Mortmain Hall

by Martin Edwards

  Or might it be Doodle, desperate to make amends? Was his heart so hardened that he could ignore a plea for mercy?

  The telephone screamed for a third time. Reggie hesitated before stretching out a hand.

  “Yes?”

  “You missed your appointment,” Trueman said.

  Reggie cursed his feebleness. He’d only capitulated because he didn’t want to hurt Doodle’s feelings. Compassion was his fatal flaw. If he hadn’t felt such pity for Gilbert Payne, he’d never have confided in Rachel Savernake. He had a sour taste in his mouth. Sheer frustration emboldened him.

  “I want nothing more to do with you,” he snapped. “Or your mistress.”

  “You’re taking a risk. Playing with fire. What happened to Gilbert Payne…”

  “Don’t you dare threaten me!” Reggie shouted. “I’ll report you to the police!”

  He slammed down the receiver. It was a moment of bravado, the sort he’d hoped to show in the RFC before office life softened him. He gave a nod of satisfaction, although nobody else was there to see it, nobody to give him a round of applause or help him celebrate. Above all, Doodle wasn’t there.

  Ah well, plenty more fish in the sea. He glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. Half past seven, far too early to consider dropping in at the Clan. He’d dine at Kettner’s before drifting over to Soho.

  The morning’s feverish unhappiness was already fading. Why shouldn’t he go back to the Clan? Just for old time’s sake. A quick drink, and then he’d head back home. He wouldn’t stay out too late.

  A tremor of anticipation rippled through his body.

  *

  “Vickers is stubborn,” Trueman said.

  “Scared,” Rachel said.

  A heavy sigh. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “Nothing. Jacob Flint will co-operate.”

  “You’re not giving up?”

  “Have you ever known me to give up? I can’t let sleeping murders lie. Especially after what happened to Gilbert Payne.” She clapped the big man on the back. “Come on, I’m hungry. Time to eat.”

  *

  Jacob adjusted his tie and cleared his throat as he rang the doorbell of Gaunt House. The last time he’d felt so nervous, he’d been waiting in an ante-room before his interview with the Clarion. He’d travelled down from Yorkshire, dreaming that he might make his name in the big city, yet quaking at the prospect of an inquisition by Walter Gomersall, Fleet Street’s very own Torquemada. Calling on Rachel Savernake inspired a different kind of dread.

  Martha Trueman opened the door. Like Rachel and Jacob, she was in her twenties. Tall and slim, she had rich chestnut hair. The first time they’d met, her appearance had shocked him. Eleven years ago, a man had thrown acid at her. He’d meant to destroy her face, and succeeded in disfiguring her left cheek. Now Jacob felt ashamed that it had taken him so long to realise that Rachel was right. Despite the damage to her face, Martha was beautiful. He’d learned to look beyond the scars.

  “Long time no see!” In the quiet of the square, his greeting sounded unnaturally loud. He tried again. “How are things, Martha? You’re looking well.”

  The maid gave a wry smile. She treated him with less suspicion than her brother and sister-in-law, but like her employer she never wasted words.

  “You’re to take a seat in the library. Rachel will see you presently.”

  An oddity of the little ménage at Gaunt House was that Rachel and the Truemans treated each other as equals. Within these walls, the servants never called her “madam” and never made a show of deference. Rachel encouraged their familiarity and they only wore uniforms when the mood took them. Such flouting of convention wasn’t the done thing. But then, Rachel scorned the done thing. During those years of living cheek-by-jowl on the island, these four people had forged a bond as strong as any blood tie. Their closeness was extraordinary. Almost as if they shared a dark secret.

  He followed the maid down the long, spacious hall. On the thick carpet, their footsteps made no sound. A walnut long-case clock chimed nine. Rachel wasn’t hurrying to greet him in person. A mirror reflected his forehead wrinkling in disappointment. Questions jostled in his brain, but Rachel would tell him nothing unless and until it suited her. By forcing him to wait, she was teaching him a lesson.

  “The Chivas Regal is on the table,” Martha said as she ushered him into the library. “Help yourself. Rachel says you can catch up with your reading while you have a drink.”

