Lost and Gone Forever (8 page)

C
laire had made a careful inventory of every wooden item in her house: furniture, toys, knickknacks, utensils. She had a list on the table next to her on the sunporch and she referred to it as she wrote. She had used the word
armoire
five times now. She stood and brushed her hair behind her ear and walked into the kitchen. There was the sideboard and the butcher block counter. There were chairs and giant spoons. She walked on down the hall to the sitting room where there was a gliding rocker and an end table and there were several paintings in wooden frames.

She had used them all.

Claire wondered if she wasn’t making an enormous mistake. She hadn’t told anyone yet, but she was running out of money. Her book of rhymes had sold well, but she didn’t feel like writing more rhymes for publication. Her publisher had refused to give her an advance on anything but more poems, and she simply didn’t feel she had enough of them in her to make a book. Her babies were getting older and they’d want real stories. She wanted to write about the things that interested them: dolls and toys and playing outside on a clear blue day.

It amazed her that a stray thought had become a full-fledged story in a matter of a day or two and now it was coming along nicely. In her new book, a forest had been razed and the wooden things had all returned to their birthplace, the place where they had been simple trees and known nothing but the green and the rain and the lemon rays of the sun.

The sun that hadn’t touched London in months.

The fog that covered the city seemed also to have covered Claire’s mind. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to keep Nevil’s office open and his staff employed, wouldn’t be able to keep him from becoming a dustman and abandoning the search for her husband.

She knew she could still take money from her father, but she would rather die. She shook her head and scolded herself for indulging her miserable thoughts. Perhaps it would help to get out of the house.

The governess wandered into the room, saw Claire’s dour expression, and turned to leave, but Claire grabbed her arm.

“Dress the children to go out, won’t you?”

“An outing, mum? Today?”

“Yes. It’s . . . Well, we ought to enjoy the last of the cool weather while we can, don’t you think?”

“The cool weather, mum?”

“Yes, it’s still a bit cool out, isn’t it?”

“If you say.”

“I do.”

“Of course. Shall I tell them where we’re off to?”

“I thought we might step out to the new store. Look at the wares, the furniture and such.”

“Furniture? The store?”

“Yes.”

“Graham’s?”

“No, I was thinking Plumm’s.”

“Ah. Because Graham’s doesn’t have furniture.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Only groceries.”

“Yes.”

“But why there? Why Plumm’s?”

“Oh, why not? Will you get them ready or won’t you?”

“Of course, mum.” The woman, Tabitha, scurried off, and Claire sank back against the wall. Everything was a chore. And Walter wouldn’t have helped her one bit, really. He would have run off at the first sign of trouble with the governess. But he would have made her laugh about it later. He would have given her a hug and whispered something pleasant in her ear. He would have been sweet. He would have been kind. He would have put the whole rest of the world in perspective somehow.

She tried to think of what Walter might say to her now. She wasn’t exactly a match girl, he would have told her. Money was tight, corners had to be trimmed, pennies pinched, but her children had a fine home and food to eat. It wasn’t as bad as all that. Was it?

She pushed herself off the wall. Plumm’s would have lots of the kinds of things she wanted to see. All sorts of wooden items for sale, and she would be inspired just seeing them all. She would finish her new book and then maybe she would write more rhymes after all. It occurred to her that she ought to invite Fiona Kingsley to come along with them.

What they all needed was a splendid outing to lift the doldrums.

T
he case of the missing Hargreave brother was much bigger and more important than the usual sort of inquiry Hatty Pitt undertook, and she saw it as an opportunity to prove herself in Mr Hammersmith’s eyes. She’d wasted no time in getting to work on it and had made a list of the places she thought Joseph Hargreave might be hiding. He lived his life as many London gentlemen of decent means did. He had an apartment in the city that he shared with his brother where he spent the bulk of the week. He and his brother also owned a cottage in Brighton, where they whiled away the weekend hours. Hatty thought she might be able to gain access to both places. Hargreave had his club, of course, and Hatty had no chance of getting in there, so she had drawn a question mark next to that item on her list of locations. Lastly, he had his place of employment: Plumm’s. That would be the easiest place to get into, and so she had underlined it on her list, but decided to save it for later in the week when she would be more tired and might need something relatively simple to do.

