A Particular Eye for Villainy: (Inspector Ben Ross 4) Read online

  ‘Yessir.’ He was pleased I knew his name. ‘All in order here, sir.’

  ‘I am not checking on you, Constable. I leave that to your sergeant. I’m on my way to find a cab to take me to the Yard. I’m afraid all is not in order!’ Quickly I explained the situation and asked him to go at once to the house and mount guard on it.

  ‘There has been some bad business done here tonight and two women waiting unprotected in a house with a murdered man lying upstairs. And one of the ladies is my wife, as it happens.’

  Butcher drew himself up. ‘If it’s been done on my beat, sir, I shall of course proceed there immediate. You may rely on me!’

  He set off at a cumbersome jogtrot.

  The wheels of the law sometimes turn slowly but they turn efficiently. No one would get past Butcher once he took up guard at the house. I could be relieved on that account.

  I found a cab quickly enough at the railway station but it was still late when I got to the Yard. Sergeant Morris had gone off duty and was at home in Camberwell. It was, as it happened, a busy evening and I had to make do with Constable Biddle. I had told the cab that had brought me to wait, and so pushed Biddle into it and gave the driver the address of the nearest police surgeon. By the time we’d picked up this gentleman and set off back across the river time was ticking by and I was growing increasingly impatient, but we could not have returned to the house faster. The surgeon, Dr Harper, did not look best pleased at being dragged out – he had been halfway through his dinner – but Biddle was clearly elated. He is young and enthusiastic, good qualities both, but I would have preferred to have Morris there. I wondered what the total of my cab fare was going to be and hoped the expense wouldn’t be queried.

  When we got back to the Jameson house, I was relieved to see the door opened by Constable Butcher.

  ‘All quiet, here, sir,’ said Butcher as soon as he saw me. ‘The ladies is in the parlour. There’s also a pair of servant girls, a-sitting in the kitchen. One of ’em works here and the other works for you, Mr Ross. They’re drinking tea and talking the hind leg off a donkey. One keeps blubbing. They wasn’t here when I got here but turned up just after. I have secured the back door – that leads out of the kitchen, too. But it occurs to me that the villain made good his escape that way and very possible his entry, too! I’ve examined all the windows on the ground floor, sir, and none of them’s been forced.’

  ‘How he got in will be the first mystery to solve,’ I murmured to Harper as we climbed the stairs. ‘But if there is only the one servant employed here, and if she left the kitchen door unlocked, it wouldn’t be difficult.’

  We had reached the room on the first floor where poor Tapley lay. Although I’d seen him earlier and braced myself for seeing him again, it was still a sickening sight.

  I have dealt with murder more often than I could have wished. Usually, in my experience, it takes place at the rougher end of society. Men kill one another in tavern brawls. They kill their wretched women in fits of drunken jealousy. Motives often seem petty and out of all proportion to the horror of the crime. Recently I had dealt with the case of a pawnbroker, killed in his shop by a customer who couldn’t raise the money to redeem his mother’s wedding ring so decided to retrieve it the direct way. I’ve known murder done for a penny-a-week life insurance. Life is hard for those on the street and little better for the labouring poor. Temptation is always at hand.

  The middle classes are on the whole subtler in dealing with a problem or an obstacle. They can afford to pay a lawyer his fee to argue their cause in the courts. They are conscious of their reputations. Of course there is violence in such homes, too. I’ve seen the signs of that also. But it seldom comes into court because they cling to a ‘good name’ with the zeal of a fanatic. The beaten wife swears she walked into a bedpost. The abused servant girl is silenced with a mix of money and threats. But murder cannot be hidden so easily. Murder is a stain that cannot be washed clean. The police cannot be turned away from an investigation into murder with a firm ‘not today, thank you!’. It is the rarity, therefore, of such an event in such a setting that makes it particularly shocking. And this time in a peace-loving Quaker home, too! There was a horrid irony in that.

