Kept (49 page)

And yet, flattered as he was by these encomia, Captain McTurk was uneasy. It is one thing to have amassed a quantity of evidence, forensic and circumstantial, which may be of use to a prosecuting counsel. It is quite another to secure a conviction. Captain McTurk had not the slightest doubt that certain crimes, and certain of them very heinous crimes, had been committed. A quantity of fraudulent cheques had been passed through the banking system. An audacious robbery had taken place on the Dover mail train. A gentleman had apparently been bludgeoned to death in Suffolk. That gentleman’s wife had been held, apparently against her will, by another gentleman who proposed to marry her and thereby secure the inheritance with which her late husband had entrusted him. That each of these misdeeds was, to a certain degree, connected with the others Captain McTurk was sure. And yet, given that two of the persons he desired most urgently to interview were dead, the second in a manner so dreadful that Captain McTurk shuddered to remember it, and the third unaccountably vanished from sight, the proof might be difficult to obtain. And so, as he sat in his office above the stable yard, with Mr. Masterson returning almost daily with the results of some freshly executed commission, Captain McTurk searched for some key that would unlock these mysteries.

For a while he thought he had found it in Mr. Crabbe, and yet Mr. Crabbe, it soon became clear, was quite equal to his stratagems. What was it, the old lawyer enquired, that he had done wrong? Certainly, he had presided over the establishment of a trust for the benefit of Mrs. Isabel Ireland, but if there was a flaw in its conception or its administration he would be glad to hear of it. As to the medical basis on which the conditions of that trust had been enforced, he had taken his advice from that very eminent medical man Dr. Conolly, now deceased, whom all the world knew. In fact Mr. Crabbe practically defied Captain
McTurk to arraign him, an action that Captain McTurk, who had examined certain medical records which application to Dr. Conolly’s executors had produced for him, feared to take.

All this, however, would scarcely do for the public and those guardians of the public conscience that take an interest in such matters. The public desired a trial—two trials—any amount of trials, so long as justice could be seen to be done and transgression properly rebuked. And so, after great deliberation, and nearly four months after these affairs had first come to the public’s attention, it was declared that the Crown intended to prosecute Robert Grace, William Latch and Joseph Pearce for their part in the theft of bullion from the Dover mail train, and to arraign Augustus Crabbe, Esq., on a charge of conspiring to defraud Mrs. Henry Ireland of money and property that was rightfully hers. Naturally, each of these proceedings caused a great sensation. The circumstances of the robbery were once more described in every newspaper in the land. Mr. Crabbe’s illustrious career and his yet more illustrious connections were similarly made much of. And yet it was generally felt that the trials were rather a frost. Messrs. Grace, Latch and Pearce were swiftly examined, found guilty, rebuked, imprisoned, sentenced to transportation and so forth, all the condign punishments that the law allows—an old lady, supposed to be Mrs. Grace, fell into a fit in the courtroom at this juncture and was taken away—but it was clear that nobody cared in the least about these satellites of the vanished Mr. Pardew, and that the public was exercised only by the fate of their commanding spirit.

On the morning before Mr. Crabbe’s appearance in court, Captain McTurk had a conversation with Mr. Hammerdown, the prosecuting counsel, in which certain of his anxieties were made plain.

“It is an uncommonly difficult case,” he explained. “Indeed, I scarcely know where one part of it ceases and another begins. There is Mr. Dixey dead, having tried, as one supposes, to marry his ward for her money. Mrs. Ireland, of course, can say nothing about it. There is this Mr. Pardew vanished with two hundredweight of bullion off the Dover train having, so far as we may deduce, had the husband of Dixey’s ward murdered for him. Dixey, one gathers, owed Pardew
ever so many hundreds of pounds. Mr. Crabbe is Dixey’s lawyer and Mrs. Ireland’s trustee. Pardew passed his fraudulent cheques through Crabbe’s office. You would think, would you not, that they were all confederate together, and yet, do you know, I doubt it.”

“Indeed, you know,” observed Mr. Hammerdown, who despite his terrible reputation was a mild-mannered man very much bullied by Mrs. Hammerdown, “I don’t think old Crabbe, whom I have known these thirty years, ever meant to murder anyone nor rob a train of its bullion.”

“I rather agree. It is a tremendous intrigue, but my belief is that Pardew is at the bottom of it. There is some hold that he had, you mark my words, some pit that he had dug for him that he could not climb out of. You had better see what you can get Crabbe to say about it in the box.”

Mr. Hammerdown said he would see what he could do. Sadly, all this delicate scheming came to nothing, for on the morning of the old lawyer’s first day on the stand it was declared that he had suffered a seizure in the night, was being attended upon by Sir Clarence Coucher of Harley Street and could take no further part in the trial.

