But they did not. With an oath, I grasped the knocker – the faithful old brass dolphin I knew so well – and beat it against its plate fully a dozen times, then paused to listen for the sounds of approaching footsteps within. At last, my efforts were rewarded. Surely that was Nora’s tread I could hear. I stepped back, struggling to decide what I would say when she opened the door.
But it did not open. Instead, the flap on the letter-box stirred and a long narrow buff envelope appeared, being pushed through from the other side. Instinctively, I reached out and took it, turning it over in my hands. My name had been typed on it in block capitals. GEOFFREY STADDON, ESQ. But there was no address.
I stumbled to the nearest street-lamp, tearing the envelope open as I went, then held the contents up to read. The letterhead of Martindale, Clutton & Fyffe was immediately recognizable. They were Sir Ashley Thornton’s solicitors.
Martindale, Clutton & Fyffe,
5–7 Partridge Place,
High Holborn,
LONDON WC1.
7th January 1924
Dear Mr Staddon,
Our client, Mrs Staddon, has instructed us to notify you that she is instituting proceedings against you for divorce on the grounds of physical cruelty. Pending a hearing of this action, she requires that you quit the property at 27 Suffolk Terrace, Kensington, of which, as you know, she is sole lessee. If you wish to remove any of your belongings currently lodged therein, please contact this office in order to agree a date and time when they can be collected by a third party.
We should be obliged if you would advise us of the solicitor who will be representing your interests in this case at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely,
H. Dodson
pp G. F. Martindale (Senior Partner)
I thrust the letter into my pocket, turned slowly and looked back at the house. No curtains moved. Nothing stirred or shifted or glimmered within. This dark cold blankness was the only home-coming Angela was prepared to grant me. This, and a curt letter from Martindale, Clutton & Fyffe, signed by a clerk in the senior partner’s absence. Per procurationem. Which was only appropriate, given that henceforth Angela and I would meet in front of witnesses, communicate through intermediaries, greet each other by petition and subpoena. It would take the lawyers many a month to bring this sad little case to what they termed a satisfactory conclusion. But I would neither help nor hinder them. I had not thought Angela would move so far and fast against me. But, now she had, I would not resist. If an end was what she wanted, an end she would have. I took my leave of her there, alone in the silent street, as night closed like a black cloud upon the roof-tops. I took my bleak farewell of all we had been to each other, and all we might have been. And then I climbed into the car and drove away.
Chapter Thirteen
I HAVE MANY times wondered why Imry Renshaw is such a good friend to me. I can name precious few occasions on which I have come to his aid, yet he has come to mine more often than I could ever deserve. So it was that night of my exclusion from Suffolk Terrace and for many of the nights that followed. Without his cheerily given advice and boundless generosity, there is no knowing what I might have done. Thanks to his influence, however, I held to a sane and sensible course.
I slept at Sunnylea – slept, at all events, for the few hours of darkness that remained after I had poured out my frustrations and resentments by Imry’s fireside. In the morning, we travelled into London together, Imry having undertaken to approach Martindale, Clutton & Fyffe with regard to my belongings and to consult some estate agents about the availability of bachelor flats. We agreed to meet later at his club.
For my part, Angela’s action had merely heightened my determination to trace Malahide. His pursuit staved off for the present all thoughts of the acrimonious convolutions divorce might force me to describe. I welcomed indeed the excuse he had given me to forget them; his was one lie I could confidently hope to nail. Pausing at Frederick’s Place only to confirm the little Giles had previously told me, I set off for Woolwich.
Croad’s men were cramming some dismal-looking housing onto a site near Woolwich Dockyard. Happily, the foreman knew my name and was as helpful as could be. Malahide had worked there until the Saturday before Christmas. Since then, nothing had been seen of him. He was a skilful worker – but unreliable, as his departure without so much as a day’s notice demonstrated. My request for his address caused much amusement. Any pub between Woolwich and Wapping was one suggestion. Some of his former workmates, however, knew his daughter’s husband, Charlie Ryan. He was a porter at Deptford Hospital and might, if handled carefully, tell me more.
