Sick of Shadows Page 7

  Kerridge sat back on his heels. “I think that’s what killed him, not drowning, but the pathologist will let us know. Let me have a proper look in this wallet.”

  He carefully extracted the sodden notes, all five-pound ones. “I think there’s about five hundred pounds here,” he ex-claimed. “Anything else?”

  He fished out a photograph showing the dead man posing on a beach with a pretty woman. “I want the police photographer to make copies of this and send it to all the newspapers. Where is he, anyway?”

  “Here, sir,” panted the photographer, running up. Kerridge heaved the body back over. “Take a photograph of this, and take this photograph I found in the man’s wallet and see if you can photograph it and send it round to the newspapers. When we know who he is, we’ll know why.”

  Before reaching Apton Magna, they had driven through some very pretty villages, but Apton Magna seemed a dreary, poverty-stricken place. It consisted of a long line of agricultural labourers’ cottages, built like miners’ cottages, directly onto the road and without front gardens. At one end of the row was a village shop and a pub, which was just really someone’s house with a green branch outside to show it sold ale. At the other end was the church with its square Norman tower.

  The rectory was, however, a large handsome Georgian building with a porticoed entrance.

  Dr. Tremaine came out to meet them. He was as thin as his wife was fat, wearing black clericals and buckled shoes. He had a craggy lantern-jawed face and small hazel eyes which regarded them with alarm.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded as Harry stepped down from the car.

  “Lady Rose was fond of your daughter and wondered whether on calmer reflection Miss Tremaine had said anything to indicate there was anyone she feared.”

  “There was no one. Now, go away.”

  “Dr. Tremaine, I fail to understand your attitude. You must surely want to know who killed your daughter.”

  “That is a job for the police and not for some dilettante aristocrat like you.”

  “At attempt has been made twice on the life of my fiancée, Lady Rose,” said Harry sternly, “and all because some madman thinks she may have some knowledge of the murderer, which, believe me, she most certainly has not.”

  “You must respect our grief,” said Dr. Tremaine. “You must go away before my wife sees you. She is still gravely upset and her nerves are delicate.”

  At that moment, Mrs. Tremaine lumbered out of the house. With a cap on her mousy hair and her round figure, she looked rather like the late Queen. “Why, Lady Rose!” she exclaimed. “How kind of you to call.”

  “They’re just leaving,” snarled her husband.

  “Oh, you cannot go without taking some refreshment. Don’t be such a bear, dear. Do come in, Lady Rose.”

  Under the rector’s glaring eyes, Rose entered the house. Daisy and Becket would have followed, but Mrs. Tremaine looked at them in horror. “Your servants may remain in the car.”

  She led the way to a drawing-room. It had noble proportions which were lost in over-furnishing. The light was dim because of three sets of curtains on the long windows—net, linen and then brocade.

  Mrs. Tremaine pulled the bell-rope and when the maid answered the summons asked for tea to be brought in. “My poor Dolly was so honoured by your friendship, Lady Rose,” she said. “She was meant for great things and struck down in her prime.”

  “Have you any idea who might have murdered her?” asked Harry.

  “I have already answered that,” said Dr. Tremaine.

  “There was one person,” said Mrs. Tremaine, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief, although Rose noticed her eyes were quite dry.

  “Who?” asked Rose eagerly.

  “The Honourable Cyril Banks, that’s who. He asked Mr. Tremaine for permission to pay his addresses and was told the answer was firmly no. ‘You’ll regret this,’ he shouted. ‘I’ll ruin that girl of yours. I’ll get even with you.’ Ah, here is tea.”

  Ludicrously, Mrs. Tremaine began to brag about the great people she had met in London, and about what a duchess had said to her and what a countess had confided in her, and Rose could practically hear all these dropped names pattering like rain among the china cups.

