The Humbug Murders

by L. J. Oliver

  Father? I stared at Adelaide, whose steady gaze signaled that this was no slip, she had meant for me to know this. Lord Dyer was a marquess, which made Adelaide . . .

  “No,” she said bluntly. “I am no lady.” She took a deep breath. “But do allow me to introduce my father, Lord Dyer, Third Marquess of Dyer Haven.”

  “And you?” I whispered.

  She turned to me, her emerald eyes sparkling. There was some deep look of sadness, but also of pride.

  “Miss Adelaide Owen,” she said. A wheel hit a stone in the path and the carriage jumped, I involuntarily reached out for balance, and she grabbed my arm to steady me. “Just that and nothing more.”

  “This is not seemly,” barked Lord Dyer. “And it is none of this man’s affair. Adelaide, you are not only disclosing your secrets, but mine!”

  Adelaide ignored his fuming and took my hand. “When I first came to you, I considered my parentage irrelevant. I made my own way in life through hard work, just like you, Ebenezer, and do not need my place in this world to be defined by the stations of those who brought me into it.”

  I shifted in my seat, feeling the warmth of her hands through my leather gloves, the pressure of her fingers against mine. Lord Dyer said nothing, but an air of sadness rose about him.

  “Your parents were not married,” I surmised. Lord Dyer twitched and stared out of the window. The implications of illegitimacy rolled in like a white winter storm and crashed into my mind in great drifts.

  “My mother raised me and my brother by herself, in the country. For all of Lord Dyer’s financial contributions to our life, she had to work hard, endure gossip and prejudice and the toll of two children.” She withdrew her hands and again looked out of the window. “Not that life for me.”

  “You were always determined to make your own way, Adelaide,” said Lord Dyer suddenly, his moustache twitching as he pressed his lips together.

  “Well, what should I have done?” she said firmly. “You left us to fend for ourselves!”

  “What should I have done?” her father said, an unexpected passion rising in his voice. “I loved her. Beyond measure, I adored her! We wanted to escape, go away, and forget the world and all its squalor. Deny such mundane things as servants and lords, maids and masters, duty and expectation. How I hated it all, all but her.” The marquess inhaled sharply and cleared his throat, I heard the telltale shake of emotion threatening to upset his lordly façade.

  He composed himself. “I was born into a cruel world, Adelaide. Far crueler than the one you were raised to know.” He looked to me and said, “We should continue this privately.”

  “No, Father. I promised Mr. Scrooge no more withholding, no more lies.”

  “So be it, then.” The ugly look in his eyes signaled that should I breathe a word of this to anyone, particularly a newshound like Dickens, the consequences would be dire indeed.

  The carriage ground to a halt under the white and weeping locks of a frozen willow, and I followed Lord Dyer and Adelaide into the snow. An ornate bench, covered in frost, overlooked the frozen lake. The two sat down, but I stood witnessing their exchange.

  “It was on this very bench she told me she was expecting you. Twins! A happier moment never occurred to me since.” Lord Dyer reached into his jacket and pulled out a small brown bag. Reaching into it, he gathered a small handful of breadcrumbs and scattered them onto the hardened snow. Two identical robins fluttered down and began pecking.

  “My father’s advisors made it clear that day. Any public knowledge of illegitimate children would put the family in peril, jeopardize the estate, ultimately damage the credibility of king and country. And for a future marquess to marry a handmaid? A terrible ‘accident’ would surely have befallen her if we had attempted to elope. What could I do, Adelaide, against the force of such responsibility? But I tried to do well by you, I truly did. Especially when your mother died. How many times did I try to recruit your brother to a better station? I tried to mentor him, to lead him up through business so that he might yet succeed despite his class, but he just kept on sabotaging himself. Alcohol. Drugs. Women. Gambling. Time after time, chance after chance. He would not be helped. Didn’t I do all for him?”

  Adelaide’s face reddened with anger. She chanced a look my way, studying my face to ensure that I was fully understanding the scene being performed before me. I was.

