Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal (30 page)

‘I never . . .

'Pulled the trigger, Mr Bull-Peg? No! Course you didn't! Accomplice is all you are. They 'angs you just as hard for it.' Bull-Peg struggled to his feet. He gave an outraged howl. 'I'm a evidence!'

'Course you are, Mr Bull-Peg, in the case of Captain Moore. In the cruel ravishing of Miss Jennifer, however, and in the murder of Mr Morant-Barham, you're just a plain defendant, like the rest of 'em. Most unfortunate you should have ravished Miss Jennifer in Missouri. Other side of the river might be different.'

'Uh?'

Verity leaned forward, confidential and helpful.

'Mr Bull-Peg, I come here as your friend, in a way of speaking. You'll be tried here with the others for Mr Morant-Barham's murder. In due course, you'll be convicted as accomplice for being Lieutenant Dacre's man, who did it. They'll keep you here a while and then hang you in the yard out there. But what's worse is you being took to Missouri first of all to answer the ravishing of Miss Jennifer.'

'What's worse than hanging?'

Verity gave a frown of serious concern.

'Mr Bull-Peg, you do know the law of ravishing in Missouri? Once you been tried, you'll be took out and gelded, same as a stable-groom do with a frisky young stallion.'

Bull-Peg's eyes were suffused with deep horror and disbelief.

'Course,' said Verity reasonably, 'you don't have to take my affydavy for it. You ask them that knows the law in those parts. By the time they fetch you back here to stand trial for murder, you'll be a public curiosity. And you have no idea how docile the gaolers shall find you, even until they takes you out to hang six months later.'

Verity's calm exposition of the horrors awaiting the criminal carried conviction to Bull-Peg's heart as no melodramatic recital would have done. The big man bellowed and shook his chains.

'I'm a evidence!'

'Don't seem right for a man to lose his privates over a tawny young piece like Miss Jennifer,' said Verity sympathetically, 'and her egging him on all the time.'

'Right!' bellowed Bull-Peg enthusiastically. 'That's right! That's just how it was!'

'I could be a real friend to you, Mr Bull-Peg. Best friend you ever had. You tell me about Mr Morant-Barham and them houses of Lieutenant Dacre's. One in Five Points I seen, another somewhere else I want to hear about.'

Bull-Peg gulped and shook his head.

'I never was there, I swear it, mister! I never so much as heard of Mr Barham!'

'That ain't the way Lucifer and Raoul tells it, Mr Bull-Peg.'

'Then they told you lies, mister! Bad things! I never done murder! I never was there!'

Verity noticed that Bull-Peg was beginning to sweat and his face was trembling slightly. The conversation was moving admirably to its climax.

'Mr Bull-Peg,' he said gently, 'you was seen coming and going from that house in the Five Points square.'

'Couldn't be. Never was near it. Swear!'

'Tell you what, Mr Bull-Peg. We offered hundred dollars reward for anyone in the neighbourhood who could identify you as being seen there. Now, we got a lady keeps a pie-stall on the corner of that little square opposite the bawdy 'ouse. For one hundred, she's going to swear to seeing you. . . .'

'There ain't a pie . . .' squealed Bull-Peg, and then he stopped.

'Oh dear, oh dear, Mr Bull-Peg, you went for that like a 'ungry mouse for the trap-cheese, didn't yer? How long you think you'd last in court, once they really got into you ?'

Bull-Peg slithered down to an abject squat in the corner of the cell. Verity rapped the door and Crowe's face appeared.

'Got all that, didn't you, Mr Crowe?'

'Yes,' said Crowe uncertainly, 'oh, yes. Sure did, Mr Verity.'

Verity turned again to Bull-Peg.

'Right, my lad,' he said briskly, 'you got five minutes. I want to know where that other house is. It ain't twenty miles from here and I reckon it was used to kill young Mr Morant-Barham, the bawdy house in Five Points being too risky by then. You tell me the truth and I'll do my best to have you made a evidence for Mr Morant-Barham, and I'll have Miss Jennifer's charges stopped. You might even walk free from here in ten years more. Cross me, and you shall be the sorriest wreck of a man that ever walked this earth. And if Miss Jolly is murdered too because she couldn't be found in time, Mr Crowe and me has seen you here this morning. If that young person is tormented and dies, we're witnesses for you being accomplice again by refusing to say where she might be found. And if you really don't know where the other house might be, you ain't half unfortunate, my man.'

