The Testimony of the Hanged Man (Lizzie Martin 5) (10 page)

‘Why, I wonder,’ I mused aloud, ‘did she dismiss all the servants?’

‘All but one!’ Wally held up a forefinger. ‘There was a maidservant, Rachel Sawyer, and Miss Sheldon kept her on. She needed someone to look after her, I suppose. Made her her housekeeper and companion. Miss Sawyer took on engaging all new staff, cook, maids, gardener, stableman, the lot.’

‘Amelia Sheldon meant to make it her own household,’ I mused, still aloud. ‘Perhaps she felt it easier that way. But it was a pity for a loyal staff, all to be dismissed without reason.’

I was married to a police detective and in my head I was thinking: Ben would say a reason existed. We just don’t yet know what it was. Leaning forward, and lowering his voice although there was no one around, Wally added, ‘They say, in the taproom, as Miss Sawyer is paid sixty pounds a year!’

That was too much for Bessie to bear in silence. ‘What? Pay a servant sixty pounds!’

‘Of course,’ warned Wally, ‘that might be a rumour, a bit of ’zaggeration. Then,’ went on Wally with something of the air of a magician producing the white rabbit from a hat, ‘to top it all, scarce a year later and hardly out of mourning, but Miss Sheldon ups and marries. She married a man called Lamont – and nobody likes him. They reckon him to be a regular fortune hunter. He’s not a local man but comes, some of them say, from one of those islands out in the English Channel that are nearly in France.’

‘The Channel Islands,’ I said. ‘Did anyone say which one? Jersey or Guernsey? Alderney or Sark?’

‘They didn’t say, ma’am.’ Wally shook his head. ‘But they do agree that he’s worse than his wife for being tight with money. It was her money, of course, when they wed. But it got to be his money afterwards because the old man hadn’t left it to his niece in any kind of a trust, but just outright.’

‘There is talk of the law being changed and a new act passed to protect married women and allow them control of their own property and fortune,’ I told him. ‘It cannot happen soon enough, in my opinion.’

‘Mrs Slater not having had any property when we got married, and me not having any now, other than the cab and Victor over there, it won’t make any difference to us,’ Wally said. ‘I mean to train up young Joey to be a cabman, like me, so that if I departs this mortal coil, Mrs Slater will inherit the cab and the horse, and she can engage Joey to drive it. That’s my plan.’

‘And a very good plan, Mr Slater. But unless there is a new act of parliament to protect women’s rights in this matter, then Mrs Slater will have to take care not to remarry. Not, of course, that she would!’ I added hastily.

‘I ain’t thinking of going yet,’ Wally retorted, a little testily. ‘But I’ll pass on your advice, as it was meant well.’

Bessie had no interest in Mrs Slater’s future, either as wife or widow. ‘Miss Sheldon, as she was when her uncle died, she would have got married to someone, sooner or later. I mean, she couldn’t go on living there all on her own, being young and nice-looking and rich. They’d be queuing up at the door, hat in hand, to propose to her. If she hadn’t accepted one of them, it’d have looked very odd.’

And up to that door at Fox House had walked Mr Lamont, with his moustaches and walking stick, and presented his case so well he’d become its master.

Bessie had, in fact, hit the nail on the head. The former Miss Sheldon’s situation, as a rich young woman with no family to protect her, must have left her very vulnerable and in a strange social position. There would soon have been gossip, if she had not married. Invitations to other houses to dine or to balls would have been few, or difficult to accept, since she could hardly arrive all on her own without even an elderly aunt as duenna. Even Jane Stephens, later to become Mrs Canning, had had her Aunt Alice. Although much good Aunt Alice’s chaperonage had done to protect the poor girl.

But we had done very well that day in our investigations. I could hardly wait to tell Ben all about our discoveries that evening.

Chapter Seven

Inspector Ben Ross

LIZZIE WAS back at home already when I returned that evening. Bessie opened the door, her face scarlet with the effort of suppressing all the news. Lizzie, too, had a look of triumph on her face. I didn’t know if that was for the good or meant trouble.

