A Particular Eye for Villainy: (Inspector Ben Ross 4) (21 page)

He treated me to an aggrieved scowl. ‘Where are police then?’

‘We have other matters than apples to worry about, Mr Weisz, but if you speak to the regular constable on this beat, he will keep a lookout. Thank you for your time.’

I rejoined Lizzie who was waiting for me impatiently. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked.

‘Not at all. Mr Weisz neither sees nor hears anything that is not his business. I fancy he hails from a country where it is unwise to behave otherwise. Let’s go up and find Jenkins.’

We proceeded up the unswept stairs and arrived before Jenkins’s door. It was not quite shut fast. A prickle of apprehension ran up my spine.

‘Lizzie,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you had better wait downstairs. Weisz will let you shelter in his shop out of the rain.’

But Lizzie had already noticed the door. She leaned past me and gave it a push. It swung open.

I was, in my mind, already half prepared for what we’d see. Lizzie was not. She gasped and when I turned to her, she had a hand clasped to her mouth.

‘Go downstairs!’ I said sharply. This was not the moment to deal with a distressed female.

I should have known my wife better. She took the hand from her mouth and snapped, ‘Certainly not!’

‘Oh, well, stay then, but here!’ I pointed at the floor. ‘Don’t come further inside.’

The body of the private detective lay behind the desk, huddled on the bare boards. I stooped over him. His face and, as far as I could tell, his skull were unmarked. He had not been bludgeoned, as had Tapley. A large damp patch on his waistcoat, staining my fingers crimson when I touched it, told me he’d been stabbed. He had been in confrontation with his visitor, I reasoned, and the assailant had been close enough to make one deadly thrust up between the ribs. This was a knifeman who knew his business. The victim had not been dead very long.

I didn’t doubt we were looking for the same killer as had slain Tapley. But he’d changed his method. Why? Because he’d needed to talk to Jenkins and he wouldn’t have had much conversation with a bludgeoned man. He had wanted something from Jenkins. Not information, something tangible. Jenkins hadn’t given it to him and so the killer had ransacked the room, looking for it. Something small, therefore, something easily concealed. Had he found it?

Lizzie, predictably, had ignored my last instruction and stood a few feet away.

‘As you’re here,’ I said to her, ‘can you confirm for me that this is the man who introduced himself to you as Horatio Jenkins?’

‘Yes, poor man,’ she said, looking down at the sprawled form. ‘I didn’t like him but he looks so pathetic lying there.’

‘Listen to me, Lizzie,’ I said. ‘And please, don’t argue. This is now an investigation into a murder. Take a cab if you can find one and go to Scotland Yard and report what has happened here. Oh, before you do that, please ask Weisz to send one of his children to find the local constable on his beat, and bring him here. I must stay here, make sure nothing here is disturbed—’

A shrill shriek made my eardrums ring. We both spun round to see a woman standing in the doorway. She was a dowdy little soul, wearing spectacles and a pinafore with a large pocket. She backed away from us into the stairwell, and screamed, ‘Murder! Horrible murder! What have you done? You’ve gone and killed poor Mr Jenkins! Oh, help, help! Police!’

I started towards her but she had turned and, with the speed of terror, had darted down the stairs and out into the street where she was already screeching, ‘Murder!’

Weisz burst out of his shop and, seeing me emerge from the door into the street, demanded, ‘What’s amiss?’

‘Jenkins is dead,’ I told him, since this was obvious. ‘Please send one of your children for the local constable and take this lady into your shop and give her some tea or something. Do you know her?’

‘I know her. It is Ruby Poole. She makes hats. I send Jacob for the constable. He is an intelligent boy, and quick. Come, come, Miss Poole . . .’

She had begun to sob uncontrollably and allowed Weisz to take her elbow and lead her into the shop.

I went back upstairs. ‘You need only go directly to the Yard, Lizzie. Weisz is sending a child for the constable.’

Lizzie nodded. ‘I’ll be back soon.’

I opened my mouth to say she had no need to return with the officers from the Yard, but she would do so, anyway. Besides, she was, after all, a witness. I returned upstairs and closed the door to the detective agency. I remembered that a taxidermist also had his workshop on this floor. Accordingly, I moved along to the next door and rapped on it. No one answered. I tried the handle and the door opened easily. I stepped inside.

At once I found myself in an extraordinary place beyond my imagination. The first thing to strike me was the smell. The air had a strange musty quality, with a hint of chemicals, and a lingering odour of meat. Death itself was everywhere, but in the form of a curious limbo in which creatures which had ceased to live and breathe still existed, in a halfway house between this life and total extinction. The room was inhabited by a menagerie of dead animals. They hung from the ceiling; they peered at me through the glass walls of boxes within which they had been tastefully mounted in naturalistic settings. They poked their snouts out from under the table and chairs, shelves, open cupboards. A window in this room gave on to the rear of the premises, and before it was a large porcelain sink and draining board. I made a cautious way towards it, conscious of so many glass eyes watching my progress, and looked down. A small dead dog of the miniature sort ladies like to carry round concealed in a muff lay in it, still entire but presumably a candidate for taxidermy.

Looking through the window I had a view of the back garden, if that was the word for it. I saw a patch of trampled mud, a washing line from which flapped the Weisz family linen; a brick-built privy and a shed. There was also a door in the back wall so an alley must run behind. Directly below, as I looked down, I could see a rough deal table, a couple of benches, some sacks of vegetables and signs of the work that had now been abandoned by Mrs Weisz and her children when the rain began.

There was a faint scuffling sound. I felt a moment’s unreasoning panic that one of the glassy eyed creatures behind me might have returned to life and was reaching out its stiff paws or had spread its wings and was about to swoop down. I spun round and just glimpsed, from the corner of my eye, a movement behind a display cabinet.