  Thomas Tapley, the scholarly recluse, had been down-at-heel but, in the opinion of all it would seem, ‘a gentleman’. He would not have expected to leave life in such a way as this. Nor would I have expected to find someone like him beaten to death. I gave myself a mental shake and told myself to stop philosophising and get on with the practical details.

  The poor fellow was as I had left him earlier before hurrying out to Scotland Yard. He sprawled on one side with his face turned towards the hearth. But if he had glanced in that direction before he died, he’d have seen no dancing flames. No fire burned in the grate nor was there any sign that one had been lit that day. The iron grille at the base of the grate was free of ash or cinders. In fact, the room was so cold I guessed no heat had warmed it in many weeks. I felt it even through my jacket. I wondered at anyone wanting to sit and read in such a chilly room, and why the lodger had not asked for a fire. Had he been required to pay extra for it?

  Tapley’s eyes and mouth were open and the features still seemed to show his incredulity at the event. The back of his skull was a bloody pulped mess. Head wounds bleed copiously and this had caused a pool of blood and brain matter to seep out and into the carpet beneath. The victim was a small man and in death looked even more shrunken, a tiny helpless figure. To overcome him would not have been difficult. But there was no sign of a struggle. I guessed that he had been reading the book that lay, open, spine uppermost and clearly blood spotted, nearby. His assailant had opened the door quietly, approached the absorbed reader across the carpet and raised his weapon . . .

  Fire irons are always the first thing to check in such a situation, but the stand usually called a companion set, in the neatly swept pristine hearth, appeared to have a full complement of these – poker, shovel, tongs – and none was bloodstained. The murderer had evidently brought some weapon with him and taken it away again. This was not a disturbed sneak thief, I thought. The intruder was someone who had come with no other purpose than to kill. But why on earth should anyone harbour murderous intentions towards such a harmless little fellow as Tapley?

  Biddle had given a little gasp when he saw the body and turned pale but assured me, when I gave him an enquiring look, that he was all right.

  ‘Go down to the kitchen and interview the housemaid, Jenny,’ I told him. ‘Ask particularly if there were any visitors to the house today and that includes visitors to the kitchen.’

  Would-be thieves sweet-talking housemaids in order to gain entry was a common enough occurrence; and it would be a necessary line of enquiry. Jenny might not want to admit to a ‘follower’. But she might speak more freely to Biddle who was nearer her age.

  Dr Harper had gone to the body and was kneeling over it. ‘A bad business,’ he observed.

  I took a more careful look round the room while he examined the dead man. This had been Tapley’s parlour, so his landlady had told us. It was a small sitting room but large enough for a single man to take his ease in. Again I wondered at the lack of a fire. Probably there was an understanding that he could join his landlady in the heated parlour after their supper taken together.

  The most significant piece of furniture was a bookcase stuffed with volumes. I took down a few at random. Most were well thumbed and their condition suggested they were second-hand. Some were novels or poetry, but others dealt with a wealth of practical subjects: health, the law, history, travel . . . There were quite few notes made in the margins, all in the same small, spidery hand. I would ask Mrs Jameson if she recognised the writing as being that of her lodger, as I suspected it was. Tapley’s interests had been scholarly and eclectic. Had he brought some of these books with him when he moved in? I wondered. Or had he bought them all in the past six months?

  I left Harper to his examination and went into the ne
xt-door room. Mrs Jameson had said Tapley occupied the front two rooms, so this should be his bedroom. It was. A marble-topped washstand was furnished with bowl and ewer, together with a shaving mug painted with forget-me-nots. The bed was neatly made. Another book lay on a small table beside it, together with a candlestick and an empty china pin tray. I opened a wardrobe and saw his coat hanging inside it as sole occupant, apart from an empty, battered travelling grip standing on the floor. Opening the drawers of a dresser I found only some handkerchiefs, a spare shirt, a set of woollen ‘long johns’ and some knitted stockings. Mr Tapley had travelled light. I returned to the book on the bedside table and examined it to see if it was one of devotions. But it was a translation from the German of Goethe’s travels in Italy. It occurred to me that I had seen no religious texts of any sort among the books. The lodger had not been drawn to a Quaker house because he was a man of deep personal faith.

