The Good Wife

by Jane A. Adams

  He was going to tell Mrs Watkins that she should get in touch if her daughter should happen to contact her, but in the end he didn’t bother. The chance of Eliza Watkins, if she was still alive, getting in touch with her mother seemed pretty remote to Mickey. He glanced back sympathetically at the girl. She had long brown hair, tied back with an old scarf and a blandly pretty face that had more to do with being young than being beautiful. What chance did she have, Mickey thought, or any of her siblings. Eliza Watkins must have felt that she’d fallen into paradise after growing up in a place like this. Of course she had believed Harry Benson, of course she had wanted, needed, to believe this man who had taken her to his bed. And of course she was dead, Mickey had no doubt of that.

  Mickey’s next visit was to Mr Steiff and Mrs Edwards, the brother and sister that Emory had observed Dr Phillips visiting. The house was only ten minutes’ walk from the Watkins’, and it was also a terraced house, but there the comparisons ended. Very clean white net curtains hung in the front room window, obscuring the view from outside. The front door was painted a glossy blue, the step was scrubbed and the door furniture polished. But there was no answer to be had when he knocked.

  He had been aware as he walked down the street that several people had noticed him. It was, he thought, likely to be a place where women were home all day and where a stranger would be obvious. The next door opened and a stout middle-aged woman came out on to the street.

  ‘They’re not there. Gone away for a few days. A family emergency, so Mrs Edwards said.’

  ‘When did they leave?’

  The woman looked narrowly at Mickey. ‘And why should I tell you?’

  ‘Hopefully, because I’m a policeman.’ He showed his identification.

  ‘That says Metropolitan Police. You’re not a local man. So why should I answer your questions about local people.’

  ‘I’m up here investigating the murder of that doctor’s wife at Southwell races on bank holiday Monday. We are speaking with anyone who might have known Mrs Mason, and Mrs Edward’s name was suggested.’

  The woman looked slightly mollified, but only slightly. ‘Left last night. The cab came and took them to the station. And no, I don’t know where they were going.’

  ‘You spoke to Mrs Edwards before they left. She told you there was a family emergency.’

  ‘She told me it was a family emergency – she didn’t tell me what or where. I didn’t ask. She left me a spare key, asked me to feed the cat for them. She’s fond of that cat, she wouldn’t let it starve. Not that it would starve, it has more sense than that. If it couldn’t find Mrs Edwards it would come next door to me.’

  ‘I don’t suppose …?’ Mickey began.

  ‘The answer to that is no. I’m not letting strangers into that house. I don’t care if you are a policeman from London.’

  ‘I could get a warrant,’ Mickey said.

  ‘And why would you want to get a warrant? You said that Mrs Edwards’ name came up because she might have known that dead lady. I expect a lot of people knew that dead lady, her being a doctor’s wife. I don’t suppose you’ll be getting warrants for all of them. So what is it about Mrs Edwards, why do you want to get a warrant?’

  Mickey realized that he’d overplayed his hand. He’d certainly met his match. ‘How long have you known Mrs Edwards and Mr Steiff?’ he asked.

  ‘This is Mr Steiff’s house. His wife died. Mrs Edwards lost her husband, so it made sense for her to move back here and keep house for him. Ten or twelve years ago probably, that happened. I’ve lived here nine. They’re nice people.’

  ‘I believe Mrs Edwards was a midwife. Perhaps that is how she met Mrs Mason.’

  ‘Retired.’

  ‘And how long has Mrs Edwards been retired?’

  The conversation had attracted attention and the door on the other side opened. A young man popped his head out. ‘Everything all right, Maev?’ he asked. ‘This bloke bothering you, is he?’ He was, Mickey noted, dressed in a railway uniform so was probably getting ready for work, or had just returned from his shift.

  ‘He’s a policeman. Come asking about Mrs Edwards and Mr Steiff. I told him that they’ve gone away for a bit. But he seems to want their life history. And he’s not even a local policeman. He’s one of them from London.’

