Murder at Madame Tussauds

by Jim Eldridge

  Would they need to start a tunnel from the floor level? wondered Daniel. It would be easier to open an entrance at about waist or chest height and then climb in.

  Once more he worked along the length of the wall, this time at waist height, knocking against the bricks, listening hard. It was when he reached the middle of the wall that he heard a change of tone as he knocked, a sound slightly higher. Or was it his imagination? Wishful thinking?

  He knocked again at the particular brick, listening intently. He was sure the tone was higher. He began to knock at the wall around the suspect brick, and soon felt he’d identified a patch of the wall which suggested a hollow behind it. He chose the centre of the patch and, taking a penknife from his pocket, began to scrape with it at the mortar, which started to crumble as he penetrated the surface. More digging saw the mortar fall away easily and he was able to pull out the brick. The mortar around the adjacent bricks was also loose, and soon he had five bricks out on the floor at his feet, exposing a hole. He pushed his hand into the hole. There was nothing there, no solid earth, just vacant space.

  He pulled more bricks out, stopping when he exposed solid earth behind any of them, and soon he had revealed a large hole, big enough for a man to be able to climb into.

  There were two candles lying just inside the hole, one of which was half burnt. Daniel lit it and held it into the hole, and saw that it was indeed the start of a tunnel which was already some way into the solid earth. The ceiling and sides of the tunnel were kept in place by slats of wood.

  I was right! thought Daniel exultantly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The police van drove through the gateway, past the tall wooden gates standing open, and pulled to a halt in the centre of the sprawling yard that was Gerald Carr’s base of operations in Somers Town. The yard area was edged on two sides by barn-like wooden buildings, the doors of which were all shut. In the side furthest from the entrance gates was a two-storey brick building, stairs leading up from the yard to the top storey.

  Telling the two uniformed constables to wait in the van, Jarrett and Sergeant Pick descended from it.

  ‘You been here before, Sergeant?’ asked Jarrett.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Pick.

  ‘That top floor is where Carr lives.’

  ‘It all looks pretty run-down and shabby,’ commented Pick. ‘The paint’s flaking off all the woodwork, including the two main gates. And it all looks dirty.’

  ‘Carr doesn’t care what it looks like, or what people think of him,’ said Jarrett. He gave a shout: ‘Gerald Carr! We want to talk to you!’

  There was a pause, then the door of one of the barns opened slightly and a man looked out.

  ‘Here’s someone I know,’ grunted Jarrett. ‘Foxy Wood! Come over here!’

  Hesitantly, the door opened wider and a small, thin, rat-faced man sidled out.

  ‘I nicked him five years ago,’ muttered Jarrett. ‘Robbery with violence. Never got it to stick, though. None of the witnesses were willing to talk.’

  Foxy Wood approached them warily.

  ‘Remember me, Foxy?’ asked Jarrett.

  The small man nodded sourly.

  ‘We’ve come to talk to your boss.’

  ‘Mr Carr isn’t here,’ said Foxy.

  ‘Come off it, he’s always here,’ snorted Jarrett.

  Foxy shook his head.

  Jarrett frowned, puzzled. ‘Where is he, then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Foxy.

  Jarrett leant towards the smaller man, scowling. ‘See here, Foxy, I don’t take to being lied to. Gerald Carr never leaves here unless it’s for something very important. He doesn’t need to. He lives here, and anything he wants – or anyone – they come to him.’

  ‘I’m telling you the truth, Inspector. I don’t know where he is. He told me he had to go somewhere, and he went.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A couple of hours ago.’

  ‘And where’s everyone else? The rest of his mob?’

  Foxy shrugged. ‘Don’t know. They weren’t here when I arrived.’

  Jarrett looked at the buildings around the yard. ‘I think we’ll take a look. Just in case he might’ve returned while your back was turned.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ said Foxy. ‘But he ain’t here.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Jarrett. He called the two constables from inside the van. ‘Constable Evans, you go with the sergeant and search the buildings on that side. Constable Butler, you come with me.’

