The Price of Murder

by Bruce Alexander

  “And how did you come to this conclusion?”

  “From what Patley and I were told by Alice Plummer. She said that she had entrusted her daughter Maggie to a man named Walter at Katy Tiddle’s urging. He had promised to find her a home with a couple who were unable to conceive.”

  “But how did she learn what had become of her daughter?”

  “That, I fear, she learned from me,” said I.

  “Oh, Jeremy,” said he, truly mourning what he had just heard. “One of the most important rules in interrogation is never to let the one you are questioning know just how much you know. She acted on your information. You do understand, don’t you?”

  At that I sighed. “Yes sir, I do understand.”

  “Now if this fellow Walter Hogg was acting as an agent for another, as we both suspect, then we have lost our chance to get the name of that other. Truly, you should have brought her straight to me whilst she was in your hands.”

  “Yes sir, you’re right, I know. If only . . .”

  “Ah yes, ‘if only’—that covers a multitude of sins, does it not? He was then silent for a time, brooding upon the news that he had got from me. Then did he say, “This is specially painful to me, for I confess that I reached a complete impasse with the one they call Mother Jeffers.”

  “I did notice that the strongroom was empty,” I ventured timidly.

  “What could I do? I could not hold her for further questioning on the evidence we had, much less could I pass her on for trial in Old Bailey.”

  “Then you do not believe the testimony of Elizabeth Hooker, sir?”

  “Indeed I do not. Do you? Clarissa told me of that awful muddle in the garret room in which Elizabeth claimed to have been held prisoner. ‘It’s all been changed,’ said she. Well, it could not have been changed so much in so little time, as I understood it from Clarissa. Do you agree with her?”

  “Oh, indeed I do, sir. And there was also the matter of the frock, which Elizabeth claimed as her own. It would have been much too large for her, and would have fit the daughter quite well. So you believe Mrs. Jeffers when she says that she had never before seen the girl?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “What then?”

  “In all truth, Jeremy, I do not believe either one.”

  Again, it was Constable Patley who had brought the word to me. Whilst on his rounds, he had encountered Mr. Deuteronomy who announced to him that he had just returned from Newmarket and would be happy to receive me at any time—“but the earlier the better.” We both knew, of course, what he would be happy to receive.

  “He wrote down where to find him. Let’s see now, I’ve got it here somewheres.” And, so saying, he began going through his pockets.

  “Save yourself the trouble,” said I. “I believe I know the place. Would it be up above the Haymarket Coffee House?”

  “So it is, so it is. Hurry along, lad, and bring the lally. I’ll take you there safe.”

  I had already divided it into two separate bags, both of which were stowed beneath my bed. I grabbed them, gave the smaller to Clarissa, who had let Mr. Patley into the kitchen and had summoned me.

  “Be careful,” said she. “Don’t do battle for it, Jeremy, for when all is said and done, ’tis only money.”

  With that caution, she opened the door and sent us on our way. Yet, thinking ahead, I remembered that I, in a sense, did yet owe Mr. Deuteronomy a pistol—the one that I had taken from Katy Tiddle. And so I did stop off for it and got no argument in the matter from Mr. Baker.

  “You brought it in,” said he, “so it’s yours to take back.”

  “Good,” said I. “I’ll not be bringing it again.”

  “As you wish. Just remember that it’s loaded.”

  And so at last we headed out, Mr. Patley and I, moving swiftly through the city streets. Though it was not late, there were not many about. We kept our silence through most of the journey, and only toward the end did I speak up.

  “Mr. Patley, when you saw Deuteronomy, did you tell him about his sister, Alice?”

  “I did, yes, Jeremy.”

  “Well, thank goodness. I would not want that burden upon me.”

  “Indeed, I can understand that. But, truth to tell, lad, he took it right well. Almost too well, it seemed to me, like it really didn’t matter to him much at all. He’s a strange sort, ain’t he? She was his sister, after all.”

