The Esther & Jack Enright Box Set

by David Field

  Percy smiled and reached in the box for the deerstalker hat, which he handed to Jack. ‘Anybody we know?’

  Jack looked inside the rim of the hat and smiled. ‘It was lost by someone called “G. Ormonde”, according to this carefully sewn-in name label.’

  ‘I think we might know someone of that name,’ Percy said, grinning. ‘At least it puts him on the train, but of even more direct significance are what this good man called “cachous”. Look at these and be pleasantly surprised.’ He reached into the paper bag and extracted three ivory jacket buttons, two of which still had material attached to them, suggesting that they had been torn from the garment on which they had originally been sewn.

  ‘So?’ Jack asked.

  Percy tapped his nose to indicate that the matter was not for discussion in the presence of a lost property clerk, then turned to their guide through this Aladdin’s cave. ‘Thank you, Mr Jenkins, you’ve been most helpful, and of considerable assistance to Scotland Yard in its investigation of a most foul murder.’

  ‘Glad to ’ave bin of ’elp, gents,’ Jenkins replied as he proudly puffed out his chest. ‘Would it be in order fer me ter tell the missus?’

  ‘Indeed it would,’ Percy replied, ‘and thank you again for your invaluable assistance.’

  Back inside the coach, as it left the forecourt of Paddington Station, Jack was curious.

  ‘Did those buttons belong to Ormonde?’

  Percy nodded as he reached inside his jacket for his pipe and tobacco pouch, and began to organise a celebratory smoke. ‘They did indeed. According to the man Gregson — you remember him, the coachman-cum-gardener? — when Ormonde got back late that Friday evening his jacket was torn and appeared to be missing a few buttons. I’d bet Bermondsey to a brick that somewhere in his wardrobe at home is a jacket showing signs of recent repair and possibly a new set of buttons.’

  ‘You’re not about to suggest that Esther goes searching in his wardrobe, I hope?’

  ‘Indeed not, but at least we know what to look for if we have occasion to apply for a search warrant.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’ Jack enquired.

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ Percy assured him. ‘And now we’d both better think of something to explain your absence from father duty when we get you home.’

  ‘How could you just walk out and leave Lily like that?’ Esther demanded the minute that Jack and Percy appeared through the front door. She had her hands on her hips, which was normally not a good sign.

  Jack moved towards her, intent on giving her a hug, but she stepped backwards and turned a baleful eye on Percy.

  ‘You! I might have known! Whenever Jack runs off the rails, there’s usually an Uncle Percy explanation. So what excuse have you both cooked up this time?’

  ‘Jack’s blameless,’ Percy explained with his best smile. ‘I called shortly after lunchtime and ordered him back on duty. Between us we’ve found some more evidence against your current employer.’

  ‘All very glib,’ Esther replied, far from mollified, ‘but Mrs Bridges was a little nervous about being left alone like that. Supposing Lily had taken a bad turn or something? What sort of father walks out of the house, leaving his child in the care of a neighbour?’

  ‘Half the fathers in London, in my experience,’ Percy replied with a knowing smile, ‘but I take it that dear little Lily came to no harm?’

  ‘No, as it happens, but no thanks to you two. I just hope that the experience doesn’t cause Mrs Bridges to back out of our arrangement. And there’s nothing organised for supper, since that was supposed to be Jack’s job. How are you at peeling potatoes, Uncle Percy?’

  ‘Well experienced, as it happens,’ Percy smirked back, sensing that the storm was subsiding, ‘but I’m even better at buying portions of stew from cook shops. From memory you have one just round the corner in Aldersgate, so supper’s on Scotland Yard, and Jack can peel the potatoes while I’m gone.’

  ‘So, in the confident belief that your employer Mr Ormonde hasn’t dictated a full confession to you while handing you invoices, what have you managed to learn so far?’ Percy asked as they dug heartily into their lamb stew an hour or so later.

  ‘You mean apart from the fact that he’s an arrogant, overbearing, selfish, unfeeling pig?’ Esther replied, still not yet quite pacified.

