Death of a Dancer

by Caro Peacock

  Ahead of me, somebody was whimpering. I walked on a few steps and saw Pauline on her knees in the passageway, huddled into her cloak. Her hands were at her throat.

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  She glared at me as if it were my fault, and didn’t answer.

  ‘Did he attack you?’

  She struggled to get up and leaned against the wall. When she moved her hands to keep her balance, the print of fingers on her skin was visible even in the dim light. She was clearly in pain and it looked as if he’d dug his thumbs deep into her windpipe.

  ‘He tried to strangle you?’

  A nod. Her hand went back to her throat. She still looked angry with me and would have pushed past if she’d had the strength.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  The words came out in a painful whisper.

  ‘Of course you know. You’d arranged to meet him here, hadn’t you?’

  Any inclination to be kind to her disappeared when I thought of what she’d done to Jenny. Something white rustled on the floor at her feet. I picked it up and found I was holding a newspaper.

  ‘Is this yours?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Were you seeing him about something to do with Columbine?’

  She took a shuddering breath and tried to push past me. I grabbed her by the arm.

  ‘He’s just tried to kill you. He might have managed it if he hadn’t heard me coming down the stairs. For your own sake at least, who is he?’

  Running footsteps came thumping from the direction of the pay desk, then a man’s gruff shout.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  A squarely built man with the face of an unsuccessful boxer appeared, with the scared boy a few steps behind.

  ‘She’s hurt,’ I said. ‘Somebody just tried to strangle her.’

  Pauline pulled her arm away, dodged past all three of us and ran for the exit. When I tried to follow the man blocked my way, positioning himself solidly across the passage.

  ‘If I find any more of you in here, I’m calling the police and having you put on a charge.’

  ‘I told you, somebody’s tried to commit a murder in here.’ Speaking over his shoulder, I addressed the boy: ‘Did you see a man come in?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘He must have gone past you, surely. Or is there a back door?’

  The man turned red with anger and shouted in my face.

  ‘As far as the likes of you are concerned, there’s not a back door, a front door or any other door. This is a respectable attraction and I’m not having you turning your tricks in here.’

  ‘You think I’m …’

  ‘I haven’t seen you before, but I know where your friend comes from. Birds of a feather. Out.’

  I let him walk me to the door. I was burning with anger at the injustice of it, but catching up with Pauline was more urgent than trying to save my reputation at the Rotunda. As I came outside I saw her turning the corner out of the square, walking fast. I had to credit her with animal strength, if nothing else.

  I ran after her, past caring about the looks I was getting, but by the time I turned into the cul-de-sac, she was going up the steps of the house called the Egyptian Palace. The door closed quickly behind her. Inside there would certainly be people used to dealing with unwelcome intruders. I’d lost her. All I’d gained for my troubles was the knowledge that somewhere, not far away, was a man with bad breath and a willingness to kill Pauline.

  After walking some way, I found I was still holding the newspaper. It was a copy of the Morning Chronicle, five days old. I was about to throw it away when I looked again at the date: the previous Wednesday, the edition that had carried the report of the inquest into Columbine’s death. It might have been a coincidence, but I didn’t think so.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sunrise on Tuesday brought one of those winter days when the first hint of spring is in the air. The wind was from the south-west, robins and blackbirds calling loudly from bare twigs. Amos was riding a flighty dark bay gelding. We let the horses stretch out in a gallop along the north carriage drive and jogged back towards Grosvenor Gate. On the way, I asked Amos if he’d keep his ears open for any information about Rodney Hardcastle.

  ‘Not difficult,’ he said. ‘Anything in pertickler?’

  ‘I’ve heard he’s planning to get married. It would be interesting to know who to. But anything at all.’

  What had happened in the Rotunda the day before had opened up a new view of the case, but I was still convinced that Hardcastle’s affairs had played some part in it.

  ‘One thing I can tell you for a start,’ Amos said, ‘only he doesn’t know it yet.’

