A Case of Spirits (14 page)

‘If you have quite finished up there, I’ll trouble you to come down here and explain what you are doing.’ It was a young man’s voice and it carried authority and, unless Thackeray was mistaken, intimations of hostility.

He looked down, but was unable to recognise the speaker through the Virginia creeper, which had been comprehensively disarranged in the last minutes. He decided it was probably safest to give an account of himself on
terra firma,
so he clambered down as swiftly as the plant would permit him.

His discoverer was young, as he had supposed, certainly not more than twenty-five, and tall. He was wearing an ulster and billycock. His face was unusually long in shape, dominated by a large mouth, and teeth which looked as though they would not fit into the space available. Thackeray could not decide which member of the animal kingdom he was reminded of, except that it was not domestic.

‘Before you fabricate a story,’ said the young man, ‘I think I should inform you that I have been observing your movements for some considerable time, and it is useless to deny that you have been following Miss Probert about Richmond for the past three-quarters of an hour. I don’t know who you are, sir, or what your game is, but I’ll have you know that nobody is going to do that sort of thing without answering to me.’

‘Perhaps you’ll tell me who you are, then,’ said Thackeray.

‘Certainly. I am Captain Nye, Miss Probert’s fiancé.’

‘I see. My name is Thackeray. It won’t mean much to you, sir.’

‘You’re damned right about that, Thackeray. The only things I know about you, I don’t like, and I demand an account of them. I don’t know what Richmond’s coming to when a young lady can’t move about without being pursued by a shabbily-dressed man old enough to be her father.’

‘I’d be obliged if you would leave my clothes out of this,’ said Thackeray, mustering what dignity he could. He was uncertain what he ought to say to Nye about his purpose in trailing Alice, but he was quite sure it would be a mistake to tell the whole truth, and he needed time to discover what would satisfy the Captain. Best, in the circumstances, to keep him talking. ‘Are you worried that I might have designs on your fiancée, then?’

‘You’re damned impertinent, sir!’ said Nye. ‘I ought to hand you over to the police. It might surprise you to know that the gentleman escorting Miss Probert down Richmond Hill this morning, when you were following them, was a detective-sergeant from Scotland Yard.’

‘My word!’ said Thackeray.

‘I don’t know what you said when you approached them by the Bridge. I suppose it was some form of begging. The sergeant very decently bought you some chestnuts, I noticed, but what sort of gratitude did you show? No sooner had the fellow got on a bus than you were away in pursuit of Miss Probert.’

‘The chestnuts was my reward for carrying her basket down the hill,’ said Thackeray.

‘That was your excuse, was it? A pity she didn’t see through you straight away. Unfortunately, my fiancée is one of the most generous-hearted girls alive. The basket you carried undoubtedly contained comestibles for the poor and needy. She devotes her life to charitable enterprises. I hope that makes you feel ashamed of your behaviour, sir.’

‘I was only looking at her,’ said Thackeray.

‘Oh, yes, I know the sort of thing men like you get up to. It’s quite harmless, you say, simply enjoying the sight of a pretty woman. Soon enough, you’re not just watching them walk by, you’re following them, and the next step is what I’ve caught you in the act of doing—peering through windows.’

‘I wanted to be sure it was Miss Probert,’ said Thackeray truthfully. ‘She went into the hat-shop and I was taken by surprise when she came out with a different set of clothes.’

‘Is it surprising?’ said Nye. ‘She visits some very seedy areas in her work. She can’t go into places like that dressed in plush hats and velvet coats, by Jove. They’d tear ’em off her back in parts of Twickenham.’

‘Why doesn’t she put on her brown clothes from the beginning then?’

‘There’s no mystery in it. She’s the daughter of a doctor. The Proberts are a well-known family on the Hill. People expect them to dress decently. That’s all there is to it. Look here, I’m damned if I’m going to account for everything to you. I want to know what you were doing at the top of that trellis.’

‘I was trying to look into that window,’ admitted Thackeray.

‘You were, eh?’ Nye came a step closer to Thackeray.

‘What did you expect to see?’

‘Not what was there, anyway.’

‘I’m damned sure of that,’ said Nye. ‘You’re a shameless brute, aren’t you? A Peeping Tom. See if this will close your nasty little eye!’ His clenched fist landed squarely in Thackeray’s face, with such speed and force that it toppled him over on to the lawn. ‘It may interest you to know,’ Nye went on, massaging his knuckles, ‘that this house is the meeting place of the Philanthropic Ladies of Richmond, and my fiancée comes here regularly. You’ll see nothing to your obnoxious taste at any of the windows here, by Jove! But if I ever find you within half a mile of that innocent girl, that sweet champion of the unfortunate, I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life!’

