An Appetite for Murder (37 page)

‘There was a man?’ asked Frances.

‘I believe so. Mother was ashamed of the connection; she didn’t like to admit it as she was of course still married to father. She knew it was wrong, and in her own eyes she saw herself as little more than an unfortunate and unfit for decent society. When I told her that I was to go as valet to a gentleman, she understood of course that she could not come to the house. We did meet occasionally in the street or the park, but then that all ended. I saw her in the street once, and she looked very ashamed and hurried away. She didn’t want to ruin my prospects by the association.’

‘Did you ever learn the name of the man?’ asked Frances, hopefully.

He shook his head. ‘No. But I think he treated her brutally.’

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
IVE

T
he next morning, Mary Sweetman, her brother Benjamin, baby daughter and a nursemaid were safely and discreetly conveyed to new lodgings in Bayswater. Mother and child were in robust good health, and it was strongly hinted that the girl would be christened Frances Sarah Finn, and that godparents would be wanted shortly.

Frances had received a message from Chas and Barstie to say that their examination of the books of J. Finn Insurance had produced some interesting results, and she called round to see them. In the short time since their return from the more desolate regions of Essex, the improvement in their situation had become still further apparent. Chas wore a sparkling ring on one plump finger and there was a pile of gold sovereigns on the desk, which Barstie was checking with his teeth before dropping them into a cash tin and making a note in a ledger.

‘Well,’ said Chas, patting the J. Finn Insurance account books approvingly, ‘this is a clever individual and no mistake. I take my hat off to him. In fact, if I knew who he was I would offer him employment. Lawful employment, of course,’ he added quickly. ‘There is, as you know, an artistry in accounts, a beauty in books, a symmetry that inspires delight.’ His recent prosperity had, Frances noticed, resulted in an expansion of his form, especially at the waistline, and he was chewing at a thick slice of roast ham, a repast wholly innocent of bread and potatoes. She wondered if he was banting.

‘The only delight I have experienced in such things is the knowledge that the books balance to the farthing,’ said Frances.

‘As indeed, they should,’ said Barstie very solemnly, closing the tin firmly and locking it.

‘But sometimes,’ Chas went on, ‘in fact, all too often, they do not. Usually this is the error of a careless man, and can be found with a little work and a sharp eye. One can paper over such errors and make everything right and no harm done.’

‘I take it this is not such a case?’ asked Frances.

Chas stuffed the rest of the ham into his mouth and wiped his hands on a napkin. ‘No, indeed, and I can see why Mr Sweetman was unable to find where the difficulty lay. First of all, he attributed the failure of the books to balance to simple mistakes, and secondly he assumed, incorrectly, that it was he who had made them.’

‘Embezzlement,’ said Barstie, darkly. ‘Going back a year or more.’

‘Do we know by whom?’ asked Frances.

‘No, but there are only two candidates, are there not?’ said Chas. ‘As you have told us, only two men other than Mr Sweetman had the skill to do it, old Mr Finn and Mr Whibley. All the writing done before Sweetman’s arrest is his, and all that afterwards is Mr Finn’s, but –’ he opened the ledger at a page where a paper slip had been inserted, and prodded an entry, ‘a great deal may be done with a razor blade and a delicate touch. Here and there, numbers have been changed, and done so carefully that all still appears to be in Sweetman’s hand, but it is not. See for yourself.’

Frances peered at the writing, but at first could see nothing wrong. Barstie handed her a magnifying lens, and she looked again. Only then did it become clear that there had been some scraping away of ink and another figure substituted for the original.

‘So subtle,’ she said, ‘and so insidious. There is no clue here as to who did this, and the changes having been made in a single digit I assume it is impossible to identify the writing.’

‘Not necessarily so,’ said Barstie. ‘The one thing we can say is that having examples before us of the figure work of both Mr Sweetman and Mr Finn senior, it is neither of those gentlemen. Only supply us with examples of other hands to compare and we may achieve a result.’

