The Ornamental Hermit

by Olivier Bosman

  He was hoping he’d be able to slip in and out of his room quietly without being barraged by his landlady. He had a lot to think about and had no patience for nosy Mrs Appleby.

  “Norfolk? What’s in Norfolk?” Mrs Appleby continued. “They don’t half make you travel about, don’t they? First it was Berkshire, now it’s Norfolk. By the by, a parcel arrived for you this morning.” She picked up a brown envelope from the hall table and held it out to him. “It was shoved through the letter box at around ten o’clock. I was having my tea in the parlour when I heard a noise in the hallway. ‘That can’t be the postman,’ I thought to myself. ‘He’s already been.’ So I rushed out and saw that envelope lying on the doormat. No stamps, no postage mark, just your name.”

  Billings stared at the brown envelope and was instantly reminded of his shameful visit to Mr Bull’s shop several days ago. The envelope had the same tint and was of the same size. Surely Al Bull couldn’t have been so careless as to send new photographs directly to his house?

  “’Ere, you’ve gone all pale!” said Mrs Appleby, concerned. “I hope it’s not to do with work. I don’t want any police matters taking place in my house.”

  Billings took the envelope off his landlady and felt its weight. A feeling of dread rose within him as sordid memories flashed through his head: Al Bull’s mocking grin as he struggled to hide the envelope in his breast pocket; the musty smell of the shop’s back room; Charlie’s dirty fingernails as his hands fumbled all over his body.

  “Thank you,” he said abruptly, then ran up the stairs with the envelope.

  “What, you’re gonna open it in your room, are ya?” Mrs Appleby called after him, disappointed. “I hope it ain’t nothing serious?”

  Billings rushed into his room and locked the door behind him. He plunged down onto his bed and held the envelope before him. His heart pounded as he stared at it. He remembered now that there had been a flash of light outside the window when he was with Charlie. He had a horrible premonition. This can’t be true, he thought. Please God, let this not be true.

  With trembling fingers he started unsealing the envelope. It contained three cabinet cards. He pulled out the first. It was exactly what he dreaded. The picture was of him, standing clearly in the light of the gas lamp with Charlie’s arms flung around his neck, and his mouth kissing him on his face. The second one had Charlie on his knees before him, running his hands down his torso. The third one clearly showed Charlie’s hands undoing his trouser buttons. The pictures were well lit and the ecstatic expression on Billings’s face, with his head flung back, his eyes wide shut and his mouth half-open, left no doubt as to what kind of activity was taking place.

  If there were three pictures, there must have also been three flashes, he thought. He could only remember one flash. Had he really been so consumed by desire that he hadn’t noticed? It surprised him that he had such passion in him.

  He dropped the pictures on to the bed and shook the envelope to see if there was anything else in it. A small piece of paper slipped out from within it and floated down on to the floor. There was something written on it. He picked it up and read it.

  LAY OFF, OR ELSE…

  What does it mean, he wondered. He looked back into the envelope to see if there was anything else, but it was empty. There was no demand for payment. No calling card. No sign of who had sent this to him or why. Then it suddenly occurred to him. Jeremiah Rook! The reporter who had written that peculiar article about him in The Illustrated Police News. He had bumped into him in Oxford and again later on Edgware Road. He was carrying some kind of mysterious equipment around his shoulder. It must have been a camera! Had Jeremiah Rook been shadowing him? Had this whole scene been carefully orchestrated in order to entrap him? If so, by who? And why? Did this have to do with the Lord Palmer case? Was this an attempt to scare him off the investigation?

  He picked the cabinet cards off the ground and shoved them back into the envelope. Then he hid the parcel under his jacket, ran out of the room and down the stairs. Ignoring Mrs Appleby’s concerned questions, he rushed out the door and took a cab towards Paddington. He only had three hours before his train would leave for Norfolk and he hadn’t packed his bags yet, but this couldn’t wait. He had to know what was going on.