  I had no response handy for that, and so I simply held my tongue. Ahead of us were the lights of the Haymarket. There seemed always to be a crowd thereabouts, as indeed there was that evening. They were women, mostly, prostitutes and the like, though a few seemed to be moving swiftly through the crowd as if on their way to some destination. To what that might be I had no notion.

  We went direct to the coffee house, which was there on the far side of the square. Still open it was. And I realized, to my surprise, that often as I had been there, I had never been there after dark.

  “Ever been up there?” Mr. Patley asked.

  “To Deuteronomy’s rooms? No, I never have. Do you see the way up?”

  Both of us studied the façade of the building, but try as we might, we saw no way up—until we ventured down the left side and discovered a sort of side entrance to the upper floor.

  “Well, I guess that’s it,” said Patley. “Go on up there, rap upon the door, and if he comes to open it, give me a wave.”

  I did it just so. And when Mr. Deuteronomy appeared, I gave to Mr. Patley, at the foot of the stairs, a great wave. He called his farewell to me and departed.

  “Your partner down there?” Deuteronomy asked.

  “He was. He thought it would be a bit safer for me, considering what I was carrying, if he were along.”

  Having said that, I passed to him the cloth bag, heavy with banknotes, which I had been guarding since the day before. Then did I make a movement toward the stairs.

  “Wait,” said he. “Come inside. I’ve someone wants to talk with you.”

  Curious, I followed him down the hall to the second door, the one toward the rear. He opened it and waved me inside. There I found Mr. Bennett awaiting me. I had not seen him since those early-morning exercise sessions wherein Deuteronomy put Pegasus through his paces. Bennett, the trainer, would observe and make a few suggestions and would answer the questions I put to him. And though he always seemed guarded and somewhat ill at ease, I liked the man well enough. (Strange it was to perceive how long ago and far away all this did seem to me at that moment.)

  “Mr. Bennett,” said I politely, “how happy I am to greet you in London. I hope that you had a good journey here from Newmarket.”

  He seemed even more ill at ease than I remembered. His eyes shifted to Deuteronomy and then back to me two or three times in as many seconds. He rose and touched hands with me—one could hardly call it more than that—and returned quickly to his chair. Tense and strained, he wanted little to do with such amenities.

  “You work for Sir John Fielding, don’t you? At the Bow Street Court?”

  “Why, yes I do.”

  “Well,” said he, “I’ve got a confession to make. Only it ain’t just mine, not even mostly mine, as you’ll see. But I know the facts, ’cause I was involved in it, so I’m the only one can tell it. Besides, Deuteronomy here says I got to.”

  I settled into a chair nearby, and Mr. Deuteronomy sat down in another. We prepared to listen to his tale. I know not how many times he had heard it, but I, hearing it for the first time, sat quite transfixed by what he told. This is what I heard:

  “Now I’m a fairly simple man, truth be told,” he began. “I come here from the country—out of Wiltshire, as it was. I didn’t know much, but I knew horses. Otherwise I’d never have got to work at Lord Lamford’s, or maybe just as a porter, or whatever. It was mainly Deuteronomy Plummer here, who got me the job. He knew he needed help managing this string of horses, and most of those sent out from the big house didn’t know a thing about them and were frightened of th
em.

  “So we worked on them together for over a year. He’d ride the horses each Sunday in races round London and exercise them and do whatever need be done. The stable boys and me fed them, kept them well and happy. And if that had been all there was to the job, we’d have been just as happy as any could be. But we had Lord Lamford to contend with, too. First, there was his ‘suggestions,’ as he called them, which were really orders, and they could come any time of the day or night. Right away it was drop anything you might happen to be tending to and do whatever little thing he might happen to want you to do. That dueling pistol I took into Griffin’s in London was a good example. We were doing trials, Mr. Deuteronomy and I, out in the little course we’d set up in the west pasture, preparing Pegasus for racing. Anyway, Lord Lamford had to have that pistol fixed, no matter what, and it couldn’t wait. He knew I didn’t know my way round London, but he sent me out with it.”

