Scandal at High Chimneys (12 page)

“You might say I am. In a way.”

“And you know my name too. So you got the note I left at your office?”

“Yes, I got it.” A grim look crossed the pock-marked face. “Pity I wasn’t there. But I knew Mr. Damon had been shot before I read your note. That’s why I wasn’t there; the electric telegraph sent the news to Scotland Yard this morning, and a friend of mine thought I might be interested.”

“You
were
interested, I hope?”

“More than interested,” said Jonathan Whicher, removing his bowler hat to show scanty greyish hair. “You mightn’t believe it, sir, but that gentleman was one of the kindest-hearted men I ever knew. I’d hate to think I was partly responsible for his death.”

“You told him something, didn’t you? Three months ago?”

“Yes!” said Mr. Whicher, putting on his hat again.

“And you know which one of his daughters is really the daughter of Harriet Pyke?”

It was only afterwards, long afterwards, that Clive interpreted the strange look on the other man’s face. But the riddle, the doubts and all the weighing of possibilities, had come back with a kind of anguish.

Police-Constable Number One spoke up heartily.

“Well, Mr. Whicher, Tom and I are on duty. Look sharp, Tom! You and this gentleman stay here, Mr. Whicher, until the last of them curious ’uns clear away from the station-house.” He turned to Clive. “No offence taken, sir?”

“No, no, of course not!”

Far from offence being taken, money changed hands. The two constables saluted and marched out with hoarse chuckles. The only other person left with Clive and Whicher was a third policeman, bearded but helmetless, who sat on a kitchen chair near the entrance to the cells, smoking a clay pipe and reading the
Morning Post.

“Tell me!” Clive insisted. “You know whether Harriet Pyke’s daughter is Celia or Kate?”

“No, sir, I don’t know,” answered Whicher. “And I’d hardly have to tell Mr. Damon, now would I? He knew it already. But there’s somebody else at High Chimneys who knows it too.”

The air in the station-house, never very clean, had grown choking to Clive’s lungs.

“Inspector … I beg your pardon. I explained in my note, Mr. Whicher, why I’m here today.”

“That’s right, sir. You did.”

“Mr. Damon had an appointment with you for four o’clock this afternoon. At least, I suppose you got his telegram?”

“Again very true. I did.”

“Mr. Damon made me promise, if anything happened to him—”

“Stop!” said Jonathan Whicher. “Did he expect something to happen to him?”

“Yes. He had a revolver,
the
revolver, in his desk-drawer. According to a witness named Dr. Bland, Mr. Damon bought the weapon a fortnight ago. If he armed himself like that, it doesn’t seem to indicate he suspected a member of his own family.”

Throughout this Mr. Whicher’s gaze, thoughtful and deprecating and fixed, had never left Clive’s face. With one hand he jingled coppers in his pocket; with the other he ticked his thumb against Tress’s visiting-card.

“Mr. Damon made me promise, then,” Clive went on, “that if anything happened to him I was to be here in his place.
I
want to engage you to find the murderer. And you may name any fee you like.”

“Thank you kindly. I’ll take your fee, sir, and I won’t deny I need it. But finding the murderer may not be as hard a job as it looks.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because I think I can guess already.”

A little reflection of firelight climbed the wall in the fusty room.

“Oh, not from police-work!” said the pock-marked man, making a face and jingling coins. “Not from brain-work, more’s the pity! It’s a guess from information received by accident only last August.”

“Then who killed him?”

“No!” said Mr. Whicher. He took a turn up and down the room. “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep that to myself for the moment, specially as I may be wrong and specially as I’ve not heard one word except what came over the wires to Scotland Yard. I made one mistake, the tomfool’s mistake of my life, in the Road-Hill House murder in ’60. I arrested Constance Kent before I’d got enough evidence; and it finished me. The King might have backed me up, and stood by me….”

“The King? What king?”

“‘King’ Mayne. Sir Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of Police. He’s a very old man, I grant you. He’s been commissioner since there were two commissioners when the Metropolitan Police was founded in ’29. Howsoever! He didn’t stand by me, and that’s that. The girl was guilty then. It may be, sir, another girl is guilty now.”

“Damn and blast the air in this place,” said Clive, tugging at his collar.

The third police-constable, who was sitting by the entrance to the cells, took the clay pipe out of his mouth and spoke with passion.