  Thomas Guilfoyle, “her Tom,” was her twin brother. I had mistaken her familiar love as something very different.

  “Of course you did, Father,” she murmured. “You did all you could . . . for him! But what for me? What opportunities came my way? I would not have squandered any of it!”

  Lord Dyer stared at her, hurt laced across his face. “Oh, Adelaide! Your brother should have been born the girl, and you should have been my son. I always admired your strength. Courage. Thirst for knowledge. But more than anything, so much more attention was lavished on your brother because he needed it. He was weak. But you! Strong! Self-sufficient.”

  Adelaide looked down, a tear dripping into her lap.

  “And now . . .” Lord Dyer lowered his voice and his head. “I fear I may have ruined it all. One final project I gave him, one last chance that would legitimately give him control of one of the companies. To secure the land for one of the fabric importers in our supply chain, you see. Said he knew of property would put us in a favorable position.”

  “Then Piermont and Piermont Acquisitions is one of your companies,” I supplied.

  “Many times removed, but yes,” Lord Dyer admitted.

  “The owners of all the surrounding properties agreed to sell, but not Fezziwig,” I said. “Not so long as there was breath left in his body. Tell me, Lord Dyer. How go negotiations now? With his widow, Jane?”

  Dyer glared at me. “You’re every bit the cruel and heartless type I might have expected.”

  “Then you deny that the acquisition proceeds apace?”

  He hung his head, and Adelaide wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders, which began to shake. The robins took flight, soaring back into the willow above us, which rained icy fractals as it was disturbed. I looked at father and daughter, joined in grief and sadness, and at once, as the mist on the frozen lake cleared with a sudden gust of wind, realization dawned.

  Rutledge had claimed that Smithson was a great man leading a double life, a man of business with a reputation beyond reproach. An apt description of Lord Dyer. But Rutledge had also been coached by Shen to say what he did.

  I thought it over as above a stream of sunlight broke through the thin cloud cover. Twinkles fell over the park like heavenly angel dust sprinkled across the lake, the trees, and every blade of grass as the sun caught the icy crystals of each frozen dewdrop. My skin tingled from the freezing air, and my stomach tingled, too.

  “Father,” Adelaide said at last, oblivious that this was a new and happy revelation. “The monster that butchered poor Tom, who killed Mr. Scrooge’s dear friend Fezziwig, Lord Rutledge, and Nellie Pearl, has vowed to kill one more, then Mr. Scrooge. The next one . . . it could be me. Or even you.”

  “Do you know of any ties between George Sunderland and the Colley Brothers? Some enterprise they may have shared?”

  “I know they’re all dead,” Lord Dyer said darkly. “Beyond that, no.”

  Adelaide took up the charge. “Father, do you know anything of the Royal Quarter and the evil they get up to there? Smithson? The Lady?”

  Lord Dyer stirred. “The Lady?” He looked up, his eyes flickering as if he were recalling earlier conversations. “Tom spoke of The Lady. Some woman with a scheme that would ensure that we would pick up Fezziwig’s land for a fraction of what it was worth. I thought little of it. Tom was always coming up with this scheme or that. I assumed this ‘Lady’ was some patron. Perhaps a wife if God was kind, as Tom would have excelled as a kept man. . . .”

  “But there must be more to it?” I interjected. “We must examine his paperwork, study the business of the proposed
acquisition of Fezziwig’s land.”

  “If you wish. My men retrieved Tom’s belongings after the attack. There are boxes of the stuff stored in the gamekeeper’s lodge. Adelaide can show you the way through the gardens. Myself . . . I’m feeling quite tired. Some days it is like all my sins weigh me down like chains posed to drag me to perdition.”

  As Adelaide and her father kissed good-bye by the doors of the stone lodge, and the carriage trundled back towards the splendor of the manor, I bit my lip to calm my beating heart. We were close to a new revelation. I could feel it!

  In the dusty, freezing gamekeeper’s lodge, we dug together through boxes of Tom’s paperwork and belongings that had been removed before the police could get their hands on anything that might embarrass the house of Dyer. Some of it would have: journals filled with senseless rants, many aimed with fury at Adelaide and their father. Their family secret would not have lasted long in the hands of Crabapple.