Over supper, I learned all they’d been doing. At last, Lizzie fell silent and waited expectantly for my comments. Bessie, who had come in ostensibly to clear the dishes, lingered by the table with a vegetable bowl in her hands, face now so red she was almost purple.

I began my response with care. Treading on hot coals might have been less fraught with danger. ‘Well, you – and Bessie and Wally Slater – have certainly been busy. I didn’t anticipate you’d meet Mrs Lamont herself.’

‘The murderess!’ exclaimed Bessie dramatically, unable to keep silence any longer. ‘And she looked so normal, too.’

‘Generally, Bessie,’ I told her, ‘murderers look just like anyone else. That’s what makes my job so difficult. The wretched Mills, whose information started this hare, looked just like any middle-aged man of business, tough in his dealings with competitors and suppliers, perhaps – but capable of dreadful physical violence?’ I shook my head. ‘No. Nor, Bessie, should you refer to Mrs Lamont as a murderess. If you let that slip in front of the wrong person and it gets about, we are all of us in a lot of trouble!’

‘Yes, sir, sorry, sir,’ said Bessie, downcast.

I turned to Lizzie. ‘Nor do we know, for sure, that she is responsible for the late Mr Sheldon’s death. But one thing I am sure of, Lizzie dear, and that is you must not return to Putney.’

As expected, this earned me gasps of dismay and indignation on my wife’s part. Bessie uttered a series of suppressed yelps. When I’d calmed them both down, I explained. ‘They will be suspicious of you there now, whether or not they have anything to hide. You were lingering in the burial ground and taking a keen interest in that headstone. You’d earlier spoken to the parish clerk who will almost certainly tell Mrs Lamont about you. There is little doubt she will attend that church. Lamont himself – if it was Lamont you spotted walking back to Fox House – will remember the cab driving past. It’s a lonely, mostly disused road, so why should any hackney carriage be driving along it? Going to or coming from which address? Inquiry on their part will reveal that the mystery cab had no business in the area. The word will get round. Someone who was in the taproom of that public house may remember a cabman who stopped by to refresh himself, leaving horse and cab in the yard. They will recall with what interest Wally listened to gossip about Fox House, and tell Lamont all this. Innocent or guilty, the Lamonts will be suspicious and with good reason. Possibly they’ll fear the house is to be burgled.’

‘What?’ burst out Lizzie, ‘by
us
?’

‘So it is very important,’ I went on, ignoring her indignation and the fact that Bessie looked about to combust, ‘that you do not go back there – at least not immediately.’

‘I may, I suppose,’ said Lizzie with a glint in her eyes, ‘go back to Somerset House and see if the porter’s wife has remembered the name of the doctor?’

‘Well, yes, since you have already asked him. But don’t ask him to do anything else. I mean, don’t ask him to quiz his wife any further.’

‘So,’ declared Lizzie, ‘what are
you
going to do?’ Battle lines were clearly drawn up here. Bessie, still with the vegetable dish in her hands, had moved round to stand at my wife’s shoulder. ‘I have discovered several facts that point to Mills’s story being true,’ continued Lizzie. ‘Are you going to ignore it all?’

I wanted to tell Lizzie that she looked remarkably attractive. A strand of hair had escaped and dangled very fetchingly by her pink cheek. Her eyes still sparkled . . .

I became aware of Bessie’s gimlet gaze.

‘No, I shall go back to Superintendent Dunn in the morning, tell him what you’ve learned and suggest I send Morris to Somerset House for the certificate of death,’ I told them both.

‘He may have more luck at that than I had!’ said Lizzie grimly.

‘He will know the name of the deceased and the date. He should have no trouble. My concern is what Dunn is going to say when he learns you’ve been investigating.’ Although, I thought, he won’t be surprised.

‘Why, sir, do you think Miss Sheldon, as she was, dismissed all the servants?’ asked Bessie. ‘Once she come into her inheritance, that is. She just kept on the one. If she was the woman we saw with her, sir, you can take it from me, she didn’t like seeing us there in that churchyard!’

‘Yes, Rachel Sawyer. That is a strange business.’

‘That must have involved so much disruption and taken so much time,’ mused Lizzie. ‘Interviewing new staff . . . getting them settled in . . . It does make it odd that she did it all at once, only keeping Rachel Sawyer to run the household.’