  The door closed behind her. At least he’d been forgiven for drinking heavily on his last visit here. After a long and unrewarding day, a tumbler of fine whisky represented welcome consolation. He poured himself an extravagant measure, and savoured the smoothness of the spirit as he made himself comfortable in a deep wing chair.

  He’d never before set foot inside the library. Twenty feet long and fifteen wide, with floor-to-ceiling shelves on every wall, and not a single window, it was home to thousands of books, from calf-bound antiquarian tomes that Jacob couldn’t imagine anyone reading to recent titles resplendent in colourful pictorial wrappers. The Savernakes were noted bibliophiles, and the late Judge’s collection was said to be one of the finest in private hands. Since arriving in London, Rachel had added scores of recent titles.

  In a rare confidence, she’d told Jacob that she’d educated herself from the books in Savernake Hall, just as she’d hardened her wiry frame by climbing rocks and swimming in the Irish Sea. It was a way of passing the time when, for all the Savernakes’ wealth, she was scarcely more than a prisoner on the island of Gaunt. Those long, lonely years had made her the woman she was. But who exactly was she? Jacob yearned to find out.

  A chunky volume in a gaudy red-and-yellow dust jacket lay face down on the low table that separated his chair from another. Someone – Rachel, he presumed – had placed inside it a white tasselled bookmark. What was she reading? Inquisitive as ever, he picked up the book, and turned it over.

  The title was Respectable Murders and the publishers trumpeted the author, Leo Slaterbeck, as a distinguished criminologist. According to the description on the inside of the jacket, Slaterbeck’s book comprised studies of cases in which life among the respectable British classes had been ripped apart by murder.

  Rachel’s bookmark was placed at the start of an account of a case that was only three years old, the trial for murder of Sylvia Gorrie. Her name sounded familiar, but Jacob couldn’t place it. Three years ago, he’d barely put his first foot on the ladder as a cub reporter. He’d been more concerned with covering football matches in Leeds than following court cases in distant London.

  Rachel had underlined the second paragraph in blue ink: “The Gorrie trial reminded observers of the tragedy of Edith Thompson. With one signal difference. Mrs Thompson was executed, although many of us consider that her crime was adultery, not murder. Unlike her predecessor, Sylvia Gorrie walked out of the court a free woman.”

  Why did that interest Rachel? He poured himself another whisky. Until she condescended to show herself, he’d while away the time by reading Slaterbeck’s account of Sylvia Gorrie’s story.

  *

  Sylvia Hardman’s father was a Norfolk builder who was bankrupted after a strike by construction workers wrecked his business. Sylvia was undeterred by this calamity. Striking to look at with lustrous blonde hair, she was determined to get on in life. She trained as a typist and moved to London a few months before war broke out; she was eighteen years old.

  On arriving in the capital, she found secure employment in a government department, but in 1921 she moved to the offices of the London School of Economics. While working in that office, she met the economist and lecturer Walter Gorrie, an intellectual in his late forties and one of the most influential thinkers of the day. Having inherited a quarter of a million pounds from his father, an armaments manufacturer, Gorrie had devoted himself to campaigning for world peace coupled with radical change for the good of the ordinary working man.

  Within six
weeks of their first meeting, he and Sylvia became man and wife. The marriage astonished everyone in Gorrie’s circle, since the couple appeared to have little in common, and Walter was universally pigeonholed as “a confirmed bachelor”. As Slaterbeck remarked, nobody expected him to embrace such radical change for the good of an ordinary working woman.

  Sylvia moved into her husband’s home, a Georgian mansion complete with tennis court and an ornamental lake, on the outskirts of Salisbury. No longer needing to work, she adored the trappings of wealth. When she wasn’t swimming in the lake or practising her forehand with a succession of handsome young coaches, she’d go out shopping in her newest mink coat, or set off for a spin in her Sunbeam Tourer.

  The Gorries’ social life together was sterile. His circle, exclusively masculine, comprised economics students, members of parliament, and trade union leaders. He couldn’t drive or swim, and hated tennis. Political arguments, meat and drink to her husband, sent Sylvia to sleep. Time passed, boredom set in.

