The Corpse of St James's

by Jeanne M. Dams

  ELEVEN

  ‘I am getting very tired of trains,’ I said next on Monday morning. We’d spent a quiet Sunday at home, taking some comfort from the usual lovely Eucharist at the Cathedral, but though we’d kept our problem off the spoken agenda, it hadn’t been far from our minds. This morning we’d decided to go into town much earlier than was necessary to meet the truculent Joe Smith, in the hopes that we could track down Jonathan. We had no idea whether he had returned to his flat in London or was still with Aunt Letty; she wasn’t answering her phone, either.

  ‘That could mean anything,’ I said drearily as the train moved through an uninspiring countryside. Rain streamed down the dirty windows, all but obscuring the view of sodden pastures and fields and misty oast-houses, making the latter look more than ever like witches’ hats. ‘If the worst has happened and the news is out, they could be hiding from the media. Or they could be hiding from the police, if they’re still trying to keep the lid on the thing. Or they could have been tracked down by the murderer and silenced.’

  ‘Have some chocolate,’ said Alan, handing me his usual cure for my glooms.

  This time I refused to be placated. ‘Oh, I admit the last idea is foolish, but it’s infuriating that the man got us into this and has now disappeared. He should have told the police the minute he recognized the girl. Or we should have gone to the police the minute he told us.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Alan, and buried his nose in his newspaper.

  There are times when I could smack the man.

  Victoria Station was even more hectic than usual, which is saying a good deal. The floor was wet and dirty, and I had to hang on to Alan’s arm to keep from slipping. It wasn’t yet lunchtime, but queues were already forming at the many fast-food stalls on the ground floor.

  ‘I want some coffee and something sweet, and I don’t want to eat it standing up,’ I informed Alan. ‘Let’s pop into the Grosvenor.’

  ‘It isn’t the Grosvenor any more,’ he reminded me.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ I pointed to the sign. ‘They’ve changed it back. Anyway, whatever it’s called, it’s here, and I’m tired and cross, and I want a little pampering.’

  The Grosvenor Hotel is one of the grand old ladies of London, a relic of the glory days of rail. In Victoria’s day, railway hotels, attached to the major stations, were the last word in luxury. Many of them are gone now, but the Grosvenor, though showing her age, maintained for years a kind of faded opulence. Now she’s been given a wash and a brush-up, and she’s certainly convenient; there’s a hotel entrance actually in Victoria Station.

  We went through the lobby to the lounge and talked a somewhat reluctant waiter into coffee and chocolate croissants. We could have had identical fare in the station for a quarter the price, but we couldn’t have sat in plush chairs and wiped the chocolate from our faces with linen napkins.

  ‘Right,’ I said, looking regretfully at the last pastry crumbs on my plate. At home I would probably have licked a finger and blotted them up, but I do know how to behave in public. ‘So we try first to find Jonathan?’

  Alan pulled out his phone. ‘I’ll try calling him one last time.’ He punched in the numbers, and I saw his expression change. ‘Jonathan? Alan here. I’ve been trying to reach you.’

  That was the English restraint at work. I would probably have said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘I see,’ said Alan, nodding. ‘Yes. Yes.’ He clicked the phone off and put it in his pocket.

  ‘That wasn’t terribly informative, dear. What did he say? Where is he?’

  ‘In hospital, St Thomas’s. If you’ve finished, let’s go.’

  We took the Tube, which at that time of day can be much faster than a taxi. On the way, Alan told me a little.

  ‘He fell. I don’t know where, or anything much about the circumstances.’ He looked around the crowded car, and I understood. Discretion was required.

  ‘Did he injure himself badly?’

  ‘He didn’t say much. We’ll know more when we see him.’

  He was sitting up by his bed, in a four-bed ward that looked like hospitals all over the planet. He was pale, but that was his usual state.

  ‘So, old chap,’ said Alan, ‘how are you?’

  ‘Not so bad, considering.’ He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. I’m sure you’ve been wondering . . .’ He looked around the ward with the same expression Alan had worn in the Underground train.

