An Appetite for Murder (15 page)

Frances’ next call was to keep the appointment with her solicitor, Mr Rawsthorne. That gentleman was both astute and good-natured, and had acted for the Doughty family for many years during which he and Frances’ father had grown from terms of solicitor and client to mutual respect, trust and friendship. It was, Frances reflected ruefully, her father’s failure to take the good advice of his old friend that had led him to make the unwise investments that had all but ruined the family, and had after his death obliged her to sell the business to settle their debts and seek a new profession. She sometimes dwelled on how different her life would have been had she been able to retain the chemists shop, complete her studies and qualify as a pharmacist. More settled, more certain, more profitable, and very much less interesting.

Mr Rawsthorne was, as ever, attended by his clerk, Mr Wheelock, whose resemblance to a pantomime droll only increased with acquaintance. Mr Wheelock liked ink, he liked the look and the smell and the taste of it. He sucked pens as if they gave him nourishment, and was never to be seen without streaks of black and blue, and sometimes red, on his lips, chin and cheeks. A smile from Mr Wheelock, never a friendly one, was a thing of horror. Why Mr Rawsthorne should wish to employ Mr Wheelock had always been a great mystery to Frances. Did he, like Uriah Heep, exert some diabolical hold over his master, or did he have some extraordinary talent in the matter of numbers or understanding the law?

Mr Rawsthorne was a married man with two daughters who had once been pupils of the ill-fated Bayswater Academy for the Education of Young Ladies, an establishment that had not survived Frances’ recent investigation into its affairs. The girls had since been removed to a fashionable boarding school out of London, and while they were far from being of marriageable age, Frances could not help wondering if by this expedient they had also been secured a long way from Mr Wheelock’s ambitious eye.

‘Oh,’ said the young clerk with an insolent grin, throwing a folder of papers down on his employer’s desk. ‘If it isn’t the famous Miss Dauntless, the terror of all Bayswater! I read how you chased a gang of robbers down the Grove in a hansom cab, sitting up top and whipping the horses yourself. That must have been a sight to see!’

‘It was,’ said Frances. ‘I have a firm hand with a whip and my valiant assistant cracked a great many skulls that night.’ She smiled as if she would have liked to see Mr Wheelock soundly whipped and his skull cracked. The clerk sneered at her, stuck two pens in his mouth, and shuffled off to do whatever it was he did.

‘Miss Doughty,’ said Rawsthorne, whose friendly manner more than compensated for the rudeness of Mr Wheelock, ‘it is always a pleasure to see you. Tales of your successes continue to excite us all. I am sure your poor late father would have been very proud of you.’

‘I would like to think so,’ said Frances, knowing that her father, looking down on her from his seat in Heaven, would be deeply ashamed of her activities and quite certain that she would never join him in the afterlife, being consigned to quite another place.

‘It seems that you cannot fail to uncover crime and misdeeds wherever you go.’

‘I have not yet been defeated,’ Frances said, ‘but that day may come.’ Whenever Frances met Mr Rawsthorne she was obliged to reflect that a past enquiry of hers had provoked a bank failure that had all but ruined him, something to which he never alluded. Even though Frances could never have anticipated this consequence of her actions, another man might have harboured a deep resentment, but Mr Rawsthorne had generously not allowed the incident to cloud his admiration and friendship.

‘Please let me know how I may help you and I promise I will do whatever I can,’ he said.

‘I have asked for this interview because I have been trying to locate the two children of Mr Hubert Sweetman who was released from prison very recently and then, unfortunately, arrested for the murder of his wife. He told me that Mr Manley acted for him after his arrest in 1866 and I was hoping that you still retain the papers.’

‘There are a few remaining, yes,’ said Rawsthorne, ‘but the correspondence only mentions the children when Mr Sweetman wrote to his wife asking to be allowed to see them. I am afraid his wife did not comply.’

‘Did she give any reason for this?’

Rawsthorne extracted a letter from the folder, and passed it to Frances. ‘This was her reply.’

