Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  Whoever it was wasn’t coming down easily, and I staggered upright still attached to his jacket, and was staring into a greasy smeared face under a flat cap. Two mighty hands shoved me backwards. ‘Oi, ___ off out of it!’ he yelled, and kept on coming like a man who planned to be well in it. I drove forwards into his stomach and he went stumbling back, then he clubbed me about the shoulders and I let him go. As I staggered upright I found myself surrounded by men like him: my assailant, and a dozen in the same rough jackets and caps and heavy boots, and all with the same dirty faces. And around us there was an immense yelling: by some nightmarish development I had found myself in an arena of street toughs, expected to fight on, and all of London was roaring for the other side.

  It would have been the smart bet, too. I was bewildered and pretty groggy, and apparently outnumbered a hundred to one. More, I really didn’t want or need this fight. I’d nothing against this chap or any of his mates, and no wish to dawdle and annoy yet another section of London society.

  Breathing hard, I came instinctively to the defensive and waited for him to come, taking that valuable instant to look around me. Dozens of faces staring, and behind them placards held high. What madness was this? And he was coming in again, fists ready and body open and a grin on his face. ‘Well look at this!’ he called. ‘Looks like I get me own blow for the workers, eh?’ He was relying on momentum and the fact that the sort of chap who wears a three-piece suit to a street-brawl wouldn’t be much of a threat. So I took a worried step or two back as he got close.

  It was a march: a protest, a political rally by workers. Rallies were ten-a-penny this season, and the papers were predicting bloody revolution on a weekly basis. And I’d barged into the middle of the class war.

  I thought about trying to explain how the Delameres have been on the wrong end of every economic and social development in British history, but it’s too long a tale. I saw his left shoulder flex and immediately I moved in towards his punch, blocking it with both forearms up and turning into him so that my back took his right and my momentum pushed him away, and as he went backwards I continued to turn and followed hard and kept him going with a wild jab of my left and then put him down with a precise right jab into his face. I really didn’t want to do more than was necessary to get away. I turned to the side, ran at the two nearest onlookers and, as they hesitated, ducked down and pushed between them. I came up through a thicket of marching legs, and caught plenty of surprised glances, and worse as I started to weave and barge through them. Behind me I heard shouts, but I was through to the other side of the column of protesters and then I turned against the flow and ran, and I knew they’d give it up pretty quickly and get on with their marching.

  I only ran for a couple of dozen yards, and slowed to a trot and then, as soon as I was sure that my posse of affronted proletarians had given me up and marched away towards the promised land, a walk. Concealment lay in normality. There was a loose string of spectators along the pavement, and I ducked in among them and continued sauntering eastward towards Piccadilly Circus.

  ‘Delamere!’

  With a last ounce of grip I stopped myself from turning to the shout, and walked on.

  ‘Delamere!’ and a whistle. Now I turned.

  It was the damned policeman – Bunce.

  I ran again. Another dozen yards got me to Fortnum’s store, and I raced in like the last box of special biscuits was up for grabs. Immediately I slowed to a stride. In a crowd of protesting mechanics I was out of place and vulnerable. In here, in this temple of genteel grocery shopping and relatively good taste, I was on home ground, and even Bunce and his myrmidons would think twice about causing a rumpus. Pity their wine selection’s so average. I made straight for the lift, pushed all the buttons, got out at the second floor, crossed to the stairs and came down again. Sixty seconds after I’d walked into the place, I was out the side door and across Duke Street and into my barber’s and in another thirty I was under a cape and a faceful of shaving foam.

  ‘A little late in the day for us, isn’t it Mr Delamere?’

  ‘Had rather a lively night, Thomas. Just getting on top of things now.’

  9.

  In a side street in St Pancras is a door with a small painted sign that reads just ‘Dobbs’.

  Dobbs’s caters for gentlemen of limited or distressed means: travellers, and gamblers, and drunkards, and bankrupts and broken homers, and now at least one man wanted for multiple murders. It’s clean, cheap, extremely discreet, and handy for the railway stations.

