by Evelyn James
Chang looked hurt.
“I thought you knew me better than to suppose I would go after innocents to get to the guilty.”
“Those men in the police station seemed to think you would do something like that.”
Chang snorted.
“Bobby Jones and his cohorts think only of what they would do in my situation and judge me accordingly. I played on that. It does not mean I would ever do it. I have respect for family, Clara, you should know that.”
“I know very little about you, Chang,” Clara reminded him. “You are a complicated person to understand, that is probably why you have survived in your chosen occupation so long. You are never quite what I expect you to be.”
Chang seemed to like this assessment. Clara did not add that his recent fury aimed at Park-Coombs, his threats towards the inspector if it turned out the police had killed his sister, hardly fitted with his attempt to present himself as a man who would not hurt innocents. The situation was confusing because of its many layers of consequence and complexity. Morally, there was a huge dilemma facing Clara over this whole sorry mess and nothing seemed to be quite what it seemed.
“What bothers me,” Chang said, finally deciding he was not going to drink his tea and replacing the cup in its saucer. “Is that Graham would try this at all. He never struck me as the sort to be so… daring.”
“Then you think Bobby is lying?” Clara suggested. “That he thinks we shall never catch up with Graham and by naming him as the killer he helps himself?”
“I don’t know,” Chang admitted. “I almost wonder, if Graham is responsible, whether someone told him to do it. That seems more likely than him suddenly making the decision for himself.”
“I suppose the only way we will know for sure is if we find Graham and hear his side of the story.”
“He could easily lie to us,” Chang had lost his good humour. “Everyone lies to me. It is my curse.”
Clara wondered if she should point out that Chang had brought this problem on himself by scaring and intimidating people. That the world he ran in was beset by the problem of deception, but she doubted he wanted to hear that. He probably knew, anyway.
“Is there any chance Graham could be in Brighton?” She asked finally.
Chang had his head tilted down, but he flicked his eyes up at her.
“Why would he stay?”
“He might not have the money for the train fare to London,” Clara pointed out. “Or he might be worried to return there in case people are looking for him. He might not know who was arrested after the raid.”
“I think he would be foolish to do that.”
“It was pretty foolish to attack Jao in the first place,” Clara said. “Sometimes people take chances. He won’t be walking to London in this weather, in any case. He will have to go by train and as I said before, he might not have the fare. After all, he had to leave the hideout in a hurry when his assault on Jao failed. He could easily have left his possessions behind.”
Chang was turning all this over in his mind. It was possible, people could end up in awkward situations.
“Does he know anyone in Brighton?” Clara asked.
“I have a few contacts here who Graham knows too. I don’t think he would risk seeking them out.”
“We need to be open to the possibility he has remained in the town,” Clara insisted. “I shall do what I can to find him, but I shall need some names from you to give me a start.”
Chang grumbled about this but conceded the logic and scribbled a list of names and addresses for her. Then they were done. They parted at the door of the tearoom.
“I hate the cold,” Chang complained, pulling his scarf up higher.
He walked off into the snow, a huddled figure disappearing into the thick flakes. Clara set her steps towards home, thinking of the possibility of a warm fire and the comfort of a thick blanket.
Chapter Seventeen
The snow continued to come down heavily through the afternoon. Clara watched it anxiously from the window seat in the parlour. Where was Jeremiah? Was he warm? She had sent a message to Mr Malory informing him of the sad news of Ethel Dickinson’s untimely death and explaining that she was pursuing a lead related to the tortoise mystery. He had not responded, and she could only suppose he had failed to find Jeremiah tucked beneath a sofa. She was left with the worrying prospect that Jeremiah had been stolen and exchanged for a pawn ticket.
Clara considered her options, they were few – wait for a note from the disagreeable landlord that Alf had appeared in the pub or take a chance on finding Alf at his home address. Since Clara was not remarkable for her patience, and with the falling snow increasing her agitation for Jeremiah’s welfare, she determined on the latter course.
When the snow eased, she collected her thickest winter coat, donned sheepskin lined mittens and a warm woollen scarf, and set out into the world once more.
The road looked pretty beneath its glistening layer of white snow. It almost seemed a sin to mar the crisp surface with footprints, but Clara was not the first to venture outdoors. It was the middle of the day and people had business to attend to. A horse and cart were trotting down the centre of the street, making ruts in the few inches of snow. It was only a slight covering for the moment, if it fell again overnight then the town would be truly cocooned in an icy blanket.
Clara had found her trusty street directory (the special edition sold with a detailed fold out map of the town) and had located Alf Martin’s home. It was on the other side of Brighton and she would need to catch an omnibus, just as long as they were still working in this weather. Stamping her feet to keep them warm, Clara reached the nearest bus stop and was relieved when a bus came into view. It was running a little slower than usual, due to the icy roads, but that hardly mattered.
It took close to an hour for Clara to reach her destination and it involved changing buses halfway. When she finally found herself in Alf Martin’s road, the sky grey and stark, heavy white clouds threatened further snow. The bus driver had informed her that if it snowed much more, they would have to return to the depot and remain there. Clara tried not to think about how she might get home if the buses were not running.
