The Scandal at 23 Mount Street (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 9)

by Clara Benson

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Freddy,’ said Angela. ‘Of course he didn’t do it. It was all a lie.’

  Freddy stared at her in dismay.

  ‘But the gun—’

  ‘I gave him the gun myself on the night of Davie’s death. He said he was in danger so I insisted he take it for his own protection. We came back here at a quarter to seven that morning, I gave him the gun and he went away and then I found Davie.’

  ‘But he said he killed Davie at about ten o’clock. He might have done it and then come to the White Rabbit Ball afterwards. It was after eleven when I saw you together.’

  ‘No,’ said Angela. ‘He didn’t know where the gun was kept. He said twice in court that the gun was in the top drawer. But I always kept it in the second drawer. He said it was in the top one because that’s where I found it when I gave it to him. I didn’t notice at the time, but somebody had obviously put it there by mistake—presumably the killer. Edgar didn’t do it, Freddy, I’d swear to it.’

  ‘But then why did he say he did?’

  ‘To save me,’ she said.

  Freddy regarded her pityingly.

  ‘He’s not a good man, Angela,’ he said at last.

  She turned her head away, but her voice was as steady as ever.

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I always knew it, although I didn’t know quite how bad he was. You don’t need to tell me how stupid I’ve been, because I’m perfectly aware of it. But now that I know everything, I won’t be under an obligation to him. We must find out who really killed Davie and bring him to justice.’

  ‘But then they’ll know that you lied in court and put you back in prison.’

  ‘That can’t be helped,’ said Angela. ‘My reputation can’t get any worse, but at any rate I’m still alive. I have that to thank him for, at least. You will help me, won’t you?’

  Freddy agreed, and marvelled at Angela’s self-possession in the face of what must have been a devastating blow. As for Angela, she had never needed that self-possession more than she did now. She had summoned up all her strength and forced herself to remember that things might have been so much worse, for she might easily have been sent to the gallows for a crime she had not committed. Now she was free. There still remained a wrong that had to be righted, however, and since the law had no interest in doing it she would have to do it herself. There was no hope for Edgar Valencourt; he had committed a dreadful crime and would hang for it, but that had nothing to do with her, and she would not allow him to take another crime upon himself and die in her name. She would find the person who had really killed her husband, inform the police and then retire somewhere to lick her wounds in private—if they would let her. Now she turned her mind to practicalities.

  ‘How did you get on at the White Star offices?’ she said.

  In all the excitement Freddy had almost completely forgotten his investigations of two weeks earlier. He felt in his pocket for his notebook.

  ‘I did manage to get a list of names out of them,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you see anyone you recognize?’

  Angela looked at the list and shook her head.

  ‘Davie didn’t usually introduce his women to me,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, it rather looks as though we’re back where we started.’

  ‘Never say die,’ said Freddy. ‘And that’s never been truer than now. The Homeric is due to dock in three days. I shall go back and speak to my White Star friend and ask him for the address of the first-class steward. If he remembers Davie he might also be able to tell us something of the people he spoke to on board. But Angela, you’re more likely than anyone else to hold the clue to all this, don’t you think? You spoke to him several times before he died. Didn’t he say anything to you that seemed odd?’

  Angela thought back to the day on which Davie had turned up on her doorstep while she was with Edgar Valencourt. Their conversation had swiftly turned into a row, for even two years apart had not been enough to wear away her resentment at all those years she had wasted as his wife. The argument had followed the same old lines, for after all that time they had nothing new to say to one another. He had brought up the story of Barbara, as he always did, and she had been cowardly enough to cave in to him, as she always did. She frowned. But what else had he said? Something about their not having had children. This was new, surely. It had never seemed to bother him before. Yes—that was it. He had accused her of being frozen, and had said that not all women were like that.

  ‘Were there any women with children on that list?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ said Freddy. ‘Not unmarried women, at any rate. What is it? You look as though you’d just had a clever idea.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ said Angela. ‘I just wonder from something Davie said whether there mightn’t have been a baby or a child in the picture.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘I’m probably imagining things. I dare say he didn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘Well, you knew Davie better than anyone,’ said Freddy. ‘I shall take your word for it.’