Frances perused the letter, which was cruelly brief:

Dear Mr Manley,

Please inform my husband that what he asks is impossible. He has forfeited the right to my affection and that of the children. I do not wish to see or speak to him again.

Susan Sweetman

‘Is that all she says?’

‘Yes, that is all.’

Frances glanced at the letter, which was written a week after Sweetman’s arrest. There was, she felt sure now, some other circumstance, something Mr Sweetman had not told her, something else he had done that had led to this terrible letter. Something that might even have led to the murder of his wife.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

T
rue to the appointed hour, Alice Finn arrived by closed carriage, her features softly veiled. Frances, looking out of the window, saw a slight form step lightly to her door, and thought of how many other blameless ladies had trodden the same path for the same reason, and the sorrow she had brought them. Domestic difficulties, or affairs of the heart, which were the daily bread of Frances’ profession, were also the hardest to resolve. So many of her clients, their settled happy worlds breaking up around them, still clung to the love that had been betrayed, and hoped for the impossible.

As Mrs Finn took her seat across the small table in the parlour, she lifted her veil, to reveal that the portrait placed so reverently on her husband’s desk had failed to do her full justice. A portrait is a still, quiet thing and the subject no more than a statue, guided into a position determined by the photographic artist. It shows only what a cold image can show. It cannot convey grace of movement, or colour, or the play of emotions across a face. Alice Finn in the flesh was a pretty, delicate-looking girl in her twenties, very slender, like the branch of a sapling made of sweet-scented wood. Her skin was creamy and unblemished, with a natural blush, her hair, its curls escaping artlessly from a lace-edged bonnet, was fine and fair and made even prettier, if that were possible, by being dressed with sprays of blue silk flowers.

Frances had met many women whose whole appearance was intended to demonstrate the status of a husband or father. These poor creatures were loaded with heavy garments that did not display their figures well but seemed to have been designed as something on which to hang ornaments, or ugly velvet bows or deep frills, and their wearers were doomed to parade around like so many Christmas trees, wanting only an array of flickering candles to make the effect complete. By contrast, Alice’s costume had been chosen to show the woman, in an unassuming and flattering yet modest way.

Frances hoped, even more than she usually did in such cases, that the lady was mistaken in her suspicions, that Mr Finn’s look of pleasure as he had gazed at the portrait of his wife and children had showed a genuine affection and was not feigned in order to conceal a disreputable secret. Despite the gentleman’s lack of personal attraction they should have been a contented, even a model family. Mrs Finn’s letter had not supplied her address, but the street directory had revealed that they lived on Hereford Road, a row of clean, smart family villas. This location afforded the gentleman of the house a convenient journey every weekday to his office, and the lady her choice of Bayswater’s fashionable shops or healthful open spaces. Truly, thought Frances, it was a place in which to be happy. From Paddington Station in the east to Ladbroke Grove in the west, from the thundering railway line in the north to the cheerful boundary of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens in the south, all the world was there, and for the most part it was good.

Alice Finn, although clearly labouring under a great anxiety that chiefly showed in the tense attitude of her shoulders, looked determined to be as natural as possible, and greeted Frances with unforced friendliness. ‘Miss Doughty, it is such a pleasure to meet you,’ she said. ‘I have to admit that when John told me about his interview with you, I was overcome with curiosity and excitement, and questioned him very closely. You are all the talk of Bayswater. I know that gentlemen often do not give ladies the credit they deserve, but even some of them are obliged to admit that you have more than ordinary ability.’

Frances had once been in the habit of denying any fame, or even skill beyond what any sensible person might have, but there were, she realised, situations where modesty was not the best demeanour, and most of those she encountered when engaged in her profession. ‘So I am given to understand,’ she said, adding in a confidential tone, ‘and if I chose to tell all the truth of my adventures, it would be even more startling than the stories you read in the newspapers!’

Alice gave a little gasp, and her eyes sparkled as blue as the flowers in her hair.

