Chapter 7

 

In Which John Pickett Makes a Tactical Error

 

Although Pickett had been quick to absolve the magistrate of any responsibility, even indirectly, for his father’s murder, there was another toward whom he was not prepared to offer the same forbearance. And so, once the magistrate and his hired conveyance were well out of sight, Pickett turned his steps in quite the wrong direction for anyone wishing to reach Curzon Street. By the time he reached the elegant Park Lane house that was his intended destination, the guilt of its primary occupant had taken such firm possession of his mind that he ignored the brass knocker and began to pound on the door with his fist.

“Open up!” he bellowed, heedless of the lateness of the hour and the slumbering residents of the adjacent dwellings. “I know you’re in there! Open up, you bloody bastard!”

A moment later the door opened and a butler, somehow contriving to appear stately in spite of the nightcap askew over his disheveled gray hair, glared at him with acute dislike.

“I regret to inform you, sir,” he began, although regret was clearly not the emotion uppermost in his mind, “that Lord Melrose is asleep in bed. Perhaps if you call tomorrow, at a more auspicious time—”

This eminently reasonable suggestion fell on empty air, for Pickett had brushed past him and was taking the stairs two at a time on his way to the upper floors where he knew the marquess’s bedchamber would be located. “Where are you?” he demanded, shedding his hard-won vowels with every step he climbed. “Don’t think you can ’ide from me, your bleedin’ lordship! I know wot did, and I’ll demolish this ’ouse brick by brick, if that’s wot it takes to flush out a rat that walks like a man! I’ll—”

He had just reached the second-floor landing when a pair of gilt-paneled double doors at the end of the corridor were flung open to reveal the marquess, resplendent in a quilted dressing gown of emerald-green satin.

“What the devil—?” he demanded. Upon recognizing the invader, he said, “Oh, so it’s you, is it? And cupshot into the bargain. Well, don’t think I’ll allow you to make a drunken fool of yourself, not while I’m calling the tune!”

Pickett, ignoring a claim that contained more than one entirely erroneous assumption, launched into a stream of invectives he hadn’t even been aware that he knew, much less had ever before directed at a fellow human being, concluding with, “You murdered my father!”

“What the devil are you going on about?”

“As if you don’t know! I’ve just been to identify Da’s body after he was murdered in the street—knifed in the back, no less, by a man too cowardly to confront him face to face!”

“And so naturally you think his killer must have been me,” his lordship observed, his cold rationality a stark contrast to his grandson’s emotional accusations. “Believe me, sirrah, if I’d had any such inclination, I would not have waited twenty-five years to accomplish my purpose.”

“Better late than never, I daresay,” retorted Pickett. “How did you know he’d returned to London? Did you think to manipulate me more easily if you eliminated him first?”

“I’ve never heard anything so preposterous in my life! The very idea that I would kill anyone, even such a one as—”

“Oh, of course not!” Pickett agreed bitterly. “You’d never sully your lily-white hands with anything so ugly as murder, would you? No, you hire others to do your dirty work for you—as I have cause to know! Tell me, was it the same precious pair who abducted me off the street this very afternoon? They have had a busy day, haven’t they? I hope they were well paid for their trouble!”

“Oh, good God,” grumbled the marquess, tightening the braided cord of his dressing gown about his waist in the manner of one girding himself for battle. “I can’t have you standing there shrieking blue murder loud enough for all the world to hear! If you won’t stubble it and go home, you might as well come in and have a drop of brandy. God knows you look like you could use it.”

“I thank you for your gracious hospitality, your lordship,” said Pickett, sounding anything but grateful, “but I’m afraid I must decline to partake of anything under your roof. I’m sure I would choke on it.”

The effect of this speech was considerably diminished by the fact that even as he spoke, Lord Melrose seized his coat sleeve and pulled him through the door into a small sitting room connected to the bedchamber. Pickett was fully a head taller than his grandfather, but as the older man outweighed him by at least five stone, he was compelled perforce to follow.

“Now, sit down!” barked the marquess, indicating with a nod the two velvet-upholstered chairs positioned before the fire from which, though banked for the night, some warmth still emanated. Without waiting to see if Pickett obeyed this command, he crossed the room to a small table on which stood two pot-bellied glasses and a decanter of golden-brown liquid. He poured a generous dollop from the decanter into both glasses, and handed one to his grandson.

