by D. J. Taylor
At least a dozen other letters—letters relating to specious applications for tide waiterships, letters from gentlemen who considered themselves grievously wronged by the activities of Captain McTurk’s lieutenants—went the same way as the custodian of Chiswick Bridge, but the thirteenth packet Captain McTurk found himself considering with almost as much interest as the life preserver. At this juncture the capital had fallen victim to a succession of fraudulent impostures. All over the City, it seemed, gentlemen had been cashing cheques they were not entitled to possess, drawn on accounts to which they were not party, using signatures that were not theirs to sign. A great commercial concern in the City Road had had one of its cheque books stolen and fifteen hundred pounds lost in this way. A firm of solicitors in Hampshire had been pillaged of eight hundred pounds after retrieving debts for a mysterious client, the cheques used to remit these debts found to be stolen and the client mysteriously absconded. By all of this Captain McTurk was much exercised. He believed that there was a pattern to it, but he could not yet establish what the greater dimensions of the pattern were. The case before him seemed particularly suggestive. A solicitor in Bermondsey had been asked to write a letter in pursuit of a sum of one hundred pounds owed to his client by a defaulting debtor. An address had been supplied by the client, the letter had been written and the money very soon remitted—paid in to the solicitor’s bank account and a fresh cheque drawn in the name of the client. Then it was discovered that the first cheque was a forgery. The client, to whom representations were made, had by this time vanished from the face of the earth. The debtor’s address, when visited by the solicitor, had turned out to be a tobacconist’s shop, kept by an old woman who knew nothing whatever about it.
A thought occurred to Captain McTurk, and, taking up his hat from where it lay on a stand near the door, he determined to act upon it. It was now the middle of the morning, and there seemed little chance that Masterson would return before noon. Accordingly, Captain McTurk descended the two flights of stairs, nodded his head to the seneschal at the door, avoided the ambitious stares of the ostlers and walked out through the tight little archway to the street beyond. Here he summoned a cab and had himself driven away across the river towards the Borough and the address to which the original demand for payment had been despatched and from which the fraudulent cheque had subsequently been returned. It became apparent to Captain McTurk as the cab bowled through the remoter quarters of Southwark that he could not expect very much from this visitation, and in this assumption he was correct. The tobacconist’s shop lay at the end of a street of shy little houses, hunched beneath the outer wall of a tanning factory about whose premises hung an indescribable stench. Within could be glimpsed certain melancholy appurtenances of the retail trade: a very little counter—no more than a trestle stretched between two boxes—displaying three or four dingy little tobacco tins, a half bin of Latakia so friable and ancient that it might have been dried pure awaiting distribution to the strawberry fields, and a fierce, dirty, little old woman with her jaw wrapped up in a handkerchief against a toothache and seated in a rocking chair from which the rockers had unaccountably become detached.
All this Captain McTurk saw in a glance, divining as he did so the absolute futility of any interrogation. Nonetheless, he placed his hat on the counter, rolled around in his fingers a fragment of the Latakia from the bin—very dismal stuff it was, which crumbled away to nothing—looked up at a dangling cage with a stuffed jackdaw suspended in it and announced, first, that he was a police officer, and, second, that he believed the old lady’s premises had lately been used as an accommodation address. Having received the old lady’s cautious assent to this, Captain McTurk further deposed that certain letters had doubtless been received at the address, and wondered who had come to collect them. The old lady remarking that it was a shame she should be so worried when plagued with the toothache and that it was no business of his, Captain McTurk grew suddenly fierce himself, let the handful of Latakia fall through his fingers and gave the gentlest little nudge to the edge of the counter, causing the nearest of the tobacco tins to shake and waver as if it might be about to spill its contents over the sawdust floor. Whereupon the old lady, half rising from her chair and putting out a claw to secure the tobacco tin, recollected that there might have been a man calling himself Carter and that he might have last called six weeks since, or then again he might not. Captain McTurk persisting, and demanding in particular what this Mr. Carter might have looked like, the old lady also recollected that he might have been tallish and elderly-looking, or then again perhaps younger and “queerish.” Had she seen any specimens of the gentleman’s handwriting? Captain McTurk wondered, but the old lady was equal to this, protesting that she could not read and in any case what would she be doing with specimens of gentlemen’s handwriting? At Captain McTurk’s wondering if she expected any further communications with Mr. Carter, the old lady altogether shook her head, and Captain McTurk knew that he had reached the bottom of the particular well he had come to drain, put his hat back on his head, administered a little pat with his hand to the nearest tobacco tin, as if to reassure its owner that his earlier gesture had been no more than a jest, and walked out into the street to the waiting cab, resolving nevertheless that he should have the shop watched and that any further visit by Mr. Carter should be his last.
