Stolen Remains (18 page)

“Yes. Said they were from your shop and you were having him buried today. I didn’t know what to think, but since you’re the undertaker . . .”

“But I no longer have a shop in London.”

“Leave it to Dorothy to foul up a perfectly simple situation,” Nelly said. “Perhaps the word ‘no’ was in order, dear sister.”

Dorothy pointed a finger at Violet. “She’s the one who is the queen’s favorite and therefore dictates our own lives.”

Gordon joined the fray. “I say, if the queen was ready for the old man to be buried, wouldn’t it be right to have a chat with us first?”

“Please.” Violet held up a hand. “Can someone tell me what happened here? I did not have Lord Raybourn taken away.”

Stephen looked at her incredulously. “You mean to say that another undertaker got confused and picked up our family member by mistake?”

“I’m saying no such thing. I’m merely saying that something quite unprecedented has occurred and I’m trying to make sense of it. Please, Miss Fairmont, when did this happen?”

“This morning. Just a few hours ago. Louisa admitted two men in matching wool frock coats. I thought they were a bit seedy-looking, but they said they were here at your behest, and that you wanted Father’s body taken back to Sussex for burial.”

“It wasn’t Will and Harry? The ones who have been with me before.”

“No.”

“You didn’t question their legitimacy, then?”

“And why should I do that, Mrs. Harper? We all know that you are at the queen’s command and therefore we are at your mercy. I assumed the queen finally decided it was time to end Father’s long repose in the dining room.”

“I’m at a loss.”

“Violet, are you telling us that you had nothing to do with his removal?” Stephen asked.

“I’m sorry to say it, but I believe Lord Raybourn has been stolen.”

The room was silent, except for a single gasp from Katherine. Violet didn’t know what to do next although she now understood Mrs. Young’s purposes.

“I think you need to know what happened to me this morning. I received a note from a Mrs. Young, requesting that I meet her at St. Paul’s Cathedral, at Mr. Wren’s tomb, because she had information for me regarding your father’s death. I can see now that she—or whoever it was—was merely trying to ensure I wouldn’t be attending to the coffin so it could be more easily spirited away.”

Dorothy shook her head in frustration. “The papers mock us, our neighbors loathe us, and now complete strangers are persecuting us. When will this end?”

Violet sympathized with the woman’s feelings. “Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen to dead bodies. Would you like me to report this to Inspectors Hurst and Pratt?”

“I suppose it is the only thing we can do. Not that they have provided a moment’s help to our state of affairs, have they? And the press will go simply wild with this, won’t they? Thanks to Nelly, they’re already slavering over the situation. Imagine tomorrow’s headlines.”

“Stephen, I’ve already told you I didn’t—”

“Yes, Nelly, you’ve told us over and over.” Stephen closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he looked directly at Violet. “The police are as bad a lot as the journalists. They take notes and nothing productive comes of it. They are worse than useless. But you can move about inconspicuously with your undertaker’s bag. After all, it is only natural for an undertaker to make inquiries about a dead body. For the sake of my father’s honor, will you find him for us before he is desecrated? Help us get our father buried properly?”

Five pairs of eyes were upon her again, but were no longer brimming with loathing. Katherine and Nelly were nodding. Dorothy’s face was still sour, but no longer accusing.

What choice did she have? If the queen discovered that Lord Raybourn was missing, Violet’s reputation with Victoria would be destroyed. Without a body, there could never be a burial, and without a burial, Violet would never make it home to America.

Yet, the family was asking her to work behind the backs of Inspectors Hurst and Pratt. What sort of trouble might she be purchasing for herself? If only Sam were here to advise her.

Of course, if she simply discovered where Lord Raybourn had been taken and immediately reported it to Scotland Yard, there could be no harm done, right? It wasn’t as though she had to personally confront a criminal or haul Lord Raybourn’s body back to the premises. All she had to do was find him.

Remembering her father’s great affection for his one-time employer, and sympathizing with this family’s plight, Violet took a deep breath.

“Yes, I will help you.”

V
iolet’s first stop was Morgan Undertaking, just to be sure that Will and Harry hadn’t been involved in Lord Raybourn’s removal. As she suspected, they were flummoxed at the suggestion.

“You gave us no such guidance, Mrs. Harper. Why would we do this? I don’t even know where the family churchyard is,” Will said.

“I didn’t think you would. I just thought it best to make sure someone hadn’t led you to believe they were acting on my behalf, or I hadn’t somehow led you astray in the viscount’s funeral plans.”

The other undertaker rubbed his chin. “What plans?”

Indeed.

Violet asked him for a current edition of
Funeral Service Journal
. With the publication in hand, she returned to St. James’s Palace to pore through it, tossing aside the gloves, corset, and other personal items that had managed to wander onto her chair and desk.

