A Kiss Across Time

by Louise Allen

  Yes, they all agreed they had seen Mr Salmond on one or two occasions and had exchanged greetings on the stairs with him. They had known who he was. But no-one else, they said.

  That left Heinrich Dettmer, the German lodger. The Coroner asked if he had he been long in London.

  ‘No, Your Worship. I come from Dresden last year. I study the making of the pianoforte, the best methods you understand? England has many pianoforte makers. I travel and spend a little time here, a little time there and I visit and learn.’

  Something was niggling at the back of my mind, a name I could not get hold of and a suspicion that seemed odd combined with the trade of piano-making. I made a note, iron-smelting??, and went back to listening.

  Dettmer had seen Mr Salmond. He bowed punctiliously across the room when the Coroner pointed him out. He did not know him by name, he said, because he hardly knew Coates, either. He knew nothing of George’s habits, his finances or his visitors, other than he had seen Mr Salmond twice. ‘Aber…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There was the other gentleman. Not so… ’ His hands sketched Mr Salmond’s rotund stomach, then he blushed and made a bob of embarrassed apology at the Under Secretary. ‘I do not see… I did not see him to the face and it was night, so the Schatten – darknesses… No, shadows. The shadows stop me seeing him. He was leaving Herr Coates’s chambers I think. I come from my rooms and I see him, a little below me on the turn of the stair but I did not hear him pass my door.’

  ‘And when was this, Mr Dettmer?’

  The German spread his hands wide. ‘I do not know. A week, ten days, perhaps? A working day, not a Sunday. A dark man, I think. He moved as though he was not old.’

  That left Luc and James. Luc gave clear, unemotional evidence that must have left the Inquest with the clear impression that Mrs Kentish was known to his lordship, that she had been over-awed by her lodger’s government employment so had immediately turned to someone she saw in higher authority than the constable to report the death.

  ‘And was Mr Coates personally known to you, Lord Radcliffe?’

  ‘By name and sight. We did not mix socially. My brother knew him a little.’

  ‘Mr Franklin?’

  James came to the makeshift witness stand and was sworn. ‘I occasionally encountered him at Grey’s Coffee House. It is convenient to me for the occasional supper and, I believe, was also handy for Coates. We have exchanged views on items in the newspapers, races, that sort of thing. I cannot recall who introduced us, I am afraid. I have no idea what might have caused him any worry or distress. We were not on such terms that he would have confided in me.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Franklin. My lord.’ The Coroner turned to the jury and summed up before they all trooped off to another room to deliberate.

  We only had about twenty minutes to wait. The foreman, red-faced, brawny and confident, took to his feet when addressed. ‘Yes, Doctor Lattimer, sir, we’re all in agreement that the poor gentleman took his own life by hanging himself when he wasn’t in his right senses. And we come to the conclusion that he couldn’t have been in his right mind acos of there not being any proper reason for him to do such a thing.’

  ‘In that case, thank you, gentlemen. I find that George Coates took his own life by hanging while the balance of his mind was disturbed. This court is dismissed.’

  We reconvened over lunch and the murder boards. I don’t think I’d ever be able to face a chicken leg again without thinking about Coates, but they were convenient for eating while we wandered about peering at the lists already pinned up and throwing out facts and ideas to add. In fact, rather too good – I managed to stab the sheet headed Fellow Lodgers with mine when I suddenly recalled what it was that had stirred in the back of my mind while Dettmer was giving evidence.

  ‘Angerstein!’

  Lucian, James and Garrick stared at me as though I’d just shouted, ‘Excelsior!’

