A Particular Eye for Villainy: (Inspector Ben Ross 4) (4 page)

Inspector Benjamin Ross

I HAD left the house with great reluctance. I thought Lizzie would have enough sense not to go upstairs. As for Mrs Jameson, having seen the body once, she would have no wish to see it again. All in all, I could be confident they’d stay in the parlour with the door locked. But they were alone and that wasn’t desirable with a murderer on the prowl. I set off in the direction of Waterloo Station where I could find a cab to take me to the Yard. It had begun to rain, a light persistent drizzle that found its way down the back of my neck. I had left home without my hat, too, but had no time to go back for it. I turned up my coat collar and hurried through the now empty streets, glimmering in the gaslight.

Then I had a bit of luck. I turned a corner and saw, proceeding towards me in a stately fashion, the unmistakable form of a police constable on his beat. He was better protected against the weather than I was, wearing his cape. I hailed him and he responded by turning on his bull’s-eye lamp and playing its beam over me.

‘It’ll be Mr Ross, if I’m not mistaken, sir!’ he said in a surprised voice.

‘You’re not mistaken and for goodness’ sake, turn that beam away from me. You’re dazzling me!’

He obliged, turning the lamp off altogether. I peered at him and thought I recognised a man who regularly patrolled this beat. ‘It’s Butcher, isn’t it?’

‘Yessir.’ He was pleased I knew his name. ‘All in order here, sir.’

‘I am not checking on you, Constable. I leave that to your sergeant. I’m on my way to find a cab to take me to the Yard. I’m afraid all is not in order!’ Quickly I explained the situation and asked him to go at once to the house and mount guard on it.

‘There has been some bad business done here tonight and two women waiting unprotected in a house with a murdered man lying upstairs. And one of the ladies is my wife, as it happens.’

Butcher drew himself up. ‘If it’s been done on my beat, sir, I shall of course proceed there immediate. You may rely on me!’

He set off at a cumbersome jogtrot.

The wheels of the law sometimes turn slowly but they turn efficiently. No one would get past Butcher once he took up guard at the house. I could be relieved on that account.

When we got back to the Jameson house, I was relieved to see the door opened by Constable Butcher.

‘All quiet, here, sir,’ said Butcher as soon as he saw me. ‘The ladies is in the parlour. There’s also a pair of servant girls, a-sitting in the kitchen. One of ’em works here and the other works for you, Mr Ross. They’re drinking tea and talking the hind leg off a donkey. One keeps blubbing. They wasn’t here when I got here but turned up just after. I have secured the back door – that leads out of the kitchen, too. But it occurs to me that the villain made good his escape that way and very possible his entry, too! I’ve examined all the windows on the ground floor, sir, and none of them’s been forced.’

‘How he got in will be the first mystery to solve,’ I murmured to Harper as we climbed the stairs. ‘But if there is only the one servant employed here, and if she left the kitchen door unlocked, it wouldn’t be difficult.’

We had reached the room on the first floor where poor Tapley lay. Although I’d seen him earlier and braced myself for seeing him again, it was still a sickening sight.

I have dealt with murder more often than I could have wished. Usually, in my experience, it takes place at the rougher end of society. Men kill one another in tavern brawls. They kill their wretched women in fits of drunken jealousy. Motives often seem petty and out of all proportion to the horror of the crime. Recently I had dealt with the case of a pawnbroker, killed in his shop by a customer who couldn’t raise the money to redeem his mother’s wedding ring so decided to retrieve it the direct way. I’ve known murder done for a penny-a-week life insurance. Life is hard for those on the street and little better for the labouring poor. Temptation is always at hand.

The middle classes are on the whole subtler in dealing with a problem or an obstacle. They can afford to pay a lawyer his fee to argue their cause in the courts. They are conscious of their reputations. Of course there is violence in such homes, too. I’ve seen the signs of that also. But it seldom comes into court because they cling to a ‘good name’ with the zeal of a fanatic. The beaten wife swears she walked into a bedpost. The abused servant girl is silenced with a mix of money and threats. But murder cannot be hidden so easily. Murder is a stain that cannot be washed clean. The police cannot be turned away from an investigation into murder with a firm ‘not today, thank you!’. It is the rarity, therefore, of such an event in such a setting that makes it particularly shocking. And this time in a peace-loving Quaker home, too! There was a horrid irony in that.