  ‘Is he now? And why would you be coming asking about Mrs Edwards?’

  Mickey repeated what he had told the other neighbour. ‘So you see, this is a routine enquiry.’

  ‘Routine nosiness, is it? Must be nice to be paid to snoop. Mrs Edwards is a good woman. Mr Steiff is a nice man. Retired, they both are. They help out at the church, teetotal they are, signed the pledge. Mrs Edwards works with unfortunate girls. She’s a good woman.’

  Mickey was interested to note that he had learnt more from this man informing an errant policeman that he should not be nosy, than he was ever likely to get from the first neighbour. ‘And where did she do that then? Help out these unfortunate girls.’

  ‘You’re the copper, you can find out.’

  As though in coordination, both neighbours stepped back inside and closed their doors, but Mickey was content. So Mrs Edwards helped out with unfortunate girls, Dr Phillips had been very angry at Sergeant Emory’s line of questioning regarding Mrs Mason’s pregnancy. He had taken the time, on his way home, to come and visit Mrs Edwards and her brother and then they had packed and gone off in a somewhat precipitous manner. So what did Dr Phillips not want them to tell Mickey and his inspector? Did it have anything to do with the poor unfortunate Eliza Watkins? And did it – Mickey felt he was pushing things in this particular line of speculation – have anything to do with the death of Mrs Martha Mason?

  TWELVE

  Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone had arrived in London and gone straight to the offices of M. Giles Esq., solicitor, Otis Freeland his constant shadow.

  He had been told that the private investigating agent, Conway would also be present, as requested and the young woman, Felicity Bennett. Henry had been assured that all assistance would be extended to him which he interpreted as solicitor and private detective both seeking to cover their backsides in case of trouble.

  Henry was aware of several private detective agencies in the area, including the famous Maud West based at Albion House, just around the corner.

  The firm of Giles & Conway – Henry was somewhat surprised to find they were partners – was on the third floor of an office building that housed also a singing teacher, a seller of hair restorer, and various pamphleteers who had set up a small publishing house, which, from the flyers attached to their door, seemed to be religious tracts on the behaviour of young women, and the moral probity of abstinence. He was amused to find that the solicitor’s office was on the same floor, and just along the corridor. He wondered if the proprietors of both organizations had interesting conversations should they accidentally meet on the stairs.

  The offices of Giles & Conway were larger than they first appeared. A partly glazed door on which their names were blocked in gold led through into a spacious reception area. A young woman sat behind a rather imposing desk and a surprisingly comfortable range of chairs was arrayed opposite, where she could keep an eye on everybody. She asked Henry to take a seat and pressed an intercom on her desk, telling her boss that the inspector had arrived.

  Henry was the only person in the waiting room. The wooden panelling had been painted white. Henry supposed that had been to brighten what might otherwise have been a very dull space, but as the paint had not been refreshed in quite a while, the effect was actually to heighten the sense that this was a gloomy room. There were pictures on the walls of racing cars and what looked, to Henry’s eye, like the Le Mans circuit. A row of windows in the waiting area did nothing to lift the mood. The outside of the sash windows was grimy so that it was like looking out through fog. Not that there was much of a view, just a blank wall of the next building.

  The door opened and a man emerged. He was wearing a blue pinstriped
suit, very white shirt and a striped tie. School or regiment? Henry wondered. He crossed the room with his hand already extended to shake Henry’s. ‘Malcolm Giles,’ he said. ‘Chief Inspector Johnstone, please come through. May I say that your reputation precedes you and I’m very glad that we can at last meet. I’m only sorry that it is such a sad event that brings us together.’

  Henry mumbled a vague reply and followed Malcolm Giles through into his office.

