Lady Marmalade Cozy Murder Mysteries: Box Set (Books 1 - 3)

by Jason Blacker

  Hiram got up, pushing on his knees with his hands. You could almost hear his old bones creak. Frances put him at anywhere from late sixties to early seventies. He went around to the opposite side of the table from where Frances and Alfred sat. He kneeled down on one knee and poured the tea into the three cups, leaving room for cream and sugar.

  Alfred needed neither and took his cup, as well as a ginger nut from the plate of biscuits, dunked it into his tea and bit the soggy end off. Frances added cream and sugar as there were no lemons. Though she felt like cream and sugar on this occasion in any event. Hiram was a big man and his use of cream and sugar matched his stature.

  He pushed down on the knee he wasn’t kneeling on and stood up with much effort. Frances saw him wince and he walked stiffly over to his armchair where he sat back down. He cradled the saucer and tea cup in his big right hand and put a tower of six cookies on the table to his left.

  He had taken three of each and they were arranged in alternative order. Ginger nut first then Marie to perhaps cleanse the palette and then a chocolate and repeat. Hiram took a ginger nut and dunked it in his tea and put the whole biscuit in his mouth.

  Lady Marmalade took a Marie biscuit and dunked the tip of it into her tea and nibbled at the wet end. She looked at Hiram.

  “When did you visit Ms. Hollingsberry?”

  “End of last year,” said Hiram, looking at the table with his dwindling tower of biscuits. He took the Marie and drowned it in his tea and put the whole soggy thing in his mouth. A small bit fell off and splashed into this tea like a high diver. Hiram hardly noticed, or he pretended not to.

  “One of her boarders said that you spoke to her. Do your remember that?”

  Hiram took his tea cup in his left hand and had his first sip. He put it back down in its saucer and then looked at Frances.

  “I do.”

  “Do you remember what you said to her?”

  Frances was finding his lack of engaging conversation starting to become frustrating.

  “I don’t.”

  “If this is not a good time to talk to you, perhaps I should come back with the police. Hopefully you’ll be more responsive then.”

  Frances got up and Alfred joined her. She had hardly started on her tea and she still held most of her Marie biscuit in her left hand. She was hoping he’d fall for her bluff. She didn’t really want to leave but she was getting exasperated.

  “Sit down,” said Hiram looking at her. “I don’t remember the conversation because it was hardly important.”

  Frances sat back down and looked sternly at him. If he was younger than she it might have helped. But, being her senior, it didn’t bother him in the least bit.

  “You told her, and this is from her recollection, that bad things were going to happen in Ms. Hollingsberry’s house.”

  “And have they?”

  “Yes, I believe they have.”

  “Then perhaps I’ll put a wager on next week’s horse race.”

  “Or perhaps I’d put a wager that you had something to do with this bad business that is affecting Ms. Hollingsberry.”

  Hiram looked down at his tea, decided he wanted a sip and so he did so.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with any letters.”

  “Would you be prepared to give me a handwriting sample then.”

  “All right.”

  There was a newspaper folded onto the side of the table by the wireless, and a pen lay on top of it. Hiram took his tea cup and saucer and put it behind his biscuits. He put the folded newspaper on his lap and looked at Frances.

  “What would you like me to write?”

  “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

  Frances watched him write the sentence while his lips moved ever so slightly. Hiram handed the newspaper to Alfred who immediately handed it to Frances and they both looked at the handwriting.

  Hiram’s handwriting was neat but small with flowing loops. It was difficult to read, but not impossible. Very dissimilar to the handwriting on the letter which next to Hiram’s looked incredibly elegant.

  “No match,” said Frances to Alfred.

  “No match, my Lady,” he agreed.

  Frances looked up at Hiram.

  “What exactly did you mean then, by trouble coming to the home.”

  Hiram had placed his tea cup back in his lap and had taken the chocolate biscuit for a drowning in his tea. He plopped the whole thing in his mouth like he had before, tilting his head back and dropping it like a fish into his open mouth.

  “I didn’t really mean much by it. That boarder you speak of looked like a young sweet thing and I’d just had a difficult conversation with Margaret. I hadn’t seen her in years and she was just as ill tempered as I remembered. I thought the young woman should know. Bad things seem to happen to Margaret. That I know for a fact, most of which she brings upon herself. So you might say I was just extrapolating.”

  Frances took a sip of tea and dunked another small corner of her biscuit into it and nibbled at the dunked end. Alfred reached for another ginger nut and dunked half of it in and ate that part.

  “From what I’ve heard, you went to Madge looking for money.”

  “Money that was rightfully mine.”

  “Or rightfully hers. From what I understand, this money was her grandmother’s.”

  “Our grandmother’s. I was Lilly’s grandson as much as Margaret was her granddaughter.”

  “Yes, but from what I understand, Lilly Gaspar gave away her small fortune to Madge. She was entitled to do with it as she pleased.”

  “So you say, and I don’t disagree in principle. However, Lilly was spiteful. I was punished for the sins of my father.”

  Frances looked over at Alfred and he raised an eyebrow at her.

  “You find something I said interesting?” asked Hiram.

