by Howard Engel
“I am, indeed, sir. And I will gladly surrender myself to the authorities as soon as I have either saved young Lambert or failed to beat the hangman in his lethal work. You, sir, if you choose, can help us as no other.”
“This is not only highly irregular, it is quite outside the law. In helping you, I should be as guilty as you are.”
“Sir, I promise you that I will surrender myself into your hands as soon as we have succeeded or failed. No matter. I am ready to face the consequences. Perhaps my friend Doyle will join me in that promise. What could be fairer? What more could you wish?”
“Mr Burnham,” I said, “I have heard that you are a sporting gentleman. Here is sport royal, if you are game. You have our assurances that succeed or not, we will end our struggle right here, or where you will. Remember, the murdered man was a colleague of yours.” Burnham looked from Bell to me and back again. For a long time he said nothing.
“You say he was a colleague. Gordon Eward was more than that, he was a friend.”
“Then you’ll help?”
“I will do what I can. I have no wish to see an innocent man die, if innocent he be. Wherein may I help you?”
“Splendid!” shouted Bell. “Splendid! You knew the man well?”
“We were locked up in the same counting house for many years. I shared his love of music and many times we visited the concert hall together. We had invented accounting techniques that tended to ease the burden of our work. He was clever with figures, Dr Bell, but… ”
“Yes?”
“He was too clever by half. I don’t know why he needed the money. I don’t know when he began—”
“What are you saying, man?”
“I had to straighten out the mess he left behind him. There were discrepancies in his books, funds missing, withdrawals that remained uncovered. Then, too, I found that he had invested heavily in the Firth of Tay Bridge Company. Great profits will come in time, but the bridge has only been open sixteen months.”
“You discovered this? Who else knows?”
“I made my findings available to the Procurator-Fiscal directly.”
“Your father. And what did Sir William decide to do about it?”
“The missing sums were calculated and assessed. Because of the suddenness of his death, because of the police enquiry, it was decided to cover the missing funds from other departments that had been showing a better balance than had been expected. The amount of missing money was considerable, as I have said, but in that I am speaking in terms understood by you and your friend here. As a missing portion of our total tax revenues, the monies unaccounted for amounted to a pittance. I am speaking of under two hundred thousand pounds. The budget of my own department totals several times that amount. In covering the loss we acted as Lloyd’s of London acted at the time of the Langham scandal: we chose to cover the missing money and allow the poor, desperate murdered man to be buried with no blot upon his memory. It was an act of charity.”
“Who else knows of this?”
“The chief constable and the deputy chief, Mr M’Sween. Perhaps Inspector Webb knew. I don’t know about that.”
“But no one else here is aware of the steps you initiated? Not even the clerk M’Dougal we were just questioning?”
“Certainly not! What we did was bend policy in order to react in a humane and Christian way to a situation that is unlikely ever to arise again. Irregular it was, as so it remains, but, damn it, sir, I would do it again!”
“And it does you credit, Mr Burnham. Have you, by any chance, any information of Mlle Clery’s husband, Mario Cabezon?”
“I had no idea the woman was married at all.”
“She was indeed. The husband lives in Dewar Place, no great distance from the house where the murders were done.”
“I heard nothing of this in reports of the trial.”
“A small omission, Mr Burnham, among so many. But, let me not keep you longer. There is still much to do and time is winging onward. Come, Doyle. We have not a second to lose.”
“Dr Bell? I release you from the promise you made in this room. And I wish you success in your quest. God speed!”
In less than twenty minutes we had made our way through The Lawnmarket, along Johnston Terrace, under the eminence of the Castle to the west end of the city. Dewar Place was a fine example of the New Town’s Georgian architecture, only diminished by having the railway cut through the corner of the street. The address had been fashionable. Indeed it remained marginally so at the south end, but where the city directory indicated the address of Sr Mario Cabezon, the block was encrusted with the grime of forty years of railway traffic. Nevertheless, under the green discolouration of his brass plaque, the name
Sr Mario Cabezon
formerly of La Scala, Milan
teacher of voice
2nd Floor
could be easily seen. The stairs leading to the door were bracketed with a curved balustrade, much damaged by soot, and the door appeared to have had its locks changed rather often over the last ten years or so.
Inside, the smells of cooking and the fires of early autumn made the climbing of the stairs unpleasant. The splendid curve of the staircase seemed to add to the look of genteel poverty rather than detract from it. The door on the second floor, with a pasteboard card pinned to the wall beside it, looked sturdy and untouched by the general dilapidation evident elsewhere.
The pounding of my friend’s stick against the door brought footsteps in our direction. When the door was opened, after the unfastening of several locks, the location of the head in the new-opened space was something of a shock. It was a good head below where one expected to find it. The man could not have been taller than five foot one or two. It was a pleasant face, but with worried dark eyes, deep-set in an angular arrangement of features. His hair was jet-black and glossy, his brow high, and his whole figure conspired to make him appear taller than he actually was. He wore a brace upon his left leg.
