Death by Silver (6 page)

He couldn’t think of anyone he knew except Julian, but as Julian was the one he wanted most, that hadn’t seemed to be a problem. He’d set about trying to rekindle their friendship, and had been rewarded gratifyingly soon by finding himself in Julian’s bed, being introduced to considerably more advanced vices than any they’d tried as schoolboys. Julian’s rooms smelled of dust and stale tea, and his bed smelled of him, and lying in it afterwards, sweaty and sated, felt like coming home.

He liked the vices, too, and he found himself as passionately devoted to Julian as ever, and it all would have been ideal if he’d thought Julian felt the same way. He was beginning to suspect, though, that Julian found their relations convenient rather than important. Ned was nice-looking and willing and an old friend, but a rather dull one, who needed to be reminded sometimes that he wasn’t invited to spend the night, or to consider himself a lover rather than a friend with certain privileges casually extended.

Ned tried not to let it make him miserable; it was the way it was, and casual encounters with an old friend were far better than extraordinarily dangerous encounters with a stranger. But being put off for two days, when he had no idea what he’d done wrong and no idea how he could make it up, was making him very close to miserable anyway. It would have been easy if Julian were a girl; he would have bought her flowers and taken her to tea and flattered her into a better mood. Flowers were out, and Julian was apparently avoiding all invitations to any meal, which left the flattery. He might work along those lines, possibly.

The remains of his breakfast were stone cold, and he pushed them away in irritation, turning his attention to the newspaper. There wasn’t much of great interest, and he was about to fold it up again to tuck it in his pocket for his walk to the Commons when a small headline caught his eye:
A Burglar’s Hand, or Silver’s Curse? Yard Baffled by Nevett Murder
.

He skimmed the story as quickly as he could. It was written with the paper’s usual mix of speculation and exaggeration where crime was concerned, but the facts seemed plain enough: two days after consulting a metaphysician with fears that the family silver carried a curse, Edgar Nevett was found dead in his study, felled by the heavy silver candlestick that lay bloody at his side.

Miss Frost was already at her desk when Ned arrived at his chambers, her own newspaper folded neatly on one corner of her desk. “It was dreadful what happened to poor Mr Nevett,” she said as he took off his hat.

“Terribly.” Ned folded himself into his chair behind his desk, angled at the moment to catch the breeze through the single window. He aspired one day to acquire chambers that boasted more than one window, and ideally room for their two desks to be more than eight feet apart.

“And a new client, too.”

“Yes, that’s also a bit unfortunate.” Ned wrestled with his sense of propriety. “I suppose under the circumstances it would be best to wait a decent interval before presenting any reminder of the tragic events…”

“I’ve already sent the bill,” Miss Frost said.

“Well, then.” He shook his head. “At least I’m not mentioned by name.”

“Maybe not in the
Chronicle
,” she said. “The
Times
mentions you as ‘noted metaphysician Mr Mathey.’ ”

The one disadvantage of having a female clerk was that he couldn’t give vent to his feelings in the first terms that came to mind. “This isn’t what I’d prefer to be noted for.”

“It’s not your fault the poor man was murdered.”

“No, I expect it was a burglary gone wrong, but you know how people are about curses. They’ll say it was a sign he was under some malevolent influence that attracted burglars.” Ned suspected Nevett had unwisely boasted about the quality of his “cursed” silver somewhere he could be overheard, but he didn’t think that was likely to satisfy the press. They already seemed determined to turn this into the sort of story that could be gruesomely illustrated in the picture papers.

He tried to put the whole thing out of his mind, and not to take the lack of visitors that morning as a sign that scandal clung to him. His morning office hours were more optimistic than anything else, held in hopes that someone with a urgent problem would come in to hire him to deal with it, but most days were quiet until he began doing the rounds of his scheduled appointments after noon.

He had nearly decided that he might as well knock off for lunch when there was a knock at the door. One of the Commons page-boys was waiting when he opened it, escorting a familiar but not – at least at the moment – entirely welcome visitor.

“Inspector Hatton from the Yard,” the boy said, sounding sufficiently awed.

“Thank you, Bob,” Ned said, and Hatton pressed a coin into the boy’s hand before he scrambled off. “Do come in,” Ned added to Hatton. “I suppose it’s about poor Nevett?”

“I’m afraid so,” Hatton said, stepping in, hat in hand. Miss Frost relieved him of it and hung it up for him, looking to Ned for some hint as to whether he preferred that she stay or leave.

“Miss Frost, why don’t you go ahead and have some lunch?”

“Thank you, Mr Mathey,” she said, and gave him an encouraging little smile over her shoulder as she went out. He appreciated it, although he hoped he wasn’t about to need it.

“Mr Mathey,” Hatton said cheerfully, prowling around the room as usual rather than sitting down at once. “Did I ever tell you we all appreciated your help with the Barton business? Well, except for old Carruthers in Yard metaphysics, but he’d have solved the case approximately never, so I can’t work up much regret about calling in an outsider.”

“That was a simple enough matter,” Ned said, and it had been, once he’d identified the curse on the necklace worn by the unfortunate Mrs Barton the night she died. It had been an interesting little piece of work, but Ned had suspected it wasn’t entirely in an English system from the beginning, and had gotten one of the Indian students of metaphysics at Oxford to confirm that whoever had done the work had almost certainly lived in India. That had narrowed the investigation abruptly to Mrs Barton’s son, home on leave from the Army and – as was reported in the accounts of his trial – in desperate need of an immediate inheritance to settle gambling debts.

“Simple once we got someone other than Carruthers into it.”

“I don’t expect he’s had much experience with foreign enchantments,” Ned said diplomatically.

“I don’t expect he has, but what good is that to us? We can’t do police work assuming that everyone’s English and has always lived in England.”

