A Broken Vessel (38 page)

Toby poked his head in to say that the surgeon had arrived. The surgeon examined Megan briefly, confirmed that her fall into the stair-well had caused her death, and agreed to testify at an inquest if required.

Soon after, Dipper returned with two men. One was a big, jovial man in his forties, with a bulbous red nose. The other was a young man of about five-and-twenty, who wore the uniform of a Bow Street patrol: blue coat with gilt buttons, blue trousers, and scarlet waistcoat. He was armed with a cutlass, a pistol, and a gaudily painted truncheon. A pair of handcuffs dangled from his belt.

The red-nosed man shook hands all around. “How d’ye do? I’m Peter Vance.”

He did not need to identify himself any further. Everyone knew the names of Bow Street’s elite officers, the Runners. They figured in newspaper stories, street ballads, crime novels; they guarded banks, theatres, even the King himself. They wore no uniform: the sole insignia of their office was a tipstaff, a wooden baton about nine inches long, with a gilt crown at the end. Vance took his out of a leather case on his belt, ready to brandish at need.

Julian introduced himself and Sally. “I’m afraid all this will take a good deal of explaining.”

“Explain away,” said Vance. “I have time. I knew from the beginning this must be serious. Nothing short of all hell broken loose would have brought this one to Bow Street of his own free will.” He clapped Dipper on the shoulder.

“Do you two know each other?”

“Know Dipper? I should say I do! Why, we’ve been talking over old times all the way here. I used to run into him often enough among the cross-coves. Pulled him in once. Bit of an achievement, that. He was a rum diver, was Dipper—damned hard to catch out.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Dipper.

“Not at all, lad, not at all. Didn’t have him up before the magistrates, though—not worth it, only a matter of a handkerchief. So, no need for bad blood betwixt us.”

He meant, Julian realized, that the reward for apprehending Dipper for such a minor theft would have been too small. The Runners were brave, determined men, but no one had any illusions about their motives. They worked for rewards; they were expected to. Bow Street did not pay them nearly enough to live on their salaries alone.

“That the victim?” asked Vance, going over to Megan.

“One of the victims.” Julian followed him and recounted briefly how she had died.

“Who is she?” asked Vance.

“I’ve heard her called Megan MacGowan, but I don’t believe that was really her name. One man would know for sure: Charles Avondale, Lord Carbury’s younger son.”

Vance whistled. “So there really are nobs mixed up in this.”

“That’s only the beginning. I suggest we send Dipper for Avondale, and in the meantime Sally and I will tell you what we know about this business.”

Vance nodded. Dipper set off, and Julian and Sally embarked on the story of the refuge, the trepanners, and the murder. Sally repeated what Rawdon had told her about his crimes, and Julian revealed that the murdered girl was Lady Lucinda Braxton. The officers were astonished and a little giddy at this parade of plots and counterplots, mistaken identities and misplaced trust.

At last Vance got to his feet, taking a large swig of the ale that Toby always provided free of charge to any law officers who happened by. “Seems there’s more than enough cause to pull in these two men, Rawdon and Fiske. Or rather, Fiske and Fiske, but it’s simpler to go on calling the younger one by his assumed name. We’ll lock them up for the night, and tomorrow morning they’ll be had up before the magistrates. You’ll have to come in, sir, and swear out evidence against them. You, too, my beauty.”

He winked at Sally, but she turned up her nose. Flirt with a Bow Street officer? Not likely!

Toby took Vance and his assistant upstairs to collect Rawdon and Fiske. Sally turned to Julian, her brow wrinkled. “I still can’t make no outs of some of this. Who was that Tom o’ Bedlam I caught nosing around the refuge, if he wasn’t Caleb?” She added with a touch of resentment, “It didn’t seem to knock you, not by half, to find out Blinkers was Caleb, and him and his pa done the murder together.”

“No, because my suspicions were already turning that way. I hadn’t worked out that Rawdon was Caleb, but I realized there must be some sort of alliance between them. This whole investigation’s been like a game of thimblerig: we had three men and one letter, and we made the same assumption that the dupes who play thimblerig do—they think the pea is under one of the three cups, and they have only to determine which one. But the pea moves: the sharper pretends to put it under one cup, then he palms it and puts it under another. And I saw that that’s what must have happened here: Fiske had the letter first and gave it to Rawdon.