  As Jarrett and PC Butler headed for the ramshackle barns, Sergeant Pick had to bite his lip to stop from saying, You might almost think Carr knew we were coming.

  Derek Parminter’s landlady apologised to the two policemen. ‘I’m very sorry, but I don’t know anything about Mr Parminter’s social life or his habits, or who his friends might have been. He was a good tenant. Never gave any trouble. Always on time with his rent. Kept to the rules of the house.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘No one of the opposite sex in lodgers’ rooms.’

  ‘How many lodgers do you have?’

  ‘Three. Two men and a middle-aged lady. Mr Parminter was a bank clerk, Mr Ostred is a shipping clerk, and Miss Wimpole is a librarian. All very respectable.’

  ‘Would it be possible to look at Mr Parminter’s room?’ asked Feather.

  ‘It’s not his room any longer,’ said the landlady. ‘I let it shortly after I heard the news about his death to Mr Pringle, an accounts clerk. My rooms are in high demand. Most of my lodgers stay with me for a long while.’

  ‘How long was Mr Parminter with you?’

  ‘Just over a year.’ She gave them a puzzled look. ‘I can’t think why he ended up in the canal as he did. The police suggested he’d been drinking, or perhaps he’d been depressed, but I told them that nothing could be further from the truth. Mr Parminter was never the worse for alcohol in all the time he was here, and he never gave any sign of depression. The opposite, he was always cheerful.’

  ‘Do you know what he might have been doing in Camden Town?’

  ‘No. But then, as I said, I didn’t enquire about his habits.’

  ‘Do you know if there was woman in his life?’ asked Feather. ‘Anyone he’d started seeing not long before he died?’

  ‘If there was, he certainly didn’t bring her here,’ she said, indignant at the suggestion.

  Daniel and John Tussaud stood in front of the hole in the cellar wall. Tussaud look stunned.

  ‘What does it mean?’ he asked, bewildered.

  ‘It means that Mr Dudgeon and Mr Bagshot were attempting to tunnel to the vault of the bank before they were killed.’

  ‘Do you think that’s why they were killed?’

  ‘I do,’ replied Daniel.

  ‘But who by? Who would have known what they were up to?’

  ‘A man called Michaels,’ said Daniel. ‘Did they ever mention him?’

  ‘No. Who is he?’

  ‘He’s the man who persuaded Mr Bruin and Mr Patterson to leave at short notice. His body was recently discovered in Piccadilly Circus, not far from Greville’s wax museum.’

  ‘Greville’s?’ Tussaud looked even more perplexed. ‘How do Greville’s fit into this?’

  ‘I must admit, I don’t know,’ admitted Daniel. ‘But I’m hoping we might find out more once we share this latest information with Scotland Yard.’

  ‘I shall send a note to Inspector Jarrett at once, informing him of this and requesting he come to see it.’

  ‘Can I ask you to send your note to Inspector Feather,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I thought Inspector Jarrett was in charge of the case.’

  ‘He is,’ said Daniel. ‘But Inspector Feather is in charge of investigating the recent bank robberies. He’s the one we need to inform first, and we’ll leave it to him to tell Inspector Jarrett. I think you’ll find that’s the proper protocol.’

  Inwardly, Daniel was thinking, And also because there’s no need for
Mr Tussaud to know we’re currently barred from Scotland Yard.

  Daniel was standing in the lobby of the museum with John Tussaud when the messenger returned from Scotland Yard.

  ‘Inspector Feather is out on an investigation,’ he told them. ‘I left your message for him.’

  ‘In that case I’ll leave you,’ Daniel said to Tussaud. ‘When Inspector Feather arrives, show him the tunnel in the cellar, and then ask him if he’d come to see me at my house.’

  Daniel left the museum and had just begun to walk along Marylebone Road in the direction of Warren Street when his path was stopped by two men, one of them smiling broadly in a cheery greeting.

  ‘Daniel Wilson?’

  Daniel tensed, on his guard. There was something about the man that gave the lie to his apparent bonhomie, especially as his companion remained grim and unsmiling.

  ‘Possibly,’ he said.