  ‘It was niggling at me while Dettmer was giving evidence. Angerstein. He was a Swedish industrial spy in the middle of the last century, I think. Snooped about Europe, especially around iron and steel works, got thrown out of some British ones, I’m sure. I read about him because his notebooks are an important source of historical observation generally.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him, I think.’ Luc frowned in concentration. ‘But are you suggesting that Dettmer is attempting to steal the secrets of British pianoforte makers? Because if so, I have to tell you, that they are good, but not good enough for murder.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I unpinned the grease-stained list and rewrote it. ‘But that would be excellent cover. Who knows enough about it to catch you out? And George worked for a government department. Dettmer moves in immediately after he receives enough money from somewhere to enable him to afford a better apartment. What if he is the blackmailer and was pressuring George to pass him inside information from the Home Office?’

  ‘What kind of information?’ James asked. ‘The Home Office doesn’t deal with trade. That’s Board of Trade and anyway, it isn’t something that government interferes with – they are more about taxes and import and export. Manufacturers just get on with it.’

  I threw my chicken bone onto a plate and grabbed a slice of pie and to hell with the carbs. ‘So what does the Home Office do then?’ I demanded.

  ‘Petitions to the monarch,’ Luc said, checking points off on his fingers.

  ‘Time-consuming,’ I muttered sarkily.

  He ignored me. ‘Warrants, commissions, royal prerogative – advising the King on all those. Agriculture, fisheries. Law and order, public safety.’

  ‘Prisons?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Control of aliens,’ James added. ‘The secret service.’

  ‘You see? Spies and aliens, I said so.’

  ‘Colonial business?’ Garrick queried.

  ‘Not any more, that’s the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, these days.’

  ‘Never mind the colonies,’ I said. ‘Spies and the secret service – what I’ve been saying all along. We’ve two foreign nationals in the picture – Dettmer and the dubious Comte de Hautmont.’

  ‘If anyone was in a position to investigate French émigrés, it would be the Home Office,’ James pointed out with infuriating reasonableness.

  It seemed I was simply not going to get anyone to take spies seriously. ‘All right, what about this mysterious visitor Dettmer says he saw? We have an incredibly good description – male, not old, slimmer than Mr Salmond and probably dark. Should be able to pick him up in a matter of hours,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘Let’s see who does fit anyway,’ Luc suggested.

  ‘Half the young men in Salmond’s section, the Comte – ’

  ‘Bromley, Talbot’s man,’ Garrick offered.

  ‘Rather a large number of men who George would have known from the particular clubs he belonged to,’ James said.

  That would be the gay clubs and meeting places, I presumed. Which reminded me of a thought I’d had while waiting for the Inquest jury. ‘We haven’t thought of another man in George’s life,’ I said. ‘Was there someone before Talbot who might have been so distressed by a break-up that George would feel conscience-stricken about it? Or anyone who was still in love with him, or obsessed, who might have attacked Talbot out of jealousy?’

  James shook his head. ‘His previous particular companion was in the army. It all rather died a death with him being away so much. Perfectly amiable from all accounts.’

  ‘Which leaver irrational obsession or jealousy,’ I said, making another heading. I pinned that up and brooded over the dark/slimmish/youngish list. ‘Sir Thomas is thin and dark, if not young.’ I added him and then went and ate cake. It seemed to be that kind of day.

  Chapter Nine

  The thirteenth continued to live up to its date. The boards stared back at us blankly, Garrick and I wrestled with the coded ledgers to little effect, James went off to his tailor and Luc to one of his clubs. He explained that
he was going to be asking pertinent questions but I was becoming restless at being excluded from all these masculine haunts. The breeches that I had worn before were still in the clothes press but I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could pass as a male in broad daylight.

  Garrick and I cheered ourselves up with another cookery session and produced toad in the hole, with very splendid sausages, followed by apple crumble and custard. I explained the concept of comfort food and I think he approved. Certainly the combined effect of Yorkshire pudding and a hefty sweet was enough to send me to bed early and off into a deep sleep, which ought, by rights, to have produced revelatory dreams. It didn’t.