Pickett’s fury had considerably abated by now, for his was not a temperament given to prolonged fits of rage, and he realized he could not resist his lordship’s orders without causing a scene which would no doubt be as futile as it was undignified. Perhaps more to the point, he discovered that the prospect of brandy, even brandy provided by his grandfather and consumed beneath that gentleman’s scowling gaze, held considerable appeal. He meekly accepted the glass proffered by his lordship and drank deeply from it.

“Better?” asked the marquess, and although it would be an exaggeration to say there was kindness in his voice, Pickett recognized a slight lessening of the brusqueness with which the man had addressed him thus far.

“Yes,” Pickett said, belatedly adding, “Thank you.”

“Now”—Lord Melrose sank into the chair adjacent to his—“what’s all this about your father?”

“Mr. Colquhoun—Patrick Colquhoun, that is; he is—was—my magistrate at Bow Street. I was a principal officer there until quite recently—”

“Yes, I know. It’s a comfort to know that you operate on the right side of the law, in any case—which is more than can be said for your father,” he added darkly.

Pickett refrained from informing his grandfather that this had not always been the case, correctly supposing that the marquess would be considerably less enchanted with his raid on the Bank of England than his father had been.

“Anyway,” he continued, “Mr. Colquhoun came to my house tonight and said he needed me to come and formally identify my father’s body. He—my father, that is, not Mr. Colquhoun—he’d been discovered in Gin Alley in Limehouse. He’d taken a room in a boardinghouse there after arriving in London. He’d been stabbed in the back.”

“And you leapt to the conclusion that I must be behind the murder, even if it hadn’t been my hand holding the knife.”

Pickett bristled at this charge, all the more so because he feared his lordship might have a valid point. “You must own that you have no shortage of weapons at your disposal for just such a purpose. Any one of that collection in your study would have been more than sufficient to the task.”

“Dare I indulge the hope that you intend to favor me with a description of this knife so that I may weigh it against those in my own possession, or is it more in your style to fling unwarranted accusations without allowing the accused to offer exonerating evidence?”

The second half of this speech made Pickett’s face burn with mortification, but he refused to be drawn. “I can do more than that.” He withdrew the handkerchief-wrapped weapon from the inside pocket of his coat. “I have the knife in my possession. The blade is still stained with my father’s blood.”

He drew back the folds of linen to reveal the primitive knife, then surrendered it, handkerchief and all, for the marquess’s inspection.

“Quite a collector’s piece,” Lord Melrose observed with interest, turning it over and back again so as to study it from all sides before handing it back to Pickett. “Not only do I not possess such a knife, I cannot recall ever having seen one like it. If I were inclined to stab anyone to death, you may be sure I would not choose to do so with a weapon better suited to the hallowed halls of the British Museum than the back alleys of Limehouse.”

Feeling compelled to offer some defense of a course of action that had gone rather glaringly abroad, Pickett rushed into speech. “When I returned home after you—after our interview”—he could think of better words for it, but this hardly seemed the time to quibble over what seemed at the moment a minor point—“I found my father waiting for me. I hadn’t seen him in more than ten years. He’d just returned to England after serving a sentence in Botany Bay. I’d just heard from your own lips how my mother had eloped from this house with your footman, and then, for the first time in my life, Da told me the truth about my mother. Save for the matter of perspective, it matched in every particular the account I’d just heard from you. I knew you and Da had no cause to love each other, so when he was murdered only a few hours later, well—”

“It might interest you to know,” the marquess interrupted brusquely, “that I have been at home all night long. If you desire proof—”

He stretched out his hand for the bell pull and gave it a tug. A moment later, the butler entered the room, the same man who had tried without success to deny Pickett the house. He was looking rather less disheveled now, having abandoned his nightcap and changed his nightshirt and hastily donned breeches for the dark suit he’d been wearing when Pickett had first been brought to the house.

“You rang, your lordship?” he asked, quite as if his master entertaining raving lunatics in his private sitting room in the middle of the night were an ordinary occurrence.

“You will please describe for my grandson my movements this evening.”

