A Corpse in Shining Armour (34 page)

‘When you wanted me to believe you weren’t on duty. Yes.’

‘Well, I wasn’t on duty, in a manner of speaking. But a man naturally gravitates towards his own trade. A barber, for instance:
put him down in a strange town and, a pound to a penny, before the hour’s out, he’ll be talking to another barber. You must
have noticed it yourself, observant lady like you are.’

‘So what you’re telling me is that you just happened to get into conversation with a local policeman?’

‘Coroner’s officer, in this case. An older trade, as it happens, but much the same line of country when it comes to unexplained
deaths, as in the case of the late Simon Handy.’

‘And I suppose this coroner’s officer, whom you just happened to meet, came rushing up to Paddington by railway train first
thing this morning, for the pleasure of your conversation. Suppose you tell me what this has to do with me and my maid?’

He sighed, as if my impatience offended him.

‘He’s a conscientious man. Some people, a death on a Sunday morning, it would be a case of let it wait till Monday. Of course,
he might have been taking into account that it was a member of the aristocracy.’

‘Lady Brinkburn?’

‘Lady Brinkburn. He went out to the hall, spoke to the servants–“Who’d been the last one to see her alive?” and so on. One
of them he spoke to was her ladyship’s maid. Clever girl, by his account. She pointed out that the lady’s laudanum bottle
wasn’t her usual pattern. She even had it safely locked up there in the bedroom. He wondered who’d told her to do that. She
remembered the name from when the lady had come visiting. Good description too.’

He paused and looked at me.

‘Yes, I advised her to,’ I said. ‘It seemed a reasonable precaution. I knew somebody would have to make official inquiries.’

In fact, I hadn’t been thinking so far ahead. It had been an instinctive reaction after the discovery about the bottle. He
nodded.

‘Very proper and public spirited. Bit of a coincidence though, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Coincidence?’

‘Simon Handy’s found dead in London. You’re there. His late employer’s found dead in Buckinghamshire. You’re there again.
Has it struck you that you might be a kind of natural magnet for coincidences?’

I’d been doing some quick thinking, not liking the way things were heading. On one hand, my client was entitled to confidentiality.
On the other, I couldn’t have envisaged these complications when I took on the case. I compromised.

‘It’s not coincidence. I’ve been involved in professional inquiries concerning the family. That’s all I’m prepared to tell
you.’

‘It’s a serious offence to withhold information about crimes.’

He said it in a tone that made it sound like a casual observation, rather than the threat it was.

‘If you think I’m withholding information, then say so outright.’

He nodded, as if accepting that was as far as he’d get, and glanced towards the gates. I thought I’d called his bluff and
was relieved to have got off so easily.

‘Well, I’ll wish you good day then, Miss Lane.’

He half-raised his hat, turned away, then pivoted back.

‘But I was forgetting where we started, wasn’t I? Your maid.’

‘If you’ve anything to tell me about Tabby, then say it.’

The look he gave me then was like the expression on an angler’s face when he stares at the circles fish make on water, all
the while weighing up where to cast his line.

‘Another coincidence–the biggest of the lot, you might say. When and where did you last see this Tabby?’

My brain clammed up with fear, so I had to struggle to count back the days. I thought he was about to tell me she was dead.

‘Friday evening, or afternoon, rather. Three days ago. There was a storm you see and…’

I managed to collect my wits enough to give him a short account of Tabby arguing with the maids and rushing out.

‘Did you ever send her to do shopping for you?’ he said.

‘What’s that got to do with it? Yes, she ran the occasional errand for me here in London. When we were at the cottage, she
bought food at the village shop.’

‘Food. You didn’t by any chance ask her to buy laudanum?’

I stared, wondering if I’d heard aright.

‘Of course not. I don’t use laudanum.’

‘Then how do you account for the fact that on Saturday afternoon a young woman who sounds very like your Tabby walked into
a chemist’s shop in Maidenhead and bought a bottle of laudanum? An unusually strong solution of laudanum, as it happens.’

‘There must be some mistake.’

The words sounded lame even in my own ears. The sceptical look on Constable Bevan’s face showed what he thought of them.

