‘You may not thank me when that day arrives,’ Mr G cautioned, but Hesketh was not so easily intimidated.
‘Neither will he,’ he vowed.
Sidney Grice scanned another file and placed it back on the desk with great precision.
‘Describe the system by which you have arranged this information.’
‘I have hardly any experience of these matters—’ Hesketh began.
‘Describe the system by which you have arranged this information,’ my guardian repeated slowly and firmly.
‘On my left are the documents which I believe relate to Mr Nathan’s estate,’ Hesketh recounted. ‘Bank accounts, bonds, shares, and he had a few small properties and some farm land in Shropshire rented out to tenants. On my left are Mr Nathan’s account books. He was most scrupulous about recording all his outgoings and always prompt in checking and paying bills. These boxes are copies of invoices and receipts going back to shortly after he moved in to this house.’
‘Goodness,’ I said, ‘are you sure you are not an accountant in disguise?’
Hesketh smiled and I wished he had not, for it opened up his cut lip again. ‘Positive, miss. I can see what the papers are about but I cannot make head or tail of all those figures. This envelope holds a copy of the Trust-fund details.’
I looked in that one first, but it was all first and second parties and furthermores and notwithstandings and estoppels. It was too like my godfather when he had tried to explain a complex mortgage fraud after midnight on Christmas Eve. I stuffed it back.
‘You must do two things and then you must not do one,’ Sidney Grice told Cherry and her valet. ‘First, leave us as soon as I gesture in a peremptory manner. Second, you must arrange for us to be served tea and, third, you must on no account, other than an emergency, disturb us further until I activate this ugly brass bell pull.’ My guardian waved imperiously. ‘Which shall you examine, Miss Middleton, since the Trust fund was not diverting enough for you?’
Hesketh pulled the door to.
‘The accounts.’ I did not hesitate for I had helped my father with those for years, though I had known so little about his debts that the total of them had come as a dreadful shock to me when he died.
‘Good.’ Mr G settled comfortably in the captain’s chair behind the desk. ‘Needless to say I shall study his estate, a labour of love, for I am ever fascinated by the wealth of men.’ He waved at Cherry in the doorway. ‘Goodbye.’
I dragged a cardboard box over, and sat in a low armchair by an empty fireplace with an accounts book on my knees. It was dated January 1873 and pencilled in small but easily legible writing in five columns – the date, the payee, the item or service provided, the bill and the running total. I lifted a block of papers, tied with white strings through holes in the top right-hand corners, and a glance through them showed that they corresponded exactly with the entries in the book. I could not fault Nathan Mortlock’s bookkeeping so far.
The first two pages were largely taken up with multiple payments to builders, iron merchants and locksmiths.
‘He spent a small fortune fortifying this house,’ I declared.
‘If a fortune is small it is not a fortune.’ Sidney Grice was writing in his notebook. ‘Stop chattering.’
‘What exactly am I looking for?’ I asked and he growled impatiently.
‘What are we always looking for? The truth.’
‘Thank you for that clarification.’
‘Shush.’
I ploughed on – butchers’ bills, bakers, coal merchants, etc., etc., etc., page after precisely filled page of them; a blocked drain; wages for domestic staff and a governess; dressmakers’ bills; five pounds cash on the first day of February to… I ran my finger across the columns. To nobody apparently; six pounds three shillings and fourpence as a gift for C. I wondered what it was. She must have been about twelve years old. Nothing improving, I hoped. After six pages I needed a smoke. After a dozen I needed a drink. Veronique arrived with tea – not the sort of drink I had in mind – and Mr G bustled her away.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
He was up and rifling through an oak cupboard. ‘I never like being told what to look at.’ The shelves were stacked with files and books. He whisked a few out. ‘This could be interesting.’ He tossed a fat red volume on the desk. ‘And this.’ A navy one followed.
‘What are they?’
‘Mrs Augusta Garstang’s household accounts and Holford Garstang’s petty cash book.’
‘They sound like good night-time reading.’
‘The truth is fascinating, whatever the time.’