“I take it you’re not here because you think I did away with Edgar Nevett?”

Hatton stopped pacing and raised a bushy eyebrow. “Have any reason to?”

“Every reason not to,” Ned said frankly. “I’d just acquired him as a client, or so I thought.”

“Yes, tell me about that,” Hatton said, withdrawing a notebook from his coat and settling finally into the chair opposite Ned’s desk. “I take it he came to you about a curse?”

“He complained of a curse on the family silver, with exceedingly vague effects,” Ned said. “I found nothing whatsoever wrong. In my professional opinion, he was making the whole business up.”

“A nervous fancy?”

“More deliberate than that, I’d say. More that all the best families have curses, and he intended to pay for the chance to say that his family had one, too. I expect he’d have been happier if I’d told him that a spectral beast would appear to stalk the footmen every full moon.”

“And did you?”

“I may not be above being paid to make a show of things, but I’m not a fraud,” Ned said. “I told him there was nothing wrong with his silver, which was the truth, but that I’d do a thorough cleansing of it to be sure. Which I did.”

“You’d guarantee that the silver was free of any enchantment when you were finished?”

“I would,” Ned said at once. “Nothing but a few domestic things. Lids magicked to shut themselves, that sort of thing.”

“Not candlesticks cursed to fall on people’s heads.”

“Certainly not. I saw nothing to suggest this isn’t a straightforward burglary.”

“It’s a damn funny burglary if it’s that,” Hatton said. “Too little taken, and a professional would have wanted to get in and out without any fuss, not bash someone’s brains in and then throw down twenty pounds’ worth of silver at his feet.”

“He was surprised in the act, I suppose.”

“That’s the best line we’ve got at the moment,” Hatton said, but he sounded as if he weren’t entirely satisfied. “According to everyone we talked to, the body was found first thing in the morning by a parlormaid. Nevett sat up late in his study until after the servants went to bed, going over some papers. Not unusual for him, apparently. The girl went in to air the room before breakfast, found Nevett lying dead on the floor with his head bloodied, and screamed the house down. When everyone calmed down enough to take stock, they found silver missing from the butler’s pantry.”

“You don’t look as if you like it.”

“I don’t like it,” Hatton said. “It doesn’t feel right. For one thing, if the burglar surprised Nevett at his desk, would Nevett really have sat doing nothing while the man walked across the room and swung a candlestick at his head? Nevett wasn’t a young man, but he looked as if he could still put up a fair fight.”

“He might have fallen asleep in his chair.”

“He might have. Or he might have been the one to walk in on the burglar, and, whack, our burglar turns round and does for him before he has time to think. Only if the burglar was alone in the study to start with, you’d think there’d be more valuables missing, desk drawers turned out, all that kind of thing. Everything looked in order in there to me, except for the candlestick and the corpse.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes, isn’t it? But we’ve already got a simple explanation, and I can’t spend much more time looking for a complicated one without having something to go on.” Hatton closed his notebook. “I did want your statement about the silver being free of curses in your professional opinion, but mainly I’d like the murder weapon looked at by someone who knows what they’re about. We’ve got Carruthers puttering around with it right now, but I’d rather have you take a look.”

Ned leaned back in his chair. “You don’t think that if I botched the job of testing the silver for curses in the first place, I might try to cover it up?”

“No, I don’t,” Hatton said thoughtfully. “I don’t think you’re that sort. If you botched the job, I think you’ll stand up like a man and admit it. But at this point I don’t know what happened, only that it doesn’t feel right, and I’d feel easier about it if you’d take a look at that candlestick.”

“I’d be happy to,” Ned said. “Should I come round to Scotland Yard?”

“I can’t have you in right under Carruthers’s nose, or he’ll raise hell. It’ll be easiest if I bring the thing round to you – I can make off with it after Carruthers knocks off for the day, and he’ll be none the wiser. He never remembers where he left things lying anyway. And I’ll stand you dinner, if you want. Only fair if I’m taking up your evening.”

Ned took that as a tactful way of saying that this wouldn’t be a paying job. He was starting to find it an interesting mystery, though, even if it might really be more in Julian’s line than his. And when he thought about it, it might go some considerable distance toward improving Julian’s temper to present him with a curious murder case and assure him that only his brilliance could possibly solve it.

“I’ll meet you at Blanding’s, then, around seven? The coffee-house at the corner. You can tell me the rest of it, if there’s any more to tell, and I’ll take a look at your murder weapon.” Ned hesitated for a moment. “I’ve a friend I’d very much like to bring along, a private detective. Mr Julian Lynes.”

“We generally try to do without the assistance of private detectives at the Yard,” Hatton said. “It’s felt that’s what they pay us for. And I’ve heard a bit about Lynes. He’s had some dodgy sorts of clients.”

“He’s solved some extremely difficult cases.”

“I’ve heard that, too.” Hatton sighed. “Bring him along, then. If you think he can keep this quiet. I don’t want any more ‘Yard Baffled’ on the front page.”

“I assure you he’s entirely discreet,” Ned said.

“He had better be,” Hatton said, and reclaimed his hat from the hat-stand on his way out.

Miss Frost came back in so promptly that Ned suspected she’d been sitting on the outside steps waiting for Hatton to leave. He waited while she divested herself of hat and gloves. “Well?” she asked, clearly unable to repress curiosity any longer.

“Inspector Hatton wants me to look over some of the evidence,” Ned said. He was writing as he spoke, a brief note:
Lynes – Asked to consult in murder case, but suspect it will require your skills. Blanding’s seven o’clock to hear particulars? Mathey.
A letter posted this early ought to reach Julian before dinnertime, but by then he might have made other plans, and Ned didn’t feel like taking chances. “And I’ve a telegram to send.”