Breaking the Circle, page 12
With a nod to the desk sergeant, Police Constable Crawford stepped out into the Bermondsey night, to patrol until dawn at the regulation two and a half miles an hour, to carry on doing his best.
SEVEN
As Andrew Crawford pulled on his clothes, he mulled over what to tell Angela. She was, after all, in a delicate condition and there was no need to upset her. On the other hand, she had known and loved Margaret Murray since before they even met, so she really should be told. As he knotted his tie, he came to a decision. If she was awake, he would tell her now. If she was asleep, then sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. Booted and suited, he peeped round the bedroom door and listened. Angela’s breathing came soft and regular, with the little snore every now and again that was endearing before midnight, hell after three. He decided to let sleeping dogs lie, with no offence intended to his beautiful wife; he had a full night ahead of him and, as he ran as lightly as he could down the stairs, he planned out his best itinerary. He should really go as soon as he could to Guy’s, but in some ways he thought that was presumptuous. Although he and Margaret were friends, he knew she had people much more precious in her life and he wouldn’t want to intrude on what may be a painful time. He could hardly knock up Flinders Petrie and, by definition, his wife. Scuttlebutt had it that Mrs Petrie was an understanding soul, but how understanding would any woman be if she were to be awoken in the middle of the night to be told that her husband’s occasional bedfellow was lying fatally injured in hospital? Then there was the guilt aspect. It was clear that Margaret had been attacked after the meeting of the Bermondsey Spiritualist Circle and although he comforted himself with the knowledge that there would have been no stopping her and he had not coerced her in any way, it still felt as if it was his fault. That would be a hard one to live with. Standing irresolute on the pavement, a sudden idea came to Detective Sergeant Crawford – Thomas would know what to do. He had known Margaret Murray longer than anyone, and who knew what he had gleaned about her family and private life in their late-night musings over coffee after the Jeremy Bentham had closed? And in any event, she would be pleased to see him, should Michael’s reading of the severity of her injuries be overblown. He dithered for another moment, between cab and running, and in the end settled down to a steady jog. Gower Street wasn’t far and anyway, he couldn’t whimper with fear and worry while running.
Archie Flambard sighed the sigh of a man as full as an egg. Margaret Murray was right – Thomas’s gentleman’s relish was food of the gods, with a little more bite than usual and something indefinable in its depths. He wiped the plate around with his finger so as not to waste a scrap. Margaret Murray watched him with the proud demeanour of a parent whose child has just completed a solo of unusual difficulty in the end-of-term concert. She looked at Thomas fondly.
‘Thomas has a wonderful touch in the kitchen,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘He has found his niche.’ The fact that Thomas had filled many niches in his time, not all as laudable as a perfect relish, she and he allowed to pass them all by.
‘I ought to be going, Margaret,’ Flambard said. ‘I hope you have forgiven me for my little subterfuge.’
She hadn’t, but as ever, she was polite. ‘I too was not totally straightforward,’ she said. ‘So we can call it quits, perhaps.’ She stood and held out her hand. ‘I’ll see you at the next meeting no doubt, Mr Mortimer.’
‘Indeed you will, Miss Plinlimmon.’ Flambard shrugged on his coat, momentarily a Cockney again. ‘Perhaps we will have heard from Eusapia Palladino by then?’
‘Perhaps.’ Margaret Murray was non-committal.
Thomas opened the door into the lobby and ushered his guest out. He couldn’t help smiling. Life with Margaret Murray in it was certainly never dull, you could say that for her. He pulled back the heavy bolts top and bottom and opened the door, only to have Andrew Crawford, covered in sweat and somewhat wild-eyed, almost fall into his arms.
‘How …’ he took a gulp of air into his burning lungs. He was getting out of shape, he needed to run more, to exercise more. He was supposed to be at the peak of fitness and here he was, fighting for breath. ‘How … how did you know I was here?’ he asked finally.
Thomas was confused. ‘I didn’t,’ he said.
‘But you opened the door, just as I was about to knock.’ Crawford was standing bent over, his hands on his knees.