‘Another coincidence, then. Short, skinny girl of fifteen or so, dark hair, good teeth, a bit of an impudent look about the
eyes. Sounds very much like the young woman I spoke to down at your cottage by the river.’

‘That description could fit a lot of girls.’

‘True enough. Still, there was one thing the chemist noticed in particular. Her voice. Broad cockney, he said. Proper broad
cockney. Doesn’t that sound like your girl?’

I looked down in the dust where the hens were pecking. Somewhere among them was the one she’d tied up, just to get my attention.
I didn’t try to answer him because there was nothing I could say.

‘If you decide there’s anything you want to tell me, my beat’s the south side of this end of Oxford Street,’ he said.

He tipped his hat again and this time really did start walking away. I called after him.

‘The girl–what happened to her?’

He turned.

‘She bought the laudanum, left the shop, that was that. As far as my friend could make out, nobody’s seen her since.’

Then he walked on and out of the gates, leaving me looking down at the chickens.

I spent a bad hour up in my room, trying to make sense of what he’d told me. The girl in the chemist’s had been Tabby. Either
that, or Constable Bevan was playing some complicated game for his own purposes, but I couldn’t see why. Looked at one way,
there was a horrible logic to it. Tabby quarrels with the maids, walks out, and next morning is seen in the nearest town buying
a bottle of laudanum. Was it with some idea of poisoning Dora and Ruth in revenge, or killing herself, in despair at being
made a mockery? An outsider would say that either was possible, but–when the shock began to wear off–I couldn’t believe
either. Tabby had taken her revenge in a direct and characteristic way, rubbing ham in her tormentor’s face. If she’d decided
that wasn’t enough, she was far more likely to have stormed back and knocked both girls down than used some sophisticated
method like poisoning. As for self-destruction, it was beyond belief that a girl tough enough to survive homeless on the streets
of London would be driven to end her life by two silly housemaids. Besides, what would she know about laudanum? It was an
indulgence above her class. In her world, if people wanted to drink themselves into temporary insensibility, it was gin not
laudanum in the glass. And where would she get the money for laudanum? I’d never given her more than a copper or two at a
time. When she went shopping, she was scrupulous about bringing back my change. If Tabby had bought laudanum, somebody else
had given her the money for it.

That raised quite a different possibility that turned the whole case on its head. Lady Brinkburn was increasingly dependent
on laudanum. Both Robert Carmichael and her maid were worried about that and trying to limit the amount she took. Suppose
Lady Brinkburn had encountered Tabby wandering in the grounds. She’d already used her to run one errand, in delivering a note
to me. Why not borrow her for her own purposes? So Tabby had bought the laudanum for her and delivered it, probably at some
secluded place chosen by Lady Brinkburn so that nobody else would ever know. Then later Lady Brinkburn drank the full bottle,
lay down in her boat and died, without anybody else being involved, and my suspicions of Stephen and Miles were moonshine.
That seemed to me much more likely than any other possibility, but it left one great question unanswered. After she’d run
her errand, what had happened to Tabby?

I puzzled at it until my head was spinning so much that only a walk across the park would clear it. It was high time I called
on Amos Legge. His practicality and commonsense were an antidote to too much theorising, and there was always a chance that
he’d know what to do next.

It was mid-afternoon by this time, the drives so packed with fashionable carriages that a nimble urchin could swing from one
to the other the length of the park without setting foot on the ground. I saw several who seemed to be trying it, until footmen
noticed and dislodged them. The urchins simply rolled themselves into balls, stood up and shook off the worst of the dust,
then dived for the back of the next carriage. The stables where Amos worked seemed quiet in comparison. The door of Rancie’s
box was open, a boy forking fresh straw inside, so she must be out in the park, earning her oats with some suitably gentle-handed
lady rider. I was sorry to have missed Rancie, because she always managed to calm me when I needed it, and that day I needed
it very much. Rancie’s black cat, Lucy, came up to me and rubbed against my skirt. I bent to stroke her and noticed that there
was some new smell around the yard, making her twitch her sensitive whiskers. The smell had nothing to do with horses. In
fact it reminded me, against my will, of what Constable Bevan had been saying about barbers.

