The Hidden Man (7 page)

‘Ah! That is the question, is it not?'

He paused again for a moment of reflection, and then said, ‘Suez. It's the perfect name for a dog. It makes me like Pimbo all the more, that he would think of it.'

*   *   *

‘Things in themselves have, peradventure, their weight, measures and conditions; but
when once we take them into us
the soul forms them as she pleases.'

I came across these words of Montaigne while reading later that same evening in my library. Having written up the events of the past week in my journal, as I did every Friday, I had turned to the French Seigneur for some light philosophical amusement. Indeed he had been my almost constant companion ever since the day, a few weeks earlier, when I'd stood in Sweeting's Church Gate bookshop, leafing through an edition of the
Essays
in a translation (so the good bookseller told me) by Charles Cotton, a literary gentleman of the last century.

‘I do assure you the sense is much easier to get than in old Florio's fantastical language,' Sweeting was saying. ‘Cotton turned Montaigne's plain French into plain English, which is the reason that Cotton is preferred to Florio almost everywhere nowadays. Futhermore this is a new and much improved edition.'

Although I had heard of Montaigne, I had never until that day read him. I turned a few pages, and at once noticed the extreme variety of subjects that came under his eye – ‘Of Sorrow' … ‘Of Cannibals' … ‘Of Smells'. Sweeting, who was notoriously cunning in matching a customer with a book, said:

‘If you've not read him before, I suspect you'll find he suits you rather well, Titus. You and Michael de Montaigne might even be made for each other.'

Still I leafed through the pages: ‘Of Books' … ‘Of Cruelty' … ‘Of Thumbs' … Of
Thumbs
? I closed the book and handed it to Sweeting.

‘I'll try it,' I said.

‘If it doesn't suit, bring it back.'

‘I think it will. If a man can entertain a reader on thumbs, what great heights might he reach on sorrow, or cruelty?'

As so often before, the bookseller had hit the mark. I found that Montaigne wrote as much good sense as any of my favourite English essay writers – those of the
Spectator
being highest in my esteem – but there was another quality in the Frenchman that I relished even more: a candour, and a sort of bluff courage in the face of his own human failings. This quite disarmed me. There are few that will address in print their own ignorance and fearfulness as bravely as Montaigne does. So, while he was an excellent guide and authority for thinking about difficult questions, I enjoyed him principally because he made me feel I was sitting in company with a witty, resourceful and admirable old uncle.

On this night, reading Montaigne's sentence about how facts are modified within each of us to suit our predilections, it struck me, with the force of a hammer on a nail, that Fidelis's interpretation of Phillip Pimbo's death was just the same case. My young friend's knowledge of literature may have been faint, but he had a most analytical mind, and this, compounded with his medical knowledge, had many times been of help to my work as Coroner.

On the other hand he had to be watched, with a view to taking a strop to Ockham's razor. My friend rated the finding and solving of puzzles high among all life's pleasures and this frequently led him to take normal sequences of fact and twist them quite perversely into Anglo-Saxon riddles or Euclidean equations. With Pimbo he was determined to make it a case of murder, but was faced with the seeming impossibility of it having been committed inside the locked room, and yet the murderer had escaped. So he arranged the facts in his head until he'd made such a murder possible, and the hypothesis of the hidden man was the result. It may have been ingenious, but it was wholly speculative, and I had no more need to believe it than in the cat and the fiddle.

I had frequently observed Fidelis as he approached a dubious death from, as I considered it, the wrong direction. Physicians I suppose must always look for practical solutions, for ways to reverse a malady. They ask, how best must I proceed against it? But as a Coroner I know that I am concerned with not the causes but the consequences of evil and death – matters that cannot be so proceeded against, and certainly not reversed. In this work there is nothing to be gained by at once running off like a hare-hound in pursuit of ways, means and possible culprits. Thinking again of Montaigne's remark, I understood that my own soul's predilection, in contrast to Fidelis's, was not to ask who killed, and how. It sought to explain the deeper causes of the death by examining what followed from it.

It was late. I yawned, shut the book and placed the guard before the embers of the fire. It was time to go upstairs.

