by Jess Faraday
Whittaker must have had contacts at the Met. A number of journalists did. I wondered who he knew there. I wondered if the story of my own disgrace and dismissal had made the pages of The Record Register. It certainly would have fit in with the rest of the muckraking tripe.
“I read that article,” I said. “If you dislike the publication so much, why did you purchase seven copies of it?”
“To keep it out of the hands of people who might actually believe that rubbish!” she cried.
I leaned back against the bench. Provoking an interviewee is a sound tactic and often yields results. At the same time, it’s important to realize when the interviewee has become provoked enough to scuttle the interview.
I said, “Mr. Whittaker seems to believe that your father’s death was somehow related to his work with the East India Company.”
“He would think something like that,” she said, her tone dripping with acid. “Sergeant, you can’t trust a word that man says.”
“Wasn’t the company dissolved, in part, due to the abuses it perpetrated against local people?”
It was common knowledge that the East India Company had been much more than a mere business. Over the course of its two hundred and fifty year existence, the enormous trading monopoly and its private armies had colonized large swathes of Asia, building an empire on the backs of local populations. The company had ruled ruthlessly, its unchecked power leading, inevitably, to abuses that had shocked the nation and eventually resulted in the company’s dissolution.
“Clearly you haven’t read any of the other accounts of my father’s life,” she said. “Yes, Papa worked for the Company. But he never hurt anyone. In fact, since he bought our plantation, he’s devoted his life to improving working conditions for indigo farmers and plantation workers all over that part of India.”
“I did read that,” I said.
“Of course Mr. Whittaker thinks it was all an attempt to assuage a guilty conscience. That perhaps Papa’s death was pigeons coming home to roost.”
“Did your father ever mention any enemies from those days?” I asked. She shook her head. “But he did meet with someone from the Company the night he died.”
“I believe so, yes.” She seemed to realize the implications of that. “You don’t think someone from the Company did this?”
“As I said I don’t know that anything’s even been ‘done’ yet. I’m merely making inquiries.” I attempted a friendly expression. “On a more pleasant note, I understand from the papers that congratulations are in order.”
Now a genuine smile crossed her face, removing another suspicion from my mind. Hers was not the expression of someone being coerced into an unwanted marriage.
“Yes. William. William Frederick.”
“According to The Telegraph, Mr. Frederick’s family also owns a plantation in the Calcutta area. A competitor?”
She looked down, biting back embarrassment. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”
“What did your parents think of that?”
“They were against it. The Fredericks’ plantation is the second largest in the area after ours, and the competition has always been fierce.”
“How did you meet, if you don’t mind my asking? Did your families socialize?”
She laughed a bit at this. “Goodness, no. William and I met six months ago at a lecture hosted by the Fabian Society. He noticed my necklace.” She placed a hand to her chest to indicate her pendant—a small but ornate knot of gold with a diamond at its center. “And correctly identified it as the work of a certain Bengalese craftsman. We started talking and had a good laugh over how very much we had in common. We also realized that we shared an interest in repairing past wrongs and improving the conditions for our families’ workers.”
I said, “But even knowing that, your father, the great reformer, was against the match?”
She shook her head sadly. “Sergeant, if we marry, any inheritance I might have will come under William’s control. Father couldn’t stand the idea. He was certain the whole idea was part of a plot to gain possession of our plantation.”
Now that was interesting. Thwarted love was a possible motive—for Miss Lewis, or her beau, or even the two of them together. On the other hand, control over the largest indigo plantation in Calcutta was an even stronger motive. On a third hand, if Mr. Frederick was thinking to hasten Miss Lewis’s receipt of her inheritance, it would have made more sense for him to wait until after the wedding. An image flashed through my mind: the porter back at King’s Cross Station—the one with the cut-glass accent, the careless good looks, and the desire to direct me away from the women stepping onto the train.
“Where is Mr. Frederick right now?” I asked.
She frowned. “In York. I sent a telegraph to meet us at the station.”
Maybe, maybe not.
“What does he look like?” I asked.
A small smile crept across her face. “He’s not particularly tall, but he is quite handsome, with thick blond hair and eyes the color of a stormy sea.”
In other words, nothing even remotely like the porter.
I was trying to think about what to say next, when Cal appeared in the doorway of the dining carriage, his voice and expression tight.
“Miss Lewis, you must come at once.”
•••
In the time that I’d been questioning Miss Lewis, the corridors had become crowded. There’s only so long a person can sit still, it seemed, even on overstuffed leather seats, and many of our fellow passengers had decided that this was a good time for a smoke and a leg-stretch. Our dash back to the Lewis’s compartment was a dance of bumps, jostles, and muttered oaths. I’d allowed Cal and Miss Lewis to precede me, and, just as they ducked through the doorway into our own carriage, a large man rushed toward me from the doorway.
The bruiser from King’s Cross Station was even uglier up close. His squashed nose and a scar just beneath his thinning hair suggested he was no stranger to violence. From his expression, he wouldn’t have minded committing a bit of violence just then.
