Chapter Six
Elizabeth Martin Ross
‘NOW THEN, Bessie!’ I said, ‘we shall have to be discreet, you and I. Do you know what “discreet” means?’
We were seated at the kitchen table. Between us stood a brown earthenware teapot with a curl of steam spiralling from its spout, two cups (pottery, for day-to-day use, not best china), two plates and fruit cake. The recipe for the cake was a special one of Mrs Simms, my Aunt Parry’s cook. It had been divulged to Bessie, with injunctions not to pass it on, when Bessie had left Aunt Parry’s staff to join our small household.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Bessie loftily. ‘Of course I know what “discreet” means. It means, we don’t tell anyone what we do.’ She gave me a look from beneath lowered eyelids. ‘And’specially, we don’t tell the inspector what we do.’
‘Yes, no, I mean,’ I went on hastily, ‘I will decide what we tell the inspector.’
‘And I says nothing,’ said Bessie cheerfully. ‘Shall I cut us a piece of that cake, missus, or do you want to do it?’
‘I’ll cut it. You have made it very nicely, Bessie.’ I carefully cut two neat slices and put one on each of our plates.
Bessie smoothed down her apron and smiled at the cake. ‘It’s nice us having a tea party like this.’
‘It’s a council of war,’ I said. ‘We are making a plan of campaign, you and I, Bessie.’
‘Whatever you say, missus,’ was the indistinct reply through a mouthful of cake.
‘From now on, we put together what we know. For a start, you tell me all you know about Miss Marchwood and anyone else who attends the temperance meetings.’
Perhaps it was wrong of me to encourage her to gossip, but as Ben says, detectives have to ask questions, and can’t be fussy about observing the rules of politeness, or they’d never learn anything. But it did strike me that I’d just told Bessie we must be discreet and here I was, encouraging her to be anything but.
‘I told you already,’ said Bessie. ‘Miss Marchwood comes up to London on the train and brings biscuits. I don’t know any more about her, only that she’s a lady’s companion, like you used to be before you married the inspector.’
‘But how do you know she’s a lady’s companion?’ I asked. ‘Did she tell you?’
Bessie gave a snort. ‘No, she don’t talk to me. Only to say, “Fetch more milk, Bessie!” But she talks to Mrs Scott, see, and I listen. That’s how I know Mrs Scott’s husband was a soldier and died of a fever in India, in some place with a funny name. Lucky something.’
‘Lucknow?’
Bessie nodded. ‘Could be. I thought it strange and a bit sad that the poor man died at a place called Lucky.’
Had Scott died at the infamous siege of Lucknow during the Mutiny, some ten years earlier? I wondered. If so, Mrs Scott had been left a young widow. Had she too been caught up in the siege as had many army wives? I felt inclined to forgive her being so suspicious of me, if she had been through so much trouble and danger.
‘Does Mrs Scott often take Mr Fawcett with her in her carriage when she leaves the meetings?’
‘Quite a lot,’ said Bessie, ‘I seen them a few times, going off together in the carriage. I think Mr Fawcett lodges not far away from Mrs Scott’s house.’
‘How about Miss Marchwood? Does Mrs Scott ever take her in the carriage?’
Bessie shook her head. ‘Not that I’ve seen. Mrs Scott lives at Clapham.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because,’ said Bessie calmly, ‘I heard her tell Mr Fawcett once, “I hope you will be at my next swarry in Clapham.” ’
‘Swarry?’ I asked cautiously.
‘It’s a party,’ explained Bessie.
‘Oh, a
soirée
!’ I exclaimed.
‘That’s what I said,’ repeated Bessie, growing a little impatient at all my interruptions. ‘A swarry. And I know she’s got a big house, very fine, because Mr Pritchard told me so.’
‘Mr Pritchard has been invited to these soirées?’ I was surprised. I could easily imagine Mr Fawcett, with his dove-coloured pantaloons and silk cravat, enchanting the guests at such a gathering. But not little Mr Pritchard with his kiss-curls plastered fast with lard across his sweating brow.
