Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘Is that all you care about – the dust on your clothing?’ I cried. ‘A man is dead.’

  My guardian blew sharply out between closed lips.

  ‘And the world,’ he swept his hand to indicate the whole of the humanity, for which he had very little regard, ‘is a safer and better place without him.’

  ‘Why was the shot so quiet?’

  ‘It was an air gun,’ he told me.

  ‘An air gun?’ I repeated incredulously. I remembered shooting crows with one in Parbold and even a direct hit did not always kill the bird immediately.

  ‘A point four five two judging by the size of the wound.’ Sidney Grice made a ring with his thumb and first finger to demonstrate the size. ‘People think of air rifles almost as toys now, but I have seen a Bavarian wild boar brought down from five hundred yards with a Windbusche.’ He ambled round the corpse. ‘Whoever it was had the sense not to take the hansom and risk me seeing him gaining ingress.’

  We went down to the kitchen where I pumped out a gush of brown water that stank so foully that I dared not use it.

  ‘Do you ever think of the pity,’ I beat the dust off my cloak but the cloud quickly settled down on me again, ‘that these men must have been babies at their mothers’ breasts once?’

  Mr G winced at my coarseness but only said, ‘Oh, March, of course I do . . .’ he handed me a cloth from his satchel, ‘not.’ He looked about him. ‘There is a cab going to waste out there. Come, goddaughter. It is quite two hours and four minutes since we consumed a cup of tea.’

  *

  ‘Man wott I brung ’ere? Dark coat and muffler. Must ’ave bin boilin’ in this ’eat. Collar up, big-brimmed titfer down,’ was the best description we could get from our driver.

  ‘What sort of accent did he have?’ I enquired.

  ‘Dunno.’ He tightened the right rein to turn us into the thoroughfare. ‘Passed me a note sayin’ Chase Street and wait.’

  ‘I am only surprised he can read.’ Mr G made no attempt to lower his voice as he raised an impatient hand. ‘Show me.’

  But the cabbie snorted. ‘Took it back orf me.’

  ‘Did you see his hand?’ Sidney Grice asked.

  ‘Levva glove.’ He edged us into a steady stream of traffic. ‘What’s this all abart?’

  We passed a hearse, the undertaker sleeping in the back, his brushed-to-a-gleam top hat rising and falling on his chest.

  ‘Did you not find his behaviour strange?’ I asked.

  He double-clicked his tongue at the mare. ‘Get all sorts in this job.’

  ‘Of course,’ I realized out loud. ‘Orchard pig/wig.’

  ‘Not none so strange as you two, though.’ The driver closed his hatch.

  *

  I could smell the blood on me when we returned to Gower Street, and I would never get used to that.

  ‘Regarding your threat to Wallace, I would not have permitted you to perjure yourself.’ Mr G rapped on the door.

  ‘I was bluffing,’ I admitted and he permitted me to witness the figure of a smile.

  ‘It can be convenient sometimes,’ Sidney Grice conceded, ‘to work with a liar.’

  Molly opened the door and I followed my guardian in with some satisfaction. I already knew he regarded me as untruthful, but I had never known him before to acknowledge that we worked together.

  7

  The Letter

  Dear George

  I almost started this letter My Darling George for that is what you are and always shall be to me.

  I have been miserable since you went away. I pretend to have headaches to excuse my moodiness but it is my heart that really hurts. You cannot pretend that you do not love me and, if you did, I should not believe you. I saw the anguish in your eyes when we last parted.

  So what is keeping us apart? The geographical distance between us can be breached in a matter of hours. I could be in Ely and in your embrace the very day that I hear from you.

  The gulf that separates us is my money and I can do little about that at present, but I made an offer before and I am making it again. When I am twenty-five and can take control of my late father’s estate, I shall assign every penny that I have inherited to you. We can live on that or, if your pride is really so delicate, you can give the money to any worthy cause of your choosing and we shall manage on your income. What use is my money to me when it keeps me from the man I love, who I know loves me in return?

  I have lived too long with memories and ghosts. I want to cast them aside and live for the living.

