Murder Most Conventional

by Verena Rose (ed)

  They could. A few clicks and she found it—an off-center, slightly fuzzy picture of her silver and black, size six Manolo Blahnik flats with square crystal buckles, sitting on a crumb-littered kitchen table, with something white and soggy-looking off to the side—a carton of Chinese food, maybe? The thief wanted six hundred dollars for the shoes, but they were worth so much more than that to Lisa and her husband, for sentimental reasons even more than financial ones.

  She dug through her purse until she found the number of the police officer she’d spoken to when she reported the possible theft, now a definite theft. Maybe he could set up a sting right away. Chances were, she wouldn’t get her shoes back in time for the banquet—they’d probably be held as evidence for the trial—but she’d get them back eventually. More important, the thief or thieves could be arrested before they had a chance to victimize someone else. That was what really mattered.

  What about the book? That was the loss that hurt her most. She went back to Craigslist and clicked on “books.” Textbooks, cookbooks, children’s books, last month’s bestsellers. No unspeakably precious classic mysteries written by Agatha Christie and signed by Dorothy Sayers. The thieves probably didn’t realize how much it was worth, Lisa thought as she dialed the police officer’s number. They probably tossed it into the fireplace or dumped it in the garbage. That’s so sad. Maybe the officer can put these thieves out of business. Maybe he can eventually get my shoes back. But the book is gone forever. From the moment I first read my mother’s will and saw she’d left it to me, I’d hoped I could use that book to do some good, to help somebody in some way. There’s no chance of that now.

  * * * *

  The night had turned cold. Maya wandered the streets, hugging her thin arms against her chest, longing for home.

  Her stepfather had made life at home unbearable, and her mother had been oblivious to what was going on. Then Cal had come along, and he’d made escape seem possible, exciting, irresistible. But he’d proven to be as bad as her stepfather. She’d been on her own for five months, and then she’d found out her mother was on her own now, too, and sick, and broke. They needed to be together so they could help each other. Wisconsin was so far away, though. Maya didn’t know how she could ever get back there.

  She kept walking, hoping to find a safe place to sleep for a few hours, and spotted a dumpster down the block. Maya hated going through dumpsters. She’d done it many times, but it disgusted her. Always, there were roaches. Often, there were rats. But she was cold and hungry and desperate. She had no choice.

  She walked over to it, gathered all her strength, forced up the lid, pulled out the top trash bag. Not too bad. It looked like a relatively fresh bag, like it hadn’t spent much time here. Maybe she’d get a break tonight. Maybe it was finally time for things to come around for her.

  She lugged the bag into an alley, sat on the ground, and gritted her teeth. Please, she thought, don’t let there be anything too gross in here.

  The first thing she found was a large brown paper bag—soggy, but it smelled pretty good. Ginger, she thought. Chinese. She opened up carton after carton, using her fingers to scrape up remnants—a little chicken and lots of mushrooms in some kind of white sauce, beef and vegetables in some kind of brown sauce, rice. And half an egg roll—clammy, but it made her stomach stop churning. Now. What else could she find?

  She found a pajama top, pulled it on, and stopped shivering. And that fabric bag looked pretty. She looked inside—knitting needles, a ball of soft pink yarn, about three-fourths of a sweater. It’s lovely, she thought, stroking it, pressing it to her face and savoring its warmth. I bet it’d fit Mom just right, and Grandma taught me how to knit. I could work on this on the bus, and if I kept at it steady, I could finish it in time for Mother’s Day. It’d be a way of telling Mom I’m sorry I left, of saying from now on we’re in this together.

  She sighed. She could picture herself sitting on that bus, knitting this sweater for her mom. But it was a fantasy. How could she ever get on a bus when she had no money for a ticket?

  She pushed the image away and kept going through the bag, stuffing everything she could use into her pockets or the fabric bag. Toothpaste, deodorant, cosmetics. And half a bottle of perfume—how long had it been since she’d worn perfume? She dabbed some on and instantly felt better. She found something purple and fuzzy and frowned at it in confusion; she found a pink hat decorated with daisies and smiled at it before putting it back in the trash bag. Then she spotted a book.