  ‘Still, though,’ she said, frowning.

  Freddy waited, but she showed no sign of continuing.

  ‘Very well, then,’ he said at last. ‘I shall root out this mysterious woman—if indeed she exists—and if she knows anything at all about what happened that night you may be sure I’ll find it out.’

  ‘Thank you, Freddy,’ she said. ‘I knew I should be able to rely on you. You’ve been a good friend to me; don’t think I don’t know it.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘Damsels in distress and all that. Mind, I don’t say I’ll be able to come up with the goods immediately. It might be a while before I can speak to the steward in question—and even then he might not remember much, since it was so long ago.’

  ‘I know you’ll do your best,’ she said. ‘I’d do it myself, but I think I’ve drawn quite enough attention to myself lately and I should prefer to stay indoors for a while.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ said Freddy sympathetically, and took his leave.

  Angela sat for a little while, staring into space. Outside, the snow had begun to fall thickly, covering the streets of London with a carpet of white. It would be cold in prison, she thought, and looked towards the crackling fire that Marthe had been tending carefully ever since her return. After a few minutes she found her thoughts drifting in an unwelcome direction, and since she was determined at all costs to suppress her feelings on the subject, she jumped up and began rifling impatiently through cupboards and drawers, in an attempt to keep herself busy and forget what she wanted to forget. She was scrabbling in a little jewellery-box, looking for a missing earring, when she suddenly saw a flash of green and drew in her breath sharply. Heart thumping, she brought out a pretty silver bracelet inlaid with green glass. She stared at it for a long moment. He had given it to her in Venice—to thank her for helping him after he had been shot, he said. She had been reluctant to accept it at first, but after all it was an inexpensive trinket and laid her under no obligation, and so in the end she took it and had worn it for longer than she cared to admit. Now, however, it was nothing but a reminder of terrible things. Her face darkened, and she turned her head and gazed out into the snow.

  The next morning, when Marthe came to sweep out the ashes from the fire and lay a new one, she found a twisted lump of blackened metal and glass lying in the grate, and recognized it immediately. Throughout the past few weeks she had remained calm and composed as her mistress stood in the dock, but at the sight of the little bracelet, charred and destroyed, she was overcome and began to weep. As she knelt there sobbing before the fire she felt a hand on her shoulder, almost like a caress, and she turned to see Angela looking down at her, cool and dry-eyed.

  ‘You cry for me, Marthe,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’

  She then went away, and Marthe was left to cry all the harder.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The snow lay on the ground for more than a week, and so there was no que
stion of venturing outdoors. Angela was glad of it, for she knew she ought to make the effort to get out, but she had been dreading the idea of it, convinced that people would stop and point at her in the street. Far better, she thought, to remain inside where it was warm, and where nobody could see or judge her. The green sofa had been pushed back towards the window, covering the spot where Davie Marchmont had lain, but apart from that, no-one would ever have known that someone had died violently there. Angela was not hypocrite enough to pretend to be sorry at his death, and so the only disturbance she felt at having to remain in the flat was the fact that the new position of the sofa spoilt the symmetry of the room.

  On Thursday morning, ten days after her release, Freddy turned up at the Mount Street flat to find Angela reading a newspaper with great attention.

  ‘You’ve seen it, then,’ he said, looking at her carefully.

  ‘If you are referring to the news about Edgar Valencourt, then yes I have,’ said Angela, with no more emotion than if they were talking about some new show they had seen.

  ‘Escaped, eh?’ said Freddy. ‘They ought to have been more careful. They already knew he was a slippery fellow. I don’t know why they thought it necessary to move him to another prison. They ought to have known he would make some attempt or other.’

  Angela looked up sharply.

  ‘It says here it was an accident—that the prison-van skidded on some ice.’

  ‘Well, yes, that’s what it says,’ conceded Freddy. ‘Whether that’s what actually happened is another matter altogether.’

  ‘Do you mean you think he arranged the weather deliberately?’ said Angela. ‘Rather clever of him, if so.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Freddy. ‘But you must admit it’s been tremendously convenient for him. Why, the man seems to have more lives than a cat.’