“It’s no warse o’ flowers,” he said. “Not in St. Giles’s it ain’t.”

“Sorry,” muttered Clive.

Jonathan Whicher studied him without seeming to do so.

“Howsoever! By your leave, sir, I won’t intrude
my
troubles when I can see
you’ve
got ’em about a young lady.”

“You are mistaken, Mr. Whicher. I have no troubles or doubts at all.”

The other drew a deep breath, still ticking his thumb against Tress’s card.

“Then if you’ll just come along with me to my office, sir, I’d like to know what did happen last night. That’s before, with your permission, we go down to High Chimneys and hammer the one person who
can
tell us the truth. There’s nothing more been happening today, has there?”

“Not at High Chimneys, no. Purely by accident I did follow Mrs. Damon into the Princess’s Theatre a while ago. I saw how a certain set of clothes, the murderer’s clothes, are to be hidden until needed; I heard a reference to a young woman, unnamed, who will be condemned to the treadmill if she’s caught.”

You couldn’t tell what would go unremarked and what might cause an explosion.

Whicher, it is true, never exploded; and he seldom raised his voice above that courteous, insistent, worry-away tone. But, at this reference to a treadmill, he gave so obvious a start that Clive became even more disquieted.

“Now, sir, if you don’t mind,” he suggested, tapping his finger lightly on Clive’s chest, “you might begin this story of yours
now,
and tell it to me as we walk along. No! Not the part about the Princess’s Theatre. At the beginning and from the beginning, if you will.”

Their departure was hastened by an elderly woman, suffering the horrors from drink in one of the cells, who at this point began to scream. An angry pickpocket, and a thin young mother with a child at her breast (arrested for begging) added complaints to the din.

Clive also could have sworn he saw, outside a half-smashed window giving on the refuse-piles of the lane behind, the shadow of a side-whiskered man who might have been the late Matthew Damon.

He almost bolted back in the direction of Oxford Street, with Whicher tut-tutting and trotting on short legs beside him.

In Oxford Street, while they walked, Clive began to speak. The scenes at High Chimneys built themselves up round him; he gave conversations just as they had taken place, together with such of his own theories he considered worthy of mention at all.

The pock-marked face had grown more and more grave.

“Ah! There’s no denying, sir, I’m a good deal responsible for this death.”

“
How?
What did you tell Mr. Damon three months ago?”

“If you don’t mind, sir, just you go on.”

They were within a few steps of the Pantheon when Whicher touched his arm at the entrance to a public-house advertising midday dinners. In a damp cellar like a dungeon, with the gas lighted, they ate a bad meal while Clive drank anything in sight and Whicher sipped a weak brandy-and-water.

“Come, sir! You’d not maintain this is
exactly
what the gentleman told you? Word for word?”

“I do maintain so. It is.”

The former Inspector’s bowler hat lay beside his plate. He drank from a great dropsical tumbler with one leg.

“—and that,” Clive concluded, when the glass was empty and the plates had been removed, “is every word about the murder spoken in my presence at High Chimneys yesterday evening. You can’t say whether Harriet Pyke’s child is Celia or Kate. I hold it doesn’t matter a curse
who
the child is.”

“Ah!” murmured his companion.

“Apart from insanity, I won’t believe murders are done because of tainted blood. Bring up any child in starvation and brutality and horrors; that child may well turn prostitute for bread or murderer for cakes and ale. Bring up the same child in a well-to-do home, and you need never have a dream of it.”

“Just between ourselves, sir, I agree with you. Though there are always exceptions.”

“In the second place,” continued Clive, striking his fist on the table, “I mean to marry Kate Damon if she’ll have me. Whoever committed this murder, I’m certain she didn’t.”

“And again, between ourselves, I agree.”

“By God! Thanks for that!”

“Mark me, now!” said Whicher, wagging his finger. “We may have to change our minds about that. You can’t expect the doctor (not that I’m an educated man like a doctor), but still! You can’t expect the doctor to say what the disease is until he’s seen the patient. Meanwhiles, I agree.”

“Well, then! Mr. Damon, being a lawyer, must undoubtedly have made a will; he may speak of the adopted child in that. There are always such things as birth-registrations or even records in a family Bible….”

“I wonder.”

