The Esther & Jack Enright Box Set

by David Field

  ‘You believe that the woman may have been in Kemble during the day she died?’ Jack asked by way of confirmation. When Bebbington nodded, Jack continued: ‘Doesn’t that make it much more likely that someone threw her in front of a fast moving train further up the line — perhaps even from the platform itself — and that her body was dragged into the tunnel by the wheels of the locomotive, then became dislodged when it somehow hit the tunnel wall?’

  Bebbington looked temporarily bemused and Percy Enright grinned as he enlightened him. ‘You must forgive my Detective Constable, who’s also my nephew by the way, but I’m afraid wild speculation runs in the family.’

  Bebbington’s puzzled expression turned to a smile. ‘He may well be right, of course. If the deceased boarded a London-bound train at Kemble, given that the tunnel on the southern side is barely a quarter of a mile from there, the locomotive could barely have got up to any appreciable speed before the woman left the carriage.’

  ‘You’re the doctor,’ Percy Enright reminded him. ‘If the woman was ejected from the carriage at a high velocity, as the result of a massive shove, then bounced off the tunnel brickwork and got dragged under the carriage wheels and thrown back out again, that would explain the mess we’re looking down at right now, would it not?’

  ‘More than likely,’ the doctor confirmed as he looked back down at the corpse. ‘The head took the initial impact, as you can see, to the extent that we can’t even determine what she once looked like. That would be more consistent with her hitting the tunnel wall with some force before dropping down onto the track. And the marks on the tunnel sides are consistent with a body having slid down it. Had the initial impact been from train wheels, I’d expect to see far more damage to the torso.’

  ‘It’s still pretty horrible.’ Jack shuddered as he looked away.

  ‘But still largely intact, except for the almost severed leg,’ Dr Bebbington insisted. ‘Had the injuries to the lower torso been worse, I’d never have found the foetus in the womb. It’s dead now, of course, poor bugger, like it’s mother, and before I forget, the rectal temperature confirms my original suspicion that she died at around midnight on the day she was found. Given that she was found before midnight, I’d hazard a guess that it had only just happened when the railwaymen found her.’

  ‘We need to speak to them first,’ Percy reminded Jack, who nodded. Thanking the doctor for his assistance, Percy and Jack moved outside, where Percy began to load his pipe ahead of lighting it.

  ‘Should we work on your theory that she was thrown from a train?’ Jack enquired, ‘or my theory that she was shoved in front of one?’

  Percy frowned. ‘What have I always taught you, young Jack?’

  ‘Never close your eyes to any piece of evidence, just because it doesn’t fit your current theory,’ Jack repeated.

  Percy blew the first smoke from the corner of his mouth in a determined gesture, then smiled. ‘And we currently have two theories — yours and mine. One or other of them will eventually be proved to be correct, but until then we collect all the facts we can, whichever way they point.’

  ‘Starting with the railwaymen?’

  ‘The ones who found the body probably can’t give us any more than they gave the local Inspector, and that was two days ago. I think we need to wait until we get something back on that laundry mark — if she was a local woman, then we need to find out what was so urgent as to require her to travel back to London when she’d only just got here. And if she was from out of town — what was she doing travelling here and back in the one day, when the journey takes almost three hours in each direction?’

  ‘Talking of journey times,’ Jack reminded him, ‘the last train for Paddington that stops here in Swindon leaves in half an hour. Shall we get a cab?’

  ‘You go ahead, Jack,’ Percy offered, ‘and get back to your beautiful wife and daughter. I’ll stay here at the local pub and get away from your Aunt Beattie’s stern Temperance lectures on the evils of ale — not to mention her atrocious cooking. But come back here tomorrow and meet me at the police station where we began today. And you’d better bring some changes of clothing — we may be here for a while.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘A little more notice would have been nice,’ Esther grumbled as she placed the dish of vegetables on the supper table. ‘Most of your shirts are at the laundry and I need to sew up that tear in your grey suit trousers that you assure me you got climbing a fence in Finsbury Park.’