‘Doors work both ways,’ Thomas said, a trifle acerbically. He was a working man, after all, and really had better things to be doing than bandying rubbish on his doorstep with a policeman in the middle of the night. ‘I was letting this gentleman out, as a matter of fact.’
Crawford gave Flambard a cursory glance and then grabbed Thomas by the lapels. ‘You’ve got to come with me,’ he said, shaking him. ‘You’ve got to come with me now.’
Thomas pulled the man’s hands from his clothing and held him off at arm’s length. This was far from being the first time a policeman had demanded the pleasure of his company, but he knew in this case he had strong grounds for refusing. ‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ he said, pleasantly. ‘I don’t think I do have to come with you.’
Crawford, breathing painfully through his nose, nodded his head. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, you do. It’s Margaret. She’s in the hospital, not expected to last the night.’
‘Goodness,’ came a mild voice from the doorway. ‘And here was me thinking I just had a touch of indigestion.’ She raised a ladylike hand to stifle a burp. ‘Too much toast late at night always affects me that way.’
Crawford looked around Thomas at the little woman lit from behind by the candlelight. He blinked but she was still there.
‘I … I was told you were … Well, who’s in Guy’s, then?’
Margaret sighed. ‘I would need to make sure, but I think I know. It’s Miss Christina Plunkett, of the Bermondsey Spiritualist Circle. We are … well, let’s say that she is Adolf Beck to my Wilhelm Meyer. They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world. Mine happens to live in Bermondsey.’
‘I … Margaret, I … I really thought you were as good as dead.’ He looked at Flambard. ‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s a long story,’ Margaret said, reaching for her coat which was hanging on a peg by the door. ‘We’ll tell you on the way to the hospital. Won’t we, Mr Mortimer?’
After a long, long night, Detective Sergeant Andrew Crawford looked moderately smart and ready for anything as he waited in his guv’nor’s office the next morning. He would need to bring Kane up to speed on the attack on Christina Plunkett, but as Michael’s miserable prognostications had not borne fruit, the lady in question now sitting up if not exactly taking notice, he thought there would be time enough for that. He and Margaret had left Mortimer Mortimer sitting by her bedside for when she woke up properly. Allowing for a substantial bandage around the woman’s head and one arm in a sling and a leg in a thigh-high plaster cast, the resemblance between her and Margaret Murray was uncanny – and close enough to fatal as made no difference. But that would all have to wait. For now, looking into the murder of Evadne Principal was the order of the day.
‘Divide and conquer, then, Andrew.’ John Kane was sifting the papers on his desk at the Yard.
‘Who do you want, guv?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Well,’ Kane was smiling. ‘It’s not often enough that a copper gets an opportunity like this, but I’m going to start with Richard Grosvenor. Or, to be more accurate, Mr Justice Grosvenor.’
‘That old shit from the Western Circuit?’
‘That’s the one. Retired now, of course, but I’ve had my knuckles rapped by that out-of-touch irrelevance once too often. And if I can pin the murder of Evadne Principal on him in the process, so much the better.’
Both men laughed. Both men knew that was not John Kane’s way. He’d get his man, all right, but it would be the right one.
‘I’m going for the female persuasion first,’ Crawford said. ‘Lucinda Twelvetrees.’
‘Anything known?’
‘Just an address in Tooting.’
‘Ah,’ Kane smiled. ‘That’s punishment enough.’
‘I don’t have all day, Inspector.’ Mr Justice Grosvenor didn’t like policemen. He’d come across too many of them in his day job and they were, to a man, morons. He vaguely remembered this one, but they did, in the end, all look alike. The judge was standing at the end of a long library in his town house, adopting peculiar postures while swinging a Number Two iron. There was no golf ball, for which John Kane, in particular, was grateful. The ricochet effect off bookcases didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Then I’ll come straight to the point, sir,’ Kane said. ‘Evadne Principal.’
The judge paused in mid-swing. ‘Who?’ he asked.
‘The medium whose séance you attended on Monday night.’
‘You are very well informed,’ Grosvenor scrutinized the man more closely.
‘I am a detective, sir,’ Kane said.
Grosvenor looked the man up and down. From his shabby suit to his co-respondent shoes, that much was evident. He resumed his tee practice. ‘Well, what of her?’ he asked.