When Thackeray got up, Nye had already gone. He patted the skin round his eye with his fingertips. There was no bleeding, but he was going to have a black eye that would want some explaining at Paradise Street, and only for trying to do his duty. There was no justice in it.

He let himself out of the gate and walked through the courtyard and back past the terrace. At the last house his attention was taken by a small board attached to the railings. The name of the terrace was Maids of Honour Row.

I’ve been so happy with you! Nice stuffed chairs,

And sympathetic sideboards; what an end

To all the instructive evenings!

‘So you’ve told me, Thackeray, twice already,’ said Cribb unappreciatively. ‘I understood what you said the first time.’

‘But hang it all, Sarge, you haven’t said so much as a blimey. A young lady like Miss Probert don’t stand in front of an artist without a stitch on every day of the week.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Cribb. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she
does.
Pictures don’t get painted at a single sitting. Your modern artist believes in fidelity to nature, and that means every eyelash.’

‘Well, it ain’t seemly, according to my notion of things,’ responded Thackeray, who was not easily put down.

‘According to some notions it ain’t seemly for a member of the Force to be looking into a first-floor window from the top of a trellis,’ Cribb uncharitably pointed out. ‘How’s the eye? I’ve seen some shiners in my time, but this one beats ’em all.’

It was the morning after the episode in Maids of Honour Row, and they were in Richmond again, at that moment mounting the steps of the police station. ‘I’d be obliged if you wouldn’t bring up the subject of Miss Probert again, Constable,’ said Cribb, ‘particularly in the company in here this morning. If I ask you to confirm anything, simply nod your head. Well, you can say “yes” if you like, but I want no more talk of artists or undressing, and that’s an order.’

‘Yes, Sergeant.’

A room had been assigned to Cribb for the morning. In the corner waiting, sitting perfectly still under a hatstand—a serviceable substitute for a potted palm—was Mrs Probert.

‘Ah, you got my message, then, ma’am,’ said Cribb.

She answered without turning her face. ‘I should not be here otherwise, Sergeant. You gave me to understand that I might be able to speak with—’

‘It is all arranged, ma’am. But tell me first: the proposal in my letter regarding tomorrow night—is that in order?’

‘Is it likely that I would refuse? As I told you on a previous occasion, I have a horror of seances and I shall remain in my room, but if you believe that reconstructing the events of last Saturday will assist your investigation, the house is at your disposal. You will tell my husband, of course?’

‘That will be taken care of,’ Cribb promised. ‘Now, the other matter. As you know, we are holding a certain party in custody in this building, and I have made arrangements for him to be brought up presently from the cells.’

‘This is very accommodating of you.’

‘Not at all, ma’am. I have my reasons. But before we bring the professor in, I should like to explain a little matter of police procedure. As you know, we detained him—or rather, you did, with your book of sermons—on Saturday night. I charged him under what is known as the Larceny Act of 1861, with entering a dwelling-house in the night with intent to commit a felony therein. He also admitted to certain other offences, namely removing a vase from Miss Crush’s possession and a painting from your husband’s, but I have not charged him with these. It’s not necessary, if you follow me, to bring more than one charge at a time.’

‘I think my husband would prefer it if the charges were not brought at all,’ said Mrs Probert. ‘He is inclined to be unsocial about his collection of pictures.’

‘Understandably, ma’am. I believe Miss Crush is not enthusiastic about pressing the charges either. Of course I should not take any account of that if I regarded Professor Quayle as a danger to the public.’

‘He certainly isn’t that,’ said Mrs Probert firmly.

‘I’m glad to hear you say it, ma’am, because I value your opinion. I believe it’s right to say that you have known the professor for some considerable time.’

A change came over Mrs Probert’s face, as if Cribb had peeled away a mask. She blinked, her brow furrowed and she actually turned towards him. ‘Who told you that?’

‘That’s confidential, ma’am, but I have it on good authority that the professor has visited the house quite regular. He used to bring sweets for your daughter when she was small.’

‘Yes, yes. That is correct,’ said Mrs Probert quickly. ‘He is a harmless man. He is no more wicked than you or your assistant.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. But I hope you understand my problem. Even if I set aside the matters of the vase and picture, I’m left with the original charge, and if the professor is convicted there’s a minimum sentence of three years’ penal servitude for that.’

