by Evelyn James
The Trouble with Tortoises
A Clara Fitzgerald Mystery
Book 19
By
Evelyn James
Red Raven Publications
2020
© Evelyn James 2020
First published 2020
Red Raven Publications
The right of Evelyn James to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the permission in writing from the author
The Trouble with Tortoises is the nineteenth book in the Clara Fitzgerald series
Other titles in the Series:
Memories of the Dead
Flight of Fancy
Murder in Mink
Carnival of Criminals
Mistletoe and Murder
The Poisoned Pen
Grave Suspicions of Murder
The Woman Died Thrice
Murder and Mascara
The Green Jade Dragon
The Monster at the Window
Murder on the Mary Jane
The Missing Wife
The Traitor’s Bones
The Fossil Murder
Mr Lynch’s Prophecy
Death at the Pantomime
The Cowboy’s Crime
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter One
It was the first of December, the last month of 1922, and most of Brighton was thinking of the upcoming festivities, and the dark, cold days of January that would follow. Clara Fitzgerald should have been thinking of Christmas; of gifts for friends, of charity baskets for the poor, of who to send a Christmas card to and who would find it a burden as it would mean sending one back. There were plans to be made for the decorations, oh, it would be a couple of weeks before they would be needed, but greenery had to be sourced, wreaths had to be made, orange pomanders crafted and set aside and, if they wanted a tree, then they would have to find someone selling them.
Decisions for who to invite for Christmas Day would need to be discussed, and they generally took up far more time than ever seemed sensible. Who might prefer to pop in on Christmas Eve? And who might appear unexpectedly?
Then there was the meal itself; Annie, the Fitzgeralds’ housekeeper, friend (and fiancée of Tommy Fitzgerald) would fret over the matter endlessly. Goose was traditional, but would there be enough? Turkey was growing in popularity and it was a bigger bird, but Annie worried it would offend some of their older guests to be fed a relatively ‘modern’ bird. And Clara would always throw in the possibility of having beef this year, which would really put the cat among the pigeons. Could Clara help it that she preferred beef? And it was her house and her Christmas Day meal after all.
No, there was always enough to worry about over December as it was, without anything extra to add to the complication.
Yet, this year, Clara found any attempt to think about Christmas thwarted by a bigger problem that she was facing. She had a murder to solve, and if she did not do so swiftly, there was a possibility it would lead to another.
Just a few days before, a Chinese woman by the name of Jao Leong had died during a police raid. The obvious assumption was that she was a victim of a stray bullet during the fracas, which had also involved the local military forces. Jao had been the leader of a criminal gang which was terrorising Brighton, and the raid had been orchestrated by Clara to finally bring an end to the woman’s tyranny. Truthfully, the Chief Constable did not much care who had shot Jao. He was just glad she was gone, and Clara would never have become involved was it not for Jao’s brother.
Brilliant Chang, truly a criminal mastermind, had begged Clara for help when his sister had betrayed him and set up her own gang to rival him. He had been influential in seeing that the police raid on Jao’s headquarters had occurred, but he had never intended for his sister to die. Despite all Jao had done to him – threatening to ruin his criminal empire and even endangering his life – Brilliant had felt a deep loyalty to his younger sibling. His purpose in bringing her to justice had never been just about saving himself; he feared for her, feared that something like this shooting would happen, and had hoped she could be arrested and placed safely in prison before such a thing occurred. That was why he had sought out Clara and persuaded her to work with him. He had even assisted (at least from a distance) the local police, but he had never meant for any harm to come to Jao.
Brilliant was outraged over his sister’s death and when you are a criminal mastermind your outrage can have violent outcomes. He naturally blamed the police and the focus for his fury was Inspector Park-Coombs – while it was the Chief Constable who had ordered the raid, he was out of reach, and since no one could say who fired the deadly bullet, Park-Coombs proved a suitable decoy for Chang’s wrath. Brilliant wanted revenge, and Clara had no doubt that boiling with grief and guilt, he would lash out at Park-Coombs if the real culprit was not discovered.
The inspector, himself, was sure it was not a police bullet that had snatched Jao’s life, and Clara was inclined to agree. Just before Jao died, she had been stabbed by one of her underlings – it seemed someone within her gang wanted her dead. Clara felt it was a fair argument to suggest someone with betrayal on their mind had taken the opportunity of the shootout to kill Jao.
Park-Coombs had asked her to investigate independently and discovered the truth. His hands were tied, and in any case, his word would never be good enough for Brilliant Chang. No, an independent voice was needed, one that Chang trusted, and he did trust Clara, for he believed she was pathologically honest and would not lie to him.