‘Oh, no!’ Bessie gave a hoot of laughter. ‘He’s tradesman’s entrance, he is! He don’t get invited. He’s her butcher, delivers her meat.’ Bessie leaned forward confidentially. ‘He says it’s a really fine place and full of beautiful things.’
‘I would expect Mr Pritchard to have got no further than the kitchen,’ I objected.
‘He’s looked through the windows. And one day when he was leaving, he saw a cab drive up and a really swell-looking feller get down. He had long black hair curling over his collar and looked, said Mr Pritchard, like a pirate. He was carrying a big square flat parcel, all done up in brown paper. Mr Pritchard thought it was another picture. The house is full of pictures. He saw them when he was looking through the windows.’
Now this Ben would be interested to know.
‘You’re doing very well, Bessie,’ I said. ‘Let us have another slice of cake.’
Ben was certainly very interested. ‘Good Lord!’ he said, when I told him about the picture.
‘Of course,’ I warned, ‘we don’t know Mrs Scott bought it at Benedict’s Gallery. But suppose she did? Do you think it could have been Benedict himself delivering it by cab? To a favoured customer?’
Ben looked doubtful. ‘Benedict isn’t a fine-looking fellow with curling hair and piratical good looks. He’s an insignificant sort of chap, medium height, balding, slender in build. But Angelis, now, I’d describe him as a swell, a man who wants to be noticed. There’s more than a touch of a Barbary corsair about him! If you saw Angelis getting out of a cab with a large parcel, you’d remember.’
He scratched his chin. ‘Well, well . . . I had dismissed Angelis from all this. Perhaps I was wrong to do so. But we mustn’t be hasty in our conclusions. We don’t, as you say, know that the painting, if the mysterious parcel
was
a painting, was bought from Benedict, even though its delivery by Angelis strongly suggests it was.’
‘But you could find out,’ I said. ‘Angelis will keep a record of all sales at the gallery.’
‘Obviously I have to talk to Angelis again, and to Isabella Marchwood. That woman has deliberately concealed a good deal from me! But even if Angelis lets me see the record of sales and Mrs Scott is in it, what does it prove?’ Ben tapped his fingers on the table top in an irritated way. ‘We could be jumping to conclusions, seeing connections where there are only coincidences. I have to have more than this, Lizzie, before I take it all to Dunn. The superintendent is already as nervous as a cat with only one of his nine lives left. Is there anything else?’
‘Not yet,’ I confessed. ‘But I might learn more at the temperance meeting this Sunday. I do know that the meetings seem to provide a link between all these people. It’s all the more curious because they are such a varied group and would seem to have nothing else in common.’
I began to tick off the points on my fingers. ‘Mrs Scott, a soldier’s widow, knows Miss Marchwood, a lady’s companion. She also knows Mr Pritchard, a butcher by trade with a clientele among the better-off, including herself. He delivers meat to her house regularly. Both Marchwood and Pritchard help at the temperance meetings, as does Mrs Scott. So does that mean that one of them encouraged the others to come along?
‘Miss Marchwood was companion to Allegra Benedict. Mr Benedict owns a business dealing in fine arts and Mrs Scott has a house full of paintings. She acquired a new one not so long ago and it was delivered by a man who might – I know it’s guesswork now -’ I said apologetically, ‘but he
might
be Angelis, the manager of Benedict’s Gallery. Someone who looks very like him, at any rate. If he was, and Mrs Scott buys works of art from the gallery in Piccadilly, then it’s possible Mrs Scott knew Sebastian Benedict himself. In fact it’s very likely. She could have met him at his gallery. You say he goes there three days a week. He would want to establish a personal rapport with a good customer. Allegra Benedict sometimes went to the gallery with him, or called in when she knew he was there. Mrs Scott could well have made her acquaintance, too.’ I paused, working out the next link in the chain.
‘You say Angelis was anxious to tell you that Miss Marchwood always accompanied Allegra when she called at the gallery, so Mrs Scott could have met Miss Marchwood there as well. She may have suggested the two women attend the temperance meetings. Bessie is keen to spread the word about abstaining from alcohol and perhaps Mrs Scott is, too?’ I paused again. ‘What do you think of my reasoning so far?’