  This non-communication was getting frustrating. ‘Jonathan, tell us what happened! We’ve been worried sick about you.’ That wasn’t quite true. We’d been annoyed. But I didn’t want to say that to an invalid.

  ‘Really, it’s nothing serious. I was at . . . I was visiting Jemima, and fell, that’s all. Bruises and grazes, nothing worse.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘Dicey medical history. But truly, I’m doing quite well.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’ I was rapidly getting past being either sympathetic or tactful. ‘You look perfectly dreadful. But since you’re insisting you’re fine, can you walk? Or wheel your chair?’

  ‘Dorothy,’ Alan began in a reproving tone.

  I turned on him. ‘We can’t talk here, and we need to talk. Now.’

  ‘I’m allowed to move about the floor.’ He gestured to his wheelchair, folded against one wall. ‘There’s a small lounge at the end of the unit. I don’t know if it’s any more private.’

  It was deserted, at least for the moment. Alan and I sat on the plastic chairs that were cleverly moulded to no human contours I could imagine.

  ‘Now,’ I said in a low voice. ‘You went to see Jemima.’

  ‘Yes, and a hell of a time I had getting her to come out of the palace to see me. I couldn’t go inside, you know.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, the terrorists have a lot to answer for. Sometimes I think they’ve won, they’ve changed life so completely. But you managed to prise her out, eventually. And showed her the picture.’

  Jonathan closed his eyes. We waited.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered at last. ‘It was bad.’

  My sympathy returned. I exchanged glances with Alan. We waited some more.

  ‘I told her the whole story,’ he said finally. ‘I thought she was going to faint when I showed her . . . but when she was better, I asked her a few things. It’s much harder when you know the family, isn’t it?’ he said to Alan. ‘I’ve never faced that before, and I thank God I’ll never have to do it again.’

  ‘It’s best to keep it as impersonal as possible, I found,’ said Alan, keeping his own voice impersonal. ‘So you asked the usual questions?’

  ‘Did she know of anyone who had reason to harm Melissa? Had Melissa said anything? The critical one: when had she last seen her daughter?’ His eyes closed again. We were getting to the worst part, I thought.

  ‘It was on Tuesday. Melissa must have come straight to her when she left Letty’s that morning. And she told her about the pregnancy.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ I felt a little faint myself. The shock to a mother of hearing that her fourteen-year-old daughter was pregnant . . . no, I couldn’t deal with that. I swallowed, to try to ease my dry throat, and asked, ‘Did Melissa say who the father was?’

  ‘No. Of course Jemima asked. Melissa said she wanted an abortion, and it didn’t matter who the father was.’

  ‘Wait. Was this in the palace?’ asked Alan.

  ‘No. Melissa wasn’t allowed inside, you remember. For that matter, no one is who isn’t official, but Melissa wasn’t even allowed to go on a tour, after the time she made a scene and ran away. No, she phoned her mother from the street and asked her to come out. I gather it wasn’t convenient, and Jemima was irritated. So, when Melissa refused to tell her who the father was, Jemima . . . well, she lost her temper and told Melissa she was telling lies to get attention, and she could turn right around and go home to Letty, that she, Jemima, washed her hands of her.’

&
nbsp; ‘And those were the last words they exchanged. Oh, poor Jemima!’ I was nearly in tears.

  Alan struggled to return to the impersonal note. ‘And I suppose that was what she wanted to talk to you about when she spoke to you after the Investiture.’

  ‘Yes. She thought I might have some advice, or might be able to talk sense into the child.’ He looked down. ‘Child. I suppose that’s not an appropriate term, is it, when she was going to have a child of her own. Or not have it, as the case might be.’

  There was nothing I could say, nothing anyone could say, that would make the situation any better.

  After a long pause, Alan asked, ‘Is Jemima going to Carstairs with the identification?’

  ‘She’s going to talk to her superior, see what the repercussions might be. The woman is a battleaxe. I doubt she’ll get much sympathy. Or that’s what she planned to do when I saw her. I didn’t intend to be out of touch for such a long time.’

  ‘You never told us,’ I reminded him. ‘What actually happened?’

