The Hidden Man (6 page)

Back in chambers I asked my clerk Robert Furzey if he knew the name of Pimbo's attorney. His answer surprised me.

‘That would be
you
, Sir.'

‘Me? No, I don't recall ever—'

‘Oh yes, Sir. A fortnight ago Mr Pimbo came, you might say, back into the sheepfold. Old Phillip Pimbo, the father, was a client of your father's, you see. But not the son, until – as I say – just recently.'

‘What happened?'

‘Well, his family papers just turned up in this office sent from Rudgewick's and packed up with a note reappointing you his family's attorney. I reckoned Mr Pimbo had fallen out there, so I simply accepted them and filed the documents downstairs together with the Pimbo papers of old.'

‘Why did you not tell me, Furzey?'

He shrugged.

‘It slipped out of my mind. Would have slipped back in one day soon, no doubt.'

I sighed to overcome my exasperation.

‘Oh, well, it's convenient as it happens. Would you look and see if there's a will among the papers?'

Furzey, already half way back to his desk in the outer room, stopped with exaggerated reluctance.

‘I have a power of writing to do, and yet you want me to go down there immediately and scour out a piece of paper?'

This time I laughed.

‘That is your job, Furzey. You put the papers there, and you must be able to find them quickly enough.'

He frowned at me.

‘A slave I am, and this no better than a sugar plantation.'

Whenever I was out of the office, or so I suspected, my clerk worked at the pace of a slow worm taking the morning sun. At the sound of my footfall or voice, however, he would appear always in a froth, and dart about as quick as a lizard. Now he disappeared into the basement at a run and, less than five minutes later, returned to slap a folded paper onto my desk. I saw inscribed on it the words
The Last Will and Testament of Phillip Pimbo Esq
.

‘Tell me, what sort of client was old Pimbo, the father?' I asked, picking it up.

‘He was a very solid merchant. His count-books balanced. And he knew enough to think twice on a good bargain.'

‘The son was not so cautious I expect.'

Furzey gave a sardonic smile.

‘He was not. His head was inflated by windy dreams, that strain the skull and split the seams – as the poet says. Now, may I get back to my desk?'

The fact that Pimbo had reappointed me his family attorney would explain the letter summoning a meeting between us at the Goldsmith's shop. But I still did not know what business ‘of wrong-doing' he had summoned me about.

I unfolded Pimbo's testament. It was dated Lady Day of the present year and was a document of four pages. I went straight to the meat of it, to see how Pimbo had disposed his estate. With neither wife nor offspring to provide for, all his worldly effects went to his aged mother for the length of her life, and then to a distant cousin in Shropshire.

Of specific bequests there were just two. One was a small sum to Robert Hazelbury, while the other was very curious: ‘To my housekeeper Ruth Peel I leave my four-acre orchard at Cadley, including all its beehives, that she shall maintain it and them ever in the production of fruit and honey, and so provide for herself, on the sole condition that she never give herself in marriage, and that if she should do so the said orchard and beehives shall be forfeit and revert to the property of my aforementioned cousin and his heirs.'

The last two pages took the form of an inventory of the contents of Pimbo's home, which I glanced through before looking back at the preamble, and to the clause in which Pimbo's executors were named. Here I read that, ‘I hereby appoint Mr Zadok Moon of Liverpool and Mr Titus Cragg of Preston to be my executors.'

*   *   *

‘What would you think of this case?' I asked Elizabeth as we sat at our supper of cold meats and buttered cauliflower. ‘A testator leaves a bequest to his spinster housekeeper, on the sole condition that she does not marry. Is it that he thinks, if she
were
married, she'd have no need of the bequest and it would be better employed elsewhere?'

Elizabeth considered the matter, chewing prettily and dabbing her shapely lips with a napkin.

‘That's possible, I suppose. But Titus, my heart, how like you only to see the more benign case! That would not be
my
first thought at all.'

‘Am I naive, my dear?'

‘Sometimes. But I do honour it in you.'