“Yes, sir.” Without betraying by so much as a flicker of the eyelash that he recognized his lordship’s grandson as the same person he had tried without success to evict from the premises, he turned to Pickett and intoned, “After spending the afternoon at his club, his lordship repaired to his study to write letters. He remained there until time to dress for dinner, at which time he retired to his bedchamber to change into his evening clothes. By the time he came downstairs again, the dinner gong sounded, whereupon he partook of the evening meal in the dining room. He lingered at the table over port, after which time he entertained Sir Matthew Whitby for an evening of cards. After Sir Matthew’s departure, he withdrew to this very room in order to read for a time before seeking his bed.”

“Thank you,” the marquess said, then turned to Pickett. “Oh, but I was to have made use of henchmen who actually did the deed upon my orders, was I not? The ‘precious pair,’ I believe you called them. In fact, they are footmen, just as your father was.”

“I—I—never—I didn’t—” Picket stammered, but was ignored. Lord Melrose turned back to address the butler.

“Pray have James and Charles attend me here, Simmons.”

Simmons was betrayed into protest. “They’ll be in bed asleep, your lordship.”

“Exactly the point,” said the marquess, inclining his head.

“Yes, sir.”

Simmons left the room, and Pickett turned to his grandfather, whose expression was inscrutable.

“You’ve made your point,” he said. In fact, he was ashamed of his earlier outburst, and his humiliation was not lessened by his grandfather’s determination to rub his nose in it. “You needn’t drag those poor fellows from their beds.”

The marquess made no reply, but watched the door expectantly. It opened a short time later to admit two tall young men wearing sleepy expressions and nightshirts whose tails had been hastily stuffed into their breeches.

“Yes, your lordship?” asked one, the same fellow who had advised his colleague against silencing Pickett’s protests with his fist.

“James, Charles, have either of you gone to Limehouse this evening?”

“Limehouse?” The more aggressive of the pair echoed incredulously. “What the dev—er, what would we be doing in Limehouse, your lordship?”

“Murdering my grandson’s father,” the marquess answered without so much as a blink.

“Murdering—? That’s what he says, is it?” James regarded Pickett with an expression that suggested he now regretted his earlier restraint, be the fellow his nibs’s grandson or no.

“No,” Pickett put in hastily. “I only—I meant—”

“Very well,” Lord Melrose continued, “just what were you doing, then?”

The question was put to the two footmen equally, but after the pair exchanged a quick glance, Charles spoke for both.

“After we fetched this fellow—your grandson, that is—we went back to our regular duties here. Your lordship will remember sending me with a message to Sir Matthew Whitby, inviting him for an evening of cards after dinner, and when I came back to Park Lane with his acceptance, you put the pair of us to work getting the study ready for Sir Matthew’s arrival: setting up the card table and chairs, making sure glasses were at the ready, and so forth. Then after helping Mr. Simmons serve your lordship’s dinner, we fetched the dirty dishes back down to the kitchen before eating our own meal and then helping clean up the lot. Mr. Simmons gave James a couple of bottles—one of brandy and another of port”—he glanced for confirmation at James, who nodded in agreement—“and had him set them out in readiness for your lordship’s guest, while I lit the fire in the study. And then Mr. Simmons said as how we could go up to our bedchambers, so long as we held ourselves in readiness to clean up the study after Sir Matthew had gone. And after that, I guess we both went to bed. Of course, I read my Bible and said my prayers first,” he added with a saintly air.

Alas, this display of piety was lost on his employer. “And what time would you say that was?” asked the marquess.

Another glance at one another for confirmation, and Charles said, “Midnight or thereabouts, your lordship.”

Lord Melrose addressed himself to Pickett. “Which, I’m sure you will agree, would hardly allow them sufficient time to walk to Limehouse—for I would certainly not wish to be wish to be linked to the crime by the unhappy coincidence of someone recognizing my crest on the carriage door—locate your father from my description of a man I have not seen in more than a quarter of a century, lure that man into a back alley and stab him, then walk back to this house, dispose of any bloodstained garments, and climb into bed in time to be awakened by my butler and summoned to this room.”

As Pickett could hardly dispute the matter, he was obliged to sit seething in silence while Lord Melrose thanked the two, begged their pardon for having unnecessarily roused them from their slumbers, and gave them permission to return to their beds.

