OLD FAITHFUL PUSHED past to hurry up the stairs, and Aldershott, spreading his arms, drove the other men out of the vault. Both he and Bradshaw had slipped back into their old Army mindsets: Aldershott’s expression was even stonier than usual, and Bradshaw had lost his affability. This was, of course, a crisis, and each and every one of them had been taught to deal with a crisis in terse, impersonal terms.
“That’s your letter opener,” Bradshaw told Aldershott, with a nod towards the knife handle. His voice was unusually steady. “Better check your office.”
“In good time, Mr. Bradshaw,” Aldershott snapped back. Eric had never heard Aldershott address Bradshaw as “Mister” before.
Meanwhile, Wolfe had turned around and begun to climb the stairs.
“Captain Wolfe!” Aldershott barked. “You are not to leave the premises! Return at once!”
Wolfe stopped at the top of the stairs and only half turned back towards the club president. His face was white and his voice was almost a caricature of its usual smug, superior tone. “You’re not my commanding officer, Mr. Aldershott. I know perfectly well how this looks now, and how much worse it would look if I were to run. But I refuse to spend the next hour standing about in that filthy little room with a body rotting not five feet away. If you need me, I will be in the lounge.”
And with that: exit Wolfe, stage right.
Eric glanced around at the other two men. Bradshaw’s beard was beginning to quiver with uncertainty as the man recalled the complications of dealing with civilian crime. Aldershott looked determined to stand here until he was relieved, whenever that might be.
“Wolfe is right,” Eric said. “There’s no sense in waiting around down here. We’d better wait for the police up in the lounge. And tell the attendants not to let anyone leave the building.”
Aldershott rounded on him as though this were all his fault. “Don’t presume to tell me how to run my club, Peterkin,” he snapped. He made an inarticulate sound of frustration, then brusquely gestured to Bradshaw to proceed.
Bradshaw gave Eric a curt nod, then hurried up the stairs to call the police and make sure no one left the building. Not that it would do much good, Eric thought, his mind already working through the facts of this very real murder mystery. If he had to guess, he’d say Benson was killed several hours ago, certainly before Old Faithful came on duty and the Britannia began to wake up. Someone would have seen Benson coming down from his room otherwise. Whoever the killer was, he would have had ample time to make his escape, and might be halfway to the Hebrides by now, for all they knew.
Unless it was Wolfe. But would Wolfe’s excessive pride allow him to leave such a messy crime scene? Even if the encounter had occurred on the spur of the moment, Wolfe was sure to have found a way to keep it tidy.
The office of the club president was no more than five feet from the door to the vault stairwell. Aldershott paid Eric no mind as he ascended the stairs and made straight for the office door, then uttered an oath when he found it unlocked. No, not unlocked, but forced: someone had taken a fireplace poker to it and cracked the frame. The poker itself lay discarded in a corner of the office, while all the drawers of Aldershott’s desk had been pulled out and rummaged through. The floor and desktop were littered with papers, which Aldershott, after letting out a grunt of frustration, began sorting into tidy little piles.
Eric pulled to a halt at the doorway and said, “Aldershott! What are you doing? You shouldn’t touch anything!”
“Shut it, Peterkin.”
“But the police will want to look at this. Whatever’s happened here has to be connected to what’s happened downstairs. I mean, the letter opener—”
“I told you to leave things to your betters,” Aldershott snarled, shaking a handful of papers at Eric. “Previous presidents may have used this room as a place in which to nap, but I use it for important business! These documents represent interests in a hundred different investments related to the members of the club. Not that I expect you to know anything about such things.” Aldershott shoved the handful of papers into one drawer and slammed it shut. “If the police want anything, the poker’s right there, and I can tell them where my letter opener’s usually kept: right here on top of my desk blotter. There is nothing, Peterkin, to be gained from leaving sensitive documents lying about for all to see.”
Eric briefly considered wrestling Aldershott away from the room, or calling for someone to help him do so, but reflected that this would only further disturb the scene. If he couldn’t stop Aldershott from cleaning up the office, he could at least take a minute to study it before it got completely ruined.