  Jack chuckled. ‘I could have told you that for myself. As for his assistant...’

  ‘Yes?’ Esther glowered back at him across the table. ‘Miss Prendergast took some time to tell me that a charming young man came to visit them and accosted her in the street a few days later, and how she’s hoping that he wants to become better acquainted with her.’

  ‘It’s thanks to my undoubted charms that we got you into the business in the first place,’ Jack reminded her, at which she bristled even more.

  ‘No it wasn’t — it was that lovely American gentleman who posed as my uncle. He was quite handsome himself and he most certainly didn’t lead my husband astray, like some uncles of my acquaintance,’ she added with a scowl at Percy, who was not prepared to be deflected from the task in hand.

  ‘You haven’t even begun to answer my question, my dear.’

  ‘Don’t you “my dear” me, Uncle Percy,’ Esther retorted as she put down her fork in what threatened to be an impromptu hunger strike. ‘Every minute I spend in the so-called employ of that insufferable prig makes my flesh crawl. Not to mention the ever-lingering feeling that the dear departed Marianne Ormonde hasn’t fully departed yet.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Jack enquired, his face reflecting his sudden alarm.

  ‘Well,’ Esther continued, ‘apart from the fact that the room I’m required to work in is her former bedroom and everything’s all laid out as if she was about to walk back in, there’s still the lingering smell of her perfume, which she must have applied with a fire hose. Then there’s his obsession with the belief that her spirit lingers around the place. And he’s very particular about keeping everything the way it was — he noticed that missing photograph the following day and all but accused me of stealing it.’

  ‘Well you did,’ Jack reminded her untactfully.

  ‘Don’t remind me!’ she replied heatedly. ‘I hope you don’t want me to steal anything else.’

  ‘No,’ Percy replied quietly, ‘but I might be asking you to take something back.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Esther demanded and Percy reached into the attaché case he’d been carrying when he first arrived and extracted the deerstalker hat and jacket buttons, along with what looked like a lady’s scarf, which was all creased and crumpled.

  ‘Would I be correct in deducing, from what you said a moment ago,’ he enquired, ‘that Ormonde has an unhealthy obsession with the prospect of his dead sister coming back to haunt him, in the tradition of the worst type of “penny dreadful” broadsheet?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Esther confirmed. ‘According to his assistant Abigail Predergast, he’s been consulting one of those “medium” types and he’s now of the firm belief that his sister’s spirit can’t rest because of “the tragic way she departed this life”, to use the phrase adopted by the old fraud he went to visit.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Percy observed quietly. ‘So, if things started to appear in that room you’re working in — things that are connected with “the tragic way she departed this life”, to use the appropriate phrase — do you think it might unsettle him a little?’

  ‘A little?’ Esther echoed. ‘From what I can tell, it would be likely to drive him insane!’

  ‘Enough for him to confess to what he did in your hearing, do you think?’

  ‘Steady on, Uncle Percy,’ Jack cautioned him, which Percy ignored.

  ‘It’s a standard technique we employ at the Yard — you get your suspect so thoroughly rattled that he either confesses on the spot, just to ease the pressure on his brain, or he says something in an unguarded moment that gives him away.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting?’ Esther asked
, far from enjoying the recent change of topic. ‘That I organise some sort of séance or something?’

  ‘In a way, I suppose,’ Percy replied with a growing smile as his brain began working overtime. ‘These objects here on the table are all associated with that night when Ormonde pushed his sister out of the railway carriage. If they were to appear silently in that room...’

  ‘I’m a book-keeper, not a conjurer,’ Esther objected, as Percy raised his hand for silence and continued as if she hadn’t interrupted.

  ‘You can organise that, since you work in that room and presumably there are times when you’re in there on your own?’

  ‘Most of the time,’ Esther confirmed,

  Percy’s smile grew wider. ‘We might start with the hat,’ he mused. ‘Ormonde lost this during the struggle in the carriage, or so it would seem. Whatever the cause of its loss, it was during that last fateful trip with the deceased. So if it appears out of the blue, somewhere in the room where you work?’

