A Corpse in Shining Armour

by Caro Peacock

  ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. A situation has arisen and we are having to close for the afternoon. Our apologies. We shall be open tomorrow morning as usual. No, sir, I assure you that there’s been no robbery. Nothing is missing, nothing at all. An accident, that’s all.’

  They filed out, slowly and reluctantly. I was lingering with the last of them when the door to the workroom opened again and Pratt came out.

  ‘Miss…Miss Lane, is it? I do apologise most sincerely, but for some reason the constable wishes to speak to you. If I may send him out to you…’

  ‘I’ll come in,’ I said and walked past him, through the door and into the workroom. Partly it was an act of bravado to prove to myself that my nerves were under control, partly that I was curious about the reaction of Miles Brinkburn. He was sitting on a chair at one of the work benches by the wall, head bent, arms hanging between his legs. He stood up and looked at me with the expression of a dog in a rainstorm, hungry for pity, and started apologising for bringing me into this. The constable cut across him, polite but authoritative. If he was surprised that I’d come into the room instead of waiting outside, he didn’t show it.

  ‘I am sorry to cause you any further distress, Miss Lane, but the coroner will need to know who was present when the body was discovered.’

  He seemed well spoken and intelligent for a mere constable. His grey eyes looked me in the face and I was sure he’d recognise me if we met again. The body was on the floor behind him, covered with a caparison ornamented in black and silver chevrons that must have been meant for the back of a warhorse.

  I gave him my name and address and he wrote them down in his notebook.

  ‘I understand you were here at the invitation of Mr Brinkburn, Miss Lane?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask if you are a friend of the Brinkburn family?’

  ‘I met Mr Brinkburn for the first time yesterday.’

  A flicker of surprise in the grey eyes.

  ‘And other members of the family?’

  ‘I have met no other members of the family.’

  He was trying to place me, I could tell that. I was unmarried, with an address in Mayfair (he might not know that it was on the unfashionable side) and I accepted invitations from gentlemen I’d only just met. The conclusion might seem obvious.

  ‘Had you met Mr Handy?’

  ‘The man in the crate? No, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen him before.’

  That seemed to be all. He thanked me.

  ‘I’ll see Miss Lane to a cab,’ Miles said.

  The constable shook his head.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you’d wait, sir. There are formalities. I’m sure Mr Pratt will take care of Miss Lane.’

  Miles seemed about to protest. Pratt took my arm and I let him guide me towards the door. Miles called after him.

  ‘Pratt, will you get somebody to send for Lomax. Oliver Lomax of Lincoln’s Inn. He’ll know what to do.’

  Pratt nodded and we went through to the shop. I told him I didn’t need a cab and walked into the sunlight of Bond Street, wondering why Miles Brinkburn’s first coherent thought had been to summon a lawyer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Back home in my room at Abel Yard, I opened the window to let in what passes for fresh air in London. It came in with the familiar smells of sun-warmed grass from the park, of the cow byre where the yard’s resident herd of four Guernseys was kept, of hot iron from the carriage mender’s workshop, with the usual faint whiff of cesspit underlying them. Still, it was sweeter than the memory of that smell from the crate. I mixed some fresh ink and wrote a note to Jimmy Cuffs at the Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street, asking him to find out when and where the inquest into a servant named Handy would take place and let me know by return. When I went back down to the yard, the boy who blew the bellows for the carriage mender’s forge was willing to carry out the errand for sixpence.

  Jimmy Cuffs was a man I’d met in one of my investigations. I suppose he might be described as a journalist of a kind, though that was rather a grand title for his trade of picking up snippets from the coroners’ courts that might make a paragraph or two in the newspapers. He was no taller than a twelve-year-old child and lurched along at a fast limp because of a club foot. He must have had a lodging somewhere, but his seat in the corner of the Cheshire Cheese was his true residence and he was always to be found there in the evenings. It was hard to tell his age and nobody knew his surname. Jimmy Cuffs was the name given to him by the other scribblers who were his drinking companions, because once, when the coroners’ courts had been unusually dull, he couldn’t afford to have his shirts washed, so took to wearing his rusty black jacket buttoned right to the neck, with a pair of respectable white cuffs sticking out from the sleeves. Only the cuffs, with no shirt attached to them.