  Nor did I wake to a man in my bed, which didn’t help my mood any the next morning. Luc was eating breakfast when I emerged from my room. I rather suspected he had a thick head, but I didn’t ask. By the time he was into his third cup of coffee and I’d eaten my second sausage (they really were very good) I’d come to the conclusion that he was not so much hung-over as bracing himself for the inquest.

  This was going to be a rather different matter to the previous one. For a start he was going to have to explain how he managed to go from a suicide to a murder scene in one morning. If I’d read about it in the paper I’d be immediately suspicious. Then he had to hide all knowledge that Coates and Talbot knew each other and, on top of that, keep me out of it.

  ‘The Coroner might want to call you to the stand,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Same Coroner?’ Luc nodded. ‘He looked reasonable and I can stick to the story we created at the time. The only problem I can see is if they ask me for my address. What do I say?’

  ‘Hell. Garrick!’

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘Send a message to Thompson. I need a house in Hill Street by noon. No-one will check while the inquest is in progress,’ he added when I looked a question. ‘Thompson’s my solicitor. And Garrick, tell him it doesn’t matter what it is like, just get one.’

  ‘That was very masterful,’ I remarked, tongue in cheek. ‘What if there isn’t one to rent?’

  ‘Then he’ll buy one or make a tenant an irresistible offer to move out.’

  Yes, well, the past is a different country, as someone once said, and aristocrats certainly did it differently then.

  The second inquest was much the same as the first, for a bit. A local pub, a bleak function room, a jury all in their Sunday best, torn between self-importance and nerves. But this time, with a gruesome murder the subject of the hearing, there was a jostling crowd of onlookers.

  I sat squashed up against Garrick, watching the jury led out to view the body. They shuffled back looking decidedly green after twenty minutes. George Coates’s body must have been reasonably easy for the undertaker to lay out in a respectable manner, but there wasn’t a great deal one could do with a skull that had been stove-in, I imagine.

  Bromley, the manservant, gave evidence of identity and recounted what he had done that morning up to the point that we arrived. He was fish-belly white, his hands shaking, but he managed to give his evidence reasonably coherently.

  Then Luc was called and explained how we had come to be there, calling to make an appointment for me with a well-known doctor.

  ‘Extraordinary that you should encounter violent death twice in one morning, my lord,’ the Coroner observed.

  ‘Indeed. And it was most distressing that I should, all unwitting, take my young female relative to the very scene,’ Luc said.

  Despite this ‘coincidence’ the Coroner did not seem to find his story unconvincing. James and Garrick took their turns on the stand and were questioned in detail, but not in any hostile manner. James volunteered the fact that he knew Talbot slightly socially, but that he would not have described him as a close friend, merely an acquaintance. He could suggest no possible motive for the crime, except perhaps that a burglar had been disturbed.

  I held my breath, but the Coroner did not decide to call me, instead summoning a Doctor Philpott to the stand to give evidence on the cause of death. Talbot had been dead perhaps six to ten hours before he first examined him, he declared. That put the time of death some time either side of eight in the morning. He found no signs of disease or injury on the body except for the head wounds which he proceeded to describe in detail. One juror and a member of the audience fainted.

  Once they had been propped upright again, feathers burned under their noses and tots of brandy administered, the Coroner enquired, ‘And were you able to draw any conclusions as to the assailant from the nature of the injuries?’

  They had certainly been caused by the poker, he said. It was produced, unwashed. The first blow had been to the centre back of the skull, almost vertical. Subsequent blows had been to the right side and the doctor was of the opinion that Talbot had fallen to his knees having been hit from behind and that the murderer had then struck him repeatedly, still from behind, until he collapsed onto the floor.

  ‘I would conclude that the assailant was right-handed, although I consider the first blow may have been struck with the poker held in both hands,’ he said. ‘I am unable to estimate his height, other than he was probably not an exceptionally short man. The number of blows inflicted seem to me to indicate either an angry, personal attack or that the attacker was seized with panic and, having struck the first blow, continued until he was more than certain there was no hope of retaliation or recovery.’