Verity, accustomed though he was to interrogations, had never expected to see a man of Bull-Peg's physique shaking so visibly. The cropped head nodded and the voice began to croak. Several minutes later, Verity beamed down on his terrified protégé’

'Why!' he said proudly. 'Mother, father, brothers and sisters never been a better friend to you than I been this morning!'

‘I don't care to see a man broke in such a fashion, that's all,' Crowe remarked with dignity, as though concluding the discussion.

'No more don't I, Mr Crowe. But then, I had to choose between that creature in his cell and Miss Jolly getting the hiding of her life from Lieutenant Dacre, and a noose round her neck or a knife in her belly to follow it. A man gotta have a sense of values in such things, Mr Crowe.'

The tail-board of the wagon, its hinges well-oiled, had been let down. A dozen armed officers in rope-soled shoes eased themselves silently down and moved like ghosts in the darkness towards the grand entrance-gate of the villa garden. There had hardly been time to locate the house from Bull-Peg's description before the hour stipulated in Dacre's note. Yet this suited Verity's purpose.

'I want to catch him there, if I can, Mr Crowe. And if he's going to put paid to that young doxy between eight and midnight, no sense in us frightening him off before by showing a whole regiment of Marines around the place, is there?'

Captain Oliphant and several men were already in position, standing at a distance from the imposing house but well able to survey the exits and entrances.

'Nothing,' said Oliphant as Verity and Crowe approached him. 'No movement, no sign of life, not a glimmer of light. I begin to fear, sergeant, that our client Bull-Peg sold you a pup.'

Verity frowned.

^‘
'e didn't look as if he was doing that, did he, Mr Crowe? Why, bless you, sir, 'e almost bust himself trying to be helpful when we put the matter to him good and straight.'

Oliphant shrugged, as if the affair were no concern of his. Behind its screen of trees and beyond the semi-circular sweep of the sandy drive, rose the darkened facade of River Gate. Verity could just make out Tudor casements and chimneys in red brick. The outline of the house suggested the front of an Oxford college, absurdly scaled down, with a squat and square little tower above the main door, and a pair of wings which hardly projected more than ten feet from the front wall of the building.

With Crowe at his side, he moved soundlessly across the springy turf of the well cared-for lawn. The windows of the ground floor were uncurtained and he could just make out the interiors as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. Not only were the rooms unoccupied at the moment, they gave every sign of having been recently stripped of their contents. Bare floorboards and dusty walls met his gaze on every side. He turned to Crowe and spread out his hands in incomprehension. At the back of his mind was a growing anxiety that Dacre had foreseen the discovery of his hiding place and would have evacuated it in ample time. If that were so, Jolly's last hours would be spent at the hands of a tormentor, far beyond any help that her rescuers could bring.

Verity cursed himself for having pinned everything on the hope that Dacre would still be at his riverside mansion. Of course the cracksman would know that Bull-Peg or one of the others could be made to turn evidence Now, following in Crowe's footsteps, he edged round the side wall of the dark building The narrower windows of the servants
¹
quarters were also uncurtained and the rooms deserted. It was only when they had reached the yard at the back of the house that he heard the first faint animal sounds. Crowe laid a hand on his arm to still him. The silence was broken by a distant mewing, almost exactly like a kitten in distress. If the house itself had offered any sign of occupation, Verity would have dismissed this plaintive keening and given his attention elsewhere. Now, with Crowe listening intently beside him, he tried to distinguish the direction from which it might be coming.

Set back from the rear of the house, facing it across the yard, was a stable building whose wooden door stood half-open and derelict. The stable block, built of stone rather than brick, looked as though it might be part of a farm which had stood on the site before the riverside villa had taken its place. The two sergeants moved toward it and Crowe, for the first time, slid back the shutter on his dark lantern. Verity followed his example and they moved cautiously through the opening. Behind them, the rest of Captain Oliphant's party spread out to surround the stone building.