*   *   *

I found Elizabeth in bed, but still awake and with a book of her own. It was Mr Richardson's
Pamela
, the craze that had arrived in Preston like an epidemic and was now at its peak, raging among the ladies with such intensity that it seemed they spoke of little else. I had bought my wife the novel at Sweeting's only a few days before, but she was already more than half way to the end.

‘I am thinking I am on the wrong path with the Pimbo business,' I mentioned to her, as I slipped off my shoes and began to unroll my stockings.

I could not see Elizabeth's face behind the book. She lay slightly curled, as if wrapped around it, her eyes held on a tight rein by the lines of print.

‘Fidelis is fixed like a fish on a hook by the idea that Pimbo was somehow murdered. Can you believe it?'

There was still no response as Elizabeth read on. I unbuttoned my breeches, stepped out of them and, turning to the glass, addressed my stock. As I did so, she spoke.

‘I doubt that Pamela's master would untie his stock with his legs bare.'

I saw that she was peeping at me over the top of
Pamela
but, before I could reply, she gave a giggle and immersed herself again in the story. I tried twice more to interest her in my difficulties over Pimbo, to be ignored the first time and then be told:

‘Titus, dearest, I am
reading
!'

Nightshirted by now, I rolled into bed and lay still. The only sounds were those of passers-by outside our window on Cheapside, of Elizabeth's fingers turning Mr Richardson's pages, and of her mouth giving out an occasional ‘Oh! Ha!' of surprise or pleasure at some twist in the tale. After five minutes of this, I blew out the candle on my side of the bed and composed myself to sleep.

 

Chapter Five

S
HORTLY AFTER NINE
on the next morning, Luke Fidelis and I stood at the door of Cadley Place.

‘The patient you come to see this morning will interest you, Luke,' I had told him as we rode across the Moor. ‘Miss Peel has brains and striking beauty, yet she hasn't married. I wonder why.'

‘Many men would rather eat thistles than marry an intelligent wife.'

‘Would you?'

‘Oh no, Titus. I run the other way. I would favour rank ugliness over gross stupidity.'

‘While hoping to avoid either.'

‘Naturally. Anyway I am in no position to marry. I must establish myself first. There are still four medical men in Preston with bigger practices than me. I shall marry when I have the largest.'

‘But do you not feel the want of being with a woman?'

He looked at me with a faint smile.

‘As much as any man. But I know how to supply the want, Titus – though naturally not in this town of gossips.'

Don't imagine from this exchange that Luke Fidelis had an adamantine heart, indifferent to sentiment. There had been a time not long ago when his heart had been much battered, if not quite broken, by a girl who'd come to Preston but had proved beyond his reach.

‘Did I mention I shall be in Liverpool tomorrow night?' he said carelessly, after our horses had taken a few more paces. ‘It occurs to me that you must wish to communicate with the Liverpool scrivener that Pimbo talked about, Zadok Moon. May I be of service in that respect?'

I did not ask for details of what he would be doing in Mayor Grimshaw's cesspit of vice. I said instead that, yes, I would be obliged it he would carry a letter to Moon.

*   *   *

Our ring on the door was answered by the same little maid as I had met before. This time she took us straight to the housekeeper's parlour, where Miss Peel stood at her table shortening the stems of some crimson roses. Having just the one working arm she could not use scissors, and so had laid the stems on a board and was hacking off the ends with a knife.

I introduced the doctor who asked if she permitted him to examine her arm. With that half smile of hers she nodded her head, at which point it was my part to withdraw. I suggested I might be allowed access to the contents of Mr Pimbo's desk during her conference with the doctor. She rang a handbell and the little servant appeared.

‘Peggy will show you to the master's study. The desk is unlocked. I do not know what's in it.'

The study into which the maid showed me was on the ground floor, and stood next to the salon in which I had met old Mrs Pimbo. Its window looked out of the side of the house over a dusty path, a lawn and a clump of bushes, or what the up-to-date Mr Pimbo would have called a shrubbery.

‘This is sad news about your master, Peggy,' I remarked as she showed me in.

‘Yes, Sir. We are shocked, Sir.'