  ‘There’s no timetable for violent crime,’ Jack told her. ‘You should know that from those dreadful Whitechapel murders, and the murder of your former employer not long before we got married.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’ Esther shuddered. ‘That’s twice now.’

  ‘And in both cases, if I’d waited until my shirts were washed and ironed and stopped to check that there were no rips in the seat of my trousers, you wouldn’t have lived to become Mrs Enright.’ He grinned back in that boyish way of his that always turned her inside out.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she pouted. ‘How long will it be for?’

  ‘No idea, at this stage. Probably only a few days, but if I’m not back in a week or so, get the Yard to send their new Dog Squad after me.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about it,’ Esther complained, then looked up from her supper as there came a heavy knock on the door. ‘Alice normally taps politely, so I don’t think that’s her,’ Esther observed absentmindedly.

  Jack rose from the table. ‘I’ll get it.’

  He opened the door to a large uniformed constable.

  ‘Constable Jack Enright?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Message from Chief Inspector Wallace at the Yard. Please report to him at eight tomorrow morning, instead of travelling back to Wiltshire.’

  ‘Right, thank you Constable,’ Jack replied as he closed the door firmly but politely, then returned to the kitchen, where they’d placed their dining table rather than clutter up the sitting room with it.

  ‘Did I hear correctly?’ Esther said hopefully. ‘You don’t have to join Percy swilling beer tomorrow?’

  ‘We could use you on eavesdropping details,’ Jack replied, grinning. ‘You have another twenty four hours to repair my grey suit trousers and retrieve my shirts from Mr Fong.’

  ‘Ah yes, come in, Constable,’ Chief Inspector Wallace muttered absentmindedly as he looked up from the mountain of paper on his desk. ‘Take a seat and tell me how you and Sergeant Enright are progressing down in Swindon.’

  ‘Early days yet, sir,’ Jack reminded him. ‘We don’t know who she is. Or rather, who she was.’

  ‘That’s probably about to change,’ Jack was advised as the Chief Inspector slid a sheet of paper across the desk towards him. ‘We got lucky with the laundry company and her name and address are there.’

  Jack took the sheet and studied it carefully, then his face broke into a smile.

  ‘Hatton Garden’s only a few streets from where I live. Full of diamond merchants.’

  ‘Go to the address and enquire whether or not Mrs — or possibly Miss — Marianne Ormonde is currently missing. Then enquire why she wasn’t reported so four days ago.’

  ‘Yes, sir. May I delay travelling back to Swindon for another twenty four hours?’

  ‘Depends how long you need to spend in Hatton Garden, doesn’t it? But perhaps best to give your uncle more time to make enquiries at that end in his own individual way. By which I mean sampling every pub in the town.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Anything else?’

  ‘Not really, except don’t tread heavily on any toes in Hatton Garden. Those wealthy types are the first to complain about constabulary big boots.’

  ‘Very good, sir. Will I report anything I find directly to you?’

  ‘No, save it for your uncle.’

  Less than an hour later, Jack checked the address as he looked up at the expensively painted name board above the window of the art gallery. ‘Ormonde’s Fine Art’ looked i
mposing and Jack did his best to clean the soles of his boots on the scraper by the front door before ringing the bell that sounded ponderously somewhere behind the double-fronted bay windows displaying portraits and landscapes that would probably each be worth more than a year of Jack’s salary.

  The door opened and a young woman dressed in a formal black costume with tight ginger curls poking out from under a stylish bonnet looked him up and down uncertainly.

  ‘I’m Detective Constable Enright from Scotland Yard and I’m here about a Marianne Ormonde,’ he advised the girl.

  ‘Come in, please,’ she invited him with a nervous smile. She showed him to a chair in front of a glass counter, behind which were more paintings on the wall. As he took the proffered seat, she effected the introductions.

  ‘I’m Abigail Prendergast, assistant to Mr Ormonde. Is Marianne in trouble? We haven’t seen her since the weekend and Mr Ormonde advises me that she simply disappeared without explanation from their country residence in Wiltshire.’

  ‘Swindon?’ Jack enquired.

  ‘Somewhere like that,’ Miss Prendergast confirmed. ‘I’ve never been there myself, but Mr Ormonde and his sister spend most weekends there, including last weekend.’