The passage of past presidents, each with his own peculiarities, had left its imprint here: there were cheap prints pulled from art folios, newspaper clippings of forgotten exploits, a dead fern that had yet to be thrown out, and a rather alarming African mask. The wallpaper was a patchwork of faded rectangles where pictures had been put up and taken down again. Through the window, one could look out onto the utility court that ran along the side of the building and the bare brick wall opposite; Eric could see the catch on the window casement was in the locked position, and nothing there appeared to have been touched. The transom pane above was wide open, letting the cold air in, but climbing in and out through it seemed like an unlikely prospect.
By the desk, a wastepaper basket contained a few torn envelopes and some brown paper, the remnants of yesterday’s post. An ashtray had been knocked from the desk, scattering a full complement of cigarette stubs and ash over the floor. A table in the corner held a decanter of brandy, and here Eric noticed a slight grease stain on the lip of two of the glasses beside it.
“Hello,” he said, “it looks like someone’s been at the brandy. You’ll want to not touch those. There’ll be fingerprints—”
“Of course someone’s been at the brandy! It’s my office, so who do you think that might be?”
Eric gave the room another look around—nothing in the fireplace grate, nothing out of place except for the poker and the papers thrown haphazardly from the drawers of the desk. He’d seen, perhaps, everything there was to see. It was time to make a retreat, before Aldershott really got upset.
He bumped into Bradshaw a few steps down the corridor. Behind him, Aldershott had gone back to tidying up his office, cursing all the way.
“The police should be here very shortly,” Bradshaw said. “Aldershott will want to know.”
“You’d better be the one to tell him,” Eric replied. “He isn’t too happy with me right this minute. You’d better tell him to leave off cleaning his office, too. Someone ransacked it last night, and the police will want to look at it.”
Bradshaw nodded and ambled past Eric to give Aldershott the word. Eric noted that Aldershott seemed far more amenable to Bradshaw’s persuasion: the sound of rustling papers and slamming drawers ceased, to be replaced by a whispered discussion between the two men. But perhaps it was only that they’d worked together before and knew each other better. Or so Eric told himself.
Back in the lounge, Wolfe had secluded himself in a corner of the bar and was nursing a drink with every appearance of normalcy. It wasn’t in Wolfe to let on that anything was amiss: if his upper lip were any stiffer, he’d need surgery to eat his dinner. There were very few other club members in the lounge at the moment, thankfully, and a handful more in the dining room downstairs. They all seemed quite oblivious to the crisis as yet, but Eric took the precaution of noting who was here, just in case.
Was it just half an hour ago that he’d been thinking of a nice helping of shepherd’s pie for his dinner? The thought of food right now made him … not precisely ill, because he was almost never ill, but certainly unsettled. The sense of unease that had begun with Wolfe’s unveiling of his prize hadn’t left him, even after the discovery of Benson’s corpse.
Corpse.
That word belonged out in the trenches of Flanders, not within the comforting confines of the Britannia Club. A corpse was a thing rotting in front of the trenches, half sunk into the mud, too close to ignore but too far away to do anything about. A corpse was a limp, gas-drowned body—certainly not your mate of five minutes ago—flung into the back of a wagon. A corpse was not a thing found within the polished, hallowed halls of the Britannia Club. If you threw someone over the club bar in a brawl, it was supposed to end with the both of you uproariously drunk and sworn to be brothers in arms forever. Not with one of you bleeding out on the floor with a knife in your neck.
This wasn’t how the world of the Britannia Club was supposed to work.
Turning on his heel, Eric strode out onto the landing overlooking the lobby downstairs. Up above, clouds raced across the face of the sun, and the skylight showered the marble floor with intermittent bursts of sunlight and shadow. He could just see Old Faithful pacing agitatedly behind the front desk. People had to know, from the fellow’s behaviour, that something was up. Aldershott had finally gone to Bradshaw’s office to wait for the police, and Bradshaw was with him—hopefully keeping him out of trouble.
Eric frowned. Given the way Benson was dressed when they found him, he must have spent the night here after all, instead of at Saxon’s. He looked as though he’d come down in a hurry, barely bothering to do up his trousers … could he have left his door unlocked behind him? When did the custodial staff set about cleaning those rooms, anyway?
It took Eric a moment to remember Old Faithful’s real name. “Cully!” he called. “I say, Cully! No, wait right there; I’ll come down to you.”