  “You lied about who Tom prayed would save him because of a prior pledge,” I said at last. “Your promise to Lord Dyer to keep your lineage—and Tom’s—secret.”

  She shook her head. “It’s tempting to let you believe that. The truth is . . . selfishly . . . I just try to have as little to do with that man as I can.”

  “But perhaps, considering the things he told you today, those old wounds, the rift between you, it could be repaired.”

  A thin smile etched itself upon her pretty face. “Are you talking about my father and me . . . or us?”

  I thought of all I had learned of this strange woman; she was so unlike my Belle. But something in me felt drawn to her. Was it merely a respect for someone else who had to make their own way in the world? But no, I felt it was more than that, there were other feelings . . . but this was neither the time nor place for these complications. The killer had to be the priority and anything else was unimportant . . . for the moment.

  Adelaide gave a cry and revealed a box stuffed to the brim with paperwork. Contracts. Ledgers. All from Fezziwig’s offices.

  “But Inspector Foote firmly assured us that all of Fezziwig’s most recent ledgers were there and were in order,” I said. “Nothing had been taken from Fezziwig’s establishment. He was quite certain.”

  “Well, you were his clerk once—are these written in Fezziwig’s hand?”

  I nodded.

  “Then we should see the ledgers left in his office,” she said. “In fact, I need to see them for myself!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  BEHIND US, CRABAPPLE locked the front door to Fezziwig’s former office, stifling the sound of a nearby newspaper boy calling “Fire! Fire! Great fire in London only yesterday! Read all about it!” The stench of smoke and burning chemicals still impregnated my hair, yet so was the horror from the clock tower chase, the confusion following Adelaide’s abrupt revelations about her lineage, and the exhaustion from the most harrowing week of my life.

  We crept through the front room, passing the rudimentary fireplace and a mahogany pedestal desk that now bore wilting sprigs of holly and cards of condolences. The building was unoccupied; Fezziwig’s body had been transferred to a funeral home after the wake, and Jane Fezziwig had escaped the morbidity by packing up her daughters and travelling to family in York. I presumed that Dick Wilkins would help Jane deal with Dyer’s overtures, but even he was not here.

  A dark atmosphere lingered, and we treaded gingerly and cautiously as if evading the sudden horrors of death. Laughter, scurrying, jokes, and parties had once been the music of this place; now there was only the silence of the grave.

  Shen ascended the fragile staircase to the workroom, followed by Dickens and Adelaide. Each step groaned like the undead. As Adelaide reached the top, before she vanished through the trapdoor, she turned and sent me a sad smile and the slightest nod. She sensed that my soul was wailing with painful nostalgia. I took a deep breath and placed my foot on the bottom step.

  The spacious workroom was dusty and forgotten, and it appeared Mrs. Fezziwig had not stepped foot up here since the police had ended their investigation. The crime scene had been swept clean, but the sickly smells of death still lingered as subtle as a ghost’s footprint.

  Adelaide and Dickens were already rummaging through the cases holding Fezziwig’s books and ledgers; Crabapple and Shen heaved the looms and spinning wheels away from the floor to make space to splay out the papers. Soon the wooden floor was carpeted with records, and Adelaide was scanning them, quickly and efficiently, her eyes working like the automatic needle of a sewing machine.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, jabbing her finger in one of the archives. “Pass me the set of Tom’s accounts, please!” I handed her the package I had been clutching, the roll of papers we had retrieved from the gamekeeper’s lodge. With her head flicking between the two like a metronome, she compared the records meticulously.

  “Well?” barked Crabapple, but I lifted my hand to silence him. Adelaide was both quick and thorough, and she deserved her concentration.

  “There are many discrepancies, Constable,” she said, running her finger down line by line as she crouched on the floor of the workroom. Dickens helped her by studying figures and names and making notes of every point of inconsistency. “Entire pages with certain entries missing, other names and addresses have been replaced with what looks like nonsense. Made-up names? Code? All recorded in a hurry, it seems.”