  Oh, George

  I screwed up the letter and rammed it in my mouth to stifle a sob. I was not weak and I would not give way to weakness.

  Dear God, George, I prayed, how can you look at the sun and know that I am under it too? How can you be so cruel? I am being crushed like this letter, shredded like the dozens more that I have written and never sent.

  If I thought that death would bring us together or end my suffering, I would take it without a second thought.

  And it was only that night, after I had written in my journal, that I remembered the name of a new coffee house in Montague Place and realized that, infuriatingly, Sidney Grice had probably been right yet again, and that I had misheard Johnny Wallace’s last words.

  8

  The Empress Cafe

  WHAT EXACTLY DO you hope to achieve by all these visits?’ Sidney Grice demanded.

  I clipped the chain around my neck. It was my lightest cloak, yet still too heavy for the oppressive summer heat. But I might as well have run naked down Oxford Street for the way my godfather would have reacted if I had set foot outside without one.

  Molly was sitting on the floor, dusting the undersurface of the hall table where her employer had been furious to discover a flake of a suspect’s dandruff that had gone missing six weeks ago.

  ‘I do not know.’ I picked my bonnet off the hall table and he shook his head. ‘But if you only looked for clues where you expected to find them you would never find any.’

  I put the bonnet back.

  My guardian tossed his head to flick back his thick black hair. ‘On the contrary, eighty-four and one quarter per centum of the clues I seek are exactly where I expect them to be. It is only the remaining fifteen and three-quarters per centum that make my job interesting.’

  ‘I aintn’t not never had a clue,’ Molly said wistfully. ‘Everybody says so – even people. Do they taste good?’

  ‘Not usually.’ I put on my other bonnet, and my guardian treated me to a that-will-have-to-do shrug.

  Ignoring Molly, he continued, ‘Of course, the real challenge lies in calculating what the clues mean.’ He turned his back on me and twisted the handle of his periscope stick to view me through it.

  ‘Dontn’t not you know neither?’ Molly lunged at a cobweb on the gas mantle and it floated out of reach unscathed.

  ‘Ox-brained sloven,’ Mr G growled irritably.

  Molly grinned. ‘Ox’s is very clever, aintn’t they, sir?’

  They are not famous for it.’ I selected a parasol from the stand and Mr G edged back uneasily.

  But Molly was undeterred by my information. ‘And that’s where London is – aintn’t it not? In Sloven England.’

  Sidney Grice clipped the ferrule back over the lens of his cane. ‘I am talking about the deductive process,’ he snapped.

  ‘You are not the only one who can do that.’ I opened the door, disappointed to find no cooling breeze. ‘For instance, I can deduce that you have recently acquired a navy-blue cravat with paler blue polkas.’

  My godfather cocked his head to one side and then the other like an intelligent terrier. ‘How on earth can you know that?’

  ‘By doing what you are always trying to persuade me to do – using my senses.’ He followed my gaze and saw Spirit coming down the stairs, dragging a frayed length of silk as proudly as if she had caught a rat.

  ‘That dratted animal.’

  The sun blazed and, because there was no nee
d for domestic fires, the sky was almost blue through the factory fumes hanging in the atmosphere.

  ‘Ladies,’ I reminded him, and stepped out into the filthy acridness that Londoners call air.

  ‘I shall get rid of that creature once and for all,’ he threatened, shutting the door firmly, and I might have believed him if I had not occasionally caught him playing with her.

  It was not far to Montague Place and I liked to walk, watching the children racing with the hoop of a barrel in the street, listening to the vendors peddling their wares – beef sandwiches, coloured bottles, linnets in willow-wicker cages – and little Betty, from whom I purchased a sprig of lavender, at her usual patch on the corner of Torrington Place.

  The Empress Cafe was quite a large establishment and almost always busy. If truth be told, I was half-convinced that my guardian was right. I had no idea who or what I was looking for, but, if it was important enough for Johnny Wallace to use his dying breath, I thought I should at least try. Besides, I rather liked it there. The decor was cheerful and modern with green floral tiles and paintings of Paris on the walls. It was difficult to imagine that the City of Lights had been in the grips of starvation and terror scarcely more than a decade ago.

