If Dr Jamieson had been a fat man, he might have been spectacularly jowl'd. As it was, his slack red face hung in creased meagre folds, his eyes watered easily and his general disposition seemed that of profound melancholy.
'It is not my custom to discuss such matters with hired policemen,' he said glumly. 'I set no precedents. What I had to say was said to the coroner's jury.'
He looked up from the broad partners' desk at which he sat. Behind him on the marble mantelshelf a fine Orleans clock with nymphs in bronze ticked sedately and, despite the June warmth, a fire burned crisply in the grate.
'I was given to understand, sir,'said Verity respectfully, 'as you mightn't object to setting Mr Richard Jervis' mind at rest.'
'I do not object,' said Dr Jamieson tetchily. 'I will set his mind and yours at rest. But I will be no party to calumny and family quarrels.'
'Family quarrels, sir?'
Jamieson ignored the question.
'The matter is quite simple, sergeant. Lord Henry Jervis was walking on the sunken fence dividing the woodland from the grass terrace. That fence is four and a half feet high. In the sight of the keepers he stumbled, the loaded rifle which he was carrying hit the ground and jarred, that jarring fired a bullet at an upward angle, entering the skull behind the right ear, being diverted by the bone mass towards the back of the skull and becoming impacted there. The gun never left his hand. Indeed, when he was picked up it was hard to prise his fingers free. He had clutched it in the final instinctive spasm, clutched it in the so-called death-grip.'
'The wound, sir,' said Verity appreciatively, 'just the entry of a rifle bullet?'
Jamieson opened a drawer and took out a sheet of blue notepaper. He unfolded it and took out a small piece of card with an engraving upon it. Verity recognized it. When a photograph was taken of a body, for the benefit of a coroner's jury, it was customary to present it in the clearer and more easily available form of a steel engraving, taken from the print itself. The card showed a tiny puckered hole, impersonal and dehumanized.
'Was he washed before the examination, sir?'
'Washed?' said Jamieson suspiciously.
'Washed for his grave-clothes, sir, when they laid him out. Only there ain't no blackening round the wound, sir.'
'Schultze powder, sergeant. He was using Schultze powder. Smokeless. Whether or not they washed the wound makes no odds; you can't have blackening with smokeless powder.'
'Quite so, sir,' said Verity, handing back the card. 'One other thing, sir.' 'Yes?'
'Might it happen, in any way you know of, sir, that Lord
Henry could either have took his own life or been cruelly murdered?'
Dr Jamieson gave a faint snort of derision.
'Who tells such tales?'
'No one, sir. Only if they're tales then the truth is the best way to stop 'em being told.'
'Lord Henry killed himself,' said Jamieson, 'of that there is no doubt. His gun was in perfect order, there was no sign of anything to trip him up, even supposing a murderer had fancied the remote possibility of staging such a thing. He fell over his own feet. As to self-destruction, it would be cumbersome in the extreme to do it in such a manner, pointing a rifle at his head and then jarring it on the ground until it went off. No, sergeant. There were half a dozen of us close by him, the keepers were looking at him. They saw no such thing. Lord Henry killed himself by pure accident. Dammit, man, he had every reason in the world for wanting to live. He was young, healthy, rich. Tell me that Richard Jervis wants to do away with himself and I might understand why. Tell me that some injured husband has taken a shotgun to Lord William and I might believe you. But not Lord Henry.'
'Yessir. Much obliged, sir. Been a great assistance, sir.'
Jamieson stood up and came round the desk, laying a hand on Verity's arm, man to man.
'Take some advice,' he said in a rich, affable voice. 'Do what you must do and then, soon as you decently can, go back to your proper duties. There's nothing for you here.'
'Yessir,' said Verity stiffly. 'Most 'elpful, sir.'
He backed awkwardly towards the door, bowed clumsily, and withdrew.