“I am Sr Mario Cabezon, gentlemen. Whom have I the honour of addressing?” He said this with no trace of accent that I could detect. With the fiery looks that seemed appropriate to the voice teacher, the voice was badly matched. It belonged to another vocal cliché, that of the bankers of Charlotte Square among others. Of course, when I thought about it, it was only natural for someone sensitive to nuances of accents to begin remedial work with himself. As he backed away from the door, allowing us to penetrate into the main room of the apartment, I could see that he had imitated Scots bankers successfully in other areas as well: the furnishings of the room, from the large pianoforte near the windows to the gilt mirrors, the hangings, the rugs, everything suited an establishment of a man, if not of high fashion, at least one of comfortable conservative taste, with possessions which a curator of the art and furnishings of the last century would not be ashamed to call his own.
Bell introduced us and explained our mission. We were invited to sit on a couch that seemed to have been inspired by Hepplewhite or Sheraton. A black servant appeared and vanished only to return in a few minutes with cups and a tea tray. As soon as we were settled, and long before refreshments arrived, we were asked by our host:
“Gentlemen, how may I help you?”
“Sr Cabezon,” began Bell, “forgive me for asking, but how does an Italian teacher of voice, in the middle of Edinburgh, come to bear a Spanish name?”
“Ah! Do you want a treatise on the twists and turns of the branches of my family tree, or will the explanation that my family has been Italian since the Renaissance suffice? A distant connection was a pupil of Il Perugian, the painter.”
“It was idle curiosity and I apologize to you.”
“Not a word of it, Dr Bell. I am surprised that you recognized the origins of the name. I’m a distant relation of a sixteenth-century Spanish musician.”
“Yes, the blind organist they call ‘The Spanish Bach.’ More to the point, Sr Cabezon, have you been visited before by the police investigating the death of your late
wife?”
“I was interviewed and questioned by a police inspector called Bryce about two weeks after Hermione was killed.”
“No further contacts from the official police?”
“None whatever. I would have thought that, as the husband of one of the victims and a natural enemy of the other, they would have had me in their cells as soon as the crime was discovered.”
We each took a cup from Sr Cabezon as he poured it. It somehow suited the setting. Powdered periwigs could hardly have improved matters.
“What contact had you with Mlle Clery since she came to the city?”
“Why, none at all. She had me bound over to keep the peace last year in London. I assumed that the judgment operated north of the Tweed as well as in the south.”
“And you accepted this?”
“No. Not at once. Certainly not. But there is a building-up of data that at last informs even the most stubborn of fools: the woman no longer delights in your company. The idea takes hold in the end and one gets on with his life.”
“But, you continued to follow her!”
“I continued to follow the opera, sir. My livelihood depends upon the lyric stage. I follow this company because I have long-established connections in the company. My dear departed wife may have flattered herself that I pursued her; the pedestrian truth is that I have been following my trade. It is a gypsy life, Dr Bell. I will away again when the opera company completes its season, barring the accident of a flood of pupils from this city.”
“Yet I see, signor, from the banker’s boxes against the wall—so out of place in a room like this—that you are not altogether the gypsy you seem to be.”
“Ah, yes, you have discovered my little vice. I dabble in stocks and shares. In a modest way. I’m no Baring, I assure you. I have some consols which may eventually amount to something. In the meantime, I do not entertain lavishly.”
“May I enquire more precisely about these securities, signor?”
“As you please. But I don’t see the relevance.” Cabezon got up from his chair and went over to the banker’s boxes and lifted the tin lid. He called out the names of companies we had heard of and others that I for one had no knowledge of at all. Only one name caught my ear. I had heard it spoken of so recently: the Firth of Tay Bridge Company.
“I have ten thousand shares,” admitted the singing teacher.
“May I ask how you heard of them, Sr Cabezon?”
“Talk in the Green Room at the opera. I can say with certainty that Hermione never mentioned them. She wouldn’t have known a share from a sachet, Dr Bell.”
“I see, I see. Could you give me the name of your broker, signor? I might take a plunge myself.” Cabezon wrote a name on a scrap of lined staff paper and passed it over. Bell glanced at it for a second before putting it safely away in an inner pocket.
“Do you believe, Sr Cabezon, that Alan Lambert murdered both Mlle Clery and her inamorato?”
“What am I to believe? I never met the man. The law says he did it. What am I, a poor teacher of music, to do but believe what I am told. In whose interest would it be to punish an innocent man?”
“In whose interest indeed,” said my friend.
TWENTY-FIVE
On leaving Sr Cabezon, we walked back to the house where the crime was committed. It reconfirmed in my mind that it was a short jaunt from the home of the seemingly guiltless husband to that of his murdered wife. How much weight should be given to Cabezon’s bland confession that it was a case of “all passion spent”? I asked Bell about this as we walked, head down and with long strides:
‘“Husbands are in heaven whose wives scold not,’” he said. “It’s too bland, too bloodless for me to accept, Doyle. If he was ever in love with her, can she have killed that emotion in him so utterly? Can she have become such a matter of indifference? My knowledge of these things begins to splinter and break. Nor do I expect you to be able to add greatly to my understanding. We are both of us out of our depth.” He shook his head, went on muttering to himself and linked hands behind his back as we turned in to Morrison Street, casting about for a cab.