‘Some truths are tedious, ditto.’ I poured our teas and battled on to March the seventeenth – Saint Patrick’s day, I remembered idly, but no orders for shamrock or Guinness and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I could not go through what was more than a decade of those figures without risking readmittance to a hospital for the insane.
I went straight to 1884. At least that would be a short year, I thought grimly. I had started admiring Nathan Mortlock’s attention to detail, but now it had driven me past distraction to the place where distraction was a dot on the landscape behind me. He had purchased a new dressing gown from Hancock Brothers. That must have been the one we saw hanging in his bedroom, hardly worn. And preserve – four jars of plum jam. Five pounds cash again to nobody and again on the first day of the month. I flicked through to the third and the last entries. Nothing else unusual.
January 1884: the first entries were wages. Then there it was again. Five pounds cash, no payee. The same in February, and then another entry caught my eye – five guineas to Critchely on the fifteenth. I ploughed through the ledger and the pattern was consistent. Five pounds on the first of every month, five guineas to Critchely around the middle of the month.
And then in December the pattern changed. There was still the cash payment but – I totted them up – there were nine payments to Critchely, all for five guineas and all paid by cheque: forty-five guineas in one month.
Then 1883: nothing to Critchely until the fourteenth of April when the regular pattern began.
‘Either you have found something or you are just trying to annoy me by making as much noise as possible,’ my guardian grumbled.
‘I am looking for his last cheque book.’ I lifted a fistful of receipts out of the box. ‘Got it.’
‘Good. Will you be quiet now?’
I flicked through. The stubs confirmed the amounts, dates and payees.
‘A few things stand out,’ I announced.
‘And they are?’
‘I have found three payments so far of twenty pounds each for artwork.’
‘Clearly that puzzles you.’ Sidney Grice did not pause in his scribbling. ‘Give me two meritorious reasons why.’
‘Apart from the Dürer, I have not seen any works of art here. So where are they?’ I began. ‘And why would they cost exactly the same amount each time?’
‘Relevant questions indeed.’ My godfather glanced up. ‘Let me know when you are able to answer them.’
‘Also...’
Mr G put down his pencil. ‘Go on.’
‘Do you think Nathan Mortlock was being blackmailed?’
‘Yes. Tell me why you do?’
‘There are entries for five pounds cash on the first of every month since he came here. Everything else is very carefully itemized, even when he bought a new pack of pen nibs,’ I told him. ‘What is your reason?’
‘I hope to be able to tell you that this evening.’ He took off his pince-nez and held it vertically to view me through one lens. ‘The other item of interest is?’
I took the 1885 ledger to show him. ‘Since April of 1883 there have been cheques for five guineas to somebody called Critchely around the middle of every month. At the end of the year he is making payments every two or three days.’
Sidney Grice clipped his pince-nez on his elegant nose and followed my finger jabs though the entries.
&nbs
p; ‘Some of these are on Sundays,’ he calculated.
‘So not a shop.’
‘I should think not,’ he agreed. ‘Look at the way it is spelled. I know of several people called Critchley with a T and L-E-Y, Crichley with no T and L-E-Y or Crichely with no T and E-L-Y, but only one C-R-I-T-C-H-E-L-Y.’ He wrote the names in block capitals on a fresh page of his notebook. ‘Open the door, March.’
I did as I was bid.
‘Miss Mortlock,’ he bellowed, so loudly and suddenly that I jumped. ‘Come at once.’
I heard a low voice and then hurrying footfalls.
‘What is so urgent?’ Cherry asked anxiously.
‘If I were to waste time chattering about things which are urgent,’ Mr G informed her calmly, ‘they would no longer be urgent. Who – and tell me truthfully if indeed you know the answer to my rapidly approaching enquiry – is or was Critchely?’
‘My father’s doctor,’ she replied. ‘He treated him for headaches. Why do you ask?’
‘You are paying me to ask questions.’ Sidney Grice circled his last spelling. ‘I do not pay you.’
‘Your father wrote a cheque to Dr Critchely every month,’ I remarked.
