The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 10

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I will explain all when we meet. If I may, I will call on you at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning. If that is inconvenient, please reply by return of post with a more suitable time.

  Yours sincerely, etc.

  I folded the letter and handed it back to Jesperson, who was gazing at me, bright-eyed and expectant.

  He prompted. “Any questions?”

  “The Foreign Office?”

  “Never mind about that. It’s only my uncle, trying to keep me in work. Don’t you want to know what I’ve deduced about the writer of this letter? What unsolved crime affects this man so nearly? I believe I have it.”

  “I think I’d rather wait and hear what Mr Randall himself has to say, first. If you’re right, well and good, but if you’re wrong, you’ll only confuse me.”

  He looked a bit crestfallen, making me think of a little boy who hadn’t been allowed to show off his cleverness, and I said, “You can tell me afterwards if you were right.”

  “But you might not believe me. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

  I heard his mother murmur, “Party tricks.” But if he heard, he at least gave no sign, and let me change the subject, and the rest of the evening passed quite pleasantly.

  ~ * ~

  Mr William Randall arrived promptly as the carriage clock on the (recently dusted) mantelpiece was striking ten. He was a dapper young man with a drooping moustache, his regular features lifted from mere good looks into something striking by a pair of large, dark eyes that anyone more romantic than I would call soulful.

  He refused any refreshment, took a seat, and began his story after the brief, hesitant disclaimer that “it was probably a load of nonsense”, but his fiancée was worried.

  “The lady I intend to make my wife is Miss Flora Bellamy, of Harrow.” Her name meant nothing to me, but we both saw Jesperson straighten up.

  “Yes, I thought you might make the connection. She was, of course, engaged to Mr Archibald Adcocks, the prominent financier, at the time of his terrible death.”

  “So she thinks his death was connected to the fact of their engagement? And that you are now in danger?”

  “She does.”

  “How curious! What are her reasons?”

  He sighed and held up his hands. ‘“The heart has its reasons, that reason knows not.’ Women, you know, think more with their hearts than their heads. It is all too circumstantial to convince me, a matter of mere coincidence, and yet... she is so certain.”

  Listening to them was frustrating, so I was forced to interrupt. “Excuse me, but would you mind telling me the facts of Mr Adcocks’s death?”

  Jesperson turned to me with a smile of secret triumph. I could have told you last night! said his expression, but he only remarked, “It was in all the papers, a year ago.”

  “Fifteen months,” Randall corrected him. “He was attacked on his way to the railway station, not long after saying goodnight to Flora at her door. She wanted him to take a cab, because he had recently injured his foot, but he insisted that he could manage the short walk easily with the aid of a stick.” He hesitated, then said, “He borrowed a walking stick from the stand beside the door.”

  “The injury must have been very recent,” I suggested, and Randall gave me a nod.

  “Not long after dinner, that same evening. He tripped in the hall and struck his foot, but although it was quite painful, he insisted it was too minor to make a fuss about.”

  “Not a man to make a fuss.”

  “He was no weakling. And quite well able to look after himself. Something of an amateur pugilist.”

  “Yet someone attacked him, unprovoked.”

  “So we must assume. He was found lying sprawled on the path, his head bloody from a terrible blow. He was barely alive, unable to speak, and died from his injury that same night, without being able to indicate what had happened. It may be that he didn’t know, that the cowardly assault had come from behind.”

  “No one was ever arrested,” Jesperson told me. “There were no suspects.”

  I frowned. “Could anyone suggest a motive?”

  “It was usually assumed to have been an impulsive crime, not planned, since the murder weapon was his own walking stick.”

  “Not his own,” Mr Randall objected. “Borrowed from Flora’s house.”

  “Even so. It may be he was attacked by a gang of thugs who thought him an easy target because he limped. Yet, if they were intent on robbery, no one could explain why they did not take his wallet, stuffed with pound notes, or his gold watch, or anything else. He was found not long after he fell, lying in the open, near a streetlamp, and there were no obvious hiding places nearby. Although one witness reported hearing a cry, no one was seen running away or otherwise behaving in a suspicious manner.”

  “Did Mr Adcocks have enemies?” I asked.

  “He seems to have been well liked by all who knew him, including those who did business with him. No one obviously benefited by his death.”

  “Who inherited his property?”

  “His mother.”

  Before I could say anything more, Jesperson resumed. “Mr Randall, you’ve suggested that Miss Bellamy believed his death was as a result of, or at least connected to, their engagement.”

  “No one else thought so.”

  “How did her family feel about it?”

  He sighed and shook his head. “She has no family. Since being orphaned at an early age, Miss Bellamy has lived in the house of her guardian, a man by the name of Rupert Harcourt.”

  Although the even tenor of his voice did not change, when he pronounced this name I shivered, and knew we had come to the heart of the matter.

