Black Ship (14 page)

“Strewth, I think I’m going to be sick,” Warren mumbled.

“Keep your head down till the feeling goes away,” advised Ridgeway. “Anything you want to tell me about the corpse, Fletcher?”

“He’s not mine, Doctor; he’s the sergeant’s.”

“Oh? Mackinnon, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“I … uh …” He looked to Alec, who gave a slight shrug. “I don’t think so, sir. Go ahead. Would you like my torch?”

“Hmm, yes, thanks.” Without further ado, Ridgeway dived into the shrubbery. For a few minutes, the only sound was the rustle of leaves; then his voice emerged. “He was bashed on the head, but I rather doubt that was the cause of death. Probably occurred very shortly before death, judging by the amount of blood. Are you getting this down, Mackinnon?”

Mackinnon whipped out his notebook. “Yes, sir.”

“Rigor is fully established. He died at least twelve hours ago, not more than twenty-four, probably of deliberate compression of the carotid arteries, though I’ll have to get him on the table to be certain. Not something he could do to himself. It looks as if you’ve got a murder on your hands, Sergeant.”

Left to
guard the northern approaches, Daisy frowned as she looked up at the Jessups’ house. The more she thought about it, the odder it seemed that the man who had come out of their front door and hurried off down the street had not at least waved a greeting. Furthermore, though not all the world matched her own inquisitive nature, surely he must have wondered what was going on in the garden.

Unless he already knew, perhaps because Elsie had disobeyed orders and told her sister, Enid, what she had seen, which Daisy considered unlikely. But even if she had, and Enid had relayed the news to her employers, wouldn’t they want to know more and from a more reliable source than a parlour maid?

That was assuming the man hurrying away had, in fact, been one of the Jessups. Daisy couldn’t put out of her mind the unwelcome visitor who had pushed past her in the Jessups’ front hall and torn off down the steps, nor that she was fairly certain she had seen him again later. He was an American. She suspected Patrick Jessup had been in America, and she knew he was expected home. There
must
be some connection.

Suppose the man she had just seen was the American. Had he met Patrick in America and come to look for him, and if so, as a friend or an enemy?

She recalled Aidan’s remark when she told him about the American’s first visit: “I knew it was a terrible idea.” Perhaps “the idea” seemed terrible to him, the stay-at-home member of the family, only because it was unconventional. As she didn’t know what it was, she couldn’t tell.

At any rate, his words had reinforced her impression that the American was not a desirable acquaintance, as her mother would put it. Friend or enemy to Patrick, he would hardly be invited to spend the night at number 5, Constable Circle.

Not the American, then. But why had Mr. Jessup, or Aidan, not greeted her?

He was in a hurry.

Not even a wave? When hordes of police had just arrived in the garden opposite his house?

Number 5 was awfully quiet. Suppose—

The tramp of heavy boots diverted her attention. Round the bend came a constable, a comfortingly solid figure in his cape and helmet. “Mrs. Fletcher, ma’am, I’ve been sent to relieve you,” he announced, saluting.

“Th-thank you.”

He looked at her with concern. “You’re half-froze, ma’am. Better get inside quick and get something hot inside you.”

“Yes, thanks, I will.” She couldn’t tell him it wasn’t just the cold that made her shiver; she’d scared herself silly with idiotic imaginings.

But once indoors, sitting at the kitchen table in dry stockings and shoes, with her hands wrapped around a mug of hot cocoa, she couldn’t shake the thoughts. What if something had happened to the Jessups, and she did nothing? She managed to steer clear of picturing exactly what might have happened.

“You’re still pale as ice, madam,” said Mrs. Dobson. “Shock as well as cold, I shouldn’t wonder. I’ll fill a hot bottle you can put on your lap.”

As if alerted by the last word, Nana, who had been lying good as gold under the table, sat up and placed a comforting, if still slightly damp, paw on Daisy’s lap.

Daisy stroked her head and said absently, “Good girl.” The dog had, after all, done her duty, and it was no good wishing she had left it to the Bennetts’ horrid fat spaniels to discover the body.

Now Daisy had to decide what was
her
duty. Alec would say it was to go straight to the police with her fears. But she’d feel very silly if the Jessups, except for one bound for Bond Street, were just having a lie-in after a late celebration of the prodigal’s return.

Was the prodigal home already? Could it have been he himself who had hurried past without so much as a wave? He didn’t know her, after all.

Before she said anything to the police, was there a way to find out whether anything was amiss? Go and knock on the door, and they’d wonder what on earth she wanted so early in the morning. If they were up and about and she was invited in, she could hardly avoid mentioning the body in the garden, which would make Alec furious. She could telephone, but again, she’d need an excuse. Suppose she invited the ladies and children to afternoon tea. No, it would look as if she wanted to gossip about the murder.