  She played her part, flattering Mrs. Tremaine and listening intently to her. Then, as they rose to take their leave, Rose said, “May I perhaps see my old friend’s bedchamber? An odd request, but it would help me to say goodbye.”

  The rector muttered, “Pah!” But Mrs. Tremaine could not refuse a title anything. “Follow me, my lady.”

  Upstairs, Rose stood on the threshold of what had been Dolly’s bedchamber and looked in. It was a bleak room furnished with a narrow bed, a desk, a hard chair and a wardrobe. Above the fireplace was a badly executed oil painting of a blond and blue-eyed Jesus suffering a group of remarkably British-looking children to come unto Him. The only other piece of furniture was a bedside table with a large Bible placed on top of it.

  “Miss Tremaine did not have a diary or anything like that?” she asked.

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Thank you,” said Rose.

  “May I visit you when I am in London?” asked Mrs. Tremaine eagerly.

  “By all means,” said Rose, confident that the rector would make sure his wife would not.

  Rose and Harry told Daisy and Becket the little they had learned. “Perhaps when everyone returns to London, I might encourage the attentions of Cyril and see what I can find out,” suggested Rose.

  “You are engaged to me,” snapped Harry. “It would be regarded as most unseemly behaviour.”

  “Pooh,” said Rose. Daisy and Becket exchanged looks. Their hopes of Rose and Harry’s marrying seemed farther away than ever.

  Harry received a message from Kerridge the following morning, bringing him up to date on the latest development.

  He rushed round to Scotland Yard.

  “Who is he?” he demanded, after entering Kerridge’s office. All the way to Scotland Yard he had been praying that it would turn out to be someone Dolly had known, that the murderer had drowned himself in a fit of remorse, and that Rose would now be safe.

  “Sit down,” said Kerridge. “I’ve just interviewed a retired prison officer from Wormwood Scrubs. He says he recognized our man from his photograph in the newspapers this morning. His name is Reg Bolton. He was doing time for stealing a reticule up the West End from a lady who had left it lying beside her on a chair in a coffee shop. He had a record of violence as well. His wife was found dead with her head bashed in but this Reg had various people to alibi him for the night she was killed, so he got off with that one. Reg had five hundred pounds in his wallet when we found him. And no, he didn’t drown. He was murdered.”

  Harry sat down in the chair opposite Kerridge. “So it looks as if someone hired him to kill Lady Rose?”

  “That’s just the way it looks to me,” said Kerridge gloomily. “This gets worse and worse. He had a lady’s purse pistol on him. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be the one that was used. Blast!

  “Did this Reg have any visitors when he was in prison?”

  “Wasn’t allowed any. If his wife had still been alive or if he’d had any children, then the authorities would have allowed them to visit, but no one else got in.”

  “May I talk to this screw myself?” In Pentonville Prison in 1840, prisoners were supposed to turn a crank on a machine. If the prisoner was to be punished further, the screw was tightened, and so that was how prison warders came to be known as screws.

  “I’ll give you a note. His name is Henry Barker.”

  Giving Becket the rare treat of taking the wheel of his new motor, Harry went to Wormwood Scrubs. He saw the governor and gave him Kerridge’s note and Henry Barker was summoned.

  “I have Detective Superintendent Kerridge’s permission to interview you,” said Harry. “I am Captain Cathcart.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” said Barker. “Private detectiv
e, ain’t you?”

  “That is correct. Now what sort of character was this Reg Bolton?”

  “Brutal. He terrified a lot of the prisoners.”

  “Did he say anything to you, anything that might give us a hint that someone might be paying him?”

  “Well, these hardened criminals always like to brag, Captain. The day afore he was leaving, he was grinning all over his face.

  “ ‘One more day to go,’ I says. He says, ‘I ain’t coming back here no more,’ he says. ‘Good,’ says I. ‘Mending your ways?’ He grins and says to me, ‘I’m going to be a gent. I got connections. Got a good job waiting for me.’ ”

  “And what did you gather from that?”