‘Three years—how dreadful!’

‘And a maximum of seven,’ added Cribb for completeness. ‘It did cross my mind, though, that if the professor wanted to commit a felony that night he would have done better to have broken into an empty house, such as Miss Crush’s. I posted Thackeray in Eaton Square for that very reason, didn’t I, Constable?’

‘Yes,’ said Thackeray, remembering the injunction to answer in monosyllables.

‘But there’s no denying that he came to Richmond,’ Cribb continued. ‘I followed him to your house myself, and saw him go inside. He pushed open the back door. Now that’s one of several curious things about that night. The door wasn’t locked. He pushed it open just as if he was expecting it to be unlocked. He wasn’t even carrying any of the tools a housebreaker uses. He had nothing more incriminating upon him than a flask of gin. I like a drop of gin occasional myself, ma’am. Do you?’

‘I’m not sure what you intend by that question,’ said Mrs Probert slowly.

‘Just this, ma’am.’ Cribb picked up a chair, planted it a yard from Mrs Probert and sat down. ‘If I could be certain that Professor Quayle entered your house for a reason that the law would not describe as a felony, I could drop the charge. He could walk out of here this morning a free man.’

Mrs Probert had taken out a handkerchief and was twisting it between the fingers of her left hand. Her knuckles were white.

‘If it was a confidential reason,’ Cribb went on, ‘nothing need be repeated outside this room. I’m the soul of discretion myself and Thackeray over there would forget his own name if I asked him to.’

She shook her head. ‘I never confide in people. It’s not the way we behave in our family.’

‘Your family isn’t here, ma’am,’ Cribb reasonably pointed out. ‘It’s Professor Quayle we’re thinking of. Three years— that’s the devil of a long time for a man as sensitive as he is.’

The lace along one edge of the handkerchief tore between Mrs Probert’s fingers. She crumpled it quickly in her hand.

‘Let’s see,’ Cribb airily continued. ‘If he’s convicted in Surrey, he’ll have to spend it in Wandsworth, some of it with hard labour, I shouldn’t be surprised. Do you know what that means, Mrs Probert?’

She drew a deep breath. ‘You have done this before, haven’t you? You know exactly how to phrase your questions to cause the greatest possible distress. You are not a gentleman.’

If she was trying to injure her interrogator in return, it was not successful. ‘I wasn’t brought up to be one, ma’am. Nor are the warders I know in Wandsworth jail.’

She closed her eyes tight for several seconds, as if to shut out the image Cribb was seeking to implant in her mind.

‘Can’t say I’ve ever seen a convict I would call a gent,’ Cribb went on, ‘but I suppose some must have
started
that way. After three months’ hard, you wouldn’t know the difference. They talk the same and they even look the same. It must be the skilly they feed them—it’s a wonderful leveller is skilly.’

Mrs Probert opened her eyes and resumed her sphinx-like gaze across the room, as if that would afford some relief from the pain of what she was to say. ‘Yes, I know what prison would do to him. It would break him in mind and body, and, as you rightly calculate, no woman’s secret is worth such a price. I shall tell you what happened for his sake, and I hope and pray that there is some compassion in you. The professor came to our house on Saturday night at my invitation. He came to visit me in my room. I knew that my husband would be fully occupied downstairs. I left the back door unbolted. Professor Quayle is, as you have discovered, an old friend. If I tell you that our occasional evenings together were innocent in everything but the sharing of a small bottle of gin, I know that you have every right to disbelieve me, as my husband unquestionably will when he hears of this.’

Cribb shook his head. ‘In this investigation, ma’am, I’ve heard no end of things I disbelieved, but I’ve no reason yet to doubt anything I’ve heard from you, and that includes the statement you have just made. As for your husband, I can think of no way he would get to hear about these meetings, can you, Thackeray?’

‘No.’ Thackeray threw caution to the winds and added, ‘Definitely not, Sergeant.’

‘Fetch the professor, then, and have the darbies taken off him first.’ When Thackeray had left on this errand, Cribb confided to Mrs Probert, ‘He’s totally reliable. Got his black eye for safeguarding a lady’s secret.’

The reunion of the professor and Mrs Probert was simple and affecting, the more so considering that she had knocked him insensible at their last meeting. He entered the room, white, gaunt, with clothes creased and chin unshaven, and crossed to where she was under the hatstand and took her hands.