  That answered one question, Jack noted mentally. The lady in the tunnel was most likely a Miss Ormonde, which meant that he would need to deal tactfully with the matter of her pregnancy. Or perhaps it was best not to mention it at all at this stage. ‘Keep your ammunition dry and safely stored away from the enemy’, was another of the pieces of advice he’d acquired from Uncle Percy.

  ‘I’ll go and get Mr Ormonde,’ Miss Prendergast offered, before disappearing through the double doors that presumably led from the front gallery to the office accommodation to the rear. Jack hardly had time to imagine what one of those massive oilscapes of the Scottish Highlands, with hairy cows in the foreground, would look like on his living room wall, when the young woman returned with a tall, aristocratic man in his mid thirties, blue-eyed and ginger moustached, and adjusting a monocle to his right eye.

  Jack stood up and was about to introduce himself when the man took the initiative.

  ‘I’m Edgar Ormonde. Have you found my sister?’

  ‘We think we may have done, sir. Could you describe her for me, please?’

  ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ Ormonde demanded.

  ‘I’m afraid she may be, sir,’ Jack confirmed and Miss Prendergast gave a faint squeak before retreating behind the glass counter, seating herself on a stool and reaching for a handkerchief inside the sleeve of her expensively tailored jacket. ‘But what made you think she might be?’ Jack enquired, alert to Ormonde’s seeming lack of surprise — or, for that matter, concern.

  ‘I’m not stupid, Constable,’ Ormonde replied haughtily. ‘Your choice of language gave it away. If you’d found her wandering the countryside, or if she was in trouble with the police, you’d know what she looked like and she’d have confirmed her identity to you. You don’t, and she didn’t, which suggests that she’s been found somewhere in circumstances in which polite conversation wasn’t possible.’

  Jack realised that he was dealing with a very cool, intelligent man. Also a very arrogant one who was used to putting mere tradesmen like Jack in their places. Time to establish his own authority.

  ‘If you could answer my question, please sir, I might be able to confirm the bad news.’

  ‘She was in her late twenties, about five feet two inches in height, with fairish auburn hair and a scar on the outside of her left thigh, some two inches long. She had a minor operation to remove an unsightly mole two or three years ago.’

  Jack had no recollection of seeing any operation scar on her thigh, but then he hadn’t wanted to look too closely at the bloodied carcass on the dissection table. But he was puzzled that Ormonde was able to identify it so accurately when it was on the left thigh of his adult sister.

  ‘The general description fits, I’m afraid,’ Jack confirmed, ‘and I gather from Miss Prendergast that she went missing while you were down in Wiltshire for the weekend.’

  Ormonde shot Miss Prendergast an angry look, then composed himself as he looked back at Jack and nodded.

  ‘That’s correct. She didn’t come down to breakfast on Saturday morning. That wasn’t particularly unusual for her lately. She seemed to be off her food somewhat and there appeared to be something on her mind for the past few weeks. When she hadn’t surfaced by mid-morning, the maid took some coffee up to her room and that’s when we discovered that her bed hadn’t been slept in.’

  ‘Did you report her absence to the local police, by any chance?’

  ‘Why should we?’ Ormonde enquired defensively. ‘It wasn’t unusual for poor Marianne to go off wandering, usually for a walk around the small lake on our property.’

  ‘The property being where exactly, sir?’

  ‘Sandpool Farm, just outside Tarlton village, in Wiltshire. Not really a farm these days. We bought the property from the estate of the last person to farm it, but the outbuildings were handy for the horses we keep there.’

  ‘And this village you mentioned — “Tarlton”, wasn’t it? — what’s the nearest township to it?’

  ‘That would be Kemble. That’s where the railway line runs, anyway.’

  ‘And you would travel to it from Paddington, leaving the train at Kemble?’

  ‘That’s correct. If we were in a hurry to get back to London, we’d take our coach to Swindon, where some of the express trains stop. If we wanted to alight at Kemble on our way down, we had to take one of those dreadful “all stations” trains on the Cheltenham service, but that could take hours.’

