Death Descends On Saturn Villa (The Gower Street Detective Series)

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  [Gregory drank some ’79 claret which tinted the margins of his moustaches.]

  He: You know as well as I that when Colonel Middleton died his estate was in ruins.

  I: [breaking a large crumb into three] I am also aware that her affairs picked up dramatically soon after she joined me. [I tidied the condiments.] My goddaughter has become a woman of some means.

  [I watched carefully to see how he took the news but he did not react – not a twitch, tic or blink – and his hand, as he put the glass down, was as steady as Wellington’s squares at Waterloo.]

  He: Then I shall have papers drawn up to ensure that the money stays in trust for her. [He picked up his cutlery again, often a diversionary tactic, occasionally as weapons.] I have known March since she was a baby and—

  I: How would you describe my personality?

  Gregory looked at me blankly: What? You are worried about your personality? Arrogant will do for a start. Offensive, insensitive—

  I: Excellent. [I stood up.] Please do not fancy that I am storming off in a sulk. I have many things to do and you are a dull man who does not even know when he is devouring the gluteus muscle of an aged mare.

  The impression I gained was of a strong (though ailing) man, intelligent and with his own code of honour. But I learned the day before my fourth birthday never to trust one’s impressions. Instinct is for the beasts of the jungles and, if it were any use, they would not be beasts; nor living somewhere so inconvenient.

  90

  Friday Afternoon

  A MESSAGE CAME back from Saint Zita’s Refuge for Domestic Servants in Penury. They had no knowledge of the whereabouts of Travers Smyth’s maid but would welcome a charitable contribution. Unfortunately for them, I could not think of anybody likely to send them one.

  More often than not I write messages for Molly in pencil. The writing will not run when she drops it in a puddle and she has a great gift for discovering those.

  I: You are to go to these domestic employment agencies.

  [Had I shot Molly, as I have twice been tempted to, she could not have reacted more violently.]

  She half-spun, gasped and grasped the edge of my desk, crying plaintively: Oh, sir, please don’t throw me out. Is it ’cause of me stealing that apple core what you threw away? Is it ’cause I gave the grocer’s boy a glass of milk when he fell into a swooned on the floor? It was on the turn already and it made him sick. Is it ’cause I said to Cook you were a miserable old stoat when you shouted at me for spilling soup over your head? Is it because of me saying ain’t? ’Cause I ain’t not said ain’t for hours. Is it ’cause I lost that important telegraph you told me to send to the king of Pryprus and spent the money on forty sugar mouses and didn’t not never tell you?

  I: [as she drew breath] No, though they are all excellent reasons.

  [Molly threw out her arms and fell to her knees by my chair in the way she had seen the farmer’s daughter entreat wicked Sir Jasper in a street entertainment.]

  She did her best imitation of such entreatment: Oh, sir, give me another chance. You’re like a mother to me. [She clasped her hands in a parody of supplication.] Nobody else would employ me. I know ’cause I’ve soughted other jobs.

  I: It was unwise of you to make that last admission, though I was already aware that you had written to the Queen, asking to be her prursonable maid. I am not dismissing you, Molly.

  [Molly looked as deflated as I have seen men do when they are reprieved. The human brain – my own and six others excepted – is a clumsy mechanism. Once it prepares itself for anything, even the worst, it does not like to be disprepared, to coin a word.]

  I: But while you are down there, pick up that cinder. I do not require it any longer.

  She popped it into her apron pocket and said: Oh thank you, sir. [She hauled herself up laboriously.] You’re a dead saint.

  I held out the sheet and said: I have written the addresses of eight domestic employment agencies on the front of this paper. Do not interrupt. And on the back is the question I want you to ask them. Read it to me.

  She: [with many strenuous facial contortions] Do you have or have you reckently had a young woman by the name of Annie [she batted her bovine eyes] Grookspank.

  I: Crookshank.

  She: Oh, but Miss Middleton has been helping me with my reading and that first letter is a Guh.

  I: It is a C, which you might know as a Cuh.

  She: But it has a sticky-up bit.

  I: That is just where I joined the letters.

  Molly nodded wisely: Oh. It’s always the joindering up that makes me confused.

  I: Give it back. [I printed the name.] Try again.

  She: [hesitantly] Crook-shank.

  I made her repeat it four times and said: When you are asking, show them the name as well. It is very important to get it right. [I gave her a red cloth bag with a drawstring.] There are two pounds in here for you—

  Molly interlocked her fingers and shrieked: Lord bless you, sir. I ain’t not never had that much money in my life ’cept when I picked up that old lady’s purse in Regan’s Park, but then I felt bad and had to give it back with a muffin to say sorry.