‘Winifred!’

‘Eustace!’

‘Your flask of gin is with the duty sergeant at the desk outside, sir,’ said Cribb, as a sort of benediction. ‘I offer my apologies for the inconvenience you’ve been put to since Saturday night. You understand that we only became aware of the facts this morning. Mrs Probert has made it clear that your purpose in entering her dwelling-house was not felonious.’

An affectionate look passed between the professor and Mrs Probert before he told Cribb, ‘You did no more than your duty, Sergeant.’

‘Thank you, sir. Before you leave, however, I wonder if you’d oblige me by clarifying one small point.’

‘Naturally, if I can.’

‘It concerns a certain hat-shop not far from here, and the visits Miss Alice Probert makes there.’

The professor glanced nervously at Mrs Probert, who was the first to respond. ‘What is the professor presumed to know about my daughter and a hat-shop, Sergeant?’

‘That she often visits there, ma’am. I didn’t put the point to you because it was unnecessary. On my first call at your house, you passed a remark about it. If you remember, your husband explained your daughter’s absence by saying that she was on a charitable excursion and you commented that she was buying a hat.’

‘So I did,’ agreed Mrs Probert.

‘A small matter, really, or so it seemed at the time,’ continued Cribb. ‘There was young Alice going off with an armful of marrows to do good works, and on the way she was slipping into a milliner’s to try on hats. Nothing criminal in it. Just something to smile over. I suppose a friend of yours must have told you that Alice is in the habit of going in there, or was it one of the servants?’

‘It was Hitchman,’ Mrs Probert confirmed.

‘The deaf woman? Sharp eyes, that one, and not above telling a tale about the young lady of the house. I don’t suppose the information troubled you, or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to the professor. It was just a family joke, and you passed it on to an old friend, didn’t you?’

Mrs Probert nodded.

‘And you, sir,’ Cribb went on, turning to Quayle, ‘mentioned it to your young lodger, Peter Brand, in the way people pass on an amusing story.’

‘I must confess that I did,’ the professor agreed.

‘But then the story came back to you and your husband, ma’am,’ said Cribb. ‘Peter Brand came to your house on the night before the seance and repeated it, with one significant addition. He had taken the trouble to follow Alice to the shop one morning and seen her go inside and come out ten minutes later, veiled and dressed in different clothes. What construction could you put upon it but that she was secretly visiting somebody? That was certainly Brand’s interpretation, and it was sufficient to secure your husband’s co-operation during the seance.’

‘Co-operation?’ said Mrs Probert. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You must understand that Brand was a sharp—a confidence trickster, ma’am. He found that calling up the spirits in Richmond and Belgravia was a better game by far than working a pea and thimbles on a sordid little fairground. He needed help, of course. Even your thimble-rigger has his nobblers in the crowd around him. He secured accomplices by blackmailing ’em. The price of his silence was not money, but collaboration. He needed your husband’s help, so he found a way to blackmail him, and he very shrewdly judged that the best lever he had on Dr Probert was not his own reputation, but his daughter’s.’

‘The monster!’ said Quayle.

‘I have always known she would be the ruin of us,’ said Mrs Probert, leaving no doubt whom she regarded as the monster. ‘That girl never gives a thought to the consequences of her behaviour.’

Cribb treated the comment as Dr Probert would have done: he ignored it. ‘He was just a clever sharp, sir. I wouldn’t put it any stronger than that.’

‘Well, I would, Sergeant,’ Quayle insisted. ‘Damn it, he was impugning Miss Probert’s reputation, and the unfortunate young lady didn’t know a thing about it.’

‘I rather think she did, sir,’ said Cribb. ‘If you had studied the circumstances of the seance, as I have, you would know that Miss Alice herself made some extraordinary claims. At one point in the evening she announced that a spirit hand was pulling at her dress, and later that her hair was being stroked. I believe that Brand had made a separate approach to Alice and told her what he had seen when he followed her. He threatened to tell everything to Captain Nye unless she agreed to assist him in producing fraudulent effects.’

‘Are you saying that he was blackmailing Dr Probert and his daughter at the same time, and with the same information?’

‘Yes, sir. He was a clever sharp, as I said. Neither of ’em was to know that the other was being blackmailed, of course. And if you think
that
was cool, consider the fact that it was all based upon a supposition—that because Miss Alice changed her clothes at the milliner’s she was visiting a lover, begging your pardon, ma’am.’