The Solitary House (9 page)

FIVE

Signs and Tokens

M
OVING
C
HARLES
’
S PARAPHERNALIA
of personal effects proves to be a rather larger job than can be accomplished in a single morning. Thunder the cat likewise takes a good deal of persuading to leave his comfortable and accustomed billet and suffer the ignominy of being carried in a wicker basket half-way across town, banging every stride against his master’s knee. But by early evening a stack of boxes and trunks has finally been hauled up the stairs in Buckingham Street to the large bare resounding room at the top of the house, which Mrs McLeod has spent much of the day cleaning. And when she hasn’t been scrubbing and washing she’s been at the nearby hiring-office, picking out two candidates for Charles to inspect. The lad, Billy, seems both sensible and sturdy, with an open good-natured face and a ready grin. The girl could hardly be more different. She is small, almost too fragile for the heavy chores she will have to do daily, up and down four flights of stairs. But she is capable and accustomed to hard work—or so the manager of the hiring-office insists.

“I know that’s what they always claim,” says Mrs McLeod, conciliatory, “but I took one look at her hands, and I could see she’s a good
worker. You don’t get calluses like that from arranging the flowers, you can take that from me. She does have one drawback, though—but maybe you won’t see it as such. She don’t speak. They couldn’t tell me if she can’t, or just won’t, but I suppose the end result is much the same.”

There’s something else I have not yet mentioned, and nor, for that matter, has Mrs McLeod. In her defence, the point is so obvious that Charles can see it for himself. I do not have her excuse and you, of course, can only see what I allow you to see. So here it is: The girl is beautiful, and she is black.

“What do you think, Mr Charles?” says Mrs McLeod, an anxious note creeping into her voice at his prolonged silence. “There weren’t many to choose from, I have to say, but she has good references and at least she won’t be gossiping with tradesmen all day long.”

Charles is still looking at the girl, demure and self-contained in her apron and white cap, her eyes down, her hands motionless. As motionless, in fact, as all those drawings in his books and maps upstairs, but those crude sketches could never have prepared him for the delicacy of these features, the gleam of this perfect skin. So if he stares now it’s because he’s struggling to reconcile what he thought he knew with what he can actually see. It’s not the first time such a thing has happened, of course—he’s a scientist, after all, but in the past the specimens have invariably been either invertebrate, or inanimate.

“They weren’t sure of her real name,” says Mrs McLeod, breaking into his thoughts. “Something long and fiddlesome in her own language, they thought. But she will answer to Molly.”

“Molly it is, then,” he says, making an effort. “Thank you, Mrs McLeod. I’m sure they will both do very nicely.”

And so they do. So much so, in fact, that before two days are out it’s hardly possible to remember living any other way. The drawing-room is put to rights, the broken window mended, the newcomers installed.
Thunder takes the longest to adjust of all of them, but once he’s learned to avoid the loud and erratic old human on the first floor he soon becomes reconciled to his new home, especially after he’s had his way with the rats in the basement, and discovered a route out of Charles’s eyrie onto the leads, where he can king it over the feral felines and prowl the chimney-tops by starlight. Up at the top of the house the boxes and trunks start, slowly, to be unpacked and placed on the attic shelves, but when a sheaf of documents about the missing Chadwick child slips from the atlas where Charles has stashed them and spill all over the floor, the thought occurs to him that it might be useful to have somewhere more professional to keep his working papers. Followed swiftly by the recollection that there is a small but serviceable room down on the ground floor where Maddox used to receive his clients, and where Charles might now receive his. If his ego is flattered by the idea of following so literally in his great-uncle’s footsteps, he has the good grace to acknowledge it. And it’s not as if Maddox will need it again; in the last two days he’s been by turns rambling and raging, but the man Charles once knew has not returned. Tucking the papers back in the atlas for the time being, he makes his way downstairs and pushes open the office door. It clearly hasn’t been used for some time. There’s a smell of damp, and a spider’s web sagging from the (rather dirty) windowpane. As for furniture, there’s a hard spindle-backed chair, a small walnut desk, and a wall of shelves. Nothing more. The upper levels are stacked with boxes, most coated with grey dust; the lower ones are largely empty, though the marks on the wood suggest they once contained the books now ranged in the drawing-room above. But it’s what remains that attracts Charles’s eye: a line of leather-bound memorandum books. His uncle’s case files.

He is, suddenly, a small boy again. Standing at the entrance of this same room, summer sunlight glancing through the half-closed shutters.
No damp in the air then, but the delicious aroma of baking drifting up from a kitchen that boasted not only a cook but two kitchen maids and a scullion: In those days it was Maddox’s business to know and be known, and some of the most eminent men in the land would eat regularly at his table, and count themselves privileged in the invitation. Charles remembers being surprised at finding this door open, and pausing at the threshold, tentative and fearful, knowing he shouldn’t be there. Then catching sight of the book open on the table and creeping forwards to look at it. Struggling at first with the handwriting, but making out a word here and there, and so engrossed in doing so he never heard his uncle’s tread.

“And what, exactly, do you think you’re doing, young man?”

Maddox’s face—when Charles summoned the courage to look up at it—was unsmiling but not unkind.

“Prying into my papers, I’ll wager, or so it would seem.”

Charles can remember even now, the hot flush of shame, and the lurch of his stomach as Maddox laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“Do you not recall what I told you?”

A nod, then another, quicker.

“And what was that?”

“That all that passes between a detective and his client is confi—confi—”

“Confidential,” said Maddox, with emphasis. “Quite so. And what does
confidential
mean?”