“Right,” I said as he stepped toward me. “This really isn’t the time for—”
He frowned at me, then his frown turned to confusion. He recognized me, but his business right then was not with me. No, I realized, he had been trying to escape—to get as far away as possible from the carriage where the Lewis’s compartment was located.
“Stop!” I cried as he roughly pushed me aside. I started down the corridor after him. A few doors opened—passengers roused by the noise, but unwilling to do more than get in my way. Cursing, I pushed past them.
I caught him up in the dining car, where he whipped one of the tablecloths off of the table and tossed it back at me. I swatted it away, but by this time, he’d found his way into second class. Car after car, the aisles of seats and bemused passengers blended together then gave way to the long wooden benches of third class, at the end of which stood the stout, closed wooden door to the baggage carriage.
I put on an extra burst of speed, thinking to leap, when, from out of nowhere, the porter with the cut-glass accent stood up from the bench where he’d sat, concealed among the passengers, and put himself between my quarry and the door.
The big man didn’t stop moving. He plowed right into the porter, sending them both through the door into the baggage carriage.
The carriage exploded into a frenzy of activity. Unlike the first-class passengers in their expensive compartments, the third-class passengers had no compunction about stepping into the fray, and I soon had more help than I needed—or wanted—separating the two men rolling about on the floor of the baggage carriage. They pulled the two men to their feet, holding them back. I pulled out my warrant card.
“I want him,” I said, indicating the man I’d been chasing, “in there.”
“I didn’t do nothin’!” he shouted, struggling against the two men holding his arms behind this back. The porter appeared to realize the futility of his situation and regarded me calmly
but warily. The passengers moved the larger man into the baggage compartment, shut the door, then threw the bolt.
“Nobody goes in or out,” I said. Then I turned to the porter. “I’ll speak with you over there.”
The two men who had been holding the porter’s arms let him loose. He shook himself out and straightened his uniform, but followed me calmly to the other side of the carriage. It wasn’t an optimal place for an interrogation, but it would have to do.
I said, “Sergeant Pearce, Cornwall Constabulary. What on earth just happened here?”
“Someone’s poisoned Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, and I can prove it.”
The carriage jolted violently, and I reached out to steady myself. A great thump sounded from the baggage compartment—someone’s steamer trunk, perhaps? Feet scrabbled on the floor behind the door. I glanced over, but no one was getting past the men who had stationed themselves there.
“Right,” I said. “Who are you, and don’t tell me a porter on this train. That’s not a proper uniform.”
“I’m a journalist,” he said, producing his card. “I’ve been following this case for some time.” He held out the card to me. It read, Abraham Whittaker, The Record Register, Journalist, Editor, Publisher. Suddenly he narrowed his eyes as if remembering my face from somewhere. I prayed it wasn’t from the salacious pages of his own paper. “What was your name again, Constable?”
“Sergeant,” I said, eager to quash further speculation on his part. “Cornwall Constabulary. I’ve seen your work,” I returned his card. “Your methods are making you enemies.”
“My only enemies are the people who would get away with murder.”
I sighed. “Mr. Whittaker, I read today’s edition. I read it several times. Your claims are sensationalistic at best. Miss Lewis is mourning the very recent loss of her father, and now her mother has fallen ill as well. You should let them be.”
“But—”
“The police were happy with the verdict of the family physician,” I said.
“I have proof,” he said again.
“You have the poison itself? The missing hypodermic? Perhaps a photograph of the poisoner in the act?”
He sighed. “All right, perhaps proof was too strong a word. Let’s call it an educated suspicion.”
An educated suspicion from an educated-seeming man. I wondered again why someone so well-spoken and refined would waste his time publishing something I’d use to line a bird cage.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I’m a physician. Well, a medical student. At least I was at one time. But the poison that killed Mr. Lewis—and that will likely kill Mrs. Lewis—I’ve seen it before.”
“What is it?”
“There’s no English word for it. It comes from the spines of a specific fish that only lives in the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal—which is why a British doctor probably wouldn’t have experience of it. It’s a favorite of certain members of Calcutta’s criminal underworld.”
“But you do have experience of it,” I said dubiously.
His tone turned evasive. “I spent time in Calcutta.” He met my eyes, his own evaluating, judging, taking my measure. Then he said, “I’d just been dismissed from medical school—for reasons I’d rather not discuss,” he added, just as I thought to ask. “My family had connections in Calcutta, and I thought I could use my training to do some good. Instead, I ended up working for some people who, perhaps in retrospect, weren’t the most upstanding citizens, but they paid well, and I learned a lot.”
“I see,” I said. It was a common story. More than one disgraced surgeon plied his trade in the criminal underground of London as well, patching up wounds that would otherwise attract unwanted attention. Underworld medic, investigating journalist, publisher of a muckraking rag—Mr. Whittaker had some stories to tell. I’d have liked to hear them.
I said, “And it was there that you learned how to recognize that poison. Can you treat it?”