  He spoke carelessly, but in reality he was watching Angela closely, since he half-suspected that she might know something about it. He might have saved himself the bother, however, for Angela knew nothing and told herself she wanted to know nothing—although she could not prevent herself from reading everything she could about the incident, or wondering where Valencourt was now.

  ‘Still, they’ll catch him soon enough,’ Freddy went on. ‘He can’t get far in this weather.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right,’ said Angela politely. ‘Is that why you came, to tell me the news?’

  ‘No,’ said Freddy, with some appearance of triumph. ‘As a matter of fact, I came to tell you that I’ve found the girl.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Angela in surprise. ‘Who is she?’

  But she saw that Freddy had no intention of telling her the name without first relating his cleverness in finding it out, and so she listened with every appearance of interest as he told her of what he had been doing for the past week. He had returned to the White Star offices, he said, and had obtained from his friend there the name of the chief steward who had travelled on board the Homeric as it carried Davie Marchmont inexorably towards his final destination. Unfortunately, the steward could not remember much about what had happened on that voyage, although he did remember Davie Marchmont very well, given what had happened to him subsequently. Freddy questioned the steward further but got little more out of him, and he was about to give it up when he remembered what Angela had said. Had there been a lady with a child on the ship, he asked. No, there had been no children on board, the steward was sure of that—although he did remember that there had been some talk about one young girl, who was keeping herself well wrapped up but who as far as he could tell was quite obviously expecting. At that, Freddy’s ears pricked up and he asked whether the steward could remember her name. The steward racked his brains and at length hazarded that it might have been a foreign name, perhaps Dutch. Van Diemen, possibly? Freddy consulted his notebook, in which he had written the list of women on board. There was a Callie Vandermeer. Might that be she? At that the steward said ‘Ah!’ and nodded vigorously. She was the one, all right. They had talked about her because she was a Miss, but she had been so sweet and gentle, so polite to all the crew, that nobody had had the heart to be anything other than sympathetic to her plight.

  ‘Where is she now?’ said Angela.

  ‘Still here,’ said Freddy. ‘I looked through all the return passenger lists and asked at the Embassy, but found no trace of her having ever gone back to the United States. That stumped me, rather, until I remembered the baby. It’s taken me a week of talking to middle-aged matrons—who to a woman regarded me as the devil incarnate until I managed to convince them that my interest in distressed young ladies was not personal—but this morning I finally got a letter from a place in Whitechapel to say that they have the woman in question and can we please come and get her. I say, Angela, one can’t help feeling sorry for these poor girls. Some of these homes for Unspeakable Women are rather awful. It’s been a harrowing few days, I don’t mind telling you.’

  ‘I imagine it has,’ said Angela, who had been fortunate enough to have friends to help her all those years ago. ‘Well, if you’re sure she’s the person we’re looking for, then I suppose we had better go and talk to her.’

  So it was that Angela and Freddy found themselves on their way to Whitechapel on a freezing January morning, in search of the killer of Davie Marchmont. The Bentley had been rejected as inappropriate, for they did not wish to make themselves conspicuous, and so they took a taxi. It deposited them outside a large, Victorian building in grey stone that seemed designed specifically to intimidate, for inscribed above the door were the words, ‘The Lord Hath Chastened Me Sore: But He Hath Not Given Me Over Unto Death.’

  ‘I believe this is meant to be one of the less awful places,’ said Freddy, as Angela shivered in the bitter wind and looked about her. He stepped forward and pressed the bell, which was shortly answered by an elderly nun who greeted them kindly and invited them to come in. Inside was barely any warmer than outside, and Angela did not take off her gloves. The nun led them down a long, bare corridor, around which their footsteps echoed loudly, and then into a tiny office, where they were interviewed by another nun—a sterner one this time—and finally escorted up three flights of stairs and into a large room that held ten beds and seemed to serve as a kind of dormitory. Each bed held a woman and an infant, and the noise of crying could be heard from some way away. Freddy averted his eyes as they were led through to one end of the room. Here in a corner was another bed, shut away behind a thin curtain.