She did not worry about the fact that she didn’t know what she
was doing. Nobody, after all, knew what they were doing when they started a new job. They learned. And Hatty was a quick study.

A man gave her his seat on the train to Brighton and she fell asleep, and so felt groggy and bad-tempered when she arrived. She followed a family on holiday off the train, and a solemn woman handed Hatty a pamphlet about the new clock tower. Hatty took it and smiled at her, but the woman didn’t smile back. The sky was a dusty blue color, and she could taste salt on the air. No fog to be seen in any direction. The breeze was a bit chilly, but Hatty wasn’t the sort to complain. She avoided the taxi rank outside the station and oriented herself before setting out, shading her eyes with one hand (the sun wasn’t visible anywhere in the sky, but it was still brighter than anything she’d been accustomed to of late), while in her other hand she clutched a torn piece of notepaper on which she had written Hargreave’s address.

She walked south down Queens Road and stopped to admire the clock tower, referring to the pamphlet the woman had given her. The tower was tall and all of polished stone, with decorative arches and little statues guarding little nooks at all the corners. Hatty thought it looked nearly as solid as the woman with the pamphlets. A pair of troubadours sang “Mr and Mrs Brown” while strolling round the square. “Dear Mistress Brown, your clock is fast, I know as well as you . . .” The man played violin, and the woman held out a hat. Hatty dropped a ha’penny in, pretending to herself she was on a seaside holiday.

After the clock tower the road changed to West Street, and she turned left onto Duke and followed that along to the end of Prince Albert Street, where she found the small detached cottage. The home shared by Joseph and Dr Richard Hargreave was in need of a coat of paint and a new roof. The garden needed tending, and the
black wrought-iron fence along the street was missing several rails. But through a break between the houses behind it, she could see Kings Road and, beyond that, the endless grey haze of the sea.

A woman came out of the house next door, at the end of a queue of terraced homes, and stood framed in the open doorway. She was perhaps ten years older than Hatty, but her face was lined and she wore the shadows under her eyes like badges.

“They don’t want any,” the woman said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Those brothers don’t want any of whatever it is you’re selling. You needn’t waste your time.”

“Oh, I’m not selling anything,” Hatty said. “They’re not at home, are they?”

“What do you think, I watch this entire street? I wouldn’t have the slightest idea if they’re home.”

Puzzled, Hatty hesitated with one hand on the gate. She thought she might be able to ask the woman a question or two about the Hargreaves, but she wasn’t sure where to begin or how to break through the woman’s hostile front. She tried on her best and brightest smile and shone it on the woman. “May I ask your name?”

“I am Mrs Ruskin. Ruth Ruskin. And that’s all you’ll get from me. I’m not any more interested than my neighbors are in buying from you.”

“Again, Mrs Ruskin, I’m not selling anything. I don’t suppose your husband’s at home?” Perhaps, Hatty thought, Mr Ruskin would be easier to talk to.

“My husband has not been with us for some time now.” Ruth Ruskin’s frosty exterior cracked, and before she could break entirely, she turned and fled back into her house, slamming the door behind her.

“What an odd woman,” Hatty said. “I hope everyone here’s not like her.” She shrugged and let herself through the gate and marched up the path to the door of the Hargreaves’ cottage. She knocked and waited and, when nobody came to the door after a minute or two, she knocked again, keeping one eye on the house next door in case Ruth Ruskin decided to come back out and cause trouble.

She didn’t have much of a plan worked out. She thought she might question the servants and perhaps they’d let her have a look round inside. At the very least, she’d be able to verify that Joseph Hargreave was not, in fact, simply away on holiday, which seemed to be a sensible first step in the investigation. She was surprised when Dr Richard Hargreave opened the door wearing a dressing gown and slippers. His hair was disheveled, tufts of silver sticking up in every direction, and he hadn’t shaved. He had a book in his hand, a finger holding his place halfway through. Hatty tilted her head to read the title.
Venus in Furs.