  Frances looked at him carefully for a moment.

  “You almost quoted the Bible verse that has been found in all of the letters Madge has received.”

  “Interesting.”

  Hiram went back to dunking his second and last ginger nut into his tea cup.

  “Interesting? It practically proves your guilt.”

  Hiram shrugged slightly and finished chewing his biscuit.

  “Hardly. If I was guilty of anything the police would be here and not you.”

  “The police might yet be here, Mr. Gaspar!” said Frances sternly.

  “I don’t see how the coincidence of that quotation that I just used, which also happens to be in the letters, is any indication of my guilt. It is a common enough saying. I’m sure most people are familiar with it.”

  “I’m sure they are, but that you used it is suspicious. Especially in light of the fact that your visit to Madge coincides with the beginning of these letters.”

  “Listen, Lady Marmalade. I just gave you a sample of my handwriting, which I didn’t have to do. I did it as good faith to show that I have nothing to hide.”

  “Handwriting can be changed.”

  “Yes, it can, but you’ve come here for my help, and I’d like to help, but you’re not making it easy. I am not guilty of any of these things you seem to suggest.”

  Frances thought that by this time he should have been getting exasperated if not hot under the collar, because she knew she was. But Hiram was still as flat as a Shrove Tuesday pancake.

  “Okay, let’s try and get back to a more conversational place then, shall we?”

  Hiram nodded before taking the last sip of his tea. He tilted the cup almost upside down, not minding the last soggy bits of biscuit crumbs that were in his tea cup. He got up with effort and went over to the teapot and picked it up. He offered to refill Lady Marmalade’s tea cup and Alfred’s before his own, which they both accepted. He refilled it, topped it with cream and sugar and sat back down.

  “Why did you want the money, which Madge had received, from your grandmother?”

  “Because I believed that it was owed to me. Or at the very le
ast, the surviving grandchildren, of whom I was one of two, should have received it in equal amounts.”

  “That I understand Hiram, but why did you need it. Why was it so important that you had to go over and visit Madge and get into an argument about it? And why wait so long?”

  “I have got myself into a little bit of trouble over the years, I’m afraid.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Nothing much, but it all adds up. I’m not good with money and I spend it quite liberally, on women, drink and assorted expensive odds and sods. I’ve also been known to get carried away on horse races.”

  “I see,” said Frances.

  “Do you?” asked Hiram rhetorically, his tone empty of animosity. “I saw you drive up in your Rolls Royce. This is not the most prestigious suburb in London and it is hard to fall from higher ground.”

  Hiram took his penultimate biscuit and dunked it into his second cup of tea. Frances took a moment to dunk another corner of her Marie biscuit and Alfred finished his second ginger nut.

  “Tell me about it,” said Frances.

  “There’s not much to tell,” said Hiram through a mouth of soggy biscuit.

  “But I think there is. I think it is important to tell.”

  Hiram looked at Frances for a moment in silence, and decided there was no shame in the telling. The shame of his situation had happened decades ago. It had been brushed under the rug for so long, it felt almost comfortable. Anyway, it wasn’t really his shame, it was his father’s and his family’s. He was just an innocent bystander.

  “I came from money at one point. My grandparents, the ones we’re talking about had done well in business. Lilly and Charles Gaspar. I suppose you know that already. If you’ve visited Margaret then you’ve visited my grandparent’s home, because she got everything and that house was theirs. The last vestige of real money they ever had.”

  Frances took a sip of tea and Alfred did the same.

  “Around the beginning of this century my grandfather made some atrocious business decisions and terrible stock purchase to try and recoup the losses. But that’s not really relevant, because I was long cut out from the will by then.”

  “Has this got anything to do with the secrets that you threatened Madge about?”

  Hiram looked at Frances steadily.

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  Frances nodded and took another sip of tea.

  “That Gaspar house that Margaret lives in doesn’t have enough cupboards to contain all the skeletons in our history. The Gaspars are riddled with secrets, though some are worse than others.”

  “I’d like to hear about those.”

  “Yes, everybody loves the juicy bits, the gossip, when it doesn’t involve them.”

  Frances still could not detect any acrid tone.

  “That’s not my interest in them, Hiram, I am interested in understanding these letters and the threats they promise.”

  “It happened in the early 1890s. It was 1893, if I remember correctly, when my father was struck from my grandmother’s will. And that was when my grandparents still had lots of wealth. We’re talking several hundred thousand pounds at that time.”

  “That is a small fortune,” said Lady Marmalade.

  Hiram looked at her and wiped his left hand across the length of his left pant let, smoothing it out.

  “Perhaps for you, but for most, it was a very large fortune.”

  Frances nodded, that’s not what she meant, even though it was not large by her standard, she still recognized it to be a king’s ransom to most.

  “I was devastated. I had been living on credit as if my grandmother was going to bequeath me a portion of it. My mother left my father at that time and moved back to the country to be with her parents. I was their only child.”

  “How old were at that time?”

  “I was twenty three.”

  “My father lost all will to live and turned to drink. He wasn’t an evil man, though I suppose he lost control of the monster within. He died three years later after drinking all night and falling into a river, where he drowned.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Frances.

