Dead Letters

by Joan Lock

  ‘Thanks to you,’ he smiled. He knew she was trying to stop him becoming pessimistic. She had remembered that his spirits tended to be either way up or low down.

  He knew he should hurry back to the Yard but it was very peaceful and relaxing sitting here. The heavy scent from the bowl of Old English roses on the table by the window mingled with that of the hot scones on the plate she now proffered.

  ‘As good as Mrs Briggs’s?’ he asked as he took one.

  They smiled quietly at each other, enjoying the shared remembrance.

  Helen wiped her hands and went back to the book. ‘This bit is evocative,’ she said, ‘and ties in with the messenger being the outside world the writer wants to shut out.’

  She began reading again:

  ‘“Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,

  Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,

  And, while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn

  Throws up a steamy column, and the cups,

  That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,

  So let us welcome peaceful evening in.”’

  She glanced out of the window at the gathering dusk, smiled serenely, and closed the book.

  Why did I let her go, he thought.

  The Cowper poem was endless, and not easy to comprehend at a glance, so Helen promised to give it further attention when she was alone again. She would also try to tease out any clues hidden in its dense depths. Meanwhile, they fell to discussing the other possible routes to the unmasking of Quicksilver, among them the Dubois case.

  Helen sat up at the mention of Wood. ‘Eric Wood?’

  Best checked back in the file. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know him.’

  ‘I was hoping you might,’ said Best, ‘but as he is so down on his luck I thought he probably wasn’t painting any more.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re right. People won’t trust him after that business. He looks like a scarecrow now,’ she admitted sadly. ‘Not that that’s a bad thing for him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Best raising his eyebrows in surprise. She had never really been a hard-hearted woman. A determined one, yes. It had taken him some time to discern the difference.

  ‘Well, he has to be thin for the posing he’s doing for Bertrand.’

  Bertrand was a relative of Helen’s and a very successful painter.

  ‘He’s in great need of gaunt men just now,’ she smiled, putting her head on one side. ‘He’s doing a series on the Etruscan wars, so he needs some starving prisoners. He’s also painting a huge panorama of the poor of London streets, so he wants gaunt beggars for that. Unfortunately, his best model has passed on. He had consumption.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it hard to find starving men in this city.’

  ‘It isn’t – but they must have the stamina to pose and the understanding of what it’s about. It’s more difficult, you know, if you are very thin. Your bones get sore. Also –’ she shrugged – ‘if they are very desperate they will steal from the studio, and the other rooms if they get the chance.’

  ‘I didn’t know Bertrand painted pictures of the destitute.’

  ‘Well, he’s no Gustave Doré,’ Helen smiled. ‘But I think Mr Fildes and Mr von Herkomer have awakened his conscience.’

  Luke Fildes and Hubert von Herkomer’s depictions of the suffering poor, hoping for admission to a workhouse, had touched many hearts – and several pockets.

  ‘Don’t look at me so cynically, Ernest. You know he’s a nice man with a family to keep.’

  She was right there, he supposed.

  ‘Trouble is Marie’s so kind to Eric, keeps feeding him up. Bertrand says if she goes on like that she’ll do the man out of a job. He’ll be too plump for a starving beggar or a slave.’

  ‘I must see him,’ said Best.

  She nodded. ‘Very well. Meet me at Bertrand’s studio tomorrow morning at nine. I expect Eric Wood will be there.’

  ‘He mustn’t know who I am.’

  ‘All right,’ she smiled. ‘We’ll dress you up as a Praetorian guard, or some such.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘We’re full up,’ declared the round-cheeked, round-bodied little woman who answered the door. Her accent was familiar. Just like Alice’s.

  When Smith failed to turn away, the woman stepped back to get a full view of this tall young man. ‘Bit late to be lookin’ for lodgings, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Smith replied.

  ‘What then, man?’

  ‘I’m looking for – Alice.’ He’d nearly said Maud.

  ‘Sorry hin. She’s gone.’