  I: For you to carry out your task. One pound is for a cab to take you from office to office. [I realigned my ruler.] You are to tell it to wait at each stop. The other pound is as a reward for the agent who can find Miss Crookshank. How much did I pay you last week, Molly?

  Molly shifted her jaw laterally in a way that might have been the envy of an ungulate: Why, not nothing after I broke those plates.

  I blew on my fingerplates and said: If you manage to find Annie Crookshank, I shall double that for the rest of your life.

  [It was just as well that Miss Middleton had not started our maid on arithmetic lessons, I pondered, as Molly skipped thunderously away.]

  *

  The doorbell rang eight minutes later and I was obliged to answer its summons myself. It was a parcel by Special Delivery from abroad and I did not have to open it to know that it contained the case notes I had requested, and a photograph.

  *

  I discovered Inspector Pound propped up in bed.

  He: Any news of Miss Middleton?

  I dusted the chair and told him: Mr Swift, the nerve specialist, and Dr Villeroy, of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, have both been to see her and neither hold out any hope of a cure or spontaneous recovery.

  Pound inflated and deflated his cheeks and asked: Is there nothing we can do?

  I: I have petitioned Vernon Harcourt, the Home Secretary, to have her declared mentally incompetent.

  Pound’s knuckles blanched: It that necessary?

  I sat down: If I succeed she will be unfit to stand trial, which at least removes the risk of a quick conviction and execution.

  He: But she will be put in Broadmoor with all those dangerous lunatics.

  [I discovered a piece of lint on my right trouser leg just above the knee and speculated where it might have come from.]

  Eventually I said: I have long since come to the conclusion that the mad are no more treacherous than the supposedly sane, and conditions there are more humane than in any prison I have visited or in which I have been incarcerated.

  Pound squinted and said: You have been imprisoned.

  I: I know. [There was an annoying asymmetry in the folds of his blanket, but I resisted the urge to tidy his bed and returned to my theme.] Also, the food is better than the filth they make you eat here.

  He: I would kill for a lamb chop.

  I: The slaughterer has already done so.

  [Two porters brought a man in on a stretcher and deposited him on a bed. He was dead before his head hit the pillow but they did not notice.]

  Pound started fiddling with his moustaches yet again and said: Is that all Miss Middleton has to look forward to, imprisonment in Broadmoor?

  I: Of course not. [I shifted in my chair, which was rocking, with a left front leg three eighths of an inch shorter than its fellows.] I shall
then have her installed in a private asylum where I may visit her when I have nothing better to do.

  I watched a nurse tucking the dead man up in bed and telling him: We’ll soon have you as right as rain.

  [She tried to take his pulse but lost interest.]

  I: Prendergast’s assets are less than her debts.

  He: That might be a motive for suicide.

  [It struck me that he had one thing in common with my goddaughter – a capacity for stating the self-evident as if it were a thought.]

  But I did not wish to annoy him so I said: If only I had your forensic experience. [He inhaled sharply.] Are you in pain?

  He: Not much.

  I: Then you should be up and about.

  A woman in a green woollen coat arrived, bringing slices of boiled ham in a brown paper bag and a jug of beer, and the nurse showed her to the dead man.

  Green-coated woman: I won’t disturb you, Daddy.

  Nurse: [somewhat irrelevantly] Sleep is a great healer.

  I brought out a folded letter.

  I: Sign this.

  Pound: What is it?

  I: A letter. If you wish to know what I have written upon it, I suggest you exercise your literacy skills.

  The inspector read the letter carefully and said: I am not sure I can do that.

  I: Do not worry. I have brought a Grice Self-Filling Flexible-Nibbed Patent-Pending Pen with me.

  We then had a discussion about the laws of evidence and I reminded him that he had not been overly concerned about them in the Samuel Wesley case, attempting but failing to persuade me to say that I had found a handkerchief in the stables, so we’d had to let the man walk free, though we knew he had broken his own mother’s neck.

  He: Very well.

  I flicked the pen to get the ink flowing and twenty-eight drops were dispersed on to the blanket, and we had a less interesting discussion about how Matron and her minions would be upset and whether I cared (the answers being positive then negative), whilst Pound appended his signature to the document.

  I know that men find farewells embarrassing and so I whipped the document away, blotted it on his sheet and walked off without a word, secure in the knowledge that he would appreciate my unspoken gratitude and good wishes.

  I passed the young woman.

  I: You might as well give your sustenance to that patient at the end. Your father has been dead for nine minutes.

  She stared at me but I am used to being stared at. It is part of the price one pays for being a man of great renown, but I ignored her. She would have been too stupid to have noticed the clink of my crowbar inside the secret pocket of my Ulster as it knocked into the bedstead.

