Death Makes No Distinction

by Lucienne Boyce

  It was Monday morning. Dan had spent yesterday trudging around Holborn. He had called at the Feathers first and spoken to the stable boy and the landlady. Neither had recalled seeing anyone matching the description of the man who had left the letter at Long’s Tavern in or around the yard recently.

  “And why would we?” the landlady had demanded. “This is an inn; people come and go all the time.”

  After that he had spent the day seeking information from the residents of Holborn. The shops and smaller taverns had been closed, and having to rouse people from their Sunday torpor had slowed down his enquiries. He had also called into the larger coaching inns which stayed open to cater for the travellers staying at them. In the streets he had questioned boot blacks, beggars, street vendors and loungers for whom Sunday was no different from any other day. All with no result.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Dan said. “I’m here on another matter. I’d like to speak to Mrs Martin.”

  “Of course. Go through.” John ushered Dan into the parlour.

  Grace sat at a small desk adding up figures and writing in a ledger. She put down her pen and stood up when the men came in.

  “Checking up on us, Mr Foster? Mr Pickering collected Joseph not half an hour ago to put him on a coach to – well, let’s just say, to put him on a coach.”

  “Let’s just say that,” Dan agreed, taking off his hat. “I want to talk to you about Louise Parmeter.”

  “Louise?” She sat down, smoothed her skirt, composed her features, gestured towards a chair. John remained standing by the open door, one eye on the shop.

  “How well did you know her?” Dan asked when they were settled.

  “We had known each other a very long time. Since we were girls. I met her when she first came to London. She and her mother lodged at my parents’ house. She was the same age as me but so much more grown up. And so gay and bright! She always found something to laugh at in the midst of setbacks and hardships. Sometimes they didn’t have money for food so we’d share our meals with them: my parents loved her almost as much as I did. When she had employment, the hours were long, the work tiring, the stage managers troublesome. But when her luck turned and she found fame and fortune, she didn’t leave her old friends behind. In fact, I think we were all the more precious to her.”

  “Did you know about her memoirs?”

  “I knew she was writing them, and forever threatening to publish them. I told her that she risked making enemies, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “Enemies of who?”

  “She never mentioned any names.”

  “Did you ever read them?”

  “No. I don’t think she showed them to anyone.”

  The bell on the shop door rang and John left his station to go and greet his customer, an imperious lady who had brought her subdued daughter to be measured for new shoes. Grace listened with tilted head for half a moment. She caught Dan’s eye and smiled ruefully: dealing with awkward customers was all part of the business.

  “Why are you asking about the memoirs?”

  “They were stolen by her killer.”

  “And you think that’s why she was murdered? But we’d heard it was for her diamonds.”

  “Those as well. You said she never asked any questions about your abolition work. How much did she know? Did she, for example, know about the burglary?”

  Grace hesitated. “Yes, she did, and considered it no wrongdoing. Louise loathed the vile trade. She was brought up in Bristol and saw at first hand how the city’s merchants wrung their wealth from the pain and suffering of others.”

  “It’s a grim business, that’s for sure.”

  “Business! Sin, rather. We are all created in God’s image, Mr Foster, and no man has the right to enslave God’s creation.”

  “It’s not a subject I know much about.”

  “Then you should. I will find you some literature to read.” Grace sprang to her feet and went to the bookshelf.

  Studying earnest abolitionist tracts was not what Dan had had in mind. “Maybe when I’ve got more time,” he said, retrieving his hat and standing up.

  Before he could escape, she thrust a handful of pamphlets into his hand. His heart sank when he saw that the topmost one was written in verse: “Would that the hand of God had stayed the wind and waves / That sped the cruel vessel o’er the frightful seas, / Or delivered to the tempest its encargoed slaves, / Or to the deep consigned, in answer to their pleas, / Those commerced souls…”

  He expected to see Louise Parmeter’s name on the title page; Grace had mentioned her anti-slavery writing. Instead, The Afric’s Lament was by Agnes Taylor.

