Whom the Gods Love (20 page)

He gave Vance a brief account of his interviews with Clare, Felix, Sir Henry, and Adams. Vance chuckled. "I knew you'd loosen the bigwigs' tongues. Though what we're to make of what they've said is more than I can tell."

"I'm more interested in what they haven't said." Julian frowned thoughtfully. "Mrs. Falkland, Clare, and Adams are very different people and seem to have no connexion with one another except through Alexander, and yet they have one thing in common: they're all tormented. Adams is eaten up with hatred of Alexander. Clare is frightened and seems guilty or remorseful as well. And Mrs. Falkland asked me if I'd ever been to Hell, with the air of one who knew the place intimately. The one thing missing was grief. I wonder if anyone really loved Alexander except his father and his valet—Is this the place?"

They had reached a narrow passage leading off the Strand. Vance nodded and waved him through. The court within was just as Dipper had described it: dark and close, with Mrs. Wheeler's little house by the entrance, Mrs. Desmond's more opulent one at the opposite end, and three more falling to ruin in between. The curtains of one of Mrs. Wheeler's windows parted a crack as Julian and Vance entered. Apparently she was still keeping an eye on all the court's comings and goings.

They crossed to the house that had been Mrs. Desmond's. Vance let them in with his key. "Mr. Underhill gave me an inventory of everything as was here when she moved in. That way we'll know what was hers and what wasn't. Seems the house was let furnished, but she added things of her own, and when she went, she left some of 'em behind. Mr. Underhill don't know what to do with 'em, so he's left 'em where they were. Which is a good thing for us, sir, since the place is just as Mrs. Desmond and her maid left it. Only the kitchen's been cleaned, to keep out the rats."

The house was built to the standard London design: a front and back room on each floor and a slender, zigzagging stairway. The kitchen and scullery were in the basement. On the ground floor were a dining room and parlour, and a back door leading to a small walled yard, accessible only from the house. The first-floor front was the drawing room; the back had been Mrs. Desmond's bedchamber.

Julian soon saw that they would not need the inventory to distinguish Mrs. Desmond's additions from the furniture belonging to the house. Each room was an incongruous mixture of homely, rather worn furnishings and attempts at a tawdry elegance. The drawing room was hung with prim silhouettes of people in powdered wigs, faded aquatints of Bath in its heyday, and engravings of long-dead members of the royal family. In violent contrast, Mrs. Desmond had added a large, splashy daub of Europa and the bull, which made up in lewdness for its lack of artistic merit. Her other conspicuous addition to the drawing room was a dainty pianoforte encrusted with gilt decoration. Julian found it dirty inside and egregiously out of tune.

All the rooms had large gilt mirrors and garish curtains—Mrs. Desmond's taste again. Several contained old books: collections of essays by clergymen, guidebooks to watering places, a volume on etiquette that explained how to sit down gracefully while wearing a sword. Their musty state showed they had not been opened for some time. Mrs. Desmond preferred a different sort of reading: protruding from under the drawing-room sofa was a clumsy translation of the kind of French novel that made English moralists cringe.

Vance pounced on the writing desk and looked through it, only to shut it regretfully. "No papers, only blank sheets."

"The papers are here—or, rather, what's left of them." Julian pointed to the grate, which was full of blackened shreds. They had been raked about with the poker to make sure they were thoroughly destroyed.

They moved on to Mrs. Desmond's bedroom. The bed was one of the original furnishings, plain and graceless, with thick posts like swollen legs. Mrs. Desmond had ludicrously swathed it in purple curtains festooned with tassels. She had also gilded the stolid bedroom chairs and upholstered them in yellow silk; they looked like sedate spinsters tricked out as opera girls. The old-fashioned wardrobe was empty except for a pink silk button and a scrap of lace.

The washstand was of inlaid wood, with hidden compartments for soap, tooth-powder, water jug, and glass. The top opened into a mirror bordered with gilt dolphins. It did not belong to the house, nor did it look like Mrs. Desmond's taste, Julian thought. Perhaps it had been a gift from her protector.