‘Of course, I do not broadcast the details of my cases, or tell my secrets,’ Frances continued. ‘I am no gossip, I can assure you of that. My watchwords are care and discretion. You may have complete confidence in me in that respect, especially where the matter is, as I judge it may be in this instance, a question of husband and wife.’

There was a brief silence as a cloud settled across Alice’s youthful face.

‘Many of my clients are married ladies,’ Frances reassured her, ‘and I am very familiar with the sorrows and disappointments that stem entirely from their husbands’ lack of proper consideration, and failure to adhere to the promises made at the altar. You need not hesitate to tell me all.’

‘Oh, I shall be very open with you, Miss Doughty,’ said Alice, wholeheartedly. ‘It would be of no benefit to engage you and then not give you the means of doing what is needful.’ She uttered a deep sigh. ‘And you judge correctly, as it is my husband about whom I must speak. It is very unfortunate but I see no other way to alleviate my terrible anxiety.’

‘How long have you been married?’ Frances asked.

‘Almost five years, and we have two beautiful children. John is a good, kind man, a most affectionate husband, and my happiness would be complete if it were not that I am convinced –’ she gave a little gasp ‘– that he is deceiving me.’ There was a pause and her eyes were bright with emotion. She took a kerchief from her reticule, a lacy wisp of nothingness, that she held briefly to her face. ‘You have never been married, Miss Doughty, but I am sure you understand that the greatest happiness of a wife should be when her husband is at home, with his family, showing in every way that it is there and only there that his true contentment lies. I try to be everything to him that a good wife should be, but it seems –’ she dabbed at her eyes again, ‘that I have failed.’

‘I assume,’ said Frances, pouring a glass of water and pushing it across the table, ‘that all you have at present are suspicions, and what you wish me to do is provide you with the proof you require.’

‘Thank you, you are very kind,’ said Alice, sipping the water gratefully and making an effort to compose herself. ‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘you are correct in your assumption, and I regret –and how disloyal it makes me feel – that I must ask you to arrange for some competent person to follow my husband and discover where he goes on those evenings when he is not at home. He may even, for all I know, sometimes be absent from his office during the daytime.’

‘Before we begin,’ said Frances, ‘may I ask the purpose for which you require this information?’ She did not think, from her client’s demeanour, that Alice was hoping for a divorce, which was as well, since infidelity unless compounded with some other terrible crime was insufficient grounds for a woman to procure one. Frances appreciated the biological and inheritance reasons why a wife’s disloyalty was alone enough for her husband to discard her, but it was, as Miss Gilbert had often said, an unequal law that forced many a woman to stay with a husband she hated. ‘Is it simply in order that you might advise your husband that you know his secret and thus persuade him to amend his ways?’

‘Yes, that is exactly the purpose.’

Frances opened her notebook and selected a fresh pencil. ‘Do you have any suspicions as to where he goes and the person or persons he meets there?’

Alice shook her head, helplessly. ‘No, not at all, it may be many places, every kind of establishment or the homes of his friends. He may even indulge himself in his own office.’

‘Surely not,’ said Frances, with a frown. ‘That would be very shocking and unpleasant. I cannot think he would dare.’

‘Oh a man who is driven, as I fear he is, may dare anything,’ said Alice.

‘Does he often work late hours?’

‘Yes, and when he returns he is very weary, and his manner is heavy and dull. Also, I sometimes wonder if in our own home …’

‘What, in the family home?’ exclaimed Frances. ‘That would be too cruel.’ Cruel, yes, but she had uncovered cases before of supposedly respectable men who had committed acts that ought by rights to have been confined to the marital bed in the most unsuitable places, and in the wrong company. These men, even when found out, were not drummed out of their clubs or shunned by society, but considered in some circles to be swaggering roguish types and were even sometimes envied by those who were less adventurous. She thought of young Mr Finn and his lumbering walk and painful back, and she could not think of a man less designed to be a rake. A worrying thought suddenly presented itself. Suppose that Mr Finn was an innocent man after all, and his wife was a sensitive lady, who was allowing her fears to become suspicions, such that she saw infidelity everywhere, even where it did not exist.