There were more than two dozen undertakers in London. How was she to decide which ones to visit?

More important, what question should she ask? “Did you steal the body of a peer this morning from Mayfair?” didn’t seem appropriate. Undertakers were a secretive and sensitive lot, both by the nature of their work and because the public frequently held them in such low regard. Any question Violet could possibly ask would be construed as an attack on the profession.

She herself would feel the same way if presented with questions that had even the slightest hint of impugning her good name.

In the end, she decided she would work in as narrow a radius as possible around Park Street, visiting those undertakers and asking if they knew anything. If she didn’t learn anything, she would expand the bands of her search.

Violet realized that an undertaker not on her list was the one whom she’d encountered when she first arrived at Raybourn House. Of course, how could she have been so blind as to have overlooked him? Mr. Crugg, who had accused her of spiriting the Fairmont work away from him. He was as angry as if someone who had dropped an urn on his foot.

But to steal a body for spite seemed more senseless than what the lowliest undertaker would do, didn’t it?

She went there first.

The man’s shop was filled with many of the overwrought tricks and devices that Violet loathed. Prominent in the center of the display area was a sample safety coffin, fitted with bells that a prematurely buried occupant could ring to alert the outside world that he was not actually dead.

Mr. Crugg also offered Franz Vester’s recently invented burial case, another absurd item permitting a person buried alive to climb out of his upright coffin and go up a ladder through a wide tube to the ground’s surface.

Edgar Allan Poe’s works had done much to stir the public anxiety for such things, and Mr. Crugg was profiting from it. Unfortunately, these fears were distributed across the classes, and unscrupulous undertakers tried to convince everyone from the poorest chimney sweep to the richest member of the House of Lords to buy any number of ridiculous contraptions.

Her rival undertaker’s displeasure at seeing her upon arriving was palpable. “Have you come to pilfer more customers?”

“I am not in the habit of pilfering customers, Mr. Crugg. However, I have come to investigate a theft, that of Lord Raybourn’s body.”

Was it a theft? Or was it more aptly termed a kidnapping? She wasn’t sure what you would call the taking of a dead body. A corpse snatching?

Mr. Crugg’s expression was at first puzzled, then a great smile settled upon his face, eventually resulting in laughter, most inappropriate in a place that served the grieving.

“Oh, that is perfect irony. The woman who stole a body from me now finds that same body stolen from her. I would happily reward whoever did that. Complimentary funerals for him and his entire family. Richly deserved.” Mr. Crugg’s laughter rolled into a coughing fit.

Violet remained still as the man recovered himself from his own wit. “I am certain you find this amusing, but assuredly the family does not. In fact, there is some question as to whether you might have been offended enough by your removal from Lord Raybourn’s funeral that you devised his kidnapping yourself.”

Mr. Crugg’s amusement quickly ceased. “What? That’s preposterous.”

“Is it?”

“Of course it is. I may have been put out by being ousted by not only a chit of a woman but by someone who has never buried a single member of the Fairmont family, but that doesn’t mean I am so unethical as to steal a body!”

Violet wasn’t quite sure about that.

“Where were you this morning, Mr. Crugg?”

His eyes narrowed. “A detective inspector, are you? I’ve no responsibility for answering your question, but if you must know, I was burying Mr. Thomas Little, headmaster of a boys’ school, who died after a tumble down the stairs into the school basement when he went after some cricket equipment. As dark as a crypt down there, and a fine mess he was for me, too.”

He noticed her skeptical look.

“I can give you Mrs. Little’s address for verification,” he said, going to a desk and scrawling on a piece of paper. “But assuredly, I was too busy to worry about Lord Raybourn’s body. Besides, what on earth would I do with it? Go to the trouble of having a burial at my own expense? What would be my gain?”

“The satisfaction of ruining my own good name, to start. A lesson to families about not daring to allow your dismissal, perhaps? An exercise in flouting the queen’s authority?”

Mr. Crugg sputtered. “What you say is slanderous. I don’t care if you are a woman, I’ll haul you into court, Mrs. Harper. I’ll not have my honor impugned.”

Violet swept her arm to indicate the various coffin samples in the room. “You impugn your own honor with your crude and seedy artifices for taking advantage of people in mourning. Good day to you, sir.”

Violet didn’t stop until she was a block away from the shop, then leaned against a lamppost, worn out from the interaction. Mr. Crugg was contemptible, but did that make him a body thief? She looked at the address he’d given her. It was in Holborn. She’d visit Mrs. Little in the course of visiting other funeral people.

Violet spent two more days on interviews. As she expected, she was met with frowns, scowls, and the occasional, “How dare you?” Not even her own status as an undertaker made the path smooth for her.