  91

  Friday Late Afternoon

  I HAD KNOWN Arbuckle since he was a young constable and had lifted me on his shoulders to witness a suspect resisting arrest, though quite how an unconscious woman could do so was beyond me. Arbuckle was still a constable, but time had taken most of the hair from his pate and sown it into his ears and nostrils.

  He paused in his labelling of a flesh-encrusted hacksaw and greeted me amiably.

  I responded with a cheery: I have a signed authorization here.

  [I allowed him to peruse it.]

  He: That will be under P for Prendergast.

  I: Your spelling has improved.

  This was intended to encourage the man but his muttered expletive indicated that my words had had the opposite effect, and I resolved to waste less of my time being kind to him in future.

  Arbuckle lifted one tea chest from on top of another, and dragged the lower away from the whitewashed basement wall.

  He mumbled: Now where is…? Ah! Here we are.

  He brandished a black parcel identical to the one Pound had brought to my happy home. I unwrapped the cloth and placed it on his desk, having swept half a partly devoured beef and mustard sandwich on to the floor first.

  Arbuckle: ’Ere be careful. That’s my breakfast.

  I did not trouble to tell him that I had cleared the space with great care, but brought out my Grice Housebreaking Cane, for which I had unaccountably been denied a patent. The constable watched with interest as I unscrewed the top and tipped a tiny chisel into my hand.

  He: What you up to?

  I was too busy wondering where the verb had gone from that sentence to respond to it and then I was too busy running the highly honed edge of my chisel round the base of the blade.

  He: ’Ere you can’t do that.

  I: I am often puzzled as to why people tell me I cannot do what I am in the process of doing, but I have yet to formulate a completely satisfactory explanation.

  [The metal, as I anticipated, was soft and chipped easily away.]

  He: It don’t say nothing about you being allowed to damage it.

  I: Inspector Pound would hardly be likely to sanction my tampering with evidence, would he, Constable?

  [I put the first finger of my left hand to the tip of the dagger.]

  He: No. [He scratched behind his right ear.] But that’s what you’re doing.

  I: Exactly.

  He: Yes but—

  I: Anyway, I have finished.

  I revolved one hundred and forty degrees anti-clockwise, flexed my right elbow and drove the dagger as hard as I could into the constable’s abdomen, right up to the hilt.

  92

  A Moment Later

  CONSTABLE ARBUCKLE GRUNTED. His blue coat indented under the pressure of my blow, as did his extensive waistline.

  He swore and folded towards me.

  I: I am glad Miss Middleton is not here to witness such language.

  Arbuckle clutched himself around the dagger and gasped: Lord, Mr Grice, what d’you do that for?

  [He took three short sharp breaths.]

  I: To save my goddaughter’s life.

  [Arbuckle expelled those breaths in one exhalation and staggered two steps to his left. I pulled the dagger away and held it up for him to see.]

  He: Oh God, the blade has snapped off inside me.

  I: I completely understand why you made that remark but let me counter it with a simple question. How much blood do you think is inside you?

  [Arbuckle rearranged his features unattractively and clutched himself tighter.]

  He: I don’t know. About five gallons.

  [He tottered forwards, gasping, and put out one hand to steady himself against a box marked in red ink EMPTY.]

  I: It is unlikely to be much more than twenty per cent of that. And how much of it has exited your adipose body in the last three minutes?

  Arbuckle patted himself and said eloquently: Oh. He considered the incident and asked: So where is the blade then?

  By way of reply I shook the handle down and the knife telescoped to its full length. Arbuckle let go of himself and straightened up warily as if still expecting his intestines to become what Molly once described, on coming across a squashed common newt, as out-testines.

  He: So it is a trick knife.

  I: You catch on quickly.

  [He grimaced at this compliment. I raised the dagger to shoulder height and brought it down into the desk where it made a gouge in the woodwork.]

  He: But it didn’t go in that time.

  I: This raised nodule is a button which, if depressed by one’s thumb, releases an internal catch. [I slid the blade inside with the palm of my hand.] The tip is rounded to avoid accidentally puncturing oneself, but the sides are well honed. We have all seen them used in stage acts where the showman will slice something, often an apple, to demonstrate the knife’s sharpness.

  [I chopped a corner from the other half of his sandwich to illustrate the point.]

  But instead of thanking me Arbuckle merely said: Oy.

  [That made him sound Jewish, though I knew him to be a Calvinist Catholic. I put the knife down.]

  I: When you presented me with the weapon, however, the blade had been soldered.

  He: Blimey.

  [He picked the dagger up and fidd
led, successfully retracting and extracting the blade.]

  I: Do not attempt that trick on me. The mechanism is faulty and could easily stick.

  Arbuckle gazed at me, doubtless thinking what I fine fellow I was.

  93

  Saturday Morning, 27 January 1883