A Broken Vessel (29 page)

He gave her a darkling look and turned his back to let her remove his coat. She put it away in the wardrobe, then came round to unbutton his waistcoat. Her hair hung loose, a little damp, and smelling of soap. Stray tendrils tickled his nose.

He undid the knot in his neckcloth, a bit more forcefully than was necessary. She folded his waistcoat and neckcloth in a neat pile. “Now, ain’t this cozy and comf’terble?” she cooed, as she helped him on with his dressing-gown.

“It’s charming,” he said acidly.

“There’s no pleasing some folks. Here I streaks off to see you directly I gets out of the refuge, I takes first-rate care of you, and all you does is growl at me and gnash your ivories. I never seed such a ungrateful cove.” She slipped her arm through his. “You come in the parlour now. I have a pot of rum punch on the fire.”

“I know exactly how it feels.”

Her eyes danced. “I knows you’re just joking. Come on now.”

He followed her into the parlour. She poured them each a glass of punch, and they sat by the fire, Sally curling up on the rug with her feet tucked under her. She told him all about her sojourn at the refuge: her nightly explorations of the inmates’ house, her suspicions of first one person and then another, her experiment to see if the cordial was poisoned, her eavesdropping on Mrs. Fiske and Harcourt, and her finding Caleb in the
area. She finished by revealing triumphantly that Mr. Fiske was Bristles, and recounting all she had learned from him.

“Sally, you’re a marvel!”

“Go on!” she said, preening. “It was just luck, mostly.”

“Luck be hanged. You’re devilish clever. You’ve brought us a wealth of new information—it’s just a question of fitting all the pieces together. Did Dipper tell you what he and I found out while you were gone?”

“Some of it.”

Julian filled in the details. “Now, let’s see if we can’t make some order out of this chaos. We’ll begin with those three men, Fiske, Avondale, and Rawdon. They’ve all turned out to be sinister in one way or another. But when it comes to suspicious circumstances, Fiske sweeps the board. He’s an apothecary, which means he has easy access to opiates and knows how to use them. He prescribed the cordial, probably knew where it was kept, and was at the refuge treating fever cases on the day Mary died. He could have added a strong opiate to the bottle of cordial, and then the following day, when he was called in to examine Mary’s body, he could have switched the poisoned bottle for another with the same amount of cordial left in it. You say he carries a medical bag about with him—he could have hidden the bottle there.”

“What about the laudanum bottle in Mary’s room?”

“As you pointed out, his wife has keys to all the doors at the refuge. He could have borrowed or stolen one from her, had it copied, and sneaked in during the night.”

Sally frowned. “It don’t sound like him. It’s so—I dunno, coldblooded.”

“He played an elaborate trick on you to make you leave the refuge.”

“Yeh, but that was for me own good, partly.”

“He says it was.”

“He meant it,” she insisted. “You didn’t see him, I did.” Julian shrugged. “The most ominous fact about him is that he denies any knowledge of Mary’s letter, and yet the odds are overwhelming that he was the man you stole it from. He’s far
more closely connected to the refuge than Avondale or Rawdon, as far as we know. Mary may have entrusted the letter to him, or perhaps his wife found it in her room, and he got it from her. But either way, he was surely lying when he said he knew nothing about it.”

“That’s what I can’t make out. It sounded like God’s own truth when he swore I didn’t pinch the letter from him.”

“Could he have had it and not known it?”

“You mean, somebody planted it in his pocket? What for?”

“To get rid of it quickly, perhaps? But that still doesn’t explain why your questioning him about Mary threw him into such a panic. He clearly knows more about her death than one would expect of an innocent man.”

She shook her head. “I can’t see him putting up a job like this, with poison and keys and all kinds of hugger-mugger—and all to make cold meat of a poor gal as trusted him. He ain’t that kind. ’Cept—”

“Except what?”

“If it would’ve helped Caleb someways, he’d’ve done it. There ain’t nothing he wouldn’t do for his son.”