  ‘Oh, blow!’ He looked so tired and crestfallen as he leaned against the door jamb that she softened and allowed him into the hall.

  ‘Are you a friend, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of …’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m John George.’

  ‘Mabel,’ she replied extending hers. ‘Well, her stays were short, I must say. She came here late last night and left the very first thing this morning.’ She led him into her parlour.

  ‘Have you been friends for long?’ asked Smith as he sank gratefully into one of her plump armchairs.

  ‘We was in the same children’s home. A long time ago mind, that was.’

  ‘Wykham’s?’

  ‘Aha. That’s right.’ She glanced at him in surprise. ‘Did she tell you about that then?’

  ‘She did. Not a nice place, she reckoned.’

  ‘No.’ Mabel paused. ‘She doesn’t usually talk about it. She had an even worse time than me.’

  ‘Do you know where she’s gone now?’

  She shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t say. Very peculiar. She didn’t seem like herself at all.’

  ‘I have to see her. It’s urgent.’

  ‘Did she not tell you where she was going either, then?’ Her currant-bun eyes grew wary.

  ‘No,’ he sighed. He thought, Hurry up and distract the woman. She’s getting suspicious and if you give her too long to ruminate …

  ‘Can I see the room she slept in?’

  Mabel was taken aback. ‘Oh, I don’t know about …’

  ‘She said she would let me know, you see,’ he explained. ‘She might have left a message there for me or something.’ He knew it sounded lame.

  ‘If she’d left any message it would have been with me,’ Mabel said firmly and she began to rise from her chair.

  ‘There might be a train timetable there or some other clue,’ he explained.

  ‘Clue?’ There was an icy silence. ‘What do you mean, “clue”?’

  Oh dear. Bad choice of words. Tiredness catching up on him.

  ‘I’m worried about her, you see.’

  ‘I think,’ said Mabel, fully erect now, ‘that Alice can take care of herself. Always has done.’

  He’d shot his bolt. She began moving towards the parlour door and clearly expected him to do the same.

  ‘Usually, I’d agree.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘But she must have been so upset by Maud’s sudden death that …’

  ‘Maud’s death!’ The woman was clearly astonished. She sat down again. ‘What are you talking about, man?’

  She hadn’t heard. Ah, that was a bit of luck. He recognized the possibility of a trade-off. Bad news was first rate currency.

  Smith launched quickly into the sad and oh-so-dramatic tale of death on the roundabout. In the process, Mabel somehow got the impression that he was a concerned neighbour and friend.

  After such shared melodrama, Mabel could scarcely refuse to allow Smith to see Alice’s room. Indeed she appeared happy to do so in the hope, Smith guessed, of gleaning new and more terrible titbits.

  It transpired the room had not yet been re-let.

  ‘I hadn’t cleaned it up and didn’t want the bother of taking on another guest tonight. That’s why I said I was full,’ Mabel explained as she pointed the way upstairs.

  Mabel puffed and blew as her little legs pulled her plump form up
the steep stairs. Were all northern women short? Smith wondered. She paused on the first landing to get her breath.

  ‘It’s all been a great shock, I suppose,’ she said putting her head back to look up at Smith. ‘But I can’t see why Alice should be so upset. That woman didn’t treat her right. There she was, saying that they were like a couple of sisters. Well, if you treated your own kin like that – worked them to death and kept them poor …’

  ‘So, why didn’t she leave?’

  He knew the answer before Mabel replied. The master’s hold over the servant. ‘Because that bitch said that if she did, after all she’d done for her, that she wouldn’t give her a character.’

  A domestic without a character was as good as in the workhouse.

  ‘And you know, hinny, even I’ve got to admit that Alice is a plain lady. Never taken any man’s eye. Not that she ever had the chance …’

  She halted on the second landing and looked up at Smith again. ‘Good riddance to that Maud. I’d have done the old bat in, if I’d been Alice.’ She leaned forward and opened the door to room three.