  Hiram looked at her and nodded.

  “It was a long time ago. Anyway, what my father hadn’t managed to squander, and I being the sole surviving heir, I managed to sell his business and I’ve been living on the meager investments ever since. To the tune of about two hundred pounds a month.”

  Frances nodded and dunked the last bit of her biscuit into the tea and ate it. Two hundred pounds a month was not a lot by any means, however, she was well aware that many people worked hard labor six days a week each month for not that much.

  “I take it your parents had divorced by then?”

  “Yes, and it was an easy divorce for my father. My mother didn’t ask for anything. Though I sent her a hundred or so pounds each month until she died in the Spanish Flu.”

  “That was kind of you.”

  “It was the least I could do, the pain that my father put us through and leaving us all but destitute. So to answer your original question, I went to Margaret on that occasion to ask for money as I had done twice before, thinking that she might have softened over the years. She hadn’t, and I suppose in a way I don’t blame her. Though why she carries on as if it’s my fault I still have no idea. I guess children really do pay for the sins of their fathers.”

  Hiram grabbed his last chocolate biscuit and dunked it into his tea before putting the entire thing in his mouth. He looked out the far living room window at something out there. Frances followed his gaze but couldn’t see what had captured his attention. Perhaps he was looking back into the past.

  “May I ask you about the secret or secrets, Hiram?” asked Frances sipping the last of her tea and putting the tea cup and saucer back onto the table in front of her.

  Hiram looked over, momentarily confused. He had been dwelling on the past. It wasn’t a good place to dwell, but then again, neither was the present for him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The secret or secrets, can I hear about them?”

  “Ah, yes, the damn skeletons.”

  Hiram looked back out the living room window as if he was expecting them to walk up through the gate to his property at any moment.

  “I suppose you’ll likely find out somehow. Might as well be from me. I could beat about the bush and try to be delicate about it, but there is just no way to be delicate about some things. And this is one of them.”

  He looked at Lady Marmalade to gauge her reaction.

  “I have been privy to the depths of depravity, sadly, Hiram. Perhaps the direct approach is best.”

  “Very well.” Hiram paused for a moment and cleared his throat. It was still difficult all these years later to give voice to the atrocity. Hiram looked out the window again, avoiding eye contact with Frances. “My father raped Margaret.”

  The words came out easily, not as harsh or as sharp as the shattered glass he expected them to feel like. They tumbled out of his mouth and rolled slowly and softly across the floor like damp clouds before disappearing. He had expected them to clang bout like raucous children running around clanging bells. But none of that happened. The room went quiet after he had uttered that vileness and the world seemed to stop. Nobody spoke for what seemed like ages. He looked at Frances. She looked at him and gave the softest, slightest sympathetic smile.

  “That’s a terrible burden to carry around.”

  Hiram nodded.

  “And there was nothing I could do about it. Lilly and Charles decided to sweep it under the rug. The police weren’t called and everyone was told very severely that police intervention would not be tolerated. We moved to Manchester for a bit, before my mother left him at around the same time I did.”

  Hiram paused now, remembering his broken father when his mother left him. She left a grown man sobbing and begging on his knees as she walked out the door. She couldn’t blame him, his father had
lost control of his monster. Once it was out of the cage, you couldn’t put it back in.

  Nevertheless, it devastated his father and left him a broken man. Hiram couldn’t stand the sight of him either and he left months later. He hated him for the rape, but he hated him more for his lost inheritance.

  Over the years he had come to be appalled at his own lack of perspective. The inheritance was the least of it. It was the rape that was the twisted evil seed that had grown the root of misfortune for everyone tainted by it. His father had been truly and gravely remorseful, perhaps if he had been helped, things would have turned out differently. But Hiram hadn’t thought of it then, and now in years gone by, he didn’t know if such evil could be forgiven and a man who committed such atrocity be helped.

  “Can I assume then that Madge became pregnant and gave birth to a boy named Michael?”

  Hiram nodded and looked at her briefly then he placed his attention out through the living room window where it felt more comfortable.

  “She had the worst of it. Obviously, but that was just the beginning. Her father blamed her and her wicked ways. What sort of wicked ways I don’t know, she never seemed improper to me. Nevertheless, she was beaten mercilessly during her pregnancy and for the year following, until her parents were murdered.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “We were close once. That was one of the reasons why I thought she might give me some of the money.”

  “But she never gave you anything?”

  Hiram shook his head wearily as if to do so was trying to rock a boulder from side to side.

  “No, I suppose being the son of her rapist, I guess she just couldn’t get over that.”

  “That explains a lot about her temperament,” said Frances.

  Hiram nodded.

  “It does. I don’t blame her, really. And if you check with Matilda about the argument we had late last year during my last visit, I’m sure she’ll attest to the fact that it was really Margaret who was upset and not I.”

  Frances nodded. She wouldn’t be surprised by that. Hiram looked back at her.

  “And that is why I wouldn’t wish to add to Margaret’s grief by sending her vengeful letters. I believe she’s had more than her share of pain.”