THE SHOT WAS not as loud as I had expected. It was louder. Big Ben was clanging wildly in my skull as I spun around.
Poynder was still standing, but there was a hole in the wall to his right as big as any workman could have made with a pickaxe.
‘Drop it,’ I made out Agnust yelling and the knife fell, bouncing on the floor only just audibly as the bell rang thirty-four o’clock.
Poynder chewed his lower lip, though not as hard as I had planned to do with his upper, and I felt quite sick now that I thought about it. It would have been like eating a raw hairy steak.
‘Nnnnyah,’ I mouthed in disgust and they both looked at me in puzzlement.
Nnnnyah? Ruby echoed in equal disgust. You are not in the nursery, Thorn.
I did not need her to tell me that as I held my ripped dress up around my neck.
‘Want you me to decease him?’ Agnust enquired as casually as, though less reluctantly than, she might proffer a second cup of coffee, and I remembered the first time she had offered to kill a man on my behalf.
‘And how,’ Poynder demanded, struggling to unfluster himself, ‘do you intend to explain to the police that you broke into my home and murdered me?’
‘Let me worry about that,’ I assured him, for Agnust’s offer was a tempting one but, apart from the fact that I could not answer his enquiry, I was not a murderess.
It would be an execution, Ruby argued.
I cannot be a witness to it, Hefty excused himself as he left the room.
Why was he able to do that when I was not?
Leave the executions to… I began but could not remember the hangman’s name. ‘Warbrick,’ I said aloud and touched Agnust’s hand. ‘Not just yet,’ I told her, hurrying to pull back the bolt on the cupboard door.
Anthony still lay crumpled with his eyes closed, but I was relieved to see his chest rise, fall and rise again.
There was an urgent knocking from the corridor.
‘Are you all right, sir?’ I heard a woman call.
‘Put the key on the sideboard,’ I told Poynder, ‘and step aside.’
I took it and opened the door.
‘Your master is uninjured,’ I assured Matilda, ‘and you are quite safe.’
She edged warily into the room.
‘They are all mad,’ her master claimed and, catching sight of a revolver-toting Agnust, Matilda drew back nervously.
‘And how do you explain my ripped dress?’ I demanded.
‘You ripped it yourself in order to lay false claims against me,’ he claimed outrageously and turned back to his maid. ‘This woman persecuted your mistress and now she fixed her attentions upon me.’
There were the sounds of running and Wormwood burst in.
‘What the…’
I put a hand to my throat and saw a smear of blood on my fingertips. I was bruised and still half-stunned by what had happened, and I did not feel like explaining anything.
‘Release my man and return with him immediately,’ I commanded, ‘or my maid will shoot your master.’
‘I kill a man ’fore now,’ she assured him.
Did she? Ruby checked but, if true, it was news to me.
‘Do as she says,’ Poynder instructed.
‘If you harm him or Tilly…’ Wormwood began to threaten but, catching his employer’s eye – though not as hard as I had – he turned and strode back into the corridor.
Agnust examined me.
‘You do need a doctor,’ she decided.
‘Oh Agnust,’ I sighed. ‘I have had quite enough of doctors for one day.’
‘Did you really kill a man?’ I asked on the way home, and I could not tell if my maid was nodding or it was just the motion of our cab.
‘Best you ask him tha’,’ Agnust advised, ‘but you wint get a n’answer.’
Inspector Stanbury called. I would have offered to go to the police station, but I did not want to go there in my dishevelled condition and he wanted to see me as I was – for evidence, he claimed, but also I suspected for his own diversion.
‘You look like a street slug,’ he assured me though I knew that much already.
Agnust had pinned my dress up for decency, but I was still far from presentable.
‘You say Dr Poynder did that to you?’ he checked.
‘She say it for it’s true,’ Agnust insisted. ‘I catch him sprawlin’ all over her like somethin’ a po-lice-man…’
‘No officer of mine would ever behave in such a manner,’ Stanbury protested indignantly.
‘Like somethin’ a po-lice-man do arrest him for,’ she completed her statement and the inspector did not so much climb down from his high horse as fall off it.
‘You had better tell me everything,’ he said then, as if anticipating a quip from Ruby, added, ‘about the attack.’