  I know this book, she thought, staring at the cover. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express—Grandpa read this to me when I was a little girl. And this copy looks really, really old. It couldn’t be a first edition, could it?

  She checked the copyright page: 1934. That seemed about right. She flipped a few pages, scanning them quickly. Rumour, centre, colour—obviously, this hadn’t been printed in the United States. England, maybe. As she turned back to the copyright page to make sure, she noticed the name scrawled on the inside front cover. Dorothy L. Sayers—wasn’t that the woman who wrote Gaudy Night? Grandpa had given her a copy of that book for her thirteenth birthday. He’d loved golden-age mysteries, and his enthusiasm had made her love them, too.

  She also knew someone else who loved them. That nice old lady—in January, she’d let Maya shovel her sidewalk, and had paid her more than Maya would have dared to ask for. Then the lady had invited her to come inside, and they’d sat in her elegantly furnished living room and shared a pot of tea. The walls were lined with books, more books than Maya had ever seen outside a library. Maya had mentioned them, and the lady had said she collected books and especially loved mysteries. She’d been delighted to learn that someone as young as Maya had read Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. When Maya left, the lady tried to give her another twenty dollars, but Maya said no. She’d do odd jobs for people, and if they paid her too much, she took it, even though she knew they were giving it to her out of pity. But she wouldn’t beg, and she wouldn’t take outright charity.

  This time, she wouldn’t have to. She had something she could sell. She didn’t know how much the book was worth, but the lady probably would. Maybe it’d be enough for a bus ticket.

  Maya stood up. It’d be a long walk to the lady’s house, but Maya could reach it by morning, especially since she felt so full of energy now. She’d tell the lady the truth about how she found the book, but she bet the lady wouldn’t mind. Maybe she’d think the story about finding the book was interesting. Maya smiled. Maybe, while she was telling the story, the lady would give her a cup of tea.

  But first she should clean up here. Maya put everything she wasn’t keeping back in the bag and carried it to dumpster. The lid didn’t feel nearly as heavy now. Then she hesitated. I’ll keep one more thing, she decided, and opened the bag again. There it was. She grabbed it, tossed the bag into the dumpster, and walked away, a new bounce in her step.

  As she walked, she inspected her just-claimed treasure and smiled. This thing always made her smile. Really, she thought, it doesn’t look silly. It looks pretty. And it’s the perfect thing to wear while enjoying a cup of tea.

  She put the hat on her head and quickened her pace.

  THE HAIR OF THE DOG, by Charles Todd

  London, 1920

  The Royal Society of Geographers was having its annual conference in the Society’s handsome red brick headquarters in Kensington. It was an important event, as they were expecting to publish a report on the frontier changes brought about by the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath. New lines had been drawn, new countries had emerged, and mapping these was of paramount importance. Members as well as guests from the Empire and Colonies were expected to attend, as were geographers from other countries.

  Friday evening was set aside for a dinner with a speaker who’d just returned from Tanganyika, where he’d been studying changes in the former German colonies after the Armistice. />
  The Honourable Henry Mellon Grayson had followed in the footsteps of his illustrious explorer father, Lord Grayson, who had devoted his life and his fortune to geography and had been instrumental in the mapping of Nepal and Tibet. His son had chosen tribal Africa for his life’s work.

  Dinner was served at eight sharp, with a brief welcome by the Prince of Wales, standing in for his father. Grayson’s speech was scheduled for nine thirty.

  The American delegation, led by Thomas Meadowes, was seated near the head table, and during the meal they struck up a conversation with their Canadian counterparts seated across from them.

  It was a little before nine when Grayson excused himself, nervously adding that he needed a moment to prepare himself for his talk.