Snow had a magical way of making even the dingiest of places look pretty. The sparkling whiteness made a street that would have otherwise been considered filthy and down-at-heel, look charming and even rather quaint. Clara had no doubt that once this snow melted the unpaved road would go back to being a muddy walkthrough. There was no pavement and the houses had no front gardens. The houses looked bare, the windows often lacking curtains and several had broken panes that had been crudely masked over with newspaper. Though not quite a slum, as some areas in the town could be called, it was plain this was not a place you lived in because you had a choice.
The houses lacked numbers, which made finding the correct address challenging. Clara could not know which side of the street the numbering began, or, for that matter, which end, so she simply started counting houses on her left and hoped for the best. Presumably Royal Mail rarely came down this way and so house numbers were little called for.
She reached a house that could have been number fifteen, it also could have been number ten (if you started counting from the other end of the road) and if the numbering followed an odds-one,-side, evens-the-other system, then it might have been number twenty-nine or number thirty, or, well, any number really.
Deciding it was going to be easiest to simply knock and ask for directions, Clara approached the door and rapped on it. An old woman answered; hunched over from age and with pure white hair that fell in ragged, greasy strands about her face, the woman could have been a caricature from a Victorian Gothic novel.
“Yes?”
“I am looking for Alf Martin’s house,” Clara informed her, she seemed friendly which was a start. “I believe he lives with his mother?”
The older woman seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to respond, then a shaky hand lifted and pointed to a
house a few doors down on the opposite side of the road.
“The Martins live there,” she said. “But I don’t have anything to do with them.”
With that the woman shut the door in Clara’s face. The sudden rudeness surprised Clara and she wondered if it had anything to do with her mentioning the Martins.
Pondering this, she crossed the road and approached the house the woman had indicated. She knocked again and this time was greeted by the noise of a dog furiously barking inside. The creature sounded enormous and ferocious. Clara was a tad concerned that she might be bitten when the door opened. She could hear a woman telling the dog to shut up and then the door was yanked open – it had to be pulled hard as it had swelled in the frame and would stick otherwise.
The woman on the threshold had a tired, grey face, though her hair was still a deep blue-black. She was lean, in the way that suggests a lack of filling meals. She stroked a strand of hair behind her ear and gave Clara a good look.
“Would you be Mrs Martin?” Clara asked.
The woman did not seem to want to answer at first, then she nodded.
“I am sorry to disturb you. It is nothing serious. I just want to find Alf Martin.”
“My son is not here,” Mrs Martin declared, and Clara’s heart sank.
What a wasted journey in the snow. She might have known she was on a fool’s errand. Clara’s sudden look of disappointment, which she had not masked, caused Mrs Martin to pause and reconsider. Her tone softened as she spoke further.
“Why had you hoped to see him?”
“I believe Ethel Dickinson gave him a box,” Clara explained. “There is something inside the box I want. Ethel has passed over, you see.”
“Oh,” Mrs Martin was stunned by the information. “Poor girl.”
“Her mother is beside herself, as you can imagine. What with her lads in prison.”
“That woman has had nothing but rotten luck,” Mrs Martin agreed. “I know her because her son, Trevor, was on the same job as my boy, at a factory. Only her lad was scouting out the place to rob it. And he did. Alf nearly got himself involved but saw sense at the last moment. That boy has no brain in his head, I fear.”
Mrs Martin was not the fearsome force Clara had imagined from the Red Lion landlord’s description, though perhaps when she was riled she was more worrying.
“Do you happen to know when your son might be at home?”
“I can’t say, he comes and goes with no rhyme or reason to it,” Mrs Martin shrugged. “You come a long way?”
“From the other side of town,” Clara admitted.
The woman gave her another long look.
“Sorry you have had a wasted journey. Why don’t you come in and warm up before you head back?”
“Thank you,” Clara replied, she had long ago lost the feeling in her toes.
She stepped into the humble house and discovered the fearsome beast barking at the door was a squat, bug-eyed mongrel, who wagged his tail furiously at her now she had been welcomed in. She patted the dog, whose front legs turned out at an angle, the sort of stance more commonly seen on a Queen Anne-style table.
They walked straight into Mrs Martin’s front room. She had been doing her laundry when Clara had knocked and a clothes horse stood by the open fire, half shrouded by white sheets.
“Snow is a nuisance,” Mrs Martin picked up another washed sheet from a basket and hung it over the clothes horse. “Why is this box important?”
“Well, it wasn’t Ethel’s to give,” Clara said, deciding to be honest. “Her mother is rather upset about it. She is not sure what was inside it, but she thinks it was something stolen. Mrs Dickinson does not need such a burden on her and if I could just retrieve the box and discover its contents, we could resolve the whole affair.”
Mrs Martin appeared to understand.
“She wants to make amends,” she said. “That woman has had a bad time with her boys. It was the father who started it, of course, he was always trouble. He died in prison.”
“He did,” Clara nodded. “And I think Mrs Dickinson has reached a stage where she is almost ready to give up, but she has her youngest girl to think of.”