It was by now sometime after midday. As the cab took him back through the Borough, in sight of the river and the forest of ships’ masts, Captain McTurk stared out of the window at the passersby, thinking to identify in one of them the outline of Mr. Carter, come to collect his letters and ripe for apprehension. But there was no one amongst the mass of city dwellers, of men and women passing back and forth from their places of work or gathered indiscriminately on street corners, to stay his glance, and he continued on his journey, stopping the cab at Charing Cross and walking the last quarter mile along Northumberland Avenue, through the tight little archway (the ostlers had all disappeared to their dinners) and back to the solitude of his desk. Here he found that Mr. Masterson, who was an efficient man, had returned from his errand and that several bound volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine, marked with the crest of the London Library, lay on his chair together with several stray fragments of glass that the janitor’s brush had unaccountably missed. Sundry other missives, communications, packages and even a telegram or two—one with a superscription marked URGENT IMMEDIATE ATTN. ASST. COMMISSIONER on its front—had arrived in his absence, but Captain McTurk was a single-minded man and the conundrum of the life preserver, which he now removed again from the safe in the corner of the room, had not ceased to occupy him during his half hour in the Borough. Transferring the bound volumes to his desk, he seated himself in the chair, placed one on his lap and began to leaf through it, paying particular attention to those melancholy pages towards the rear of each number given over to gentlemen’s obituaries.
Captain McTurk was a thorough man—besides, the obituary columns of the Gentleman’s Magazine are not notably extensive—and within a quarter of an hour he had the information he wanted before him. This, it may immediately be remarked, was the memorial to Mr. Henry Ireland. Mr. Ireland had not been personally known to Captain McTurk. Consequently, he began merely by studying the catalogue of that gentleman’s accomplishments. This done, he took up a pencil and a piece of paper from the desk drawer and noted down such points as he found to be of interest. These, it seemed to him, were very singular. For one thing, the late Mr. Ireland was represented as an excellent horseman, a rider to hounds, an amateur jockey even, who had performed to advantage in the Newcastle Plate ten years before, and yet somehow he had allowed his horse to run away with him. For another, the horse, having run away and deposited him on the base of his skull at the roadside, had for some reason ceased to run and returned to crop the grass peacefully ten yards away. Mr. Ireland’s fatal accident, according to his obituarist, had occurred not so very far from his Theberton estate. In a glass-fronted bookcase to the back
of Captain McTurk’s chamber there were a number of maps of the English counties. Taking the map devoted to Suffolk, Captain McTurk traced the road connecting Woodbridge to Wenhaston with the end of his pencil and found that it ran exceedingly close to Theberton. After this, Captain McTurk took the life preserver out from its wrapper again, held it in his right hand and administered with it a little blow to the palm of his left. The pain that this caused was sufficient to make him drop the life preserver onto the desk and wring his left hand between his knees, and it was in this condition that Mr. Masterson found him on entering the room a moment or so later.
“Gracious! Is something the matter?”
“Only that I have near shattered my palm with this d——d bludgeon! Thank you, there’s no need”—this in repudiation of the hand that Masterson extended towards him—“but look here! The thing is found on a roadside on the way to Woodbridge. And not a mile away by my reckoning a man is discovered with his head cracked to pieces and a horse that is supposed to have run away with him still at his side.”
Masterson nodded his head over the facts of the case as they were revealed to him. “I should say that that was a very singular horse, if indeed it did run away with him. By the by, you remark the man’s name?”
“No. What about it?”
“Is he not the husband of the Mrs. Ireland that was lost? The young lady whose trustees were said to have been at fault?”
“And replied that they should be permitted to perform their duties without interference? I believe I do recall.”
Masterson looked as if he might be about to volunteer further information on this topic, only for his eye to fall on the topmost envelope.
“You will not mind my mentioning it, I am sure, but I believe that is from Sir Edwin.” Sir Edwin, it may be said, was the Home Secretary.
“Is it? Well, Sir Edwin will have to wait his turn like everyone else.”
However, Captain McTurk consented eventually to open the Home Office envelope, and even to take certain steps with regard to its contents. Nonetheless, he was sufficiently interested in the bound volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine to send Mr. Masterson down to Suffolk and also to ponder in his head what he had heard of Mrs. Ireland and her history.
Mr. Masterson was a diligent man. Despatched to Suffolk, he determined to acquit himself in a manner of which he fancied Captain McTurk might approve. Accordingly, he engaged a room at the Crown in Woodbridge, hired a horse from the stables adjacent to that inn and set out thoroughly to investigate the route that Henry Ireland had taken on the day of his fatal mishap. He discovered, by application to the doctor who had attended Mr. Ireland in his death throes, that the road on which he had met with his accident was perhaps two miles from the gate of his property at Theberton and perhaps a further two miles from the road that connected Woodbridge and Wenhaston. This former thoroughfare Mr. Masterson rode up and down on several occasions with the medical man’s directions on a sheet of paper before him as he went until he was tolerably certain that he had located the exact spot at which Mr. Ireland had come to grief. It was, to be sure, a lonely part of the county—a narrow track running alongside the bed of an old, dried-up river, with a band of dense woodland spreading away in the middle distance behind—and even here, on a spring afternoon with the larks ascending into the pale sky above him, Mr. Masterson said to himself that he did not much like it.