I found Ryan in a dank corner of the hospital laundry. Lean, sallow and unsmiling, he proved as informative as he was disagreeable. A cigarette and a patient audience was all he needed to unburden himself on the subject of his father-in-law, a man he clearly loathed. The long and the short of it was that he did not bother to keep track of the old man’s frequent changes of lodging, but that his wife, Alice, did – much to his regret. I should find her at home that afternoon and was welcome to tell her that my visit was yet another indication of her father’s predictable failure to mend his ways.
The Ryans inhabited one of a terrace of mean yellow-brick houses off the Old Kent Road. The street was a cul-de-sac, entirely overshadowed by the vast grey wall of a gasometer at its farther end. There was an acrid taste of gas in the air, blending rankly with blocked drains and rubbish-choked gutters. The Ryans’ door stood open, revealing a bare linoleumed passage. Inside, a child was crying. I hammered on the door and shouted ‘Hello!’
‘Through here,’ came the reply. I followed it towards the rear of the house and found myself in a low-ceilinged kitchen where the air seemed even colder than in the street and a young, heavily pregnant woman was wringing clothes in a sink. Behind her, in a high-chair, sat the bawling infant, who fell instantly silent as I entered and stared at me, uncertain how to respond.
‘Mrs Ryan?’
She turned to look at me and started with surprise. Probably no more than twenty-five, though poverty and toil had lined her face and chapped her hands, she was that saddest of creatures, one who looked worthy of a better life. There was a spark of intelligence in her eyes, a hint of pride in her bearing. She seemed weighed down by hardship, but not yet completely crushed by it. ‘Who are you?’ she said suspiciously. ‘Thought it must be the tallyman, with a knock like that.’
‘I’m looking for your father, Mrs Ryan. Tom Malahide.’
‘He ain’t here.’
‘I realize that. I hoped you might be able to tell me where I could find him.’
‘What d’you say your name was?’
‘I didn’t. I’m a … a business acquaintance of your father.’
‘Oh yeh? Well, if Dad wanted to do business with you, he’d have told you how to find him, wouldn’t he?’
‘Indeed. It’s simply that we’ve lost touch.’ To avoid the challenge of her gaze, I stepped further into the room and looked around at the sparsely stocked shelves and peeling wallpaper. ‘He spoke of you, however. That’s how—’ My eye was suddenly taken by a scrap of paper pinned to the edge of the nearest shelf. It was a rudimentary shopping list: bread, tea, flour, butter, candles. But the handwriting was familiar. It was what, until recently, I had thought of as Lizzie Thaxter’s. Quarton’s words came into my mind. ‘It’s definitely a feminine hand, so he must have an accomplice.’ I reached out and tore the list free, then peered at it more closely. There could be no mistake.
‘Here! What d’you think you’re doing?’
I turned to confront her. Subterfuge would serve no further purpose. That at least was clear. ‘The game’s up, Mrs Ryan. I’m one of those who bought a letter off your father. A letter, as it turns out, written by you.’
‘I never—’ She stopped, unable, it seemed, to compose a denial, least of all a convincing one.
‘This is your writing.’ I held up the list.
‘
Well, yeh, but—’
‘Then there’s no room for doubt. I know the letter I was sold is a fake and now I know who faked it. You.’
‘You can’t prove nothing!’
‘With this, I rather think I can.’ I slipped the list into my pocket, then smiled in an attempt to reassure her. ‘Look, Mrs Ryan, I’m not trying to get you into trouble, though no doubt I could. All I want to do is to speak to your father.’
She stared at me, falteringly now, with little pouts of indecision. She was frightened, but also determined not to let me trick her into a betrayal. All this seemed to declare itself in the protracted silence that followed.
‘How did he talk you into it?’
‘I’m saying nothing.’
‘And did he tell you what to write? Or did you copy it from the original?’ A mute glare was her only answer. ‘Has he shared the money with you?’
‘What money?’
‘He’s made several hundred pounds out of this so far, you know. At least, I hope you do know.’