“The motive, you see, was Rawdon’s. I felt sure he and his colleagues had trepanned Lady Lucinda, and that gave them every reason to want her out of the way, once they knew her true identity. But there was no connexion between Rawdon and the refuge. It was Fiske who had access to Lady Lucinda—Fiske who could easily have got hold of her letter, poisoned the cordial, and sneaked into the refuge at night to plant the laudanum bottle in her room. What he denied so convincingly wasn’t that he ever had the letter, but that he was the man from whom you stole it.

“If Fiske got the letter from Lady Lucinda and passed it on to Rawdon, that would explain why they were both in the Haymarket that night. You said you couldn’t conceive what Fiske was doing there at that hour—he clearly wasn’t looking for the kinds of entertainment the neighbourhood has to offer. Then there was Rawdon’s spying on you and Fiske at the Cockerel. We wondered what there was about you to rouse his interest. We never thought to consider that he was watching you because you were with Fiske.”

“Watching his own pa!” she said in disgust. “He’s a stinker, and no mistake! You know, I didn’t think he’d be like that—Caleb, I mean. When I heard his ma talk about him to Wax-face, I was sorry for him. I thought she’d treated him like dirt. And when I seen that boy at the refuge, as was so addle-pated and afeard of his own shadow, I just naturally thought he was Caleb.”

Julian nodded. “You had an image of Caleb in your mind, and that boy obligingly stepped into it. I made exactly the same mistake about Rosemary, and it played the devil with my whole analysis. Because I thought she might be Mary, I kept picturing her in Mary’s image—as a beautiful, helpless young girl, a victim. The real Rosemary may be nothing like that—”

He stopped, caught up Avondale’s letter again, and stared at it “Good God.
Half English and half Scottish.
How could I have been so blind? Avondale as good as told me who Rosemary was, and I didn’t see it!”

Sally gaped at him. But before she could get out a question, the officers brought Rawdon and Fiske downstairs. Fiske was meek, but Rawdon was wild with rage. The officers had had to bind his arms with ropes and stuff a handkerchief in his mouth. “You should have heard the language he was spewing out,” chuckled Vance. “Nothing we hadn’t heard before, but we got tired of listening to it. Well, we’re finished here. If you’ll come to the office tomorrow at ten, sir, I expect the magistrates will clear everything else aside for this.”

“We’ll be there,” said Julian. “Thank you for all you’ve done.”

“Thank
you
, sir. You’re a rare hand at this kind of thing. If you’d been born in my sphere of life, you could have made a fine career of it. ’Course, being a gentleman as you are—and a pink of St. James Street, as everyone knows—this is all a sort of lark to you. A sport, you might say. Like hunting foxes.”

“Rather like that.” Julian smiled quizzically. He knew very well what Vance meant. A gentleman does not catch criminals professionally—and certainly would not dream of taking a share in any reward that might be granted.

Toby summoned a hackney to take the officers and their prisoners to Bow Street. Julian and Sally saw them off, then returned to the back parlour to keep a vigil over Megan till Avondale arrived. In a few minutes Dipper joined them and told them Avondale was waiting in the taproom. “I left him there, sir, ’coz I didn’t know if you was done with Lighthouse Pete.”

“Lighthouse Pete?”

“Oh, that’s Mr. Vance, sir. It’s a nickname we give him, on account of this.” He tapped his nose.

“Very apt.” Julian glanced toward the door to the taproom.

“What have you told him?”

“Just that you needed to see him slap off, sir—some’ut to do with Miss MacGowan.”

“All right. I’ll go and speak to him.”

He went into the taproom. Most of Toby’s customers had cleared out, not liking the reek of Bow Street about the place. Avondale came over to him at once. “What the plague is this? First you’re taking messages from Megan in the street, and now you send your servant after me, saying you have to see me about her. I don’t understand any of this. Why are you dogging my steps?”

“You got into the thick of something I was looking into— some thing that turned out not to involve you, but seemed at first as if it might. It’s a very long story. I have something to tell you I’m afraid it will come as a shock. The young woman you call Miss MacGowan came here tonight. She followed you to your assignation with Sally.”

