Scarper Jack and the Bloodstained Room

by Christopher Russell

  ‘Well,’ said Rupert, emerging on to the roof and looking around. ‘Here we are then.’

  He was clutching the morning newspaper, having managed to smuggle it from the breakfast room. April thought he seemed rather full of himself. He spread the newspaper on the roof.

  ‘A woman was seen in Nunwell Street,’ he said. ‘By a clerk in one of the offices across the road. The papers are saying her name’s Freda Barlow.’

  Jack studied the newsprint and shook his head. ‘There’s no gaslight in front of number seventeen. I don’t see how anyone could clearly see a face, not looking from a window opposite.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Rupert. ‘We can forget the woman. It’s got to be Erskine and the scaffolder.’

  ‘I didn’t say that–’

  ‘You heard two men talking in Erskine’s room.’

  ‘Through the chimney?’ April was becoming irritated by Rupert’s manner. ‘One of them could easily have been a woman. Jack didn’t see them. Did you?’ she demanded.

  Jack shrugged. ‘No.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rupert, suddenly defensive, ‘what difference does it make if one of them was a woman?’

  ‘A lot,’ said April, ‘if you’re going to keep on about scaffolders.’

  ‘Forget scaffolders then,’ said Rupert airily. ‘That still leaves Erskine. I’ve deduced,’ he continued importantly, ‘that neither the housekeeper nor the maid were in the house at the time you were in the chimney. Erskine had the place to himself.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘Because they always go to the market on Tuesday mornings with our cook.’

  ‘Still doesn’t prove it was him in the room,’ retorted April.

  ‘Then we’ll just have to see what we can prove, won’t we,’ said Rupert with a rather smug smile. ‘I have an appointment with Erskine at lunchtime. To discuss art.’

  The announcement had the desired effect. Jack and April both stared at him.

  ‘And while I keep him talking, Jack can search his room. He might find all kinds of evidence.’

  ‘Such as what?’ asked April.

  Jack thought for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, nodding at Rupert, ‘I suppose the rope, for a start.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Rupert turned to April. ‘It won’t be a job for three,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could find out more about this woman Freda Barlow? Meet us back here this afternoon.’

  April felt she was being fobbed off, but she didn’t complain.

  Colonel Radcliffe had decided against having Mrs Barlow brought to the police station. The fact that she hadn’t voluntarily come forward was disturbing, if indeed she was the woman seen outside Featherstone’s office. But it was more than possible that the witness was wrong. Mrs Barlow might be entirely innocent. She might not know she’d been blatantly named by certain of the morning papers.

  However, as his carriage turned into the street where she lived, Radcliffe saw there was no hope at all of a quiet, discreet interview in her own home. The crowd outside her house was ten deep. Clearly, the press could scent blood and a large number of the public liked the smell of it too. Newsmen and onlookers turned eagerly as they recognized the Assistant Commissioner.

  ‘Come to make an arrest, sir?’

  ‘Is it true she threatened to kill Featherstone?’

  ‘Does she deny visiting Nunwell Street?’

  ‘Why has she not come forward if she didn’t do it?’

  ‘What was the murder weapon, sir?’

  ‘How did she get out?’

  Colonel Radcliffe ploughed through to the front door, looking neither left nor right; answering nothing.

  To his surprise, the front door opened as he reached it. Mrs Barlow closed it again behind him as soon as he was inside.

  ‘Colonel Radcliffe, ma’am. Assistant Commissioner of Police.’

  ‘Yes. I have seen your photograph. That is why I let you in.’

  Clearly, she had been crying. She led him through to the parlour and indicated a chair. She herself paced the room tensely.

  ‘You will know why I’m here, ma’am?’

  ‘Of course. Of course…’

  Radcliffe paused before asking the question.

  ‘Did you visit Henry Featherstone on the night he was murdered?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was no hesitation. She looked at him and nodded, eager to speak. Too eager? ‘Yes, I did… He had said I should, but at first I was too proud and angry.’ She sat down, turning away from Radcliffe. ‘Then all I could think of was that I hadn’t enough money to bury Edwin properly.’ She rocked back and forth where she sat, fists clenched in her lap. ‘And Henry Featherstone was so kind… In spite of everything I’d said about him, he was so kind…’ She wept, tears streaming down her face.