  “Is Miss Taylor involved in your activities?” he asked.

  “Not her. She only wrote that to impress Louise. And if the truth be told, it’s probably more Louise’s work than Agnes’s. Louise told me Agnes’s first book of poems needed a great deal of rewriting before it was fit to publish, and the poems for her second were in the same unpolished state. But Agnes thought she was ready to make a success on her own and refused to listen. When she managed to find a publisher to encourage her vanity, there was no reasoning with her. If I’d have been in Louise’s place, I’d have let her get on with it and learn her lesson when the book fails, as it surely will.”

  “You already know about Miss Taylor’s publishing agreement? But I thought she only learned about it herself a day or two ago.”

  “If you mean the agreement she made with Messrs Cadell and Davies behind Louise’s back, Louise told me about it weeks ago. She warned Agnes that it would do her career no good to rush poor work into print. She only had Agnes’s interests at heart, and look how she repaid her.”

  “What do you mean, repaid her?”

  From the shop came sounds of the ladies’ bustling departure, the rattle of the door opening and closing, the ting of the bell. John crossed the room and resumed his station in the doorway.

  “The terrible things she accused her of.” Grace glanced defiantly at her husband. “It’s true. Louise knew that Agnes’s poems were not ready for publication and refused to return them to her unless she agreed they would work on them together as they had planned. But Agnes wanted her manuscript back without any alteration. She accused Louise of stealing her work and attempting to sabotage her career out of envy.”

  “Harsh words said in the heat of the moment,” John said. “I’m sure they would have come to an understanding if things had not turned out as they have.”

  Grace turned her indignant face to him. “She even suggested that Louise had deliberately sold her previous poems at a cheap rate to keep her in a lowly station.”

  Dan interrupted what was clearly a long-running contention between husband and wife. “Louise Parmeter was holding up the publishing deal by refusing to return Agnes’s poems?”

  “Yes,” Grace said.

  They had not found any poems in Louise Parmeter’s study. Only an empty desk drawer – a desk that someone had gone out of their way to open. Dan had suspected from the outset that the diamonds had only been taken as an afterthought. He thought the real target of the robbery had been the memoirs, the murder the act of an enraged lover who couldn’t bear the humiliation of being mocked in print, or someone who feared the revelation of some compromising secret. What if the real target had been an ambitious writer’s manuscript, withheld by an overbearing patron?

  Easy now to guess what had happened. Agnes had gone into Louise’s office to plead, cajole, demand. Louise had refused to return the manuscript, dismissed her protégée, picked up her pen and calmly continued with her writing. The sight of her at her desk in her opulent study, complacently enjoying what Agnes desperately wanted for herself, had been too much for the unfortunate woman. She had grabbed the candlestick, brought it crashing down on the bent head with all the force of years of want and struggle and powerlessness beh
ind it.

  She knew where Louise kept the key to the drawer, had retrieved her poems, seen the memoirs and taken them too. Then on an impulse, she had undone the clasp of the necklace, snatched the earring from the right ear, clumsily tearing the lobe in the process. Perhaps she had been unable to face the thought of moving the bloodied head to get at the other jewel, or a noise had disturbed her. However it was, she had left it and fled.

  When she had hidden the papers and jewels in her room, she had gone back downstairs, knocked on Louise’s door and raised the alarm. No wonder she had fainted when Dan suggested that Louise knew her killer. She had pulled herself together though, and had given nothing away since.

  If she had had the nerve to do all that, maybe the murder had not been done on the spur of the moment. Maybe it had been carefully planned, the weapon identified in advance, the scene set to make it look like robbery.

  He handed the pamphlets to John. “I have to go.”

  Startled, Grace said, “But you can’t think Agnes murdered Louise?”

  “I think she needs to answer some questions.”

  “But I didn’t mean to suggest – John, I didn’t.”

