A Particular Eye for Villainy: (Inspector Ben Ross 4) (31 page)
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Authors: Ann Granger
The door was opened to us by a small, plump woman who
barely stood as high as my shoulder; she had a great deal of fluffy fair hair pinned up on top of her head in a bun, so that she resembled a cottage loaf.
‘Hullo,’ she said, by way of greeting, looking the three of us up and down. ‘What’s all this, then?’
‘Mrs Slater?’ I asked. ‘I am—’
I got no further before I was interrupted. ‘Oh, I know who you are, I do!’ said Mrs Slater merrily. ‘You’re that Miss Martin as my husband is always talking of!’
‘Yes, well, I am Mrs Ross now.’
‘He told me that, and all. Married to a policeman, he said. He reckoned that would suit you. Come on in, then.’
We trooped into her spotless parlour where I introduced Bessie and finally, Joey. I then explained our purpose. ‘I did speak to your husband about Joey, perhaps he mentioned him? I do hope so.’
‘He told me all about it, never you fear. But tea first, business after,’ said Mrs Slater firmly. ‘You sit there, Mrs Ross, that’s the best chair. You, Miss Bessie, you sit over there on that one. It rocks a bit but it won’t tip you on the floor. I keep on to Wally to fix the legs. And you, young feller-me-lad, you come into the kitchen with me. You can carry things.’
Bessie, delighted at being treated as a proper visitor, was beaming as she took her seat on the wobbly chair. I sat in a vast wing chair that was obviously normally reserved for Wally. A table and cupboard were the only other articles of furniture in the room, and a well-worn scrap of carpet on the stone flags, but everything was spotlessly clean. Mrs Slater, I was sure she was responsible, had compensated for lack of furnishing by adorning the walls with all manner of pictures.
Most, I suspected, had been bought from a street barrow for a few pence. There was one, in pride of place, of Her Majesty Queen Victoria in her coronation robes. Another, beside it, featured the Prince Consort, looking very much the dandy in his younger years. Sadly, this picture was crowned with a black ribbon bow, in recognition of his death a few years earlier. There were images of the royal children, two or three paintings of flowers, a representation of the Parting of the Red Sea, and several images of prizefighters. The largest of these was displayed above the hearth and showed a fearsome figure, bare chested and in breeches, whose feet appeared remarkably small for the rest of him to balance on. He crouched, holding out his clenched fists and fixing us with a menacing scowl.
‘That’s my Wally,’ said Mrs Slater with cheerful pride, returning from the kitchen to find me studying this one. ‘In his prime, as you might say. That’s when I first knew him. But I told him straight away, once I saw he was sweet on me, I’m not being married to no prizefighter. They’ve always got a black eye, or a thick ear and coming home covered in blood. So make your choice, I told him, and he did.’ This last was said with deep satisfaction. ‘His family was in the licensed hackney carriage trade,’ she went on. ‘Father and grandfather before him, so Wally turned to that.
‘Now then,’ continued Mrs Slater, turning to a miserable-looking Joey who stood behind her, shuffling in his new boots, and carrying the tray of tea things. ‘You can put that on the table, over there.’
Joey obeyed, but not without remarking loudly, ‘I come here to look after a horse. I never come to be no footman!’
‘No backchat!’ ordered Mrs Slater sternly. ‘Now then, Mrs
Ross, I’ve had a look at this young feller and a bit of talk to him in my kitchen. We will give him a try, a shilling a week to begin with. He can sleep in the stable loft and I’ll feed him, is that all right?’
‘That would be excellent,’ I spoke up for Joey. ‘Thank Mrs Slater, Joey.’
‘Much obliged, I’m sure,’ mumbled Joey.
‘No taking of strong drink, no using of foul language, no blaspheming and no hanging out in bad company,’ ordered Mrs Slater. ‘No going in the pubs. No gambling. You keep the horse groomed, the cab fit for a gentleman or lady to ride in, and you keep yourself clean. You can wash out in the yard under the pump.’
Joey rolled his eyes at me in despair.
‘Certainly,’ I agreed. ‘You understand all that, Joey?’