‘It’s certainly very curious,’ I agreed. ‘But since we don’t know her reason, well, we can’t speculate. Or at least,’ I added, ‘not aloud – not to anyone outside of this house.’

That gained me stony looks from both of them.

‘Oh, bother,’ said Lizzie at last, with a sigh of frustration. She put up a hand to tuck the loose strand of hair back into place. It immediately fell down loose again and was joined by another chestnut curl.

‘Bessie!’ I said firmly to our one and only maidservant. ‘Haven’t you got some washing-up to do?’

When I returned to work the following morning, I found a message on my desk from my opposite number at Wapping. The woman, whose body had been taken from the river and about whom I’d inquired, had now been named as Maria Tompkins. She was a known prostitute, aged forty. Water in the lungs and airways indicated she had entered the river alive. Bruising to the face had probably been caused on forceful contact with the river surface. The marks on the torso were about a week older. The man with whom she lived, who controlled her and took her wretched earnings, was a known bully-boy. Currently, however, he was in prison charged with procuring for prostitution a girl under the age of twelve (the age of consent). Coroner’s verdict, therefore, was suicide. In the absence of a close relative or legal husband to claim the body, it had been sent to a school of anatomy.

It was a sad but not unfamiliar story. Maria had no longer been in her first youth and her looks had gone. Her man had been seeking younger flesh to peddle on the streets of London. Once he found it, he’d turn her out. She had no future but further and rapid decline into complete destitution. She had apparently leaped from the bridge at Southwark, an area she was known to frequent. A witness had now come forward to say Maria had been seen there the night before discovery of her body. The witness, who was a fellow lady of the night, stated that Maria had complained of business being slow. She had spoken of being ‘very tired’.

There had been no such luck in finding any witness who’d seen Jane Canning or her daughter. Of them there was no news. Canning appeared in my office a little after nine, Vandyke beard bristling with aggression as usual.

‘What, still no news? I am not surprised because you appear to have a very odd way of looking for my wife, Inspector Ross. I believe you have been at my house yesterday, where my wife clearly is not. I am at a loss to understand what took you there. You cannot have achieved anything by troubling my household and taking the nursemaid out walking! For what purpose, may I ask, must you promenade with Ellen?’

‘To establish the route she normally took with your wife and child,’ I said as mildly as I could.

I often have to deal with awkward customers, even outwardly respectable persons such as Canning, but I’d never yet come across one I would so dearly have liked to punch on the nose. Alas, I could not do that. I also had the ignoble and undignified urge to reach across and tug that ridiculous beard.

‘If this continues and you can bring me no evidence of progress,’ Canning declared, drawing himself up to his full height, and thereby only succeeding in drawing attention to how modest his stature was, ‘I shall be forced to engage a private detective.’

‘Do as you wish, sir,’ I told him curtly. ‘We shall continue to do our best to trace the lady and the little girl.’

He stormed out.

‘What are we to do, sir?’ asked Morris, casting a worried look after our visitor. ‘About the missing lady, I mean. He’s going to make our lives a misery, that’s my view. Not that anyone can blame the gentleman, since his wife and his daughter have vanished into thin air. But he’s what you might call a prickly customer, isn’t he?’

‘I share your view, Morris. What can we do, but what we’re doing already? Tell Wapping to keep us informed about any more female bodies recovered from the river. Send Biddle round the workhouses and hospitals again. She may have applied to one of them for help in the last twenty-four hours. In any case, whatever Mr Canning may think, he is not the only problem we have to tackle. I have to go and see Superintendent Dunn about the late Mr Mills’s story. I think we may have cause to look into it, after all.’

‘That’ll be tricky,’ said Morris.

Dunn listened with remarkable, not to say unusual, patience as I recounted Lizzie’s adventures in Putney. Towards the end of my tale, however, he began to look worried.

‘Mrs Ross isn’t going back there, is she?’ he asked. ‘I trust not?’

‘I have made it absolutely clear to her that it would be inadvisable,’ I told him.

‘Think she’ll listen to you?’