Eric made his way down the stairs and over to the front desk. “Benson spent the night here, didn’t he? Which room was he in? We can’t let anyone in there until the police get here.”
Old Faithful’s eyes went wide. “You’re right, sir! I never thought of that. Come with me, sir.”
They hurried up the main staircase to the first floor, and then up a smaller set of stairs to the second. “Here we are, sir.” Old Faithful stopped in front of a door and opened it. “I should have known there was something amiss when I found it open this morning, but it looked like he’d only stepped out for a moment, maybe to use the facilities. I just closed the door without locking it. I’m quite sure nobody else has been in there yet.”
Eric knew better than to enter a room that the police might want to examine, but from his vantage point he could see quite a good deal. He’d nearly forgotten how windy the day was: the window was open, and some soot and detritus had blown in. That window overlooked the utility court beside the building, and all the sounds below came funneling up and echoing back against the hard brick of the building opposite.
Old Faithful shifted nervously from one foot to the other, and Eric said to him, “Benson wanted this room last minute, did he? I thought he had other arrangements planned for last night.”
“I reckon he did, sir. It was quite late—nearly ten o’clock—when he rang me bell and said he was going to be spending the night after all. Not but it hasn’t happened before, with other gentlemen. Things happen of a sudden, and then plans have to be changed, and what can you do?” The old man fidgeted again, and went on, more anxiously: “This … this murder, though—it’s murder, isn’t it? Man doesn’t stab himself in the neck, either on purpose or on accident. Never seen the like of it, sir, not in all the time I’ve been here. And I never saw nor heard nothing. I waited downstairs until half eleven in case any other gentlemen decided they were in no fit state to go home to the missus after last call at the pubs, and then I went back to me own little flat, upstairs from the staff room, and went to bed. The night attendants will vouch for me, sir.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Cully.”
It seemed ridiculous to think of Old Faithful as a suspect in a murder, but then it had seemed ridiculous to think of the Britannia as the scene of a murder, too. Unwilling as he was to consider it, Eric had to admit that Old Faithful was a suspect … unless the night attendants really could supply him with an airtight alibi. And why on earth would Old Faithful, permanent fixture as he was, want to injure a member of the club to which he’d devoted his life?
“I think it’s only a matter of time, sir,” Old Faithful went on, his voice dropping to an anxious whisper. “They’ll know I’ve been down in the vault, too; my fingerprints will be on the vault door. And nobody touches that door but me.” The poor fellow had no idea about the bet.
“But turning that wheel is your job,” Eric said. “Everyone knows that. I’d be more worried if your fingerprints weren’t on it. If they’re there, it’s really more a sign you’ve got nothing to fear.”
“You think so, sir?”
Eric nodded, and felt the tension ease out of the man beside him. Old Faithful had always treated him as a proper member, he thought, never as an interloper. It was something Eric had grown to take for granted, and he reminded himself now to be grateful for the old man’s service.
The lodging rooms of the Britannia were fairly spartan, each containing a single bed, a washstand, a chest of drawers, and a single chair that had probably seen long years of service in the public rooms below before being retired to the lodging rooms above. Benson’s room had an armchair similar to those in the lounge, though considerably more threadbare; his jacket and waistcoat were flung carelessly over its back, and his necktie lay on the floor beside it. His hat, a grey felt cap better suited to the countryside than to the city, had fallen from the hook behind the door and now lay on the floor against the corner of the door. The bed itself, positioned lengthwise about a foot from the window, was a similarly untidy situation: its covers were heaped up on the near side and practically spilling over onto the floor, as if violently cast aside.
Eric’s attention was arrested by a photograph lying on top of Benson’s chest of drawers, among the toiletries. This one was a studio portrait of a young woman, a different one from the nurse who’d been the subject of the now-missing photograph from the vault. There was no mistaking the eyes, the cheekbones, or the nose … Eric wanted to say she was Chinese, if only because his mother had been, but she could easily have been Japanese or any of the Far Eastern races. Who was she, and why did Benson have a picture of her on his chest of drawers? Wasn’t he supposed to be married to the “Helen” of the other photograph?
Could this be the Emily whom Mrs. Aldershott had referred to last night?