‘Yus, I understand all right,’ said Joey.
‘Mutton stew for dinner tonight,’ said Mrs Slater in a careless sort of way, with the suspicion of a twinkle in her eye. ‘That all right, too?’
‘Oh, yus! That’s all right!’ exclaimed Joey, brightening.
‘It will work out splendidly,’ I would tell Ben much later.
‘If he doesn’t run off,’ warned Ben.
‘He won’t run away from a hot dinner every night and shelter in bad weather,’ I said firmly. ‘Besides, if he did, I fancy the Slaters would have every cabbie in London looking out for him.’
But I had to wait a little before I could recount my success, because Ben had other, more important, matters on his hands.
Inspector Benjamin Ross
I HAD found Sergeant Morris drinking a mug of tea in a shadowy nook between a cupboard and a wall. This hideaway was sacred to Morris and known throughout the Yard, at least among the constables, as ‘the sergeant’s earth’. The query, ‘Where is Morris?’ might, if you were lucky, be answered, ‘He’s gone to earth, sir.’ Then, if you knew the code, you knew exactly where to find him.
Morris made to put down the mug and stand up as I approached. I waved him to take his seat again and sat down beside him. If anyone deserved a mug of tea on the quiet, it was Morris. Besides, he wasn’t going to get much chance of a few minutes’ relaxation for the next two days.
‘Well, Sergeant,’ I said to him. ‘We have forty-eight hours to save my reputation or ruin it.’
‘How’s that, then, sir?’ he asked, eyeing me over the rim of his mug.
I explained. Morris drained his tea and sat with the mug nestled in the palms of his hands, staring thoughtfully ahead of him. ‘It’ll take a bit of doing, Mr Ross.’
‘Then we’ll have to get started. What I want you to do is find out which case Jonathan Tapley was appearing in on the day of the murder. Find out what time court rose, and if his actions can be accounted for thereafter.’
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said Morris, ‘but he’d be a bit of an idiot to say he was in court, if he wasn’t appearing that day.’
‘I don’t suggest he didn’t appear at any time that day in court. I am particularly anxious to know the
latest
time he was seen there. If I am right – that is to say if Mrs Jameson is right – and Tapley was walking up and down outside her house shortly after three in the afternoon . . . We must allow the lady’s estimate of “shortly after” to be any time up to half past. But if he was there, then it follows he wasn’t in court. To turn the argument around, if he wasn’t in court, he could have been walking outside the house.’
‘Very well, sir. Where will I find you? Should I need to, that is.’
‘I am going to seek out Dr Harper. Then I’ll meet you back here.’
We went about our separate ways.
By one of those quirks of detection – which generally take you in directions you don’t anticipate – I found myself going back to Wapping. Enquiry at the hospital where he was normally to be found told me Dr Harper had been called to the River Police morgue there, on account of a drowning.
Accordingly, I found myself in the somewhat ramshackle structure that dignified itself by the name of morgue and was used for the reception of bodies pulled from the Thames. Its latest arrival, a young woman, lay on the table awaiting the
attention of Harper, who was standing by, scalpel in hand, with an assistant at his elbow.
‘Ah, Dr Harper!’ I hailed him. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but glad to see you haven’t started yet.’ That was true. ‘Could I have a word?’
‘If it doesn’t take long,’ replied Harper. He indicated the woman on the table. ‘This will turn out a suicide, of course. Well nourished. Clothes good quality and nothing darned or mended.’ He indicated the pile of sodden clothing on a nearby bench. ‘Hands . . .’ He lifted one of the drowned girl’s hands and turned it palm upward for my inspection. ‘Never done a day’s work in her life.’ He stared thoughtfully at the subject. ‘It will be the old, old story, I dare say, seduced and abandoned. She is with child, of course.’ He replaced the girl’s hand on the table surprisingly gently.
We moved away from the table and the assistant tactfully went out of the room.
‘Dr Harper,’ I began. ‘You will recall the night I fetched you away from your dinner to a murder in a house not far from Waterloo Station, in the same street in which I live myself, as it happens.’
