A Case Most Peculiar
Michael Moreau
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2015 Michael Moreau
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Table of Contents
Prologue
The Letter
The Train To Yorkshire
A Disdain For Motorcars
Mr. Peterson
An Inauspicious Start
Larchwood Manor
The Stable Boy
The Master
The Gambian Boy
Nanny, Nurse, Educator
The Stables
The Lion’s Den
A Rude Awakening
Starry Night
The Grounds-keeper
Too Easy A Hunt
The Search
A Final Demand
A Semblance of Resolution
Epilogue
About the Author
Prologue
Were I an ordinary and reasonable man it is entirely possible that the volume you are about to read would never have been written down in the first place. I, of course, have never considered myself anything within the realm of ordinary so it is only fitting that the most extraordinary experience of my life be chronicled. Most assuredly it will be chalked up to my overabundance of imagination and affinity for opium but nevertheless it is written here for those with an open mind, or at least time to be wasted. The story began with a letter in the winter of nineteen-hundred and twelve. It was addressed to the offices of Carson & Parney. Obviously the soul that had written it had procured the address from an outdated edition of the London Times. No advertisement bearing that name had been posted in years.
My partner, Matthew Parney, had met his end three winters preceding; stabbed to death with a crudely fashioned shiv by the snakesman we had been pursuing at the behest of a warehouse owner who had seen stock continually vanish from his property. The thug’s weapon brought to a crashing halt a partnership that had already been on the rocks for several years. Parney and I were friends, that much had always remained constant, but being a man of military background the baser aspects of my personality often grated on him.
He’d married a woman from Leeds who was something of a teetotaler and far more religious than any sane person ought be. Despite allowing him to choose me as best man for the wedding she never approved of Parney and I fraternizing in the evenings. Gone were our nights of drunken revelry for Mr. Parney, despite his staunch military facade, had quite a penchant for hard drink and was prone to pub brawls or running off to some dark alley with a local Judy.
As our friendship deteriorated so did my diligence and more and more frequently Parney found himself retrieving me from opium dens and brothels. You see, unlike my partner, I did not receive the loving affection of two stable parents and the benefits of a modest education.
I was born in the year eighteen-hundred and seventy-six to a cowardly drunk of a father and a mother who’d once earned her keep as a lady of the evening. My father was twenty years my mother’s senior and worked as a shoemaker in Northampton.
At the age of six I was sent to live in an orphanage in London after that old muck snipe decided one evening to burn down our house in a jealous and drunken rage and to blame the fire on my mother. He said she’d gone off her chump and had her committed the very next day to the state hospital. It would be thirteen years before I would see her again. By that time, of course, being in the presence of so much madness had left her little more than a specter. Her heart still beat and still she drew breath but she did little else, save for stare out of the windows; through those bars that contained the insanity within.
As to my father I found that some years later he had succumbed to syphilis and died penniless and alone, a fate I feel he likely deserved.
At the age of twenty-two, with empty pockets and little more than the clothes on my back I left Northampton for London, hoping to find decent employment. Something which had eluded me in my home city. Little had prepared me for the reality of the place. It was a foul city, the sky often black with soot and the streets smelling of shite and all manner of retched things. Realizing very quickly it was not a place for me I made the decision to join the Queen’s army.
Attempting to work up the nerve I went for a quick pint before signing away my very life to queen and country and it was in that dreary establishment on Fleet Street that I met Mr. Matthew Parney.
From his manner of dress and the slight limp that he carried it was apparent to me that he had served, so I bought him a pint and began to inquire about his career. After polishing off the first round with astonishing speed he order another and kept them coming. In fact in retrospect it is now apparent to me that he sought to make sure that I was too inebriated to ever make it out of that pub and back to the enlistment office. He told me about the miserable conditions; the friends he’d lost serving in Burma and of the many men he’d seen die pointlessly of illness a few years later in Ghana. Naive as I was I did finally catch on to his plot and explained to him that although the military was not what I truly wanted out of life that I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to make a life out of.
I walked, or rather stumbled, out of that pub some time approaching sunrise with a new friend and the promise of employment. Matthew had the good fortune to catch the eye of a young woman whose father owned a brewery. It was a modest one, the family had in no way become rich from their business, but they were at least comfortable. A month later and I’d managed to acquire lodgings, meager as they were, of my own and things began to improve. I even met a young lady who worked at a restaurant as a waitress and began to court her. Her name was Alice and she had lovely shoulder length hair the color of wheat. She had a beautiful smile and seemed to take quite a fancy to me. Best of all her family was poor, this meant that a boy like me had nothing to live up to in order to gain their acceptance.