Mr. Crabbe survived his attack, but he retired altogether from legal practice. The chambers at Lincoln’s Inn have been taken over by a brace of rising barristers and the old clerk finally evicted from his kitchen in the basement. The West End hostesses on whom Mr. Crabbe used so sedulously to call no longer see him now, for he sits in his Belgravia mansion, meekly attended by his daughters, and thinks who knows what thoughts of his former life.

Mr. Guyle continues about his business as before.

Mrs. Ireland did not appear at the trial. Her absence was regretted by both the public and the legal profession. “Only put her on the stand,” Mr. Hammerdown was thought to have pronounced, “and we shall carry all before us.” However, polite enquiry revealed that Mrs. Ireland could not be put on the stand, could take no part in anything, that her health, in fact, was in an altogether precarious state, and that it would be better for her to remain in the establishment to which she had been conveyed after her rescue. Of these lodgings I know
very little, other than that they are very genteel, well conducted and altogether discreet, and that Mr. Farrier, visiting her there, emerged looking very grave and would say nothing of what took place.

It was thought that given the urgency with which he had returned to England, Mr. Farrier might remain some time in his native land, but the wanderlust to which he is peculiarly susceptible was soon upon him once more and within three months he was gone. There is a poste restante address in Paris for those who wish to communicate with him, and Mr. Devereux may be contacted on any legal matter.

In due course there was a parliamentary by-election in the borough of Southwark, and Mr. John Carstairs did indeed come forward as the Conservative candidate. He fought a vigorous campaign and in losing by a scant fifty votes was thought to have acquitted himself admirably. It was believed, however, that the expenses were very high, so high in fact as to preclude any subsequent reattempt, and that additionally Miss du Buong, Mr. Carstairs’s fiancée—she is of the brewing family in Aldershot—advised him to have no more to do with those dreadful political persons.

Mrs. Carstairs declares herself very satisfied by her son’s present mode of life and always defers to him in any family matter.

The Dean of Ely, Mr. Marjoribanks, fetches his own slippers now, pours his own tea and is very morose of an evening when there are none of his fellow clergymen come to call.

Of Esther I know nothing at all. How should I? She comes from a place of which the fashionable world knows little and cares less, and has doubtless returned there. Certainly, the villa at Shepherd’s Bush has had an agent’s board at its window these three months past, and as is generally the custom the neighbours know nothing about it. If, as certain newspapers averred, Captain McTurk had her placed on an emigrant boat to Van Diemen’s Land in the wake of her departed consort, then he has said nothing about it. I myself believe that she is now fortunate enough to occupy a most suitable situation in life, agreeable to herself and those around her.

Rumours of Mr. Pardew could be heard in every part of the globe to which miscreant Englishmen abscond. He had been seen at Pau and glimpsed walking the promenade at Boulogne. A gentleman passing
through Leghorn swore that he had set up as an attorney in the town, dined with the mayor and could be viewed proceeding by carriage to the Roman Catholic church each Sunday forenoon. So persistent were the stories of his presence in Ottawa that Captain McTurk absolutely sent Mr. Masterson across the Atlantic to investigate. He found a person of that name, certainly, but one barely thirty years old, with a thriving law practice, six red-haired children and a pronounced North American accent. After this fiasco, and the routing out of sundry other false Pardews in those continental spas and watering holes where English people congregate, Captain McTurk’s eye turned nearer to home. A search was made of the premises at Carter Lane, which yielded up the most interesting documents—nothing, perhaps, that incriminated anyone other than Mr. Pardew but sufficient in themselves to submit half a dozen persons prominent in public life to agonies of embarrassment. Such was the stir caused by these revelations that a Duke’s lady, told by her husband that he had some grave matter to discuss with her, was thought to have remarked that “she supposed it was another of Pardew’s bills.”

All this was highly amusing, no doubt, but it did not bring the investigating authorities any closer to Mr. Pardew’s whereabouts or indeed to the man himself. A short while after his disappearance a lady living at a house in Kensington, very shocked by the public accounts of her husband’s wrongdoing, came forward—or was perhaps induced—to declare that she was Mrs. Pardew, whereupon the general sensibility was acutely inflamed. Let the woman be most severely questioned, the cry rose up, let her be charged as an accessory to her husband’s crimes and forced to make reparations, and then justice would be seen to be done! And yet Captain McTurk was compelled presently to concede that Mrs. Pardew, a comfortable middle-aged woman whose marriage lines showed her to have been married to Mr. Pardew for ten years, knew almost as little of her liege lord as the police officer himself. Indeed her ignorance of her husband’s career, acquaintance and habits—let alone his criminal propensities—was invincible. She was also very nearly penniless. Whereupon, as so often happens in these clement times, the general sensibility reversed its previous view and declared that she was a wronged woman. A newspaper got up a
subscription for her maintenance, the Queen herself was known to be interested in her fate, and Captain McTurk, not without all private misgivings, gave up on her as a bad job.