  “I know,” he said, though his eyes were reproachful.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  At Berkeley Square, the front door was open on a flurry of noisy, busy people who neither saw nor heard Dan when he went inside. The shelves and alcoves in the hall had been emptied of vases, plants and statues. All the doors stood open. Louise Parmeter’s study had been stripped of paintings, ornaments and silver, and in the middle of the bare floorboards two men hammered lids on to crates.

  He negotiated a path through wooden boxes and drifts of straw to reach Mr Parkes. The butler stood in the doorway of the drawing room with a bundle of inventories in his hand. Inside the room, the maids billowed sheets over the furniture. Parkes turned a harassed face to Dan.

  “The solicitor sent orders to close up the house,” he explained. “He’s coming round later to pay our wages and collect the keys. Miss Parmeter has a brother, a merchant in Italy. The house is his now.”

  “I’ll need everyone’s addresses before you all disappear.”

  “I will collect them for you.”

  “Good. While I think about it, you’d better have Miss Parmeter’s key to the garden gate back.” When Parkes had taken it, Dan asked, “Is Miss Taylor still here?”

  “She’s in her room. I’ll send one of the maids to tell her you are here.”

  “No need. Which is her room?”

  “It’s first on the left. But—”

  Dan was already running up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Parkes gave up and went back to his work. Miss Taylor was not his mistress, her proprieties no concern of his.

  Dan knocked on the door, went inside before Agnes had finished calling an irritable “Come in!” He noted the case on the bed filled with clothes, next to it a portmanteau of knick-knacks from the dressing table and wash stand. Agnes stood by a box on the floor, clutching a handful of books. She looked up in surprise.

  “Wondering where to pack the diamonds, Miss Taylor?”

  Her smile twisted into a panicked grimace. “I – I don’t know what you mean.” She managed to retrieve the smile. “An odd pleasantry, Mr Foster.”

  “You lied to me. You told me on Saturday that you’d only just heard about your publishing deal when you’d known about it for weeks – and been arguing about it for weeks with Miss Parmeter. I know she was keeping back your poems, stopping you from having what you wanted more than anything. That’s a powerful reason to murder her.”

  “Murder her?” Her hands flew up to her face.

  “Spare me the theatricals. She was getting in the way of your ambitions, and so you killed her and took back your manuscript, along with the diamonds and her memoirs.”

  She swayed, pressed one hand to her forehead.

  “There’ll be no more swooning. And unless you want me to rip your things apart, you’d better tell me where the diamonds are.”

  Her hands fell to her side. “I only took back what was mine. Louise had no right to keep my work from me. But I didn’t kill her. She was already dead when I got there.”

  “You’ll have to explain yourself.”

  “Isn’t it clear enough? I knocked on her door. She did not answer so I went inside, found her weltering in blood. I was going to sound the alarm, but then I saw my chance to get my poems back.”

  “And the diamonds?”

  “They’d already gone.” She reached into the portmanteau, brought out a flat parcel wrapped in a cloth and tied round with string. “This is all I have.”

  He took the package from her and unfastened it. Inside he found a sheaf of poetry written in a niggling hand. Beneath it, fastened with tape, was the flowing manuscript of Louise Parmeter’s memoirs.

  He held up Louise’s document. “This isn’t yours.”

  “It was my recompense for the money she lost me when she sold my work short.” Agnes sat down on the bed, gestured wearily at her things. “I don’t have the diamonds. Look for yourself.”

  He put the papers on the dressing table and upturned the portmanteau, scattering hairbrush, mirror, pins and jars. No jewels. He rummaged through the clothes in the case with the same result, turned his attention to the box of books.

  “Louise had made money out of me,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I make money out of her? There are lots of people who will pay well to make sure the memoirs aren’t published.”

  He paused in his search. “Is that why you went to see Lord Hawkhurst? To blackmail him?”