  Gorrie was often in London, leaving his wife to her own devices. With no children to keep her occupied, she joined an amateur dramatic society. Slaterbeck mentioned a series of flirtations, some of which developed into full-blown but short-lived romances. Then she became infatuated with Ralph Cullerton.

  Cullerton was nine years younger than Sylvia. A clerk in an insurance brokerage, he hated office work and was hopelessly incompetent. If his uncle hadn’t been senior partner in the firm, he’d have been out on his ear. Handsome if chinless, he dreamed of becoming a famous actor, but was as likely to set foot on the moon as tread the boards of the Old Vic. His delivery was lifeless, and his butterfly brain was incapable of remembering lines. For most of his colleagues in the dramatic society, his long hair, winsome expression, and habitual sulkiness made him a laughing stock.

  Sylvia fell for him, head over heels. Making the most of Gorrie’s frequent absences from home, they became intimate, and insatiable. They fantasised about running away together, and making a new life in a distant land, where jealous folk wouldn’t mock her lowly origins or his yearning to make a name in the theatre.

  The couple claimed that, in return for her helping him to learn his lines, Ralph was teaching Sylvia how to improve her backhand. But the snatched hours together were not enough. Neither could bear to be out of touch for long, so they wrote to each other, sometimes more than once a day.

  “Ralph and Sylvia exchanged correspondence brimming with naive expressions of mutual ardour,” Slaterbeck wrote, “and unconstrained by commonly accepted standards of decency. Their language might embarrass a dock worker. Ralph’s spelling and grammar would certainly shame an eleven-year-old.”

  Sylvia’s marriage had never been consummated. She could have sought an annulment rather than a divorce, but although she wanted to be rid of Gorrie, she was less keen on losing her life of luxury. Panic sounded in her letters to Ralph as she begged him to do something. Each reply from Ralph was wilder than the last. His first instinct, to shoot himself with his father’s old army revolver, met a wail of protest.

  Sweety pie, but what about me?

  As a romantic alternative, he proposed a suicide pact. Sylvia’s appalled refusal made clear that she’d much prefer him to do something about Walter. Anything, she said, anything at all.

  Ill have it out with him, promised Ralph. He had no time for apostrophes.

  She begged her lover to be decisive. Come what may, she’d stand by him.

  Ill do it. Cross my hart and hope to die.

  Walter Gorrie returned to Salisbury from a meeting in London at two o’clock the next afternoon. A creature of habit, he took a constitutional around the ornamental lake at teatime, rain or shine. An April shower had left the grass damp and the stone paths slippery, but the sun broke through as he strolled by the water’s edge. Lost in thought, he didn’t see Ralph Cullerton step out from an oak tree’s shade, waving a gun.

  “Ralph! Please!”

  Standing on the terrace at the back of the house, Sylvia watched as her lover confronted her husband. She shrieked wildly, and started to run towards them. One of the maids heard the commotion and pressed her nose to the kitchen window. As she later testified, Ralph Cullerton struck out at his rival, and after a brief, hectic struggle, Gorrie lost his footing on the treacherous York stone. Screaming with pain, he tumbled head first into the water.

  Gorrie’s desperate cry paralysed Cullerton. Only as Sylvia, panting and sobbing, reached the lake did he pull himself together. It looked as though he might dive in to the water himself, but Sylvia banged her fists on his chest in a frenzy of distress. The maid watched the couple tussling with each other, and her own squeals of anguish acted as a summons to Wann, the elderly butler. Ordering her to telephone the police, Wann hurried outside himself. Sylvia kicked off her shoes and jumped into the lake. Cullerton jumped in after her, and they struggled with each other, as well as with the motionless body.

  Walter Gorrie was dead before they hauled him out of the water.

  *

  Sylvia Gorrie and Ralph Cullerton were both charged with murdering her husband. Ralph insisted that he’d only meant to frighten Walter Gorrie into agreeing to divorce his wife and provide for her financially. The gun was a toy, a theatrical prop. The correspondence with Sylvia was simply an outpouring of romantic twaddle. Neither of them, he insisted, took a word of it seriously.

