Fell the Angels

by John Kerr

  ‘Aye,’ said the barman, a fellow Scot. ‘I do.’

  ‘A regular customer?’

  ‘Aye.’

  Fishing in his pocket for change, Cameron slid two coins across the scarred surface and said, ‘I don’t suppose you could point him out to me?’

  Jerking a thumb over his shoulder, the barman smiled and said, ‘In the back room, tall fellow with a black beard wearing a wool cap.’

  ‘Thank you, my good man,’ said Cameron. Taking his drink he made his way to the low-ceilinged parlour warmed by lumps of coal glowing on an open grate. Two men drinking pints of stout were seated at a table in the corner, one with a black beard wearing a wool cap and the other an exceptionally large man with ill-fitting clothes. Cameron briefly studied the man with the cap, who was handsome in a rakish way, and then walked up and said, ‘You’re George Griffiths.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ he said with a scowl.

  ‘I need a word with you.’

  ‘Bugger off,’ said the large man. ‘Can’t you see we’re occupied?’

  ‘It’s about the Cranbrook murder,’ said Cameron quietly. Both men eyed him warily. Taking an empty chair from a nearby table, Cameron sat down. He took a sip of Scotch and said, ‘My name’s Cameron. I’m a detective, and I’ve been hired to investigate the case on behalf of the victim’s family—’

  ‘Listen here, mister,’ said Griffiths in a low voice. ‘I know nothing about it, apart from what I read in the papers. You’re wasting your time.’

  ‘My associate was in Balham last week,’ said Cameron in a conversational tone, ‘having a drink at the Bedford Hotel. Later, while taking a turn in the night air, someone gave him a nasty blow on the back of the head. Might have killed him.’ A smile curled the lips of the large man. ‘I suspect it was you, Griffiths,’ said Cameron, looking him in the eye. ‘Trying to stop him from gathering some interesting information from the barman.’

  ‘Sod off, mister,’ said Griffiths. ‘I’ve half a mind—’

  ‘Perhaps we should discuss this outside,’ suggested Cameron, believing that both men had been drinking for hours and that their reflexes would thus be impaired.

  ‘A capital idea,’ said the large man, rubbing his hands. Exiting through a side door, the three men found themselves in a narrow, dark alleyway, with rain dripping from the eaves. Cameron stood with his back to the wall, facing Griffiths and his confederate, who suddenly pulled a short club from his pocket and clumsily lunged at Cameron. Easily sidestepping him, Cameron drew the revolver from his holster, cocked the hammer with an audible click and trained it on his would-be assailant.

  ‘I wouldn’t, if I were you,’ said Cameron. ‘Now, drop the billies and put your hands over your heads.’ After both men complied, Cameron waved the long barrel of the Colt at Griffiths and said, ‘The poison used to murder Cranbrook has been traced to a packet you purchased at the Pickford Apothecary last December.’

  The terror in Griffiths’ eyes was discernible even in the darkness. ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I swear it….’

  ‘And what’s more,’ said Cameron, ‘the bartender at the Bedford Hotel swears you threatened to kill Cranbrook shortly after he dismissed you from your position as stableman at The Priory. Unless you co-operate with me, Griffiths, you’ll be in hot water, very hot indeed, with Scotland Yard.’

  Griffiths swallowed hard and then said, ‘All right. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Let’s go back inside,’ said Cameron, ‘and have a little chat by the fire, as though nothing happened.’

  Cameron chose a quiet table in the parlour at the back of the pub, seated alone with Griffiths, whose companion had wisely retreated to the bar in the main room. ‘All right,’ said Cameron. ‘Let’s begin with your purchase of the tartar emetic in December.’

  ‘Well,’ said Griffiths, holding a fresh pint of stout in both hands, ‘I knew it was poison, but I bought it to use on the horses—’

  ‘To worm them,’ interjected Cameron.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Griffiths with a look of surprise. ‘Just a few grains mixed in their water does the trick.’

  ‘Where did you keep it?’

  ‘In a cabinet in the stables.’

  ‘Under lock and key?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘No, but with a notice that says “danger – deadly poison”.’