  ‘Was there anyone with Alice when she arrived?’ asked Smith as he glanced around the modest room where she had slept.

  ‘No. Who would there be, hinny?’

  ‘Oh. Nobody. Just wondered.’

  There was no revealing timetable or impressions of hand-writing left to investigate. Only a couple of pink and white glass ornaments on the dressing table.

  ‘A cabbie did help her up with her luggage. I couldn’t believe it – you know what they’re like.’

  ‘All the way up to this room?’ Smith asked as he opened and closed the dresser drawers. They were empty save for their floral paper lining.

  She nodded. ‘Aha. I think so, anyway.’

  ‘But you saw him leave?’

  ‘No. Well, I was too busy talking to Alice. I was so taken aback to see her. It’s been such a long time and …’

  Smith had moved over to the battered mahogany chest of drawers. ‘So he could even have stayed the night?’

  Mabel’s eyes widened, then she laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t think so, hinny!’

  Smith said nothing.

  She knitted her brows disbelievingly. ‘You’re not telling me our Alice had a fancy man?’

  ‘Not sure. Maybe.’

  ‘Well, you’re full of surprising notions, young man. Tell you what, though, hinny. If she did, she never said anything to me – and he didn’t come down to breakfast neither!’

  At the same moment their eyes lit on the cigarette ends which had been ground into the ashtray on the bedside table.

  ‘Did this cabbie have one eye by any chance?’

  Mabel pursed her lips and her own little eyes grew more pensive. ‘Aha, hinny,’ she admitted eventually. ‘Yes he did.’

  Smith moved on to inspect the light-oak wardrobe wedged into the corner of the room to the right of the window. He turned the key and pulled the knob. Nothing happened. The door stayed shut.

  He put his left hand on the frame and pulled again, harder. As he did so the wardrobe began to rock, then the top tilted forward as if some heavy weight was throwing it out of balance. Had some of Alice’s baggage proved too cumbersome and been left behind?

  The wardrobe began to topple. Smith put his hand out to catch it. As he did so, the door sprang open and the heavy object fell out. It left them in no doubt why the cabbie had not come down to breakfast.

  Arthur Herring was clearly very dead. There were massive wounds to the front of his head, inflicted, it seemed, by the heavy brass candlestick which lay beside him on the floor of the wardrobe. The blood around his wounds was dark and dry. He had obviously been dead some time

  But wasn’t it odd, thought Smith, after a hysterical Mabel had been escorted downstairs by a skivvy, that there were no bloodstains anywhere else in the room? The man would scarcely have gone into the wardrobe voluntarily so that his assailant didn’t have a messy room to cope with. Maybe he was hiding in there at the time he was attacked?’ Smith pondered the matter for a moment before leaning forward to pull back the bedclothes

  The pillows and sheets told their grisly tale. They were crusted with blood – also long since dried and darkened. Arthur had been lying down when attacked. May even have been asleep.

  There were no stains on the bedhead or the wall above. That was odd. Even odder, the wallpaper at that spot looked lighter than that which surrounded it, although there had been an effort to shade off the edges of the paler circle.

  Alice must have used some of her hard-won cleaning skills to wash away the blood splashes. With all her experience she would know that one must use cold water to dissolve the blood, not hot, which congealed.

  Best replaced the sheet, went downstairs, wrote a note and sent the now gawping skivvy off to get the local constable.

  Then he set about calming Mabel so that he could extract some more information from her. But even when settled down to quiet sniffling, every now and then Mabel would throw back her head and howl, ‘I divn’t believe it! She was like a sister to me! I divn’t believe it!’

  Smith cut into one of these outbursts by demanding, ‘Who came to collect Alice this morning?’

  ‘Nobody. Nobody,’ Mabel insisted between sniffles.

  ‘So her trunks are still here?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she shook her head. ‘Of course not. She got a growler!’

  ‘Whose cab? Someone you use regularly?’

  ‘No. No. She wouldn’t hear of that, I didn’t know why.’

