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BOOK: Ann Granger
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‘It is not only that,’ I said unthinkingly. ‘But she owned some property in Agar Town and sold it to the railway company. My late godfather invested in a good deal of property and I believe my Aunt Parry owns houses all over London.’
It was only when I finished speaking that I realised the full import of my words. It could not be coincidence that Madeleine Hexham had been found in Agar Town. In some manner, her death was linked to this house. I knew my sudden realisation was written on my face.
Ross said slowly, ‘Did she, indeed?’ and I knew he was thinking as I was. Abruptly he asked, ‘Do you know what kind of houses those were in Agar Town?’
I stared at him and shook my head.
‘They were some of the worst slums in London, and that is saying something.’
‘Josiah was – Mrs Parry still is – a slum landlord?’ I gasped. This comfortable house with its luxurious furnishings, the ‘good English table’ and my forty pounds a year, all this was funded by poor people living in wretched slums? The food I had eaten that day felt heavy in my stomach. Everything about me seemed tainted. I thought I would be sick.
‘Please, sit down!’ Ross urged me and led me to the wing chair. I was happy to collapse into it. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said abjectly. ‘I should not have told you that on top of everything else.’
‘No, it’s right I should know,’ I whispered. I managed to rally and got to my feet, albeit a little unsteadily. ‘You must go now, Inspector.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, moving towards the door.
Simms was standing outside with the visitor’s hat at the ready. I was not surprised. I wondered if he had heard anything through the panels but they were solid enough and I doubted it.
He greeted our appearance with, ‘I will see the officer off the premises, Miss Martin!’
I thought Ross might be angered by the butler’s words, intended as they were to put both of us in our places. But he only looked amused.
‘Goodbye to you, Miss Martin,’ he said with a bow.
‘Goodbye, Inspector Ross.’
I managed the farewell with tolerable composure and walked to the far end of the hall. I waited there until Simms returned from having seen the intruder safely off the premises. It was to be his turn to be surprised.
‘Ah, Simms,’ I said. ‘The inspector brought some very sad and shocking news. It seems poor Miss Hexham has been murdered.’
I had the satisfaction of seeing Simms lose all countenance. He gaped at me. ‘Murdered, miss?’
‘Yes. There will be a police officer coming here to question the staff. Do prepare them for it, will you? He will be particularly anxious to know where Miss Hexham went after leaving this
house, so if anyone has any idea at all, the officer should be told.’
Simms nodded, swallowed and uttered a gurgled noise which I interpreted to mean he would tell the staff.
I thanked him and added a request that he bring the Madeira wine to the sitting room as Mrs Parry was probably in need of a restorative. Simms rallied at being given this order.
‘I’ll do it at once, Miss Martin.’
I went back upstairs to do my duty by my employer. My mind was in turmoil and it was not only on account of Madeleine Hexham.
IT WAS some little time after Inspector Ross’s departure before Aunt Parry, having taken two glasses of the Madeira, retired to her bedroom, there to lie down and allow Nugent to minister to her with a cologne compress. Before that she expressed herself at great length and forcefully on the subject of Madeleine Hexham.
She was sorry, of course, to hear she had perished so horribly but what was one to expect? Dr Tibbett had been right. The girl had fallen into bad company with dire results. Whatever would Mrs Belling say? She would be highly embarrassed and would, of course, blame her friend in Durham who had found Madeleine in answer to Mrs Belling’s request, made on behalf of her friend, Mrs Parry. Mrs Belling’s correspondent had shown a very poor judgement in recommending the girl. To think she, Aunt Parry, had taken the girl under her roof and shown her every kindness. Now, no doubt, the lady in Durham, to cover her own shortcomings, would blame Mrs Parry for not keeping a stricter eye on Madeleine.
What Aunt Parry did not say, but what occurred to me, was that this very much resembled the game of ‘musical chairs’ which children play at parties. Everyone seeks a refuge and no one wishes to be caught out when the pianist stops playing. Now the music had stopped for poor Madeleine and all who knew her bolted for a position of safety.
Eventually Aunt Parry rose to her feet and observed, ‘I
hope I may never have such grief on your account, Elizabeth!’
‘No, Aunt Parry, of course you won’t.’ I felt myself flush as I said this. I didn’t like being warned against any course of action I’d no intention of undertaking. As if I’d be so addle-pated as to elope with some admirer who felt it so necessary to protect his identity that not a soul knew his face! Having thought this I then scolded myself mentally for falling into the trap of blaming Madeleine for her own misfortunes. Whoever the man was, he’d had the gift of persuasion. Madeleine had believed him. Who knew whether, in her situation, I might not have believed him too? But I did like to think I was sharp enough to scent a deceiver.
Aunt Parry’s expression had softened and she patted my arm. ‘But you are Josiah’s god-daughter and your papa was a respected man, a professional medical man. The circumstances are quite different. Well, it is a lesson to us all.’