‘My father saw him regularly for injections and pills, and to be galvanized across the temples, which gave some temporary relief.’
‘Here or at the doctor’s practice?’ I asked.
‘At Dr Critchely’s usually because the electrical generator was too heavy to transport,’ she said. ‘But in the last few weeks of my father’s life I believe the attacks were so prostrating that the doctor made house calls. Why is this so important?’
‘What else are you hiding from us, Miss Mortlock?’ Sidney Grice slapped his notebook shut.
‘Well, nothing, and I was not keeping that a secret,’ she replied. ‘It did not seem relevant, I suppose.’
‘In a few days’ time I may present you with an outrageous account for deciding what is and is not relevant.’ Mr G stood up.
‘A few days?’ Cherry’s eyes sparkled. ‘You really think you are that close?’
‘Oh, Miss Mortlock, with what velocity you catch the subtle import of my words.’ He packed his notebook and some of the sheets of figures into his satchel. ‘Make a list of all the things which you believe to be trivial and bring it to my home in person at seven o’clock tonight. Stay to dinner.’
‘Will you be there?’ she asked me uncertainly.
‘Of course,’ I promised and, leaning forward to kiss her, whispered, ‘Have something to eat first.’
‘No need,’ Sidney Grice assured her. His hearing was always much more acute than mine. ‘I shall command Cook to put an extra turnip in the pot.’
‘Yum yum,’ Cherry said and sent Easterly to summon a cab.
66
✥
The Storm of Stones
THE FOG FLED, pushed back towards the gardens by a gigantic tidal wave to our left, bricks hurtling through the ocean, crashing into the trees. And a door – I saw that quite distinctly – flying past. And then the most almighty bang I had ever experienced.
The ground jumped. Something punched me under the soles of my boots, banging me into the air and dropping me like a bun shaken loose in a tin. The paving stones went higgledy-piggledy, cracked, raised and sunken.
I grabbed my guardian’s coat and we both staggered sideways. His hat blew off and down the street.
I put up my arm and my umbrella shot open and Sidney Grice, who was terrified of such things, put a hand up and shouted in a trough of noise, ‘Cover your face.’
A storm of stones and grit hailed into my umbrella, rattling around my skirts. There was a pause and then a crash. I do not think that particular crash lifted the pavement. It was just that I jumped.
My guardian pointed down the road. ‘Run, March.’
But he did not and so I did not either. He prised my fingers off his coat. A heavier missile had smashed a spoke on my umbrella and ripped the pretty powder-blue fabric. I lowered it and saw that the dust and rubble was coming from the northern end of Gethsemane. The windows had been blown out and a pair of shredded curtains fluttered through one of the apertures. On an upper floor the shattered glass hung from the frame like fangs.
People were running, some away from and some towards the scene.
‘Stand back,’ Mr G bellowed at two young clerks moving in for a closer look and, as we watched, the outer wall of the northern wing cracked and a line zigzagged between the bricks from top to bottom, as rapidly as ripping paper. The remaining roof tiles slipped, most into the gulley but some showering down. One hit a clerk on the leg and he yipped. The other took a piece to the head and he stumbled back, rubbing it but still standing.
‘Fools’ wages.’ My godfather stooped to retrieve his hat and banged the dust out of it against his filthy trousers.
A soap man fought to calm his rearing horse.
‘Do you think it will fall into the road?’ I watched a hole appear in the roof, the lathes torn.
‘I doubt it.’ He reshaped the crown of his hat. ‘But a damaged building can be as fickle as a woman.’
‘Or a man,’ I put in.
‘We have not time for that nonsense.’ Sidney Grice combed back through his debris-greyed hair with all his fingers.
‘Gas?’ I asked.
‘Indubitably.’
I had seen the results of gas explosions before but never witnessed one happen.
‘We are fortunate that the Boulton Gasworks are no longer fully operational.’ Mr G patted his coat down in a hopeless attempt to spruce it up. ‘If the supply had been under full pressure the whole Crescent would have gone up.’ He shuddered. ‘Imagine, March, if Sidney Grice had been killed in a domestic misadventure – how infra dignitatum.’
