She rolled back the rug. A section of floorboard had been prised up then replaced.
“Didn’t hear a thing apart from some scraping of furniture. Assumed it was standard practice. Sent Mathilda up to ask if he wanted tea. She tried the door but he’d locked it. Sent for me. Knocked. No answer. Knocked again, harder. The door opened, he squeezed out. Brushed right past me and out of the house. Not a word.”
“You’ve told the police … Inspector Brookman?”
“Mathilda ran a message over to the police station earlier.”
“Did anyone else witness this? The artillery officer maybe?”
She sighed.
“He picked his moment. Waited till Mathilda and I were alone.”
“Did he threaten you in any way?”
“No. He seemed cold. How do you say, detached? But I had no reason to suspect. No reason not to let him in. There’s been a lot of paperwork. You have a murder, people take interest.
“There appears to be nothing taken from the room,” she added. “The shirts, the few personal items that you saw, I had already packed them for you. Downstairs … the carpet bag.”
Finch saw the Vesta Lane print on the mantelpiece. She had fallen over face first.
“What else can you tell me about him?”
“A suit. Smart. Looked the part. Like I say, broad, strong. Oh, and the hair … Rooi … Red.”
In her no nonsense fashion, she moved the conversation on. What had happened had happened.
“Tell me,” she asked, “when you return to England, will you be calling upon the major’s widow in person?”
Finch explained that Cox’s family lived in India.
He went to the window and stared out. Beyond the backyards, the ground rose sharply up to Signal Hill, the coarse grass of the slopes dotted with tumbling natural rubble. When he turned round a moment later, Du Plessis had squeezed back out of the room. He heard another door crack and a drawer slide open. She returned with a small bundle of papers.
“Then it is safe to give you these.”
It was a tattered stack of personal correspondence tied up with a red silk ribbon.
“I thought it prudent to remove them.”
Finch undid the bow and began thumbing through the missives, which had been folded and reinserted in their envelopes. There were maybe 20 or so, all bearing Cape postage, all uniformly addressed in a decorous, looping feminine scroll – some directed to Cox’s regimental HQ, the rest to a local post office box. The most recent, a telegram, had been sent only on December 24th, Cox’s last full day on earth.
“They were in the back of wardrobe. See here …”
She opened the door. It creaked. She indicated below a lower shelf and what appeared to be a false panel at the rear, about one foot square. It was now split and wrenched open.
“I saw wood shavings. I thought mice. And then I noticed. The screws.”
The heads of the four that had been holding it in place were shiny with use, not varnished over. The police had missed it but not the eagle-eyed ransacker.
She was fortunate indeed that this man had not figured her as the letters’ remover.
Finch pulled out a few sheets at random. It was largely expensive pale blue bond. Each letter, some several pages long, commenced: ‘My Dearest Leonard’ and concluded ‘With all my heart, V’, or a variation thereof. To Finch, even from a cursory inspection, it was patently clear that ‘V’ was not Cox’s wife … neither was she, barring a gross misjudgment of character, Vesta Lane.
“Does the inspector know about these?” Finch asked.
She shook her head.
“Can I keep them?”
“Do with them what you feel necessary. Please be discreet. I know what it is like to be widowed. Why make that poor woman suffer any more? But act with caution. If you choose to give them to the police, then I only discovered them this morning. You understand?”
Finch nodded. He was not sure how much Du Plessis knew of the details of Cox’s death but felt that she was owed some kind of explanation. He told her as much as he could without betraying police trust.
He concluded with the detail that there was a man now in custody for the murder but that Cox had been killed for a reason – A woman? A debt? – a motive that was not yet clear.
“You must promise me, Mevrouw Du Plessis. If anyone suspicious calls upon you, if you are concerned about anything at all with relation to Cox, you must contact Brookman immediately.”
He was satisfied by her look that she had understood.