  The smiling man turned to his companion and chuckled. ‘Possibly!’ he laughed. ‘What a card!’ Then he turned back to Daniel, still smiling. ‘We hear you’re looking into these murders at Tussauds wax museum.’

  ‘Do you,’ said Daniel warily.

  ‘We do. And we’re here to tell you to stop.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘For reason of your good health.’ Then the smile disappeared from the man’s face to be replaced by a look of menace. ‘Or, more to the point, for the good health of your partner, Miss Fenton. It would be a great pity if a good-looking woman like that suffered something like a vitriol attack. Terrible stuff, vitriol. Burns the skin. Even worse if it gets in the eyes.’

  Daniel glowered at the man.

  ‘If you touch one hair of her head …’ he snarled.

  ‘We wasn’t thinking of her head.’ The man grinned lewdly.

  Daniel suddenly launched himself at the man, determined to wipe that nasty smirk from his face, but he hadn’t spotted the other man moving behind him, and he felt a thunderous blow to the side of his face that felled him to the pavement. Momentarily addled, he was aware of the cosh being swung in front of his face, before it smacked onto his head.

  ‘This is a warning from Gerald Carr,’ he heard the man say. ‘Forget about the wax business or else it’ll be the worse for both of you. Especially for your lady friend.’

  Abigail left the Langham Hotel and walked down Portland Place to Oxford Circus, making for a particular bookshop with a good stock of practical books on the pyramids of Egypt. If she was going to lead this expedition of Conan Doyle’s – and she’d now decided that she would – then she wanted to find out everything that had been written about the temple of Ra at Abu Ghurob. It had become obvious during her conversation with Doyle that their ambitions for this expedition were different, Abigail’s practical, while Doyle’s interest was almost religious, in as far as the pagan religions of ancient Egypt were concerned. I should have been aware of his interest in the supernatural when I read his Egyptian stories, she told herself. Because her mind was full of their recent conversation she wasn’t paying attention to the people crowding the pavement. In fact, she’d moved to walk along the kerb to avoid the crush, and she was shocked to feel a sudden push in her back that sent her stumbling forward into the road, right into the path of two heavy horses pulling a wagon, their massive metal-shod hooves rising up as they reacted to this sudden apparition, and then crashing down towards her …

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Desperately, Abigail rolled out of the path of the two horses, and just in time, as the great hooves smashed onto the cobbles close by her head. Abigail pushed herself up as the wagon driver looked down at her, concern on his face as he held on to the reins to calm the horses.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he called.

  Abigail looked down at herself, her long coat smeared with horse manure from the road.

  ‘Someone pushed me!’ she said to him, angry.

  A crowd had gathered, men spilling into the road to see if she was all right and to offer their help.

  ‘Thank you, but I’m fine,’ Abigail told them. In truth, she wasn’t. Her elbow hurt where it had hit the road, and she was furious at the fact that she was covered in horse dung. And most of all, she was angry that someone had pushed her into the road right in front of the oncoming heavy horses. She looked towards the people on the pavement, watching her anxiously. Was it one of them? If so, there was no expression of guilt or malicious triumph on any of the faces. Whoever did it had vanished. But who? And why?

  She shook her head as hands were offered to lead her back to the pavement.

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine,’ she insisted, waving away the offers of assistance. ‘I’m just shaken. Thank you.’

  She stepped back to the pavement. There’d be no bookshop visits for her today. She needed to get home and clean herself.

  John Feather worked his way backwards out of the hole in the cellar, his hand protected from the burning candle he held by a stout cloth wrapped round his fingers, and joined John Tussaud and Sergeant Cribbens.

  ‘It’s a tunnel right enough,’ he said.

  ‘How far does it go?’ asked Tussaud.

  ‘Without the aid of a measuring stick I can’t be sure. We’ll get someone in who can answer that question properly. But it’s certainly quite a way in already. And properly constructed, with wooden sections at the sides supporting the roof slats.’ He looked at Tussaud. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind they were heading towards the bank.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what Mr Wilson said.’