“I said you’d made your point,” Pickett reiterated once he and his grandfather were alone. “Did you really have to humiliate me in front of the household staff?”

“If you choose to barge into the house throwing about accusations of murder without first ascertaining the facts, I feel no obligation to shield you from the consequences of your own folly,” replied the marquess, unrepentant.

Pickett had the lowering conviction that Mr. Colquhoun would be in complete agreement with his lordship on this point, and so made no attempt to defend actions he knew in retrospect to be indefensible.

“I—I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly, trying not to choke on the words. “I can only say that I had just endured the crowning blow to a day of unwelcome surprises, although of course that is no excuse.” He set aside his empty glass and rose to take his leave. “As you pointed out, it’s very late. I’ll trespass no longer on your—” Your what? “Hospitality” was hardly the word for it. “—your time,” he concluded, then executed an excruciatingly correct bow and betook himself from the room.

“Not at all,” his lordship said mockingly, accompanying him as far as the top of the stairs. “I daresay you acted with great courage. Who knows but what I might have decided to mete out to you the same fate that I dealt your father?”

Pickett paused on the stairs and turned back to address the marquess. “On the contrary, I knew myself to be quite safe with your lordship—unless and until some other claimant to the title turns up.”

And on this Parthian shot, he descended the stairs with his head held high, feeling the eyes of one marquess, one butler, and two footmen upon him as he retraced his steps to the front door and stepped out into the cold December night.

* * *

When he reached Curzon Street, he found that the house was dark, save for a single candle burning on a small table at the foot of the stairs; Rogers, it appeared, had not waited up for him. Pickett could not but be relieved. He didn’t want to face anyone at the moment, not even his wife. If he was very quiet, he thought, taking the candle to light his way up the stairs, perhaps he could undress and slip into the camp bed without waking her.

In this, he was doomed to disappointment.

“John?” Julia asked sleepily, “did you go out, or was I dreaming?”

He was sorely tempted to deny it, to agree that she must have been dreaming and urge her to go back to sleep; after all, it could hardly be good for her to be burdened with images of violence and murder when she was so near to her confinement, but if he had learned anything in nine months of marriage, it was that his gently-born bride had no very high opinion of his withholding from her the more brutal aspects of his profession for her own good. No, he would be obliged to tell her the truth in the morning in any case, so sparing her now would only delay the inevitable.

On one aspect of his nocturnal activities, however, he was determined to remain silent. With any luck, she need never know of his invasion of his grandfather’s Park Lane residence or his accusations of murder. He wasn’t quite ready to absolve Lord Melrose entirely, but the combination of brandy and a brisk walk in the cold night air had brought home to him the realization that he had gone about it in the worst possible way. No, he would say nothing to Julia on that subject, but he would go about establishing the guilt or innocence of Lord Melrose just as he would that of any other suspect. After all, the man was nothing to him.

“Yes, I had to go out. Mr. Colquhoun came by; he needed me to come with him and—and identify a body. Sweetheart, my father was found dead. He’s been murdered.”

“Oh John, no!” She sat up in bed at once, and reached out to him. Hastily revising his plans, he slipped not into the despised camp bed, but into her arms. “And after you’d just got him back! How did it happen? Who could have done such a thing?”

“He was taken by surprise—stabbed in the back. As for who, well, I don’t know. But”—his jaw tightened, and the determined set of his chin was one which his grandfather would have instantly recognized—“I intend to find out.”

“Darling, are you sure that’s wise, with you being so closely involved? After all, he is your father, and the investigation might turn up elements of his recent past that could only distress you.”

“No one could tell me much about Da that I don’t already know,” he said, but even as he spoke the words, he knew they weren’t true. Less than twelve hours earlier, he’d heard from his father’s own lips things he’d never even imagined.

“Be that as it may,” Julia persisted, “I’m a bit surprised that Mr. Colquhoun would countenance your involvement in the investigation, when you are so intimately connected to its subject.”

Pickett readily conceded the point. “He didn’t. But I’m not with Bow Street anymore and no longer accountable to Mr. Colquhoun. In other words,” Pickett concluded with the faintest hint of a smile, “he can’t stop me.”