  I was beginning to be intrigued by the character of Mr Tapley. His meagre belongings suggested a man of few means, but he had found the money to buy books and pay his rent. Was he, perhaps, in receipt of some small pension? Did he enjoy the income from a small sum wisely invested?

  I left the room and investigated the rest of the passageway. Mrs Jameson’s bedroom was a large room at the back. The view over the yard was uninteresting but the room offered more privacy than one overlooking the street and would also, I conjectured, let in the morning sunshine. A marble-topped washstand here was twin to the one in Tapley’s room.

  By what route did Jenny bring up the morning’s hot water? I completed my exploration to the far shadowy end of the passage and found a narrow iron spiral staircase that must lead down to the kitchen. If Tapley’s murderer had come in via the kitchen, then he would have used this spiral stair to access the upper floor and to make his escape.

  I went back to the victim’s sitting room, where Harper still knelt above the victim, He was slowly working around the upper body. As I watched, he cupped the victim’s jaw and moved the head a fraction. The doctor then sat back, balanced on his heels, his hands hanging loose above his knees, staring thoughtfully at poor Tapley. I took my notebook from my pocket. I drew a careful diagram showing the position of all the furniture in the room and the body. I also made one of the first floor with its two points of access from below. I was putting the finishing touches to this when Harper sighed and stood up.

  ‘Well, Inspector, your man was killed by at least two heavy blows to the back of the skull by the usual blunt instrument, something like a jemmy, for example.’ His tone was matter-of-fact.

  ‘A jemmy!’ I exclaimed. Were we, after all, looking for a burglar? This short, solid iron bar was the standard tool of the housebreaking fraternity, prising open windows, doors, locked boxes, anything needing to be forced. It went without saying it doubled as a useful weapon if the villain was cornered. But housebreakers are cautious coves nowadays, since burglary alone no longer leads to an appointment with the hangman. Tapley had been a frail man and a good shove would have pushed him over without further violence. I frowned. No, a housebreaker would not go out of his way to creep up on an unsuspecting old gentleman, sitting in a chair reading. All the fatal blows were to the back of the cranium. If Tapley had heard the intruder, had jumped up and confronted him, he would have been struck on the front or side of the head. The assailant would then have fled. If, on the other hand, Tapley had not heard him open the door, if the intruder had spotted Tapley engrossed in his book and oblivious, the burglar would have closed it quietly again and made good his escape.

  Constable Butcher had examined the ground-floor windows, something I’d failed to do before I left for the Yard, and I believed him when he said none was forced. Butcher was a man of experience who would have been called to numerous breakins. He wouldn’t make a mistake over a thing like that. It all confirmed the theory that the intruder had slipped through an unsecured window or door, probably in the kitchen.

  ‘I only use “jemmy” as an example,’ explained Harper. ‘Something weighty enough to do a lot of damage at a single blow. I would say considerable force was used, more than required.’

  ‘Can you give me a time of death?’ I asked.

  Harper allowed himself a small, professional smile. ‘My dear Inspector Ross, you know as well as I do that such a thing is very difficult to judge. But in this case we are, if the expression doesn’t seem unfortunate, in luck. Despite faint early signs of it, rigor is barely setting in. Even the jaw and neck muscles can still be manipulated to some degree and they, as you know, are among the first to set.’

  ‘So he has not been dead long,’ I said.

  ‘No, Inspector. It will be some hours before rigor has advanced enough to render all the muscles completely stiff. I would venture to say the unfortunate man had not long died when you paid your first visit to his house and saw him. What time was that?’

  ‘A little after seven thirty.’ My mind was racing with possibilities, all of them unwelcome, and I knew my voice sounded dull.

  Harper took out his pocket watch and consulted it. ‘Well, it is now nearly half past nine. So, some time between five and when you found him, shall we say? Or rather, when the maidservant found him at about a quarter past seven.’