  “Villains never change. I thought maybe one of the other villains had put him in touch with a gang.”

  “Did he have a particular friend?”

  The warder shook his head. “The others detested him, even the real hard ones. He was a nasty bit of work. I mean, I’m only guessing one of them offered him a job. But I never saw him talking much to anyone all the time he was here.”

  “How long he in here for?”

  “Two years.”

  “And no one visited him during all that time?”

  “No, sir. Not a one.”

  Harry turned to the governor. “Would it be possible to find me his home address?”

  “I’ll get my secretary to look up the records,” said the governor. “Thank you, Barker, that will be all.”

  Harry left and headed for Bermondsey and to the address the governor had given him. He changed his mind when he saw the attention his Rolls was getting from bunches of sinister-looking men on street corners. “Turn around, Becket,” he ordered. “We’ll leave the car somewhere safe and take a hansom.”

  They returned later, told the cabbie to wait, and stared up at a rat warren of a building.

  They entered a narrow hallway, edging around broken prams and soggy boxes of detritus. There was no reply on the ground floor and so they mounted the rickety stairs. The smell was appalling. Harry knocked at a door on the first landing.

  A slattern of a woman answered it.

  “I wondered if there was anyone living here who remembers Reg Bolton?”

  “Never ’eard o’ ’im.” The door began to close.

  Harry put his foot in it. “Is there anyone who has been living here for some time?”

  “Try old Phil at the top and get your bleedin’ foot out o’ my door.”

  Holding his handkerchief to his nose, Harry, followed by Becket, went on up the stairs. He knocked on one door and there was no answer. He tried the other one. There came the sound of shuffling feet behind the door and then it opened.

  An old man stood there, or perhaps, thought Harry with sudden compassion, he might not be that old but aged by poverty. Behind him was a bare room with an iron bedstead.

  “Are you Phil?” asked Harry.

  “Right, guv. I’d ask you inside but there ain’t nowheres to sit down.”

  Phil’s face was marked by scabs and his clothes were ragged.

  “Do you remember Reg Bolton?”

  “That’s over two years ago. Flash fellow, he were. Wouldn’t spend the money to get his missus out of this rat hole. She said she was leaving him and he beat her to death. But he got loads o’ villains to testify he was somewhere else at the time. Shame, it was.”

  “Did he know any grand people?”

  “Naw, only villains.”

  “How old are you?” asked Harry.

  “Fifty-five, come Tuesday.”

  “And how did you come to land up here?”

  “The wife went off and left me. I adored my Elsie. Went to pieces. Lost me trade as a joiner. Shut up in the asylum, and when I got out I was done for. Just existed here ever since.”

  Harry could not bear to leave him. A voice in his head was screaming at him that he was surrounded by hundreds of other cases of dismal poverty and to leave Phil alone. But he found himself saying, “Come with me. I think I can find work for you. Have you belongings you can pack?”

  “Got nothing but what you see.”

  “Come along.”

  Phil meekly shuffled down the stairs after them. Becket opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again as he remembered how Harry had saved him from a life of poverty after Becket had collapsed from hunger while working as a porter in Covent Garden.

  The driver of the hansom told him that he wasn’t going to allow Phil in his cab until Harry promised to pay extra.

  “What is your name?” asked Harry.

  “Phil Marshall.”

  “Well, Phil, first of all we need to get you cleaned up and get you some decent clothes.”

  “What can he do?” asked Becket.

  “That cleaning woman is finishing work for us at the end of the week. Do you think you are fit enough to do some cleaning, Phil?”

  “Reckon I could, guv. I feel a bit weak, mind.”

  “When did you last eat?”

  “Maybe Tuesday.”

  “Dear me, and this is Friday. Becket, summon the doctor when we arrive. He’ll need to treat those scabs.”

  Phil began to feel as if he had died and gone to heaven. A warm bath was run for him and Becket laid out clean underwear and a suit for him.