  I was about to nudge Luc and whisper a question when a lad pushed his way through the mass of spectators and handed him a note. He glanced at it and passed it to me.

  An address in Hill Street. I memorised the number, put the note in my reticule and realised I had forgotten my question. After that the evidence was not very helpful. Talbot’s solicitor was called to testify to his family circumstances – no-one but some cousins in Perthshire and an elderly aunt in Bath – and his estate. He was comfortably off but not in any way that could not be accounted for by inheritance and a successful practice. There were no significant debts, no borrowings and nothing in his papers that might give cause for suspicion.

  Then about half a dozen witnesses gave evidence on Talbot’s social and professional life. I felt James tense on my other side, but the doctor had been careful. He belonged to a number of well-known clubs, to various medical associations and groups and attended a variety of smaller clubs and places of entertainment. None of them appeared to cause any raised eyebrows and none of the witnesses could think of any quarrels Talbot had been involved in or any enemies he might have made.

  Bromley was recalled to go over the security of the house and the daily routine. He was then asked about enemies, threats or any signs of anxiety on Talbot’s part. After some shuffling of feet he confessed that one gentleman, becoming suspicious of the doctor’s relationship with his wife, had uttered intemperate threats. This had caused a tightening of security and the temporary employment of the ex-Runner but had blown over and was many months in the past.

  The Coroner asked Bromley to write down the name of the gentleman in question, which he did. The Coroner glared at the note, pursed his lips and transferred the frown to the jury. ‘The name here written is known to me as that of a gentleman of the utmost respectability who is not resident in London or the South Est of England at this time. As the upset in question was several months ago I feel safe in keeping the name under seal.’

  He went on to sum up, sent the jury out to consider their verdict and we all sat back as much as possible in the jammed space. They were not out for long. The foreman stood up and delivered a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown.

  Luc led the way out, along the road, down a cross street and into a small but brightly-painted inn with flowers in tubs outside and cheerful copper jugs on the shelves. The landlord found us a private parlour, promised an excellent luncheon as soon as his wife removed the pigeon pie from the oven and brought ale all round, with a slightly startled look at me.

  ‘Did that get us any further forward?’ James asked.

&n
bsp; ‘A right-handed killer who Talbot trusted enough to turn his back on,’ Luc said.

  ‘A man of normal stature or above,’ Garrick contributed.

  I remembered my query. ‘How do we know it was a man?’ I asked. ‘I’m five foot six inches and I could easily have inflicted those injuries, especially if I used two hands for the first blow. I’m a little above average height for a woman in this time, but I’ve seen plenty who are my height or taller and many men shorter than me.’

  ‘You have been trained to fight,’ Luc objected.

  ‘You heard what the doctor said – the blows could have been inflicted by someone in a panic or a frenzy of rage. Any well-fed, healthy woman might have done it. Look – Garrick, stand up.’

  He was nearest the hearth. I picked up the poker, went behind him and raised it in both hands, then lowered it slowly. The top part lay against Garrick’s head from crown to nape.

  ‘He falls to his knees, stunned. I swing it up over my right shoulder – ’

  ‘Your pie – ’

  ‘Thank you, landlord.’ Luc got up, took the tray and smiled at the man. ‘My cousin is a lady golfer from Scotland. Just demonstrating her swing.’

  I stopped battering Garrick and sat down again while the bemused landlord went out. ‘Golf? Me? Still, you see what I mean? If I was angry, or frightened enough, I could kill with that poker.’

  We passed plates, then I said, ‘If I was attacking from behind, then using both hands and bringing it straight down feels right. Taking a sideways swipe for the first blow would actually give him some warning, especially if he had good peripheral vision. That means we cannot rule anyone out, provided Talbot would have allowed them to get behind him.’

  ‘But no lady would visit a man, even a doctor, without a chaperone or a maid,’ James objected.