  *

  As Billings approached Praed Street from Paddington Station, he could see Al Bull’s shop in the distance. It was shut up. Wooden boards had been hammered to the windows and a padlocked chain had been wrapped to the door handle.

  He’s fled! thought Billings. That blessed Arab has fled! His heart sank as he walked towards the shop and more clues of Al Bull’s desertion became apparent. The little window by the back entrance, through which the photograph had been taken, had also been boarded up. He went to the back entrance and tried pushing open the door, but it was of no use. The door had been firmly locked from the inside. Billings hung his head and put his hands to his face. What the devil was he to do now?

  Suddenly he heard a noise coming from inside the shop. A shuffling noise. Something or someone was moving inside the building. He looked around for something he could use to prise open the board on the window with. He found some shards of a discarded roof tile lying on the ground, one of which seemed the right shape for his purpose. He picked it up and climbed onto an upturned water barrel which had been conveniently located beneath the window (the same barrel, no doubt, on which Jeremiah Rook had stood with his apparatus when he took the photograph). He stuck the shard underneath the board and prised open a gap big enough for him to look through.

  The shop was dark. Pitch black, in fact. And Billings was feeling weary. He was standing in a little alleyway, just off Praed Street, in broad daylight and he could hear a lot of commuter traffic passing by him. What if someone were to see him? And what if that someone happened to be a policeman? How would he explain that? He was about to give up, when he heard more shuffling noises coming from the shop’s front room. Could it be rats, he wondered. A light was suddenly lit inside the shop and large shadows were cast on the backroom floor. Billings could now see that the room had been stripped bare. The shop’s contents had been packed into crates which had been piled up against the wall. Al Bull had clearly not fled yet, Billings concluded, but he was intending to. The shuffling noises in the front room continued as the flickering candle light caused the back room shadows to dance over the floor.

  Billings moved his head closer to the window and called out through the hole in the board.

  “Mr Bull, is that you?”

  The shuffling stopped and the light was instantly extinguished.

  “Mr Bull, I know you’re in there,” Billings continued. “Let me in. I have you speak to you.”

  It would’ve been foolhardy for the shop’s occupier to continue to pretend that the building was empty. Sure enough, the candle was re-lit and Billings soon saw a man shuffle into the back room, holding the lantern over his head and peering at the window. It was Al Bull.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, frightened.

  “Open the back door, Mr Bull. I have to speak to you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Never mind who I am. Just open the blessed door!”

  Al Bull hesitated. “The shop is closed,” he said. “I’ve closed down. I’m leaving the city!”

  “Open the back door now, Mr Bull, or I will pull out this board, climb in through the window and bash your head in!”

  Billings’s threatening tone did not have the desired effect, because as soon as the shopkeeper recognized his voice, he lost all fear.

  “Doctor Smith, is that you?” he said, smiling that mocking smile of his. “Why didn’t you say so?” And off he shuffled to open the back door.

  The back door opened and Al Bull stuck out his head.

  “I’m closing down, Doctor Smith,” he said. “I’m moving to Birmingham.”

  Billings climbed down from the barrel and took the envelope out of his coat pocket.

  “Would you care to exp
lain the meaning of this!” he asked, approaching the back entrance.

  “That has nothing to do with me, Dr Smith,” Al Bull replied.

  “You know what it is, then?”

  There was a pause. What a blunder! Al Bull had clearly spoken too soon.

  “No, I don’t know what it is,” he continued, looking a little flustered, “but whatever it is, it has nothing to do with me.”

  “You set me up, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean!” Billings slammed the envelope against the door, causing Al Bull to cower back. “Who asked you to do this?”

  “I have nothing to say to you, Doctor Smith.” The shopkeeper retreated back into his shop and grabbed the door, ready to shut it. “Please go away,” he continued, “I’m busy packing up.” He was about the slam the door shut, but Billings stuck his foot in the opening just in time to block it.

  “Tell me who put you up to this, you blessed little Arab!” he said, slamming the door again, this time with his fist.