He followed her out. Down in the hallway he stuffed the bundle inside his tunic. On the dresser by the front door, the one with Mathilda’s tip jar, the carved cross-eyed spaniel panted at him. On the floor beneath it was Cox’s carpet bag, done up with string – the remainder of his things.
He hoisted it by the leather handles. They shook hands.
“I’m so sorry you have been caught up in all this, Mevrouw Du Plessis. I truly am.”
She shrugged, as if to blame it all on fate.
He patted the bundle in his tunic, assuring discretion.
“Thank you,” he said. “And Happy New Year …”
“Goodbye, Heer Dokter,” she replied, flat, expressionless.
* * *
Out on the dusty street, Finch checked Cox’s watch. He had less than an hour before his train left the main station. His hansom cab, generously laid on by Rideau, was at the bottom of the slope, waiting patiently. He waved to the driver and it began a languorous trit-trot out from the shade of a jacaranda.
Half an hour later he was amid the khaki chaos of Cape Town railway station again, a military man once more. Under the vaulted roof, the noise – of men, of barking sergeants and of the chuffs and hisses of shunting locomotives – conspired for an almighty din.
Across the forecourt was the army postal desk where harassed clerks, army NCOs, sought to make order of the great scrum of men trying to avail themselves of its services.
Finch hated doing it, but handed his kit bag to a porter and summoned a second one to carry his two items for postage – the box and the carpet bag – then limped his way over and pulled rank to carve himself a route through to the front of the queue, not without some cursing from the men of the lower orders.
Du Plessis had tied a brown paper label to the carpet bag. The box, the one with Cox’s clothing, but minus the Zeiss watch, was now layered in thick brown paper.
Finch also retained Cox’s wallet. The burglar had deemed the small slab of tattered leather to be of no intrinsic worth. To Finch there was something about it – the scrap of paper with the name ‘Shawcroft’ upon it, even the crumpled chemist’s shop receipt. He had lodged it in the waist pocket of his tunic, under which bulged the bundle of Cox’s letters.
Ten minutes later he had relinquished the last of Cox’s worldly goods, to be headed in the direction of the harbour and a steamer across the Indian Ocean. Lord knows when they might arrive in the Punjab, though he always marvelled at the magnificent ease of transit – of both goods and people – to and from the most far-flung reaches of the Empire.
Though he had already sent a letter to Mrs Cox, expressing his condolences, he had inserted another note to explain that these were personal items and how he thought she might like to have them. He was, again, very sorry.
By a quarter to four, Finch had pushed past the pale, fresh-faced tyros bound for the Front. Those who returned would be weathered, grim-faced men.
He found his way into a second-class compartment, his kit bag slung on the luggage rack above his head by the Indian porter whose heroics earned a greater tip than might have been expected.
Across the way, as he had seen on arrival, ambulances waited to take away the wounded from the incoming trains. The invalids were being siphoned off so as not to shock those champing at the bit to see some ‘action’.
For a moment he ventured that he was just arriving, that all that had passed in the previous three days was just some dream.
Christ. Was it just three days?
The platform guard blew his whistle. The locomotive yielded a great hiss and an iron shudder.
Chapter Thirty-One
The train trundled out of the station, out of the hubbub, past the blithely wandering rail gangs. It chugged past the rickety black shanty towns, the immense slopes of Table Mountain receding behind. It was not that far to Paarl, 40 miles or so, an hour’s ride. Paarl would mark the end of Finch’s communion with urbanity. Further up the line lay nothing but heat and death.
The six-man compartment was full of officers this time. The sheer volume of men heading north, now that the troopships had started docking, made it difficult to believe that the Boer Republics could hold out for long.
Finch had managed at least to procure a seat by the window. He nodded a mutual greeting to a fellow RAMC captain he assumed to be there to attend the same conference.
Once underway, once everyone had settled down to their editions of the Cape Argus or their penny novellas, he removed the red-ribboned bundle of letters from his tunic. It earned him a knowing look from the lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Canadian Dragoons seated next to him.
