The Dorset House Affair (19 page)

‘It was soon after that night that my brain began to go wrong. I started to see things, and hear voices, I heard
him
– Maurice Claygate, I mean, though I couldn't make out what he was saying. I started to wander about, getting more and more unsettled in my
mind. I went to his funeral, and fancied that I could hear him talking to his family as they came out of the chapel. I saw you, then, and ran for it. But it was no use. Maurice wouldn't leave me alone…. I fancied I saw him again, tonight, in Lewisham Street, smiling, and pointing to the wound in his chest. It was there that I collapsed, and they brought me here. Are you still there? Why have they turned the gas out? Nurse! Nurse!'

The door opened, and the sister hurried into the room. She took one look at the patient, and told them that they would have to leave. They met the specialist in the corridor, and Box felt compelled to ask him a question.

‘Sir,' he said, ‘Harry Stamfordis had a great deal to say for himself. Can it really be true that he won't last the night?'

The surgeon looked at Box, and sighed. It was so hard to explain these things to a layman, but he'd have to try.

‘Mr Stamfordis has a tumour on the brain, and this is
complicated
by a distended cranial artery which will burst at any moment. He's coherent now, because of the drugs that we have made him drink. But soon, he will lose the faculty of speech, and I should say that by three in the morning, he will be dead. It's tragic, and very frustrating, for us here at St Thomas's as well as for you; but there is emphatically nothing that we can do to save his life.'

It was nearing eleven o'clock when Arnold Box turned out of Fleet Street and into Cardinal's Court. Mrs Peach had evidently not retired for the night, as a welcome glow of yellow light gleamed from the half-moon of glass above the door of Number 14. He had bade a sombre farewell to Sergeant Green outside St Thomas's, and had taken a cab from the rank in Westminster Bridge Road.

After signing off duty, he had gone to Samson's Café at the top of Aberdeen Lane, and dined off liver and fried potatoes, followed
by ginger sponge pudding and a cup of rather greasy tea. There, he had met George Boyd, an old friend and ally, and the two men had talked about crime and criminals for over an hour. Samson's Café was not one of Box's favourite haunts, but he never liked to bother Mrs Peach with dinner when he was on a late day-shift.

Box used his latch key to open the front door, and climbed the stairs to his rooms. Mrs Peach had kept the fire going and, when he had divested himself of his hat and greatcoat, he lit the lamp, and put a small cast-iron pan of milk on the trivet over the fire. In a moment, he would make himself a cup of Epp's Cocoa, to which he would add a dash of navy rum. He sat down in his leather armchair beside the fire.

So, it was the haughty Monsieur de Bellefort, not his frantic sister, who had actually shot Maurice Claygate. It was logical, when you thought about it. That poor young woman could not have been relied upon to shoot her former lover in cold blood. In her own mind, of course, she had done so, even though it had been a blank round that she had fired, but her brother had made quite sure that Maurice died, by firing the fatal shot himself.

And so the Frenchman's warped sense of honour had been satisfied.

Honour? No, there was more to the business than dubious honour. De Bellefort had arranged for the young man's dead body to be conveyed by cab to the house in Soho, thus linking Maurice Claygate's death with that of Sophie Lénart. It had been a bold move, designed to furnish De Bellefort with an apparently
unassailable
alibi, and at the same time to suggest that Claygate was one of Sophie Lénart's associates.

The milk boiled, and Box poured it on to the little pile of cocoa and sugar at the bottom of a large earthenware breakfast cup. He added a spoonful of rum, and sipped the steaming liquid
thoughtfully
.

Without doubt, Alain de Bellefort was a double murderer; but there was much to be done to bring the Frenchman to book,
particularly with respect to the murder of Sophie Lénart. The folk in ‘C' Division would have to be alerted first thing in the morning to the substance of Harry the Greek's confession. He would ask Mr Mackharness to talk personally to Superintendent Hume at Little Vine Street.

It was also essential that Colonel Kershaw should hear of this latest development. Maurice Claygate had been one of his agents, and it was beginning to look very much as though De Bellefort had personally silenced him for that reason. He'd never really swallowed all that high-minded talk about ‘honour'. ‘What is honour? A word. Who hath it? Him that died o' Wednesday.' That was in the Bible, somewhere. Or maybe it was Shakespeare.

From the inside pocket of his coat Box removed the tightly rolled spill of paper that he had taken from Colonel Kershaw's cigar case when he had met him in the upstairs room at the London Pavilion. He unrolled it, and read the few words that someone had printed on it in soft lead pencil.

Thank goodness! Ashentree Court was only a short walk from home. He'd call there first thing in the morning, on his way in to the Rents.

Box finished his cocoa, left the room, and climbed a further set of stairs to his bedroom on the second floor front. From the small window he could see the glow of the night sky above the buildings in Fleet Street. There were lamps glowing in the rear windows of the
Daily
Telegraph's
offices, where the presses were being made ready for the early morning edition of the paper.

Box blew out his candle, and within minutes he had sunk into a deep sleep. He awoke with a jolt some hours later, and sat up in bed. What was it? What had disturbed him? He began to recall a dream, a dream in which he had watched a foaming tide receding
from the shore of a moonlit sea. It came to him then that Harry the Greek had just breathed his last.

