An Appetite for Murder (17 page)

Frances stared at him, but kept her dignity and refused to be unnerved by his manner. Ignoring the smirk of the desk sergeant, who seemed unable to view her as anything other than a comical eccentric, she squared her shoulders and followed Sharrock into his office.

Instead of throwing himself into the scarred and creaking chair behind the mountain of papers on his desk, as he usually did, Sharrock strode up and down the room barely able to contain himself. ‘I have stood by for too long,’ he said at last, ‘watching you walk blindly into any danger you can find. If you were my daughter, I would lock you up and not let you out of the house! I’d see you married off to the first man insane enough to ask for you and that would be an end to all these goings on!’

Frances said nothing, seeing that he had more to express, and waited for him to finish. He was obliged to stop for a moment and breathe heavily to enable himself to continue.

‘That business with your father, all right, I can understand why you meddled in that – family feeling and so on, but then to offer yourself as a detective, I could hardly believe it when I heard. I have told you a dozen times, this is not women’s work! Can you imagine women dressed up as policemen parading about the streets and chasing criminals? Of course not! Missing pets, thieving maidservants, scandalous letters, perhaps – I was prepared to ignore that and hope that you would find yourself some more suitable employment before too long. I thought you might do all right at that school but no, as soon as you step into any establishment, there’s an end to it! You closed the school, bankrupted the Bayswater Bank, and I suppose you have seen the pile of rubble where the mortuary once was. And now I have been told that you are offering to look into a murder, and a nasty, brutal one at that.’ He glared at her and pointed a thick finger with an angry stabbing motion. ‘Don’t deny it; Mr Marsden has told me that you have agreed to act for Mr Sweetman.’

‘I deny nothing,’ replied Frances, calmly, ‘but please do tell me the reason for your agitation. I am not seeking to undermine your work. After all, we both have the same object; we wish to see justice done.’

‘
Police
work, Miss Doughty,’ he insisted. ‘
Men’s
work. Hard and dangerous. I have spoken to Mr Curtis about it but he is obstinate.’

‘I act for him, too,’ Frances reminded the Inspector. ‘I hope you have not been trying to persuade him to dismiss me.’

Sharrock scowled, folded his arms and paced up and down again. Clearly, that was precisely what he had been doing.

‘Obviously he has
not
dismissed me,’ said Frances. ‘So now I wish to see Mr Sweetman.’

‘Well you can’t!’ snapped Sharrock, turning on her petulantly.

‘He is my client.’

‘That gives you no rights round here!’

This, unfortunately, was true. It was clear to Frances, annoyed and frustrated as she was, that she would have to remain calm if she was to make any progress. ‘Inspector, you know me by now,’ she said gently, ‘and I will see Mr Sweetman either sooner or later. It would avoid trouble and delay if you were simply to permit me to speak to him today.’

Sharrock, however, was determined to be obstinate. ‘It’s no trouble or delay to me. The answer is no and it will stay no.’

Frances decided to try a different argument. ‘But why are you so anxious about my safety in taking this case?’ she asked. ‘You have in your cells the man who you believe to be the killer of Mrs Sweetman. You assume it to be solely a domestic matter, and there has never been any suggestion that Mr Sweetman might have dangerous associates. So where is the risk to me in taking the case, or indeed to anyone else if the right man is in custody? Unless,’ she went on, seeing that her words were finding their mark, ‘you have changed your mind and now suspect that Mr Sweetman is, after all, innocent.’

‘It was a good arrest,’ he asserted, ‘and I stand by it. Whether or not he is guilty is for the courts to decide. I’ve done my job.’

‘But now that you have had a chance to know the man better you do not see him as a murderer,’ said Frances. ‘And this despite his previous record.’

‘Well if you are right, Miss Clever, and I don’t say you are,’ he said belligerently, ‘all the more reason for you to have nothing to do with the case!’