  “Her parents named this man as her guardian?” Jesperson enquired.

  Mr Randall shook his head. “They did not know him. He had no connection to the family at all. When Mr Bellamy died, the infant Flora was all alone in the world. A total stranger, reading of her situation in a newspaper, was so struck with pity that he offered her a home.”

  “You find that strange,” I said, remarking his tone.

  His eyes, for all their languid soulfulness, could still deliver a piercing look. “It is surely unusual for an unmarried, childless man of thirty-plus to go out of his way to adopt an unwanted infant. In fact, he never did adopt Flora, but set up some sort of legal arrangement to last until she married, or reached the age of twenty-one - a date still eight months in the future.”

  “She has money?”

  “Very little. To give him credit, Harcourt never touched her small inheritance, yet she lacked for nothing; toys and sweetmeats, clothes and meals, books and music lessons, were all paid for from his own pocket. The money from her father was left to gain interest. I suppose it may be near one thousand pounds.”

  It sounded a lot to me, being used to managing on less than thirty pounds a year, but it was not the sort of fortune to inspire a devious double-murder plot.

  “Has any attempt been made on your life?” Jesperson asked suddenly, and I saw Mr Randall wince and raise his hand to his head before he replied, “Oh, no, hardly - no, not at all.”

  Jesperson responded testily to this prevarication. “Oh, come now! Something happened to frighten your fiancée, whatever you may make of it. Don’t try to hide it.”

  With a sigh, Randall lifted the lock of dark hair that half-hid his forehead and bowed his head to reveal a bruised gash, obviously quite recent, at the hairline.

  He explained that a few days earlier he had been to dine with Flora and her guardian. After the meal, the two men had adjourned to Harcourt’s study, a large room at the front of the house, with cigars and brandy, and there Randall had asked permission to wed Miss Bellamy.

  “It was a formality, really, since she had agreed, but as the man was still her legal guardian, it seemed the right thing to do.”

  “His response?”

  “He said, rather roughly, that young ladies always made their own de
cisions, but he had no objections. Then he asked if I knew she’d been engaged once before. I said that I did, and he gave an unpleasant laugh and asked me if that hadn’t made me think twice. I didn’t know what he meant to imply, but it seemed meant to be offensive. Trying not to take offence, I told him that I loved Flora, and that since she had been good enough to accept me, nothing short of death would induce me to part from her. And it was at that dramatic moment that a book fell off a shelf high above my head.”

  He winced. “It looked worse than it was - scalp wounds bleed profusely - but it was quite painful. I had never imagined a book as a lethal weapon.”

  “Where was Harcourt when this occurred?”

  “He was facing me, standing farther away from the bookshelves. Before you ask, I could see him clearly, and while I suppose he might have contrived it, I was not aware of him doing anything that could have triggered the fall. In any case, he seemed completely shocked, and almost as worried about his book as my head. I should probably say more. If he’d meant to harm me, I don’t think it would have been at the risk of any part of his collection.”

  “He’s a book collector?”

  “Nothing so benign,” Mr Randall replied. “In fact, it was because of the collection that Flora rarely set foot inside that room. She found the morbid atmosphere more unpleasant than the scent of our cigars.”

  “R. M. Harcourt of Harrow,” Jesperson said.

  “You know of him?”

  “I had not made the connection until this moment. He has written of his collection - at least, certain recent acquisitions - in a journal to which I subscribe.”

  Turning to me, Jesperson explained that Mr Harcourt took a particular interest in murder, and had, over the years, managed to acquire a goodly number of weapons - knives, guns, and a variety of sharp or heavy instruments - that had caused the loss of human life: a lady’s hat pin, a piece of brick, a Japanese sword, an ordinary-looking iron poker. In addition, he had amassed a library on the subject of the crime, as well as what might he described as mementos of murder, odds and ends that were connected in some way with any famous - or infamous - crime: hair from the heads of murderers or their victims, blood-stained clothing, photographs of crime scenes, incriminating letters. He possessed poison rings, flasks, phials, bottles, and even the very cup in which Mrs Maybrick had mixed the arsenic powder with which she killed her husband.

  “He’s very proud of it,” Randall said. “Occasionally, people call at the house to see the collection, or to offer new items they hope he’ll buy. I was polite, but, frankly, I will never understand the appeal of such gruesome objects.

  “After the accident, Flora became hysterical, and made me promise I’d never enter that room again. Then she decided that was not enough, and that I must not return to the house. She also suggested we should not announce our engagement, and wait until she’s twenty-one to marry.”

  “She suspects her guardian?” Jesperson asked quietly.

  Mr Randall hesitated, then shook his head. “She says she does not. But she feels I am in danger, through my attachment to her, and if she’s right about that, who else could it be?”

  “Forgive me, but...are there no rejected suitors?”