“Otherwise,” said Clive, with a dryness in his throat, “is there any reason to mention this matter to Kate or Celia either? I thought of telling Kate, and confiding in her. But I couldn’t force myself to give her a shock like that, and Celia is not at all strong. If the police don’t discover it, why shouldn’t we keep it to ourselves?”

“We can, sir. I think we should.”

“Thanks again. Very many thanks.”

“Now, sir, you take it easy and don’t be all upset! We can keep it to ourselves, ay, provided we get the proper answers from the one other person who knows the truth.”

“Mr. Whicher, who
is
this person?”

“Can’t you guess?”

Shabby and troubled, with his sparse greyish hair and his pock-marked countenance looming against the cellar wall, Whicher fell to ruminating.

“No, I’m not what you’d call an educated man. But I pick up what I can; and, in the old days, a Peeler had to sound pretty genteel if he had his eye on the swell mob. Tell me, sir. Are you the same Mr. Clive Strickland who wrote a serial story called ‘If Death Should Keep a Tippling-House …’? I read it in
All the Year Round.
Did you write that?”

“Yes.” Clive was a little taken aback. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s rum, you know. It’s uncommonly rum. Those words didn’t seem to have much to do with your story, and yet blow me if I could forget ’em. ‘If Death Should Keep a Tippling-House …’ They haunted me, as you might say.”

“They haunted me too. That’s why I chose the title. It’s the first line of some verses from the Roxburghe Ballads. But I don’t see how this concerns us.”

“Quite right, too. It hasn’t a blessed thing to do with Mr. Damon’s murder.”

Clive looked at him.

“The point, howsoever,” pursued Whicher, and leaned forward, “is there all the same. I judged by that tale you’d have made a pretty fair detective-officer yourself; and now I’m sure of it. For instance: you’d like to know who killed Mr. Damon?”

“Yes.” Clive restrained himself. “I think I’ve indicated that.”

“Ah! But Mr. Damon told you who was going to kill him, or thought he’d told you. Only he was half out of his mind and near demented, as you described him; he loved to quote examples, like all the lawyer gentlemen; bang went the example, and he wasn’t too helpful about the main fact.”

“Mr. Damon didn’t have time to tell me the main fact!”

“Sir, at least three people have all told you the main fact.”

Clive rose to his feet, seizing hat and greatcoat.

The cost of the meals at the pub was sixpence apiece, with an additional shilling for what they had both taken to drink. Dropping half a crown on the table, Clive struggled into his coat and spoke formally.

“Mr. Whicher, if you want to be cautious about making any statement before you have talked to this witness at High Chimneys, very well. Use caution! But don’t talk hocus-pocus. I only ask you to say something, or else say nothing.”

“Now, now, sir, there’s no call to be excited.”

“On the contrary,” shouted Clive, “there is every call to be excited. Come with me.”

Still striding ahead, he led the way upstairs, past the window of the Easy Shaving Parlour, and up a dirty staircase in the house beside the Pantheon. A gas-jet was burning on the landing outside the locked door of Jonathan Whicher’s office.

“I’ve just remembered,” Clive continued, as he heard footsteps pacing the landing, “that it’s well past one o’clock. I have had a leisurely meal and left a friend of mine stranded outside your door since before twelve. But I never thought he would wait.”

Victor had not waited.

Instead, as Clive reached the landing, he met Dr. Rollo Thompson Bland and one other person. All his anger left him.

“Kate,” he said. “What are
you
doing here?”

F
OR OVER AN HOUR
he had experienced a series of strong, varying emotions. This was the strongest if not the last of them.

The house had been built in the third decade of the eighteenth century, when Oxford Street was little more than the road to Tyburn gallows amid fields and flowers. And, though the house had gone to seed, its graceful lines and fanlight windows survived all grime of a utilitarian age.

Kate, on the landing under a bright gas-jet and against an arched window, wore a black-and-red costume which heightened her vivid colouring. Her boat-shaped hat with the short flat plume fitted closely against the dark hair.

“Kate. What are
you
doing here?”

“I am here because—”

“She is here,” interrupted Dr. Bland with some exasperation, “because I verily believe she would have come alone if I had not escorted her. That a young lady should go un-chaperoned to London, and to meet you, and on the very day after her father’s death, did not even seem to strike her as outrageous.”