  “Not blackmail. To offer him first refusal on the manuscript. But there were all those men. You were so kind, Mr Foster. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t come along.”

  “Were you going to try him again? Or approach someone else?”

  “There are certainly others who are more deserving of the opportunity. If they could read the things she said about them! She wasn’t a kind woman, you know.”

  “She was generous to you.”

  “Oh, yes, she was generous enough. She loved being generous. It gave her such power. She liked playing patron to native genius, but she couldn’t bear a rival. She couldn’t bear that Cadell and Davies wanted to publish my poems, so she had to interfere with them, delete, rearrange, take out the best lines for herself. She couldn’t bear it when I outshone her in company, so she made me dress like a maid of all work and paraded my wit and originality as things of her own creation. She couldn’t bear it when Lord Hawkhurst paid attention to me, though she’d discarded him. She couldn’t bear the thought that I might make a good marriage and be free of her. She cloaked it all behind her cant of women’s rights: better independence in a garret than subservience to a husband. She was willing to please the men when she had her own fortune to win, but once she’d got all she wanted, she must preach to the rest of us about freedom and rights, and devil take other women with their own way in the world still to make.”

  “You could have refused her money.”

  “And do what? Rot my life away in an attic sticking feathers on to bonnets? Have you ever known what it is to be poor, to struggle, to face the future with nothing but uncertainty? The rich wallow and guzzle, and what choice do the rest of us have but to run at their heels, curtsying and bobbing and treating them like little gods for a small share of prosperity? There is a life that is more like death and I will never go back to it.”

  She sat with her head turned from him, her hands limp in her lap, her shoulders bent. Misery had leached the beauty from her face. Her fine, gaily printed dress hung off her as if it did not belong to her, as if she did not know how to wear it, exposing her for what she really was: a poor girl in another woman’s clothes. That other woman had taken the wearing of good clothes as a thing of course, along with the food in he
r belly, the perfumes on her skin, the fireplace that warmed her, but these things still sat uneasily on Agnes.

  Poverty and the fear of poverty were ugly. A picture flashed before his eyes: a child’s thin hands clutching the bars of a cot, and beyond the bars a woman and man tumbling in rags on the floor. The smell of gin, chamber pot, sex, damp plaster, mice. The grunting and slapping, and out beyond the bare walls, shouts and curses echoing around a filthy courtyard. Dogs barking, running footsteps, bumps and scuffles, knuckles on soft flesh, the wails of women. The feel of his breath snuffling in and out in the cold air, the slime of snot on his face, the wet blankets at his feet, the terror of making a noise and reminding his mother of his existence.

  Agnes did not have the diamonds, but she had lied, wasted time, stolen evidence. Now, like all thieves when they were caught out, she was pathetic, scared, pitiable. That didn’t change the lie. He should arrest her, charge her with theft, cart her off to Newgate, start the fall which would lead sooner or later to her destitution and death.

  All for a bundle of paper.

  “Here are your poems,” he said, thrusting them at her. “Finish your packing and go.”

  For a few seconds the manuscript lay on her lap. Slowly she moved her hands and took hold of it, and as she did so hope came back into her face. He did not stay to see it. He put the memoirs in his coat pocket and left.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Dan opened the door on to the scent of coffee and the companionable murmur of voices. He passed the long, age-darkened table in the middle of the room with the cluster of smaller ones around it. Many of the seats were occupied by men absorbed in their newspapers, some drawing thoughtfully on their pipes. The rows of coffee pots and cups on the shelf behind the counter glinted invitingly. Trays of the Rainbow’s renowned fresh breads and cakes sat temptingly in front of them.

  A waiter leaned on the counter gossiping with his colleague, who was busy with the gleaming urn of hot water and jars of aromatic beans. Dan went straight to the table in the corner beneath the window. He hung his hat on a hook beneath the high shelf of blue and white Delftware which ran the length of the room, and placed the papers on the table.