‘Come out!’ I ordered.

With a moan a small man, wearing an apron and a skullcap crammed over straggling grey hair, emerged and sidled a few inches towards me. He looked as terrified as Miss Poole had done.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ I reassured him. ‘I am a police officer. Are you Mr Baggins?’ I produced my warrant card.

‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘I’m Baggins, Sebastian Baggins, sir . . .’

‘There has been an incident concerning your neighbour, Mr Jenkins.’

‘I heard Ruby Poole screeching,’ he confessed. ‘She shouted it was murder. Is it murder? I hid.’ He blinked at me pathetically. ‘When you knocked at my door, I thought you were the murderer, come to find another victim.’

A polite murderer who knocked at doors, I thought. ‘No, Mr Baggins, you are quite safe. The assailant has fled.’

He straightened up and heaved a deep sigh of relief. Then, with a twitch of fear, asked, ‘He ain’t coming back?’

‘No, I doubt that very much, Mr Baggins.’

The murderer had either found what he sought in Jenkins’s room, or he hadn’t. Either way he wouldn’t return. ‘How thick are the walls here?’ I gestured at the room.

‘Reasonable,’ said Baggins cautiously. ‘You don’t hear no conversation. That suits me just fine. You’ve got to concentrate on taxidermy. You can’t go being distracted. The animal has to look lifelike. You can’t have one cross eyed or with a hump in its back. I take pride in my creations. Why, that owl over there, you’d swear it was about to swoop down on you. When I’m working, I generally don’t hear anything, not if you was in this room and spoke to me.’

I had been trying to ignore the owl in question. It had a decidedly unpleasant gaze fixed on me. I could see where this was leading. Mr Baggins, like Mr Weisz, would have seen and heard nothing. But I persevered.

‘Did you know Jenkins had a visitor or visitors this morning?’

He hesitated fractionally. ‘No, I would have to be out on the stairs to see that. I’ve been in here.’

‘Did you hear anything?’ I repeated. ‘Don’t deny it if you did, Mr Baggins. That would be withholding important information.’

‘You didn’t hear voices raised in argument?’

‘No,’ said Mr Baggins firmly.

‘You didn’t hear furniture being moved? You didn’t hear, say, a crash?’

‘There was a bit of a bump at one point,’ he admitted, ‘but nothing to make me worry. It was about there.’ He pointed at the wall between his room and the next one. He had indicated the spot where, on the other side, the wicker basket of disguises had stood. That would have been when the killer upended it in his search, I thought.

‘Nothing more?’

‘Nothing, sir. I didn’t hear anyone leave. The first I heard was Ruby Poole screaming fit to bust.’

‘Who is in the remaining room on this floor?’

He looked puzzled then said, ‘Oh, you mean the little room next to this. That’s my living room, sir, and my bedroom, too.’

‘I should like to see it.’

Baggins pattered ahead of me to the remaining door on the landing, unlocking it after searching through a collection of keys on a ring. There were keys large and small, from sturdy house keys to modest cabinet ones, even tiny ones such as might have opened a tea caddy. I wondered why he needed so many, when he only had two rooms. He would need one for the street door, but that totalled no more than three. I asked him.

‘Keys is handy,’ he said vaguely. ‘I never throw away a key.’

‘Vegetables,’ he said, confirming what Weisz had told me. ‘A store for the greengrocery, downstairs.’

Prompted by the sight of the brick privy, I asked how he managed for necessary sanitation. Tenants all shared the privy in the garden below, I was told. Those upstairs such as himself and Jenkins and the milliner all had to go down to the street, round the corner and into the yard from a back alley through the door I’d observed.

‘And above here?’ I pointed upwards. ‘Apart from Miss Poole the milliner, who else lives up there?’

‘No one,’ he shook his head. ‘The back two rooms are unlet at the moment.’

‘Who owns the building?’

‘He does.’ Baggins pointed downwards.

‘Weisz, the greengrocer?’ I was surprised.

‘That’s him. He’s got a business head, he has. He wouldn’t give you a bruised apple for free.’

I thanked him and warned him not to gossip, and that a constable would come eventually to take down his statement.

‘I’ve got nothing to state!’ he protested.

‘You repeat what you told me, that you heard someone admitted to Jenkins’s agency about two hours ago. You heard Jenkins ask the visitor what he wanted. You later heard a muffled noise, a bump, and you indicate the spot you showed me. You see? You know more than you think you do.’

This did not appear to cheer Mr Baggins at all. He trailed gloomily back to his glassy eyed companions.

A clump of footsteps on the stairs heralded the constable brought by the child. After a brief conversation I left him guarding the scene of the crime and went back to the shop.

Someone had put up a ‘closed’ sign, but when I tapped on the glass, Weisz emerged from the back room and led me there. The family was gathered around Miss Poole who was still sniffing noisily into a handkerchief. Mrs Weisz ushered her brood, all with eyes shining with curiosity and excitement, into a little room next door. She then went to stand by her husband facing me. Both looked despondent and wary. I felt sorry for them. They had worked hard in their adopted country, even becoming owners of property. Now they were involved with the police in a serious inquiry. Their experience was that, however innocent, it was not a good situation to be in.

‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you,’ I said to Mrs Weisz, hoping to reassure her.

She murmured, ‘Thank you, sir.’

I turned to Miss Poole. ‘If you feel able, Miss Poole, perhaps you would return upstairs with me.’

‘I can’t go into his room!’ wailed Miss Poole.

‘No, no, you don’t need to do that. But I’d like to talk to you in private.’