“You have to keep trying,” Mrs Martin agreed. “Take me for example. I am a widower, much the same as Mrs Dickinson, however, my old man perished as a result of falling from the pier one summer’s day. He was prone to these odd fainting fits. We didn’t have the money for a doctor to tell us what they were all about. Normally he could feel one coming on and would make sure he was sitting down. But that day he didn’t realise what was happening and he tumbled off the end of the pier. Quite spoiled our Sunday stroll.
“That left me with Alf and Jessie to raise alone. Now that was hard, finding enough to make ends meet, and Alf always getting into mischief. I think he suffers from a version of his father’s complaint, not the fainting, but he has these odd moments when he doesn’t seem to know where he is or what he is doing.
“Anyway, the result is he has never held down a job for long. I don’t blame him for that, he clearly is troubled. But I get cross when others take advantage of him. He doesn’t have much common sense and people are always asking him to do things for them, more often than not illegal things. He has been in and out of that police station dozens of times and it is only because of his problems that they have always let him off with a warning. They can see he gets used just as I can.”
“Poor Alf,” Clara sympathised.
“I’ve tried to keep him out of trouble, but he just sees it as me attempting to control his life and so he disappears for days on end and who knows where he goes,” Mrs Martin finished with the sheets. “Take a seat if you want.”
Clara thanked her and sat down in an armchair. She rubbed her cold hands together and wished she could take off her shoes and set her feet before the fire.
“I haven’t seen Alf since the weekend, and I have not seen him with a box,” Mrs Martin added.
“Does he often accept things from Ethel?” Clara asked.
“I couldn’t say,” Mrs Martin replied. “He is sweet on her.”
She came to a halt as she recalled what Clara had said.
“I don’t suppose he knows she is dead,” she mumbled. “What happened?”
“A sudden fever,” Clara answered. “She was gone in a handful of hours.”
“Terrible,” Mrs Martin slumped back onto the arm of another chair.
“How long have they been walking out?” Clara asked.
“Oh, I don’t think they were doing anything like that,” Mrs Martin shook her head. “No, Alf was smitten, but Ethel kept her distance. He moped about the house sometimes, looking so lovesick over the girl. I don’t suppose Ethel meant any harm. She was kind to him, that’s all. She got to know him when he worked with her brother. He saw more to it than she did, but they stayed friendly, all the same.”
Clara felt no closer to a solution to the mystery. Where was Alf and where was he keeping the biscuit tin he had been given?
“I don’t suppose you could give me any idea where to find Alf?”
“I’m sorry, but he keeps that a secret from me, too worried I might track him down,” Mrs Martin gave a strange snort that was half amusement, half sorrow. “He could be lying dead in the snow for all I know. I’ve contemplated as much more often than not. My Alf is a great worry to me, but he is not a bad boy.”
“I understand,” Clara reassured her.
Mrs Martin dabbed at her eye, though there was no sign of tears; she had shed enough of those in her time.
“How are you going to find him?” She asked.
“Well, I have asked people to let me know if they see him. I would ask you the same. Tell him, he is not in any trouble, I just need to find out what is in that box to give Ethel’s mother peace of mind.”
“Children bring us so much sorrow,” Mrs Martin sniffed. “I shall do as you ask, but I wouldn’t hold out hope. Alf comes by here only when he wants a hot meal.”
“
Thank you anyway,” Clara said. “I appreciate your help.”
She rose and Mrs Martin followed her to the front door. Clara felt awkward; she had not exactly lied to the woman, but she had been cautious with the truth. Mrs Martin’s kindness and concern for Ethel’s mother made her feel guilty about that.
Back out in the snow and with the light fading, Clara turned her thoughts to Alf; where was he hiding? Surely, he must have a house, or be staying with someone? He would not stay out in this snow when he had the option of a roof over his head, would he? She hoped he was safely installed in lodgings, with a warm fire where Jeremiah could keep toasty.
With only that thought to keep her going, she strode off into the snow just as a fresh flurry began to fall. She was lucky to find the buses still running and even luckier that they took her close to home before the driver announced he was going to be returning to the depot and would not accept any more passengers.
Snow was falling thick and fast by the time she was in her front door, and there was little more Clara could do on either of her cases for the time being.
Chapter Eighteen
While Clara was making her way through the snowy streets of Brighton to speak to the Martins, Tommy and Captain Laker went to the police mortuary to see Dr Deáth. They arrived between snowfalls and traipsed down the steps, debating as they went whether it was colder inside the building than outside.
“Theoretically it should always be colder in here,” Tommy observed. “If it was ever warmer, then there would be a problem.”
“That would make sense,” Harold agreed. “Doesn’t do much for a man’s temperature however.”
He rubbed his hands together to emphasise his point. They were both wrapped up well, but the cold inside the mortuary was biting and they could see their breath as it condensed on the air before their faces.
Dr Deáth appeared immune to the freezing conditions of his workplace. He was bent over a corpse, in the process of stitching up his post-mortem incisions, wearing only shirt sleeves and a long rubber apron. His arms from the wrist up were protected by rubber sleeves that could be washed off afterwards, though Deáth was a careful surgeon and rarely splashed himself. He did not look up from his stitches as the two men appeared.