‘I am confident, sir, that she will. Lizzie is very sensible. She won’t go back to Putney.’ I did not mention that she meant to speak to the porter at Somerset House.

Dunn got up and walked about the room for a minute or two, rubbing his close-cropped head of hair and scowling. Eventually, at the far end of the room, he stopped, swung round to face me and announced, ‘I shall take responsibility, should the necessity arise, for Mrs Ross’s actions.’

This was such an astounding statement, that I couldn’t answer for a moment. I stood there, probably with my mouth open, and gazed at him. At last I rallied and asked, ‘Why, sir?’

‘Oh, come, Ross. Let’s not be naïve. When you came to me before about this and I told you we could not investigate, I more or less dropped a hint I wouldn’t object to Mrs Ross deploying her undoubted skills.’

At the time he had, indeed, suddenly inquired after Lizzie. ‘Mr Dunn,’ I said firmly, ‘if anyone is to take responsibility, it lies with me. She is my wife, after all, and I knew all about her trip to Putney before she went. The thing is, now we know what she found out, is it not possible for us to carry out some quiet investigation of the points raised? Lizzie can’t go back to the scene of the crime, if there was a crime. We are agreed. Lizzie understands that. But someone – that is to say, we, as the police – should follow up in some way. For example, may I not send Sergeant Morris to Somerset House to obtain a death certificate for the late Isaiah Sheldon? It would be helpful to know the cause of death stated on it.’

‘Yes, there is no reason why we shouldn’t take a look at it,’ Dunn agreed. ‘But the whole thing must be kept very quiet.’

‘Yes, sir, I understand.’

I sought out Morris immediately and dispatched him to Somerset House. He had not been gone very long when Constable Biddle appeared, his youthful features wearing a strangely secretive expression.

‘I have a note for you, sir,’ he said in a hoarse whisper that somehow carried more clearly on the air than his normal voice.

‘From whom?’ I asked.

‘From Mrs Ross, sir.’

Biddle is a well-meaning youth and promising as a constable, but being young he is apt to dramatise events. His favoured reading in his leisure moments are the so-called ‘penny dreadfuls’, those tales of highwaymen, pirates, vampires, explorers stumbling upon lost civilisations, that sort of stuff. I know this because he lends some of the less lurid ones to Bessie, with whom he has a sort of unofficial arrangement. That is to say, they are not walking out, as both Lizzie and Mrs Biddle
mère
agree they are too young. But on a Sunday afternoon, it is not unusual to find Biddle sitting in our kitchen, drinking our tea and eating our cake. Delivering this week’s reading matter is often given as an excuse for his presence. I did ask Lizzie if she approved of Bessie reading yarns of that kind. Lizzie replied that she preferred Bessie to have a taste for swashbuckling men of action in her literature, rather than for tales featuring swooning females with adoring swains.

‘She might,’ I objected, ‘identify Biddle with a swashbuckling gallant, and from there it could be only a step to adoring swain.’

‘Oh, really, Ben,’ retorted Lizzie. ‘Bessie has her head screwed on the right way. Besides, Biddle is nothing like a pirate or a highwayman. As to his being a gallant . . .’

This was true. Bessie was of a practical turn of mind. In any case, Biddle hardly looked the part of romantic hero. He was also clumsy and apt to fall over his own stout boots.

‘Is Mrs Ross waiting downstairs?’ I exclaimed, rising to my feet.

‘No, sir, she’s left. She said she would not disturb you, but asked me to give this to you as soon as possible,
direct into your hand
.’

He stood there, looking hopeful. Awaiting part two, no doubt.

‘Thank you, Constable!’ I told him. ‘Off you go.’

Biddle withdrew, still looking furtive and a little disappointed.

‘
The Shadow strikes again . . .
’ I murmured as I unfolded the piece of notepaper he’d given me.

The note was brief and to the point.

The doctor’s name was Croft.

No signature but I knew my wife’s handwriting. It seemed the constable was not the only one with the taste for drama. So, Dr Croft had attended Isaiah Sheldon. The porter’s wife has a good memory, I thought to myself, refolding the note and tucking it into my waistcoat pocket. But is Dr Croft still to be found and will Dunn agree to my seeking him out?