  ‘So you travelled down there last Friday, as usual?’

  ‘Who told you it was our usual practice?’ Ormonde demanded, with another withering glance at the hapless Miss Prendergast.

  ‘Whether it was or not,’ Jack insisted, determined not to be overawed by the bullying manner of the man who ought to have been more subdued in the presence of a Scotland Yard detective, ‘you travelled to Kemble last Friday?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ormonde conceded with bad grace.

  ‘When were you planning to return?’

  ‘Originally on Monday morning, in accordance with our normal practice, why?’

  ‘And did you, despite Miss Ormonde being missing?’

  ‘No, I caught a Sunday train, as it happens — I remembered that I had some business to conduct yesterday. Why do I get the feeling that I’m under suspicion of having murdered my own sister?’

  ‘I don’t recall suggesting that she’d been murdered, sir,’ Jack replied ominously.

  Ormonde shot him a furious look and turned in the direction of the back room, pausing for long enough to bark an instruction to Miss Prendergast. ‘Show the constable out, please.’

  ‘I’m afraid he can get a bit heated at times,’ Miss Prendergast offered by way of a red-faced apology for her employer’s behaviour. ‘Probably his artistic temperament.’

  ‘He’s an artist?’ Jack enquired.

  She nodded. ‘He was, once. That’s one of his portraitures up there,’ she added, pointing to a delicate water colour depiction of a young girl who appeared to be lying face-up in a stream of some sort, her head surrounded by flowers that were floating alongside her.

  ‘That’s his famous “Ophelia”,’ she explained. ‘She’s a character in Hamlet. Hamlet’s love, and the sister of the fiery Laertes. Shakespeare,’ she added, in case the classics were outside the reading range of a police officer.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Jack observed admiringly.

  ‘That’s Mr Ormonde’s personal favourite and he’s very reluctant to sell it, despite offers in the hundreds of pounds. He’ll probably be even more reluctant now.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Jack asked.

  ‘The model for Ophelia was poor Miss Marianne. I’m surprised he didn’t point that out when you were asking for her description.’

  Jack looked more careful
ly at the painting and tried to reconcile the entrancing, slightly misty and wistful, young face in the portrait with the mangled mess he’d been forced to look at in the mortuary.

  ‘Was Miss Ormonde also an artist?’ he enquired.

  Miss Prendergast shook her head. ‘No, she handled the books of account for the business. I do the cataloguing and valuing. I’m a student of art myself — Camberwell.’

  ‘So Miss Marianne’s death will create a vacancy for an accounts clerk?’ Jack asked, a thought already forming in his mind.

  Miss Prendergast winced slightly. ‘Nothing so common as an “accounts clerk”, I’m afraid. Mr Ormonde was always very particular in describing Miss Marianne’s duties as those of a “Financial Controller”. You probably gathered already that Mr Ormonde is very particular in everything.’

  Everything except reporting his missing sister to the local police, Jack reminded himself before moving towards the front door. Then a thought occurred to him; he might get answers from Miss Prendergast that he hadn’t wished to put to her employer. ‘Do you happen to know if Miss Ormonde had a young man?’

  Miss Prendergast blushed slightly at the mere suggestion, then managed a smile. ‘If she did, she said nothing to me, but then we didn’t exactly exchange confidences. However, I’m sure her brother wouldn’t have approved of anything like that — he was very protective where Miss Marianne was concerned.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine,’ Jack replied with faint sarcasm. ‘Anyway, thank you for your assistance, Miss Prendergast.’

  ‘Abigail, please,’ she replied with a warmer smile and Jack remembered that his boyish charm could sometimes achieve wonders where constabulary sternness failed. A pity he couldn’t have charmed Edgar Ormonde into explaining why he seemed to have accepted with such equanimity the death of a dear sister, whose portrait hung in pride of place inside his art emporium. Perhaps the answer lay deep in the Wiltshire countryside.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Since you took your time about it, we may as well test the meat pies in here,’ Percy advised Jack with a disapproving frown as they sat in the public bar of the ‘Artificer’, in the centre of Swindon. ‘The beer’s a bit weak, but drinkable,’ he added.