The chatelaine at Mrs Butcher's waist rattled its cluster of keys, her starched skirts rustling on the narrow wooden steps of the servants' stairway as she climbed. Once or twice she put a hand to her lace cap, as though fearing that the exertion of the ascent might have dislodged it from its place, crowning her white hair. Verity followed behind her, puffing a little. The arrangement of the Jervis town house reminded him of a visit with Bella to the Old Vic to see the Indian Jugglers. Then, as now, the way had lain up bare precipitous steps to the gallery, a staircase divided from the more expensive part of the building which led to boarded and roughly furnished apartments.
'That's a nasty wretch, Rumer,' said Mrs Butcher, 'a cold cruel man, to be sure. Dr Jamieson I only saw, never heard speak above a few words.'
'Friend of Lord Henry's, was he?' gasped Verity. 'Friend and medical man altogether?'
Mrs Butcher paused on a step, drew breath and thought. She shook her head and began to climb again.
'More Lord William's friend, though he cared for the whole family o' course. He was more of Lord William's liking, if you take the meaning, more of a sporting gentleman and ladies' man.'
Verity puffed a little more.
'I don't see 'ow I should be a sporting gentleman and ladies' man, Mrs Butcher, not if I was obliged to spend half the year at sea and most of the rest caring for a great house like this and the lands at Bole Warren.'
Mrs Butcher chuckled and climbed faster.
'Bless you, Mr Verity! Lord William don't spend more than two months a year at sea. 'e's in town all the rest. Only, o' course, he prefers to live where he's accustomed rather than in Portman Square.'
'Not live 'ome, Mrs Butcher? Not in a fine 'ouse like this? Now, why might that be?'
Mrs Butcher turned on a tiny half-landing and faced him.
'There's gentlemen,' she said, 'that likes their game with other gentlemen, wagering sovereign for sovereign with the 'ighest in the land. There's gentlemen that likes ladies who ain't quite what they should be. In course, they can't bring 'em in a carriage to Portman Square, nor they can't send 'em through the kitchen way neither. Such gentlemen is very often found to have apartments in the White Bear and such places. And that's all about that, Mr Verity.'
'And such goings-on might lead to family quarrels, as Dr. Jamieson said?' Verity asked innocently.
'I don't undertake to know what 'e may a-said,' Mrs Butcher announced firmly. 'However, I do know what my place is worth and when I've said enough, even to oblige a sad young fellow what Mr Stringfellow was prevailed upon to take as son-in-law.'
She turned her amply-skirted back upon him and opened a small door on the half-landing. Stepping through it, Verity found himself on a sumptuous landing, carpeted in blue and gold, ending in a fine rounded Georgian window before which the sculpted head of a girl in corkscrew ringlets reflected on its pedestal the afternoon sun with brilliant marble whiteness.
Mrs Butcher bustled along before him, drawing up her chatelaine and selecting a key. They stopped before a massively carved door.
'Never a soul crossed the threshold since the poor young gentleman went to his tomb,' she said, lowering her voice dramatically. 'And you wouldn't be now unless Lord William was with the fleet and Mr Richard had give such express instructions.'
The key turned in the lock and she opened the polished door.
'I'm to stay here, like a sentry at St James' Palace,' she said, 'till you do come out again.'
Verity bowed slightly, in his lumbering awkward manner, and entered the apartments of the late Lord Henry Jervis. The door closed behind him.
His first impression was of a heavy and dusty silence. Even the view of Portman Square from the windows, the cypress grove and beech trees railed in on the broad lawn, surrounded by the cobbled thoroughfare and the houses on the four sides, seemed mute and remote, as th
ough he had indeed passed from the world of the living to the mansions of the dead. A warm stillness, the faint sickliness of dead flowers not cleared from their vases, gave strength to the impression. The apartment consisted of a large drawing-room in front divided from a smaller back room by folding doors. It was furnished in the style of twenty years earlier, the furniture and decorations of Louis Philippe.
Ormolu tables and boule cabinets were ranged about the rooms, each bearing its small bronze statuette or ornament. Above the gilded tables, the walls were hung with brackets and watercolour drawings. Over the cabinets, glass-shades and picture-frames there hung an oppressive sense of gloomy richness.