“How do you fancy Caleb as a suspect? From what you’ve said of him, it’s hard to imagine him planning a stealthy, elaborate crime—unless of course his simpleton manner was a ruse.”

“It was real enough. Though he wasn’t al’ays such a Tom o’ Bedlam. Bristles said he used to be ’prenticed to him in his shop.”

“So he must know something about poisons. And he was accused of killing a young woman once before.”

“I don’t believe he done it, though. He’s a poor lamb as couldn’t say ‘boo’ to a goose. Though I must say, them words he spoke just before he run off give me the shivers. I asked him if he’d kill a wicked gal to save her soul, and he said ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’”

“In the Bible, those words are spoken by the Lord. Caleb may have meant that it was up to God to punish him.”

“I didn’t think of that. My eye, you’re a downy one! Let’s see if you can make any outs of this: why did Bristles shout, ‘Oh my
God, my boots!’ when he was in a fever, and why did he come over queer when I asked him about it?”

“I have an idea about that. You said that when you surprised Caleb in the area, he wouldn’t come out from behind the cistern, even though it only hid him from the knees down. Perhaps that wasn’t so irrational as it seemed. Perhaps he was the ‘tramp’ to whom Fiske gave away his boots, and he didn’t want you to see them.”

“Well, I’ll be blowed! It’s true his duds was shabby—he probably could’ve used new boots. But why shouldn’t Bristles give his boots to his son if he wants to?”

“His son is wanted for rape and murder. If the boots were recognized as Fiske’s, that might reveal the connexion between them, and lead to Caleb’s being identified and apprehended.”

“But I already knowed he was Caleb, so he had no call to hide the boots from me. Besides, if he was so afraid they’d give him away, why would he wear ’em at all?”

“That’s a poser.” He got up and poked the fire. The coals spat out sparks, then subsided into a ruddy glow.

Sally sat back, her arms clasped around her knees. “I don’t see how Caleb could’ve done the murder. He’d have had to break in the refuge, find Mary’s room, tip her the poison—”

“I grant you, if he was involved in the murder, he didn’t act alone. The devil of it is, any two of these people may have carried out the murder together. There are all sorts of plausible alliances: Fiske and Caleb, Avondale and Harcourt—Wideawake Peg and anyone who paid her handsomely enough.”

“She’s a deep ’un,” nodded Sally. “Sharp’s the word and quick’s the motion. She was in good trim to kill Mary: she had the run of the refuge more than any other inmate, and she was thick as two peas in a shell with Wax-face. She told me she had pals on the outside as could get her whatever she wanted—like poison, maybe. And she knowed Mary was writing a letter—she give her the paper and pencil, and offered to sneak it into the postbag for her. Maybe Mary give it to her, and she passed it on to one of them three men.”

“But, don’t you see, her telling you all that is the strongest argument for her innocence. If she’d had a hand in Mary’s death, she would have been at pains to cover her tracks. Instead, she blazed a trail straight to herself.” He considered. “What about the other inmates? Do you suspect any of them?”

“No. ’Cept I wonder about Florrie. She said she come to the refuge to get away from a cove, but she wouldn’t tell me nothing about him.”

“And we have no way of knowing if that’s significant or not.”

“Well,
I
hopes it was Mrs. Fiske as croaked Mary. She’s one I wouldn’t mind seeing dangle in the sheriff’s picture frame.”

“I’m not over fond of her myself. Unfortunately, murderers can’t be counted on to be the people one likes least. Still, the circumstantial evidence implicates her more strongly than anyone else. She could have put the poison directly into Mary’s glass of cordial, without needing to tamper with the bottle. And she could have planted the empty laudanum bottle in Mary’s room when she went on her round of inspection that night.”

“I dunno about you, but I needs to moisten me clay.” She got up and refilled their glasses from the pot on the hob.

“Thank you. Let’s turn to Avondale. Is there any reason to think Mary was Scottish?”

“Nobody knowed where she come from. But if she sounded Scotch, somebody would’ve said so.”