  Jimmy Cuffs was a cultivated man. I’d seen him in St Martin’s Lane with his nose pressed to a bookshop window like a starving boy at a pie shop. He claimed to know all the Odes of Horace by heart. Late one night, when business had taken me to Fleet Street, I’d heard him trying to prove it by reciting one of them to a crowd of drunken friends. He was just as drunk himself and had to cling to a lamp post to stay upright, but his Latin sounded as clear as Cicero’s. He and I were occasionally able to do each other professional favours. Although I’d never betray a client’s confidence, I could sometimes put a story Jimmy’s way that did him good and nobody else any harm.

  In not much more than an hour, the bellows boy returned with his reply, written on the back of a few inches of newspaper proof in his fine Italic hand: Day after tomorrow, Thursday, 10 a.m. at Marylebone. Would have been tomorrow, but they have to wait for a witness to come up from the country.

  While I was reading this, Mrs Martley returned from her daily visit to Jenny and Daniel, with two warm pies for our supper in her basket because she hadn’t had time to cook. I’d opened a bottle from our small store of claret in celebration of having a case that might pay well and poured two glasses to go with the pie. As we ate and drank I asked her how Jenny was.

  ‘I’ve never known a woman so happy. Mr Suter fusses over her that much, he’ll hardly let her lift a finger. I told him not to worry. She may be only a little scrap of a thing, but she’s strong as oak.’

  ‘The baby’s due soon, isn’t it?’

  She gave me a reproachful look for not knowing.

  ‘Four weeks this Sunday. It’s often late with the first, especially if it’s going to be a boy. She’s carrying it high, so …’

  Tides of midwife’s technicalities drifted over my head. Mrs Martley had got over her reluctance to talk about such matters, with me in my unmarried state. There were times when I wished she hadn’t. I thought about the Brinkburn family, and how the death of Handy might affect my investigations.

  ‘…so I told her if she did it again I’d pitch her down the stairs and watch while she bounced.’

  ‘What?’

  It took me a while to realise that she’d changed the subject. While I was away, she’d caught the waif Tabby inside our part of the house.

  ‘Right up here in the parlour, looking round like somebody at the zoo. The girl’s so alive with lice and fleas it makes my flesh creep to look at her.’

  It made my flesh creep too. Still, I felt an interest in the girl.

  ‘Did she say what she was doing here?’

  ‘She said she wanted to know how people lived. Can you imagine the insolence of it? I told her I had a good mind to call the beadle and have her put in the poorhouse.’

  ‘Oh, don’t do that.’

  I didn’t want Tabby in the house uninvited either, but it sounded as if the girl had been guilty of nothing but curiosity. Since that’s a sin of mine as well, it gave me something of a fellow feeling for her. I decided not to tell Mrs Martley about the day’s events. She thoroughly disapproved of my way of earning a living, even though it did pay our rent and put food on the table. A few months before, I’d lost patience and told her ro
undly that she must either accept it or go. To my surprise, she stayed. To my even greater surprise, I was glad that she’d stayed. So we’d come to a truce on the subject. I tried not to intrude my professional concerns on her, while she tried hard not to nag about my irregular comings and goings. When, after the meal, I fetched my old black bonnet down from my room and asked her help in steaming it back into shape, she didn’t even ask why I needed it at the height of summer.