  ‘You bought the poison in December,’ said Cameron. ‘Ten grams, a small packet.’ Griffiths nodded a little drunkenly. ‘And you were sacked by Cranbrook in February, forced to move out of the coach-house, is that right?’

  ‘Right,’ muttered Griffiths. ‘The effing sod; my wife was almost due.’

  ‘Was anyone else, so far as you know, aware of the packet of poison in the stables?’

  Griffiths shook his head and said, ‘No one.’

  ‘But after you were sacked,’ said Cameron, ‘the poison remained where you left it?’ Griffiths nodded. ‘And so anyone might have come across it by chance,’ suggested Cameron. Griffiths nodded again. ‘Did you complain of your ill-treatment by Cranbrook to Mrs Clark?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘Mrs Clark? No. Never said a word to her. But I told the missus Mr Cranbrook had blamed me for wrecking the coach – it warn’t my fault, I assure you – and had give me notice, but it was to no avail – he bein’ such a hard man.’

  ‘You never mentioned to Mrs Clark,’ said Cameron, ‘that you kept poison in the stables?’

  ‘Of course not. Why should I?’

  ‘After leaving The Priory,’ said Cameron, ‘you moved here with your wife and child?’

  ‘The wife took the baby and moved in with her mother in Lambeth,’ said Griffiths, staring into his glass.

  ‘I see. Well, Griffiths, considering the facts, you remain under suspicion.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it, I swear it.’ Griffiths wiped perspiration from his brow and said, ‘I’ll grant you it didn’t grieve me to hear he was a goner, but how was I to get into that house unnoticed, what with all the people about? It was an inside job, no doubt of it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Cameron. Abruptly rising from the table, he said, ‘Good evening, Griffiths,’ and walked quickly from the room.

  Having spent the night at a local inn, Cameron took the early train, filled with junior clerks wearing inexpensive business suits and bowler hats commuting into the City, arriving at his flat before ten. After bathing and changing into fresh clothes, he downed a quick cup of tea and a currant scone and ventured out on a long, solitary walk. After the previous day’s rain, a heavy fog had settled over the metropolis, obscuring the passing carriages and omnibuses, visible only by their ghostly coach-lamps. He strolled along the pavement, turning at the corner on Walton Street. There was a limit, Cameron knew from long experience, to the powers of deductive reasoning; notwithstanding the most careful examination of the known facts, the solution to the puzzle often lay just beyond the mind’s grasp, requiring a spark of imagination, or even a hunch. Walking through the murk, he ignored the shopfronts, forming an image in his mind’s eye of his native highlands blanketed with heather on a summer’s day, and then allowed his mind to wander, drifting randomly from one fragment to another of his conversations with Cecilia, Dr Gully, and Griffiths. While he was inclined to believe Griffiths, there was something about the man, his appearance or manner, which suggested there was more to the story. Something about the fact that his wife, with newborn child, had left him. Cameron wondered about Cranbrook; by all accounts a polished, well-educated member of the professional classes, outgoing and presumably handsome, and yet deeply disliked by as amiable a soul as Gully and terrifying to Cecilia to the degree that she attempted to run away from him. What was it Gully had said about Cranbrook? Something about his ‘hazy past’? Halting at the busy intersection with the Brompton Road, Cameron pondered Cranbrook, and then considered Griffiths, the look in his eyes when Cameron had casually enquired about his wife and child. Thus deep in reflection, Cameron was jolted by collision with
a man walking behind him. Aha, thought Cameron as the man mumbled an apology and hurried along the sidewalk. Could that be it? With a quick glance at his watch, he reversed course, tacked across the street, and began walking quickly in the direction of home.