“Avondale told me she was only half Scottish. But I don’t think we can put much faith in anything he says. The case against him is straightforward, though highly speculative. Mary was his mysterious Rosemary. He hid her in the refuge, for some reason not yet clear, then contrived with someone there to put her out of the way more permanently.”

“If Mary was Rosemary, why’d she keep mum about it?”

“She said in her letter that she didn’t want to disgrace her family by revealing who she was. It’s also possible that Avondale threatened her, or simply persuaded her to hold her tongue. I imagine he’s a great hand at getting women to do what he wants.”

“Oh, he is that!” She smiled to herself.

“If you’ve finished reminiscing, perhaps we could return to the subject.”

She came up on her knees on the hearth-rug and leaned on the arm of his chair. “You ain’t jealous, are you?”

“No, I gnash my teeth for exercise. Would you mind moving a little away, before I lose my train of thought completely?”

“We can’t have that, now, can we?” She grinned and curled up on the rug again. “You was saying Blue Eyes might’ve put Mary up to keeping mum about who she was. But maybe he didn’t even know she was at the refuge. Maybe she hid there, and he didn’t find out where she was till somebody tipped him her letter.”

Julian shook his head. “That cock won’t fight. If Mary was Rosemary, Avondale must have known where she was and arranged with someone at the refuge to watch her—otherwise, how did he get hold of her letter in the first place? It can’t have been intended for him. It may have been meant for Megan, but obviously she never got it, or she would have known where to look for Rosemary. Someone at the refuge must have intercepted it and given it to Avondale. And since there’s nothing in the letter to connect Mary with him, that person must have known already that he had an interest in her.”

“Who do you think give him the letter? Wax-face?”

“Very likely. But, you know, Mr. Harcourt’s vanity and ambition go some way toward exonerating him. It’s hard to imagine him allowing a suspicious death—let alone a murder—to take place at his refuge, and taint its reputation. On the other hand, his efficiency in hushing up Mary’s death suggests he may have known in advance it was going to happen. We know how much Lord Carbury’s patronage meant to him. Perhaps he weighed the danger of angering Carbury’s son against the scandal likely to arise from Mary’s death, and decided it was of paramount importance to keep the Carbury connexion.

“Now then: Mr. Rawdon—the most puzzling of the suspects. On the one hand, he has no apparent connexion with the refuge, and not a glimmer of a motive to kill Mary. On the
other hand, he has a vile character, and we know he can be vicious toward women.”

“But it don’t make sense. I know coves like Blinkers. Any game gal sees ’em now and again. They likes to hurt a gal, make her blubber and beg, or maybe fight. A cove like Blinkers wouldn’t get no sport out of doing for a gal the way somebody done for Mary—sending her to sleep forever. He’d only kill like that if he had a reason.”

“And we have no idea what his reason might be. But Dipper may be able to throw light on that, once he’s had a look around Smith and Company. If Rawdon had a hand in Mary’s death, I’ll lay any odds his motive is linked to this mysterious business of his.

“We haven’t talked about alibis, which is usually the key enquiry in a murder investigation. But I don’t think that, in the case of our three men, it would be much use. If Avondale or Rawdon was behind Mary’s death, he would almost certainly have had an accomplice, and needn’t have been anywhere near the refuge while the plot was being carried out. Fiske is another matter—he just might have committed the entire crime himself. It would be interesting to know where he was—or says he was—the night Mary died.”

“I ain’t done with Bristles—not by half. I got a mind to bing off to his shop tomorrow, and ask him what he means by trying it on with me like he done.”

“You said he was trying to protect you.”

“Bugger his protection! I can—”

“—take care of yourself. Yes, you’ve mentioned that once or twice.”

She glared at him. Then she smiled insinuatingly. “You’ve got a good memory, Lightning. You don’t mind if I calls you Lightning, just for old times’ sake?”

“We don’t have any old times. We met precisely a fortnight ago.”

“Didn’t know you was counting the days. Cor, you should see yourself, you’ve got such a furrow ’cross your brow, just there—”

She put up a finger to trace it. He caught her outstretched hand, turned it palm upwards, and pressed it to his lips.