And so I told him almost everything but nothing, to her chagrin, about Ruby’s part in the events. People tend to look at me oddly when I mention her.
You should hear what people say about you, Thorn, she retaliated.
Nobody should hear that, I told her, having hidden all the nasty reviews of Blood in the Gaslight away from her ever-inquisitive eyes.
When Stanbury returned that evening his face was grim.
Did he put up a fight? Ruby wondered. Did he flee over the rooftops and fall into the Thames in the path of dredger?
He would have had to run a long way for that, I argued.
Pheidippides ran twenty-five miles from Marathon.
He was not in a frock coat with the Central Suffolk Police Force on his tail.
‘He denies everything,’ he told me, which was not astonishing. Being given Pineapple my pony when it was not even my birthday was a bigger surprise than that. Being bitten by Pineapple on the shoulder was an even bigger one. ‘He says that you broke in through the French window – I saw the smashed pane – and attacked him with Gerrund and Agnust, all three of you armed to the teeth.’
I laughed – not the sort of chuckle I might emit while reading Three Men in a Boat nor the devil-may-care guffaw of Pedro Rodriguez the Mexican bandit. It was more of a cynical pull-the-other-one that employers employ when the parlour maid claims that the Meissen shepherdess jumped suicidally off a shelf when nobody was in the room.
‘I rang the front doorbell and was admitted, unarmed, by Matilda the maid,’ I protested and the inspector clicked his tongue.
‘The trouble is, Lady Violet, Matilda claims the first she saw of you was after she heard the sound of breaking glass.’
‘He battered Anthony Appleton unconscious,’ I said furiously, and Stanbury puffed out his cheeks.
‘Mr Appleton tricked his way into the house pretending to be a police officer – a serious criminal offence in itself – and tried to arrest Dr Poynder,’ he said. ‘A man is entitled to protect himself from fraudulent intruders.’
‘He was trying to protect me,’ I objected. ‘And Wormwood locked Gerrund up at gunpoint.’
‘He says he found your man skulking in the shrubbery armed with a revolver.’
That much, I had to grant him, was true.
‘Unfortunately, the only evidence we have is a broken window and the conflicting statements of three intruders against three residents.’
There had been four of us, but Anthony was in no state to make any kind of statement.
‘He murdered his wife,’ I insisted.
‘And, if you have evidence of that, I would be very interested to investigate further.’
‘Her hair contained traces of arsenic.’
‘Traces?’ he queried, but did not wait for a reply. ‘And can you even prove that it came from Mrs Poynder?’
‘Yes,’ I insisted. ‘If the coffin is opened up, you will find her hair has been cut. In fact,’ I speculated, ‘we can have her whole body examined. My father has contacts in the government. He can apply to the home secretary to have her exhumed.’
Stanbury rubbed the back of his neck.
‘And he may have succeeded for all I know,’ he said, ‘but according to Dr Poynder his wife had a terror of being buried alive and was cremated at Woking Crematorium.’
‘That was quick.’
‘She did not wish to be embalmed either.’
‘Her ashes will still have arsenic in them,’ I floundered, having no idea whether or not the element would survive incineration.
‘Scattered, at her request, into the sea at Sackwater.’
‘Does none of that strike you as suspicious?’
‘A great deal of it,’ he admitted, ‘but I have my suspicions about many people who are walking free and enjoying their coffee,’ he added hopefully, and I poured him another cup.
‘His first wife,’ I recalled.
‘Was part of some weird religious sect,’ he told me, ‘and was buried in a shroud with no coffin. After all these years there will be nothing left of her.’
‘Dr Cronshaw,’ I recalled, ‘treated Dolores and…’ I waved a hand to forestall any interruption, ‘his wife died in similar circumstances.’
Stanbury screwed up his mouth and, for a moment, I thought that he was going to blow me a kiss, but he unscrewed it and said, ‘I can’t simply march into his house making allegations.’
‘Probably not,’ I agreed. ‘But, with a little more preparation, I can.’
Stanbury half rose.
‘You are not going to do anything reckless, Violet?’ he worried, my title lost in his concern.
Please do, Ruby urged.
‘Do not worry,’ I reassured him, but did not make any promises.