  ‘He gave you money?’ Radcliffe’s questions were gentle but insistent.

  She nodded. ‘He gave me money. Not just for the funeral, but for our immediate debts as well…’

  ‘Might I ask how much?’

  ‘Two hundred pounds in cash.’

  ‘A great deal, ma’am.’

  ‘He said I didn’t need to tell anyone where the money had come from: that I should just let people think one of Edwin’s investments had proved a success after all.’

  ‘Were you aware of Featherstone locking the street door again when you left?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. He spoke of it as his constant routine.’

  ‘And you saw or heard nothing else untoward? No one else in or near the building?’

  She shook her head. Colonel Radcliffe found it difficult to doubt her honesty. But perhaps it was just the grief that was genuine, not her version of events.

  ‘Then I shall trouble you no further at the moment, ma’am. Just…’

  As he stood up, he drew from his pocket a flat, lidded tin and a fold of thickish paper.

  ‘I wonder if you would be so kind… This is a procedure not unknown in India, where I was until recently engaged, and which I hope now to pioneer in England.’ He opened the tin. Inside was what appeared to be a pad of damp, greasy soot. ‘It’s a kind of ink, ma’am, though it will wash off, I assure you. And it provides a means of identification – or in your case, I’m sure, elimination. May I?’

  He took her hand politely, gently, placed her fingertips on the pad and then rolled them on the paper. She stiffened and recoiled. He let go of her hand and nodded at the black marks she’d left behind.

  ‘Fingerprints, ma’am,’ he said with a reassuring smile. ‘Everyone’s are different.’

  Behind him, beyond the lace inner curtains, the face of a small girl who had wriggled her way through the crowd was pressed against the window.

  Rupert let Jack in at the side gate.

  ‘You’d better not use their fire escape,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if the doors are kept unlocked. Use the backstairs instead. Their housekeeper’s in our kitchen gossiping with Elizabeth so there’s only their maid, Joan, to get past. Give me two minutes. She should answer the front door when I knock.’

  Jack ran at the creeper-covered dividing wall and scrambled swiftly up and over into next door’s garden. Then he crouched where he could see the basement kitchen, and waited.

  He heard Rupert’s knock, deliberately loud, at the front door, and saw the maid disappear from the kitchen to answer it. Jack ran to the kitchen door, nipped inside and stood a moment, getting his bearings. The layout of the house was, he guessed, a mirror image of the Shoreys’. The backstairs, the servants’ stairs, had to be through the door in front of him. He found them and bounded up two at a time. At the top of the second flight, he paused and cautiously opened the door into the corridor. No one about. He ran along to what he was sure must be the artist’s room and quietly turned the door handle. The door was locked.

  For a moment Jack stood staring at the brass doorknob, angry that neither he nor Rupert had anticipated this. He turned to retrace his steps, then realized what he must do.

  ‘Hello, I’m Rup
ert. Very good of you to spare the time, sir.’

  In the Knights’ hallway, Hugo Erskine shook the proffered hand and tried to look pleased.

  ‘No trouble at all,’ he said. ‘Though I am rather busy.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Where are you working at the moment, sir? I’d love to see.’

  Erskine showed Rupert into the dining room. All the furniture had been removed, stepladders and planks were propped in one corner, and the floor was covered by a huge dust sheet. A stag, poised haughtily on a mountain top, stared down from the wall opposite the door. Rays of sunshine streamed through cloudy skies behind the beast and a thick pine forest was sprouting in the foreground.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Rupert, gazing at the very life-sized and life-like animal.

  ‘The client’s choice,’ said Erskine with a slight shrug, absolving himself of blame.

  Two floors above, Jack squeezed himself into the fireplace of the Knights’ attic room and began to climb. He reached the main chimney space, hesitated for a moment, then lowered himself into another narrow and very sooty flue. The Knights weren’t as punctilious as the Shoreys about having their chimneys regularly cleaned.