  Arriving at his flat, Cameron was greeted as always by Angus, the Scottie, with a vigorously wagging short tail, and by his housekeeper, who tut-tutted when Cameron declined her offer to serve him lunch, declaring that he had ‘no time for nourishment when truth is just around the corner’, a pronouncement that caused the dour Scotswoman to mutter that her employer ‘had gone daft’. Donning a soft wool cap and placing a pair of gloves in his coat pocket, Cameron hurried out the door and walked briskly to the corner, where he hailed a cab to Victoria Station. In Balham, some miles from the centre of London, the fog had lifted when Cameron detrained, and after a brief stop at the Wheatsheaf for a sandwich and half-pint, he continued on foot to The Priory. Noting the sign on the gatepost advertising the property for sale, he approached the house by the gravel drive, having first satisfied himself no one was on the premises. As before, he went first to the stables in the back and with little difficulty located the cabinet to which Griffiths alluded. Turning the latch, he looked in on its empty shelves. On the middle shelf, in plain view, was a small placard on which was crudely scrawled: ‘Danger – Deadly Poison.’ Cameron closed the cabinet, looked briefly around the neatly swept stalls, and then moved furtively to the door at the back of the house. He had considered the events of the fatal night from the point of view of the victim and of each of the principal witnesses; Cecilia, Mrs Clark, Mary Ann, the butler, and the attending physicians. But not of the murderer, until now.

  Putting on his gloves, he took a tool from his pocket and picked the lock on the kitchen door. Nothing had changed from his previous visit. Cameron moved from the kitchen to the dining-room, imagining the night Cranbrook was poisoned, with Cecilia seated at the table with Mrs Clark. Sawyers, the butler, had helped him upstairs and onto his bed earlier in the evening. But then Cranbrook had recovered sufficiently to come downstairs and join his wife and Mrs Clark for supper – mutton and green beans, according to Dr Bell, with a glass of burgundy wine. Whatever may have caused Cranbrook’s illness earlier in the day, or his weakness after the riding incident, it was not, Cameron was sure, poisoning with tartar emetic. He walked slowly from the dining-room to the foot of the wide staircase. When Cranbrook had come down to supper, there was no one on the upper floor of the house, as Mary Ann had stated before the inquest court that she had joined the other servants for supper in the kitchen. Lightly touching the banister, Cameron ascended the stairs.

  Though the furniture had been removed from the master bedroom, and the door firmly shut, the door to the spare bedroom at the top of the stairs was ajar. Pushing it open, Cameron walked in and surveyed the scene in the weak daylight from the window: the single bed, still made, a dresser, two straight back chairs, and a homely lithograph of children at play over the mantelpiece, where Dr Bell had found a small bottle of chloroform and vial of laudanum. Next to the bed was a nightstand, on which, according to various witnesses, there had been a water pitcher and drinking glass. Cranbrook, according to his friend and cousin, Dr Bell, had long been in the habit of drinking a glass of water just before retiring. Griffiths, Cameron considered, had observed that it would have been highly difficult to enter the house, with its many occupants, unnoticed. Unless – Cameron walked to the window and lifted the sash – the assailant had climbed in through the bedroom window, during the interval when Cranbrook was downstairs having supper. As antimony is soluble in water, and once dissolved leaves no telltale odour or taste, Cameron reasoned it would have been a simple matter to empty the packet of poison from the stable into the water pitcher. Even half of the ten-gram packet would have been twenty times the lethal dose. Having accomplished this in a matter of seconds, the killer left in the same way he or she came – through the window. Cranbrook returns to the bedroom after supper, dresses for bed in his nightshirt, pours his customary glass of water, and downs the deadly potion.

  Cameron walked over to the window and leaned out. There was a distance of some eight feet to the pitched slate roof below; Cranbrook’s killer could easily have climbed out of the window, dropped to the slate roof, and crawled down to the gutter. The problem would have been getting up from or down to the ground below. Gently closing the window, Cameron took a final look around the small room and then hurried downstairs and out of the kitchen door. He moved stealthily around the house to the spot directly below the window of the spare bedroom on the second floor. Something caught his eye, concealed in the thick shrubbery that bordered the house. Taking a closer look, he discovered a section of lattice, about eight feet long and constructed of sturdy laths. Propping it against the side of the house, he used it to climb up to the roof, just, he surmised, as the killer had done. And there, lying in the gutter, he discovered what his well-honed instincts had suggested he might: the final clue to the identity of Charles Cranbrook’s murderer.

  ‘And so,’ said James Clifton, relaxing in one of the easy-chairs in Cameron’s study with a glass of brandy and soda, ‘you’ve worked it out in your mind?’

  ‘Yes, Clifton,’ replied Cameron. The orange cat in his lap purred contentedly.

  ‘I don’t suppose you intend to share your theory with me?’

  ‘No,’ said Cameron with a slight smile. ‘I do not.’