Nevertheless, he was bidden to undertake a survey and undertake that survey he did, fastening his horse’s bridle to a tree and tramping back and forth along the path with his notebook in his hand and casting his eyes first to one side and then to the other. Several things immediately attracted his notice. The first was that the road was not tarmacadamed, being no more than a farm track, and that had Mr. Ireland tumbled from his horse in the normal manner, it would have been very nearly impossible for him to have sustained the injuries over which the doctor and the coroner’s jury had shaken their heads. Had Mr. Ireland then come down upon a rock sufficient to smash open his skull at its base? Mr. Masterson examined the grass of the verge, which he found remarkably soft and springy and altogether devoid of rocks. How, then, had Henry Ireland come by his blow? Mr. Masterson assured himself that it could only have been administered by the horse during the course of that animal’s running away, and yet the horse had been found calmly cropping the grass a few yards from his dead master’s side. The more Mr. Masterson considered the matter, the more he could find no plausible explanation. Naturally, it occurred to him that if a gentleman who is riding his horse along a country path is subsequently found at the roadside with his head stove in, then some other agency may be to blame, but he was aware that before he reached this conclusion there were other avenues that it behoved him to pursue.
His next action, consequently, was to return to Woodbridge and interview the police captain who had caused the life preserver to be sent to London for the attention of Captain McTurk. This gentleman, though, could only confirm what he had stated in his letter: that the bludgeon had been found at such and such a spot on the road from Woodbridge to Wenhaston, apparently concealed behind a clump of foliage, that nothing like it had been seen in the county before and that no incident existed in his recollection with which it could be connected. Mr. Masterson thanked the police captain and rode back to Theberton, thinking to himself that he would do best by finding some witness who had observed Mr. Ireland at an earlier point on his last ride and could attest to the manner of his progress, the attitude of his horse and so forth. With this object in mind, he spent a day in Theberton village—the estate was altogether shut up, he noted, with an iron bar raised across the gateposts and the trees flaring up above the fences—drank a pint of beer at the local inn and, making no secret of who he was and what he wanted, asked questions of such persons as placed themselves in his way.
He did not find out a great deal, but he discovered something: a labouring man, employed in draining ditches and pollarding willows for the local farmers, professed to have been walking along the track to his work on the afternoon in question and had seen “th’ squire” half a mile or so from his gates. Interested, but taking care not to show it, Mr. Masterson conducted his interrogation with such suavity that it did not seem like an interrogation at all. Had he spoken to the squire? “’Deed he had, for that he had touched his cap and squire had remarked as it were a fine day.” Mr. Ireland had been riding his horse on the path, had he? “No, he had not. He had been a-leading of the animal on his bridle, like as if it were lame.” And had the man seen anyone other than himself and the squire on the road that afternoon? “None but a tinker or a pedlar or some such person with a pack mule.” Had he thought of imparting this information to the coroner? “Sure, he knew nothing of coroners and suchlike, and if they wanted aught from him, they should come and seek it out.” Mr. Masterson asked various other questions, but this was the sum total of information that he extracted, whereupon he thanked the man, retrieved his horse and returned to the Crown in Woodbridge, thinking that whatever else had happened to Mr. Henry Ireland on the afternoon of his death, he had not fallen into the road, had not struck his head on a rock, had not been kicked by his horse, but had very probably been murdered.
XXII
AN AFTERNOON IN ELY
DIARY OF THE REV. JOSIAH CRAWLEY, CURATE OF EASTON
16 January 1866
Dixey called at my lodgings, somewhat discomposed—his hair much dishevelled by the wind—and wishing to speak. On my inviting him in, he declined, saying that he preferred to walk. Accordingly, we strolled a little way along the back lanes. Dixey apologetic. Wished, he said, to allow me some explanation for the events of yesterday. Having remarked this, somewhat silent as if he did not know how to begin. A dank, chill day, the roads quite deserted. The young woman apparently a distant relation, his ward, altogether disturbed in her mind (“Quite deranged”—Dixey), who lives in the house. She is biddable enough, he maintains, but prey to fits of violent agitation, these necessitating her confinemen
t. Naturally, I was much interested in this lady, Mrs. Ireland (Dixey somewhat reluctant to reveal her name), yet seeing his discomfiture restrained my curiosity. Mindful of my duty, I enquired, was there anything I could do for Mrs. Ireland from the spiritual point of view? At this Dixey laughed. “She thinks the world a well, and God the bucket. If indeed she thinks anything at all.” Spoke of Mrs. Ireland’s “nasty tricks,” her guile with the servants, &c. Dixey remarked that he proposed a visit to London, where business summons him, meetings with lawyers and so forth, but would return in the spring, when he hoped to see something of me. I was sorry to see him go.
24 January 1866
My poem “Alaric” returned by the publishers. I placed the manuscript hurriedly in a drawer, not wishing to reread it.
28 January 1866
To Ely. Much conversation with A. I find her much better schooled than I surmised. Decided opinions about the late American war, the Royal household, &c., much better than the usual feminine twaddle one hears on such occasions. Came back in the twilight: the afternoons much less drear, me judice.
