A PLEASANT PORTLY porter admitted me to Marmaduke Maudsley Mansions.
‘Mr Appleton dint have many of callers,’ he chatted as he directed me to a flight of stairs. ‘And never no shiny young ladies.’
Shiny meant well-presented rather than luminous.
Tell him it is not his place to remark upon our appearance, Ruby had simpered, though I was not convinced that he was including her in his remark.
He means nothing by it, I assured her.
Then why are you simpering, she challenged. Needless to say, I was not, but I did have to admit to an irrational glow of satisfaction upon learning that Anthony was not in the habit of entertaining female admirers.
‘Number six,’ the porter told me. ‘The door int locked for he can’t come to it.’
Ruby skipped ahead while Inspector Hefty trudged behind, but somehow he managed to be on the second-floor landing before us both. I knocked and entered a pleasant, though sparsely furnished, lounge overlooking the park with a telescope set up by a window. It looked like it was trained towards Haglin House but I had no desire to take a close look at that property again.
‘Who is it?’ Anthony called through an open doorway to my left.
‘Violet Thorn,’ I replied, not going straight through in case he needed time to arrange himself.
‘Oh,’ he said without enthusiasm, and I resisted a temptation to let myself out. ‘I’ve already told you I can’t pay the rent until I am on my feet again.’
‘Violet Thorn,’ I repeated more loudly.
‘Oh,’ he said again, ‘I thought you said Mrs Brown. It’s difficult to make things out above those church bells.’
I could not hear any.
‘Can I come in?’ I asked.
‘Please do,’ he said. ‘Oh, thank goodness they’ve stopped.’
It was difficult to judge how Anthony looked. His whole head was bandaged rather as mine had been when, as children, Rommy and I used to take turns at being doctor and patient, and my cousin was getting his revenge for me having splinted both his arms. There were holes for Anthony’s mouth and nostrils but only one of his eyes – the right – was visible and that was bloodshot.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.
‘I have rarely felt better,’ he replied indistinctly and untruthfully.
He lay propped up on a ramp of pillows.
‘Are you in any pain?’
‘Only when the effects of the laudanum wear off,’ he told me, ‘which they do after a couple of hours. My aunts have been looking after me very well, but they have an idea that too much opium is bad for one.’
‘And I have an idea that they are right,’ I told him. ‘Where are they now?’
‘One is having a lie-down at home, complaining that my complaining had given her a sick headache, and the other has gone to buy a handbag to cheer herself up.’ He managed a chuckle. ‘They will both be needing laudanum when they hear that I have been entertaining a lady in my bedroom without a chaperone.’
He has a peculiar notion of what constitutes entertaining, Ruby scoffed.
‘I came to thank you,’ I said, ‘for trying to rescue me.’
‘I wasn’t much use, was I?’ Anthony said modestly.
None whatsoever, Hefty concurred.
‘It was a very brave thing that you did.’
He waved a bruised hand dismissively but said, ‘Yes, I suppose it was.’
I smiled and he tried to, but drew a sharp breath in and touched his upper lip gingerly.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘it was not as brave as your actions, going into that house to confront a murderer and then fighting to save me.’
If I’d been there I’d have given that doctor a taste of his own medicine, Ruby declared pugnaciously.
‘Did he break your nose?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but the surgeon assures me he has straightened it out.’ He sniffed. ‘If not, I can always play the villain. I can be quite menacing you know.’
I found that difficult to imagine but I said, ‘You make an excellent police constable.’
Might even make a sergeant out of you, Hefty said generously, for nobody else was worthy of being an inspector.
Grunting with the effort, Anthony raised his head an inch or two, cocking it to the left to survey me.
‘Did you call out Oh my dear when he attacked me?’
‘Certainly not.’ I drew myself up, trying to look indignant. ‘I said Oh my. Dear me.’
‘I thought so.’ Anthony managed a smile this time, but then it dropped. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Ten minutes before midday,’ I replied, consulting the brass carriage clock stationed between the masks of comedy and tragedy on his mantelpiece.