  ‘Jemima was leaving. We’d been talking just over the way, at the edge of the Green Park. She was angry and confused and upset, and I was afraid she’d ignore the traffic. She looked ready to run across the street without waiting for the crossing signal. So I tried to run after her, and I tripped over my own cane. Sheer stupidity.’

  I don’t know quite why, but I didn’t believe him. Something was going on, something nebulous . . . ‘Jonathan, do you think Jemima would see me if I asked? Not near the palace, I mean, but somewhere else?’

  He shrugged. ‘You can ask.’ He moved a hand towards where his pocket ought to be, and remembered he was wearing a hospital gown. ‘Letty will give you her mobile number. The palace number is only for emergencies.’

  ‘How is Letty?’ Alan asked.

  ‘Bearing up,’ said Jonathan briefly. ‘She’s been spending a lot of time here with me.’

  That explained the unanswered phone. ‘Does she have neighbours or friends who will help?’

  ‘She has neighbours. I don’t know how much help they’ll be. They mostly thought Melissa was a huge pain, so they won’t be too sympathetic that she’s gone. Relieved, probably.’

  A nurse came up then, scolded Jonathan for being out of bed too long, and whisked him off.

  TWELVE

  ‘I hate hospitals,’ I said when we had escaped into the fresh air.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘Where shall we go to get the taste out of our mouths? A spot of lunch? We don’t have to meet Joe for at least another two hours.’

  ‘You’ll find it hard to believe, but I’m not hungry. Let’s go back to Green Park and walk. Then we’ll be close to the palace and the pub, when the time comes.’

  ‘It may rain again at any time.’

  ‘We have umbrellas.’

  St James’s Park has a good deal more shelter than Green Park, in case of rain. Alan knew why I didn’t suggest it.

  The Green Park, as it’s officially called, is at its best in April, when drifts of daffodils spread across its expanses of grass, and make me go all Wordsworthian. The rest of the year it pretty much lives up to its name, and today, still early in the season and after a rain, it looked and smelled . . . well, green.

  The benches were all beaded with water. Alan, anticipating the problem, had bought a newspaper in the Tube station, and spread it over the seat.

  ‘Restful,’ I said after we had sat in companionable silence for a while. Our silence, that is. Around us, children shouted, dogs barked. Traffic noises came from Piccadilly and, farther away, The Mall. But somehow the grass and trees isolated us.

  ‘You’re in need of some rest, aren’t you, love?’

  ‘Not as much as Jonathan is,’ I said with a sigh. ‘He looks awful, and it isn’t just pain. Alan, he lied to us.’

  ‘He didn’t tell us all the truth,’ said Alan. ‘There’s a difference.’

  ‘Lying by omission, you called it.’

  ‘About how he met with his accident,’ he went on, ignoring me.

  ‘At least about that. Do you think the rest was true?’

  ‘As far as it went. It was painful for him, too painful to be a made-up story. His one fault as a policeman was always that he had trouble masking his feelings.’

  ‘I can relate. But why would he lie about his accident?’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Alan, ‘because he doesn’t want us to know how it really happened. Which means someone else is involved.’

  ‘Jemima.’

  ‘It all comes down to Jemima, doesn’t it? And if she knew her daughter was pregnant, and she and Jonathan quarrelled about it . . . He contradicted himself, did you notice? At first he said he just fell, then that he tripped over his cane.’

  ‘I missed that. I was so horrified by the rest of the story. But Alan, you’re surely not suggesting . . . her own daughter?’

  ‘It’s not as uncommon as you’d like to think. You know perfectly well that the first suspect in any murder case is a member of the family. A spouse, if there is one, but mother, father, brother, sister . . . unpleasant, but true.’

  ‘The first recorded murder was a fratricide,’ I said soberly.

  ‘Jonathan isn’t necessarily lying to protect Jemima,’ Alan went on. ‘He may have been injured by someone else, or in a way that he finds too embarrassing to relate.’

  ‘He wouldn’t lie over something that was just embarrassing,’ I argued. ‘At least not to us. He respects you, Alan. He reveres you. Yes, he does, don’t look at me that way. He’d only lie about something really important.’

  ‘Like what?’

  And there we were stuck. Neither of us could think of something Jonathan would want to conceal, after he’d already told us so much.