  The small black terrier entered the study, sniffed the air, and then bounced up on the sofa beside his master to receive the usual nuzzle of his ears. ‘Good boy, Angus,’ said Cameron as he gazed into the dog’s dark-brown eyes. ‘Loyal, faithful, and true. If only more of our race possessed such admirable traits.’

  ‘As opposed to jealousy, deceit, and treachery,’ said Clifton after taking a large swallow of brandy.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Cameron, ‘we shall journey to Birmingham to interview Mrs Clark, and the dénouement of this intriguing mystery.’

  ‘Oho,’ said Clifton, beaming. ‘You’ve come round to my point of view. Have you made the necessary arrangements?’

  ‘I intend to confront the lady without warning. And, as you’ve previously visited her, you may show me the way there.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Clifton.

  ‘Mr Cameron,’ said the housekeeper, standing in the doorway. ‘Your dinner is served.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  HAVING WORKED PAST midnight at his desk in the study preparing a concise précis of the actions and statements of all material witnesses and suspects in the case, Duncan Cameron slept during most of the three hour trip from London’s Paddington to New Street Station in Birmingham, terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway. The one witness Cameron, of course, had not questioned was Mrs Jane Clark, whom he had resolved at the outset of the investigation to interview at the very last. There was the risk that, arriving at the lady’s doorstep unannounced, she would refuse to see him, or that she might be away, but Cameron was prepared to trade these risks for the chance of confronting her with the advantage of surprise. While Cameron dozed, James Clifton, seated opposite, occupied himself with the morning newspaper while smoking a mild cigar. At the sound of the train’s whistle and slowing speed, he gazed out the window at the factory smokestacks and rows of identical brick houses in the outskirts of the industrial city, only awakening his travelling companion with a shake of the shoulder when the train arrived at the station. Alighting from their carriage, Cameron remarked on the impressive glass and iron arched roof, almost a thousand feet long, before turning toward the exit. As Clifton had previously called on Mrs Clark, who, since Cranbrook’s death, had been living at the home of her sister in the Birmingham suburb of Handsworth, he was able to provide the driver of the hired coach with directions for the hour-long journey.

  As they passed out of the city centre on the broad thoroughfare of the Soho Road, Cameron silently studied the grim industrial landscape; black smoke belching from numerous f
actory chimneys, filling the air with a sooty haze that obscured the sun, block after block of dreary working-class tenements, until, reaching a large park with a pretty lake, they entered the semi-rural environs of Handsworth, where yeoman farms competed for space with residential neighbourhoods and commercial establishments, turning at last on Grafton Street and a pleasant double row of small brick cottages. Tapping on the glass, Clifton informed the coachman, ‘Number 67, on the left.’ Climbing out of the coach, Cameron briefly studied the tidy house, with its neat flower garden in front and ornamental tree, and then walked up the path to the door while Clifton settled up with the driver. Cameron knocked, knocked again and, when the door finally opened, a pale girl, perhaps sixteen, peered out and said, ‘Yes? May I help you?’

  ‘Hallo,’ said Cameron with a smile. ‘We’re here to see Mrs Clark.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the girl. ‘I’m afraid Aunt Jane is not in.’

  ‘My name’s Cameron, and this is my friend James Clifton.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Clifton with a slight bow.

  ‘When is your aunt expected?’ asked Cameron.

  ‘She had an errand in town,’ said the girl. ‘Should be home by midday.’

  ‘Perhaps we could wait inside,’ suggested Cameron, ‘as we’ve come all the way from London.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said the girl, holding open the door. ‘You can sit in the parlour.’

  In due course Mrs Clark returned from her errand, wearing her usual plain black dress with her dark hair tied back with a black ribbon and a basket of fresh fruit and vegetables over her arm. Upon entering the house she immediately observed James Clifton seated in a chair by the fireplace in the parlour. ‘Oh,’ she said, raising a hand to her mouth and in the process nearly dropping the basket.

  Cameron rose from his chair, took a step toward Mrs Clark and said, ‘I hope you will pardon our intrusion.’ As she gazed at him with narrowed eyes, he added, ‘My name’s Cameron. Duncan Cameron. And I’m sure you remember my associate, Mr Clifton.’