  And I told him he was clutching at straws, thought Feather ruefully. And not just me, Abigail said the same thing.

  ‘For the moment, Mr Tussaud, I suggest you move a couple of these crates back against the wall to block the entrance to the hole. I’ll arrange for an engineer to come and investigate it properly, and then we can arrange for it to be filled in.’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Tussaud. He looked at the hole in wonder. ‘To think this was going on the whole time and no one had any idea.’

  Feather and Cribbens made their way out of the cellar and headed upstairs to the ground floor.

  ‘Looks like Mr Wilson was right, sir,’ said Cribbens.

  ‘It does indeed,’ said Feather. He looked at his watch. ‘Right, that’s us finished for the day. Head back to Scotland Yard in case there’s any new messages about the bank robberies.’

  ‘Right, sir. And if there are?’

  ‘Bring them to me at Daniel Wilson’s. You know his house?’

  ‘I do.’ Cribbens nodded. Then he looked doubtful. ‘Is that wise, sir? Superintendent Armstrong says we’re barred from having anything to do with him and Miss Fenton.’

  Feather gave him a wink. ‘I have a special dispensation from the superintendent. I’m allowed to call on him, providing no one else at the Yard knows about it. So, officially, you don’t know. And, if you’re asked, I just went home.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He gave Feather a puzzled look. ‘It’s all a bit odd, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘I don’t mind you saying so at all, Sergeant. In fact, that’s my opinion as well. But ours is not to reason why, Sergeant. Ours is just to go through the motions. If I don’t see you later, I’ll see you in the morning at the Yard.’

  Daniel stepped down from the hansom cab. He’d originally set out to walk home after being attacked, but his head ached. If I’m going to collapse I’d rather do it in a cab than tumble down in the street, he’d decided. The pain in his head from the blow had eased slightly by the time the cab pulled up outside his small terraced house in Camden Town. Luckily it had been a warning, not a murderous attack, although the end product seemed not much different to him. A glancing blow to his cheek followed by a harder one to the back of his head. He was lucky that he’d been told by a doctor that he had a particularly thick skull. And the blows, although hard enough to hurt, could have been worse.

  He walked into the house and called, ‘Abigail!’

  ‘I’m out here!’ came the
shouted response.

  Daniel walked through the kitchen, then the scullery, and into the small back yard, where he found Abigail with a pail of soapy water, sponging her long coat, which had been pegged to the washing line, but there was still the familiar aroma of horse manure.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  Abigail had been weighing up what to tell Daniel all the way home. If she told him she’d been pushed into the road, he’d get overprotective of her. And, on reflection, she wondered if she hadn’t leapt to the wrong conclusion. The pavement had been crowded. People were jostling to get through the crush.

  ‘I fell into the road,’ she said. ‘Right into a pile of horse manure.’ Suddenly her expression showed alarm as she saw the livid bruise on the side of his face. ‘My God, what’s happened to you?’

  ‘I was attacked by two men, with a message for me from Gerald Carr,’ said Daniel bitterly. ‘Correction, a message for us. They threatened harm to you if we didn’t stop looking into the murders at Tussauds.’ He frowned as he regarded her inquisitively. ‘You’re sure you fell? I’ve never known you stumble before.’

  Abigail hesitated, then admitted, ‘It’s possible I was pushed.’

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Daniel.

  ‘But it can’t be the same people,’ added Abigail quickly. ‘You said they warned you what might happen to me if we didn’t stop. They’d hardly launch an attack on me at the same time.’

  ‘You don’t know Gerald Carr,’ said Daniel. ‘He’d do it to drive his point home.’ He looked at her earnestly as he said, ‘You can’t stay here. In London, that is. I think you ought to go to Cambridge and spend time with your sister, Bella.’

  ‘No,’ said Abigail firmly. ‘I’m not leaving.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Would you run away if the positions were reversed?’

  ‘It’s not running away. You’re always saying you’d like to pick up your relationship with Bella. It’s been almost three years since you last saw her.’

  ‘Daniel, don’t dissemble,’ said Abigail sternly. ‘We are partners. Whatever happens we face things together.’