  ‘He’d probably have a heart attack,’ Esther confirmed, her mouth set in a determined grimace. ‘Then you could arrest me for causing his death.’

  ‘She has a point, Uncle Percy...’ Jack began, only to be silenced by a man who was more interested in being a Detective Sergeant than an uncle.

  ‘Nonsense!’ Percy insisted. ‘A man like that doesn’t have a heart. And should he die of shock, that would be the result of his own guilty conscience. You would simply be confronting him with what he’s done — like we do in all police interrogations.’

  ‘I’m not a police officer,’ Esther objected. ‘And he’s bound to accuse me of planting the hat in there, behind his back.’

  ‘Which you will of course firmly deny, with an air of outraged innocence,’ Percy advised her.

  ‘Is that before or after I expire out of sheer terror?’ Esther demanded.

  ‘The more unsettled you appear yourself, the more it will convince Ormonde that you had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I’m really not sure I’m up to this, in my delicate condition,’ Esther objected.

  ‘Talking of which,’ Percy reminded her, ‘don’t forget to visit that abortionist.’

  ‘The offhand way in which Jack treats his first child,’ she retorted, ‘I might be better having a real one, to prevent our second being abandoned whenever he hears the call of duty.’

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ Percy insisted. ‘Start with the hat and I’ll start on the washing up,’

  Long after Percy had left, Esther sat morosely at the kitchen table, staring at the wall. Jack tried everything in his power to lighten her mood, but nothing seemed to work.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re both asking,’ she said out loud eventually and Jack took the seat next to her and reached for her hand.

  ‘It was Uncle Percy who asked,’ he reminded her. ‘For myself I wouldn’t have dreamed of such a terrible strategy. But it can’t result in any danger to you, can it?’

  ‘You don’t know what he’s like,’ Esther reminded him. ‘At the best of times it’s like working on the edge of a volcano. Even Abigail Prendergast’s scared to death of him and she’s been there a lot longer than me. If I do what Percy asks and start to crank up the pressure in his mind, he could go completely berserk.’

  ‘Or he could simply crumple up and cry, and perhaps confess it all,’ Jack suggested.

  ‘Fat chance!’ Esther insisted. ‘Like I said, you don’t know the man. And you don’t have to be there to witness his darker moods. He really is very scary, even at the best of times.’

  ‘Imagine what it must have been like, being his sister,’ Jack reminded her and her face screwed up in distaste.

  ‘You’re both assuming that she got pregnant to him by consent. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was rape.’

  ‘Don’t you think you owe it to her to expose him?’ Jack suggested. ‘You could take a weapon to work with you, just in case.’

  ‘Like what? How long do you think he’d continue to employ me if he saw a kitchen knife poking out of my shopping bag? Or a billy club down my blouse?’

  ‘Good point. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think you should expose yourself to such risks anyway. You’re not a police officer in the first place and you’re only a woman after all.’

  ‘Only a woman?’ Esther bridled. ‘What exactly did you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, I mean...’ Jack offered, pleased that she’d taken the bait.

  ‘What you mean, Jack Enright, is that women are weaker than men. In body maybe, but not in the head. We aren’t all put on this earth simply to open our legs to get pregnant and then open them again to give birth.’

  ‘I didn’t mean...’

  ‘Didn’t mean what, precisely? That I’m not capable of doing underhand police work, simply because I’m a woman?’

  ‘Undercover police work,’ Jack replied pompously, knowing precisely which buttons to press.

  ‘Underhand police work, in this case. Well, let me remind you that you’re talking to the woman who exposed the Ripper, when all you men were blundering around Whitechapel looking stupid. The woman who confronted a mad slasher of prostitutes who was all set to slit her throat. The woman who...’

  ‘The woman who I love,’ Jack murmured as he gathered her in her arms at the precise moment when she needed it and held on to her as she burst out crying.