“What are you doing here?” His breath reeked of gin.

“Well,” Hatty said, “what are
you
doing here?”

“I live here.”

“I thought you’d be in the city, at work.”

“I took some well-deserved time away from my practice,” Hargreave said. “I find I have too much on my mind at the moment.” He turned and walked away, leaving the door open. “Might as well come in, you made it this far.”

Hatty stepped over the threshold and looked around. It was a small cottage with no hallways, each room leading to another, and she guessed she was in some sort of sitting room doing double duty as a study. She held a finger up to her nose to help mask the odor in the room and hoped Hargreave wouldn’t notice or take offense. The windows were shuttered, and the single lamp at the back of the room
didn’t illuminate much, a sharp contrast to the delicious sunlight outside. Green wallpaper was peeling away at the corners, and a lazy cobweb drifted in Hargreave’s wake as he showed her in. There were three deeply cushioned chairs in the room and a table that was heaped with dirty dishes. Newspapers littered the floor beside one of the chairs. Hargreave bent and tore a piece from one of them, used it as a bookmark. He set
Venus in Furs
on the arm of the chair and looked around, as if seeing the place for the first time.

“Let the staff go a week ago now,” he said. “I think they were stealing from us.”

“I see.”

“I suppose I’ll have to find someone to come in and clean, though, won’t I?”

“That might not be a bad idea.”

“Well, have a seat, if you like.” He waved a limp hand in the direction of the other two chairs. Hatty examined the nearest one and flicked a few crumbs away before sitting down. “Got no tea and no coffee, but if you want gin I have that. Maybe some rye. And there’s milk, I think, but I wouldn’t touch that if I were you. Smelled a bit off yesterday, and I doubt it’s got better overnight.”

“I’m fine,” Hatty said. “Thank you.”

“So, you thought maybe Joseph had gone on holiday and forgotten to tell me,” Hargreave said. “Is that it? Forgot to tell Mr Plumm, too, hadn’t he? Just shimmered off to the sea and not a care in the world, eh?”

“I thought . . .” Hatty said. She cleared her throat and started again. “Mr Hammersmith suggested I come have a look round here.”

“Ah. So Hammersmith’s handling the likely stuff and leaving the odd tidbits for you.”

“Something like that.”

“Has he got any clues yet? No, I suppose not, or you wouldn’t be nosing round here, where you’re not needed, would you?”

Hatty smiled. “You say you’ve spoken to Mr Plumm?”

“Told him I’d be forced to take legal action if he sacked Joseph. My brother’s not been gone so very long, has he? No reason to replace him just yet. Let the detective do his work, I say. And he says back to me that the store’s got work of their own needs to be done and no worker to do it, has they? And I say, ‘Well then, you’ll be hearing from my solicitor unless you’re willing to give the matter more time to sort itself.’ And Plumm says, ‘Very well.’ Just like that. ‘Very well, Dr Hargreave, I’ve got solicitors of my own, don’t you know?’ And before I have a chance to say anything else, the door’s hitting me on the backside and I’m out in the street without so much as a fare-thee-well. Is that right? Does that sound right to you?”

“It sounds rather uncaring,” Hatty said. “I’m sorry.”

Hargreave took a small shuddering breath and smacked his lips and looked down at the book on the arm of his chair. He frowned and turned it over so that Hatty could no longer see the title. “I might eat,” he said. “Would you care for anything? I think I’ve got half a pudding, maybe the butt of a roast. Almost certainly there’s a cheese, if it hasn’t turned.”

Hatty hesitated. She was hungry, but suspicious of anything that might be found in Hargreave’s pantry. Still, she wanted to take a look round the place, and a detective’s work wasn’t always meant to be easy, was it? “Yes, please,” she said.