  ‘Visitors to see you,’ said the stern nun, and pulled the curtain aside. ‘You may have half an hour,’ she said to Angela and Freddy, as though she intended to throw them out by force if they outstayed their welcome. They thanked her and she left, her footsteps tip-tapping towards the door.

  Lying in the bed was a young woman holding a baby. She was pale, and her clothes hung off her as though she had been ill. She looked up at them questioningly.

  ‘Miss Vandermeer?’ said Angela.

  ‘Yes?’ she replied in a soft American accent. Her eyes were large and brown and her face wore a habitually sweet expression. It was hard to believe that this woman could have killed Davie Marchmont.

  ‘My name is Angela Marchmont,’ said Angela. ‘I’ve come to ask you about Davie.’

  She looked at them for a moment, and then down at the bed.

  ‘I guess I knew somebody would come eventually,’ she said.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It had begun to snow again. The windows of the dormitory were large and high, but they could see the flakes against the grey of the building opposite.

  ‘Are you his wife?’ said Callie Vandermeer, looking back up at Angela.

  ‘Yes,’ said Angela.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl, and two tears appeared in the corners of her eyes and began to roll down her cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  It was impossible to be stiff in the face of such obvious grief. Freddy brought out a handkerchief and handed it to her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she sai
d, dabbing her eyes. ‘But I don’t deserve your kindness, as you can see.’ She looked down at the baby, which opened its eyes sleepily and then closed them again. ‘He nearly died,’ she said. ‘And so did I, they tell me. But he’s so much stronger now. In a few days, when he’s well enough, they’ll take him away from me.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you rather keep him?’ said Freddy.

  ‘I’d like to,’ she said. ‘But how can I support him, here? I don’t have the money to get back home. Davie took care of all that.’

  ‘Don’t you have family?’ said Angela.

  ‘Only an aunt,’ said Callie. ‘She’d take me in, but she doesn’t have a great deal of money and I’d be too ashamed to ask her to pay for my passage. I’m sorry,’ she said again to Angela. ‘I’d give anything to go back and do things differently, but I loved him, you see. He said we’d get married and be happy, and I believed him. I guess you were the one to find him. I’m sorry I was such a coward. I know I oughtn’t to have left him but I didn’t know what to do, and then I got sick and they took me away and brought me here. I only wish I could help in some way, but I don’t suppose there’s much I can do after all this time. I hope there wasn’t too much trouble.’

  Her expression was open and innocent, and it was evident she had no idea that Angela had been arrested and put on trial for murder. Angela and Freddy glanced at one another.

  ‘There was a little trouble, yes,’ said Angela at last. ‘That’s why we’re here. We want to know exactly what happened that evening. It’s rather important.’

  Callie looked down and with her free hand smoothed the thin bedclothes.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘You met Davie in the States, I presume,’ said Angela.

  ‘Yes,’ said Callie. ‘I was in the park and he picked up something I’d dropped, and we got to talking. He was so kind and cheerful that I couldn’t help but fall in love with him right away, and he told me he felt the same. I knew pretty quickly that he wasn’t—wasn’t the best of men, but he mostly treated me well, and I guess I was dazzled by him, and I thought that with a little time and patience he would change. Not long after we met he asked me to marry him and I said yes, and for a little while I was happy, but time went on and he said nothing more about it, and then I found out I was going to have a baby, so I told him we had to get married immediately. It was then that he confessed to me that he was already married. I’d had no idea of it and it came as a horrible shock. He was terribly sorry for what he’d done and said he hadn’t meant to lie to me, and that he still wanted to get married, but that he would have to divorce his wife first. He said they’d been living separately for years, and that she was English and had gone back to London, so we’d have to go there and speak to her. He didn’t have much money—only just enough to cover the trip there, he said, but his wife was wealthy and would happily agree to a divorce and give him some money too, although it wouldn’t be enough for us to live on. Then he laughed and said something about how it didn’t matter anyway, because he had another plan in reserve and was minded to carry it out if she wasn’t nice to him, and then we’d be set for life. I didn’t know what he meant, but he was always saying things I didn’t understand and then laughing, and so I thought it was just one of his usual jokes.