  The manager may have been sullen but his employees were quick and amiable, and ladies who sat away from the windows were allowed to smoke. I was shown a table in the far corner, and ordered a pot of coffee before settling down to survey the other customers and try, as always, to work out what constituted suspicious behaviour. The unshaven man immersed in a broken-backed novel – he had been at the same table by the cake counter every day – was he waiting for Johnny? The woman in grey with a brown paper parcel – she was obviously ill at ease – was she going to deliver something? Mine was a fruitless task.

  My coffee had just arrived when the doorbell clanked and two women came in – a petite, pale young lady struggling on crutches, with her companion, slightly taller, statuesque and heavily veiled, arms linked to support her. The companion was engaged in an animated conversation with the waitress and I saw that they were being turned away.

  I hurried over. ‘Is there a problem?’

  The woman on crutches was clearly having considerable difficulty standing up. ‘Apparently they are full,’ she said hoarsely.

  She was in her mid-twenties, I guessed, and her face was badly scratched and bruised.

  Her friend’s veil puzzled me. It was Lincoln green and I had never seen one so impenetrable except in black for deepest mourning.

  ‘It is too bad,’ emerged a light feminine voice from behind the gauze.

  The waitress was pink. ‘The manager says I mustn’t push people on to tables that are already occupied. Customers don’t care for it.’

  ‘These ladies are my guests,’ I said. ‘If you can make it to the back there.’

  ‘For a half-decent beverage I could make it on to the roof,’ the woman with crutches avowed, and struggled between the chairs and parcels on the floor to flop exhausted but triumphant at my table. ‘This is very good of you.’ She propped her crutches against the wall.

  ‘Two coffees and iced buns,’ her companion ordered, and the waitress hurried away.

  ‘March Middleton,’ I introduced myself. ‘March.’

  The lady with the crutches held out her hand. She had masses of curly blonde hair, topped by a neat periwinkle-blue bonnet, and a sweet face, but, the more I looked at her, the more damage I saw. Her right cheekbone was indented and she had a healing split in her upper lip.

  ‘Bocking,’ she said in her croaky voice. ‘Lucy Bocking.’

  ‘I am pleased to meet you.’ I turned to her companion.

  ‘Might as well get it over with.’ She lifted the veil up over her hat, and I am ashamed to confess that I shot my hand to my mouth. It was difficult to judge her age for her face was shrivelled, not by time, but partly eaten as if by acid. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were missing and part of her upper left eyelid. And her skin was yellowed by streaks of scar tissue between angry scarlet pools of tissue-paper skin. ‘Freda Wilde.’ She gazed straight at me, daring me not to look away. ‘Friends call me Freddy.’ Her right hand looked normal as it extended towards me and her grip was strong.

  ‘How do you do, Freddy? Do you mind if I smoke?’

  She smiled lopsidedly. ‘I would mind more if you did not.’ And she delved into her voluminous handbag.

  ‘Have one of mine.’ I held out my father’s silver case. ‘If you do not mind Turkish. I find they have more flavour.’

  Freddy took one, but Lucy shook her head. ‘Not for me – but please do not let me stop you.’

  Freddy was already lighting hers and held out the Lucifer for me.

  ‘Is there a greater pleasure than your first cigarette of the day?’ I sucked deep into my lungs.

  ‘None that I can think of,’ Freddy agreed, ‘but this is at least my sixth.’

  The waitress returned with more cups and another pot, and she was taking them off her tray when she caught sight of Freddy and slopped coffee on the tablecloth. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Shall I change the cloth?’

  ‘Do not trouble.’ Freddy waved her away and added, ‘At least she did not scream.’

  I did not know what to say to that. ‘Have you never smoked?’ I asked Lucy. ‘Like Woking Crematorium,’ she replied, ‘but I find tobacco irritates my throat at present.’

  ‘You have a cold?’

  Lucy’s white face coloured and something struggled its way across it – a mixture of hate and fear that fought its way into her mouth as she choked out the words.