  He gave me that sideways look that meant mischief for somebody, or ‘mishtiff, as he’d put it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not supposed to let on, but if you happened to be on the corner of Piccadilly and St James’s Street around midday, you might just see something interesting.’

  I could get no more out of him.

  Before we left the park I did something I’d been putting off for weeks and told Amos I was ready to sell Rancie. A gentleman who rode out from the livery stables was getting married at Easter to one of the ladies with hands gentle enough to be permitted to ride Rancie. I knew her by sight. She was generally acknowledged to be one of the sweetest, kindest, prettiest young ladies in London. The gentleman wanted Rancie as his bridal present to her. I tried hard not to hate the woman.

  ‘You sure of that?’ Amos said, face grave.

  ‘Yes.’

  It tore my heart to look at Rancie’s finely shaped ears or the play of the muscles on her shoulder and know there wouldn’t be many more rides in the park for us, but I was deceiving myself if I thought the life I was living could go on for ever. The disaster that had hit Daniel was a reminder of how precarious things were for people like us, without position or money.

  As luck would have it, that morning’s lesson was in Bruton Street, so I found myself on the corner of Piccadilly and St James’s Street a few minutes before midday. A lot of other people just happened to be there as well, even more than might have been expected in such a fashionable part of town. Quite a few looked like coachmen or grooms in breeches and top boots, although there was no sign of Amos. There were clusters of ragged boys – the kind who offer to hold people’s horses for a few pennies – some with nothing on their feet except encrusted mud from toenails to calf. Even the more respectable sort were lingering; ladies in fashionable capes and bonnets attended by boys carrying their parcels, gentlemen who at this hour would usually be calling for cards and bottles of hock in Piccadilly clubs. Carriages were drawn into the kerb with men and women lounging inside them, waiting for nothing in particular.

  ‘Is the Queen coming?’ I heard someone ask.

  The crowd grew. It looked as if Amos’s secret was known to a good part of the town. Some time after midday, one of the grooms gave a whistle.

  ‘Here he comes.’

  Instantly, a dozen or so of the loitering men formed into a purposeful-looking group. Most of them were carrying coach whips or riding switches. The group split into two on either side of St James’s Street. A murmur went through the crowd and some people drew back, away from the roadway. The purposeful men were looking down St James’s Street towards Pall Mall. A two-horse travelling chariot lumbered up, with a footman in livery at the back. They let it pass. A second vehicle, a one-horse droshky with two elderly ladies on board, was allowed past too, but as soon as its wheels cleared the junction, half a dozen of the men spread out and blocked the way into Piccadilly. A third vehicle was coming up the street, a gleaming new Stanhope phaeton drawn by a dark bay cob. The driver was the only person in it, obviously a gentleman who thought highly of himself, trying to flick his whip like a professional driver, curling the lash in and throwing it back out again to one side then the other. He was so absorbed in the game that he didn’t see what was waiting
at the top of the street.

  ‘Look out, Rodders!’

  The cry came from one of the club gentlemen behind me. The driver dropped his whip and looked round him, open-mouthed. Heavy-booted feet thundered and people went flying on all sides as more of the purposeful men pushed in through the crowd. Rodney Hardcastle, in the driving seat of the Stanhope, saw the line across the road in front of him and wrenched at the reins, trying to turn the cob round. He got it halfway, blocking the street crossways, but by then another line of men was in position behind him, preventing his retreat, and more were arriving at a run, surrounding the phaeton with a mass of black hats and broad shoulders. The vehicle quivered as three of them jumped on board.

  ‘What are you doing? Get orf me. Get them orf me, somebody.’

  Hardcastle’s panic-stricken shouts rang out over the hubbub. Some people around me were laughing, others were shouting about highway robbery and calling for the police. The clubmen among the spectators almost certainly included some who had gambled and drunk with Hardcastle, but none seemed in a hurry to go to his rescue. Two of the men on the phaeton simply picked up Hardcastle and put him out over the side, fairly gently, as a market man might unload a sack of cabbages. The third man took the reins and expertly turned the phaeton round. The men who’d been blocking the way stood to the side and cheered as it went away at a spanking trot down St James’s Street.

