AGNUST FLUNG OPEN the door with a flourish.
‘Romulus, Viscount Thorn of Thetbury,’ she announced as if this were a grand ball and he a complete stranger, though she had larruped him more than once when he was a child.
‘Rommy,’ I greeted him with a kiss.
‘Good evening, Vi.’
My cousin gave me a hug. He was the only one allowed to Vi me. My parents, taking the opposite approach, called me Violetta even though they had had me christened Violet.
‘I swear you look younger every time I see you, Agnust,’ Romulus told her as he released me, and my maid blushed.
‘There do be no swearin’ in this house,’ she told him but skipped from the room, the bottles in my cabinet rattling with every impact of her boots.
‘Whisky and soda?’
‘Just a drop.’
‘Of whisky?’
‘Of soda.’
I poured us a large one each, diluting mine much more than his.
‘You look well,’ he said and we clinked glasses, ‘though I may have to bill you for that opinion.’
‘You still owe me for breaking my dolls’ house.’
Romulus was a Thorn through and through with the hooked nose, sapphire eyes and thick head of straight black hair. He was even taller than my father and more willowy. I, as Agnust liked to tell me, had been the grunt of the litter. ‘You look worn out. How is Jane?’
His face fell.
‘She is in such pain.’ He gulped his drink. ‘I feel so useless. She cannot spend her life in laudanum slumbers.’ He drained the glass. ‘What little is left to her.’
‘Is the new treatment not helping?’ I had tried to ask him when I telephoned, but he had given me to understand that his wife was within earshot.
Romulus put his tumbler to his lips, oblivious to the fact that it was already depleted.
‘Mine is a dishonourable profession,’ he asserted, dabbing the lower borders of his waxed moustaches with his handkerchief. ‘The extraction of money from the sick is often little short of fraudulent.’
‘There are some good doctors,’ I protested. ‘You for instance.’
He snorted.
‘I try,’ he said, ‘but even so I find myself giving people false hopes rather than admit how little I can do for them.’
‘But surely people are living much longer now.’
He looked at his tumbler, surprised to find it empty and, surprised to find how quickly he had emptied it, I took it to refill.
‘We have the likes of Bazalgette and their sewage systems plus some improvements in housing and diet to thank for that,’ he said, peering at the bust of Tchaikovsky on my mantlepiece. For all my cousin’s advanced views, he did not enjoy modern music.
We stood by the window. An empty hearse was going by, a black boy riding at the back sticking his tongue out at a little girl in a brougham. She would go home to her feather bed, he to sleep under the counter in the undertaker’s shop.
‘I am sorry,’ I said and took his hand. ‘She does not deserve…’
‘I took a look at your woman,’ Romulus broke in. ‘At and inside her.’
‘And?’
‘You were right about the injury being unusual.’ My cousin put his drink down untouched on the mantlepiece. ‘I have never seen the like since Burma.’ Officially the country had been in rebellion but my cousin, regarding it as a bid for independence from the British who had no rightful business to be there, had resigned his commission and returned to Norfolk, some said as a coward, though no one who knew him or had seen his medals shared that opinion.
‘So what do you think caused it?’
Romulus delved into his tweed jacket for a small cylindrical corked bottle. ‘This.’
He handed it over. There was a silvery-grey lump inside, shaped like a miniature rock-cake.
‘Looks like a bit of lead.’ I held it up to the gas mantle.
‘That is exactly what it is,’ my cousin confirmed.
‘Where did you find it?’
The surface was pitted.
‘Lodged on the inside of the skull behind the cerebellum.’
‘The little brain,’ I recalled from his studies. ‘But that is…’ I racked Ruby’s brains for she had done additional training in Zurich. ‘In the base at the back is it not?’
I have just told you as much, she grumped, miffed at my lack of confidence in her superior knowledge.
‘At the top of the spinal cord,’ he confirmed. ‘I thought it looked like a bullet wound the moment I saw it, but I was surprised not to find any sign of an exit hole.’
‘I heard a bang but I thought it was a motor car,’ I admitted, turning the bottle to and fro. ‘It does not look much like a bullet to me.’
‘It was so soft that it would have flattened the instant it hit bone, in this case the eye-socket,’ Romulus said. ‘I have seen men survive being shot through the head. A high-speed bullet can make a very neat tunnel through the brain and, if you are lucky, not hit anything vital, but this was designed to make as much mess as possible.’ He grimaced. ‘And, believe me, it did. For lack of a better word, a great deal of her cerebrum was a mush.’ Romulus fiddled with his watchchain. ‘Whoever fired at that unfortunate woman was determined to kill her.’
‘But she was just a beggar,’ I protested, and he puffed out.
‘Remember what you said to Jerkins, our old estate manager, when he threatened to horsewhip that girl? Nobody, you told him, is just a beggar.’
‘I meant that she was unlikely to have been so important or such a threat…’ I struggled to explain.
She was not actually begging, Ruby ganged up on me with relish as she had feelings for Rommy that she made little attempt to camouflage.
‘I take your point,’ he said.
‘So who was she and why was she murdered?’
Romulus took up the tumbler again and swirled it around. The glass, big as a bucket in my hand, was small as an eggcup in his.
I have told you before about exaggerating, Miss Kidd scolded, and Ruby railed because my governess had no business mingling with my characters.
‘You said that she died in the square?’ Rommy checked.
‘Just out there,’ I pointed.
‘Let’s take a look.’
We went into the hall where he took his cane from the copper-and-iron stand.
‘You will require that for our long journey,’ I mocked gently as I selected a bonnet from the table.
‘Just as you will need your parasol,’ he riposted, donning his grey bowler and opened the door.