  I had listened in silence up to that moment, but when he mentioned the pistol I recalled that I had one of the two in question in my pocket at that very moment. I fetched it forth and handed it over to him, taking care to caution that it was loaded. He laid it down carefully upon a small table next to his chair.

  “I guess you know what happened to this one, the one that didn’t need no work done on it. I loaned it to Katy Tiddle, and there it sat with her. Might never have got it back, if she hadn’t got herself murdered.

  “But anyway, that wasn’t the worst of it with Lord Lamford. The worst was his personal habits, his ‘amusements,’ as he called them. There never was a Lady Lamford, but I don’t know that he would have been any different if there had been a wife, because in my opinion the man wasn’t right in his head. Maybe one of those mad doctors they got at Bedlam could have done something with him—but prob’ly not.”

  “Tell me about his ‘amusements,’” said I to him.

  At that, he sighed. “Well, I might as well get to it, for that’s what this is all about. I’d been there near a year when I started to hear rumors and little hints from the big-house staff about him—how he liked them young and didn’t care how much he had to pay, and so on. But I didn’t really understand what they meant by young until one day this little girl—couldn’t have been more than five or six—must’ve escaped from where they kept her locked up and come down to see the ‘horsies.’ I could tell by the way she talked that she was from London. Then this old bat, the housekeeper, she comes down and slaps her good and proper and tells her that Lord Lamford is going to be very unhappy with her. And so on. She told her that if she ever did this again, she couldn’t be his queen anymore. I could never quite figure out what he did when he was through with them. There must have been—oh, I don’t know how many in the time I was there. The truth is, I didn’t want to know. I looked the other way.

  “But Lord Lamford must have had some idea how I felt about him. Maybe I was a little careless and spoke out in front of one of them in the big house, and the word was passed on. Or maybe I wore the wrong sort of expression too often when I looked upon him, for truth to tell, the man disgusted me something horrible.

  “Anyway, he seemed determined to bring me into it, and he did it the worst way he could—by making me part of his crime from first to last. About a month ago he come out from the house at the end of the day just to tell me he had a request of me—a ‘request’ was even stronger than a ‘suggestion. ’ It meant, if you didn’t do it, and do it right, you might as well just leave and not come back. He told me to ride to Bermondsey and go halfway cross London Bridge. There I’d meet a fella named Hogg who had something for me to bring back to the big house. That’s how he put it.

  “Well, I did just like he said, and there at the midpoint in London Bridge, I come across the man named Hogg sheltering against the cold and holding on to the hand of a little girl. I thought she was about five or six, but later on I found out she was all of eight years.”

  “She always was small for her age,” put in Mr. Deuteronomy, thus confirming what I had suspected.

  Bennett nodded. “That’s right, Deuteronomy,” said he. “Just like I told you, it was Maggie, your niece.” Then did he return to his tale: “This fella didn’t say more than four or five words, just ‘Here’s what you came for.’ Then he lifted her up to me, and I held her close against the cold, ’cause by now ’twas after dark, and I feared she might catch a chill. She was quite the charmer, she was. She said she’d never been up top a horse before. And I told her I took care of the horses, and she wanted to know all about that, and so that was just about all we talked about all the way back to the big house.”

  At this point, Mr. Bennett stopped. He breathed deeply a time or two, as if to gain control of himself, then did he set his jaw before continuing. “The next part,” said he, “is hard to tell.” Yet he managed, by stopping from time to time, wiping his tears before they became a problem, and clearing his throat as necessary.

  “So we got there to the big house,” he resumed. “I carried her to the door, and the housekeeper came and took her from me. I heard no more of her or from her for quite some time, two weeks at least. But then at night I began to hear weeping; just the sort of tears to break you heart. Then there was nothing more until, toward the end, there was some screaming. Deuteronomy here didn’t hear none of it because it was always at night that the tears and the screams came, and by that time he was back here in the Haymarket. There was this one night it got terrible bad, just before Easter. But then it stopped, and somehow or other that seemed even worse.

