘The snake is probably after that, miss.’

  I watched it slide smoothly over the trunk as the alarm cries of the male grew increasingly urgent, while from the undergrowth came a weaker alarm call and some scuttling.

  ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ I quoted.

  ‘Why, March’ – my guardian brushed a leaf from his shoulder – ‘that was almost poetical.’

  We wound our way through a thicket of rampant rhododendrons, Cutteridge first and Sidney Grice following, slashing some nettles to widen the path for me.

  ‘I refuted every one of Aquinas’s seven proofs under that mulberry tree,’ my guardian recalled proudly.

  ‘And Master Rupert was chastised for encouraging you as I recall,’ Cutteridge chipped in.