  Anybody may attend an inquest. It’s a public event like any other court case. Still, a woman among the spectators tends to be conspicuous and I didn’t want to attract attention. I wore the re-shaped bonnet tilted well down to shade my face and a black cloak, hoping to pass for some obscure mourning relative. The usher didn’t give me a second glance as I took my place at the end of the back row in the stuffy courtroom. The windows were set so high that the dusty sunlight coming through them made little difference to the dimness of the place. When Jimmy Cuffs limped in, I kept my head down. He walked past to a seat at the front without noticing me. From the sideways glance I had of him, he looked to be the only cheerful person present. The oddity of the body’s discovery combined with the current jousting mania should pay his wine and laundry bills for another week. The coroner arrived and we all stood up. The jurors were sworn in and immediately sent out again for the formality of viewing the body in a room next door. After a two-day delay in this heat, I didn’t envy them. Several were holding handkerchiefs to their noses as they came back.

  While most of the attention was on them, two men walked in and sat down on the end of my row, with eight chairs between us. The elder one looked to be in his early fifties and had an air of distinction that set him apart from anybody else in the room. He was slim and upright, with a firm profile, iron-grey hair and clean-shaven face. His black jacket and trousers were finely tailored, his shoes crafted by a master boot-maker to flatter long and narrow feet. The younger man was Miles Brinkburn. He too was carefully dressed in black, but in contrast to his companion he looked uncertain and ill at ease, all his vitality and confidence gone. The coroner told the jury that the first business of the court was to establish the identity of the deceased.

  ‘Mr Brinkburn, please,’ the coroner said.

  Miles glanced at the grey-haired man and got a nod from him, as if his orders mattered more than the coroner’s. He got to his feet steadily enough and walked to the front of the court.

  ‘Mr Brinkburn, have you viewed the body of the deceased?’ the coroner said.

  Miles nodded.

  ‘Answer yes or no, please.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you able to identify him?’

  ‘Handy. Simon Handy.’

  ‘In what capacity was Mr Handy known to you?’

  Miles swallowed, glanced towards the grey-haired man and away again.

  ‘He was a family servant.’

  ‘At what address?’

  ‘Brinkburn Hall, in Buckinghamshire.’

  ‘How long had he been employed there?’

  ‘Only for a few months, but before that he’d been my father’s servant for twenty years or more. Then my father didn’t need him any more, so…’

  His voice trailed away. The coroner may have been aware why Lord Brinkburn was no longer in a position to employ servants, because he didn’t press the point.

  ‘How recently before his decease had you seen him?’

  ‘Back…back sometime in the spring, I think. The last time I was home anyway.’

  ‘Were you present when his body was discovered?’

  Another nod. Another reminder that the question must be answered in words.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I was.’

  It took the coroner some time to get an account of what had happened in Pratt’s workroom out of Miles Brinkburn. It added nothing to what I knew from being there.

  ‘Do you know of any reason why Mr Handy should have been inside the crate?’ the coroner said.

  ‘No, of course not. I’d told Whiteley to have the armour packed up and sent to Pratt’s. Handy shouldn’t have had anything to do with it.’

  ‘Whiteley being?’

  ‘Our steward.’

  After a few more questions the coroner thanked him and asked the jurors if they had any questions. They hadn’t, so Miles was allowed to stand down. He walked back to his seat, blowing out his cheeks with relief, said something to the grey-haired man as he sat down and got a brief nod in reply.

  The next witness was the intelligent policeman. He described how he’d been called to Pratt’s premises and what he’d found there, without adding anything to what I knew already. Then it was the turn of a doctor employed by the police to give evidence on the cause of death. Translated into layman’s terms for the benefit of the jury, Handy had died from being struck several times on the back of the head by a heavy object. The injuries to the skull had been such that death must have been almost instantaneous. The doctor’s opinion was that he’d almost certainly been dead before he was put into the crate. There was a perceptible feeling of relief in the court. The coroner asked the doctor if he’d been able to establish when Handy had died.

  ‘Not with any degree of certainty. I examined the corpse the day before yesterday, soon after it was brought to the mortuary. By that point, rigor mortis had entirely passed off. From the state of the internal organs, it’s likely that the deceased had been dead for something between twenty-four and forty-eight hours.’