Looking about him, Verity could scarcely decide what it was that he was expected to do. If these rooms represented Lord Henry's collection of worldly goods, then he could have owned little which bore his personal mark upon it more specifically than a stick of furniture. Nowhere was there any sign of family or personal correspondence, the accounts of Portman Square or Bole Warren. Walking ponderously about the rooms, Verity examined the little tables. Two of them had drawers which opened and revealed no more than notes of the most cursory kind written to Lord Henry by men who could or could not attend his party and would or would not make up a group for a battue at Bole Warren. In the rear drawing-room, where the furniture was more varied, a Chippendale bureau stood, immaculate and inviting. Verity went through it, drawer by drawer, sifting the trivia of the dead man's life. Little bills and receipts, hastily-scrawled notes with half incomprehensible jokes and exclamations intended only for the eyes of a near friend who understood them, a tiny miniature of a girl's face, and lockets bearing the likenesses of Lord Samuel Jervis and his wife. There was a locket of female hair, which might have belonged to a young beauty of the past century as easily as the present. Verity felt a great sadness overcoming him at this glimpse of the loved and loving details of the Jervis family. And it was all for nothing.
On such occasions, there was no cure for melancholy but in work. "The square of four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever proportionate to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy,' someone had once said to him. It rang true to Verity that work gave a man a sure hold of something outside his own uncertain emotions. When the drawers of the bureau yielded nothing further, he turned his professional suspicion upon the structure of the polished furniture. With half his mind dwelling on other things, he tapped and felt, sliding a hand under a ledge of a drawer-opening or running his fingers along an elegant piece of beading in search of some concealed lever.
Such pieces as the bureau were mere toys. No self-respecting criminal would have entrusted his treasure or his confidences to their so-called 'secret drawers'. Why, thought Verity, anyone with an eye for it soon got to seeing where the places were which no other drawer or cubby-hole occupied. Then it was only a matter of tapping to find the hollow sound. And when that happened, a thief would carve his way with a chisel, never stopping to try the genteel method of searching for a hidden spring. It was at that moment that his own finger-tips struck a hollowness beneath the polished surface. He had the flap of the bureau down and was facing the little drawers and pigeon-holes inside. Between two sets of drawers there was a narrow, inlaid panel, four inches across and about eight inches tall. He tapped it again and heard the hollowness once more.
'Ah!' he said with faint satisfaction, 'so that's it!'
There was no sign of a catch, no place where a catch might be concealed nor a knife blade could enter. Verity patiently opened the drawers on either side of the panel, drew them from their recesses and searched methodically in the wooden frame. At last he found the thin strip of springy metal and thumbed it back. Suddenly the entire section behind the panel came free so that he drew it out like an open box, four inches by eight and about a foot long.
At first he expected it to be empty but there were several items in it. He drew out a book, printed in some foreign language which he assumed to be French. The paper was thick and greyish, the cover no more than marbled paper pasted on cheap board. There was another volume, bound in stained and rubbed grey boards with a dingy white spine whose lettering had faded to invisibility. Two more small and recently-printed volumes accompanied these. Verity opened the first at random.
After dismissing the eunuchs, I again drew the couch close to her, and without further ceremony lifted up her clothes. How lovely white was her round belly and ivory delicate-formed thighs! The mount of love, just above the temple of Venus, covered with beautiful black hair. . . .
Verity put the volume down and, picking up the other, glanced at its title: Venus Schoolmistress: or, Birchen Sports. He shook his head thoughtfully.
'Poor young gentleman,' he said aloud. There was something loathsome in the duty of dredging the furtive, trivial lusts of the dead in this manner. However, the four books had occupied the greater part of the concealed compartment in the bureau. They were unremarkable in themselves, the broken-down little shops of Holywell Street, just north of the Strand, thrived on such editions of aged erotica. Yet it saddened Verity to think that the books might in some way sully the reputation of the dead Lord Henry Jervis with his unrealized ambition to take Holy Orders.