  Malcolm Giles and his colleague Ernest Conway occupied adjoining offices behind the reception area. Both were large and were brighter than the room Henry had just left, the windows being cleaner and looking out on to Tottenham Court Road. Ernest Conway came through into his colleague’s office, closely followed by a young woman with bleached blonde hair. She was fashionably dressed and carefully made up. Felicity Bennett, he assumed. Introductions were made and Henry invited to sit down. The receptionist, or secretary, or whatever she was, came through with refreshments. Malcolm Giles took a seat behind his desk, Conway perched on a corner and Felicity Bennett settled elegantly into a chair to Henry’s left. She tucked her legs out of the way, crossing her feet at the ankles and folding her hands neatly into her lap.

  Henry extracted papers and his notebook from the document case he had been carrying. He first showed the postcard found in Martha’s desk to Felicity Bennet. It didn’t say much apart from the fact that Felicity was enjoying a short holiday and that she missed her friend.

  ‘And yet she kept it,’ Henry commented. ‘So your friendship must have been important and yet I found no other correspondence between you?’

  Whatever the trio had expected as Henry’s opening gambit he suspected it had not been this. Felicity took the card and then nodded. ‘I sent it earlier this year. It must have been Easter time. I visited an aunt for a few days. Mary … Martha and I spent some good times there, I thought about her and sent her a postcard.’

  ‘But you didn’t correspond regularly?’

  ‘Is this relevant, Inspector?’ Conway looked both puzzled and amused. Giles, the solicitor, mildly annoyed.

  ‘I am trying to discover who killed Mrs Mason,’ he said coldly. ‘As yet, there are no obvious suspects; it might be that her death is the result of something from her past. So, I will decide what is relevant, Mr Conway.’

  Conway frowned, shrugged and left his perch on the desk. He brought up another chair and settled himself into it. He had clearly wanted this interview to be brief, Henry thought, hence his consciously louche but not terribly comfortable position on the edge of his colleague’s desk.

  Felicity handed the card back. ‘When she first moved north we wrote regularly. Once a week each way. But after a time her letters dried up and when I asked her about it she said she’d just been very busy. Well, I knew that – she was working all hours for that husband of hers and joining every board or committee going. She said in her letters that she wasn’t that keen, but she thought the connections she made might be useful to Dr Mason.’ Felicity frowned. ‘It was funny. In her letters she always called him that. Dr Mason. Not Clive or even “my husband”. It was like she was trying to tell me how important he was. That I was to be forever on formal terms with this man, even if my friend had married him.’

  ‘Did you get the impression he disapproved of this continuing friendship?’

  She laughed, ‘Oh, he disapproved all right. She made no secret of the fact he wanted her to forget all about her old life and all about friends like me. She’d say things like, “Dr Mason is out so I thought I’d take the opportunity to write to you.”’

  ‘This seems very clear in your mind.’

  Conway got up, took a small stack of letters from the desk and handed then to Henry.

  ‘I can remember because I re-read them after I heard she’d been killed,’ Felicity told him.

  ‘We were concerned,’ Giles said. ‘Anything that might reflect badly on the reputation of our office, is of concern. When Miss Bennet said she still had letters …’

  ‘You thought you should see if there was anything incriminating in them,’ Henry finished for him.

  ‘Not at all, Chief Inspector. We were merely concerned that there might be useful information. We want the killer found as much as you do.’

  Henry tucked the letters into his document case.

  ‘I’ll want them back,’ Felicity said quickly.

  ‘And you should make out a receipt,’ Giles added.

  ‘And what exactly did Mary Betteridge do in your employ?’

  The two men both looked ready to respond but it was Felicity who spoke first. ‘She started as an office girl, same as me, but we’d been told there were opportunities for betterment and when they were offered we both jumped at the chance. Mary … Martha, was younger than me by a couple of years and I’d been an inquiry agent for six months when she came to work here. She was stepping into my shoes, I suppose, and she followed on after me.’

  ‘And you are still employed in the same position?’