  “Flora told me she received but two marriage proposals in her life, and she’s never mentioned anyone...I’ve never heard of any other man, who might harbour such strong feelings for her,” he replied. “But, in any case, she is wrong. Adcocks’s murder, quite naturally, affected her nerves. She sees danger, an unknown assassin, lurking everywhere; an evil force behind every accident.” He paused to take a deep breath.

  “Shortly after the injury in the study, I chanced to stumble over an object in the hall - and I might have fallen and struck my head a second time if Flora hadn’t been there to catch me. This was the same object that Adcocks had bruised his foot on, and this coincidence was too much. Her nerves are not strong. How can they be? She’s suffered so much, has lost everyone she has ever loved - that’s when she insisted I leave at once, and not come back. She imagined danger where there was none.”

  “And yet, whether or not you are in danger, someone killed Mr Adcocks,” Jesperson said with heavy emphasis.

  “Precisely. And if you can solve that crime, I hope her fears may be put to rest.”

  ~ * ~

  After Mr Randall had departed, Jesperson dashed off a letter to Mr Harcourt.

  “I think it best that Harcourt has no reason to connect us to his ward or her fiancé,” he told me. “Therefore, I shall present myself to him as a fellow aficionado of murder. And as he shows me his collection, it may be that, if he does know something of Adcocks’s death, he’ll give himself away.”

  “Won’t he wonder how you’ve heard of it?”

  “Not at all. It is quite well known in certain circles.” He scarcely paused in his writing as he replied, stretching out his other hand and running it down the spines of a stack of journals on the desk beside him, as if he were one of those blind folk who read with their fingertips.

  Abstracting one issue, he paused to flip through the pages until he found the one he wanted me to see.

  It was a page of letters, with the headline More Solutions to the Ripper Murders. The letter indicated by his finger was signed R. M. Harcourt, The Pines, Harrow. Another, finishing in the next column, bore the name of J. Jesperson, Gower Street.

  “So he may know who you are?”

  “As you’ll see by the date, this issue is a year old. I was still a mere student of crime and detection then, unknown to the public.” Finished, he sealed the envelope and held it out to me. “Take this to the post office—” He stopped, with a look of chagrin. “Forgive me.”

  “For what? I am your assistant.”

  “My manner was too peremptory. I should have—”

  I cut him off. “If we’re going to work together, you must stop thinking of me as a female who’ll be mortally offended if you forget to say please.”

  “It’s not that.”

  I waited.

  “I advertised for an assistant, not a servant. I hope we can work together as equals.”

  “Understood,” I said, not revealing how pleased I felt. “Also understood is that when time is of the essence, politeness can go hang. And the only reason I am still standing here with this letter in my hand, rather than being halfway to the nearest post office, is that I don’t know where that is.”

  ~ * ~

  Mr Harcourt replied with an invitation by return of post, so the next day found us on the train rattling through the north-western suburbs of London, at one time a familiar journey to me. Although I had not been in Harrow for more than ten years, it was the scene of my youth, my father having been a classics master at Harrow School until his untimely death.

  However, we had lived in the village on the hill, whereas Mr Harcourt’s house was almost a mile away, in one of the newer developments which had grown up following the extension of the Metropolitan Line.

  Jesperson had said nothing in his letter about a companion, and we had decided my role would be that of Inconvenient Female Relative. Naturally, I would have no interest in the collection - indeed, if I knew what it was, I might well be shocked - so while the men were closeted together, I’d be free to conduct my own investigation. Randall had told Miss Bellamy to expect me.

  The Pines was a mock-Tudor affair shielded from the road by the two namesakes that gave it a somewhat secretive and gloomy air. But that was nothing compared to the interior of the house. As I stepped across the threshold, I was gripped by panic. I am sensitive to atmospheres, no matter how much I try to blame it on imagination, and what I felt in that hallway was as bad as any haunted house. But it is difficult to describe to someone who has never experienced such things. If I were describing a smell, I could compare it to a tannery, a slaughterhouse, or a sewer. Only someone with no sense of smell could bear to live there.

  Fighting the panic, I looked around for distraction.
A large, attractive Chinese vase, green and yellow, had been put into service as a stand for umbrellas and walking sticks. Among the curving wooden handles clustering above the open top, the silver-capped walking stick stood out, commanding attention not simply by its different appearance, but by the grim air of menace it exuded, like a low and deadly hiss.

  Of course, I knew at once what it was, and felt appalled. How could they have kept it? Why hadn’t it been broken and destroyed, the wood burned to ash, the silver head melted down to be remade into something new?

  Tearing my horrified gaze away, I spotted the hideous stone gargoyle crouching like a demon near the foot of the stairs, and shuddered at its baleful look before my partner’s light touch on my arm recalled me to the present as he introduced me to the owner of these things.