  Half an hour later, as the last course dishes were being removed and the coffee service was wheeled in, Lord Willingham, the head of the Society, looked at the guest’s still empty chair and quietly summoned a waiter.

  “Will you look in the cloakroom, if you please, and inform Mr. Grayson that I am ready to present him?”

  The waiter nodded and disappeared quietly in the direction of the antechamber where drinks had been served earlier. The cloakrooms were just off the passage beside it.

  He returned very quickly, bent over Lord Willingham’s shoulder, and said something in his ear. Willingham, his glass raised halfway to his lips, sat there without moving for a moment. Then he set his glass down carefully, excused himself to his neighbor, the Prince, and followed the waiter from the dining room.

  Five minutes later, Willingham used the recently installed telephone in the lobby off the Society governor’s office, and put in a call to Scotland Yard.

  * * * *

  Chief Superintendent Markham had left for the evening. When the call came in, Sergeant Gibson studied the duty roster and then hurried down the passage to knock lightly on Inspector Ian Rutledge’s door.

  Rutledge called, “Come,” and then, as he saw it was Gibson, he said, “No. I’ve finished for the day. It will have to wait.”

  “There’s a call come in from Kensington, sir. The Royal Society of Geographers. An attendant will be at the door to meet you. There’s a dead man in the cloakroom, and the Prince of Wales is a guest. Sir, it’s you or Watkins.”

  Watkins? At the Royal Geographers? He shuddered at the thought. The man would make a muddle of it. Besides, the Society’s proceedings were private, although the highly regarded journal it published was available for a subscription.

  Rutledge was tired; it had been a long day. And yet the chance to step inside the well-guarded portals was tempting. “I’ll need a team to cordon off the premises. See to it, will you? They haven’t moved the body, have they?”

  “No, sir. I was going off duty at twelve, myself, but I’ll head up the constables, if you like.”

  Rutledge was surprised. The taciturn Gibson avoided large private gatherings of any sort. Why would a conference of the Geographers be any different? Was the sergeant human enough to be curious as well?

  “Done.” He set the report he’d just finished in his desk, locked the drawer, and with a nod to Gibson, left the Yard.

  As he drove toward Kensington, Rutledge heard Hamish MacLeod’s voice from the seat behind him, the voice that had given him no peace since the Somme Offensive of 1916, following him through the rest of the war and to the Yard when he returned to duty there. The young Scots corporal was dead. He’d seen him die, and Rutledge was no believer in ghosts. But he’d never had the courage to look over his shoulder to see if Hamish was there. Dr. Fleming had called it survivor’s guilt, and told him he must find a way to deal with it, but Dr. Fleming didn’t have to live with Hamish sharing his head. The general public called it shell shock and considered anyone who suffered from it nothing less than a coward, lacking the moral fiber expected of an English soldier.

  The general public had never been in the bloody trenches of Flanders.

  “Ye’ll be all the night questioning the lot of them,” Hamish said. “Men who spend more time in the back of beyond than in England? Ye ken, they could kill a dozen men and who would know the difference?”

  “I won’t know if it’s murder or natural causes until I get there,” Rutledge replied, and caught himself speaking aloud. A habit he found it hard to break. “Either way, the Society did the right thing, summoning the Yard.”

  But when he got to Kensington and rang the bell at the Society’s door, the man who opened it, his dress telling Rutledge that he was a waiter, looked shaken.

  Rutledge identified himself and was led without a word to the passage outside the cloakroom, where Lord Willingham himself was standing guard. The head of the Society was easily recognized: his luxurious white moustache was famous.

  Willingham nodded as Rutledge identified himself a second time, and said, “In there, Inspector.” He indicated the cloakroom. “I don’t think I can bear to see him again.”

  Rutledge opened the door and stepped inside the cloakroom. It was paneled like the antechamber, a rich dark wood, but the fixtures were porcelain and the tap handles were globes, the countries and the oceans detailed exquisitely. The floor was marble in the popular black and white diamond pattern.