  He emerged in the fireplace of a first-floor room and crouched, rubbing soot from his eyes and stifling the urge to cough up the black dust he’d breathed into his lungs. His knees and elbows were scraped and bleeding a little but he was in the right room, the artist’s room. The room in which he had heard murder plotted.

  Jack stood up, wiping his hands on his shirt in an effort to clean them a little, and glanced quickly around. Everywhere there were paintings, some finished, some half finished, some on easels, some propped against the walls and the furniture. The bare floorboards were spattered with paint, and strips of canvas with daubs of different colours hung like washing on a line by the window. Cautiously, trying not to shed too much soot, Jack stepped away from the hearth, intending to search behind the canvases propped on the floor.

  The painted faces seemed to look up at him as he hovered over them. A street singer, his mouth wide open, held out a cloth cap for pennies; a carpenter sawed a plank of wood; bricklayers sweated under hods full of bricks; and a group of scaffolders sat nonchalantly eating their lunch on a girder above a tumbling river. Jack was mesmerized. He’d never seen paintings before, not close up, not like this. He felt he wanted to speak to these people, to put a penny in the singer’s cap and to balance on the girder with the scaffolders. He told himself off. Concentrate.

  He skirted the room, peeping behind the canvases without actually touching them, but that was enough to see there were no coils of rope, no piles of sovereigns or bank notes. The furniture in the room consisted of a couple of battered old armchairs and an equally old kitchen table with one drawer. Jack wiped his hands on his shirt again before opening the drawer. It was stuffed full of scraps of paper, pencils, brushes, charcoal, palette knives, all the tools, he presumed, of the artist’s trade.

  Near the back of the drawer, he found a manilla envelope. It contained more scraps of paper: handwritten notes, lists and bills, but no money. Still, it was more interesting than anything else he’d found. Jack hesitated. He was no thief but perhaps, just perhaps, this could be useful. He slipped the envelope inside his shirt and shut the drawer. He could always get it back to the artist later. Somehow. He scanned the room again. He had to be quick now. There was no telling how long Rupert could keep Erskine talking.

  Rupert was still in the half-painted dining room. Just. He’d exhausted his store of questions regarding the influence of classical art on the modern and was becoming desperate.

  ‘So tell me, please,’ he begged, ‘about brushes.’

  ‘Brushes?’ repeated the long-suffering Erskine without enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes, would you recommend squirrel hair or badger? Or is there really nothing to match Siberian mink?’

  ‘For oils or watercolour?’

  ‘Uh, yes. Indeed. Both. Either. Of course.’

  As Jack turned from the table in Erskine’s room, he noticed again the scraps of canvas on their washing line by the window. Each one had splodges of paint, different colours daubed on singly then swirled together. He guessed the artist used these to experiment with mixing the shades he wanted for his canvases. One scrap in particular attracted his eye. The reds and blues and blacks were mixed in the centre to a deep bruise purple. But it wasn’t the colour that had made him look more closely. In the barely dry paint, he could clearly see marks where the artist had held the canvas. Marks made by fingers. What had he heard about such marks? Quite recently. He couldn’t remember but he reached up anyway and quickly unpegged the scrap of canvas, slipping it inside his shirt, next to the manilla envelope. Then he hurried back to the fireplace, scuffing his feet from side to side to obliterate the footprints he had made. Crouching beneath the mantelpiece, he blew some more damp, black dust from the hearth into the room, hoping to make it look as if there had been a sudden heavy fall of soot from an unswept chimney. With a bit of luck, Mr Jevons might even get another job.

  Jack squirmed and clawed his way slowly up inside the flue until he reached the main chimney space again. There he paused, his feet braced against one wall, his back against the other, and silently spat soot from his mouth and rested his aching arms for a moment. He was anxious now about emerging back into the Knights’ attic. Their maid or housekeeper could be anywhere now; quite possibly on the backstairs. If he tried to go out that way, he might be seen, stopped. He concentrated hard, trying to work out which flue would lead down into the Shoreys’ attic instead. That would be a safer exit route. A sudden noise startled him, a key in a lock and footsteps on the bare boards below.