When she had gone I made my escape to the privacy of my own room and sat down to disentangle the thoughts chasing one another around my skull. Madeleine’s death had resulted in a strange meeting for me. I hadn’t recognised him, of course. How should I? It had all happened over twenty years before and we had both been children. But I remembered the events and the circumstances of our meeting as if they had taken place a mere week before.
Early spring that year had been a chilly damp season. It had rained heavily during that night, as I recalled. The sound of it beating on the window glass kept me from slumber as I lay tucked up in my bed with the blanket pulled well round my ears. At last I’d drifted into uneasy sleep only to be awoken by the heavy-handed rat-tat of our brass fox-head door knocker, followed by a couple of urgent thumps with a fist on the panels of the front door.
I sat up, thinking at first it might be thunder. But then I heard a distant voice, shouting, ‘Doctor! Dr Martin! You are needed, sir!’
I scrambled on to the windowsill and peered out. The nursery was at the very top of our house which was an old narrow one with rooms stacked high upon one another like children’s building blocks. It was just before dawn and far down below me I could see the bobbing light of a lantern in the gloom, casting an inadequate yellow circle. A dimly perceived figure held it. I wasn’t afraid because this sort of early-morning visit happened not infrequently. My father was the most popular medical man in the town. The other was old Dr Fray and he, it was well known, never turned out before breakfast, even for an emergency, unless it involved the gentry. In addition, my father was the designated police surgeon and was called out on all kinds of business. A messenger in the early hours was as likely to bring news concerning the already lifeless victim of a brawl in an alehouse or a dead vagrant found by the roadside as the more respectable medical summons to a woman in labour. At barely eight years of age I was already well aware of that.
If I sound a somewhat precocious child, then it’s because I was. My mother had died when I was three and I had been left to the care of my father; our housekeeper Mary Newling; and my nurse Molly Darby, a plump, indolent girl. I had always roamed around our house, up and down its narrow stairs and in and out of its many hidey-holes, for a large part of the time unattended and unobserved. Thus I listened to conversations I shouldn’t have been party to and acquired information by no means suited to my tender years.
So there was no fear someone would come and order me back to bed. I could hear Molly snoring peacefully in her bed across the landing. The front door could have been knocked in altogether by the caller and she wouldn’t have stirred.
I struggled to push up the sash but my arms were too short and I could only make it creak open a bare inch at the bottom. Already the cold grey light of early dawn was creeping over the peaks on the horizon and through the crack in the window I could hear the
voices which rose clearly on the chill crisp air. My father had gone down to open up and was talking to someone. I heard him say, ‘I’ll come directly. Run round to the stable, will you, and tell the boy to put the pony to the trap?’
At that moment some small devil got into me. Not a large serious one, just some imp who was twiddling his thumbs at that hour with nothing to do. I decided I’d like to accompany my father. It would be exciting. It would also be declared quite out of the question if I asked, so I wouldn’t ask. I knew that it would take the stable boy quite a few minutes to harness up the pony which was newly bought as a replacement for our former pony. That one had been a placid mare who hadn’t minded small girls scrambling on to her and would back into the shafts of her own accord. But old age had led to her being sent to live out her remaining days in comfort on a nice farm, or so my father had told me. I knew this wasn’t true and the mare had gone to the knacker’s yard. But I didn’t want to distress my father by letting him see that I was upset, so I had pretended to believe the well-meant untruth.
Was it also true, I had wondered briefly, that we went to heaven when we died, or did they just take you off somewhere like the knacker’s yard? I reproached myself immediately because heaven was in the Bible. I’d attended funerals and knew them to be sombre and decent affairs and where much was made of a ‘sure and certain hope of resurrection’. But sadly there was nothing in scripture about ponies.
Still I nodded and said I hoped the farmer fed the pony carrots sometimes, because she liked them so. My father was relieved I hadn’t burst into tears and said yes, he was sure about the carrots. It was an early example in my life of people conspiring to accept what they know is a lie, because the truth is too unpalatable. As I grew older, I saw and heard how often this is the case. It was also, in the matter of the carrots, an example of how, once you tell a lie, you have to start embellishing it. In no time at all, it becomes a real nuisance.
Just at that moment I was concerned only with scrambling into my clothes. Dressing was a complicated business and I usually had the help of Molly. Of course I couldn’t call Molly now. I managed to pull on my drawers and a petticoat and a dress but my boots had been taken away by Molly to be cleaned, so I pushed my bare feet into an entirely unsuitable pair of satin party slippers, wrapped a crocheted woollen shawl round my shoulders and scurried down the back stairs.