Beside the books there were four glass-plate photographs, positive prints of a kind which required a sheet of white paper behind them to see them clearly, and an envelope containing what would no doubt be an old love-letter. Verity picked up the four glass plates with care. They were all chipped or broken in some way. Two of them had had a strip of glass sheared away, converting the oblong to a square, a third had lost a triangle at one comer. The fourth was accidentally chipped but the image appeared complete. Verity drew a sheet of white paper from one of the bureau pigeon-holes and slid it behind the first plate.
His heart sank. It was all to be worse than ever he or Richard Jervis could have expected. There were two figures in the picture, the man naked and flat on his back, his neck and head missing where the end of the plate had been sheared away. The girl who knelt astride his legs was petite, trimly-rounded and olive-skinned, her tawny blonde hair worn down her back with the aid of a comb. Her head was lowered to her partner's loins, eyes closed and lips pouting, while she spread her thighs for the man's fingers with their two distinctive rings. The man himself was distinguished by a white forked streak where his left thigh and belly joined. It might be a scar or a blemish on the plate. Of the girl's identity there could be no doubt.
'Simona!' said Verity softly, and looked again. In the background was a blurred oval shape. Blurred it might be, but he knew it for the finishing bath in Charley Wag's private apartment at Ramiro's. As for the man in the picture, Verity had seen the Wag naked and knew that the pale, undeveloped body was not Charley's. But it must have been a most important client for Charley to have made both his private bath and his own girl available.
The second plate confirmed his suspicions. Simona and Stefania, the latter with paler body and shock of dark hair, lay naked, nuzzling one another's mouths. They seemed to be on a low divan, a man standing over them, his head and shoulders missing again where the end of the plate had been broken off. But the white fork at the join of left thigh and belly was there again, confirming it as the scar of an old injury.
The third plate had suffered no more than an accidental chip. It seemed to Verity the most mysterious of all. There was no man in it, merely a girl who was fully dressed in a theatrical costume which suggested the part of a page to a knight errant in some mock-tournament. He studied the snub-nosed, narrow-eyed insolence of her expression, the sturdy figure of a fifteen-year-old tomboy, fair hair spread loose across her shoulders.
'Now her I have seen,' he said gently. 'Youngest doxy in Ned Roper's flash 'ouse a year or two back. Name of Miss Elaine.'
He studied the picture again. There was little in it that even the Vice Society could have taken exception to. Elaine was in three-quarter profile, though her head was turned towards the camera a little more. She wore
a 'doublet' fashioned from a blouse. The lower part of her 'armour' consisted of very tight trousers in grey-blue material. From the style of the costume, Verity had no doubt that the girl formed part of a display which gulls and yokels paid willingly to watch. The plate showed her as a broad-hipped, sturdy-thighed youngster, the grey-blue trousers stretched smooth over her figure and nipped in narrowly at the waist. From the rear, Elaine's bottom appeared a near-perfect circle, the tight cloth creasing deeply under the full cheeks. It was unlikely, Verity thought, that many of the spectators were much interested in the finer points of jousting or the ways of ancient chivalry. He laid the third plate aside and took up the final one.
The composition was so crowded that at first it was difficult to distinguish the subject. Presently it appeared as something enacted on a stage or dais with a half circle of spectators on the far side. The faces of these men and women were represented in miniature but quite distinctly. They were a fashionably-dressed group in evening clothes, some laughing at what they saw, others staring in dismay. The four men on the dais were naked, as was the girl, all four of them wearing goat-masks, which the girl did not.
Verity examined her, the slender but well-shaped body, the profile and colouring of Eastern beauty tempered by a childhood in the mean streets of Ratcliffe or Wapping. The dark hair rose in an elegant coiffure from her delicately-shaped neck and ears, her cat-like almond eyes lighting the fine oriental mask of her beauty. She knelt on all fours, the four men standing over her, one on each side, one before and one behind. Her slim young shoulders curved down to the velveteen lustre of coppery skin in the small of her back, the smooth paler ovals of her bottom narrowing to firm thighs and trim calves. Lynx-eyed, she turned her head to the spectators, as though their excitement at what she was showing them somehow intensified her own.
SV - 03 - Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments Page 10