‘I do,’ said Harper, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘You’ll not be wanting me to carry out a second post-mortem examination? I have a very busy day ahead of me. I have to go straight from this one to another case elsewhere, in which the victim supposedly shot himself. But it wouldn’t be the first time a dead man has shot himself, eh?’
‘No, Doctor. The body I called you to that night . . .’
‘Oh that,’ said Harper. ‘Cause of death was clear.’
‘We buried the victim yesterday, or rather his family did. I
don’t anticipate applying for an exhumation order. We are agreed on cause of death.’
‘Good,’ said Harper. ‘Once they’ve been in the ground a while, it all gets more difficult.’ He frowned. ‘Something else bothers you?’
‘Yes. I wonder if you would cast your mind back to that evening. Do you remember anything about the room in which the body was found?’ I waited apprehensively for his reply.
‘Small sitting room of some sort, or gentleman’s study, perhaps?’ Harper offered. Seeing this vague memory was not enough, he asked, ‘What is it you have in mind?’
‘Nothing else about the room, Doctor? Anything . . .’ I urged. I must not lead him, but if his recollection was no more than that, I was done for.
Harper was scowling in effort. ‘Well, it was simply furnished . . . couple of chairs, a bookcase . . . no fire in the grate.’ He caught the expression on my face. ‘Oh, so that’s what you’re getting at? The room was very cold. I did notice that.’
‘It was very cold. Apparently he could have had a fire lit, had he wanted it. But since midwinter he’d done without. He said it didn’t trouble him. I have this from the landlady and the maidservant. Dr Harper, I have read, or been told, that if a newly slain body is kept very cold, the onset of rigor may be delayed?’
‘So it is time of death that troubles you, not cause?’ Harper indicated the door. ‘Let us go outside, Ross. I fancy a pipe of tobacco.’
We went outside the building and stood in the sharp breeze blowing across the water. Gulls wheeled above and uttered
their discordant cries. Out on the river, a vessel sounded a warning whistle blast. Harper took his time filling and tamping down his pipe. Then he had to get the thing going and only then, when it was drawing satisfactorily, did he take it from his mouth and, holding it by the bowl, point the stem at me.
‘If a body is cooled rapidly, or kept at a very low temperature, it is true rigor may take longer to set it. But, mind you, once the surrounding temperature returns to normal, rigor not only proceeds but may even speed up. These things are notoriously hard to judge, Ross. Sometimes I’ve found it easier to state cause of death than estimate time it occurred.’
‘By the time you got the body to the hospital, what state was it in then?’
‘Stiffening nicely,’ he said. ‘But you want me to reconsider my estimate of time of death, I assume?’
‘I do, Doctor. Please don’t take offence, but on the night in question it was very late in the day, I’d called you from your dinner table . . .’
‘And I might, therefore, have been in a hurry to get back to it, eh? Made a quick judgement as to time of death when I should have looked around me and thought a bit more?’
‘Believe me, Doctor . . .’
He waved the pipe stem at me again. ‘And so I might have done. However, does that mean that now, in retrospect, I am ready to change my opinion?’
‘Are you?’ I was on tenterhooks.
Annoyingly – and I am sure on purpose – he puffed a few clouds of tobacco at me. ‘It’s important to you, eh?’
‘Doctor, it is very important.’
‘Well, then, Inspector, let me put it this way. I repeat that it is not always easy, and seldom possible, to be exact about time of death – especially if, as in this case, you have no other evidence than the body itself. I believe I gave the time of death as no earlier than five o’clock that afternoon?’
‘You did, sir.’
‘I could, you know, if I wanted to be awkward, stick to my guns and what I said then.’ Another wave of the pipe stem.
‘You could, Doctor, and I couldn’t blame you.’
‘Oh, couldn’t you? Personally, I hope I shall always be open to revising my judgement if necessary, and not become one of those touchy fellows who cling to a point, even when they’ve been proved too quick in reaching it! Now then, I don’t say that I was wrong . . . but I may not have been right. Do you understand me?’
‘I think so, Dr Harper.’