  The coroner made a note, writing slowly.

  ‘You said that death would have been almost instantaneous?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘In your opinion, is there any possibility that the deceased might have climbed inside the crate after receiving the blows to the head?’

  The doctor hesitated.

  ‘In my opinion, it is extremely unlikely. The brain is a peculiar organ. There are cases on record of people performing actions which seem to imply some form of consciousness after receiving what subsequently prove to have been fatal blows.’

  ‘So it can’t be ruled out entirely?’

  ‘Not entirely, although I repeat it would be very unlikely. For one thing, head injuries of that nature bleed profusely. The crate and its contents would have become so suffused with blood that anybody attempting to move it would have noticed.’

  The coroner sat forward.

  ‘So you are saying that the bleeding must have taken place elsewhere, before the deceased was put into the crate?’

  ‘In my opinion, yes.’

  The doctor was followed by the steward from Brinkburn Hall, Wilberforce Whiteley. He was a middle-aged man who seemed to be made up of circles, like a child’s drawing; a rounded figure, neat little paunch bulging out of his waistcoat, round head with sleek brown hair combed carefully over the bald patch, slightly protuberant brown eyes that reminded me of a guinea-pig’s. He held himself stiffly upright, showing his nervousness by blinking often and quickly. The coroner asked him how long he’d been employed as a steward by the family.

  ‘Twenty-six years, sir.’

  He spoke with a country accent.

  ‘Were you well acquainted with the deceased?’

  ‘He joined us quite recently, sir. Before that, I only saw him when his lordship came to visit us.’

  ‘And how often was that?’

  ‘Once a year, sir.’

  The coroner raised his eyebrows. I noticed that Mr Whiteley glanced towards the grey-haired man after answering.

  ‘Are you able to tell the court anything of the way in which he met his death?’

  ‘No, sir. I didn’t even know he was dead until we got word from London.’

  ‘Had he not been missed from his employment?’

  ‘The housekeeper told me he hadn’t been seen all day Monday and Tuesday morning, but that wasn’t entirely out of the way with Handy.’

  His tone of voice made it clear that he hadn’t thought highly of the man.

  ‘He was accustomed to absent himself from his
employment?’

  ‘From time to time, yes, sir.’

  The coroner made another note.

  ‘Is it a fact that you were instructed to pack up a suit of armour and send it to Pratt’s in Bond Street?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sir Gilbert Brinkburn’s armour. I received a note from Mr Miles saying I was to have it crated up and sent off as soon as possible. I asked her ladyship and she was entirely agreeable, so I started seeing to it that same day.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’

  ‘I received the note last Saturday morning. As soon as her ladyship gave permission, I had the armour dusted and moved from the gallery to the old dairy for packing. We had to wait for crates to be got down from the attic and wood-shavings brought from the carpenter’s shop, so by the time we finished packing and nailing them down it was too late to send that day. There was no point in sending the armour up on Sunday, with the shop not open, so I gave instructions that our carter was to come first thing on Monday morning and collect the crates.

  ‘And did that happen?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did you check the crates when they were loaded on to the vehicle on Monday morning?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The coroner looked surprised.

  ‘Wasn’t that part of your duties?’

  ‘The carter came early, sir, and I was engaged elsewhere on the estate. My instructions to him were quite clear, so there was no great need to be there.’

  ‘So nobody counted the crates when they were loaded and realised there was one extra?’

  ‘It seems not, sir.’

  ‘You said the armour was packed in the old dairy. Where is that in relation to the house?’

  ‘A hundred yards or so away, on the far side of the back courtyard.’

  ‘Why choose to pack the armour there?’

  ‘We don’t use it as a dairy any more, now we get our milk and butter from the farm, so it was just convenient, sir.’

  ‘Was it locked overnight while the armour was in it?’