‘Then what is your first thought?'

‘That he wants to bind her to spinsterdom. That he wants dominion over her, even from the grave.'

‘Why would he want that?'

Elizabeth laughed.

‘Really Titus – that you are a lawyer and can ask such a question!'

‘What is the answer, though?' I said, with lawyerly persistence.

‘Because she was his mistress, of course, and he was passionately jealous, even from the grave, at the thought of another man touching her. Happen we're speaking of the will of poor Phillip Pimbo, Titus.'

I conceded that we were and went on,

‘And I asked Miss Peel, who is the housekeeper in question, whether Phillip Pimbo's manner had recently changed, hoping it might explain his unexpected death, and she answered in an oddly personal way: not towards
her
,
she said.'

‘Tell me how did she say it, Titus. In regret? In anger, or bitterness?'

I chewed the last of my meat for a few moments, as I recalled the conversation with Miss Peel more sharply.

‘She spoke it with spirit, I would say. Almost in defiance.'

‘Against what?'

‘Let's say Fortune.'

Elizabeth rose and went to the dresser, where there lay a cold asparagus tart to finish off our meal.

‘In that case there may be another explanation, I think.'

She cut me a slice of tart, placed it in front of me, and watched while I ate it.

‘You are not having any tart?' I said.

Evidently not, for she stuck to her theme.

‘I mean that the case may have been the perfect opposite: not love, but animosity that led him to bind her.'

‘Does not animosity sunder, rather than bind?'

‘Delilah wanted Samson bound, because he had rejected her – so she hated him. That could be the case here.'

That was my Elizabeth – clever and to the point. She stretched down and picked the last piece of tart from my plate and put it in her mouth. She took up my empty plate, laid it with her own on a tray, and carried them towards the door on her way to the scullery. I followed her.

‘That is very possible,' I said. ‘But how can I tell which it is, love or hate?'

‘Ask Miss Peel.'

‘She may not choose to say. She can be a very – imperious woman.'

‘What precisely was Mr Pimbo's bequest?'

‘His four-acre orchard, and beehives.'

And now Elizabeth was laughing as she clattered the plates into the stone sink.

‘Why are you laughing?'

‘Don't you see?'

‘Not I.'

‘She was being made to play the part of Eve, Titus. He's given her a garden to be hers alone, just so long as she does not sin against him. But if she should sin – well, then she is cast out for ever and ever, Amen.'

‘He was playing God?'

‘Yes, the God of the Pentateuch. The God who devises tests. The Jealous God. There was something between them, Titus, and it seems to me you will have to find out what it was.'

*   *   *

After supper Luke Fidelis came to my house and we walked together to our favourite coffee house, the Turk's Head. As we went along he told how he had fared taking Amity Thorn home.

‘I found her on the road and took her up to ride rump. We got on very well but compared to yesterday, when I first met her, she didn't say much.'

‘What happened yesterday? You had better give me every detail. If Thorn dies he will have to be inquested.'

So Fidelis gave me the exact course of his previous day's bedside visit to Adam Thorn, of the man's state and of the silver apostle spoon that he'd advised Amity to get valued, all of which I've related in my first chapter.

‘She didn't get much luck with the spoon this morning, though,' I said. ‘The pawnshop's closed for business and who knows when it will reopen?'

‘After she left this morning she was showing it around town hoping for a buyer. She has it polished up since yesterday and very handsome it looks too with its saint perched on the end. But people she showed it to were wary and there were no takers, yet it looks to be very good genuine silver, even though it's old.'

‘People might be right to be suspicious. Pimbo's journeyman Ambler, for one, thinks one of the Thorns stole it.'

‘Well, from the state of it I'd say it had been lying some time in the open, which would argue that it was just found. But we will see if an owner comes forward.'