The maid's room was in the garret. It was tiny, with a meagre bed that turned up during the day. There was a small washstand, a table, and a narrow, rather tipsy deal wardrobe. The only sign of recent occupation was the coal ash in the grate and the remains of a tallow candle congealed on the table.

Julian and Vance had now been through the whole house. They stood reflecting a moment. Then Vance said with decision, "Dustbins!"

They retraced their steps room by room, searching through all the dustbins. Julian smiled to think what his friends at White's would say if they could see him now. By the time they reached the basement, they had garnered a collection of dead nosegays, bits of tissue paper and ribbon of the kind used to wrap purchases from ladies' shops, half-eaten sweetmeats, an empty bottle of curacao, a torn white lace stocking, and some crinkled fair hair that looked as if it had been cleaned out of a hairbrush.

Julian regarded the little heap quizzically. "Not very informative, is it?"

"Not half, sir," Vance agreed.

"Well, we've learned one thing: Mrs. Desmond took herself off in a tearing hurry. She left the vases unemptied and the grates unswept, and packed only what she could fit into a portmanteau. You can see spaces where small knick-knacks have been removed, or pictures taken down from the walls." 

"Left some fine things behind, too, didn't she? That piano, for one—her fancy-man must've forked out a good bit of blunt for that."

"A cart big enough to transport it wouldn't have fit through the entrance to Cygnet's Court. After taking all the trouble to move out at night, on the one day of the week when she knew her only neighbour would be away, she wouldn't want to be seen loading a pianoforte into a cart in the middle of the Strand."

Vance knit his brows. "Do we know she left at night, sir?" 

"I'm assuming she did, to avoid attracting notice. But I know how we might find out. We could look in the front hall for signs that people went in and out loading a carriage in the rain."

"How do you know it rained that night, sir?"

"Because it was the same night Eugene stayed out in a rainstorm to make himself ill. It was also the night of the Brickfield Murder, when the rain washed away any footprints or cart tracks the murderer might have left."

"You're right at that, sir! Let's have a look."

They began prowling around the front hall. Sure enough, there were splotches of mud, all but invisible against the dark-patterned Persian carpet. Julian bent down and felt them. "It's quite dry, but it must be fairly fresh, since it hasn't been trampled into the carpet. And we clearly didn't track it in; we wiped our feet at the entrance, and in any event the streets are dry today."

"Nobody tracked this in," said Vance. "There ain't any footprints."

"No, that's true. It looks as if someone dripped rain and mud from something he was wearing, or carrying."

Vance went into the dining room and parlour, stooping to look at the carpets. "No mud in here."

"There are a few spots on the stair carpet. Whoever it was must have gone upstairs."

They followed the trail up to Mrs. Desmond's bedroom. Here they found a few more spots of mud on the carpet and one on the bed-curtains. Vance went to look in the drawing room and the maid's room. "No mud there," he reported.

Julian scraped a little off the bedroom carpet and scrutinized it, frowning. "This doesn't look like mud. It's too red—more of a deep plum colour, really."

"That's London clay, sir. My pa was foreman at a brickworks, he used to track it home all the time—"

He broke off. They stared at each other.

"Well, carry me out and bury me decent," Vance said softly.

They hastened downstairs and took samples of mud from the front hall carpet. It was the same purplish colour. Vance wrapped it in his handkerchief for safe-keeping. "This is London clay, sure as eggs is eggs. I take my hat off to you, sir: it was you as first thought to link Mr. Falkland's murder to the Brickfield Murder. And now we come here looking for a clue to who killed Mr. Falkland, and instead we stumble on brickearth where no brickearth ought to be."

Julian waved away his praise. "Murder isn't so common, thank God, that we should be surprised to find two such brutal killings linked. Especially when they occurred only a week apart, and the methods were so similar."

"But what link could there be between a gentleman like Mr. Falkland and the poor soul found in the brickfield?"

"I have no idea. And there's one glaring contrast between the two murders: one obliterated the victim's features, while in the other the victim's identity is the most startling aspect of the case. Of course, this brickearth we've found, coupled with the disappearance of Mrs. Desmond and her maid on the night of the Brickfield Murder, strongly suggests that one of them was the victim."