Seraphim Square was almost deserted in the gathering twilight. A well-dressed courting couple went by, surreptitiously holding hands, their chaperone, a rather grand lady I had seen in her own box at church, affecting not to notice.
‘Show me,’ my cousin said and we went outside.
I jumped.
‘Oh for goodness sake!’ I exclaimed and rubbed my ear. Did that hurdy-gurdy man never sleep? ‘I hope his heart breaks.’
‘It’s not like you to be so vindictive,’ Romulus commented and we crossed the road.
‘It is the name of the song,’ I explained, though he probably knew that. He had frequented Morley’s Music Hall many a time before his professional status obliged him to avoid being seen in such disreputable venues.
There were traces of stains on the kerb and some between the cobbles as we had not had any rain since the incident and nobody had troubled to wash the blood away.
‘Will this heat never end?’ I lamented.
‘I shall remind you of that when you are complaining about the snow in winter,’ he promised, bobbing to take a closer look and then peering at the sky. ‘Where was she standing?’
He stood again.
‘Just near that lamppost.’ We walked towards it. ‘She tried to keep herself up on it before she staggered and fell in the road.’
‘And which way was she facing?’
‘Towards Break House.’
‘All the time?’
He flicked an apple core to one side oblivious to Ruby’s objections that it could be a vital clue. She was fond of reminiscing about how she had tracked Count Craven by the traces of his specially formulated tooth powder on a discarded cucumber sandwich.
‘She seemed to be staring at my window,’ I recalled, ‘but I was not really watching her.’
Shame on you, Hefty scolded.
‘Inspector Hefty would not be impressed,’ Romulus rebuked me.
‘He is not,’ I assured him and I hoped that he was better at hiding his feelings when coming across patients whom he believed to be mad.
‘The problem we have,’ he told me, ‘is trying to work out from where the shot came.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘She was a midget not much taller than you.’
‘If you listen carefully,’ I told him, ‘you will hear the bonds of second cousinly tolerance starting to snap.’
‘So,’ he continued unabashed, ‘if the bullet entered through her eye at about this height…’ He held his cane by the side of my head. ‘And travelled in a straight line to the back of her skull around here.’ He angled his cane, pointing down at about forty-five degrees. ‘Then it must have come from the top of a building at about fifty feet.’ He scanned the square. ‘Which means that the shooter had either climbed on top of your observatory…’
‘He cannot have weighed very much,’ I remarked. ‘As you know, it is thinly framed glass.’
‘Or…’ my cousin swung his cane up and around to the far corner, ‘she was facing the other way and it came from the roof of the Splendid.’
The hotel occupied a good third of the side of the square to the right of my house from the far corner – five storeys of red brick with a grand colonnaded entrance manned by a heavily bearded Sikh commissionaire so resplendent in his blue-and-gold turban and matching robes that it was difficult to believe that he was John Smith, a laundress’s son from Lower Montford.
‘Was there anybody important around?’ Romulus asked. ‘A cabinet minister or a member of the royal family for example?’
‘I do not think anyone like that has been here since King Edmund,’ I said, ‘and he was only passing through. Why?’
‘Whoever fired that shot was either shooting randomly or a very fine marksman indeed,’ he speculated, ‘but in Montford and in public?’
My cousin shook his head in disbelief.
Pity the hurdy-blinking-gurdy man wasn’t in the line of fire, Ruby said grumpily as he ground out another dirge.
‘Before she died…’ I began, and was about to tell Rommy about the victim’s warning to me when Pottager cleared his throat discreetly.
If I might be so bold, milady, Ruby’s manservant said softly, and I stopped in my tracks for he rarely spoke unless he had something important to say. Do you not think that Dr Thorn has too many worries already with his wife’s illness and the pressures of his profession?
You are right, of course, I conceded, I am being selfish.
I would not say that, Pottager murmured in a way that made me suspect he thought it though.
‘Before she died…’ I began again and Rommy glanced at the clock tower, presumably watching the hands of time move on. ‘Cane Braise rode past my window. He scarpered when he heard the shot.’
‘Braise?’ Rommy checked in alarm. ‘You did not tell me that.’
‘I did not think much of it.’
He frowned.
‘Remember how Ruby Gibson castigated her manservant for omitting to tell her that the arsonist had freckles?’ Romulus reminded me. ‘How can your character be cleverer than you?’
‘Because she does not have to live in the real world.’
And I am going to die in the world you created if you do not get me out soon.
‘Do you think…?’ I suggested.
‘Anton Gervey,’ Rommy confirmed. ‘Though Braise was not his target.’ I opened my mouth to question that statement, but my cousin was already explaining. ‘He must have been thirty or forty yards from the woman and even you would not be that bad a shot.’
I huffed indignantly.
‘When we had that competition,’ I reminded him, ‘I hit the bullseye first.’
‘On my target,’ he countered as if such petty details mattered. ‘If Braise had been killed there would have been open warfare, but what better way to fire a warning shot than to show your willingness to kill and in as public a way as possible?’
There was a wonderful silence and I was pleased to note that my persecutor was packing his instrument of torture away.
‘Keep a sharp eye out and your curtains closed, Vi,’ Rommy advised grimly. ‘I doubt that either man cares much about who he kills.’
You may be a professional assassin, Van Dyke, Ruby said, blowing smoke into his monocled eye, but you are no match for the British amateur.
‘Be quiet,’ I commanded her.
‘Why? Did you hear something?’ my cousin whispered after a few seconds.
‘Only Ruby Gibson,’ I replied as if it were the most normal thing in the world but, if anyone would understand, it was Romulus and, if Ruby did not behave, I would never let her out.