Frances looked through the books, examining all the pages where paper slips had been inserted to show where the amendments had been made. ‘Was the amount missing as I suggested?’

‘It was,’ said Chas, ‘and very helpful, too, to know to the penny what we were looking for. Mr Sweetman knows his business.’

‘Were you able to discover anything about J. Finn Insurance and Anderson, Walsh and Whibley that could have some bearing on this?’

‘Only that J. Finn Insurance was less profitable in the last three years before the robbery than it ought to have been. That might have been due to Mr Whibley’s activities once he got some knowledge of books, but it’ll be hard to prove,’ said Chas.

‘And what about his uncle’s firm? He was a partner and a qualified man by then, so he must have had a still better chance to extract funds.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Barstie. ‘Old Mr Walsh was known for keeping a very close control of his affairs. If anything, admitting a new partner made the business more profitable still.’

‘Are you suggesting that Mr Whibley abandoned his life of crime when he went to work for his uncle?’ asked Frances.

‘Men have been known to reform,’ intimated Chas, with a smile. ‘But if you ask me, he didn’t. Impossible to estimate how much he spent on pleasure, but he strikes me as a man with a taste for the luxuries of life, and men like that don’t give it up easily. He might not have been able to filch money from under the eyes of Mr Walsh, but he was well placed to inspire more confidence and enter into his own schemes outside the business.’

‘We have been making a few enquiries amongst our associates,’ said Barstie, ‘and there have been some suggestions that if certain financial services were required, services that Mr Walsh might have frowned upon, the man to go to was Mr Whibley, who would undertake them privately for a fee.’

‘What kind of services?’ asked Frances.

‘Oh, changing bad money into good, and he was said to have had a way with wills.’

‘What stories he might have told me if he had lived,’ said Frances. She wondered if there was anyone connected with the company she might have missed, any employee of J. Finn Insurance who was alive and not yet interviewed, and able to tell her more.

She turned through the pages and found a list of all the staff in 1866: John Finn, proprietor, Hubert Sweetman, manager, Thomas Whibley, accounts clerk, Robert Browne, salesman, James Elliott and Frederick Minster, copy clerks, and one other name. Frances stabbed her finger at the page. ‘The messenger boy,’ she said. ‘Timothy Wheelock.’

She had never heard or sought to know the first name of her solicitor’s unpleasant clerk, but the coincidence of surname and age was too much. Thanking Chas and Barstie, she took the short walk to the office of Mr Rawsthorne.

A smart young junior clerk, his scrubbed cheeks as yet unacquainted with a razor, greeted Frances politely and assuming that she had come to see Mr Rawsthorne informed her that he was busy in a meeting. ‘Thank you,’ said Frances, ‘but it is not Mr Rawsthorne I wish to see but Mr Wheelock.’

The clerk raised his eyebrows in surprise. Apparently no one ever came in there actually asking to see Mr Wheelock, which, thought Frances, was wholly understandable. In the last year, Mr Wheelock had made substantial progress in the business. He had once been confined to a small desk in the main office, which he had ringed about with as many cabinets as he could cram into the space, thus creating a domain into which few dared to intrude. He now had a room of his own, although admittedly, judging by the size of corner in which it lurked, a poky one that was hardly more than a cupboard. It did, however, have a sign on the door saying T. Wheelock. The clerk, after taking a moment or two to brace himself, went in, and soon emerged with a slightly pinker face than before, saying that Frances might enter.

Mr Wheelock inhabited his room like a predatory animal that liked to drag the carcasses of its prey into a hidden lair, where they were left to rot or mummify. The tiny space was lined with shelves, not an inch of which was wasted, those nearest the ceiling already acquiring thick veils of grey cobwebs, and there were cupboards with multitudes of drawers, some of which were stuffed so full of loose leaves and notebooks that they could not be closed. Everywhere was heaped with books, folders, and thick mounds of paper, and there were rusted iron weights holding down crumbling documents and unidentifiable things wrapped about with rags, some of them stabbed into wood with long pins. On the desk were battered pots crammed with pens and pencils, jars of ink, blotters and several knives. The room smelt of dust, ink, decaying paper, old parchment and unwashed clothing. Wheelock, who clearly neither expected nor wanted visitors, sat behind his desk on the only chair in the room. He snatched up a blackened knife and began to pick his teeth, staring at her suspiciously. ‘What do you want with me?’