He felt like a voyeur – he was being a voyeur – but he knew he would have to sift through the missives if he were to find out what on earth had been going on with Cox. If anything came to light, he would of course pass the letters on to Brookman.
The reality was there was not one grieving widow here but two. The first a wife, a mother; the other a lover – a lover right here in the Cape, unable to express her sorrow or to learn the details of the fate that had befallen her clandestine paramour. Maybe she didn’t yet know he was dead?
Should there be nothing criminally incriminating in the letters’ contents, he swore that, when next in Cape Town – whenever that might be – he would track down ‘V’ and return the letters personally.
There were 23 items in all. The earliest letters pre-dated the war, going back to April, when Cox had first been posted to the Cape. Some were addressed to his regimental HQ, others to a post office box. The last, the telegram, had been delivered directly to Cox at the Esperanza guest house, shattering the scrupulous secrecy maintained up till then.
The first letter, penned on April 20th, 1899, was short and relatively curt. It began ‘Dear Major’ and thanked Cox for lunch the previous day with a polite wish that they ‘might avail themselves of the opportunity to luncheon together again under similar circumstances.’
Within two weeks, the Major had become ‘Dear Leonard’. By the end of May he had evolved into ‘My Dearest Leonard’. Come June he was ‘My Darling’, ‘My Sweet’, or, in particularly effusive communications, ‘My Dear Sweetest Darling’.
‘V’ was a constant, though from pretty early on, the initial was preceded by ‘With Love’ or ‘Love’, ‘All my love’ or variants thereof.
‘V’ clearly found Cox to be a charmer, someone who had brought some much-needed fun and laughter. It was apparent from the outset that she, too, was married. In the first few letters the prose were studded with references to both her shame and her understanding that ‘in the eyes of the church’ she had ‘broken sacred vows’.
The eyes of the church, he noted. Not the eyes of God.
The epiphany seemed to have been reached in late June, resulting in a particularly lengthy epistle of the 29th, a nine-sided epic of deep soul-searching which concluded that, instead of an acceptance of her own, apparently miserable domestic lot, the damsel should now seize the outstretched hand of her shining knight. And so it continued blissfully and apparently thrillingly through the onset of the South African winter.
On August 11th, following what appears to be their first lovers’ tiff – something to do with a day trip to Simon’s Town and a recklessness that caused them to be almost spotted by someone she knew – there came a reference to Cox’s drinking. There were certain things about him she had been prepared to overlook thus far, she professed, but that issue needed to be addressed ‘should they have a future together’.
In the sweet make-up afterwards, ‘V’, it seems, and Cox too, had pledged to leave their old lives behind and start anew … in London. Cox had a friend, an importer/exporter of canned goods. He was going into the wine trade. Cox was sure said friend would need an agent in England.
Rideau? Given the willingness with which he had extended an offer of employment to Finch – no matter how hypothetical – the fact that no such thing had been dangled before Cox spoke more about the major’s trustworthiness than anything else.
‘V’ appeared to live in Stellenbosch somewhere, clearly a woman of means, for there were references to household staff and her ‘gilded cage’. She had married young, some 23 years ago, she had referenced, which must put her in her early 40s now.
To her great regret she had been unable to bear children, one of the reasons, she cited, why her husband had begun to treat her with contempt.
They were British but had come to South Africa because of ‘his blasted job’, something that entailed long hours, much time spent away from home and, she suggested, plenty of womanising. They had lived in the Cape for three years. Her social life was one of society functions in the company of dull Imperial wives.
She mentioned something about her husband’s dealings with Milner – one supposed the Cape Governor himself – which probably meant that ‘V’’s husband was a Government official or a high-ranking civil servant.
The more Finch read, the more he understood that Cox was on the verge of upsetting some very powerful people. ‘V’ admitted as much. There were several instances where she urged caution; that revelation of their union would cause a scandal.