  ‘I’m terrified of what you’re asking, Jack,’ she burbled, ‘but I’ll be damned if I let you write me off as a mere woman! That’s what got poor Miss Ormonde killed and it’ll be a woman who sees to it that she gets her revenge!’

  ‘I believe you,’ Jack said reassuringly as he pressed her even closer and smiled over her shoulder at his realisation that Uncle Percy wasn’t the only one who knew something about human psychology.

  Chapter Eleven

  The determination to prove Jack wrong about women that had led to Esther’s initial outburst had slowly dissipated over the weekend that followed, to the extent that as she walked through the front door of Ormonde’s art gallery on the Monday morning, she was hard put to conceal the trembling hands and the tightness of chest that affected her normal breathing pattern. The deerstalker hat concealed beneath the pack of sandwiches she had brought for her lunch was burning a hole in both her shopping bag and her courage. She felt sure that it must be obvious to anyone who took a cursory look beneath the lunch that she knew she would not be able to bring herself to eat, such was her nervousness at what she had foolishly undertaken to do.

  The only bright light on her horizon lay almost a week away, when she would travel to Barking in order to see her latest niece baptised into the Church of England. That was, of course, assuming that she could survive Ormonde’s fury when he discovered the ridiculous looking hat on the dressing table in the same room that Esther was expected to sit working on her accounts, awaiting the predictable outburst from the employer of whom he was already little short of terrified. She prayed to God for the courage to see it through, but in the event it was the victim of her intended subterfuge who made it possible by his own action.

  She’d spent the first quarter of her working day staring at the columns of figures in her Profit and Loss Ledger Book while her mind tortured itself with the enormity of what she was planning, when Ormonde came up the stairs carrying a small white envelope. She smiled weakly as he came into the room and he smiled back.

  ‘I must apologise profusely for not having given you your wages on Friday, my dear. I’m sure that, given your family’s undoubted wealth, you were in no urgent need of fifteen shillings and my only excuse is that I’d grown accustomed to having only one employee, but here it is anyway.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Esther replied with appropriate gratitude in her voice, then froze in indignant disbelief as Ormonde placed the envelope down on the desk immediately beneath her left arm where it was extended across the ledger page, gazing at her bosom for a lingering moment before turning abruptly and walking out of the room and down the stairs.


  A few moments later she heard Ormonde down in the salon, engaged in his usual smarmy sales routine with a customer, and the time would never be more right. She swiftly extracted the deerstalker hat from its place of concealment and scuttled over to the dressing table. Placing the hat carefully in the centre, where it couldn’t possibly be missed, she grimaced in satisfaction and went downstairs to offer to make the morning tea.

  ‘Coffee for you as usual, sir?’ she asked breezily as Ormonde came through to the back with a self-satisfied smirk, a bill of exchange in his hand.

  ‘Yes please,’ he beamed, ‘and this morning we can all enjoy a custard cream with our morning tea, because I just sold that Pelez — the circus scene. I’ll just go up and leave this bill on your desk, Miss Jacobs, and once you’ve recorded it, place it in the banking envelope, so that I can walk it down the street when I go to lunch.’

  He took the stairs two at a time and Esther stood with her back to the room, taking as long as she could with the hot water, tea and coffee grounds as she braced herself for a yell of outrage from upstairs. Instead it fell deathly quiet until she heard Ormonde descending the stairs slowly and turned in time to see him return into the back room, ashen-faced, holding the deerstalker in front of him at arm’s length, as if it were an unexploded bomb or a dead cat. Without a further word to either of his employees he opened the back door and stepped out into the rear yard like a man walking in his sleep.

  ‘He doesn’t look very well,’ Abigail observed unnecessarily during the ensuing silence. ‘Is he heading for the lavatory?’

  Esther leaned forward and looked through the still open door. She continued to watch as Ormonde disappeared inside the storage shed located along the back wall and re-merged with a container of restorer liquid, which he poured all over the hat before throwing it on the ground and setting fire to it.