  I do, thought Smith.

  ‘So, she’d arranged for one to pick her up?’

  ‘No, no.’ Mabel shook her head. ‘She just went out and got one herself. Insisted on just picking one up off the street. It’s not that difficult around here.’

  Clever woman, thought Smith. Now how can I trace that? The cab could come from anywhere for miles around.

  Smith contemplated the first in the stretch of railway termini which were strung out along the north side of the Euston Road. Remarkable buildings, all three.

  The workmanlike King’s Cross was built of pale yellow-ochre London brick and, despite the central clock tower, resembled a toy fort. It was the terminus of the Great Northern Railway where Alice could have completed her journey from Alexandra Palace.

  Why hadn’t she? Why hadn’t she stayed on the train and taken the opportunity of a quick getaway to Doncaster, York, Newcastle or Edinburgh? Probably because she knew they’d expect that. So it was unlikely she’d gone there today. He’d leave King’s Cross until last then.

  When the first find-the-cab line of enquiry dried up, Smith had decided to move on to the next logical step – investigating the nearest main-line railway stations.

  Of course, Alice might have travelled only a short distance on a local line, or had the cab she’d summoned take her to the East End, where she could lose herself in the endless warrens of seedy streets. She may even have crossed London to Victoria Station and boarded a train heading for the Continent – as so many fugitives did. In which case, she’d probably be in Paris by now.

  The local policeman had been none too pleased when Smith had greeted him, described briefly the reasons why cab driver, Arthur Herring, had landed up dead in a wardrobe on his patch, then dashed away, promising to telegraph the divisional headquarters and Scotland Yard from King’s Cross Police Station.

  Help and further information would arrive from the Yard soon, he promised. He wasn’t sure that it would at this hour. They’d probably all gone home by now but he felt that time was of the essence in his pursuit of Alice.

  ‘You can only do what you think is right at the time,’ Best was always telling him. Fine, if you turned out to be correct, he had once admitted, but if you turned out to be wrong …

  Smith pushed such demoralizing thoughts from his mind. He’d try St Pancras first. That marvel of red-brick, high Gothic, fairy-tale pinnacles, towers and gables was home to the Midland Railway. She might have fled
to Birmingham from there. Britain’s bustling, industrial second city would be just the place to hide from the world.

  Detective Sergeant John George Smith sat on a rather superior bench in Euston Station’s vestibule, the magnificent Great Hall. It was a place which usually delighted him with its deeply coffered ceilings and double sweep of white marble stairs, punctuated at the foot by a huge statue of the railway king, George Stephenson.

  But John George was tired, despondent at this lack of success so far – and very hungry. The fairytale St Pancras Station had not supplied him with a happy ending. Far from it. None of its servants admitted to ever having clapped eyes on Alice and her trunks, while pointing out that they were highly unlikely to remember her from among the passing throng. Had she been a pretty young woman, the story might well have been different.

  John George had realized that it was not sensible to continue his task without something in his stomach, so he bought a pork pie and a jar of ale from one of the street stalls. Much cheaper than the station buffet.

  He began to devour the pie, holding his left hand beneath to catch any crumbs, stopping every now and then for a swig of the ale. That was better.

  But there was little he could do about his tiredness until his self-appointed task was done. He closed his eyes to rest them, just for a moment, to refresh them. A short pause would help him reassess his plans and let his food go down …

  He fell asleep instantly.

  The last trains of the day arrived and departed and the stream of travellers, their friends, relatives and servants, petered out. John George slumbered on.

  Since he looked reasonably respectable, if a little rumpled, the beadle did not seek to have him removed. He was obviously a passenger who had missed his last train and who would be moving on with the dawn departures.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The rumbling noise, at first distant, grew steadily closer.

  Suddenly, a horse and cart was speeding towards him.

  Oh God, he must get out of the way!

  But he couldn’t move. His feet seemed stuck. He was just making a final, desperate effort to escape when, somewhere, a whistle shrieked.