A Particular Eye for Villainy: (Inspector Ben Ross 4) (32 page)
Read A Particular Eye for Villainy: (Inspector Ben Ross 4) Online
Authors: Ann Granger
‘WELL, INSPECTOR, I am here at your request . . .’ Jonathan Tapley seated himself in my office and placed his folded hands over the skull pommel of his cane. ‘I take it you have something of interest to tell me? Since you have the culprits safely under arrest, I cannot imagine what it is that necessitated my coming here with such urgency.’
Morris had stationed himself discreetly behind our visitor and, even more discreetly, young Biddle had slipped into the room and sat in a corner with notebook and pencil in hand. I was sure that Jonathan Tapley had not yet noticed him. He’d have remarked on it, if he had done.
‘I do indeed have something of interest to tell you, sir,’ I began politely. ‘New information has reached us.’
‘How? From the French police?’
‘No, Mr Tapley, fresh evidence from a witness.’
He stiffened slightly. ‘A witness? To what?’
‘This witness has come forward, admittedly a little late, to tell us you were seen on the afternoon of the murder, at some time shortly after three, walking up and down outside the house where the murder took place. You were seen to glance up at the front of the house, as if seeking something.’
Coldly, Tapley said: ‘My movements on the day, and particularly for the period during which my cousin’s death could have occurred, have been accounted for. I have given you a list of witnesses.’
‘You have give us a list of witnesses from four thirty onward.’
He looked annoyed. ‘Well, then! That is sufficient. The medical man gave his opinion my cousin died after five of the afternoon.’ He tapped the cane on the floor. ‘What is all this about?’
‘The medical man has reconsidered the time of death. He is now of the opinion it could have occurred as early as four or even before that, possibly half past three.’ I waited to see how he’d take that.
Any other man with a heavy conscience might have betrayed shock or panic. But Tapley was used to courtroom tactics, including a witness making an unexpected and unwelcome statement.
‘Indeed?’ he said drily. ‘And what has caused this medical fellow to revise his opinion, originally made at the time with my cousin’s body on the floor in front of him?’
‘I don’t recall telling you the body was on the floor,’ I said. ‘I told you, I think I am correct, that the assassin came upon your cousin as he sat reading in a chair.’
‘Pah!’ Tapley dismissed this as a quibble. ‘Chair . . . floor . . . If he was sitting in a chair when he was struck, then he presumably fell on to the floor? Do you agree?’
‘Oh, yes, he did that,’ I had to admit.
‘It seems obvious to me. I repeat, what has caused the doctor to change his mind? It seems extraordinary that he can
reduce the time of death from five in the afternoon to, what, a full hour and a half earlier?’
‘The doctor has been reconsidering,’ I said carefully, ‘because he is now taking into account the very low temperature of the room. That can slow the onset of rigor. It was the absence of rigor in the body that had prompted him to make his first assessment of five o’clock.’
By now he knew what this was leading up to, and he was ready for me.
‘I do not practise in the criminal law courts,’ Tapley said with a touch of disdain. ‘But I have heard cases discussed between those who do. I understand, from such conversations, that a corpse left in a cold place may remain remarkably flexible, as you say. Equally, however, the body might not. There is no hard and fast rule about it. If your doctor were to be questioned in the witness box, he would admit that. He is unwise to revise his estimated time of death on that alone.’
A rustle in the corner as Biddle turned a page of his notebook caused our visitor to look over his shoulder.
‘Why is that young fellow writing all this down?’ he asked sharply.
‘It is the procedure, Mr Tapley.’
Tapley permitted himself a faint smile. He leaned back in the chair. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘I might be tempted to imagine you mean to charge me with the murder of my cousin, Inspector.’
‘You might be right, sir.’
‘You would be foolish. Even if my cousin died earlier than five, something that is not established fact despite the vacillations of your doctor, I was—’
‘You were not seen in court after about ten to three,’ I interrupted. ‘A witness in the case with which you were concerned that day was taken ill. Court rose at half past two. You chatted with fellow counsel for a few minutes and then you left.’
‘You have been thorough, Inspector,’ Tapley said after a pause. ‘You have a witness who saw me leave the building?’
This I did not have. He had unerringly picked a weak spot. This was not going to be easy. ‘No, sir, but no one in the building saw you or spoke to you after that time, a little before three.’