His mouth tightened. “Unfortunately, the only treatment is palliative. If the victim survives the first twenty-four hours, they’re usually fine afterward. But there’s no antidote.”
“I see,” I said, letting out a long breath. If someone had used this poison against Mrs. Lewis, Cal should at least be able to provide supportive care.
“I also learned a lot about how the East India Company kept order in the area,” Whittaker continued. “How they pressured local farmers and craftsmen to produce their wares under terrible conditions and for a fraction of their worth. I talked to old farmers who had beaten and maimed, their family members kidnapped and even murdered. And Oliver Lewis was there. He was there during the 1860 rebellion, and he was there when the company’s private armies put it down. What part was he playing?”
“But Mr. Lewis has devoted his life to improving conditions for plantation workers,” I said.
“Trying to make up for past sins, is my guess.”
I said, “Mr. Whittaker, this is an awful lot of smoke and conjecture.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Oliver Lewis was twenty-five years old when the East India Company was dissolved. He acquired his plantation less than a year later. Lewis, like his father before him, was a clerk. Where would a clerk find the money to purchase a plantation in Calcutta and build a small empire of indigo and silk?” That was a good question, and not one that had occurred to me. “If you ask me,” he said. “His murder was a long time coming.”
“So you’re saying, what, someone who knew him in Calcutta thirty years ago has come to England for some sort of delayed revenge?”
Whittaker sighed. The way he pulled his hair back from his forehead reminded me of Theo as well. I pushed the thought away.
“Possibly. I have my theories, and that’s one of them. Another is that the plantation was a payment for Oliver Lewis’s silence, or his complicity in past atrocities. Perhaps Lewis had been keeping a secret that his conscience could no longer bear to hide, even after assuaging his guilt with decades of charitable work.”
As much as I hated to admit it, that did make a kind of sense. Especially considering that Oliver Lewis had met with people he’d known from the East India Company just hours before he’d died. Another thought occurred to me.
“Or maybe you, who seem to know so much about this rare poison, are yourself the poisoner,” I remarked.
“How dare you?” he cried.
“He certainly deserved it, according to you.”
“There are thousands of men in London equally deserving of a horrible death—more deserving, in fact. Why would I pick someone who was trying to make amends? Besides, my job is to expose such men. That’s the worst punishment of all. And—and—if I’d killed him, why would I go out of my way to tell you how I’d done it?
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know who did it, but I am certain of the poison, and more than certain that the murderer was someone from Oliver Lewis’s past.”
It was a sound theory, but where was the evidence? And who could have done the deed? I was about to ask my self-appointed deputies to keep an eye on Mr. Whittaker while I spoke to the man in the baggage compartment, when another very heavy crash shook the carriage. But this time it was followed by a scream. Then the prisoner was scrabbling against the door, seemingly desperate for escape.
“Open the door!” I cried, pushing past Whittaker. “Open it!”
The passengers hurried to pull back the bolt. The door flew open, and the man who had seemed so confident to lay hands on myself and Whittaker both, launched himself out of the compartment as if the very devil were on his heels. He might have run straight through me, had my self-appointed wardens not caught him.
But this man was no longer my primary interest. My primary interest was the new figure standing behind him, swaying and holding himself steady in the doorway, the wreckage of a cheap wooden coffin littering the floor around his feet.
“He’s…he’s….” The thug blubbered.
Oliver Lewis was alive, ba
rely. His face was the color of ashes, and he was holding onto the door frame as if to life itself. I ran to his side, just as he started to tip forward. Catching him, I helped him to the bench that several of the passengers kindly vacated.
“Mr. Lewis?” I asked. “What happened?”
He blinked at me, jaw slack, mouth silently working. Then he coughed. “Is this York?”
“What?”
“Hazel…my wife…was to open the coffin when we arrived in York.”
“No one told me anything about that, sir,” I said. “But your wife is very ill with whatever is afflicting you. If you want to help her, you need to tell me exactly what happened.”
His jaw dropped even wider. Distress sharpened his expression as fear cleared the haze from his eyes.
“But…she…but….” He grasped the lapels of my jacket and pulled himself close. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”
And all at once I knew—with certainty—that Lewis, in an effort to fake his own death, had poisoned himself, and, inadvertently, his wife.
•••
The train manager was guarding the door of the ladies’ compartment when I returned with Oliver Lewis in tow, and Abraham Whittaker following along at our heels. The manager’s expression faltered as we approached. Lewis looked every inch a man who’d just risen from the grave—which he was, I supposed.
“I need to speak with Mr. Webster,” I said.
The train manager nodded and slipped inside. A moment later, Cal emerged. He’d removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and rolled up his sleeves. His trousers were spattered with I knew not what, and he smelled appalling. But despite the worry in his expression, he looked exhilarated. He was in his element, I realized. And it was glorious.
“How is she?” I asked, shaking my head clear.
“As well as can be expected, though I’ve no idea what we should be expecting.”
“Hazel?” Mr. Lewis asked.