  The dead man lay just inside, his eyes wide and bulging. His face was nearly black, his tongue protruding. There were a number of daggers in his chest, each with a distinctive handle. Wood, steel, horn, inlaid with precious metals, or gold decorated with jewels. Rutledge counted eight.

  Looking at them, his first thought was of Julius Caesar, waylaid in the Senate. One man stabbed by many so that no single person could be blamed for the killing. Standing together in murder, friend and enemy alike. But where was this man’s Brutus?

  He knelt by the corpse, trying to determine if one knife had done the deed, or if Grayson had bled to death internally from so many wounds. There was not a great deal of blood around the body. But only the postmortem could answer how Grayson died. What intrigued Rutledge was the man’s face. Had there been some sort of poison on those daggers? He remembered what Hamish had said about geographers and exotic corners of the world. Anything was possible.

  Not a tribal killing, he thought. Or a religious one. Not in London.

  Were the daggers a warning? Or an explanation?

  He rose to his feet and examined the windowless room. There was no sign of a struggle. And only one door led in and out of it. He rather thought no one had lain in wait—it would have been impossible to know when or if Grayson would come in here, or even if he would be alone. Who then had followed him? Surely the absence of eight men from the banquet tables would have been noticed?

  Satisfied that he’d seen all he needed to see at the moment, he walked to the door. “Who found the body?” he asked Willingham.

  “The waiter. The man who let you in. Coffee is still being served, they haven’t really noticed his absence yet. Grayson’s, I mean. The Prince is here, with small entourage. What shall I do about that? The King won’t care to hear his heir has been questioned in a murder case.”

  “Is there a doctor among the attendees tonight?”

  “Yes, Dr. Haldane. He’s a medical missionary as well as a cartographer.”

  “Then find him. Announce to the diners that the speaker has been called away, but that he will be returning within the half hour. After you’ve done that, speak quietly to the Prince’s equerry. Ask him to take the Prince to a private parlor and wait with him there. But casually. All of this should be done casually.”

  Willingham said, “And how am I to be casual, after seeing that?”

  “Surely you’ve seen worse on your travels,” Rutledge replied.

  “Good God, man, he was a friend. And murder here? Not even when John Speke and Richard Burton fiercely contested the finding of the source of the Nile was there bloodshed. Although,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “it was a close
run thing.”

  With a nod Willingham walked through the anteroom and after the briefest pause, straightened his shoulders and opened the door into the dining room. Rutledge could hear voices, louder now as the meal and wines had relaxed the guests. He walked to the door and through a crack studied the conference attendees. At a guess, half a hundred well-dressed men sat at the long tables. The room itself was quite handsome, dark paneling lined with oil portraits of famous geographers, and he could just see the Prince of Wales seated beneath the likeness of the Society’s founder. Quietly closing the door again, he turned to the waiter.

  “Have you kept the outer door locked?”

  “Yes, sir, I have. And the other doors as well.”

  “Have any of the guests left the room during the dinner, to your knowledge?”

  “No, sir, every plate was accounted for. Nor are there any empty chairs.”

  “How did you come to find him?” Listening to the man’s account, he added, “And no one followed him into the cloakroom?”

  “Sir, no, not to my knowledge. It’s usually not until coffee has been served that there is a general exodus. Before the speaker. Although I’ve never been fond of coffee myself. What is served here comes from the highlands of Ethiopia, I’m told.” He reached into his coat pocket for a copy of the menu. “It’s all foreign dishes, for that matter. The soup was an African bean dish, and in the main course, the potatoes were from Peru, the aubergine from France, and so on. The pudding has maple syrup in place of toffee sauce, as a nod to our North American guests.”

  “How many guests are there tonight?”

  “Sixty, sir. And twenty-seven staff to prepare and serve the meal.” As if anticipating his next question, the waiter added, “All of them have been with us for at least ten years, save for two who came after the war. Offering a soldier a job.” That had been essential to help the severe unemployment that had followed the Armistice.