Inside the stable block the same scene of dereliction was repeated. The whitewash had peeled from the stalls and the rotting straw on the floor was black with the slime of decay. But now the mewing was louder and more frantic, coming from somewhere above their heads. Facing them, and dividing the stable block into two, was a wooden partition, about six feet high. Above this, the building was open from end to end, but the partition separated the animals from the store of fodder. A cottage door with a latch was set in the centre of the partition to allow access. Verity raised his lamp, looked up toward the rafters beyond the wooden division and emitted a long breath of horror. There was another sound which was now audible, a gentle hiss like a tap with an ill-fitting washer. But it required no sound to demonstrate the hideous details of the death which Dacre had prepared for his traitress.

Attached by four bonds at wrists and ankles, Miss Jolly hung from the high beam, her body twisting and arching in terror, an urgent mewing penetrating the cloth which filled her mouth. The hissing came from a speck of red light, rising slowly in the dark to the place where she hung. At first Verity thought she was entirely nude. Then his lamp caught the burning tail of the slow fuse, now hanging only a few inches below the base of her spine. Dacre had sheathed part of the fuse and left other sections open, to burn against her with appalling effect. He had trussed Miss Jolly with it as though harnessing her for some erotic game. It ran several times round the smooth gold of her slim nude waist, then following the intimate clefts and sensitive buds of her body. The final length of cord ran to a wooden keg on the beam itself, apparently containing enough powder to give the victim her quietus and blow the entire building to pieces.

When he positioned Jolly and lit the fuse, several hours before, Dacre had calculated Verity's reaction. In the horror of the moment, Verity could think only that the glow-worm spark of the fuse would touch the back of the girl's bare waist in a few seconds more. She was already arching up her belly frantically, as though this would postpone contact with the sputtering fire. There was no time for reason, no time for anything other than action.

Verity sprang forward, half-turning to smash his shoulder into the flimsy latch-door of the partition and burst the fastening. He was in mid-stride when Crowe's voice rang in his ear at the pitch of a scream.

^‘
Stop!’

At first he thought that Crowe had misunderstood his intention and that the alarm in his voice was unwarranted. Then he had a glimmer of recollection: the after-deck of the
Fidele
and Verney Dacre, apparently sitting with docile resignation on the upturned life-raft. He checked his stride. Crowe shouted again.

'Not the door!'

And then Crowe was beside him. The Marine cupped his hands as a stirrup. Verity lodged his foot, snatched the top of the partition and was over it in a second. He fell to the floor on the other side, picked himself up, and turned round to where Crowe was just landing.

'Knife, Mr Crowe! On my shoulders with it! She ain't more 'n twelve feet up! Just reach that smouldering cord!'

He dipped again, to let Crowe crouch with his feet on the plump shoulders. Then, using every resource of his powerful body, Verity straightened up, lifting the crouching Marine until Crowe could balance sufficiently to stand upright, knife in hand as his arms reached for the slow burning fuse. Verity gripped Crowe's ankles to give him purchase and heard the girl's stifled cries of urgency above him. At last Crowe gave a gasp.

'Right, Verity. Safe enough. Now she can be fetched down.'

Verity helped his companion down, then turned to the door in the wooden partition. Attached to the bar of the latch on the inner side was a black metal cylinder, the size of a large tankard. From it, a short length of cord hung down into an iron pot below. Now that he was facing it, Verity saw that the open top of the cylinder cast the faintest wavering light on the roof above. It was this which Crowe had seen and he had not. Now it was easy enough to imagine how the movement of the latch, had he tried to open the door, would have upset the flame in the cylinder, igniting the oiled fuse and carrying fire down into the big iron pot below. With extreme caution, Verity dipped a hand into that pot and felt the dry grains of powder run through his fingers.

'Easy!' said Crowe, meticulously detaching the cylinder with its concealed flame, while Verity dragged away the pot. 'One finger on that latch outside, one good thump on the door, and you'd have been accompanying the heavenly choir. There's enough powder in that thing to take you, me, Miss Jolly and the entire building up to the stars and back.'