‘Is your first name Timothy?’ asked Frances

‘No, it’s Torquemada!’ he sneered. ‘What of it?’

‘Did you once work as a messenger boy for J. Finn Insurance?’

He stuck the knife into the desktop and wiped his mouth with the back of an inky hand. ‘Who wants to know? Who’s been asking?’

‘The only person who has been asking is me,’ said Frances. ‘I am looking into the robbery that took place in 1866, and speaking to everyone I can find who worked for J. Finn Insurance at the time, and can remember what happened.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me robbed the safe!’ he snapped. ‘And I don’t know who did.’

‘I’m quite sure you had no hand in it. You were only about nine and I doubt you were strong enough to hurt Mr Gibson.’

His eyes flickered back and forth, the sandy lashes crusted with dirt.

‘
Is
your name Timothy? I could ask Mr Rawsthorne if you like …’

‘You don’t need to trouble him!’ he growled.

‘So it
was
you who worked at J. Finn Insurance in 1866? Your name is in the ledger.’

‘Oh well, that proves it, doesn’t it? Ledgers always tell the truth, we all know that!’ He picked up a pencil and licked the end with an ink-stained tongue. ‘I took messages, that was all, I didn’t do anything else.’

Frances looked around the little room and suddenly realised that it was not so much a lair as a store. The miscellaneous nature of the material around her, the variety of age and type, some of it appearing to be no more than the kind of abandoned scrap that could not even be cleaned and re-used and anywhere else would have been considered as mere kindling, this was what Mr Wheelock had surrounded himself with, little pieces of the past, tucked away like old memories. He found, and quite probably even hunted, and retrieved things that others threw away, things that might, many years later, have value and significance. This, Frances realised, was the reason Mr Rawsthorne employed him. He was a man whose very nature it was to pick up and hoard information.

‘But how well placed you were to know everything that happened in that office. Maybe things that even old Mr Finn didn’t know.’

Wheelock gave a derisive laugh. ‘Old Finn! He didn’t know anything! You could have stolen his purse from under his nose and he wouldn’t have seen it. He trusted people! Can you imagine that? A man in insurance and he
trusted
people. Hah! He was never going to be a rich man and he never was.’

‘I have just had the books of the business examined, the ones for 1866 and just before, and there is evidence that someone was extracting money and making changes to cover it up. Mr Sweetman noticed that there was something amiss and was looking into it, but before he could discover where the fault lay he was arrested and charged with the robbery. Can you tell me anything about that?’

Wheelock dipped the pencil into a pot of thick dark ink and stirred it slowly, letting his nostrils hover over the liquid, sniffing it as a connoisseur would have appreciated a glass of good wine. ‘Why would I tell you even if I knew?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Frances, honestly. ‘I don’t know why you would tell me anything.’

‘There’s reasons not to say things, good reasons.’

‘Well, you can hardly be afraid of Mr Whibley now can you? I’m fairly sure he was the man behind what happened.’

‘Oh he was the
brainbox
all right.’ He sucked his teeth noisily.

Frances wished she could sit down to think, but there was nothing in the room that might have been offered her in the way of comfort. Wheelock’s tone had strongly suggested that while Whibley was the guiding intelligence, he had not worked alone. There must have been another man, more daring and more active, a man of violence. She walked around, gazing up at the shelves and their cascade of greasy papers. Messages, she thought, little messages between Whibley and the other man who wanted to keep the association secret and could not, therefore, be seen in conversation, all carried by a nine-year-old boy that no one saw as a danger, all thought to have been destroyed long ago.