  After that, he was checked by the doctor, who said the scabs were caused by untreated bedbug bites and malnutrition and suggested a gentle diet of soup and light meals to begin with.

  Phil was given a small room in the basement and told to rest as much as possible.

  He lay on the bed after Becket had gone, tears of gratitude pouring down his cheeks. He swore that from that day on, he would die for the captain if necessary.

  Harry called on Rose later that day. She listened in alarm as he described the body fished out of the Thames and how they feared that Reg had been a hired assassin.

  “But I think you will be safe now,” he assured her. “A story has gone into all the newspapers that you held nothing back from the police.”

  “So I suppose you will feel free to go back to ignoring me.”

  “On the contrary,” said Harry. “I have been remiss and I do apologize. But you cannot have any social engagements in August. Everyone is away.”

  Rose bit her lip and then said in a small voice. “I’m bored.”

  “Then next week, I will take you for a drive if the weather is fine.”

  “I wish I were a man,” raged Rose later to Daisy. “He can call at Scotland Yard any time he likes and be part of the investigation, but all I can do is sit here and rot and get letters from that dreary Mrs. Tremaine, oiling all over me in print. I am not interested in the fact that she and her dear husband have gone to Cromer on holiday.”

  Daisy brightened. “I am.”

  “Why, pray?”

  “It would be interesting to go down to that village while the Tremaines have gone and ask around about them and about Dolly. See what we could find out.”

  “That is a splendid idea. I must find out how to get there.”

  “We could take one of the carriages.”

  “They’ve all got Pa’s coat of arms on the panels. That would occasion comment. Better to travel by rail to the nearest town and take a carriage from there. We need not trouble to tell Aunt Phyllis where we are going. She is only concerned with ordering the servants around and eating vast quantities of food.”

  They took the train to Oxford and changed onto a local line and took another train to Moreton-in-Marsh, where they hired a waiting carriage to take them to Apton Magna.

  “It is pleasant to be back in the country again,” sighed Rose. “When all this is over, I shall go back north to see Bert and Sally.”

  “And how will you do that?” asked Daisy. “If your parents are at home, they are certainly not going to let you go all that way to see a mere village policeman.”

  “Perhaps the captain can arrange something,” said Rose. “Oh, do look at that sweet cottage.”

&n
bsp; “All I see is the pump at the front for the water and no doubt the you-know-what will be out in the back garden. I can smell the cesspool from here.”

  “You have no romance in your soul,” admonished Rose.

  “I have memories of poverty in me soul,” said Daisy.

  “Don’t say ‘me.’ ”

  They told the cabbie to wait for them at the entrance to the village. They had both decided to wear their plainest clothes.

  A woman was sitting outside a cottage, holding a baby on her lap. “Excuse me,” said Rose, “we were wondering if you could give us some information about the Tremaines.”

  The woman got to her feet and, disappearing inside the cottage, slammed the door behind her.

  They met with the same lack of success at other cottages.

  “Perhaps one of the more well-to-do residents would be more forthcoming,” suggested Rose.

  “There don’t seen to be any,” replied Daisy. “We’ve forgotten our village ways. We’re too direct. We need someone friendly. Ask them something like where we can get a cup of tea, enter into conversation about the weather and so on, and then slide in some remark about the murder.”

  “That sounds a very good idea,” said Rose. “That is, if we can find anyone amiable.”

  “I remember there was a cottage up by the rector’s place. It looked in better shape than the others,” said Daisy. “Why is the rector called ‘doctor’?”

  “Because he’s a doctor of divinity. Remember that Gilbert and Sullivan opera? ‘A doctor of divinity/Who resides in this vicinity.’ ”

  The cottage they approached was small and thatched and made of Cotswold stone, unlike the red brick cottages of the other villagers.

  It had a front garden crowded with flowers. They opened the gate and walked up the path. Rose knocked on the door.