Clara had contemplated in her darkest moments, (usually when lying in bed just before dawn, wide awake) what she would do if she did discover that it was a policeman or a soldier who shot Jao by chance. Would she tell Chang the truth or lie to him to save people just doing their job? She had not managed to come up with an answer.
And now, here she was, stood in the room where Jao had met her end. It was a spacious attic room four floors above the street, with a pitched ceiling that sloped down so low it was impossible to stand upright anywhere but in the central aisle of the space. There was a bed, the blankets still rumpled. A comfortable chair with a red, patterned fabric and big arms, the sort of chair you could sink into like a hug. There was a desk covered in papers that were largely written in Chinese letters, and thus unreadable to Clara. An oval rug rested over the bare boards at one end of the room, while a square one covered the space next to the bed. Both were new and very soft and plush. Other furniture was as might be expected – wardrobe, dressing table, chest of drawers. The room was expensiv
ely furnished and luxurious, the perfect den for a female criminal to tuck herself away in.
Here Jao could plot her schemes relatively safely. She was high up from street level and no doubt had her door guarded. No, the only way a person could have shot her was if they were part of her gang and able to get past her guards or they shot her through the window, as the Chief Constable was content to believe.
Clara moved to the blood stain on the pale floorboards that marked where Jao had fallen. The stain had partially seeped into the plush rug and marred its pale, cream border. Tommy, Clara’s brother and now her partner in the detective business, moved beside her. He had been exploring the room, getting a feel for it, but inevitably he was drawn, just like his sister, back to the bloody circle on the floor.
“Have you got that photograph Oliver took of the scene?” Clara asked him.
Tommy produced a large black and white image, showing Jao’s corpse lying on the floor. Oliver Bankes worked part-time as the police crime scene photographer; he was also a friend of the Fitzgeralds. As Clara looked at the picture he had provided them with, a random thought reminded her to ask Oliver for Christmas dinner. How strangely the mind could work, she mused, before setting herself to the task at hand.
Clara had studied this picture for hours since she had been sent it with Inspector Park-Coombs’ blessing. He wanted her to have every scrap of evidence there was available to assist her. Clara now compared the image of Jao’s body, with the bloodstain on the floor.
“Every time I look at the photograph I am struck by the same thing,” Clara said to her brother. “Look where the blood stain is in relation to the window and how Jao fell. Jao was much shorter than me and for me to tumble back in the same way she did and end up here, I could not have been looking out the window.”
Clara demonstrated. Tommy was not entirely convinced.
“Depends if she just fell straight back, could be in her dying moments she took a step back first. People fall in funny ways when they are shot.”
Tommy had served in the war and he had seen enough men die to know that there was nothing hard and fast about death.
“Still, it makes you wonder,” Clara said. “And the wound was to the side of her head, as if she was turning away.”
“Could be she looked out, then decided it would be better to stay away from the window, or she was called away.”
Clara nodded. It was a fair point.
“That being said,” Tommy added. “The angle could also indicate that someone shot her from the doorway. If they were stood on the threshold, then they might have shot her at the right angle, and she could have fallen back in the same place.”
“Or they moved her to make it seem she had fallen back the way we found her,” Clara said. “Then there is the window. All the windows in the rest of this house are shut tight, except for those that were opened so someone could fire a gun through them. The night of the raid it was bitterly cold and there is only a small fireplace in this room. Why would you open a window and let the cold air in, except if you had to, to fire a gun? Only, Jao was not holding a gun when we found her and there was no gun found in this room.”
Tommy joined Clara by the window and they looked out to the street below. The spot where the military had stopped their lorries to form a barricade was still visible from patches of oil left on the road. One of the lorries had been punctured through the bonnet and had leaked a considerable amount of petrol and oil before the shootout was concluded. Tommy studied the scene, looking at the line down to the barricades.
“I wasn’t a bad marksman in the war, but I would say it would be a very lucky shot that not only came through this window but hit its target from that angle,” he said. “I could look into that further.”
“That would be helpful,” Clara nodded. She grabbed the edge of the window and pulled up the pane. A sharp blast of cold air blew straight in. “The houses funnel the wind right up the street and through this window. You wouldn’t have this wide open on a winter’s day, you would freeze to death.”
Tommy was more curious about the height of the opening. He took out a pencil and started to contemplate angles again.
“It would be tough to get a head shot through this opening,” he said. “Not impossible, but more likely to hit the neck or shoulder. Just stand here, Clara.”
Clara obeyed and moved into the position he pointed to. Tommy stepped back, assessed Clara’s position in relation to the blood stain, and then moved her a fraction. He went back to lining his pencil up at various angles through the open window.