At just after 7.30 the next morning, Arnold Box pushed open the door of Mr Broadbent's tobacconist's shop in Ashentree Court, just off Bouverie Street. A cheerful, rather elfish man in a black alpaca coat sat behind a small counter. As the bell behind the door set up its merry jangling, the man looked up from the newspaper that he was reading.

‘Inspector Box, I think?' he said, smiling. ‘I thought you might be dropping in soon. He's in Number 4 control box at Cardington Lane shunting yard, Euston Station. He'll be there all morning, I expect. A box of vestas? Certainly, sir. A ha'penny. Yes, he'll be there all morning. Good day.'

Although the morning promised to be fine, very little sunlight filtered through the dull canopy of engine smoke hanging above the complex network of tracks in the great shunting yard at Cardington Lane. A porter, evidently on the lookout for him, had conducted Box away from the busy platforms of Euston Station and through a maze of narrow walk-ways between the sets of lines. They had passed mysterious little brick sheds, in which you could see fires burning in miniature grates. Railwaymen bent on mysterious tasks to do with their vocation looked up as they passed. Countless wagons filled with coal stood in the sidings, and from time to time trainless locomotives would come bustling and clanking past them in a cloud of steam.

After a few minutes they emerged on to a sort of island, upon which rose a tall structure of wood and glass. A perilously steep iron staircase gave access to a kind of elevated office. A board affixed to the structure declared it to be Number 4 Control Box: East.

A very long passenger train had stopped at a signal on one of the main lines running through the sidings, its great locomotive
was letting off steam. It reminded Box of an impatient
thoroughbred
horse waiting for the start of a race, and straining at the bit.

‘He's up there,' said the porter. He turned his back on Box, and began his walk back to the station. Box climbed the steep iron stair, and pushed open the door at the top.

Colonel Kershaw looked up as he entered, and immediately motioned him to be silent. At the same time, he beckoned Box over to the window where he was standing, evidently watching the impatient passenger train held up at the signal.

‘Let me just watch this, Box,' said Kershaw, ‘and then you and I can talk.'

Following Kershaw's gaze, Box saw a carriage door open, and a prosperous-looking man in frock coat and tall silk hat clamber down on to the track. He was immediately joined by four men clad in the livery of the London and North Western Railway Company, who hustled him across the sidings to a remote line where a small locomotive, coupled to a single grimy carriage, stood with steam up.

The man in the frock coat was helped up into the compartment, the door was slammed, and the small engine immediately began to move. In moments the little train had rattled its way out of sight under a bridge. On the main line, someone blew a whistle, and the long passenger train began its final haul into the station. Colonel Kershaw breathed a sigh of relief.

‘That man, Mr Box,' he said, ‘was about to be met at Euston Station by a little delegation of enemies – my enemies and yours – who would have ensured that he was never seen alive again. Well, they'll be disappointed, because he's already changed trains, and embarked on the last leg of his journey. It's a long story, Box – another story – that doesn't concern you, so I'll say no more. Now, what have you found out?'

Colonel Kershaw was wearing a dark overcoat and a flapped leather cap. He looked nothing like the elegant figure who had met Box in the upper room at the Pavilion. Evidently, he had no
wish to stand out too obviously from the pervading gloom of the sidings.

Very carefully and slowly, Arnold Box told the colonel of his interview with Harry the Greek in St Thomas's Hospital. Kershaw listened patiently without attempting to interrupt Box's narrative, but his face turned very pale, and his lips set in a stern line. Box had seen him like that before. It was a sign of cold anger, fully mastered, but boding ill for whoever had caused it.

‘Harry's story confirmed what I'd already suspected,' Box concluded. ‘The so-called hallucination was, in fact, something that actually happened, and the killer was not Elizabeth de Bellefort but her brother, Alain—'

‘And the whole contrived drama at Dorset House, Box,' said Kershaw, ‘was merely a cloak for De Bellefort's assassination of Maurice Claygate. He may not have known that Claygate was one of my people – I should imagine that he is quite unaware of my existence – but he probably thought that the poor young man was working for Sir Charles Napier. It makes no difference, either way. Claygate was a danger to De Bellefort, and so he murdered him. It means – damn it all, Box! – it means that Sophie Lénart came into possession of that fatal list, and then decided to sell it on to De Bellefort—'

‘Why should she do that, sir?'

‘Because in her own warped way she was a French patriot, and knew that De Bellefort, for all his posturing, is a rootless scoundrel. If those misguided Alsatians were to be betrayed, it would be better for someone like De Bellefort to do it. She would offer it to him, and if he refused, she would have salved her conscience, such as it was. She would have suggested a high price, which that beggar could never have met….'

‘And so,' said Box, ‘he made an assignation to see her – it would have been on the afternoon of Thursday, the sixth – and when he turned up at the house in Soho, he murdered her, and took the document.'

‘It must have been like that. And later the same day, Box,' said Kershaw, ‘De Bellefort shot Maurice Claygate, and then furnished himself with an alibi by having him conveyed to that house in Soho while he remained at Dorset House. First he murdered Sophie Lénart, and then he brought poor Claygate's body along to keep her company.'