“Well, come along, then, and let us see what there is to see.” He led the way through a door at the back of the room, which Hatty discovered led to a dining room. The table was heaped with financial papers. Through another door and she found herself in a grubby kitchen. Food-encrusted crockery filled the basin and every surface
in the room was covered with butcher’s paper, shriveled ends of sausages, puddles of beer and gin and clotted cream, half an apple, brown and withered, a bowl with something that had formed a skin, a knife embedded upright in a hard barm cake. A cloud of insects, tiny pinpricks in the air, hovered over some sort of gelatinous substance on the wall. Hatty’s heart sank.

“This isn’t all my own mess,” Hargreave said. He seemed embarrassed, which Hatty took as a good sign. It was the sort of room that called for embarrassment. “As I say, we let the servants go, and Joseph and I forgot to clean up after ourselves last weekend. Besides, there’s dishes here I know we didn’t use. They must have snuck back in here while we were in the city and helped themselves to our provisions.” He drew himself up in a pose of indignity. “They bloody well deserved the sack, didn’t they?”

“Do you have a broom?”

While Hargreave looked for a broom, an activity that involved standing in the middle of his kitchen and turning slowly round and round while peering at the skirting board, Hatty found an apron hanging on a hook inside the pantry door and put it on. She decided to tackle the goo on the wall first and rinsed a rag in a pitcher of water that was only slightly yellow. She discovered that the goo had cleaned the wallpaper beneath it, so that once she had wiped it all away there was a bright spot on the wall, but she wasn’t committed enough to the task to keep going. The bright spot would have to remain isolated there until Hargreave spilled more of whatever the goo was and dealt with it himself.

Hatty was reasonably certain that housekeeping and cooking weren’t in the average detective’s job description, but she wasn’t the average detective. Besides, she was still hungry and she wasn’t about
to eat anything that came out of Hargreave’s kitchen until the place was properly cleaned.

After the muck was washed off the wall, she tackled the dishes, wiping them down with more rags and leaving the pots and pans to soak in more yellowish water. She gathered the garbage in a pile on the counter and caught Hargreave’s attention.

“Where’s your rubbish?”

“My rubbish?”

“I need to toss all this or you’ll have more bugs and other vermin even nastier.”

“Oh, the bin is . . . um, I think right outside the door there. At least, I think it is.” He pointed at an outside door next to the pantry, and Hatty unlocked it, stepped out, and took a deep breath of clean sea air. Sure enough, there was a big bin, swarming with flies, resting against the back wall of the cottage. She would have to cart the leftover food out to it, rather than bringing it in.

She stepped inside and realized how bad Hargreave’s home smelled. She decided she must have grown used to the odor, but the cool breeze outside beckoned her, and she decided she’d much rather find a vendor and buy a meat pie on the way home than try to cook something edible in that particular kitchen. She would get the old food out of the house and then be done with it all. Richard Hargreave hadn’t hired her to clean his house, he had hired her to find his missing brother.

She scowled at him as she walked back past, but he didn’t seem to notice. Nor did he help her gather the garbage and take it out. So she didn’t bother to try to salvage the dirty knife or the bowl. She tossed them along with the rest of it.

The bowl was heavy, though, and it sank quickly to the bottom of
the bin, causing layers of refuse to topple in on top of it, upsetting whatever delicate ecosystem had begun to form. Something grey and pink and strange caught Hatty’s eye as it was uncovered in the process. She held her breath and leaned in for a closer view, then ran back inside the kitchen for a rag. She took it to the bin and reached down inside, wrapped it around the pinkish grey thing, careful not to touch anything with her fingers, and fished it out.

Dragged into the light it wasn’t nearly as odd-looking, but still she stared at it, trying to understand what it might be. It seemed harmless, if disgusting: wilted and tough, but not like any cut of meat she had seen before. She brought it closer to her face and licked her lower lip while she thought, then thought about the fact that she was licking her lip and suddenly recognized the thing wrapped in the rag. She dropped it in the dirt.

She leaned against the house and waited until she was calm again. Back inside, she stalked through the kitchen, leaving the back door open, and sat down at the dining room table. She found a pencil and used the back of one of the financial documents to take notes. (She was going to have to remember to carry round one of those little notebooks Mr Hammersmith always used.) When Hargreave followed her into the room, she indicated that he should sit across from her.