  “Not even your expressions of mutual devotion?” enquired the attorney general, leading for the Crown.

  “That was different!”

  It was one of half a dozen foolish answers which knotted the noose around Ralph Cullerton’s neck.

  According to Leo Slaterbeck, Sylvia learned from the shocking precedent of Edith Thompson, whose inept testimony in her own defence had sealed her fate. Sylvia declined to go into the witness box. The case against her was, her counsel said, so pitifully inadequate that she refused to dignify it with a response.

  That decision was a risk, and Slaterbeck evidently thought the prosecution had a strong case. It wasn’t simply that Sylvia had egged Ralph on, arguably inciting him to kill her husband. Her wild reaction to Ralph’s attack had prevented him from rescuing Walter, while her own belated attempt to save her husband had done more harm than good.

  The cards fell in her favour. The judge was an elderly puritan with a rabid attachment to the black cap who was showing alarming signs of senility. He’d not presided over a capital case for years, and many senior figures in the legal profession were appalled that he had been allowed a last hurrah. His summing-up savaged Sylvia, and his ranting about her moral turpitude made even journalists blanch. Her silent dignity in the dock impressed the jury. They took less than half an hour to acquit her, and tears of relief were still trickling down her cheeks as in thunderous tones, the judge sentenced Ralph Cullerton to death.

  Ralph Cullerton was hanged a month later. Slaterbeck noted that he’d outlived the judge, who died of a stroke the day before the execution.

  *

  Replete after a dinner of succulent braised venison washed down with a bottle of full-bodied Grenache, Reggie Vickers emerged from the restaurant into the balmy Soho evening. Half past nine, and the street was quiet. It was still light – the longest day of the year was only a few days past – and the district never came fully to life until darkness fell.

  Reggie loved Soho: the bright lights and raucous laughter, the smells from the restaurants and pubs, the flavour of danger in the air when night-time came. There were innocent pleasures to be had, as well as forbidden delights. On a Saturday, with nothing better to do, he’d wander around Berwick Street Market, smell the spice and coffee, and indulge his craving for salt beef sandwiches. A fruit seller who was rumoured to inject his wares with water so as to make them juicier would cry, “A glass of wine in every orange!”

  Tonight Reggie felt a touch light-headed. Not unpleasantly so: he wasn’t drunk, or even woozy, just unfocused after a strange day. Once again he was footloose and fancy-f
ree. This was quite like old times. There was no reason to steer clear of the Clan, no reason at all.

  Shame about Doodle, but his mood was philosophical. The Grenache helped. Soon he’d be able to look back on their affair with a tinge of nostalgia. The truth was, it could never have worked. Their backgrounds were too different, and these things mattered. He regretted calling Doodle a nobody, but who could deny that he was right? They’d only been together for the blink of an eye. As the initial pain of rejection eased, it felt easier to bear than the responsibility of bringing the curtain down on a relationship that had run its course. Sad, but there it was.

  Yes, it would be fun to return to the Clan. He wouldn’t linger. Just one drink, and no playing cards. Call it a trip down memory lane.

  What harm could it do?

  8

  “Ah, one of my favourite murders,” Rachel Savernake said, glancing over Jacob’s shoulder.

  Immersed in Slaterbeck’s narrative, Jacob hadn’t heard the library door open. As Rachel spoke, he breathed in her perfume, a subtle fragrance of violet. He looked up. Her dark hair was soft and fine, like chiffon. Dropping the book on the table, he realised he was blushing. Anyone would think she’d caught him salivating over a smuggled copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  “Good evening.” He couldn’t help glancing at his watch. “Thanks for the invitation.”

  She took a seat in the wing chair facing him, but said nothing. Small talk held no interest for her. Nor did he expect an apology for the discourtesy of keeping him waiting for fully thirty minutes. Rachel Savernake always did as she pleased.

  Nettled, he said, “You’re interested in Sylvia Gorrie? I saw you’d marked up that chapter. I suppose the scandal ruined her?”

  Rachel made a dismissive movement with her shoulders. The black crêpe frock, unfussy and elegant, suited her. The latest creation of one of her favourite Continental designers, he presumed, costing more than he earned in a year.