The poor fellow was as I had left him earlier before hurrying out to Scotland Yard. He sprawled on one side with his face turned towards the hearth. But if he had glanced in that direction before he died, he’d have seen no dancing flames. No fire burned in the grate nor was there any sign that one had been lit that day. The iron grille at the base of the grate was free of ash or cinders. In fact, the room was so cold I guessed no heat had warmed it in many weeks. I felt it even through my jacket. I wondered at anyone wanting to sit and read in such a chilly room, and why the lodger had not asked for a fire. Had he been required to pay extra for it?

Tapley’s eyes and mouth were open and the features still seemed to show his incredulity at the event. The back of his skull was a bloody pulped mess. Head wounds bleed copiously and this had caused a pool of blood and brain matter to seep out and into the carpet beneath. The victim was a small man and in death looked even more shrunken, a tiny helpless figure. To overcome him would not have been difficult. But there was no sign of a struggle. I guessed that he had been reading the book that lay, open, spine uppermost and clearly blood spotted, nearby. His assailant had opened the door quietly, approached the absorbed reader across the carpet and raised his weapon . . .

Biddle had given a little gasp when he saw the body and turned pale but assured me, when I gave him an enquiring look, that he was all right.

‘Go down to the kitchen and interview the housemaid, Jenny,’ I told him. ‘Ask particularly if there were any visitors to the house today and that includes visitors to the kitchen.’

Would-be thieves sweet-talking housemaids in order to gain entry was a common enough occurrence; and it would be a necessary line of enquiry. Jenny might not want to admit to a ‘follower’. But she might speak more freely to Biddle who was nearer her age.

Dr Harper had gone to the body and was kneeling over it. ‘A bad business,’ he observed.

I took a more careful look round the room while he examined the dead man. This had been Tapley’s parlour, so his landlady had told us. It was a small sitting room but large enough for a single man to take his ease in. Again I wondered at the lack of a fire. Probably there was an understanding that he could join his landlady in the heated parlour after their supper taken together.

I left Harper to his examination and went into the next-door room. Mrs Jameson had said Tapley occupied the front two rooms, so this should be his bedroom. It was. A marble-topped washstand was furnished with bowl and ewer, together with a shaving mug painted with forget-me-nots. The bed was neatly made. Another book lay on a small table beside it, together with a candlestick and an empty china pin tray. I opened a wardrobe and saw his coat hanging inside it as sole occupant, apart from an empty, battered travelling grip standing on the floor. Opening the drawers of a dresser I found only some handkerchiefs, a spare shirt, a set of woollen ‘long johns’ and some knitted stockings. Mr Tapley had travelled light. I returned to the book on the bedside table and examined it to see if it was one of devotions. But it was a translation from the German of Goethe’s travels in Italy. It occurred to me that I had seen no religious texts of any sort among the books. The lodger had not been drawn to a Quaker house because he was a man of deep personal faith.

I was beginning to be intrigued by the character of Mr Tapley. His meagre belongings suggested a man of few means, but he had found the money to buy books and pay his rent. Was he, perhaps, in receipt of some small pension? Did he enjoy the income from a small sum wisely invested?

I left the room and investigated the rest of the passageway. Mrs Jameson’s bedroom was a large room at the back. The view over the yard was uninteresting but the room offered more privacy than one overlooking the street and would also, I conjectured, let in the morning sunshine. A marble-topped washstand here was twin to the one in Tapley’s room.

By what route did Jenny bring up the morning’s hot water? I completed my exploration to the far shadowy end of the passage and found a narrow iron spiral staircase that must lead down to the kitchen. If Tapley’s murderer had come in via the kitchen, then he would have used this spiral stair to access the upper floor and to make his escape.

I went back to the victim’s sitting room, where Harper still knelt above the victim, He was slowly working around the upper body. As I watched, he cupped the victim’s jaw and moved the head a fraction. The doctor then sat back, balanced on his heels, his hands hanging loose above his knees, staring thoughtfully at poor Tapley. I took my notebook from my pocket. I drew a careful diagram showing the position of all the furniture in the room and the body. I also made one of the first floor with its two points of access from below. I was putting the finishing touches to this when Harper sighed and stood up.

‘Well, Inspector, your man was killed by at least two heavy blows to the back of the skull by the usual blunt instrument, something like a jemmy, for example.’ His tone was matter-of-fact.

Constable Butcher had examined the ground-floor windows, something I’d failed to do before I left for the Yard, and I believed him when he said none was forced. Butcher was a man of experience who would have been called to numerous breakins. He wouldn’t make a mistake over a thing like that. It all confirmed the theory that the intruder had slipped through an unsecured window or door, probably in the kitchen.

‘I only use “jemmy” as an example,’ explained Harper. ‘Something weighty enough to do a lot of damage at a single blow. I would say considerable force was used, more than required.’

‘Can you give me a time of death?’ I asked.