✥
A HOSPITAL VAN WAS about to set off to collect a prisoner from the station. Despite and because of Sidney Grice’s peremptory manner, the driver agreed to give us a lift so long as my guardian sat in the back with the warders.
‘That was productive,’ he announced, rejoining me on the platform. ‘After I tactfully exposited to my travelling companions how incompetent they were, they expressed the hope that one day they might be looking after me.’
‘I am sure they meant it kindly,’ I comforted him.
‘I do not doubt it,’ he agreed in all seriousness.
The train arrived on time and we settled into an otherwise empty compartment near the front.
‘Why should Angelina Innocenti want to kill you?’ I asked.
My guardian shook his insulated flask sadly. ‘Probably because I refused to help her defence.’
‘Did you believe her to be guilty?’ I tried to ignore my craving for a cigarette.
‘More importantly than that –’ he pulled out the cork and upended his bottle, unwilling to admit to himself that it was empty – ‘I believed her to be poor.’
‘And you would not help her because she could not afford your outrageous fees?’
A drip fell on to the back of his hand just as it had that day in my cell.
‘You are hiding something from me,’ I said.
‘No,’ Sidney Grice told me very quietly. ‘I am hiding a great many things.’ And then, ‘If ever you get out of here, do you want to leave our home?’
‘Where would I go?’ I was fascinated by an arc of blood vessels on the back of his hand. ‘You are my protector and you called it our home.’
My guardian patted my shoulder awkwardly and I looked down to see a drop of water falling for ever until it burst.
‘Quite so.’ Mr G slipped his flask away. ‘I had another reason but, before you give vent to a bout of Middletonian self-righteousness, perhaps you would be so delightful as to satisfy my curiosity. How often do the police, the clergy, Members of Parliament or the admirals of our unparalleled fleet work for no remuneration?’
He spread out his copy of the Bloomsbury Bugle.
‘I think you know the answer to that,’ I replied grumpily, for it was difficult to live with a man who was always right, as my best friend Harriet often affirmed. I opened my Henry James novel.
‘According to this, Dr William Price has been arrested for attempting to incinerate his dead son,’ I was informed from behind the curtain of newsprint.
‘I have no objection to cremation,’ I chatted. ‘It is common in India and shows every respect for the dead.’
‘I care not a jot about what they do to cadavers three thousand, six hundred and fourteen miles away.’ He lowered the screen. ‘But to burn anyone here is an abomination.’
I resisted the temptation to hurl my book at him. ‘You think an Englishman’s body is worth more than that of an Indian?’
Mr G considered my question. ‘A maharajah’s corpse might be ransomed for more than that of one of the street vermin one stumbles over daily.’ He forced his eyelids apart and dropped his glass eye into his palm. ‘But I am more concerned with the criminological aspects. A body burned may be innumerable clues destroyed.’ He shook out a lavender patch. ‘How on earth could I have solved the Camden Vampire Mystery if those remains had been no more than eight bucketfuls of ashes?’
He raised the curtain and I reflected how Harriet had told me I was lucky. Her husband only thought he was infallible. My guardian very nearly was.
‘What does that say on the back page of the Bugle?’ I asked and he tsked.
‘Even you might have observed that I have got no further than page three and am trying to read a report on the effects of vibrations from our underground railways on the habits of earthworms.’ Nonetheless he folded his paper and turned it round. ‘Horse Predicted the Murder of Reclusive Mr Nathan Mortlock,’ he narrated. ‘I might have known. It was scribbled by the juvenile hand of your drinking companion, the Trumpeter.’
It was true that Traf Trumpington had bought me brandy once when I was upset by the murder of the Reverend Jackaman, but I had regarded him with nothing but suspicion since he wrote scurrilous innuendoes about my guardian and myself. I decided to let Sidney Grice’s barb pass.
‘What does it say?’
‘See for yourself.’ Mr G thrust the paper at me and I scanned the four columns.
‘Mr Gerald Feather, a Bloomsbury coal merchant, claims that his horse Megan has psychic powers because she was spooked—’
My guardian pulled a sour face. ‘How loathsome that last word is. I believe it is Dutch in origin but expropriated by those renegades who describe themselves revoltingly as,’ he swallowed, ‘Americans.’
‘Just as the day before the Garstang family was massacred, Boadicea – the horse belonging to Mr Nig, a purveyor of spirits – stampeded, when he was lifting a crate of sherry from his cart, the same thing happened to the coalseller’s horse, Megan, the day after Nathan Mortlock met his end.’ I précised and skimmed through the article. ‘He says Megan has always been a placid animal and never pays any attention to shouts, the torments of street urchins or the noises of traffic, but she bolted in Burton Terrace on that one occasion.’
‘Fascinating.’ Sidney Grice brightened briefly.
‘Surely you do not believe the story,’ I protested. ‘She is probably getting old and he wants to sell her to a travelling show – like that monkey who was supposed to be able to sing.’
‘How cynical you are becoming.’ My guardian observed me sorrowfully. ‘I am delighted to note. Still, he may be worth interviewing.’
‘You cannot be serious,’ I objected.
‘I am not in the habit of manufacturing comic entertainments whilst being propelled along the London and South Western Railway track.’ He snatched his paper back. ‘I am struck by the claims that the first horse predicted death but the second detected it.’ He ripped out the article and stuffed it into his satchel. ‘If the owner of the unfortunately named Megan were inventing the story, surely he would pretend his mare had foretold the murder too.’
We rattled over the points.
‘So now you are a woman of means,’ George Pound said, ‘and therefore beyond my reach.’
I forced myself to concentrate.
‘Do you think Easterly was telling the truth about having an itch?’
‘Not entirely.’ My guardian unhooked the leather window strap. ‘He lied about staying in his chair. In the process of examining his shoes I dabbed the soles with a slow-setting ink.’
‘The metal bar,’ I recollected.
‘The Grice Patent Marking Rod.’ He pulled the strap up a notch to close the window.
‘So he left marks on the floor.’ I wished it had been a corridor train, then I could have gone up the corridor for a smoke.
‘The process of deduction goes some way beyond repeating what you have been told, but in a slightly different way,’ he expounded. ‘And, to save your tongue from further unnecessary exercise, the exuberantly dubbed Sou’ Easterly Gale Nutter left evidence that he had walked some distance along the hall away from the pot of peacock feathers. Unfortunately, the ink was exhausted after five paces but the marks were close enough together to suggest that he was creeping.’
My guardian folded the newspaper with great care.
‘He may have been trying to walk off his cramp.’ I suggested. ‘There are several innocent explanations for his action.’
‘But none for his lies,’ Sidney Grice retorted. ‘I shall interrogate him about it tomorrow after my appointment with one Joseph Penton, known to his customers as Bookie Joe.’
‘What time are we setting out?’ I enquired.
Sidney Grice clapped the back of his head and his eye shot into his other hand. The suddenness of it still unnerved me sometimes, with that dark cavity staring into my mind.
‘We?’ he cried in astonishment.
‘But we always question witnesses together,’ I protested and waited for him to list the many times when we had not.
My guardian polished his eye. ‘My dear March Lillian Constance Middleton, I have a much more important task for you than that.’ He glanced at my book. ‘What are you reading?’
‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ I told him.
‘Not a description of you then.’ He sniffed and returned to his worms.