‘You may have missed it in the press, sir,’ Kane said, ‘but she was found dead the morning after the séance of which I spoke. Murdered.’
This time, Grosvenor’s swing didn’t miss a beat. ‘I can’t say I am surprised,’ he said, ‘although I confess I missed it in Tatler.’
‘You’re not surprised?’ Kane took it up. ‘Why?’
Grosvenor sighed and put the club down. ‘Look, the sun’s over the yardarm somewhere in the world, officer. Would you like a tincture? I find these days I concentrate more with the warm glow of a brandy or three inside me.’
‘Not for me, sir, thank you. Duty and all that.’
‘Yes,’ Grosvenor sneered. He rang a little silver bell on a side table and a flunkey appeared with a tray in his hand. ‘Tincture, Hackett,’ he said. ‘Better pour two in case the inspector changes his mind.’
Hackett obliged.
Grosvenor sat down and waited until he had gone. ‘I attend séances for the thrill of it all,’ he said. ‘I must admit I miss my days on the Bench – the adversarial clash of counsel, the pomp and ceremony. And there’s something exquisite about having a black cap on your head as you hold the power of some wretch’s life in your hands. Contacting the Other Side is a bit like that – the frisson of the unknown, the unknowable. What, for example, goes on in the mind of a man who bludgeons his wife to death; a lunatic who stabs a bishop in the street? We of the normal persuasion can’t understand that, any more than we can fathom what lies Beyond.’
He sipped his brandy.
‘The problem is that most mediums are charlatans, confidence men and women who can perform almost anything for the right amount of what I believe the criminal classes call “readies”. That’s why I’m not surprised that the Principal woman was murdered. It’s a kind of justice.’
‘And you were not its instrument?’
Grosvenor sat open-mouthed. ‘Are you seriously accusing me of murdering the ghastly woman?’
Kane smiled. ‘Oh, no, sir,’ he said. ‘Be assured that when I do, I will have a considerable body of factual evidence to make my case.’
‘Miss Lucinda Twelvetrees?’ Andrew Crawford touched his hat. He couldn’t see much more than an eye peering through the crack of the door.
‘Yes.’ The voice was soft, muted, almost girl-like.
‘I am Detective Sergeant Crawford of A Division, Metropolitan Police.’ He flashed his warrant card. ‘May I have a word?’
‘Yes.’
Nothing happened.
‘May I come in?’ Crawford asked.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly be in the same room as a strange man. It wouldn’t be seemly.’
‘But I am a policeman, madam,’ he said. ‘And this is 1905.’
‘I am aware of both of those things,’ Lucinda Twelvetrees said, ‘but it doesn’t change the situation. I have never failed to return a library book in my life.’
This was more difficult than Crawford had expected. He wished now that he had opted for the High Court judge. ‘I’m not here about a library book, Miss Twelvetrees,’ he said. ‘I’m here about a murder.’
There was a screech and the door slammed shut.
Crawford knocked again. ‘Miss Twelvetrees. Open the door, please. It’s vital that I talk to you.’
‘You’re wasting your time there, mate.’ The voice seemed to be coming from the hedge that separated the Twelvetrees house from the one next door. ‘Poor old Lucinda’s away with the fairies.’
Crawford peered through the privet and saw a gardener, complete with smock and gaiters, clipping the foliage. ‘You are …?’ he asked.
‘Looking forward to the day when the Hedgeclippers’ and Borderkeepers’ Union of Great Britain gets its voice heard in Parliament.’
‘Absolutely,’ Crawford said, wondering whether this entire street in Tooting wasn’t one large lunatic asylum. ‘In the meantime, I am from Scotland Yard investigating a murder.’
‘Blimey!’ The gardener stopped clipping. ‘That’s exciting, ain’t it? I shouldn’t think poor old Lucinda’s got anything to do with it, but you might try four doors down. Veronica Makepeace. She’s poor old Lucinda’s minder. And don’t say you haven’t been warned.’
A policeman’s lot is not always a happy one and it’s not always very productive either. When John Kane got back to the Yard to put his feet up and down a cuppa, he flicked through his notebook. After a little verbal sparring, during which the judge had told Kane just what he thought of policemen, the inspector had left the vast town house, realizing, not for the first time, that he had chosen the wrong arm of the law as his career.