The fact that I would have shared my guardian’s fate did not seem to trouble him unduly.
People were running out of their houses, maids curious to see what had happened, footmen gawking, an old man being helped down his steps, his wife hobbling behind clutching her jewellery box.
A policeman was racing across the Crescent, blowing his whistle with every outbreath.
Hesketh was at our side.
‘Is Miss Mortlock all right?’ I asked.
‘She is unhurt and attending to Easterly, miss,’ the valet told me. ‘He is feeling lightheaded.’ He blinked at a bit of grit in his eye. ‘Do we need to evacuate the house, sir?’
‘Go indoors and see to your mistress,’ Sidney Grice instructed. He retrieved and replaced his hat at a vaguely jaunty angle. ‘Come, Miss Middleton. You have been entertained enough for one day.’ He straightened his Ulster. ‘And close that damnable umbrella before you frighten me and the horses.’
The fire engines arrived, reeling out their hoses through the gathering onlookers, but we had seen enough. The fog was creeping back. We pushed our way through to Marchmont Street, where we persuaded a cabby to take us home for a triple fare in advance.
67
✥
Ruffians and the Varnished Skull
THERE WAS A letter on Sidney Grice’s desk and he handed it to me without comment. Inspector Quigley confirmed that the braid of the curtain cord almost exactly matched the marks on Nathan Mortlock’s neck.
‘A pity he did not check that while the marks were still fresh,’ I commented.
‘Quite so.’ My guardian tapped the mantel clock as one might a barometer. ‘It is four minutes past the magic hour of six,’ he complained and, as if responding to his cue, Molly entered with our tea.
‘Oh, miss.’ Her face was blotchy. ‘Cook has been telling me how the invisual elephant is a trick.’
She had been forbidden to discuss that with her employer since trying to make herself disappear by closing her eyes and walking into a wall with his breakfast on a tray.
‘Surely not.’ I suppressed my urge to have a nice quiet scream.
‘Answer the door,’ her employer sighed and the bell rang. ‘And if it is a blind beggar
, admit him.’
Molly lingered uncertainly. ‘Does admit mean lock up?’
‘It means let in,’ I told her.
Molly greeted my explanation sceptically. ‘Only whenever my cousin who aintn’t not really my cousin admits things, they lock her up.’
‘Go.’ Mr G threw out his arm and Molly returned a minute later with the man to whom he had given money on Burton Crescent.
‘Well?’ Sidney Grice demanded.
The beggar came in; his odour preceded him. Even in an age when many people had no means of bathing, it was so staggeringly noisome I was astonished that my guardian had allowed him in the house.
‘Twenty-one Thimble Street,’ he said.
‘You are sure?’
Our visitor went to the window, his long, ragged overcoat flowing behind him. ‘We’re a solid team, Mr Grice. You know that.’
‘Description.’ Sidney Grice picked up a pencil.
‘Male, speckled light brown hair, well trimmed, thin excuse for moustaches, otherwise clean shaven, five foot eight or nine, fifty to sixty years old, dressed like a clerk – grey suit coat and bowler hat, horn-rimmed spectacles – pipe smoker. Keeps a wife, a skivvy and tabby cat. Goes by the name of Sam Wells.’
‘You are sure of that?’ my godfather pressed him.
‘A neighbour called good evening to him but my man, Tredge, was not close enough to catch what else they said.’
‘You are very well spoken,’ I observed. ‘And how did you manage to walk round that table?’
‘Show her, Prabberly.’ Sidney Grice leaned back in his chair, hands linked behind his head.
The beggar took off his eye patch and raised it to the light and I saw that it was nothing like so opaque as I had imagined. I could see the room in outline through it. He put his fingers to his left eye and the glass fell into his palm. I had seen that trick many times but this was a thin disc and, when Mr Prabberly looked up, I saw that he still had an eye.
‘Smoked-glass pupil.’ He held it out in his hand for my inspection. ‘I can see most things through that.’
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 30