The door of the office next to the tack room opened and Amos Legge walked out, holding a small bottle. He was dressed with
less than his usual elegance, in breeches and shirtsleeves, with a leather farrier’s apron over them. He seemed pleased to
see me, but had a slightly guilty look and put the hand with the bottle behind his back. Then he looked at my face and his
smile faded.

‘You were there when they found the lady, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry for that.’

I wanted to tell him about Tabby, but somebody shouted to him from inside the office, telling him to hurry up. He gave me
an apologetic look.

‘We’ve got to get it done so it dries in time, but the way the lad’s fuddling about, the funeral will be over before we get
there.’

‘Funeral?’

But he was striding away towards a loosebox. I followed. I supposed a horse had some small injury, and it was always useful
to learn from Amos’s expertise.

The occupants of the box were a stable lad, looking nervous, and a very large black gelding, not in the best of tempers. I’d
seen the lad before, but not the horse. Amos opened the half door and went in, making reassuring sounds at the horse. It rolled
its eyes and flared its nostrils at him.

‘He won’t let me put the twitch on him,’ the lad said.

‘We don’t need no twitch for this. It’s not as if we’re hurting him. It’s only the smell of it bothers him.’ He gave the bottle
to the boy. ‘You be careful you don’t spill it. The guvnor says it costs more than French brandy. I’ll see he stays quiet.’

He put his hand on the horse’s neck and murmured a string of words to it in his deep Herefordshire voice. There was no particular
sense to them, but even to my ears they were as soothing as the cooing of doves. Soon the big horse had dropped his head and
was standing quietly. He was a fine beast, sixteen hands high or more, and pure black apart from one white sock on the near
hind and a small white blaze.

At a nod from Amos, the lad squatted down by the horse’s near hind, poured liquid from the bottle on to a cloth and dabbed
it on to the horse’s white sock. The smell I’d noticed outside filled the box and the horse shifted a little, but stayed calm
enough under Amos’s hand for the white to be turned black. Then Amos took the bottle and cloth from the lad and quickly did
the same to the small white blaze on the animal’s forehead, before it had a chance to realise what was happening.

‘Thar lad, good lad.’

He produced a carrot from his pocket, snapped it into pieces and fed it to the horse, murmuring quietly to it all the time.
When he was sure it was completely calm, he opened the box door and the three of us filed out. I waited till the lad had gone
about his business.

‘Are you turning horse thief then?’ I said to Amos.

He laughed.

‘Undertaker, more like. You’ve surely seen that trick done before.’

‘Yes, but isn’t it usually with boot polish?’

I knew that some people were very fussy about having the horses that drew their carriages matched to perfection. A groom could
do a lot with black boot polish to even up markings on legs and foreheads. Amos shook his head.

‘Quality job, this one. A very particular customer.’

‘He can’t be so very particular if he’s dead, can he?’

‘Left instructions in his will: six coal-black geldings to draw the hearse, four coal-black mares for the mourning coach,
all geldings to be matched at sixteen hands or above, all mares at fifteen two. Now how many pure coal-black horses have you
seen in your life?’

‘Not many.’

‘And then not as many as you think. Even the ones that look black usually have a touch of white on them somewhere. So any
stables with a horse for hire that’s big enough and can be made to look black enough is in a good market. It’s not just the
one stage, either. The hearse and mourning coach have got to go all the way from Kingston to Portsmouth, and that’s three
changes, even going slow like they will be.’

Until then, I’d been laughing at the absurd vanity of it, but the name Kingston rang a hollow bell with me.

‘Do I know this late gentleman?’ I said.

‘You know his sons, any road.’

‘Lord Brinkburn?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘He was in a private asylum near Kingston upon Thames. Why are they taking his body from there to Portsmouth?’

‘As far as I gather, he’s said in his will he’s to be buried in Rome, so they’ve got to put him on a ship. They’ll have had
him embalmed, I reckon, this weather.’

‘He thought he was the Emperor Hadrian,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s why he wanted to be buried in Rome.’