“Sally?—oh, the little Covent Garden nun who sent me the note.
”
 He caught his breath. “What do you mean, the woman I
call
Miss MacGowan?”

“She got into the midst of a fight,” Julian went on quietly. “There was—an accident. She was killed.”

“Killed?”

“I’m sorry.”

Avondale groped blindly for the back of a chair and held on to it to steady himself. “Dead. Megan is dead.”

“She asked me to give you a message. Again,” he added ruefully. “She said to tell you that you’ve won. She asked me to give you a letter she had with her. And she begged you to have mercy on Rosemary. ‘Tell him to pity her, if he can’t love her,’ she said—”

“Oh, no—” Avondale put out a hand to ward off any more. “You have to believe me, I didn’t want to win like this. I hated Megan; there wasn’t much I wouldn’t have done to tear her out of my life. But this—this wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Would you like to see her?”

“Yes. Yes, I think I owe her that.”

They went into the parlour. Avondale went over to the table where Megan lay, and stood looking down at her. Dipper regarded him thoughtfully, Sally with unabashed curiosity.

“This is all my fault,” he said. “I had a feeling I’d been followed here tonight. She was always following me, or watching me. She thought I might lead her to Rosemary, or to someone who knew where Rosemary was.”

“Where is she?” Sally could not resist asking. “And
who
is she?”

Avondale did not answer, only went on looking sadly at Megan’s still, unforgiving face.

Julian handed him the letter. “I’m bound in honour to give this to you, because it’s what she wished. What you do with it is between you and your conscience.”

“You’ve read it, I suppose?”

“I did, I confess.”

“What’s it all mean?” Sally persisted. “Who’s Rosemary?” She looked at Julian narrowly. “And why’d you say
her
name wasn’t really Megan MacGowan?”

Avondale smiled faintly. “So you worked that out.”

“Yes,” said Julian. “I have a friend who’s Scottish by birth, and he and I once had a conversation about the peculiarities of Scottish law.”

“Bugger Scottish law!” Sally stamped her foot. “If her bloody name wasn’t Megan MacGowan, what was it?”

“Her bloody name,” said Avondale quietly, “was Mrs. Charles Avondale.”

CHAPTER
28

S
ally stared. “She was your
wife
?”

“I suppose you’re entitled to the whole story,” Avondale sighed, “now you’ve got into the middle of it like this. But in return you have to tell me what all this is about: how you two know each other”—he looked from Sally to Julian—“and how she died.”

Julian told the story yet again, but briefly this time, and leaving out Lady Lucinda’s name—though, God knew, her fate would be public soon enough. Avondale did not seem to take in more than the basic outline, but listening in silence had a soothing effect on him. It helped that Dipper, ever practical, had ordered a great, steaming bowl of brandy-and-water, which they all partook of gratefully.

At last it was Avondale’s turn to explain. He rose and paced up and down for a short time, steeling himself. “All right. Here’s where it all began. About three years ago, I went to Scotland on a shooting trip, and afterward I stayed in Edinburgh with some
friends, the Lauders. While I was there, I met a young woman, a governess in the neighbourhood. That was Megan.

“She was very fetching in those days. She’d pretty well gone to rack and ruin by the time you saw her, but she used to have a vitality about her—a fire, a kind of animal spirits, I don’t know. She was a little older than I was, but that didn’t signify. We started meeting in secret, and—well, you can guess the rest.

“But then she got after me to marry her. It wasn’t fair, really, because I’d never said anything to make her believe I had marriage in mind, and she’d never brought it up herself until after she was my mistress. Finally it was nearly time for me to leave Scotland, and I was glad to get away, but Megan wasn’t going to let me slip through her fingers without a fight. One morning, just before I was due to leave, Megan sent me a letter. She was in a thundering great temper. She said she was my wife in all but name, ran on for pages reminding me of what we’d been to each other, and threatened to come to the Lauders that very night and kick up hell’s delight if I didn’t write back at once promising to marry her. And I thought, oh the deuce, why not? If she brought a breach of promise suit afterward, she could always be bought off. The Lauders were having a party that night for a lot of English and Scottish big-wigs, and the thought of Megan coming there and blowing me up in front of all those people made my skin crawl. So I wrote her this.”