Frances could see that he would not be persuaded and she would have to be patient and try other means. Nevertheless, she was determined not to have had a wasted journey.

‘Very well, I must abide by your decision,’ she said, ‘but since I am here I wish to discuss the crime for which Mr Sweetman was convicted in 1866.’

Sharrock opened his mouth to protest.

‘You were the first policeman at the scene, were you not?’

Sharrock’s mouth snapped shut and he raked his fingers through his thick brush of hair. ‘You are a very annoying young woman!’ he said. ‘Two minutes and not a moment more!’ He moved a pile of papers from the visitors’ chair, throwing it on top of a lopsided heap on his desk where it threatened to slither to the floor, and gestured her to be seated before taking his place opposite. Frances could not resist straightening the unruly heap of documents before it collapsed, and noticed that it included the file on the 1866 robbery, its dusty surface streaked with fingermarks.

‘What was your impression of Mr Sweetman when you first encountered him?’

Sharrock grunted. ‘He wasn’t a serious suspect at first, not the right type, not until we found out about his money troubles. But I could see from the start that I wouldn’t have to look far. My old Inspector, he used to say, when a safe gets emptied, start with the company staff. They know what was in it, and they’ll have been tempted by it every day. There was never any doubt that the thief was an amateur. He’d used a company key to unlock the safe, and then tried to make it look like someone had broken in by damaging the door. But it was obvious that the door had been damaged
after
it was opened, and from the inside, and he’d used old Mr Finn’s brass inkstand to do it, which was dented, and it wasn’t the day before. So it didn’t take a Miss Doughty or even a Miss Dauntless to solve
that
one.’

‘So you suspected Sweetman because he had the key to the safe and no reliable alibi, and was in debt.’

‘You would have done the same,’ Sharrock protested. ‘When his colleague identified him as the man he saw in the doorway we had our case.’

‘Tell me about that morning,’ said Frances. ‘What was the first thing you saw when you walked in?’

He grunted again. ‘Blood on the floor, all trodden about, people dashing here and there in a panic, and the man lying on his face.’

‘Whereabouts? In the main office?’

‘Yes, though it turned out he hadn’t been attacked there.’

‘No? Where was he attacked?’

‘In Mr Finn’s office. He must have staggered or crawled out, and collapsed where he was found.’

‘You surprise me,’ said Frances. ‘Why was he working there and not at his own desk?’ She thought for a moment. ‘Surely anyone who intended to enter the premises and rob the safe would have chosen a time when the office was empty. Any robber would have seen the light in Mr Finn’s office from the street as Mr Browne and Mr Minster did, and known that someone was there. Why would they have taken the risk?’

‘Ah, but Gibson
wasn’t
working in Mr Finn’s office, or at his own desk. He’d been working in a room at the back where the customer files were stored. We found some papers on a table there, letters he’d written that evening. His lamp couldn’t be seen by someone passing by in the street, so from the outside the office would have looked unoccupied. Sweetman must have let himself in, not realising that Gibson was there, and lit the gas in Mr Finn’s office so he could see to open the safe. There was no risk about that; enough men work late at their desks so a light on in an office wouldn’t attract attention. Finn was in the habit of doing that himself, and any police patrol would have known it. That night, however, Mr Finn had already told Sweetman that he wouldn’t be working late, he’d be dining at his club with Mr Whibley.

‘When Gibson finished his work, he would have left the storeroom, and walked across the main office to reach the outer door. On his way, he had to pass the door to Mr Finn’s room. We think that he saw the light on in the room, which it hadn’t been before, and heard movement, but of course he knew that Mr Finn had already left for the night, so he walked in to investigate and interrupted Sweetman while he was emptying the safe. There was a struggle, and Gibson hit his head on the edge of the desk. We found blood and hair there.’

‘So his injuries were accidental?’ said Frances. ‘Dr Collin thought otherwise.’

‘Oh, it was no accident; the doctor thought Gibson had had his head smashed against the desk more than once.’