  “Leave my shop now,” Al Bull said as he continued to push the door shut, “or I will cry out for the police!”

  “I am the blessed police!”

  Once again the shopkeeper was stumped. But then a thought occurred to him and his eyes lit up. “Ah, so that is why!” he said with a strange little smile on his face.

  “That is why what?”

  “I wondered why the foreign gentleman was so interested in you. I thought perhaps you were a judge or a councillor, but you’re far too young and shabbily dressed for that. But now I know. So Doctor Smith is a policeman, is he?” He laughed. “Oh boy, oh boy! Are you in trouble!”

  “Who are you talking about? What foreign gentleman?”

  “I don’t know, Mr… um… What is your name, anyway?” Al Bull let go of the door and started digging into his coat pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He clearly felt he held all the cards in his hands now that he realised Billings was a policeman.

  “Never mind my name! Who is the foreign gentleman?”

  “I don’t know who he is,” Al Bull said, shoving a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it with the candle. “Really, I don’t. I just know that he came into my shop a few days ago and offered me three hundred pounds for my client list. I’ve been offered money for it before, but never as much as that. And I was desperate to leave this shithole and start a respectable shop in Birmingham. So I sold it to him. Then he came back the next day and offered me a further hundred pounds if I arranged for you to visit me. He had picked your name out of the list. I didn’t ask why. Why would I?”

  “And what about Charlie?”

  “Oh, Charlie has been working for me off and on. But I didn’t put him up to anything. What you did with him, you did out of your own free will. I played no part in that. I have broken no laws.”

  “You’re a pornographer.”

  “Excuse me, Doctor Smith, but I am not a pornographer! I am a dealer in artistic photographs.”

  “You are a blackmailer.”

  “It weren’t me who blackmailed you, Doctor Smith.”

  “Did you know there was a photographer outside?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you were party to a deliberate act of blackmail. And that is a crime, Mr Bull.”

  “And so is sodomy, Doctor Smith!”

  There was a pause.

  “Nothing unlawful happened between me and Charlie,” Billings mumbled feebly.

  “Well, then what are you getting so hot under the collar for?”

  Al Bull was right. Technically no sodomy had been committed, but the pictures were compromising nevertheless. His reputation and career were still at stake.

  “What did the man look like?” Billings asked.

  “Look like? I don’t know. Tall. Dark.”

  “Where was he from?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Arab?”

  “No, he was definitely not an Arab. Russian maybe.”

  “Russian?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know. Now please, Doctor Smith. I’ve told you all I know and it’s three o’clock already. I’m supposed to vacate the premises by four and I’m not yet packed.”

  14. Sandringham House

  “There will be eighty-four guests in total,” said Chief Inspector Wright.

  Billings was sitting in a private room at the White Swan in the village of Dersingham, listening to the briefing of the following day’s activities. There were sixteen officers in the room. Eight Yard men who had travelled with Billings up from London and eight local officers from the Norfolk Constabulary.

  “The guest list includes the Prince’s sister, Her Imperial Majesty the Empress Frederick; the ambassadors of France, Spain and Denmark; our foreign secretary the Marquess of Salisbury; the governor of The Imperial East Africa Company, and many other notables.”

  “Will the Queen be there?” The question came from an eager young Norfolk constable, who was sitting in the front row taking careful notes.

  “No, the Queen is in Osborne House.”

  “Always bloomin’ is,” mumbled Sergeant Cooper who was sitting next to Billings. This caused a ripple of chuckles amongst the men.

  CI Wright turned towards the sergeant with an angry frown. “What was that, Mr Cooper?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “The Queen is in mourning, Mr Cooper, as I’m sure you are aware. She has retired from public life.”

  “She’s been in mourning for twenty-nine bloomin’ years! Ain’t it ’bout time she came out of it?” This was followed by more laughter.