We had walked well nigh to West Port before we were able to stop a hansom. Bell instructed the driver to take us round to Lothian Street but to pass his door without stopping. As the cab came down the street, it was easy to see that the door was being watched. One dark-clad ruffian stood exactly where Webb’s minion had formerly held the ground. Another two were placed nearer the house, each plain-clad man having adopted a stance that could not have fooled a backward child. Had the word “police” been attached to their coats, they could not have been more conspicuous. Bell gave the cabbie my address and the horse trotted off in that direction with a similar result.
“I would wager that the university and my own surgery are also well watched tonight, Conan. I think I have hit upon a way to arrange for our capture to satisfy the conditions that we settled in York. I begin to feel that the curtain to the last act in this tragedy is about to rise. I am rather interested in discovering how it will play.”
“In the theatre, Doctor, it has always helped to have the script of the author to work from. Here we must make up our parts as best we can.”
“Not entirely true, my friend. We have learned a great deal about this business in the past few weeks. And, of course, we know how the story ends.” This statement so surprised me that my response must have been visible in my face long before I was able to give it utterance.
“You know the ending? You know who murdered Mlle Clery and her friend?”
“Of course. What do you think I am, a ninny? I dare say that you too could name the guilty party after reviewing what we have learned. And remember, you did much of the work yourself. I hardly stirred from my surgery or my study.”
“Still, Doctor, I canna guess the name of the guilty party,” I said, sliding, in my excitement, into broad Scots.
“And when I have told you, you will say ‘How obvious! How could anyone say otherwise?’ You observe, my friend, you even see, which is better than most so-called observers, but you do not allow yourself to be led by the facts to the only possible set of circumstances that will explain all parts of this intriguing puzzle.”
“Puzzle? Is that all it is to you, sir? A puzzle? An entertainment like a game of chess or a mathematical problem?”
“To see well, Doyle, you must see clearly. To do that, you must shun anger and habits of thought. Assume nothing. You or I could be the guilty party until we have been logically eliminated. Any of the people we have met could have done the deed. That they did not must be demonstrated in every case.”
“Where are we going now?” I asked, not knowing how to respond, nor how to tease from the doctor an answer to the question burning on my lips.
“All will be revealed in good time,” he said, and that was the last word on the subject until he surprised me again. This time, it was a word to the cabbie, not to me: “Driver, take us to the office of Donald Webster in North Bank Street.” He was reading from the paper Cabezon had given him. I waited in the cab, while Bell disappeared into the small, rather dusty office with a shingle waving to the left of the door. He was gone less than ten minutes. From the broker we went to the office of Henry Burgoyne in the Grassmarket. Here we waited at the curb until a messenger came running down the street and almost, but not quite, past the door. He went inside and came out again in less than two minutes holding a bright sixpence in his hand. Now both of us got out, but kept the hansom waiting.
Burgoyne, it turned out, was an officer in the Firth of Tay Bridge Company. Bell told me this while we waited for a wee slip of a girl to inform her employer that we had arrived.
“Mr Thompson and Mr Blanchard! Welcome, sirs, welcome! I have only this minute been informed that you were in the city and looking for an investment opportunity. Let me present my associate, David M’Clung.” The face that came around the door-jamb belonged to the hatless fair-haired young man who had accosted Graeme Lambert and me on o
ur way home from Rutherford’s bar some nights ago. Hands were extended and shaken, the weather was apologized for, and we were politely manhandled into Burgoyne’s sanctum sanctorum.
“Gentlemen, may I get you a wee dram of something against the inclemency of the season?”
“That’s very good of you, Mr Burgoyne, but unnecessary,” said Bell in a deeper voice than I remembered him using before. “But you could furnish me and Mr Blanchard with a list of investors in the Tay Bridge venture.”
“Ah-hah! The Firth of Tay Bridge Company! A venture, gentlemen, no longer. It has been in operation daily for more than a year. The risks, and there were many, are now buried in the past.” After more palaver with the sleek and excited Mr Burgoyne and the agreeable Mr M’Clung, we were shown the list we had requested. After looking down the names included, Bell asked for a prospectus of the company and, with it in our possession, we made our way back to the cab. Burgoyne stood on his doorstep watching our retreat, wiping his forehead with a large red handkerchief. His partner joined him there. It was hard to see which of them was more surprised at the shortness of our visit.
“Next stop, Waverley Station,” Bell sang out so that the driver could hear. “We have to meet the train from the south.” He spoke as one who had committed Bradshaw’s Monthly Railway Guide to memory. As he settled back in his seat, he looked at me, enjoying, I thought, my misery and confusion.
“My dear Doyle, we are watched for at every corner. All our haunts are being spied upon. I dare say even Rutherford’s bar has a spy from the chief constable looking for us. What I mean to do, with your approbation, is to give ourselves up to the supreme authority in matters of life and death: we shall give ourselves up to the official whose function is the cutting of the thread of life itself. I am suggesting that we meet this train and surrender ourselves to Mr Marwood, the man from Horncastle.”
“The hangman?” I asked, not believing my ears.
“The same,” said he.