  For a few seconds, Hardcastle simply stared after it, then he started running and shouting.

  ‘Stop them! That’s my property. Stop them.’

  But his breath gave out before he’d run more than a few dozen yards. He collapsed on the kerb as the phaeton rounded the corner into Pall Mall, the bright red varnish on its wheel spokes gleaming, the two men who’d unloaded Hardcastle making themselves comfortable on the red leather seats.

  Once it was out of sight, the people in the crowd who hadn’t been in on the plot stared unbelievingly at each other.

  ‘Highwaymen in Piccadilly – I’ve never seen the like of it.’

  ‘We could all have been killed.’

  ‘Where were the police? That’s what I want to know.’ At that point, two constables did arrive and were immediately surrounded by people giving them different versions of the story. Then, from further back in the crowd, somebody shouted the word ‘Repossession’. The ragged boys took it up and chanted it happily, then within seconds the whole crowd was fluttering with printed leaflets. They were being distributed by half a dozen or so down-at-heel-looking men who must have been there all along, waiting for their opportunity. I grabbed a pamphlet.

  Malvern and Morris Coach

  builders to the gentry

  Phaetons, barouches, dress chariots and the latest

  in broughams built to your personal specifications.

  Some used vehicles also available, restored to the

  highest standard.

  An address on the Bayswater Road was given, about half a mile from the livery stables where Amos worked. I was certain that some of the men who had carried out the attack were his fellow workers, and was relieved that for once he’d kept out of trouble himself.

  I looked up and saw that the policemen were reading the leaflet too. They seemed ill at ease. Merchants who supplied goods not paid for were entitled to apply for a warrant and repossess them, though it did not usually happen as dramatically as this. In any case, the legal niceties hardly mattered, because by then the men who’d carried out the repossession had all taken themselves off and only we curious spectators were left.

  Apart, that is, from the man at the centre of it all. Rodney Hardcastle hadn’t gone far. He was sitting on the kerb halfway down St James’s Street with his feet tucked up to keep them out of the filth of the gutter, head in hands. A group of half a dozen or so clubmen who might have been his friends had formed a semicircle on the pavement round him, but at some distance, as if ridicule and misfortune might be contagious. Not one of them had gone close enough to put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  As I watched, he raised his head and said something to them. It looked plaintive and produced no more than a few wry looks and half-hidden grins. I moved closer to hear.

  ‘… told them, all they had to do was be patient for a day or two longer. I’ve been a good customer to them. A hundred and fifty, it cost me, and they’d have had the money within the week. Within the month, at the very outside. They just had to be patient.’

  The policemen went about their business, the crowd dwindled. Two of Rodney Hardcastle’s semi-circle broke away and strolled towards Piccadilly and, probably, the delayed first drink of the day at their club. Then the others followed, until only Hardcastle was left. I walked down the street and stood beside him. It was some time before he noticed me.

  ‘Where are they taking it?’

  His question came out as a plaintive wail. I gave him my copy of the leaflet, but it seemed to take him some time to understand it.

  ‘I need it back,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to let me have it back.’

  ‘I saw you at the Augustus Theatre,’ I said. ‘I was there the night Columbine died.’

  He looked up, but my words hardly penetrated the cloud of misery round him. All he said was, ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Why were you so anxious that Jenny Jarvis should be arrested?’ I said. ‘They were your posters, weren’t they?’

  He nodded. ‘Because the little bitch killed Columbine.’

  ‘You and Columbine had quarrelled, hadn’t you? Over Jenny.’

  He might have told me to mind my own business, but there was no fight in him.

  ‘That’s the unfair thing. She had no cause.’