  Sergeant Cooper was a fellow Yard man who’d been loaned to the Security Service. A stout, middle-aged man with a bushy moustache who’d been whining and complaining all the way from London about having to protect the ‘toffs and swells at their little do’. CI Wright ignored him and continued with his briefing.

  “There are thirty-two servants resident at Sandringham House, but most of the guests will also be bringing their own, which means that there will be over two hundred people present at the reception tomorrow. And there’s only sixteen of us, so we must remain alert at all times. There have been no threats and we have no reason to suspect any trouble, but at a gathering like this we must always anticipate intrusions from the usual opportunists who hope to gain notoriety by harming the Prince of Wales or a member of his family. By the usual opportunists, I mean people such as Fenians or anarchists or...”

  “Disgruntled mistresses!” Sergeant Cooper again, causing another ripple of laughter from the men.

  CI Wright ignored him this time and continued with his briefing, but Billings was annoyed by the constant interruptions and turned to scowl at Cooper.

  Cooper had been particularly raucous on the train to Norfolk. He’d taken a pair of dice with him and had started playing with some of the other officers, laughing and shouting and annoying the other passengers in the process. Billings had asked him to keep it down a little (mostly because he was trying to read Robinson Crusoe and couldn’t concentrate) but this didn’t go down well and Cooper had lashed out at him. Cooper had called him dour and boring and had nicknamed him ‘Little Miss Proper-Drawers’. Billings hadn’t replied to this and simply got up and walked off to find a quieter carriage. But as he did so he heard Cooper whisper to the others: “That’s the one from the newspaper article. You know, the Quaker,” and they all burst out laughing again.

  “I hope you’re not frowning at me, Miss Proper-Drawers?” Cooper whispered defiantly.

  Billings didn’t answer and turned his attention back to the briefing. From the corner of his eye he could see Cooper make an obscene gesture to his cronies, who snickered amusedly.

  The real reason for Billings’s agitation, of course, had nothing to do with Cooper. He was still preoccupied with the fate of Sebastian and Mrs Forrester. He had managed to send Mrs Forrester a telegram before he departed to Norfolk, explaining that he’d been taken o
ff the case. He told her not to worry because as far as he was concerned there simply wasn’t enough evidence to convict Sebastian. But he was not convinced of this himself. He regretted not having done more to investigate the case when he was in Sutton Courtenay. His goal at the time had simply been to obtain a positive identification, so he hadn’t even looked at any other evidence the Berkshire Constabulary might have assembled. And now it was too late.

  He was also concerned about Jacobs. Why was Jacobs so upset to find out Sebastian had retracted his confession? It occurred to Billings now how unusual and irregular the way Jacobs had extracted the confession from Brendan was. Why couldn’t he have waited for Billings to return? He assumed the money problems Jacobs was suffering from had made him distracted and impatient, although it did strike him as odd that Jacobs should have such debts in the first place. He didn’t seem like a flamboyant spender.

  And then, of course, there were the photographs. Who was that mysterious Russian who’d been trying to blackmail him? And why?

  *

  While all the other officers had been paired up and sent to patrol the grounds of the estate, Billings was working alone in the wardrobe, guarding the coats, hats and furs of the distinguished guests.

  “It’s because you’re well spoken,” CI Wright had told him. “If any of the guests should speak to you, you’ll be able to answer back in correct English and without an offensive regional accent.”

  Billings knew that it was to his well-spokenness and proper middle class bearings that he owed his job at Scotland Yard. He was in essence a middle class man driven to a working class fate by lack of inheritance. But sometimes he wished he were coarse and rough like Clarkson. Perhaps he wouldn’t have stood out so if he was. Perhaps he’d have been more accepted by his peers.

  The orchestra was playing a waltz in the ballroom next door and Billings could hear a lot of animated chatter from the guests. He even caught the occasional glimpse of swirling plumes and dresses through the crack of the door. It certainly looked like a lively reception. But there was no life in the cold, dark hallway – other than the occasional appearance of an exhausted waiter carrying an empty tray back to the kitchen.