  ‘Oh no. I’m a married woman now, so it wouldn’t seem quite right.’ She smiled at Conway. ‘I’m Mrs Conway now. So I direct the girls instead. We employ three, don’t we? As inquiry agents. Alongside five male detectives. Women are very useful; they can talk to people who wouldn’t talk to men or they can get into places where men would just stick out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘And of course it is a quite different situation for a man to be discovered in a hotel room with the young woman. To be discovered in a hotel room with the young man might lead to more than divorce proceedings.’

  Felicity looked shocked. Conway laughed and Giles frowned in annoyance. This, Henry considered, seemed to be a general pattern among the three.

  ‘If any of our girls produce evidence that does assist in a divorce, and we have of course never overstepped the mark of legality,’ Giles said carefully, ‘then at all times we make sure that one of their male colleagues is on hand. Our young ladies are never put at risk.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s the case,’ Henry said. ‘After all you need a detective on hand to take the relevant photographs, of the hotel register, and of the couple in question in their hotel room.’

  ‘We fulfil a need, Inspector.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. But not everybody approves of that; not everybody will be sanguine about it. I’m sure there have been instances where a divorce has been procured by a husband, the husband himself presenting the evidence of adultery, where the wife is not party to this and has not given her consent. I know of instances where the wife is then cut adrift, sometimes with children to care for and the husband goes on to marry his new inamorata, with little care for the families left behind. The enforcement of the laws pertaining to the payment of maintenance sadly often lags behind even the law pertaining to divorce.’

  ‘We know of no cases like that,’ Conway said quickly.

  ‘And besides,’ Giles, the more pragmatic one, added, ‘we are employed to gain a particular end. What happens thereafter is none of our concern. Our detectives give evidence in the courts, a divorce is obtained, the rest is not our concern.’

  Felicity looked somewhat uncomfortable and would not meet Henry’s gaze.

  ‘Mrs Conway, was your friend completely at ease with the role she played? Can you think of any incidents where this ended badly for her or that she was unhappy with an outcome?’

  He was slightly surprised to see that Felicity looked relieved. ‘No, nothing like that. We were always careful to make sure that the proprieties were maintained. We signed the register, not always with our own names of course, and then we would pose on the bed to have a photograph taken. We might take off our coat and hat, otherwise it would have looked somewhat strange, don’t you think, but that was all. And then of course, we would disappear from the scene before the court case. The court will be told that the young woman could not be found, but that there was photographic evidence and that was enough.’

  Henry nodded, he was very familiar with this ploy. It w
as not strictly illegal but it did occupy something of a grey area.

  ‘And how many times did this happen. With Mary Betteridge?’

  Again, Conway got up and crossed the desk, and came back with a sheaf of papers which he handed over to Henry. ‘Obviously we cannot compromise client confidentiality,’ he said. ‘But these are summaries of the cases that Miss Betteridge was involved in. After all, the outcomes are items of public record, divorce having been obtained satisfactorily for all concerned.’

  Henry flicked through the pages and then put these too in his document case. He doubted he’d get much more out of Conway & Giles but warned them that he may return.

  He took the opportunity to return to New Scotland Yard, checking in with Central Office, catching up with proceedings on cases he was also obliquely involved with and also asking the fingerprint bureau if they had any matches on the prints that Mickey had sent down. Not yet, he was told.

  He then went to his little flat and packed clean shirts and underwear to take back with him, having retrieved also the spare clothes that Mickey always kept in his desk. His train did not leave until the following morning and Henry had already decided that he would pay his sister a visit that evening, but in the meantime he sat down in his favourite chair, close to the window overlooking the river and began to sort through the notes that Conway & Giles had given him.

  Shortly before seven, Henry arrived at Cynthia’s house. Another few weeks, he thought, and the children would be coming down from school and the family would decamp to the south coast for the summer, Cynthia’s husband owning another house in Bournemouth.