Then, he had caught a cab to Fleet Street, much against his better judgement, to talk to Alfred d’Abo of the Daily Mail. Perhaps the single line he had written in his notebook – ‘foul-mouthed arsehole’ – was not one he could repeat in court, but it summed up Mr d’Abo perfectly. He got an unsolicited lecture on the sanctity of the fourth estate and had never heard the word ‘alleged’ so often in one conversation in his life. Yes, Mr d’Abo had attended Evadne Principal’s last séance, in his capacity of scientific correspondent for his newspaper. Yes, he remembered exactly who was there, but he couldn’t divulge that information without a court order. No, he was not impressed by the sleight of hand of Miss Principal, who, at best, was merely an average ventriloquist. As to who might have killed her, had the inspector considered any number of other mediums driven to murder because Miss Principal was giving them all a bad name by the unconvincing show she had put on?
Kane, at the Yard now, shook his head. The next two on his list of séance attendees were no-shows. Henry Angel was a dealer in ladies’ fol-de-rols currently exhibiting his wares somewhere in Hartlepool. Auguste St-Remy was a sculptor who flitted from séance to séance in search of his Muse. Unfortunately, as his landlady told Kane, the Muse was hovering over Paris’s Left Bank at that moment and that was where the inspector could find him. That left Hilda Ransom.
This time, Andrew Crawford got more than an eye peeping out. He got a stately woman the wrong side of forty who seemed to be wearing surprisingly little for that time in the afternoon, in an out-of-the-way street in Tooting.
‘Veronica Makepeace?’ The sergeant tipped his hat.
‘Charmed.’ She held out a hand, intending him to kiss it, but Crawford was a policeman and a married policeman at that. He shook it instead.
‘I am from Scotland Yard.’
‘Are you?’ she purred. ‘How delectable. Come in.’
There was something of the spider and the fly about the pair of them in that passage and Crawford was shown, appropriately enough, into a parlour. When he was a very young copper, the sergeant had seen places like this, bordellos, which hid behind the respectable façade of suburbia.
‘Sherry?’ she asked him. ‘Or something a little stronger?’
‘Information,’ he said. ‘I tried to talk to Lucinda Twelvetrees.’
‘Ah, poor old Lucinda,’ the woman said. ‘Never the same since her mother passed. She virtually lives in séance-rooms.’
‘I understand you look after her,’ Crawford said.
‘Ah, you’ll have heard that from the gardener,’ she smiled.
Crawford sat down, careful to keep a distance between them. ‘Do I understand that you accompanied her to the séance at which Evadne Principal was the medium?’
‘Indeed I did.’ Veronica poured a very large sherry. ‘I quite enjoy them, actually. A chance to extend my own client base.’
Crawford ignored that. ‘Did you notice anyone new, perhaps, someone not usually there?’
‘No, I … oh, wait. Yes, there was one woman, tall, big shoulders. Heavy on the mascara.’
‘Did you catch her name?’
‘I did, as a matter of fact, because it was rather unusual. It was Exeter. Valerie Exeter.’
‘I take it that you and Miss Twelvetrees were regulars?’
‘We were. Are. I shan’t stop taking Lucinda to the sessions. She derives a great deal of spiritual comfort from them. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.’ He suddenly found her sitting beside him on the settee, fondling his leg. ‘Or perhaps I can be?’
He looked into her deep, dark eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Thank you, Miss Makepeace.’ He stood up suddenly. ‘If I need you, I’ll be sure to call.’
She stood up with him. ‘Be sure you do, you naughty man.’ She flicked her feather boa, the one that was doing its best to cover her breasts, across his face. ‘Friday nights are best for me. The queue isn’t so long.’
‘You know her?’ John Kane sensed a breakthrough. ‘Personally, I mean?’
Hilda Ransom took the pins out of her mouth and shook the yards of taffeta free of her lap. ‘Yes, I did. I won’t pretend I wasn’t shocked by Evadne’s passing, Inspector, but I am content in the knowledge that she is safe on the Other Side and will, no doubt, be coming through early next week.’