It is impossible, though, in the modern age—the age of railways and the penny post—for a man to be altogether mysterious, and gradually, over the period of a twelvemonth, there came forward one or two persons able to furnish certain details of Mr. Pardew’s former life. These were not very remarkable. It was subsequently proved beyond doubt that he was the son of a Manchester manufacturer who had lost his money, that he had spent much of his early life abroad—might even be supposed to have been educated there—and later been engaged on certain projects in the engineering line, blameless in themselves but no doubt furnishing the expertise wherewith to commit grand larceny. The trail in this regard having led, as it was bound to do, to the door of Mr. File, that gentleman was able to demonstrate to his complete satisfaction, if not to that of the magistrate who sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment, that he and Mr. Pardew had never met. An account was subsequently found in Mr. Pardew’s name at a joint-stock bank in Threadneedle Street, devoid of all but a few shillings. And at about this time there arrived at Captain McTurk’s office in Northumberland Street a small package, addressed personally to him and postmarked with a Nottingham frank, which, when opened, was found to contain a pair of keys. At which point Captain McTurk remarked to Mr. Masterson that Mr. Pardew was a cool one and no mistake. There are, perhaps, worse epitaphs.

MR. RICHARD FARRIER TO MR. JOHN CARSTAIRS

I could not of course have gone away from here without satisfying my curiosity with regard to her—over and above, that is, the dreadful day on which we took her from the house—and this I determined to do. The place is about twenty miles out of London and very discreet; indeed, as Devereux remarked, were it not for the palings and the person who sits at the little lodge
gate until such time as the door is closed for the night, one would think it a very pleasant spot for a gentleman’s residence. Devereux, who knows all about it, says that in point of diet, medical care, &c., it could not be bettered, and indeed I could find no fault in anything that I saw either inside or out. But I tell you, Carstairs, it does no good to a man to visit such places for they speak of a providence that is neither beneficent nor wise, that can tap you on the head with his hammer and leave you speechless on a whim. Boys robbing birds’ nests and trampling the squabs for their sport are not more cruel…

I had been told that I might find her in the garden, and so it proved, sitting in a little chair that someone had put out for her in the shade of a laurel hedge, very neatly designed, I should say, with a spigot for her drinking cup and a bell to ring should she need attention, and the bell always answered, which is not universally the case, I believe. I came upon her, I must own, in silence, wanting to gain some idea of her before I spoke. Indeed to see her thus sent an absolute pang through me, so unchanged did she seem from those days of which you have heard me speak, when we were, as I suppose, children together and yet conscious of a time when we should be children no more…. She had some object before her on her lap with which she played that I thought for all the world a mouse, until I saw that it was but a toy moved hither and thither by the motion of her hands, innocent enough, you may say, but somehow made horrible by the restless play of her fingers, her habit of clutching the thing to her cheek, &c.

Seeing me walk towards her over the grass—the day was very bright and the sun high over the hedge—she looked up and smiled, and again it was as if time had stopped since the occasion of our last meeting, but for a slight hollowness, perhaps, about her face, a certain brightness about her eyes that spoke more of artifice than nature, and I knew that she recognised me. “You are very comfortable, I see,” I said, having been instructed to confine myself to remarks of easy familiarity. “Oh, yes,” she replied—and I could see that there was some struggle
proceeding in her mind—“very comfortable indeed. But I shall take no more medicine, however much entreated.” “I have none,” I told her—there was a sheet of foolscap, I now saw, on the tray before her, black with scrawl—“so you may rest easy.”

There was a silence which I must confess embarrassed me, for having come with my head full of harmonious sentences, I could now think of nothing to say. “Is there any way in which I may serve you?” I asked finally, hearing the noise that her hands made as they pushed the mouse across her lap and down among the folds of her skirt. “I think not,” she said. “And yet you may send Esther to me.” At first the name meant nothing to me, and I shook my head. “It is a long time since she went away, and I would have her back.” Intrigued, in spite of myself, I looked down at the sheet of foolscap, but a child learning its letters would have been more intelligible. “You must not think,” she went on, gathering the toy in her hands as if it were something infinitely precious to her, “that I am afraid of a mouse. Indeed, I killed one once with a poker, as I shall do this if I have a mind.” And then she laughed, quite girlishly, with not the least suggestion that she sat in a garden where there is a porter at the gate and an iron railing six feet high for a fence.

“Isabel…,” I began once more, but it was as if a door had been locked and bolted between us that no key could open, and so we stared again at each other—she with her hands turning in her lap, I with my gaze fixed upon a pair of eyes that seemed to conceal awful, trackless depths behind them—until something—the sun perhaps, glinting off the roof of the distant house, a bird alighting on the hedge top, the neat step of the servant girl moving across the bright grass—drew her glance and she turned aside.