‘Plausible,’ said Ben. ‘But far too many “perhapses”.’
‘There is a weakness, too,’ I admitted, ‘because Allegra Benedict didn’t accept the invitation to the temperance meetings; only her companion did. Bessie never saw Allegra there. She didn’t go.’
‘That simply means Isabella Marchwood was interested enough to go along, and her employer was not. Perhaps we are being led down the wrong path by concentrating on the Temperance Hall. Allegra Benedict was Italian and grew up in a country where everyone drinks wine and thinks nothing of it,’ Ben observed. ‘I can’t imagine she would fancy going to a temperance meeting.’
‘No,’ I said, leaning forward in my excitement as the idea entered my head, ‘but she might go to a soirée at a fine house in Clapham.’
There was a silence. Then Ben said slowly, ‘If your mind is travelling along the same track as mine, then there may be another link between them – between Allegra and Mrs Scott, I mean. I am thinking that they were both lonely women: one widowed, possibly when young, and one an exile from her native land and married to an older man whose only interest seems to be paintings and his art business.’
He paused. ‘Angelis would have an excuse for calling on Mrs Scott. He would be advising her about her purchases in the art world. She might, if lonely enough, encourage his visits; even invite him to her soirées. He’d cut a fine swashbuckling figure there.
‘But Allegra was lonely too. I have no doubt at all about that. We know for certain that Allegra and George Angelis knew one another. They met at the gallery. I don’t know Angelis’s origins, but even if he was born in this country, his ancestors weren’t, that’s clear. Perhaps he and Allegra shared the fact that they were
both
exiles in a strange land. They both hailed from countries full of sunshine and vineyards . . . and they both ended up living in rainy, foggy England where demon drink is shunned. I think,’ concluded Ben with a smile, ‘that would be enough to make any two people form a friendship. It could be furthered by meetings at Mrs Scott’s house.’
‘It’s a splendid theory, Ben,’ I told him, ‘but it has a fatal flaw. For that to be the case, Allegra would need to be friendly with Mrs Scott.’
‘It was you who suggested she might be,’ he pointed out. ‘You said she might attend these soirées given by the Scott woman out at Clapham.’
‘I know I did. But I can’t be sure of it. Give me time,’ I told him. ‘Bessie and I will work on it.’
He looked at me soberly. ‘Be very careful, Lizzie. Don’t forget, someone out there in that circle is a murderer.’
Inspector Benjamin Ross
Of course I was very interested in everything Lizzie had told me. It made me even surer in my own mind that it was not by some unlucky chance that Allegra Benedict went into Green Park that foggy afternoon. She had arranged to meet someone and was so desperate not to miss the appointment that she decided she could find her way to the oak tree, despite the fog. That suggested to me she and the unknown person she was to meet had rendezvoused at the oak tree before. It, and the way there, were familiar to her. Even with such poor visibility, she was confident she could find it.
It seems I am too well known. The gentlemen of the press certainly know me and I had to run a gauntlet of them before I reached my office the next morning. One wretch trapped me a good hundred yards away. He was a tall, lean, eager-looking fellow with a long thin nose, who reminded me of a greyhound.
He loped alongside me, pestering with his questions. ‘Oh, come on, Inspector! You know, the press can help you a lot in this. Look at the number of people we reach! Everyone wants to know more about the River Wraith! Is it true he’s a known lunatic who’s escaped from a madhouse? You must have something you can tell me. I’ll see my paper gives you full credit.’
Superintendent Dunn would love that, I thought sourly.
‘Are you making any progress? Are you about to arrest anyone?’
‘Yes, you, for impeding me in my duty!’ I snarled at him.
He gave a high-pitched giggle and his eyes gleamed at the thought of what a good story that would make – if I should be so foolish as to arrest him. He knew I wouldn’t.
‘My, you are a wit, Inspector. Come on, now, anything . . .’ he coaxed.
I walked on, ignoring him until I realised a different voice spoke in my ear and saw that another member of the Fourth Estate had taken his place. This one was of middle height and stocky with a red jowly face, more a bulldog than a greyhound.