  Dobbs is Lancelot Dobbs. He was once butler to the Fawcetts of Abingdon, until young Charlie Fawcett, last of the line, celebrated his inheritance of the increasingly impoverished title by selling his last and favourite horse to three different buyers on the same day with a promise to deliver tomorrow, then waving the accumulated cash under the noses of three different bookmakers with a promise to pay tomorrow, for a bet on an absolute certainty at Newbury. Marvellous plan, until the certainty tripped a furlong from home, and Charlie found himself being harassed by the police for multiple counts of fraud and debt. Fairly reckoning this the end of the Fawcetts, the poor lad walked out of the mortgaged house, said a fond farewell to the mare – I don’t think he’d ever have given her to even one of the buyers – and blew his head off with a shotgun. Outraged by this collective failure of flexibility and good humour by the police, the buyers, the bookies, and the banks, Lancelot Dobbs the now-unemployed butler had gone into business as harbourer and guardian of disadvantaged young gentlemen, no questions asked and policemen be damned. I don’t think the Fawcett creditors ever did find the family silver.

  In one of Dobbs’s spartan rooms, I slipped a thin package behind the empty wardrobe, a roll of bank notes into one of the metal legs of the bed, and more behind a loose bit of skirting board. I hefted my pistol in my hand for a few moments, in two minds. Eventually I stuffed it into the grey pillowcase and left it there. The way things were going, I’d be more likely to shoot a policeman than anything else. However tempting that was, it wouldn’t help much.

  Then I set off, back across London again, in the mild late afternoon. ‘Westward, look, the land is bright’, as the chappie wrote. But he probably wasn’t talking about Bayswater.

  10.

  Without wishing to sound like a cad, I’ve been in various ladies’ bedrooms over the years, and indeed passed some of my happiest hours there. But only when the lady herself has also been present.

  To be in a lady’s bedroom without the lady is not the behaviour of a gentleman, and a damn’ sight less entertaining. I was particularly uncomfortable being in this particular lady’s bedroom because downstairs her front door was being guarded by a policeman, so I’d had to come in the back way. Uncomfortable also because of certain aspects of our personal history which I need not detail. And because I was widely believed to have murdered her husband.

  So I prowled pretty restlessly around Pamela Sinclair’s bedroom.

  Victoria Carteret had arrived at the front door with careful timing and much fanfare, great lady visiting her friend in her hour of grief and so forth, to allow me to arrive unobserved through the back garden. She was downstairs with Pamela now.

  How do you find words for a woman whose husband has just been stabbed? And how do you find words to explain that you’ve installed his presumed murderer in her boudoir?

  I hadn’t told Victoria that I’d just shot someone else in my rooms. Even her patience is limited. We’d agreed this rendezvous with Pamela Sinclair before the whole burning foreigner debacle.

  I needed to disappear, and this kind of meeting would become much more difficult – even contacting Victoria would become more difficult. I had to grab the opportunity while I had it.

  It wasn’t an entirely feminine room, I realized. For economy or modernity, the Sinclairs shared. Had shared.

  David Sinclair’s dressing gown hung on the back of the door of the bedroom he had shared with his wife. On the dressing table there was a box
of collar studs, and a tie-pin with a battleship design, to match the cuff-link that I’d found under his hand – and, I realized, still had in my trouser pocket. He would never again look at the things I was looking at. I felt even more of a swine.

  The door opened. I took a deep breath.

  She looked ghastly. Pretty girl, Pamela; but she’d aged a decade in a morning. For the first time, I saw the impact of Sinclair’s death beyond its inconvenience for me. Her face was white, and waxy, where she’d wiped and wiped at tears that would not stop. Her eyes were rimmed an angry red.

  She couldn’t have looked at me with more horror and revulsion if I’d been holding the knife still dripping with her husband’s blood. Her face shuddered as she gazed at me from the doorway, and her breaths came in great sobs.

  ‘Pamela, I’m so sorry.’ She pressed her eyes tight shut. It sounded like I was apologizing for having murdered him. ‘He was a good man; he was a better man; and it’s appalling that he’s gone from you.’