‘Had the servants noticed anything that might explain it? I wonder if Mr Pimbo had recently changed in his manner.'

She shrugged her thin shoulders.

‘There's only one thing they're saying in kitchen, Sir. That he'd gone off his food. In two days he'd not ate a proper meal but only piddled it round his plate. That's what cook said, not me, Sir. I never saw it. I'm only three weeks here, and I'm not let in to wait table just yet.'

‘Have you been told anything of how you are all situated? About what the future may now bring?'

‘No, Sir. Nothing. But if I am going home I shall not mind.'

‘You have not been happy here?'

‘I didn't say that, Sir.'

But I could tell it was true. I felt the whole household to be locked in unhappiness, but without a key to the secret it was not possible to know why.

This thought reminded me that one of my tasks this day was to find a more tangible key. I dismissed Peggy, and made a quick survey of the room to see where a man might keep one – a large brass key to match that which I had yesterday seen in Hazelbury's hand. There was no hook-board of the kind on which keys are hung. Two small vases stood at each end of the mantel, both empty, and a flat matching dish between them on which lay a clay pipe and nothing more. On a side table there was a snuff barrel, half full, from which I took a pinch and enjoyed a sneeze.

I looked through the bookcase. Pimbo had not been a very interesting reader. There were the usual volumes: sets of sermons by forgotten divines, a copy of
The Pilgrim's Progress
, another of
Robinson Crusoe
. There was no poetry, no plays. I pulled down one tattered book whose title on the spine I could not read. It was an old account of El Dorado, ‘written by one that hath been there and beheld its golden glories'. He had it no doubt for professional reasons.

Next I addressed myself to the desk. It was in the form of a large and solid inlaid escritoire, with a lid that hinged down to form a writing surface. The interior, considerably deeper and more spacious than the lady's writing desk I had seen the day before in the salon, was subdivided into small square compartments and narrow drawers, for ordering documents and stationery.

I went through the little drawers first. They were reserved for the accoutrements of writing: quills, pen-knife, sealing-wafers, wax, tapers, a tinderbox. There was no key. Then I turned to the open compartments, each of which was stuffed with paper.

I settled myself into an armchair and began to glance through the contents of these in turn, and found that the papers had been more or less rationally organized. There were many mundane household letters, all of which had been stuffed into the compartments towards the left hand side of the desk – estimates tendered, accounts rendered, demands submitted and receipts remitted – mostly in connection with repair works or domestic supplies and services. I noticed that many of these were of quite an old date and not many had been countersigned as ‘paid', while there were a number of increasingly exasperated duns from the grocer and the butcher, and one stonemason's account in the sum of four guineas that had remained unpaid for seven months.

Putting these on one side, I was left with items from the right hand side, which were all papers connected with Pimbo's business. One compartment was devoted to letters signed ‘Zadok Moon', with an address at Pinchbeck's Coffee House, Liverpool. In one, Moon provided Pimbo with costings for a range of purchases which had nothing to do with goldsmithing: hogsheads of Wigan nails and china beads, numerous bales of cotton cloth, firearms, gunpowder, spirituous liquors and a range of ironwork. In another paper, headed
The Fortunate Isle
, there was a schedule of chandlery such as chain, cordage, sailcloth, caulking, brass fittings and hammocks, as well as such provisions as raisins, dried meat and biscuit. A third had a list of men's names, who seemed to be prospective crew members.
The Fortunate Isle
was evidently a vessel being fitted out for a voyage.

There were considerably more letters to inspect but I had hardly looked at these before Peg knocked at the door and said that Dr Fidelis and Miss Peel had finished, and would I like to return to the parlour? I quit the chair and took one last hasty look inside the escritoire, thrusting my hands deeper into the compartments or slots to find anything lodged at the back I might have missed. I found nothing significant but, as I withdrew my hand from one of them, my knuckle caught the leading edge at the top of the cavity, and something moved. I put my fingers under it and pulled. A shallow drawer slid out. Looking more carefully I saw it had been made outwardly to appear part of the desk's construction. So completely was it concealed that merely looking would not tell you it was there.