"It couldn't have been Mrs. Desmond. The brickfield victim was at least forty, and Mrs. Desmond by all accounts was a chit of a girl. But the maid's a possibility."

"Yes. Mrs. Wheeler told Dipper she was a drab woman of about forty. What else did she say about her? Her name was Fanny, she was a churchgoer, and she seemed afraid of her mistress and unwilling to talk to strangers." He frowned. "But why should the murderer have killed her in a brickfield near Hampstead, then come all the way back here and dripped mud and clay on the floor? Do you suppose it was Mrs. Desmond who killed her, and that was why she took herself off in such a hurry that same night?"

"It might have been her fancy-man who did it, and she took fright and made herself scarce. I'll tell you what, sir: we have to find Mrs. Desmond. I'll start asking questions round the neighbourhood."

"Capital. But you know, this neighbourhood harbours some dubious people: beggars, nymphs of the pavement, thieves. I think we also need someone to speak to them in their own language."

"I get your drift, sir," Vance said, grinning. "You want to set Dipper on them."

"Precisely. Should you mind?"

"Not at all, sir. The more the merrier. You'll talk to the gentry in their lingo, Dipper'll patter flash to the cross-coves, and me—why, I'll talk to everybody else."

*

When Julian got back to his flat that evening, he found a group of sharp-faced men with pencils behind their ears lounging against the area railings. They saw him and came crowding around.

"Mr. Kestrel!" cried one. "Has anyone been arrested for the murder?"

Julian smiled. "You gentlemen keep such close track of events at Bow Street, I should think you would know better than I."

"Who do you think killed Mr. Falkland?" called out another.

"I should say it was most likely a journalist, in the hope that it would make a good story."

"Seriously, Mr. Kestrel, have you any leads?"

"None that I care to see blazoned in the
Times.
Good evening, gentlemen." Julian extricated himself and went inside.

That evening, he dined with Felix Poynter and some other male friends. There was a good deal of talk about the murder, but none of it was of any interest. After dinner, he declined an invitation to a gaming hell. Instead he went to Alexander's house and told Nichols, the butler, that he wished to make some investigations in Mr. Falkland's library. Nichols showed him in. An hour or two later, he emerged more than satisfied with the results.

Next morning found him back at Quentin Clare's chambers. Clare seemed less than overjoyed to see him. "Mr. Kestrel. Please come in."

"I've brought back your book." Julian held up the
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

"Oh. Thank you, that's very good of you."

Clare held out his hand for the book, but Julian pretended not to notice. "I found it most instructive. I particularly enjoyed your sister's comments in the margins. Writing in books seems to run in your family: I noticed when I was here last that you'd annotated some of yours. You even underlined a sentence in this book and wrote ‘How true!' beside it. I believe this is your handwriting rather than your sister's?"

Clare looked at the page apprehensively. "Yes. I did write that."

Julian read: "
'Yet truth is not with impunity to be sported with, for the practised dissembler, at last become the dupe of his own arts, loses that sagacity, which has been justly termed common sense.
' Tell me, Mr. Clare, when you marked this passage, were you thinking of Alexander Falkland or yourself?"

"What—what do you mean?"

Julian smiled quizzically. "I see you're going to make this difficult. Very well." He glanced around the room at Clare's vast array of books. "You seem extremely well-read. And to judge by your library, you're fluent not only in Latin and Greek, but in French, Italian, and German."

"I grew up on the Continent. I could hardly help but pick up a number of languages."

"You're too modest, Mr. Clare. It doesn't follow that you should have read everything from French drama to German philosophy. Some English people spend years on the Continent and never learn how to order dinner. When I first perceived what a scholar you were, I thought that might explain the friendship between you and Alexander. His letters to his father show an extraordinary grasp of law and literature. But you would know that, of course."

Clare froze. "I had no occasion to read Falkland's letters to his father."

"I didn't suppose you'd read them. I think you wrote them, Mr. Clare. And I should like to know why."

14: A Tangled Web

Clare's eyes closed, and he stood white and silent. At last he dragged open his eyes and asked, "What makes you think I wrote Falkland's letters?"