Then, three days before Christmas of eighteen ninety-seven, Parney’s fiancée was found murdered in her flat. Despite knowing him for only a short while I felt that I understood Matthew Parney quite well so you can imagine my surprise when such a strong and grounded man flew into a rage and disappeared for several days. I found him half a week later in an opium den. He refused to speak with me until I partook in the evil myself. Introducing me to opium was one of the things I knew Parney always regretted, though he never said it aloud. My mental fortitude was stronger in those days and I managed to wrestle him from his stupor the next morning and with some tea and harsh words brought him to his senses.
As he stood and dressed himself he made his intentions quite clear. He wanted to return to London and track down whoever had taken the life of his beloved. There was no mistaking the seriousness in his eyes. As absurd as it seemed he somehow thought that he and I could do what Scotland Yard could not, track down the killer and bring him to justice. To be honest I thought him a complete fool, though I did understand how his recent bereavement could bring him to such madness. So I went along.
That was our first case. We succeeded brilliantly. As it turned out the fiancée’s brother had accumulated a rather sizable gambling debt and had hired a young bootblack to remove his sister as a beneficiary to what little fortune he would inherit when his father passed away. How, precisely, he had planned to kill the old man we never discovered.
/> After presenting our evidence to the authorities an arrest attempt was made but the brother fled. Parney and I caught up with him shortly thereafter but the fool pulled a pistol. My partner; however, made short work of him with the service revolver that he carried concealed in his coat pocket.
After that Matthew Parney asked me to go into business with him, we were to be private consulting investigators. I agreed so long as what had happened with the pistol did not happen again. We were to solve crimes, not to deal out justice. He agreed and with the meager funds at our disposal we rented an office above a bakery.
The heat from those ovens rising through the ceiling kept us warm that first winter as the office served both as our place of business as well as our residence. Slowly but steadily we built our endeavor and it seemed as though we’d both found our calling in life. We were damned good at what we did. For ten years we worked together.
The first six or so of those years were exhilarating. Then came Margaret and as my closest friend in the world pulled away from me thanks to the meddling of that conservative wench I sank into self-doubt and my actions began to cause Parney to lose confidence in me. I’d strung along poor Alice for many years as well, too uncertain of myself to ever marry her, so eventually she walked out and never came back.
Then one night that miserable little gonoph sent Parney to the grave and it was all over. I moved into what had once been Matthew and I’s office once again and sank into an overwhelming depression. My life became a bizarre mixture of bouts of heavy cocaine use, so that I could get any work done, interspersed with days on end of wasting away in opium dens trying to forget how much it hurt to simply be alive. No family, no friends, dwindling business. I began to get an overwhelming sense that the time when I would compromise my morals was fast approaching and that soon I would become little better than the criminals that I sought to bring to justice.
So it was in my thirty-fifth year that a letter arrived, a letter that set off a chain of events that would completely remake my life. Surely, staring at the multitude of pages on my desk, I have already begun to ramble. I shall now get on with my story.
The Letter
Inspectors Carson & Parney, I pray that this letter finds you well. My name is Elizabeth Dunning, I am the daughter of Mr. Michael Dunning, a prominent businessman of Leeds.
At the mention of Leeds I distinctly remember opening the bottle of scotch which sat upon my desk and pouring myself a glass. Any mention of the city quickly brought the Widow Parney to the forefront of my mind, someone I preferred not to think of. I decided instead to inspect the letter itself. The letter was typewritten, the paper of a fine quality and a faint odor of expensive perfume. Whoever had posted it possessed money to spare, she was not lying about her father.
I hope that you will forgive my forthrightness, I know that it is not proper for a lady of my standing, but I write to you concerning a matter of a most urgent nature. A grievous act has recently been allowed to occur on my family’s estate. My father and brothers would prefer that the matter slip for fear of the truth tarnishing my prospects of marriage into a noble family. I, however, have decided to seek out my own justice and hence is the reason that I am writing you now. There is no tactful means of conveying this so I shall simply spell it out for you kind sirs. I was involved in a love affair with the boy who managed our stables and on the morning of February 17th he was found dead by our servant boy.
Considering the haste with which he was buried and the lack of any investigation I can only surmise that someone in my family decided to end our affair and plotted his death. It is my hope that you will choose to take the case and can come to Leeds as soon as your schedule will allow. Enclosed you will find train tickets as well as the address of Mr. Samuel Peterson. He is an old family friend whom I have arranged to escort you to our estate upon your arrival. I can assure you that you will be paid handsomely for your time. I look forward to meeting you both in person.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Dunning
Swirling the scotch in my glass I began to wonder if my distaste for Leeds was truly warranted, most especially since the words “paid handsomely” had been included within the contents of the letter. The dreariness outside of my office window and the cold that the ovens below barely held at bay made me consider how nice it would be to get away from London for a few days; to enjoy the warm bed and satisfying food that would be provided at such an estate. After all, it had been several years since I’d left the depressing greyness of London behind and seen some of the countryside.