“Peterkin!”
The hearty slap to the back nearly sent Eric tumbling headlong into the very room he was trying to keep people out of. He caught himself just in time and turned around. “Norris,” he said, recognising the man who was now grinning mischievously at him—and wearing nothing but a towel. Evidently, Patrick Norris had spent the night here too, and had only just stepped out of the bath.
“Lieutenant Norris, sir!” Old Faithful exclaimed. “You’re not decent!”
“I don’t think I ever was,” Norris replied with a laugh. “What? We’re all men here; I’m sure you’ve seen worse in the barracks. I know I have.”
“You’ll catch your death of cold!”
“Certainly, if you insist on leaving that door open. There’s a nasty draught … Oh, someone’s left the window open, has he? In October, no less …” Here, Norris attempted to enter the room, and both Eric and Old Faithful hauled him back out. Norris turned to them in surprise. “I say! What’s got into the two of you? Such grim expressions you’ve got! You’d think someone died.”
“There’s been a murder, sir!” Old Faithful burst out.
Norris’s eyebrows shot up into his damp-tousled curls, and he turned to Eric for confirmation.
“Albert Benson,” Eric clarified. “He was found in the vault not half an hour ago with a knife in his throat.”
“I see. Well, that’s one way to ruin a weekend.” Norris’s tone was light, but his expression was anything but. “I reckon I’d better get dressed in a hurry, then. Wouldn’t do to meet the bobbies in the altogether.”
Eric motioned to Old Faithful to stand guard, and followed Norris as the latter trotted down the corridor to his room. “I take it you spent the night as well, then?” he said, more as a way to tag along than to confirm what he already suspected.
“I’m between lodgings at the moment. Rather bad luck: it’s no fun being woken up at all hours by people knocking over dustbins outside your window, but this time I’ve got a quiet room, at least.”
Patrick Norris was the last of the five board officers after Aldershott, Bradshaw, Saxon, and Wolfe. He was a wiry little terrier of a man built on much the same lines as Eric himself, and with similarly dark colouring. But Norris was of unquestionably Anglo-Saxon descent, and he had the roguish, scruffy charm of an unrepentant ne’er-do-well. This was a different sort of scruffiness from Saxon’s: where Saxon looked as if he simply didn’t care what you or anyone else thought, Norris looked as though he was just so happy to see you that he couldn’t be bothered to quite finish knotting his tie before taking you out for a night on the town.
“Damned shame about Benson,” Norris muttered as he rubbed his towel vigorously over his wet hair and then carelessly cast it aside. “We were just discussing the fellow’s membership yesterday morning. I’ve been meaning to talk to you as well. I’d like to pick your brains about what it’s like as a … well, you know, living in two worlds as you do. For this stage production I’m collaborating on.” Norris made his living as a musical composer and had garnered a moderate degree of success. His work was largely for the stage, and he often had as much interest in the play itself as in the musical accompaniment. The fashionably Oriental villain of his last collaboration had been suspiciously Eric-like.
“I’m here nearly every day,” Eric said. “Now seems like an odd time to bring it up.”
“I know, I know, but I actually just met with my playwright friend yesterday afternoon. This next production is going to be a full-blown opera, Peterkin.” Norris gave a proud wave to the music score pages scattered around the armchair, and promptly lost his cufflinks. “This murder, though. Terrible,” he went on, opting to roll his sleeves up over his forearms instead of hunting under the bed for the missing cufflinks. “Do we know who did it? No? I heard about that bet poor Benson had with Wolfe and Aldershott … I reckon that means Wolfe will be the prime suspect. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes. Should I shave?”
“I don’t think there’s any hot water in the jug,” Eric said, peering at the washstand. “And the police will be here by the time you’ve had an attendant fetch some … or fetched some yourself.”
Norris set his razor aside with an air of regret. “I reckon you’re right. And I reckon a man’s got a right to a certain amount of stubble on a Saturday. Don’t tell Wolfe I said that.” He rummaged around in his chest of drawers and emerged with a silver cigarette case. “I think I’m as presentable now as I need to be. Cigarette?”
