Death at the Diogenes Club: a Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery (The Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mysteries Book 6), page 5
“Miss James, it was a pleasure making your acquaintance.”
“Your definition of pleasure may be somewhat faulty,” I said. “But it was nice to meet you as well. And I apologize again for thinking you a criminal.”
“Not at all.” Mr. Barton gave me a quick grin, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’m rarely threatened with grievous bodily harm in the course of carrying out my secretarial duties. It was quite the most exciting thing to happen to me all week.”
“Oh, well.” I smiled. “In that case, I’m happy to have been able to oblige.”
“What sort of a person was Royce?” I asked.
Ester, the young maid to whom I was speaking, shrugged. She was a quiet, sallow-skinned girl, with dark hair tucked tightly up under her white cap and dark brown eyes.
“He was all right. Not very friendly. Did his work and kept to himself, mostly.”
I suppressed a sigh.
We were speaking in one of the upstairs bedrooms, down the hall from the room where General Pettigrew had died.
The room had been given over to me to speak with the servants, while Inspector Lestrade and my father conducted interviews of the Diogenes Club members downstairs.
Ester was the fifth Diogenes Club maidservant I had interviewed, and every single one of them had given me variations on exactly that same answer.
Royce had been quiet, efficient, had spoken little, and fraternized with his fellow servants not at all.
If his goal had been to ensure that no one at the Diogenes knew the slightest bit of useful information about him, he had succeeded beyond his wildest hopes.
“I understand he had only worked here a short while,” I said.
“That’s right, miss,” Ester said. “About a fortnight.”
“Have you any idea where he worked before coming here?”
“No, miss. He never said.”
“And when was the last time you saw Royce today, can you remember?”
Ester screwed up her face. “Ten o’clock, maybe? I think he was in the kitchen when I came in to fetch scones and a pot of tea for one of the gentlemen in the dining room.”
“Do you remember him fetching General Pettigrew a cup of coffee?”
“Is that what killed him, miss? The coffee?”
“We’re not sure yet. Did you see him pouring it for the general?”
Ester looked frightened, but shook her head. “No, miss. I didn’t notice particularly what he was doing.”
“Did you ever see him interact with General Pettigrew?” I asked. “Did Royce ever seem to have a grudge against the general? Or had the general ever lodged any complaints against him?”
Ester shook her head. “No, miss. Not that I know of. I mean, none of us liked—” She broke off, clamping her mouth shut.
“None of you actually liked General Pettigrew? Is that what you were going to say?”
“Well, not to speak ill of the dead, but that’s about the way of it, miss. A nasty old curmudgeon, he was. But I never saw him have it out for Royce in particular.” She stopped, glancing nervously over her shoulder. “Beg pardon, miss, but is it true that the general’s ghost was seen up here?”
“Something was seen.” I doubted that Ester was involved in the apparition that Holmes and I had glimpsed. But I still watched her carefully as I added, “Whether or not it was General Pettigrew’s spirit is in doubt.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, miss.” For the first time, Ester’s face brightened to something like animation. “My aunt goes to séances regular-like and gets messages from the spirit world.”
Ester seemed like a nice girl, so I stopped myself from rolling my eyes.
The Fox sisters, who had begun the spiritualist craze with their story of communicating with the ghost of a murdered man, had actually lived not too far from the boarding school I had attended in America.
The fad for séances and mediums and communicating with the spirits of the dead had been spreading like wildfire ever since—never mind that the Fox sisters had eventually admitted the entire thing to be a hoax.
Ester leaned forward, lowering her voice. “My aunt’s medium, Madam Giselle, was able to put her in touch with her dead husband and her dead sister.”
“Remarkable.”
It wasn’t that I doubted the existence of the soul or of life after death. What I doubted was that the dead had nothing better to do than rap once for yes and twice for no in answer to questions put by women named Madame Giselle.
If that were the case, I was going to find heaven unbelievably boring.
“Thank you for your help,” I told Ester.
As Ester rose and turned to go, I glanced out the window. The room we were in overlooked the front entrance of the Diogenes Club and Pall Mall outside.
Edward Barton had been entirely right; the street down below was crowded with police and newspaper reporters. The members of the Diogenes were going to loathe everything about the memory of today.
As I watched, a Brougham carriage, drawn by a team of four perfectly matched gray horses, drew up as close as could be managed to the club.
A page boy wearing a royal blue livery uniform hopped down, but before he could open the door, a young woman emerged and climbed down from the carriage herself.
She wore a burgundy colored hat and matching cloak, both trimmed with so much white ermine fur that the woman inside was almost lost to view.
But as she hurried forward towards the club entrance, a man came out meet her.
I recognized Mr. Teale.
This, presumably, must be his wife, whom the dead man had insulted and whom Neville Teale had asked permission to telephone. Suzette, he had called her.
They embraced, and as she tilted her head back to look up at her husband, I caught a better look at her face: round and pretty in a slightly doll-like way, with blue eyes and curls of blond hair artfully arranged across her forehead.
I went still.
At the same moment, she happened to glance up at the window and caught sight of me too. I saw the same jolt of recognition I felt echoed in her expression. Her mouth dropped open, and she looked at me, agape.