  ‘Feather-brained child…’ muttered Erskine.

  He stopped in the middle of his room. Something was not quite right. He was used to remembering, visualizing the arrangement of objects. There was a gap in his line of colour samples. One was missing. It must have fallen from its peg into the litter beneath. No matter. He could find it later. And there must have been a fall of soot too. How messy. Everything was irritating but he was late, thanks to the idiot Rupert. He gathered up sketch pad and charcoal and hurried out.

  Jack waited until he heard the key turning in the lock again, then eased himself down into the Shoreys’ attic chimney. The room almost felt homely, he had been there so many times now. He hurried out into the passage, heading for the fire escape, then stopped. Someone was banging about in Rupert’s room below. He crept to the top of the staircase and peeped down. Perhaps Rupert was back already. Softly, he descended a few steps so he could see through the open bedroom door. But it wasn’t Rupert clattering about. It was Elizabeth, the maid. Her broom was propped against the chair, and clothes, boots and books she’d picked from the floor were piled on the bed. She was now on her hands and knees, pulling a black, grimy sack from underneath it. Jack retreated quickly as she straightened up. She was muttering crossly.

  The returning Rupert met her downstairs at the kitchen door.

  ‘Master Rupert! That filthy object in your room.’

  Rupert swallowed hard.

  ‘Look at my hands,’ demanded Elizabeth, showing him her slightly blackened palms. ‘I look like a sweep. I’m not touching it again.’ She glared at him. ‘Does your mother know about it?’

  ‘Sorry, Elizabeth.’ Rupert didn’t answer her question. ‘Very sorry. No need to mention it to Ma, though. I’ll get rid of it. And, um, don’t worry about doing the rest of my room. I’ll do that too.’ He gave her a beseeching smile and hurried up the backstairs.

  Safe in his room, the door closed behind him, Rupert peered under his bed. The sack with its grapnel had disappeared.

  The pleasure of Tony Tolchard’s company was wearing thin in the Cap and Cockerel. For one thing, he was now cadging drinks rather than standing them all round. The sovereigns were all spent, and he’d mislaid the card that Richard Featherstone had given him, so he had no money. Also, although he’d stopped boasting about his so
n, he’d become particularly derisive about the murder investigation. Evie and the other regulars were used to his superior knowledge on every subject so did their best to ignore him.

  ‘No access,’ he scoffed. ‘No access? Course there was access. Has to be for a murder. Police don’t know anything, Evie. Never did and never will.’

  ‘Should consult you again then, shouldn’t they, Tony? You’d put them right.’ It was always best to humour him when he was drunk.

  ‘Many a true word, my girl. Many a true word…’

  Tony leant across the bar as if to impart a secret, then winked and tapped his nose and straightened up again. He steadied himself, located the pub door and wavered out into the daylight.

  Evie and the regulars shook their heads and chuckled. None of them was aware of another drinker putting down his glass and slipping quietly out through the same door.

  6

  Father and Son

  When he returned to the flat roof later that afternoon, Rupert was relieved to see that Jack had the grapnel.

  ‘I had to come back into your attic,’ explained Jack. ‘Erskine’s door was locked so I used the chimney. Then I saw your maid pull the grapnel from under your bed.’ He grinned. ‘Wasn’t she cross. She marched off in a right old temper and as soon as she’d gone I nipped in and took it.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Rupert. ‘I was really worried.’

  ‘We can’t hide it in your room again,’ said Jack. ‘I’d better take it home with me.’

  ‘That would be really stupid,’ snorted April.

  Both boys looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Why?’ asked Jack, a bit annoyed at being called stupid.

  ‘Because you don’t know for certain no one saw you on the roof at Nunwell Street. What if you were seen and the police traced you and came round to your place? If they find that under your bed, you’ll be number one suspect. For murder.’

  Jack looked at her but knew she was right.

  ‘Where can we hide it then?’ he asked, his voice betraying his fear and frustration.