Eric accepted the proffered cigarette, lit it, and, occupied as he was, promptly forgot about it. “Wolfe was with us when we found the body. He seemed as surprised as we were. I don’t know if he’s so good an actor, or if he has quite the bloody cheek to stick around after doing the deed.”
Norris blew out a smoke ring. “Wolfe’s got plenty of cheek. That’s what I like about the fellow. But I don’t see him doing a murder, not if it means getting blood on his precious shirt cuffs. Depend upon it—it’ll be some burglar whom Benson caught unawares. The blighter struck back, killed him, got cold feet, and did a flit.”
“How’d he get in the vault, then? We’re supposed to be proof against that sort of thing.”
“Wolfe found a way. And that, by the way, is a waste of a perfectly good cigarette.”
Eric looked down in surprise at the tower of ash extending from the filter between his fingers, and quickly disposed of it. Meanwhile, Norris went to open the door, and the soundproofed silence was broken by the tramp of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Here’s the police,” Norris said, “right on schedule. And it looks like we’re in luck. That’s Detective Inspector Horatio Parker himself. They say he’s an absolute wizard at the Yard. Aldershott’s been trying to get him to join since the dawn of time—he’s a Victoria Cross, you know, and Aldershott positively worships that sort of thing—though maybe it’s just as well Parker never took up the offer … Would be a conflict of interest otherwise, wouldn’t you say? Mark my words, with Parker in charge, this whole thing will be over and done in an hour, tops.”
Horatio Parker?
Wasn’t that the name on the medical report that had gone missing from Benson’s box?
The first thing one noticed about Detective Inspector Horatio Parker was the scar that went from cheekbone to temple on the left side of his face, pulling the flesh towards it and shining like silver in the light. Another inch up and it would have blinded him. Eric imagined it might have been a duelling scar, left a little too long before being given medical attention.
Parker himself was slightly built, his whipcord-thin body lost under the layered fabric of his trench coat and suit, and his untidy dark hair was shot through with grey. Eric guessed him to be just past thirty-five, though there was a haggardness about his cheeks that suggested a much older man. He works too hard, Eric thought. That much was obvious.
He’d seemed much younger in the now-missing photograph from Benson’s box. Oh yes, Eric recognised him now as one of the patients crowding around the nurse whose birthday it was, though the scar hadn’t been present then.
Funny that both articles referencing the inspector directly should be the ones to go missing first. Eric had an idea that Detective Inspector Horatio Parker was the last person who should be handling this murder inquiry.
The inspector pulled out a pocket watch to check the time. The dull brass gleamed like an echo of the scar on his cheek. “Mr. Cully here,” he said, “says it was your idea to guard the dead man’s room and see that no one got in.” Hard eyes scanned Eric from head to toe before boring into his eyes. “Good thinking,” he barked suddenly, in much the same tone as one might say, “Go to hell,” just as Eric opened his mouth to inform him that he might be an interested party.
“I’ll want to take your statement later,” the inspector said. “For now, I must ask you to wait.” He looked down the corridor to the doors of all the club’s lodging rooms. “Alone, if you don’t mind. It reduces the potential for collusion.”
He suspects me, Eric thought, and why am I not surprised?
Not that there was much choice about it. Without waiting for a response, the inspector had turned to enter Benson’s room, and Old Faithful was now apologetically tugging at Eric’s arm to take him to the nearest lodging room. Norris had long since retreated to his own room and locked the door.
A loud crash from the stairwell interrupted them. It was followed by sounds of a struggle, and a stream of bitter invective. Old Faithful dropped Eric’s arm to stare down the corridor. Eric turned around to address the inspector, but stopped.
Inside Benson’s room, Inspector Parker had picked up the photograph from Benson’s chest of drawers—the portrait of the Chinese woman—and folded it into quarters.
He tucked it into his inside jacket pocket.
Before Eric could say a word, a pair of constables erupted into the corridor with Oliver Saxon, snarling like a savage animal, held tightly between them. Saxon stopped abruptly as Inspector Parker stepped out of Benson’s room and fixed him with a stern glare.
“We caught this one sneaking in from the back entrance,” one of the constables announced. “Mighty suspicious, wouldn’t you say?”
Saxon glared back at the inspector and spat on the carpet. “You,” he growled. “I might have known it would be you.”