‘Mm . . . Given that the room was so very chilly and the deceased appeared to have been sitting in it reading for some time even before he was struck down, it is just possible that rigor was slightly delayed. If so, then it is also just possible that he died before five.’
‘How much earlier than five?’ I asked eagerly.
‘Now that’s a tricky one to answer,’ he said aggravatingly. ‘Four o’clock?’
‘How about three o’clock?’ I asked.
He frowned and my heart sank. ‘Three would be very early.’ He shook his head. ‘I would hesitate to put my money on three o’clock. Not even to oblige you, Ross. Half past three might be a possibility.’
Mrs Jameson had seen Tapley walking up and down the
street shortly after three. He was looking up at the house fronts. He might have glimpsed his cousin at the window upstairs and made a note of the room. He might then have gone away and returned twenty minutes later. That might give us a time of half past three.
I was reasoning frantically. Why did he go away? Because just as Mrs Jameson noticed him, he, too, was aware that someone was looking out of a downstairs window? So he leaves, and returns at half past three, enters the house from the kitchen, unseen, goes upstairs and strikes down his cousin, then he leaves as he’s come . . . Oh, yes, oh yes! He could still have got back to his chambers in the Gray’s Inn Road by half past four. Only just, perhaps, but he could have done it. Then, clever fellow that he is, he sends out the office boy for half a roast chicken, making some remark about having just time to eat it before the people attending the case conference arrive. Thus the boy remembers with certainty what time he was sent out on the errand. If Morris can establish Jonathan Tapley wasn’t in court all afternoon, then I do believe we have him! Or at the very least, we have enough to bring him in and question him. And to think that, had Lizzie not served up a three-day-old meat pie with a remark about how well it had kept in a cold larder . . .
‘Dr Harper,’ I said, ‘I am exceedingly obliged to you. You may have to go into the witness box over this. Will you stand by it?’
‘I will say in the witness box what I have just said to you,’ said Harper. ‘Whether that proves good enough for judge and jury isn’t up to me.’
No, I thought ruefully, it is up to me.
Morris arrived back at the Yard nearly an hour after I returned there. I was on tenterhooks by then.
‘Well?’ I asked him eagerly.
Morris permitted himself a smile and my heart began to rise. ‘Seems, sir, that proceedings were interrupted in the case in which Mr Tapley was appearing. Court had just reconvened after lunch when one of the main witnesses was suddenly taken ill, in mid-testimony. There was no likelihood the witness would be able to continue that day, so the case was adjourned. Court rose at a little after half past two. Tapley was conferring with fellow counsel for a further ten minutes or quarter of an hour. After that, the gentlemen of the bar concerned all dispersed for the day. As far as I could find out, no one else there saw or spoke to him. The other cases being heard were proceeding, and those involved were in attendance on those. I asked ushers and doorkeepers and such, and while none of them can swear to the exact time he left, they are sure it wasn’t late.’
‘Let’s say he left at about ten minutes to three,’ I conjectured. ‘He could have jumped in a cab . . . there’s always plenty waiting around there. Yes, he went directly by cab south of the river. He had the cabbie set him down a couple of streets away from his destination. By twenty minutes past three he was outside Mrs Jameson’s house. She is not exact as to time, but says it was “some time after three”. I take that to mean before half past. If he then went away and came back when he was satisfied she was no longer at her window, he could still have returned by a quarter to four. He slips into the house, up the back stairs, comes upon his cousin, strikes him down, and leaves. He probably goes to the railway station
and picks up another cab there. At half past four he is entering his chambers in the Gray’s Inn Road.’
‘It’s a tight timetable, sir,’ warned Morris.
‘But not an impossible one. Let me speak with the superintendent.’
‘Yessir,’ said Morris, looking relieved. ‘Best have Mr Dunn on our side, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Very well,’ said Dunn, when he’d heard me out. ‘I must consult the deputy commissioner about this, given who Tapley is. But I suggest you proceed immediately, without waiting for me to return, and let me deal with objections from on high. I will take responsibility. Go on, man. Strike while the iron is hot!’
I hastened back to Morris. ‘All goes well, Sergeant. I think we may invite Mr Jonathan Tapley to call upon us here at the Yard!’