“Secret.”

“Exactly so. Secret, and not to be shared with anyone, however small, and however inquisitive.”

Maddox had sat down on the chair then, and lifted Charles on his knee, the wood creaking beneath their weight. “One day,” he said, touching him lightly on the brow, and smoothing his hair, “one day, young Charles, when you are older, and the people in these files dead and gone, I will let you read about these crimes, and show you how I resolved them. But not today. Today I am too occupied, and you are
still too young. So run along now, and have Cook give you a glass of milk. But ask politely, mind.”

Charles moves now towards the shelf and works back along the spines, wondering if he can find that same book, and read the pages he read that day, such a long time ago. He pulls out the volume for 1834 and is struck for a moment by the coincidence. Sixteen years ago. The same year that Chadwick’s grand-child went missing from the Convent of the Faithful Virgin orphanage. Not that he expects to find anything so commonplace here. Here it is all forgery, and coining, and housebreaking, and theft. Profitable investigations, as the neatly noted fee receipts demonstrate, but rather lacklustre, from a purely professional point of view. He closes the book and pulls another at random from the shelf: 1811. Now this, it seems, was quite another story. He spends half an hour enthralled by an extraordinary murder case at a Northamptonshire mansion, only to turn the page at the end and find himself confronted by what will prove to be one of the most infamous crimes of the nineteenth century: the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Charles already knows the bones of this story—the savage and apparently inexplicable murder of Timothy Marr and his family in their East End draper’s shop, followed twelve days later by a second equally brutal killing spree, which left the landlord of the nearby King’s Arms with his throat cut, and his wife and maidservant likewise. Charles—like most of his contemporaries—has always thought the man arrested for these murders was in all likelihood the one who committed them, even if he killed himself in jail before he could be tried. But as he winds deeper and deeper into Maddox’s notes he finds inconsistency after inconsistency in the evidence, and failure after failure in the official police investigation—inconsistencies and failures that are amply and fascinatingly described, by the way, in a more modern account of exactly the same events by one of our most revered crime novelists (though the Baroness of
Holland Park does not come to quite the same conclusions as the master thief taker of Buckingham Street once did). By the time Charles is a dozen pages into Maddox’s notes he’s already questioning whether the same lone killer can possibly have committed all these crimes, and is starting to wonder how on earth his uncle got drawn in—

“The Home Secretary asked for my help.”

He looks up, just as he looked up all those years ago, only the man in the doorway now is bent and grey and leaning heavily on a stick. Though Billy’s good offices are now clearly in evidence, for his hair is brushed, and his dressing-gown newly washed.

“That was indeed what you were thinking, was it not?” says Maddox, coming slowly into the room. “How I came to be involved in the Ratcliffe Highway case?”

Charles starts forward and helps Maddox to the chair. “Are you sure you should be on your feet, Uncle—”

Maddox waves his hand dismissively. “Don’t fuss, boy. You’re as bad as that damn Stornaway—man’s turned into an old mother hen. Show me the book.”

Charles slides the volume towards him, and the old man looks at it for a moment, turns back a few pages, reads a paragraph here and there, then returns to where Charles left off.

“So what have you concluded thus far?”

Charles scarcely knows what to say. He’s caught between his bewilderment at this utter and unlooked-for change in his uncle’s demeanour, and a dizzying sense of being still that same little nine-year-old boy, frantic to gain his great-uncle’s good opinion but never quite measuring up to the task.

“Well, I—” He hesitates. “From what I’ve read, I think it likely that the second murders were the work of other hands.”

“The latter plural was, I take it, intentional?”

“There were two men seen running from the inn soon after the attack.”

“Indeed. Go on.”

Maddox’s tone is cool, non-committal; Charles can’t tell whether his great-uncle agrees with him or not. He swallows, and plunges on.

“I think the first murder was a robbery that went wrong, probably committed by someone with a grudge against Marr. That’s the only way I can account for the degree of violence involved. I also think this man must have been involved in some way with the Marrs’ servant girl—she was rather too conveniently out of the way when it happened, and seems to have behaved rather suspiciously thereafter.”

Maddox nods. “And the second murders?”

“Made to look like the Marr killings, and in that respect almost entirely successful. But this crime was far more methodical in its execution, and seems to have been driven by something quite other than passion or revenge.”

“Or robbery,” says Maddox. “The only item missing was the landlord’s watch, which would have been next to impossible to sell, since it bore an engraving of a man’s name. Bravo, my lad, you’ve made noteworthy progress since I saw you last. Indeed you seem to be applying my principles with no small success. After all, there is no problem, however intractable, that cannot be resolved by the steady application of—”

“—logic and observation,” finishes Charles with a smile. “I can still remember the very first time you told me that. I was six years old, and you were visiting us in Berkshire. I’d found a broken window in the stable-block, and came rushing back in to tell you we’d had a burglary in our midst.”

Maddox, too, is smiling now. “But having conducted a thorough inspection of the scene, we were able to determine that the glass had fallen
out
side the building, not
in
, and the breakage was therefore far more likely to be down to a stable-boy’s carelessness, than a determined assault on your father’s property.”

He sits back in the chair. “I recall we undertook a number of similar ‘investigations’ that Christmas—the Strange Death of the Vagabond
in the Ditch being one of them. Though I seem to remember we concluded he had merely had the misfortune to become intoxicated and fall asleep on the high road on an unexpectedly cold night. Did I not set you to write me an account of that?”

Charles grins. “Indeed you did. I have it even now. It took me a whole week—I was so desperate to impress you.”

“As you did. As you do still.”