We entered the Turk's Head, an establishment well kept by Noah Plumtree. As Plumtree's own character was marked above all by geniality, so was his coffee house and, this being a Friday night, the room was even more than usually full of coffee drinkers and wine bibbers standing and sitting in groups, their voices raised in toasts and laughter. In one part of the room a pleasant argument was in progress; in another, a boisterous card game; and in a third a good tenor voice had launched into a ballad. Every now and then a group of men would fall into attentive silence while one related a story, the climax of which they greeted with an explosion of hilarity and back-slapping.

I ordered wine and pipes and, finding a table bay empty, we settled there in a fair measure of seclusion.

‘The death of Pimbo has occupied me all afternoon,' I told my friend, ‘though I'm no nearer to knowing why he is dead. And now I am in double duty, having been appointed his executor. This means that if as Coroner I find the man murdered himself, I must as executor surrender all his worldly goods to the Crown.'

‘You may rest easy on that point. I do not believe that he murdered himself.'

‘Every circumstance of that room says that he did. You had better explain.'

Fidelis took a long draught of wine and replaced his glass carefully on the table before him.

‘Very well. It's quite true that there was just the one way to leave that fatal room, and that it was found locked on the inside. And yet I feel someone else was in the room when Pimbo died.'

‘You are not reverting to this business of his wig, Luke. Surely it's a minor detail.'

‘In the case of inexplicable death, no detail can be said to be minor. There is also the dog. That dog was reputedly always with him.'

‘That is so. His housekeeper confirmed it to me only this morning.'

‘So why not at the hour of his death?'

I put a flaming spill to my pipe-bowl.

‘Here's why not,' I retorted, when I had set the tobacco nicely smouldering. ‘Having determined to shoot himself, Pimbo himself put the dog out of doors, to spare him the sight of it.'

‘That would be too delicate. If he really shot himself he'd have shot the dog first. The man that kills himself, first kills his dog – that's a proverb in Ireland.'

‘I am not sure that bears the same interpretation as—'

‘Yes it does. Pimbo's dog was not found shot in the room; consequently, I say, Pimbo did not kill himself.'

I laughed at Fidelis's obduracy.

‘He might have killed the dog elsewhere, and that's why we haven't found it.'

Fidelis shook his head.

‘No, he would have done it in the room. He would have killed the dog, and then himself, in immediate succession.'

‘Do you know William of Ockham?' I asked.

Fidelis shrugged.

‘A wrestler?'

As so often, I was astonished at Fidelis's ignorance of the literary and the philosophical.

‘He was a philosopher who denounced those that cloud an argument with over-complication. He recommended the use of a razor to cut away obfuscations.'

‘And?'

‘I propose we employ the razor and state the case simply: Phillip Pimbo was alone when he shot himself behind the locked door of his business room. It is perverse to look for ways for the case to be different.'

Fidelis put his two elbows on the table between us and pressed his hands together, almost in an attitude of prayer.

‘Indulge me a little longer, Titus. Tell me again exactly what happened when you had the door of the room forced open and you went inside.'

So I filled our glasses and indulged him. When I had finished he sat as if meditating, his wine untouched, and himself oblivious to the cheerful noise of the surrounding coffee house. I rose and went to the jakes.

On my return, he snapped out of his reverie.

‘And you are certain the dog was not alive in the room?'

‘Certain. I knew that dog. It was a busybody dog. Had it been in the room, we would have had it chewing our shoe buckles.'

‘But your eyes were fixed upon the corpse lying across the desk. So were those of Hazelbury and the others who crushed into the room. Under such circumstances the dog might just have run out through the crowd all unnoticed. Is that not possible?'

With a sigh I indulged him once more.

‘Very well. That might have happened. It's possible.'

‘And, if a dog could escape in that way, then tell me why not a man? Why not a man, concealed inside the room, who simply mingled with the insurgent crowd, and made his escape unnoticed? As unnoticed as the dog. What was its name?'

‘Suez. But a man is much larger, Luke. A man would be seen.'

‘It was a large crowd of men that came in, all together. This hidden man left in their midst. And
that
man, I warrant you, was Phillip Pimbo's killer.'

‘And who was this hidden man?'