  Her eyes were still pressed shut, and now the tears came again. Victoria stepped closer behind her, and gently held her shoulders.

  Her eyes flickered open, puffy and hot. ‘Why are you here?’ she gasped.

  ‘Because I didn’t do this terrible thing, Pamela, and I’m going to find out who did. Because I need to ask you some questions.’ She shut her eyes again. ‘Because even though I know I’m the last man you want to see, I won’t hide from you.’

  ‘Not in here’, she said, and turned away. I followed her out, frankly glad to be out of the bedroom. But she was making for the top of the stairs – until Victoria saw my concern and took her arm again. ‘We should stay upstairs, dearest,’ she murmured into Pamela’s ear. ‘Best if no-one sees Harry here. That’s why he had to come in the window.’

  Pamela spun round, and gazed at me with venom for the chaos that I represented.

  ‘Just like old times?' she said; the bitter sarcasm was weakened by her shaking voice.

  Had Inspector Bunce had a little longer to put his papers in order, he’d no doubt have learned that when Sinclair and I had found ourselves digging in the same allotment, the object of our interest had been the woman whom Sinclair had later married. She had grown up in this house, and when her parents had gone from Bayswater to glory she and her sister had lived here together, and then it had become her marital home.

  Victoria led her into a spare bedroom, which seemed to double as a dressing room for one or both Sinclairs.

  There was a paper parcel on the bed. Pamela picked it up, and sat down on the bed clutching it close.

  ‘He was better than you’, she said. She wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were wild, and unreliable.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he was decent, and serious, and hard-working.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was right to marry him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He truly cared for me.’ Now she looked at me, and the tears were flowing again. ‘More than you ever could.’

  I just gazed back at her. Not a lot I could say to that.

  It was true enough, almost certainly. I’d been fond, and enjoying myself, but as soon as I found out that Sinclair was serious about her and that she’d glossed over a couple of details about what had passed between them I’d been happy to step back.

  Victoria sat down next to her, and put an arm round her shoulder. ‘We all get infatuated with Harry for a spell,’ she said, looking up at me as she spoke. ‘But then the champagne wears off, and he’s just a headache.’

  A bit harsh, but it wasn’t the moment to explore the point. Pamela nodded. Victoria, head next to hers, went on: ‘David was right for you; and you were very good for him.’ Pamela nodded again.

  ‘It’s his suit,’ she said, eyes closed again. ‘I’m holding his suit.’ She sounded surprised at herself. ‘They delivered it just before you came.’

  Victoria looked rather shocked at this. She’d not seen the body and the knife, and she’d no idea how torn or bloody the suit might be. ‘I’ll hang it up’, she said uneasily. ‘Where it belongs.’

  Gently she pulled the parcel out of Pamela’s arms, and turned away to unwrap it. As she turned I managed to catch her eye, and mouth the word ‘pockets’. The look I got in return was not a happy one.

  I crouched in front of Pamela, and took one of her hands in mine. ‘Pamela, can you think of any reason why anyone would want to do this horrible thing?’

  She shook her head, holding the emotion in with difficulty. Then she opened her eyes. ‘Apart from you?’

  I think she was trying to make it a joke. It didn’t work.

  ‘Apart from me.’ She shook her head again. ‘Was he… was he in any kind of difficulty? I don’t know – money, that kind of thing?’

  Again, the head shook. She pulled her hand away, and scraped a few wild strands of hair back over one ear. ‘Oh no, nothing like that. He played cards – just with friends – for amusement; but he was very sensible.’

  This, of course, was nonsense. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Victoria had half-turned from the wardrobe and was frowning at the words. Sinclair gambled incessantly, recklessly, and badly. But if his widow didn’t know now, then hopefully she’d never know. As news of his death got around today, the air above St James’s would be thick with the smoke of burning I.O.U.s; chaps would quietly forget the debts. I’d already chalked off my thirty guineas as another lost hope for the family fortune. In any case, if his gambling had somehow led to his death Pamela wouldn’t know about it.