If it hadn’t been for that, I might have doubted my own memory. But she recognized me too, which meant that I was right; I had met her before. I hadn’t been acquainted with her well, but when I knew her, she hadn’t been married to Mr. Teale or dressed in expensive furs.
And her name definitely had not been Suzette.
CHAPTER 8
“What are Mycroft and Lord Lansdowne meeting about?” I asked Holmes. “I assume that is the source of the unpleasantness at the Diogenes you mentioned the other night?”
Holmes looked up from the array of bubbling tubes and beakers on his work table. “Why should you say that?”
We were back at 221 Baker Street.
Uncle John had undertaken to accompany General Pettigrew’s body to the St. James mortuary on Golden Square, where an autopsy would be performed. Holmes, meanwhile, had brought the sample of coffee he had taken back here to be analyzed.
Lestrade had hemmed and made slightly disapproving noises at allowing Holmes to remove evidence from the crime scene, but had relented when Holmes pointed out that he would be more accurate and have results a great deal more quickly than the laboratory at Scotland Yard.
Holmes had—uncharacteristically—refrained from mentioning it, but Inspector Lestrade was hardly in a position to criticize anyone else’s investigative methods, given that he had managed to lose one of the chief suspects.
Holmes was now giving Becky a comprehensive course in methods of testing for various poisons; she stood beside him, watching with wide, fascinated eyes as he heated various tubes over a gas burner or added a sprinkling of mysterious powders to his beakers.
I was sitting on the couch, out of the way of the chemical proceedings.
“It can’t have been the quarrel between General Pettigrew and Mr. Teale,” I answered Holmes. “Mycroft wouldn’t have bothered to call you in over one man’s having insulted another man’s wife.”
“True.” Holmes used a tiny metal scoop to measure out a few grains of another powder onto a tissue-thin sheet of paper, then set the paper on a small set of brass scales. He turned to Becky. “You may add that to the test tube there.” He gestured. “Carefully, mind.”
“Yes, Mr. Holmes.”
Careful wasn’t usually a favorite word in Becky’s vocabulary, but awe of my father—and the thrill of being allowed to help with gathering evidence—was so far winning out.
At the moment, I could see her trying so hard to stay quiet and calm that she was practically vibrating in place.
She picked up the paper Holmes had used to hold the powder and bit her lip, her eyes crossing slightly as she focused on folding it and tapping the contents, bit by bit, into the tiny mouth of the test tube.
“There has been some trouble with the shipments of arms to the Sudan,” Holmes went on. “Lord Lansdowne is looking into the matter.”
His voice was guarded, which led me to believe there was more to the story than he was telling me. Though whether that was because it was a state secret or just because my father habitually horded information like a dragon hordes gold I wasn’t sure.
“The Sudan.” I was only vaguely familiar with the conflict in that part of Africa from what I had read in the newspapers. I knew that Kitchener was leading a coalition of British, Egyptian, and Sudanese soldiers against the Mahdist forces that had invaded and taken over the region. “So nothing to do with General Pettigrew, then—or is it?”
“Nothing to do with him at all. The general’s military service was in India, and his career ended five years ago, since which time he has been a crabbed and cantankerous fixture at the Diogenes.”
“Had he any family?”
“I believe there is a nephew, but no other near relations.”
Holmes’s tone was abstracted, which could have meant he was focusing on the chemical experiments before him. Or it could mean that his thoughts were following another track entirely.
“So we still have no motive for anyone’s having wished to kill the general?”
“As yet, no.” Holmes eyed the test tube to which Becky had just added the powder. “However, we do know one thing: Whatever manner General Pettigrew met his end, it was not through any injurious additive to his coffee.”
I looked up quickly. “You’re sure?”
“Miss Kelly and I have just tested for all of the most common forms of quick-acting poisons: cyanide, digitalis, strychnine …” Holmes gave Becky an approving look before returning his gaze to the arrangement of tubes and beakers. “The coffee is free from all of them.”
A light tap sounded on the sitting room door, and Mrs. Hudson entered, holding an envelope.
“This arrived just a moment ago, Mr. Holmes, by special messenger.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I left word at the club for Mycroft that I would appreciate the address of the missing waiter.” Holmes ripped open the envelope and glanced at the single sheet of paper inside before tossing it aside. “This is his reply.”
I picked up the fallen sheet of paper. “113 Foley Street,” I read. “The police will have already been there.”
Holmes made an of course gesture with one hand, while continuing to hold the vial of coffee up to the light with the other.
“It goes equally without saying that they will have found nothing. A man adept enough to vanish from the Diogenes from under their noses will not be simply sitting in his own home, waiting for Scotland Yard to come and arrest him.”
“But you’ve just established that the coffee wasn’t poisoned,” I said. “So then why did Mr. Royce run away?”
“This man Royce would hardly be the first to wish to avoid being the subject of a police investigation, regardless of whether he was guilty of murder or no.”
I frowned. “It still doesn’t seem likely that he would flee if he wasn’t involved.”
“On the contrary,” Holmes said. “I can think of thirteen separate scenarios in which such a course of action would be likely, and twenty-one in which his flight from the club would be a reasonable possibility.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Thirteen?”