I was now faced with the problem of actually getting out of the house. The front door had been unbolted, it was true, but there were risks in leaving that way. I could too easily be seen. The back door would still be fast and I knew my fingers weren’t strong enough to draw back the heavy bolt. Then as I reached the bottom of the stair I heard a rattling sound from the kitchen at the back of the house. Someone was doing the task for me. I peeped round the door and saw that Mary Newling had been roused by the commotion and was opening the kitchen door. She presented an awesome sight in a voluminous nightgown and plaid shawl, her head a forest of rag knots. I was momentarily sidetracked by these, wondering why she tried to curl her hair, since she normally wore it hidden by a cotton bonnet.
She dragged open the door and shouted out into the yard, ‘What’s amiss?’
A voice called back, ‘The doctor’s needed at the mine!’
‘God help us!’ returned Mary, ‘is it an explosion or a roof-fall?’
‘Neither, missus, they’ve only found a body!’
Only a body? Even I understood he meant there had been only one fatality. When the pit props gave way or the firedamp caused an explosion, the bodies came up by the dozen, if they ever came up at all. Most men still worked by the light of traditional lamps with flame open to the air. Molly Darby had chilled my infant imagination with tales of men buried down there among the coal seams they worked, women and children too. Molly’s father and three brothers worked in the pit and her
own mother, when young, had crawled underground through cramped passages with heavy baskets of coal on her back until an accident had left her lame. It was Molly who explained the irony that where the safety lamp invented by Sir Humphrey Davy was in common use, men were required to work in even deeper and more hazardous tunnels.
Although ours was a small mining town on the Derbyshire coalfield, we seldom saw the colliers themselves in the town. They and their families lived in mine villages, cramped purpose-built housing near the pits described to me by Molly. If one person turns over in bed, she had declared cheerfully, then the fellow in the bed in the next-door house falls out! Behind each house was a pigsty and its carefully fattened occupant would be slaughtered at the beginning of the winter. Its preserved meat would supply the mainstay of the family’s diet until spring. Colliers were required by their employers to buy their provisions at the mine shop, exchanging tokens there which were not acceptable in other shops in the town. These tokens were known by the nickname of ‘truck’, Molly told me, adding, ‘It keeps them from spending their wages in the pubs.’ It also increased their isolation from the town’s other inhabitants who had no cause themselves to visit the collier villages.
As a result a kind of superstitious awe of them had grown up. They were acknowledged to be a hardy and self-sufficient race but a breed apart, of mythical strength and resilience, who ventured down into the dark depths where most people would have feared to go. Mary Newling would sigh from time to time when conversation led to the existence of the pit, and give her opinion that it was a dangerous life and no one should be obliged to earn a living scrabbling about like a mole in the dark.
This was generally followed by a grumble about the price of good sitting-room coal and dire reference to the fact that one of the local mine managers had just built himself a mansion on his profits.
Mary had not approved the hiring of Molly Darby as my nurse. My father had done so in an effort to help the Darby family. ‘The doctor is letting his good nature make a decision his common sense would not!’ sniffed Mary. ‘Not for the first time. Nor, you mark my words, will it be the last.’
All this meant that I longed to visit a mine as I would any forbidden place. Not to go down into the dark, mind you, just see it from above. I didn’t like the dark much and was always happy to hear Molly Darby’s snores across the landing. But I was more than ever determined to smuggle myself into the trap. Mary had turned away from the back door, pushing it shut but not rebolting it. I hid in the stairwell as she stomped past, muttering to herself, and began to climb the stairs. She met my father coming down and they began a brief conversation. Now was my chance.
I ran across the kitchen, opened the door a crack and squeezed through. We had no garden, only a cobbled yard. On the far side was a primitive stable with a loft above in which the boy slept. There was a good deal of activity in the yard. It was growing lighter now. I could see how the stable boy and another man, presumably the one who had brought the message, were struggling between them to get the new pony into the shafts. It was a showy animal with white socks and an uneven temperament. It didn’t like being dragged from a warm stall in the early hours and was clearly demonstrating its feelings. It kicked out as I watched and struck the visitor on the leg. He let fly a volley of abuse including several words I’d never heard before. I stored them in my memory, though I realised they were not for my use. I was a child with sharp ears.
Now was my moment. Keeping to the shadows, I scurried round the outside of the yard, along the front of the stable and scrambled into the trap unseen. Once there I pulled the rug which was always kept there over me and crouched down under the wooden seat.
The trap rocked violently as the pony was eventually partly coaxed and partly forced to back between the shafts. My father arrived in the yard and the trap rocked again as he climbed up and took the reins. I wondered if the messenger would also climb up and accompany him. If he did so, I would almost certainly be discovered. But he didn’t and my father called to the pony, shook the reins and we were off.
It was very cold. I hadn’t realised how chilled I would be. In my run across the yard I’d ploughed through puddles left by the overnight rain and my silly satin slippers had become soaked. My lack of stockings was soon felt. My crocheted shawl was of little use: too many holes in it. I was already shivering with cold and feared I was in a fair way to freeze. I tried to snuggle down into the rug and pull it closer around me. There was an exclamation from my father.
BOOK: Ann Granger
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