A knock at the door brought me back to the moment. I emptied my glass and placed it on the table before getting to my feet and walking over to it. Through the large crack in between two of the door’s planks I could see that it was Mrs. Caffrey. She was the baker’s wife and also my land-lord. I reached for my pocket watch and was surprised to see that it was already supper time. I straightened my collar, attempted my best smile, and opened the door.
“Good evening Mrs. Caffrey.”
“Good evenin’ Mr. Carson.” the plump middle-aged woman smiled up at me and spoke with her typical accent, cockney of the variety so thick it could be spread onto toast with a knife if one so desired. “A lil’ somefin to soak up all de scotch you’ve no-doubt been getting’ into since mid-day.”
“You would be correct Madame.” I replied.
“It’s not good for you Mr. Carson and I don’t like it one bit but since you’re not likely to ‘ave a change of ‘eart on account’a me I’ll just leave you wif your supper.”
She held a plate out in front of her. By the look of the inlaid patterns it had at one time been part of a set of fine china. It now served as a second-hand curio, something to feed the good-for-nothing upstairs tenant off of and likely the dog as well. For I could swear I’d seen the same plate in the alley every morning. It was of little importance. At such a low point in my life eating from the same dinnerware as a dog was only one more indignity to heap upon the already considerable load that I somehow managed to make bigger day by day.
I decided, like every evening, that politeness was the best course of action. I looked down at the steaming meat pies resting upon the chipped old plate, they looked delicious. They were accompanied by what looked, by the state of it, to be a hunk of three-day-old rye bread. Beggars, as they say, cannot be choosers and my land-lords had no obligation to feed me. They felt sorry for me and therefore offered me kindness.
“It smells positively delicious. I shall cork my bottle and sit down to enjoy my meal. Please tell Mr. Caffrey that he has my appreciation, as do you my good lady.” and with that I smiled at her once more and nodded a quick thanks before closing the door.
In the depths of winter the floorboards in my living space made an awful creaking any time I roamed from one side of the room to the other and as predicted they did so as I walked back to the spot where I had been sitting near the window and set my plate onto the wobbly old table. I often considered how the Caffreys were actually rather lucky to have me as a tenant. Between my drunken stupors, in which I seldom moved from my chair, and my many evenings spent in opium dens those creaky old floorboards were frequently silent for long spans of time.
As I bit into the first pie my thoughts returned to the matter in Leeds. The meat was so savory and this did much to lift my mood. Yes, perhaps I would take the job in the country. Not that I would in any way wish to decry the quality of the Caffreys’ cooking but perhaps a few days of fresh air and some finely prepared meals would do much to restore my vigor. Of course should the entire affair fail to work as a restorative at least I would have some coin in my pocket, even if it was only to spend on narcotics and women of comfort. The fact I had degenerated into such a sad state that even my land-lords took pity upon me, and had for some time, had not been lost on me. I make no excuses and do not expect any reader of this story to sympathize with me. My suffering is and has been without exception of my own doing.
Upon finishing the meat pies I
decided to tuck the stale slice of rye into my coat pocket. Might as well save it for another time, it was already long past fresh. My hand went for the nearly empty bottle of scotch but retreated. I’d told Mrs. Caffrey that I’d cork the bottle and leave it corked I would. I had packing to do.
The Train To Yorkshire
There had been a few items of business to attend to before setting off for the train station, which I did roughly at noon. The day was especially rainy and the general cold misery of London when it was wet only reinforced my decision to leave for a time. As a long-time inspector I had the train schedule memorized, in case I needed to prevent a criminal’s flight from the city, but they had recently changed it all around and I’d yet to commit the new schedule to memory. As luck would have it, however, the next departure to Leeds was at 1:15 in the afternoon so my wait was not a terribly long one.
Upon boarding the train I was directed to a private cabin. It would seem that my benefactor indeed had money to spare. Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth I gladly tipped the boy who’d helped me with my belongings and asked where I might find the bar. He pointed me toward it and I hesitated for a moment. Should I begin this new venture with a head full of alcohol? My weakness got the better of me and assured my good reason that I’d be plenty sober by the time I went calling upon Mr. Peterson. Walking from my cabin to the bar I shuffled by many passengers but all of them seemed to be of middle or upper classes. I figured it doubtful they even allowed the riff-raff from steerage to come into the more luxurious cars. Despite the fact that I often found class distinction to be distasteful I can say that it certainly added to the ambiance. Not once were my nostrils offended by the harsh smells I was accustomed to whilst walking the streets of London. Everyone seemed to smell of delightful and fragrant perfumes which began to make me keenly aware of the ragged state of my own attire and how my own fragrance likely offended their delicate upper-class noses. I smiled and chuckled to myself. “Good. Let them be offended.” was all I could think.
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