“One.” Holmes held up an index finger. “This man Royce was pilfering money from the club’s petty cash box. Two, he had been guilty of some misdemeanor in his old job and feared that his dubious past would be uncovered. Three—”
I interrupted. “All right, I believe you.”
“What about a snake?” Becky stepped very slowly and carefully away from the worktable, let out an audible breath of relief, and then—as though unable to contain herself another second longer—spun in a circle, skipped, and landed beside me on the couch with enough force to send up a small puff of dust from the cushions. “The man who died could have been bitten by a poisonous snake, couldn’t he? Like in that story of Dr. Watson’s?”
My father smiled, which was more than the mention of Uncle John’s stories usually elicited from him. Becky had a softening effect, even on Sherlock Holmes.
“That is possible. Though it does not explain the apparition that Lucy and I saw at the dead man’s bedside.”
“The ghost!” Becky bounced on the seat of the sofa a little. “Do you think the missing waiter is the one who made it appear?”
Holmes had started to dismantle the chemical apparatus and looked at her over the tops of his test tubes with approval.
“I am delighted to hear, young lady, that you place little credence in the supposed spirit having been a genuine manifestation of the supernatural.”
“Super—” Becky’s forehead wrinkled.
“You don’t think it was a real ghost,” I supplied.
“Oh. No.” Becky shook her head. “I wish there were real ghosts, I’d love to see one. And it would be nice to talk to … them, sometimes.”
A trace of sadness crossed her small face, and I wondered whether she was thinking of her mother, who had died three years ago.
“But Jack says that if the dead really wanted to speak to us, they wouldn’t have waited this long to figure out a way. I mean, people a hundred years ago didn’t have Ouija boards and things like that.”
“Your brother makes an excellent point,” Holmes said.
He said something more, something about the history of the occult, but I was only half paying attention.
Becky’s words—and recalling my conversation with the housemaid Ester—had made me think of something.
I crossed to the cabinet where Holmes kept his files: the one area of 221B Baker Street where organization and neatness reigned.
I ran my gaze over the various ledgers and leather-bound files, trying to remember the name I had heard. Minton … Marsdon …
“Maskelyne.” Holmes’s voice interrupted me. I looked up with a jolt.
“You will find him listed under p for paranormal and cross-referenced under o for occult and also l.”
Of course Holmes had had the same thought occur to him—and probably some time before me too. I shouldn’t even have been surprised by now.
“L?”
“Levitation,” Holmes said. “He is commonly held to be the inventor of that particular illusion.”
I quickly flipped through, found the correct file, and carried it with me back to the couch.
“Who is that?” Becky craned her head to peer down at the photograph attached to the file of a mustached man in a smoking jacket and bow tie. “John Neville—”
“Maskelyne,” I finished.
Holmes was looking at the clock over the mantel. “I believe if you were to leave directly, there would be just time enough for you to reach the Egyptian Hall for the start of the afternoon show.”
“Egyptian Hall?” Becky repeated. Her eyes were wide.
“That’s right.” I stood up. “Becky, how would you like to come with me to a magic show?”
CHAPTER 9
“And now”—the man in the top hat stepped towards the edge of the stage and lowered his voice impressively—“as my grand finale, I shall make this magnificent animal vanish into thin air.”
He waved at the elephant that occupied the stage with him.
The elephant looked fairly unimpressed by the whole proceedings. Though the same couldn’t be said for the audience. There were gasps and murmurs all around. Becky, sitting beside me, was on the very edge of her chair.
Two costumed assistants led the elephant into a caged enclosure constructed of bamboo rods. The gate was closed, though everyone could still see the huge animal through the bars.
The magician snapped his fingers, and a black silk cloth descended from the ceiling, covering the entire cage, elephant and all.
He waved his wand, a puff of smoke erupted, and then he whipped the silk covering off the cage.
The elephant was gone.
The room erupted into applause, the magician took a bow to thunderous cheers, and then the stage curtains came down. The lights in the theater came back on.
“Did you like it?” I asked Becky.
Becky’s eyes were still saucer-wide. “That was … amazing.”
The rest of the audience was standing up, starting to filter out.
A young theater usher in a brass-buttoned coat appeared beside our aisle.
“Miss James?” he asked. “Mr. Maskelyne will see you now, if you’ll just follow me backstage.”
The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly had been built earlier in the century as a museum and then soon after was converted to an exhibition hall. According to a plaque on one of the walls, the emperor Napoleon’s carriage in which he had ridden to Waterloo had once been on display here.
The whole interior was decorated to look like an ancient Egyptian tomb or temple, with columns painted in bright turquoise and gold and stone statues of the Egyptian goddesses and gods lining the walls.
Becky and I followed the usher through a doorway marked private, along a hall, and down a flight of stairs. The usher knocked on another door, and a man’s voice called out, “Come in.”
The room inside was a riot of paraphernalia from the stage: racks of costumes, chairs and tables, and furniture of every description. An entire bookshelf was filled with various decks of cards, and in one corner was a cage with a pair of white rabbits, calmly nibbling on lettuce.