Her jaw had sagged, her eyes had widened. Then she frowned. ‘You’re lying.’
‘No. My word of honour, Mrs Ryan. I paid him a hundred and fifty pounds. I know of at least one other person who paid him a similar sum. As to how many buyers he had altogether, well, you’d know, wouldn’t you? How many letters did you write?’
‘A hundred and fifty quid?’ Disbelief had transformed her expression. ‘You paid him as much as that?’
‘I did.’
‘Gawd.’ She put her hand to her mouth and turned away. ‘The lying old—’ Then she looked back at me. ‘I ain’t got a penny of it, mister. That’s the honest truth.’
‘So, your father’s kept all of it. Perhaps that makes you think he doesn’t really deserve your loyalty.’
‘All of it?’ She sniggered harshly. ‘No, he ain’t kept the lot.’ She pointed at an open box of painted wooden bricks on the floor. ‘He bought them for the kiddy’s birthday last week.’ She sniggered again, but this time it was closer to a sob. Then, with a sudden swing of her foot, she kicked one of the bricks the width of the kitchen. It bounced off the leg of a table and rattled to rest beneath the mangle. ‘Bloody bricks!’
‘Will you tell me where I can find him, Mrs Ryan?’
‘Oh, I’ll do better than that.’ She grasped a cloth and dried her hands energetically. ‘I’ll take you there. It’s not just you who wants a word with him now. It’s me an’ all.’
The child was deposited with a neighbour. Then, wearing only a thin raincoat and a headscarf over her indoor clothes, Alice Ryan led me north towards Rotherhithe, by narrow streets and back-alleys, past more foul-smelling factories and beneath more dank railway viaducts than I would ever have guessed could be jammed between the swathes of tumble-down housing. As we went, she sustained a monologue explaining and excusing her involvement in Malahide’s scheme, as much, it seemed, to relieve her own feelings as to appease mine.
‘I should’ve known better, of course, but Dad knows how to talk me round. He has the gift of the gab even if he has the gift of nothing else. And he said it was so easy. All I had to do was copy what he’d written out for me and he’d see I got some of whatever he made. And, Gawd, could we do with a bit extra. So, I went along with it. Why not? I never thought it was going to bring the likes of you to me door. But, like I say, I should’ve known better. Dad’s little wheezes, as he calls ’em, never work out the way they’re supposed to.
‘Dad said he had this letter left him by a bloke he met in the nick who was hung. After he came out a couple of years ago, he passed the letter on to the bloke’s family. So he says, anyway. But I reckon he sold it. Otherwise, why should he have thought there was money to be made from it now? And why should he have kept a copy of it? That’s how he was able to make something out of it, you see, because he still had the copy. But it was in his writing, of course, and nobody was going to take his crabby hand for a young woman’s. So, he got me to copy it again in me best script. Three times. He reckoned he could flog all three copies for a tidy bit of cash, with this trial coming up. And it seems he was right. But I never thought – I never dreamt – it’d be as much as you say it is. Gawd, my Charlie could hump dirty linen down the hospital for a year and not see a hundred and fifty quid for it.
‘Dad’s a crook. Always has been and always will be. Well, you must know that. They say he’s a good chippy, but he’s never been content to work for a wage. Oh no, he’s always wanted more. But he’s been a good father to me in his way, so I’ve never had the heart to turn me back on him. I get that angry with him sometimes – like I am now. Then he talks me round and, before I know it, I’m laughing at his jokes again fit to bust. Mind, I don’t reckon I’ve ever been this angry. He’ll have to come up with something really special to wriggle back into me good books this time.’
We came at length to a shabby terrace of three-storeyed houses facing a railway embankment along which a seemingly endless train of rusting trucks was being slowly pulled, their wheels squealing like tortured geese. At the far end of the terrace, Alice turned in through an open doorway and started up an ill-lit staircase, on which the carpet had grown so thin that holes had been worn in the centre of each tread. The carpet expired altogether as we climbed towards the second floor and here the plaster had crumbled away from the wall in gaping patches, revealing the laths beneath.