  ‘What about his work? Any problems there?’

  This time she shook her head more slowly. Sinclair was foolish with a hand of cards, but serious about his work; he’d not have said much to his wife. ‘No, I don’t… He’d been – he’d been worried recently.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘I don’t know. The last week or two. Preoccupied. Home late sometimes. There was one evening when he just sat in his chair and… I couldn’t get through to him at all.’ She was crying freely again. ‘I know he was worried about the new ship. “A lot on my mind” – That’s all he’d say.’ Her breaths shuddered. ‘“A lot on my mind.”’ She took in a great sniff, breathed out unsteadily. ‘There was a man – he’d been seeing a lot of him recently – something about international co-operation.’

  ‘And… and this man was linked to what he was worrying about?’

  ‘I don’t know. They seemed to be becoming great friends. Go out together. But then sometimes when David came back…’ She shook her head. ‘Greenberg. His name.’

  I nodded as if any of this was helpful. ‘And last night? Did he say anything about what he was doing? Anything unusual?’

  Victoria had turned away from the wardrobe, holding something which she’d got from Sinclair’s suit.

  ‘He was just going to his club. Nothing unusual.’

  It was a slip of paper, no bigger than her hand. Pale blue, and thin; one end perforated. A printed number – 1536. 1536; Tudor times, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and that business with the monasteries. Then, handwritten, Sinclair’s own name, the date from a couple of days ago, and a longer number. Some kind of receipt, by the looks of it. I took it. ‘Any idea what this is, Pamela?’ She glanced at it; shook her head. ‘Never mind; I’ll look after it.’ I slipped it into my pocket. ‘He didn’t say anything about what he might do after the club?’

  Pamela Sinclair looked up at me straight now, the violent wounded eyes gazing at me. ‘He said he hoped he was going to see you. He said there was something he wanted to have out. Something he hoped to settle once and for all.’

  11.

  I liked Hugh Stackhouse, as soon as I met him on his threshold and he showed me into his sitting room. Partly I liked him because he let me in at all, and had had the sense of discretion to keep the servants out the way. More I liked him because he was a quiet, steady, thinking sort of man. Solid chap; dark hair, strong features. It
was frankly a pleasant change to meet someone who didn’t try to assault me. But on top of that, his impression of calm and competence reassured and impressed.

  Once he’d got me into a seat, he considered me for a moment or two, then offered me a drink, which I refused, and a very decent cigarette, which I took gladly. Then he sat himself, and considered me a moment more. ‘It’s my pleasure to meet you,’ he said. ‘You seem to be having rather a tough time of it.’

  I took a long pull on the cigarette. ‘Damned decent of you to open the door at all,’ I said.

  ‘Lady Victoria Carteret suggested that it would be sensible.’ For a moment – some hesitation in there – I had the sense that he wasn’t comfortable about it.

  ‘I’ll try to live up to that. Look, Stackhouse: for starters I should be entirely frank; the police still fancy me for the killing of poor Sinclair, last night, and there’s been more trouble today. I’m a fugitive, and I should advise you that you’re taking a risk by having me here at all. It’s my assertion that if you give me three minutes’ hearing you’ll be doing something constructive as well as fulfilling Victoria’s request. After that you’d be best locking me in the closet and sending your man for the nearest constable, or at least unlocking the back door and forgetting you ever saw me.’

  Again the moment of steady consideration.

  ‘My only concern is getting who really killed Sinclair. Whether that’s you or not. And keeping the company going. You have your three minutes, Delamere. For Lady Victoria I’ll make it five. Then we can review our options.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Take another cigarette.’

  ‘I will, thank’ee. So, as you’ll understand, I have my reasons for wanting to find out who killed Sinclair. You do too. I happen to think it wasn’t me. You’re being a sport enough to keep an open mind, for the next five minutes at least. If it wasn’t me, it was someone else, and they must have had a reason. I gather that you were close enough to the poor chap personally and professionally.’