“Very tight. I mean, it’s an acute angle to begin with, and to hit someone in the head, even someone shorter than you Clara, would mean the bullet skimmed in just beneath the very top edge of the opening,” Tommy demonstrated by moving his pencil slowly through the air. He paused by Clara’s shoulder. “Of course, lucky shots do happen.”
“Either Jao was the victim of major misfortune, or someone thought that by shooting her during the raid they could lay the blame on the police. They were probably hoping the raid would be a failure and they could step into Jao’s place once it was over,” Clara was still looking down at the street. She had not been present at the raid, but she found herself imagining the scene in vivid detail.
“The killer could have been hoping the police would not look too far when they found her dead, just assume she was a victim of the shooting. There were a few of them, after all,” Tommy said.
“And they would have been right to hope that, considering the attitude of the Chief Constable. Who cares if a criminal is shot dead? Especially one who is as much trouble as Jao Leong?”
“The question now is who hated her enough to take a chance in killing her?” Tommy looked around the room again, as if a fresh clue would spring to mind. “Had to be someone she knew and trusted, else they would never have got this close, especially in the middle of a gunfight.”
“And Jao had no gun,” Clara frowned. “Taking a backseat from the fighting, perhaps?”
“Confident her men could handle it.”
“Or uninclined to risk herself,” Clara shrugged. “Jao was the sort of person who values themselves above all others. Maybe that is why she came to be so detested by some of her people?”
“It’s all very curious, but I am not sure how you are going to solve this one,” Tommy said with a hint of melancholy to his tone. “There is no evidence to point to a suspect, at least none we have so far found, and I don’t think any of the men currently in police custody are going to be willing to talk about it. They have more to gain by keeping quiet. No one wants Brilliant Chang out for their blood, after all.”
“The sort of people happy to let the police take the blame,” Clara sounded despondent too. “Still, you never know what might come up until you look.”
She shut the window, having started to shiver quite badly from the cold wind blasting inside.
Tommy also gave a shudder, and it was not from the cold. This death house had an unpleasant aura about it.
“Let’s go home,” he suggested. “I hate this place.”
Chapter Two
Clara was glad to return home and step out of the biting wind. They were due a storm, of that she was sure. The Brighton Gazette had said as much in its weather column, though they were not renowned for being reliable in their predictions. But the pale grey sky, thick with dense clouds, told its own story. It was not a time to be outdoors.
Bramble, the Fitzgeralds’ small black poodle, greeted Clara and Tommy with typical enthusiasm, prancing on his back paws in merriment. He was enjoying the Christmas preparations which had meant the kitchen was especially busy and there were lots of opportunities to steal something when Annie had her back turned. He had already disgraced himself by liberating a bacon joint from its baking dish.
Annie popped her head around the kitchen door to see who had entered. She had her ‘busy’ look on her face, which was somewhere between stern and determined. It was best not to interfere with
her at times like this.
“A note came for you, Clara,” she called out. “From Colonel Brandt. It’s on the telephone table.”
She disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Is it worth removing my coat?” Tommy asked as Clara found the note and read it.
“Colonel Brandt has asked I come over to the Gentlemen’s Club as one of his fellow club members is in need of the services of a detective.”
Clara thought about facing the cold north wind yet again and resolved herself to her fate.
“It doesn’t require the both of us,” she said. “I need you working out firing angles, anyway.”
“I’ll need some help,” Tommy replied. “Someone who understands the technicalities of bullet trajectories.”
“Know anyone who could assist?”
Tommy considered for a moment.
“I might. Whether he will be willing to become involved is another matter, but I shall see what I can do.”
“Very well, you do that, I shall head to the Gentlemen’s Club,” Clara glanced at the hall clock to discover the time. “I wonder if they will let me have some luncheon there? Oh well, if not, I shall come home ravenous.”
Grabbing her coat, hat and gloves, she departed once more into the cold.
Brighton had only one Gentlemen’s Club and it was not quite on a par with the sort found in London, but it served its purpose and, during the summer, its numbers positively swelled as visiting gentlemen retreated to its quiet smoking and reading rooms. It was not a place a woman was supposed to set foot, even the staff were all male, but Clara had never been a person to allow such concerns to worry her. Besides, she was already known at the club.
She hurried up the stairs just as the wind found new momentum and hurried down the street, whipping up loose leaves and scraps of paper. A folding shop sign fell victim to its force and Clara heard an old man swear as his umbrella was whisked inside out. She was glad to get through the heavy doors and put the chaotic weather behind her.