  Then she got up, dusted off her dress, and sighed. “Tom forged these. I know his hand.” In that moment, her eyes seemed dark with a profound sadness.

  “But how was he able to switch the ledgers?” I asked.

  “He must have come here often,” said Shen. “Different ink, different day.”

  “He was letting himself in and out as often as he liked,” said Dickens, calling from the window at the far corner of the room. “Look.” With a smooth and soundless movement, he slid the window open and leaned out, feeling the sill with his fingers. “It’s been prized open from the outside so many times the latch mechanism has snapped. Nobody would know unless they opened it, which I doubt has been necessary since summer.”

  Crabapple started pacing, scratching his moustache and making nasal noises as he thought. “He was setting something in motion, then. Needed to cover his tracks as he went along. Stay where I can see you, Shen! You are still a fugitive criminal as far as I’m concerned! Your grace period lasts only as long as you help solve this abomination.”

  Shen had been moving to the window to see what Dickens had discovered but turned and sat down. He didn’t care about the man’s threats. He sought only to get to the bottom of this and do what he might to protect Nellie’s legacy.

  “Stellar policing, Crabapple,” I scoffed. “London’s underground opium dens may rest safely yet another night.” The constable ignored me, snatching away the papers Adelaide had been comparing and scanning the leaf from top to bottom.

  “This entry here,” he said, his nose almost touching the paper, “is a farm complex up in Essex. It’s not in those copies. How many times does it turn up in that book you’ve got there?

  Adelaide checked. “A lot. Only in the originals, though. In Tom’s forgeries it has been replaced with . . . I don’t know that address. I doubt it exists.”

  “Criminals often hide their wrongdoing in plain sight,” Shen mused, staring into the space of the room as if he were counting dust flecks dancing in the afternoon light. “I do it all the time. The Colleys certainly did as well. Co-opting legitimate businessmen to use their offices as fronts for whatever they need, money laundering, you name it. It’s so simple to arrange. Yet . . . not with a man like Mr. Fezziwig. Too honest.”

  “Unless it was being done without his knowledge,” Crabapple said.

  A sudden chill shuddered through my body as a ghostly finger traced my spine all the way to the nape of my neck. “We need to see what’s on that farm,” I whispered. “And something tells me we should go now!”

  Two hours later the police wago
n Crabapple had commandeered veered round a gravelly corner and sped up the driveway to the farm complex, nestled in a remote valley between white hills in Essex. I had been here once before, with my former mentor, many years ago. It was a non-operational farm on land now derelict and untended that Fezziwig had held on tight to as a security asset. He had collected several such spots around the country, never selling them despite their value; he kept them for his daughters.

  The stone farmhouse stood empty, with black windows staring at us like dead and hollow eyes. Parts of the roof had caved in under the weight of snow and neglect. The adjacent farm buildings, spread out across at least an acre, consisted of cowsheds, stables, and barns. It would take us hours to search them all.

  Adelaide sighed, steam bursting from her red lips and into the frozen air. Just as I was about to suggest starting at the farmhouse, a horse snorted. The beast was tethered to a broken winnowing machine outside a threshing barn; its trotting tracks led right from where we stood. Someone was here.

  With hushed whispers and exaggerated gestures, Crabapple indicated that Shen and Dickens should creep round to the back of the barn, avoiding the horse lest it got startled and alerted its rider. The two of them would block any exit from the back while he and I snuck in from the front. Adelaide was ordered to stay safely hidden in the wagon, a suggestion she bore with a tense and reluctant obedience.

  “Wouldn’t it be safest to alert your men, Constable?” she asked with a palpable irritation. Crabapple’s face grew dark.

  “No time,” he answered. “And there ain’t no one left that would help me these days. Not even Humperdink, and if that don’t show how a man has fallen, nothing will.”

  The heavy padlock securing the front door was smashed and hanging limply from a broken hinge. I pushed the door gently. It creaked, so I stopped, slowly prying it open just enough for us to squeeze in through the crack.