‘A brutal crime,’ agreed Frances, ‘and you thought that Mr Sweetman was capable of that? Pounding another man’s head against a desk?’

‘He was a desperate man. Who knows what a desperate man might do on the spur of the moment?’

‘Did Mr Whibley say when he arrived the next morning whether the light was still on?’

Sharrock grabbed the file from the desk and examined it. ‘I don’t know why I’m helping you,’ he growled. Frances smiled as he studied the written statements. ‘He arrived at half past seven o’clock, but didn’t notice whether the light had been left burning. We think that was because the gas was on very low in Mr Finn’s room and it was already bright daylight. It wasn’t until I examined the room that I saw that the gas was still on.’

‘Would the door have appeared to be tampered with or unlocked from the outside?’

‘No, it would not.’

‘Was there a light on in the main office?’

‘No, but the light coming through the windows was enough for Whibley to see Gibson on the floor.’

The light coming from Mr Finn’s room together with the light of the street lamps had also been enough the night before, thought Frances, for Mr Browne to recognise someone he already knew.

‘What can you tell me about the murder of Mrs Sweetman?’

Sharrock threw the file down on the desk. ‘Now you don’t expect me to encourage you in this madness, do you?’

‘I will discover what I need to know at the inquest in any case. You can’t stop me going there.’

‘Oh, can’t I? Just give me one reason and I’ll do it.’ He stared at her aggressively then gave in. ‘Well, it’s best you know the kind of man you are dealing with. Then you might see some sense. She was hit on the head with a bottle, and then strangled. It was a savage attack and he meant to kill.’

‘Was she hit from behind or the front?’

‘She was hit on the side of the head so it could have been either. It wasn’t enough to kill her, but she would have fallen. Then he knelt on her and strangled her.’

‘Were there any other injuries? Did she put up her hands to defend herself?’

‘No. But it was a brandy bottle, and there were two glasses on the table. We don’t know for sure yet, but she may have been part drunk when she died.’

‘Do you think the visitor came with the intention of killing? Perhaps the brandy was a part of the plan, to make her less able to defend herself.’

‘That’s possible, or maybe it was a peace offering in a reconciliation that went wrong. We think they argued, and it got violent. And Sweetman and his wife had any number of things to argue about.’

‘But there could be many other suspects apart from Mr Sweetman,’ said Frances. ‘After all, we know nothing of Mrs Sweetman’s life between her leaving the family home in 1866 and taking up residence in Redan Place. Unless
you
know something you are not telling me.’

‘Even if I did, which I do not, I would make sure not to tell you, Miss Doughty. I won’t have you go chasing after dangerous men.’

‘I could set Sarah on them,’ said Frances with a smile.

‘No thank you – she’s not a woman, she’s an army. She’ll tear someone’s head off one of these days.’

‘And what of Mrs Sweetman’s children? Have they not appeared? Surely you can tell me that.’

‘They have not,’ Sharrock answered firmly.

‘If it is of any help, I heard a rumour that when they were very young they were seen on stage at a variety night at the Bijou Theatre, but no one seems to have seen them since.’

‘Well it’s not my business to find them. They might have gone abroad, a lot of these theatrical types do. And now I’ve given you far too much of my time, so if you could go home where you rightly belong, I shall get some
proper
police work done.’

Frances could see that she was not going to get any more out of Inspector Sharrock on that visit, but she did not go home – instead she went to see Dr Jilks.

The late Mr Whibley’s doctor was a gentleman in his fifties who was a rare example of a medical man that took his own advice. His complexion was fresh, without a trace of the ravages of alcohol, his figure was neither too fat nor too thin, and his room did not reek of tobacco. He looked like a man who would prefer a brisk walk in the open air to a cigar. He readily admitted to being the author of the letter to the
Chronicle
concerning Mr Whibley, in which he had said that he had advocated a reducing diet and exercise to his patient for many years.