Malahide’s room was at the front of the house, at the end of a dingy passage. His door looked more substantial than most of the woodwork around it, stout and fitted with a Yale as well as a mortice lock. Alice knocked loudly, waited and listened for a moment, then knocked again. There was no answer.
‘He’s not worked since Christmas,’ she said. ‘And it’s too early for him to be boozing. I’ll see if one of the other tenants knows where he is.’
She descended to the first floor whilst I waited. I heard her knock at another door, then there followed a muffled conversation I could not make out. A few minutes later, she returned, looking more worried now than angry.
‘It’s funny,’ she announced. ‘Old Mother Rudd don’t miss a thing, but she’s not seen Dad since Saturday.’
‘So, what do we do?’
She thought for a moment, then said: ‘We’ll go in. I’ve got some keys.’
A second later, the door was open. Alice was still struggling to remove her key from the Yale lock when I walked past her into the room. It was set in the eaves of the house, with the greater part of the ceiling sloping at forty-five degrees, lit by one dormer window. Of this, the mean furnishings and the chill, fetid atmosphere, I was instantly aware. Then, in the very next instant, awareness of something else, something altogether overwhelming, came upon me.
Malahide was lying flat on his back across a threadbare rug beneath the window. He was dead. I was certain of that even before I moved towards him and saw the bullet-hole in his right temple, the black clot of blood on his head and on the rug beneath him, the stiff, white, lifeless grip that death had taken on him.
I turned back to shield Alice, but already she had seen for herself. She did not scream or faint. She did not even blanch. She simply put her hand to her mouth, said ‘Oh my Gawd’, then lowered herself slowly into the only chair in the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Somebody’s done him in.’
‘Yes.’
Now she was losing some of her colour and beginning to tremble. ‘He keeps whisky in that cupboard.’ She pointed at a wooden cabinet in the far corner. ‘D’you think … Could you …’
‘Of course.’ I fetched the bottle, found a glass and poured her a stiff measure. As she sipped it, I stepped closer to Malahide and crouched down beside him. There was nothing horror-stricken or agonized about his face. Death had come suddenly and unannounced, as if it had been waiting to pounce when he entered the room. He was wearing boots, jacket, muffler and mittens, suggesting he had just walked in, and his woollen hat was lying on the rug beneath his head. Only then, abs
urdly late, did I remember that the door had been locked from the inside. How had his murderer come and gone?
I rose and turned towards the window. One of the panes was punctured by a small round hole, with cracks radiating from it like a sunburst. I walked towards it until I was standing by Malahide’s feet. Looking down, I could see fragments of the mud that had been on the soles of his boots; it had dried and flaked off whilst he had lain there. Then I looked at the window. Through it I could see the railway embankment on the other side of the road. It, the hole in the glass and my head were now connected by an invisible line, a line that led my thoughts to the only possible conclusion. Somebody had stood on that grass bank, waiting for Malahide to step into view. And, when he had, they had raised their rifle, aimed and fired. But how, from such an exposed position? Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the bare electric bulb in the centre of the room. It was alight. The shot had been fired at night, when the embankment was in total darkness.
I looked down at Malahide’s body. So swift, so unprepared had been his exit that it seemed, in some childish sense, unfair. A neat and instantly fatal head-wound administered at thirty yards’ range. It was a marksman’s shot, less a murder than an assassination. The assassin had reconnoitred the scene, no doubt, had chosen the embankment as the ideal vantage point. He had waited for Malahide to come home, to climb the stairs, to switch on the light, to move obligingly to the uncurtained window. Then, too quickly even for pain to register, he had killed him, and descended the bank and vanished into the night, leaving Malahide where he lay, for us to find him.
How long? How long had he lain there? He had not been seen since Saturday. Saturday night, then? It was quite possible. The weather had been cold, mercifully too cold for putrefaction to set in. For four days his corpse had patiently awaited discovery, four days in which his murderer could have covered every one of his tracks. I shivered. The preparation, the calculation, the professional efficiency: they made the crime seem worse, less shocking, perhaps, but infinitely more sinister.
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