‘No witness, in other words. Tut, tut, Inspector. Another supposition on your part. Another statement you cannot back up. I dare say that you’re about to claim, in another flight of fancy, that I leaped into a cab and was carried immediately to where my cousin lived?’
‘Yes, sir, I think that is what happened. I suspect you asked the cabbie to take you to Waterloo railway station, because that would have allowed you to ask him to make all possible speed. You had a train to catch, you told him. If you’d asked him to set you down in the street where your cousin lived, he might have remembered you and the address – should we find the cabbie. We are looking for him, by the way. But you would have calculated that no cabbie troubles to remember a particular fare among many delivered to a railway station. The destination is too commonplace.
‘You could not have planned it, because you could not have known court would rise early. But you were intending at some point soon to face your cousin. You had earlier learned that your cousin was back in London. I think you had also
learned that your niece, Miss Flora, had been in contact with her father. I fancy your coachman told you of the escapade when he drove the young lady, in disguise as a young boy, accompanied by a friend, to the vicinity of the house. The coachman had told your wife. She was anxious you did not learn of the adventure and asked the coachman not to tell you. But you are his employer. It is upon your recommendation he depends. I think he did tell you. You quizzed your wife. She admitted it.
‘Unlike your wife, you did not imagine Flora had made a romantic tryst with some unsuitable young man. You immediately and rightly guessed it was her father she’d gone to see. You were furious and alarmed. Thomas had broken his word to you about returning to England. You already knew that because Fred Thorpe had told you. You had been hoping your cousin had returned to France. Now you had discovered he was living in London and, even worse from your point of view, he had contacted his daughter. This had led to a potentially scandalous escapade involving Miss Flora dressed as a boy. You and your wife had set your highest hopes on Flora marrying her highly connected young suitor. Now the possibility of dangerous gossip loomed. I don’t think the noble family into which you plan Flora to marry would take kindly to news of her travelling round London in male attire. As for Thomas appearing, like Banquo’s ghost, at the marriage festivities . . . You had to take some action.
‘As soon as you learned what Flora had done, you had your coachman take you to the same spot where he had set down Flora. It did not take long, asking around, to locate your cousin and where he lived. You did nothing there and then;
because the less Joliffe saw or heard, the better. You had him drive you home again to Bryanston Square. While you were still debating what to do, a few days later, court rose unexpectedly early in the afternoon. You seized the opportunity to go to the house, face your cousin and have it out with him. You meant, perhaps, only to insist he write out a formal consent to the marriage, then return to France immediately, after which there must be absolutely no more contact between him and Miss Flora. You would not allow, could not allow, Thomas to ruin everything.’
I concluded my exposition of the situation leading up to the murder as I saw it, and fell silent.
‘Even if I did all that, Inspector, and I am not admitting any such thing, it is a far cry from “having it out with him” to killing him in cold blood,’ Tapley pointed out. He had been listening carefully to my case as I laid it out, just as he would have listened to an opponent in a courtroom.
I was not finished yet. But I had to go slowly and carefully, because I was now dealing not with what Jonathan Tapley must have felt, but with what he did.
‘You entered the house secretly. You did not announce yourself at the front door because you did not want to be seen and remembered. There must be no link with Bryanston Square! You slipped in through the kitchen in the absence of the single maidservant, went up the back stairs, located the room, opened the door quietly . . . Your cousin sat there reading peaceably. The sight fuelled your anger. There he sat, the man who had broken his word and caused so much trouble, apparently without a care in the world. Your rage overcame you. You raised your cane – that cane . . .’ I pointed
at it. ‘You struck the back of his head and he toppled from his chair to the floor. You struck him again when he lay on the carpet, to make sure he was dead. Having struck him once, you could not risk that he might be conscious enough to identify his assailant, or survive to tell of the attack.’
Tapley rested the cane against his knee and placed his fingertips together. ‘You are ingenious, Inspector, I’ll grant you that! You make me curious. How did I know – again I ask without admitting anything – which room my cousin was in?’
‘You had a bit of luck. You were looking up at the front of the house – the witness saw you do that – and glimpsed him through an upstairs window.’
‘Did I indeed? I must ask you again, Inspector, to identify your witness. Otherwise, how do I know such a witness really exists?’
‘The owner of the house saw you, through her parlour window.’
‘The owner of the house?’ He looked stupefied. ‘Do you mean that elderly Quaker lady who attended the funeral?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘She did not know me. When she saw a stranger in the street how on earth could she tell it was I?’ Anger broke into his voice.