A visit with Mrs. Little, a short woman with a strange bald spot on one side, confirmed Mr. Crugg’s claim that he was conducting the headmaster’s funeral at the time Lord Raybourn’s body was taken.

Not that it prevented him from hiring someone else to do it for him, which he must have done, since Dorothy didn’t recognize either of the men who showed up to take Lord Raybourn. Yet for all of Mr. Crugg’s bluster and irritating manner, she had to admit she wasn’t certain that the reasons she’d presented to him for wanting to steal Lord Raybourn were really valid.

Violet stopped at Twining’s tea shop along the Strand, located near the last of her undertaker visits. While sipping a cup of black tea and nibbling at a watercress sandwich, she spread her papers on the table in front of her, hoping she might discern something of value from her sparse notes.

There was nothing.

She asked herself obvious questions, hoping to divine an answer. Why would someone steal an embalmed body? Was Lord Raybourn stolen by the same person who had murdered him? If not, did the thief know the murderer? How was it that two different crimes had been perpetrated on poor Lord Raybourn?

Moreover, what of Mrs. Peet? Her death was most certainly not a suicide, although now that she was buried and gone, no one would give her a second thought. What of that neighbor’s maid? Rebecca, wasn’t it? A nervous little thing, but she’d implied that there was an immoral undercurrent in the house. What was it? Perhaps she should talk to the girl again.

The Fairmont family was a puzzle in and of itself. The sisters harbored great resentment for their father, Gordon was a milksop who had few interests outside of pleasing his wife, Toby was an enigma, and Katherine was a skittish colt. Stephen was the only placid, composed one currently residing at Raybourn House.

The queen and Gladstone sat across from each other over Victoria’s favorite desk, a mass of papers between them. Victoria frowned at what she was reading.

“You obtained these from Scotland Yard?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. They are reproductions of the blackmail letters de Lesseps received. Commissioner Henderson thought we’d be interested in seeing them ourselves.”

Victoria continued reading, amazed at the blackmailer’s audacity.

How utterly outrageous. Did Britain not have enough problems without some lunatic parading a paid actor through the kingdom to spew slander and lies? She picked up another letter.

“He is quite the theologian,” Victoria said.

Gladstone chuckled, despite the gravity of the situation. “It’s almost as if he sees himself on some sort of moral crusade, except that money is at the forefront of his mind.”

“Shouldn’t it be a simple thing to find him? Can’t the delivery of the messages be traced?”

“It’s a curious thing. The blackmailer had an elaborate system set up involving the passing of notes through a series of boats along a stretch of the Suez Canal near Port Fuad. They use some intricate combination of hand signals and lamps that was never decoded. It appears that he is using the same method in London.”

“What a ridiculous scheme. Can’t the police merely post some men along the Thames?”

“It’s not quite so simple as that, Your Majesty. The blackmailer appears to be using some, er, unsavory characters for his messages. The riverbank teems with them, and they move in the shadows, so it is hard to figure out who is a messenger and where along the river he will be picking up or dropping off a message.”

Victoria frowned. “Has Monsieur de Lesseps considered paying the blackmail amount?”

“He refuses to do so, madam, on principle.”

“Yes, we suppose a blackmailer is like a rat. Once it has discovered a good feeding source, it never leaves and brings in friends to join him. What are these papers here?”

“Commissioner Henderson also sent these along. The detectives assigned to the case discovered them.”

They were a series of telegrams between Lord Raybourn and a Gordon Bishop. There were many of them, dated during the period that Lord Raybourn was in Egypt.

“It looks as though Mr. Bishop was asking His Lordship to purchase items for him,” she said.

“Scotland Yard believes it may be code for something underhanded. For example, here Mr. Bishop instructs Lord Raybourn to spend twelve Egyptian
gineih
for three Pea Blue butterflies and four Yellow Pansies. Scotland Yard has researched, and says that butterflies do not thrive in Egypt, therefore ‘Pea Blue’ and ‘Yellow Pansy’ probably stand for something else.”

“Such as?”

“They aren’t quite sure. Possibly antiquities.”

“That isn’t illegal.”

“It is if they are being poached from archaeological sites or stolen from museums.”

Victoria nodded. “More embarrassment for us. Does Commissioner Henderson know what we know about Lord Raybourn?”

“No, Your Majesty, I thought it wise to keep close counsel on that until we see what Scotland Yard unearths.”

“We’ve not told Mrs. Harper, either. We shouldn’t like to throw this investigation into disorder.”

“Which reminds me, Your Majesty, have you received confirmation of the . . . situation . . . yet?”

“I have, which makes me wonder what in heaven’s name is really happening here? We do so wish our dear Albert were here to take care of things.”

“We all do, madam.”