  ‘You think a cold did this?’ She indicated her crutches and her broken cheek. ‘A man did this.’ She cried out as she touched her throat. ‘Or a vile creature posing as one.’

  9

  The Terror of Ferns

  ‘IF I HAD wanted to do house calls,’ Sidney Grice grumbled as he stretched to step over a damp patch, ‘I would have become a plumber.’

  ‘I am not sure Lucy could get up our steps,’ I told him.

  ‘What then?’ he enquired. ‘Am I to have them removed and my house lowered?’

  He buttoned his coat collar. ‘And now it is raining.’

  I had not brought my umbrella, as my guardian had what he described as a rational fear of anything that flapped. He gave me his arm and I skipped out of our cab on to the kerb.

  ‘It is not too heavy.’ I held out my hand, palm upwards.

  ‘All rain is too heavy,’ he decreed. ‘If it were not, it would not fall from the clouds.’

  ‘Perhaps it will clear the air.’

  ‘London air is never clear, nor is it meant to be.’

  I looked about me. Grosvenor Square was one of the most exclusive developments in Mayfair, one of the most expensive areas of London and, therefore, the world. It was built round a large gated garden and was unusual in that most of the houses were individually constructed rather than the more conventional uniform terraces. It was no less imposing for that, though, and the property we faced on the north side was a splendid four-storey Regency villa with high arched windows. Carved into the white stone facade, and highlighted in ebony to match the front door, was the name: Amber House.

  Mr G tapped the steps with his cane. ‘She managed to ascend these.’

  ‘There are only two and we have six,’ I pointed out. ‘I should have thought you would have observed that.’ And, before he could retaliate, I added, ‘At least this gets you out of the house.’

  ‘I do not wish to be got out of my house. If I did I should never have gone into it.’ He forced the wide brim of his soft felt hat down over his eyes. ‘I trust you have not familiarized these women with Miss Hockaday’s case.’

  ‘For once your trust in me is not misplaced.’ I knew better than to discuss another client’s business, especially in so sensitive a matter. ‘Do you think the crimes are connected?’

  Sidney Grice prodded the foot scraper with his toe. ‘All crimes are connected,’ he proclaimed un
helpfully, ‘if only by the fact that they are crimes.’

  I stepped back to look up, narrowly avoiding a collision with a passing cobbler’s handcart.

  ‘Make your shoe good as noo,’ he bellowed in my ear as I skipped clear. ‘Fix the ’oles in your soles.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ my guardian snapped.

  ‘I ain’t done the bit abart ’ow you nevah saw shinier levvah,’ the bootmaker grumbled as he trudged by. His lips, I noticed, were stained brown, and I wondered if he sucked his blacking.

  I craned my neck to admire the house’s decorative capitals. ‘It does not look like Miss Bocking will have any trouble paying your fees.’

  Mr G slid a shrivelled worm out of the way with his cane. ‘Clorrence Bocking, her father, was reputed to have been the one hundred and nineteenth richest man in England.’

  I went up to the door. ‘Where did his wealth come from?’

  ‘From stealing the design of a safety pencil sharpener and patenting it whilst the true inventor, his younger sister, was recovering from an accident with her self-tightening corset.’

  ‘There was a court case about that, was there not?’ I racked my brains for something that a detective should be doing but came up with nothing.

  ‘Indeed.’ My guardian ran a gloved finger down a railing. ‘But, since it was a civil action, I have no record of it. I shall peruse the details before the week has expired.’

  The door was opened by a neat maid in a rigidly starched hat and gleaming white apron, with a welcoming ‘Good afternoon’. She spoke to us pleasantly. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Mr Grice and assistant to see Miss Bocking.’ Mr G thrust his card at her.

  ‘Please come in. Miss Bocking is expecting you.’ We stepped into a rectangular hall, the pale marbled floor inset with an apron of green squares and the pale cream walls with a faint bamboo pattern, brightening it even in the weak daylight that seeped through the windows to either side of the door. ‘If you could wait here one moment,’ she requested after taking our overcoats and hats.