‘Then, regretfully, I must evict you,’ he said. ‘My doctor is due at noon and is bound to report to my aunt if he finds us together.’
‘Are you frightened of her?’
‘Of course I am,’ he admitted. ‘She gives me an allowance.’
‘Then I had better go,’ I said. ‘Besides which I am going to see a doctor myself.’
‘Oh.’ I thought he frowned, but it was difficult to judge as his bandage had risen. ‘I trust there is nothing seriously amiss.’
‘Not with me,’ I reassured him, ‘but I believe there is something very seriously wrong with him.’
Dr Cronshaw had a pleasant villa on the outskirts of town. It was just far enough out for Friendless to regale me with everything that I could possibly want to know – and a great many things that I most certainly could not – about a fare he had taken to Stolham St Ernest when Old Queeny was Young Queeny.
‘Losted a shoe just past Lower Downhill Up,’ he had told me mournfully.
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
‘One on her favourite.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said again.
‘Never do find it,’ he concluded that part of his adventures to a third ‘Oh dear’ from me.
Fitterby House was tall and thin and set in extensive, treeless, flower-free lawns.
Like a miniature Pampas, Ruby observed wistfully, for she had fallen in love with an Argentinian prince found murdered by a gaucho’s bolas on their wedding morning.
A bored maid took me through to Dr Cronshaw’s consulting rooms, where I sat in a creaky leather armchair and he in another, his fingertips together in a very Poynderish manner. Was this something that doctors are trained to do in the same way that builders are taught to cluck and suck their teeth?
‘I believe you have been suffering from nervous anxiety,’ he began after a few pleasantries, including an accord we reached on the almost insufferable nature of the summer heat.
‘Then you have been misinformed.’ Before he could say – But my maid – I added, ‘by me.’
‘I see,’ the doctor said, though clearly he did not, and leaned forward. ‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? No, don’t tell me. I never forget a face.’
‘It was as I was quitting the house of Dr Poynder,’ I explained and, before he could point out that he had asked me not to say, jumped in with, ‘while you were assisting him in the process of murdering his wife.’
I was not sure that process was exactly the word that I had intended to use, but it was a minor detail.
It was a minor detail that put a rope around Linocker Bloom’s skinny neck, Hefty recalled with great satisfaction, for Bloom had set fire to the inspector’s favourite oyster shop.
Cronshaw considered my claim and decided to gape.
‘Just as you aided and abetted him in the murder of the first Mrs Poynder,’ I continued. ‘By colluding in the misdiagnosis of their illnesses and in providing death certificates for both of those unfortunate women.’ I took a quick breath. ‘And Edward Poynder reciprocated when you poisoned your own wife.’
Cronshaw shut his mouth and licked his lips.
‘It is simple enough to prove,’ I ploughed on, for I could not stomach being asked what on earth I was talking about and told how outrageous were my allegations. ‘My father, the Earl of Thetbury, is a close friend of the home secretary. One word in Sir Mathew White Ridley’s ear and we shall have your wife’s remains exhumed for analysis.’
Dr Cronshaw put his head to one side, reminding me of a blackbird listening for a worm.
‘Is that true?’ he enquired as politely as a man might ask if I were sure that the capital of Australia is Constantinople.
‘Yes,’ I said simply, but he still looked a little sceptical and so I added, ‘it is,’ which appeared to satisfy him.
‘I see,’ he said quietly. ‘In that case, Lady Violet, I regret to say that you leave me with no choice.’
He stood up and I braced myself. If Dr Cronshaw was going to attack me, I would put up a better fight than I had with his colleague, but he was walking past me and around his desk to open the middle drawer.
‘I was in the Suffolk’s,’ he told me with justifiable pride, and I was about to tell him that my second cousin had been too when he added, ‘and this…’ he reached into the drawer, ‘is my service revolver.’