Other than that, ‘V’ appeared to be highly intelligent, passionate and – if Finch had deciphered their secret code correctly – sexually adventurous. Once she had accepted her own infidelity, she was driven only by doing what was ‘in her heart’ so that her conscience ‘could be free’.
In September, Cox was moved up to Beaufort West as the war drums began sounding. The letters from that point went via his regiment. The new, cool, more formal tone, marked not only a change in emotion but the reality of military censorship.
She ‘understood all too well’ the new circumstances, something he had been apologetic about. She understood, too, of his frustration with his new posting, seconded to the RAMC. She assured that ‘saving lives’ was as important as ‘taking them’.
On October 11th, when war was declared, she urged Cox never to hold back from doing his duty, but prayed that he would keep himself safe. As he moved up to the Front, she told him how proud she was of his part in attempting to relieve the dreadful siege of Kimberley, sparing its poor women and children from the ‘beastliness’ of the Boers.
Cox didn’t mention any names, but his vaunted admiration for the doctors under his charge concurred with Rideau’s expression of Cox’s appreciation – something that warmed Finch to his old CO.
She longed to see Cox again, wrote ‘V’. He hinted that he might have leave come Christmas.
Unfortunately, the lovers were never to reunite. On his return to Cape Town they were unable to undertake an immediate reunion due to her Imperial wifely duties, but had planned to rekindle their flame on the 27th – today. Her husband would be away again. She had hoped to sneak into Cox’s hotel room tonight, this very night, in Paarl.
But then … on December 24th, dispatched at two minutes past eleven in the morning, came that final panicked telegram:
ONTO US ++ PAARL IMPOSSIBLE ++ WILL EXPLAIN ++ BE CAREFUL ++ SO SORRY ++ VERITY
“Verity. Not ‘V’… ‘Verity!’ In a moment of alarm she had let her guard slip – and even, noted Finch, paid extra for the lettering.
Finch had barely had time to finish reading the letters when the train began to slow. As the line curved in to the Paarl station he could see the great smooth, domed Paarl Rock.
When the train came to a bumpy halt, the usual scramble began as sol
diers disembarked and porters, hawkers and everyone else mobbed the carriages, resulting in a collision of two opposing human waves.
The officers and civilians in second class waited patiently in the corridor, carrying their briefcases or dragging kitbags.
As Finch stretched forward, turning and stooping to the right to drag his, he was unaware of the blade that swung with well-rehearsed efficiency, thrust upwards, piercing his tunic under his left armpit.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Finch hailed a cab. As he stood kerbside, he had a cold-shock moment of realisation.
The letters!
He swung his kit bag into the buggy, asked the cabbie to wait and turned back against the human tide, trying to retrace his steps. It was a futile mission. As he limped on, head down, scanning the ground, he bumped into people randomly, eliciting muttered expletives.
He navigated his way back to the platform, hoping that the bundle could have fallen out on the train. But then came the shrill blast of the guard’s whistle. The carriages were already pulling away.
He cursed loudly at the train and then at himself.
“Sir … Sahib.”
A turbaned Indian porter was gesturing. His tunic.
Awkwardly Finch felt at his side. The porter pointed more specifically.
Finch removed it.
Down the right hand side there was a long straight slash that revealed the silk lining within. He had seen such handiwork before, on Cox’s jacket. Whatever implement had been used to cut through the cloth had been very sharp indeed. Whoever had done it had been skilled.
What the hell—?
In a state of sweat and fury, he limped towards the exit.
When he re-emerged, the Coloured cabbie saw the jacket draped over Finch’s arm and the slash. Such things happened here in crowds all the time, he said. Someone looking for money. The captain did have money?
The disgruntled Finch assured him that he did.
Pick-pocketing or not, Finch had at least had the good fortune to have read everything and committed the important details to memory. As soon as he reached his lodgings, he would put them down on paper.
No Ordinary Killing Page 21