  I hoped Biddle was making a thorough job of the interview with the maid. Someone had entered this house during that recent period of time, killed Tapley, and slipped out without being seen. He might still, I realised with dismay, have been hidden in the house when I entered this room. He’d escaped while I was here – in this room viewing his handiwork! Mrs Jameson and Lizzie had been downstairs in the parlour. Jenny had still been at our house with Bessie. The murderer could have left without any hindrance, certainly not from me. I should have searched the place! I might have been too late already; but I might have confronted him and, even if he’d knocked me down, and then fled, I’d have laid my eyes on the wretch and known what he looked like.

  Harper was watching me quizzically. I dare say he knew exactly what was in my mind.

  ‘You’ll want to be on your way, Doctor,’ I said to him. ‘Thank you for your promptness in coming tonight.’

  He nodded. ‘I will arrange for the mortuary van to come and take the body.’

  We went downstairs together. I shook hands with Dr Harper and he left. In the parlour I found Lizzie and Mrs Jameson engaged in conversation. The moment would come when the house owner realised that the murderer might still have been on the premises when she sent Jenny running to fetch me. But it could wait. I asked her if there had been any visitors at all that day and particularly during the afternoon. She shook her head and insisted it had been a quiet day and no one had called. The kitchen, then, was increasingly looking like the murderer’s way in. But I had to make sure.

  ‘Your lodger lived in the two front rooms upstairs,’ I said. ‘If he had been watching from one of his windows and had seen a potential visitor to himself approach, could he have gone downstairs and opened the front door to that person? Taken him upstairs, without your knowledge or the knowledge of your maid?’

  She admitted it was possible. Her day was a busy one. The devil made work for idle hands. She did her sewing, mending and letter-writing in the small back sitting room. Jenny lit the parlour fire at five o’clock in the winter months and of a cool evening, such as today.

  I couldn’t help but mention the lack of a fire in the lodger’s rooms.

  She was anxious to explain. The upstairs parlour for his use had had no fire lit in it for the past three weeks now, since the onset of milder weather. But, she assured me, it had been Tapley’s own request to discontinue the fire in the grate.

  ‘I several times asked him not to suffer cold unnecessarily,’ she told me. ‘I had the impression, you see, that he was used to making economies of that sort, and that was why he didn’t ask for one to be lit now the winter is past. I assured him he was welcome to enjoy this parlour fire from five onwards. But the cooler evenings didn’t seem to trouble him and, as J
enny has more than enough to do, I admit I didn’t press him. Jenny has this hearth to tend and the supper to help me cook. Then she must serve the supper to both Mr Tapley and me, clear the table and wash the dishes. After that she must make the dining room ready for my breakfast. She’s a willing girl, but it would be unfair to expect her to run up and down the stairs tending a second fire in the evening, and clearing a second grate of its ashes in the morning, if the lodger didn’t want it. It was a different matter in the middle of winter, of course. He didn’t refuse a fire then. I should have insisted, even if he had.’

  Her voice trailed away and she looked distressed.

  Lizzie caught my eye and said, with an apologetic glance at Mrs Jameson, ‘Mr Tapley had a key to the house, a street-door key.’

  This was important. I hurried back upstairs. Tapley’s frock coat hung in the wardrobe and I searched its pockets first. I then knelt by the body and slipped my fingers into the pockets of the clothes he wore. My search turned up a gold half-hunter watch, which was interesting, and not only because a robber wouldn’t have missed it. Tapley had not been reduced to selling or pawning it. At some time in the past he’d been well off enough to buy it in the first place. I opened the case hoping for an inscription but there was none. I closed the case again and contemplated it. The watch was dented and a little rubbed, suggesting it had resided in his pocket for years, but it was an expensive item.

  However, there was nothing like a street-door key. A further search in all drawers and any other likely spot failed to turn up any key whatsoever.

  I went back downstairs. ‘Mrs Jameson,’ I told her, ‘I strongly advise you to send for a locksmith in the morning. Have him change the lock on the front door. Tapley’s key may be upstairs but I haven’t found it. So we have a possibility that his killer took it and if there is something in Tapley’s rooms that the killer wants, but may not yet have found, he could return.’