  ‘Not as far as Jenny was concerned, no. Did you manage to make up the quarrel before she died?’

  ‘She wouldn’t even talk to me. It’s all so unfair.’

  He pushed himself to his feet and stood looking up and down the street as if he expected somebody to come and rescue him.

  ‘If it wasn’t Jenny, who else might have killed her?’ I said.

  ‘It must have been Jenny.’

  A disreputable-looking cab came round the corner from Piccadilly. It was bright red, the driver brown-whiskered and white-hatted. Hardcastle fumbled in his pockets.

  ‘Seem to have come out without my money. Lend me the price of a cab fare.’

  ‘I’ve only tuppence in my pocket myself,’ I said.

  It was the truth. The red cab rumbled past us, not summoned. Hardcastle gave me a look as if I were the last in a long line of betrayers, turned and began to walk towards Pall Mall. He went slowly and painfully because the soles of his boots were fashionably thin, not meant for walking. I could have caught up with him quite easily, but decided there was nothing to be gained from it.

  When I got back to Abel Yard there was a note with my name on it in Daniel’s writing, tucked into the door jamb at the bottom of the stairs.

  My dear Liberty,

  I am continuing to inquire about Rainer or, as you probably prefer, the man with the brown face, with no success so far. Since Rainer was a Household Cavalry officer, I thought there must be somebody at the barracks who knew him. So I simply walked in and asked to see the commanding officer. They kept me waiting for an hour, then practically marched me, as if I were a prisoner under escort, into the presence of a man with a lot of gold braid on his uniform and moustaches wider than his forehead. He didn’t invite me to sit down. I asked him if he’d known a Major Charles Rainer. He stared at me as if I were a puppy that had made a mess on his carpet and said, “There is no such man.” I thought he’d misunderstood, so I started explaining about the forgery trial and so on. He cut across me and said it again, practically roared it, “There is no such man.” I suppose I must have looked as puzzled as I felt, because he condescended to explain, after a fashion. No Household Cavalry officer could be accused of a filthy offence like forgery, so the minute he was charged Rainer ceased to be a Household Cavalry officer and, from their point of view, he didn’t
exist any more. The military mind is truly an amazing thing.

  I felt hot with anger on Daniel’s behalf and sorry that he should put himself in the way of such humiliation. His note went on:

  It occurred to me that a cavalry officer would not have the skills necessary to forge bonds himself and I have been able to discover, from newspaper reports of the time, that he indeed-had an accomplice, a Fleet Street printer named Stephen Sned. Sned was also sentenced to transportation. I have begun asking round the newspapers and print shops in the hope of finding associates of Sned, who may know more about Rainer, so far without success.

  That was even worse. Trailing round the dark alleys off Fleet Street, trying to find associates of a criminal, was almost begging to be attacked.

  I have also been back to the Augustus. Blake didn’t throw me out, in fact he was as helpful as he could be in the circumstances. I think you and Kennedy may be right, and that he is at least trying to make things no worse for Jenny. I told him about Rainer and tried to get a clearer description from him of the man who was asking questions at the theatre two days after Columbine was killed. Unfortunately he couldn’t improve on what we know already. He had much on his mind at the time and no particular reason to take an interest in the man.

  I thought of the man in the Rotunda. I’d had no chance to see the colour of his complexion or even guess his age. Should I tell Daniel about him and risk adding fuel to his obsession? It turned out, from the end of Daniel’s note, that it was a decision I’d have to make sooner than I expected.

  One of Kennedy’s friends has recommended a barrister at the Old Bailey, Charles Phillips. We are going to see him tomorrow morning. Kennedy thinks your observations may be helpful. He wants to know if he may call for you at nine o’clock.

  I went upstairs, scribbled a note to Kennedy saying yes, of course, and sent it by the boy who blew the bellows for the carriage mender’s forge. My guess was that he wanted me to be present not so much for the value of my observations as for a calming influence on Daniel. I only hoped that I could be of some use.