  “They sent somebody down for me, and right at the door I was met by the housekeeper, and she takes me upstairs. She unlocks the door, and she takes me inside what seemed like a child’s room, a—what is it they call it?—a nursery. There was toys, dolls and such, all over it. The bed didn’t seem to have nobody in it, just blankets and a pillow. Only then, the housekeeper lifted up the pillow, and there was Maggie, the little girl I picked up on London Bridge. Dead. ‘Who done this?’ I asked the housekeeper. And she gave me a kind of smirk, and she says, ‘Who do you think?’ She took a blanket and wrapped the body in it, even covered her face up. Then she presents it to me. ‘Here,’ says she. ‘Lord Lamford wants you to dispose of this.’ I’d no choice but to take it from her. I went back to the stable, saddled up a horse, and took the trail to the river. There’s a place upriver with a shallow bank. I threw Maggie’s body into the Thames right there, and kept the blanket, as I was told to do.”

  Having said his piece, Mr. Bennett halted. He pulled from his pocket a kerchief and blew his nose loudly upon it.

  “When we came up with that ticket for the pistol at Griffin’s,” said Deuteronomy to me, “I was naturally pretty curious, because I could remember the very day that Bennett was sent off with it. As he said, we were just starting to train Pegasus for racing.”

  “Did you confront him with it immediately?”

  “No, I started to work on him, though. It wasn’t till the journey back from Newmarket that he started to see things my way. I told him to talk to you—tell you the story—then you could sort of prepare the way for him with Sir John.”

  “I ask him, could I trust you, and he said he’d trusted you with all his winnings,” said Mr. Bennett to me. “I don’t know what laws I’ve broken, but I know I must have broken some, but what I did in getting rid of the body ain’t nothing compared to what Lord Lamford did in killing that child. But what I done has been on my conscience something terrible.”

  “When did you begin to suppose that the little girl you picked up on London Bridge was Mr. Deuteronomy’s niece?” I asked.

  “Well, he told the tale of Maggie disappearing and then his sister going off somewheres, and I began to wonder because the times matched up pretty fair. And then Deuteronomy showed me the dueling pistol I’d left off for repair and said the woman who had the mate to it—Katy Tiddle—lived in a room next to his sister and Maggie. But now Sir John Fielding had it and considered it property to do with the investigation of
Katy’s murder.” Then he wailed: “Oh, how did I ever manage to get in with that drunken whore?”

  Bennett was so disturbed by the rhetorical challenge he had offered himself that I thought it likely that he might break into tears once again. Though he did not, I thought it wise to get him to Sir John immediately.

  “I fear your confession will be useless unless you make it direct to Sir John. Why not come with me now? He would, I’m sure, listen to you, no matter what the hour.”

  “Alas, I cannot. I think it likely that I might not return from such a trip. If I’m to go to Newgate, I shall need all my money to bribe the guards. I’ll go back and gather together what I can and return on the morrow soon as ever I can.”

  “Must we do it so?” I asked. “I can virtually guarantee that you would not be sent to Newgate, but rather to the Fleet.” I saw that made little impression upon him. I could not persuade him to go with me to Bow Street, and so I did urge him to come in the morning, if at all possible, all to no avail. He repeated that he would come soon as he could. He stood, bade me goodbye, and, pocketing the pistol, made for the door. Deuteronomy bounced out of his chair and accompanied Bennett to the door. There they exchanged a few words and Bennett left.

  “Well, what did you think of that?” Mr. Deuteronomy asked me.

  “Why, I believed him. Did you not?”

  “I’ve known him for two years, and I’ve yet to hear a lie pass his lips.”

  “When did you hear this from him?”

  “’Course I suspected ever since I saw that pistol, but it was just last night on the drive back from Newmarket that he told me all. He’s been carrying a terrible burden for over a month.”

  “I can see that,” said I. “He seems a man haunted by guilt.”

  And so did I return to Bow Street, quite bursting to tell Sir John of what I had just heard from Bennett. Yet upon my arrival, I discovered that it was far later than I had supposed. Past midnight it was, and not a soul awake in our upper floors of the court. I had not heart to wake anyone to tell them, though, I confess, the thought did cross my mind.