  The Horse and Groom was small and not very crowded, but what clientele there were, were exclusively male. I was very glad I had decided not to go in by myself.

  Joe Smith spotted us before we identified him.

  ‘You’ll be Bob Finch’s friend, then?’

  The voice came from a rather dark corner. I shaded my eyes and saw him – a small man with a countryman’s face and an air of deep suspicion. We approached.

  ‘And who’s this, then?’ He glowered at Alan, with a sideways nod of his head towards me.

  ‘This is my wife, Dorothy Martin.’

  ‘Thought you said your name was Nesbitt.’

  Alan smiled genially. ‘Alan Nesbitt, sir. I see your glass is empty. Will you have another?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Joe Smith, his manner edging a point or two away from hostility. He waved a hand towards a chair in what I took as an invitation to sit.

  When Alan came back with three brimming pints and several packets of crisps (what we Americans call potato chips), Joe relaxed even more. ‘Cheers, mate,’ he said, raising his glass. He downed half its contents in one swig while I took a genteel sip. By now I really was hungry, and beer on an empty stomach wasn’t such a good idea. I helped myself to a handful of crisps.

  ‘You’ll be wondering why my wife and I wanted to talk to you,’ said Alan.

  Joe shrugged. ‘So long as you’re buyin’, mate, don’t know as I care.’

  ‘Well, then, what can you tell me about life in the palace? Seems a rather extraordinary place to live.’

  ‘Can’t tell you about the family, y’know. Took me oath.’

  ‘Does that include the corgis?’

  ‘Ah, them!’ He raised a trouser leg to reveal a bandage on his ankle. ‘See that there? That’s just the latest. That’s Emma did that. Rest of ’em behave themselves, mostly, but Emma, she’s got it in for me.’

  I couldn’t stay silent. ‘Does the Queen know Emma bites you?’

  ‘Can’t talk about the Queen,’ he said, and polished off the rest of his pint.

  Alan gave me a ‘Keep still’ look. ‘How long have you lived at the palace, Joe?’

  He considered. ‘Twenty years come Michaelmas.’

  ‘Then you must ha
ve seen a good many corgis come and go.’

  ‘Corgis, and people. I don’t just work with the dogs, you know. I’m a footman, and we do all sorts of things.’

  ‘Are you allowed to talk at all about your work? The kinds of things you do all day? Most of us never get a glimpse inside the ordinary workings of the palace,’ Alan added.

  Joe looked pointedly at his empty glass. Alan rose, lifting his eyebrows at me. I put a hand over my almost full glass, but mouthed ‘food’. He gave a tiny shrug and went to see what he could do.

  ‘How did you get to know Bob Finch, Mr Smith?’ Surely that was a safe topic, something he wouldn’t mind talking about, even to a woman.

  ‘We were at school together, weren’t we? Village school, mind you. Donkey’s years ago, that was.’

  ‘Was that near Sherebury?’

  ‘Brockhurst.’ He named a village a few miles from the Cathedral city. ‘Lived there all my life, till I came to London.’

  I wanted to ask why he came to London at all, but Alan returned with the beer and more crisps. He handed the packets to me with an apologetic look. ‘They don’t do much in the way of food, it seems.’ He turned back to Joe.

  ‘You were about to tell me what, exactly, a footman does. Besides ride on the back of carriages.’

  ‘Bit of everything, really. No two days alike. I used to drive a bus. Same thing, day after day. Couldn’t stick it. There’s parts of this job I could do without, like the corgis. But most of it is interesting, and I got me mates to talk to.’

  Ah. If there was any point to this conversation at all, which I was beginning to doubt as I ate my substitute for real food, we were approaching it. His mates. I kept my silence while Alan probed.

  ‘I expect you’ve made a good many friends in twenty years.’

  ‘Like I said, the people come and go. A few stay on, but there’s not many been there as long as me. Couple of the women.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever come across a woman named Jemima? I don’t recall her last name, but I think she works for the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.’

  Joe’s face had darkened. ‘You a friend of hers?’

  ‘Friend of a friend,’ said Alan. ‘I don’t actually know her.’