‘She recognised and identified you, having had a good opportunity to observe you closely, during the short train journey from the church to the Necropolis on the day of the funeral.’
‘That was quite some time later than the day my cousin died,’ he objected. ‘She could not be sure I was someone she had, she claims, seen briefly, for the first time in her life, at a
distance, through a window, and many days earlier! Good heavens, Inspector, you have been an investigating officer long enough to know that even several witnesses of one event can give wildly differing accounts. Asked to describe someone, one witness will say he was tall, another that he was short. One swears he saw a walking stick –’ Tapley indicated his cane – ‘but to another this same object appeared to be an umbrella! They cannot all be right, obviously. So, how can you, Inspector, who have a single witness, be so sure she is not mistaken? The lady is of advanced years, I recollect. She is a religious female and no doubt spends much time reading her Bible. I doubt her eyesight is first rate. She probably wears spectacles to read.’
‘No, sir, she does not. I asked her.’ I smiled at him.
Of course he was right: Mrs Jameson’s confident assertion, that she had seen Jonathan Tapley before the house, would easily be demolished by a competent defence barrister. But I knew both she and I were right too. Jonathan had been there; and now he knew he’d been seen. Frustration struck me as a physical ache in my stomach. I had to have something more. But what?
Tapley gripped his cane again and rose magisterially to his feet. ‘Inspector Ross, I have sat here with remarkable patience and listened to this farrago. Your two main witnesses, the doctor and the house owner, wouldn’t last five minutes under cross-examination. Nor would a cabbie’s testimony, even if you found a cabman who said he took me on the day, at the time, to the destination, hold up in court. As you yourself said, I would have been one fare among many. Let us say – again this is purely hypothetical – that I remember I left court
early. Let us say I admit I went to the street and walked up and down before the house, debating whether to go in and face my cousin. But suppose I also say I changed my mind as I walked there, and left without doing so. What then, Ross? You cannot put me in that house, in that room, with my cousin. If you have nothing more to say, then I shall leave, unless you care to arrest me? Or you can lose your senses altogether and charge me. Otherwise, I shall go.’
He stood there before me, that same dapper figure who had entered my office not so very long ago, and told me he thought he could identify the victim. I remembered him standing in the morgue looking down at his cousin’s body and showing not a scrap of emotion. Here was that same man, in that elegant coat and holding that same distinctive cane, looking down at me with something very like triumph. And he was a murderer! I could not let him win. I would not let him win. We were like a pair of duellists, facing one another in a misty dawn, pistols drawn and having one shot each. But he had fired his pistol shot. Now it was my turn. Now it was a test of whether his nerve would hold out the better . . . or my resolve.
‘Your appearance is impressive, Mr Tapley,’ I said. ‘Because it is part of your stock in trade to look the part, is it not? It impressed me when we first met. It is even possible a cabman might recall such a distinguished gentleman. Your distinctive appearance is why Mrs Jameson took a good look at you from her window; and was so sure when she saw you again on the train, that it was you she’d seen in the street. She particularly mentioned to me your well-tailored frock coat and . . .’
I saw it then. It lasted but a split second but I saw the alarm in his eyes. I caught the involuntary twitch of his shoulder as if he would have moved his arm but stilled it. The coat! I thought.
That well-tailored coat, it is something to do with his coat
. . .
Now I dared not let him walk out of here. If he had forgotten something that might incriminate him, he would immediately put it right the moment he left the Yard. It could not be a bloodstain, because anything like that he’d have looked for and cleaned off at once. So, what else could a coat have?
It has pockets
, I thought. Can it be . . .?
He had already told me he thought me a fool in my attempt to build a case against him. I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.
‘Mr Tapley,’ I said, ‘would you be so kind as to turn out your coat pockets and put the contents on my desk?’
‘What?’ he shouted, suddenly losing his temper. ‘Am I to be treated like a delinquent schoolboy? Like a common pickpocket?’
‘If you would oblige me?’ I persisted in a polite tone. His loss of composure confirmed to me I was on the right track.
‘Damned if I will! You shall hear more of this, Ross! I shall complain to your superiors! I am a professional man of some standing in the community. I practise the law myself and have represented many eminent men and their cases before the courts. When they hear of this, this nonsense of accusing me, they will laugh the Yard to scorn and your superiors will not thank you for it!’