The cook-housekeeper presented her with a hot-water bottle, neatly shrouded in a woolly cover. The faint rubbery smell was somehow comforting. “There you go, dearie, that’ll help, I hope.”

“Lovely. I’m sure it will. Mrs. Dobson, are you on cup-of-sugar borrowing terms with next door?”

“Certainly, madam. Their Mrs. Innes is a very good sort of woman.”

“Then could you please think up something you need to borrow right now?”

“Well, I don’t know, madam, I’ll be popping round to the shops this morning anyway…. Well, now, I could say I want
to make some biscuits for elevenses before I do the shopping, though there’s plenty in the tin, perfectly good.”

“Perfect. And who knows, you may have a kitchenful of frozen bobbies to feed by then.”

“And a finer body of men I couldn’t wish for, though I says it as shouldn’t.”

Daisy was diverted. “Why shouldn’t you, Mrs. Dobson?”

“Because of working for a police detective, madam. Looks like boasting, doesn’t it? But I must say, madam, all these years of working for the master, and I never thought something like this’d happen so close to home.”

“Nor did any of us,” Daisy helplessly. “I know you won’t desert us, Mrs. Dobson.”

Mrs. Dobson put her hands on her hips and glared. “As though I would, madam! Me that’s been with Mr. Fletcher through thick and thin. And if that Mrs. Gilpin says another word, I’ll give her the rough side of my tongue, so I will.”

“Oh dear, Nurse Gilpin is still threatening to leave?”

“Now don’t you fret, madam. She won’t leave the babies. You can say what you will of her, and nobody’s perfect, but I will say this: She’s proper fond of the babies. There now, I never meant to say nothing about that dreadful murder, and you upset already—”

“I started it, talking about frozen bobbies. I know you won’t say anything to anyone else.”

“That I won’t. Now I’ll just find Elsie and tell her to go next door and borrow a bit of brown sugar.”

“Couldn’t you go yourself, Mrs. Dobson?”

“Oh no, madam, it wouldn’t be proper, not now we’ve got a parlour maid. They’d think it ever so queer next door.”

“Really? We don’t want that. I’ll tell her, then. I’m feeling much better, thanks to your cocoa and hot-water bottle. How much brown sugar do you need?”

“None at all, seeing I’ve a canister full in the larder, but she can ask for a quarter of a pound. Right, madam, I’ll just get on with weighing out the ingredients.”

Elsie was dusting the drawing room. “I’ll go and put my hat on this instant, madam,” she said when Daisy asked her to beg, borrow, or steal a quarter of a pound of brown sugar from next door.

“You’ll need an umbrella. Elsie, Mr. Fletcher will be quite annoyed that you didn’t obey my order not to talk to anyone about what you found in the garden.”

“I only told Mrs. Dobson, ’m. That’s not the same, is it? Mrs. Dobson isn’t just anyone.”

Daisy could hardly deny this, having just involved Mrs. Dobson in a somewhat mendacious scheme. Nor did she feel up to getting into a discussion of what she had meant by “anyone.” With a sigh, she said, “Well, if you breathe a word to your sister, you’ll find it a lot more difficult to chat with her in future, because you won’t be working here.”

“Oh, I know, ’m. I wouldn’t want that. I won’t say a word next door, honest.”

The moment Elsie left, Daisy had second thoughts. She must be crazy to trust the rattle-tongued girl to be discreet. But on the point of calling her back, she hesitated. She really was desperate to know whether the Jessup household were all right.

She returned to the kitchen to wait, as Elsie would no doubt take the sugar straight there. She watched Mrs. Dobson measure, melt, mix, and stir together butter, golden syrup, rolled oats, and brown sugar.

“Flapjacks,” she said. “Quick and easy, ‘cause I’ve got to be off to the shops if lunch isn’t to be late.” Heaven forbid a mere murder on the doorstep should make lunch late. “The twins like ’em, and they’re good and filling if those frozen coppers turn up. I’m making a double batch in case, and I’ve used the last of the brown sugar, so it’s not stretching the truth too much borrowing from Mrs. Innes.”

“I’m sorry I made you stretch it at all.”

“That’s all right, madam. I know you wouldn’t without good reason.” She scooped the mixture into a couple of baking tins
and flattened it with the back of a spoon. Stooping, she listened to the oven. “Still heating up. Wonderful invention, these thermo whatchamacallits, aren’t they? No more guesswork. I’m that glad the house had a gas stove. It’d be hard to go back to a coal range.”

“We’d have bought you a gas stove if there hadn’t been one already installed, Mrs. Dobson.”

“I don’t know how I’d get on without one, and that’s the truth. There, the burners have stopped; that’s hot enough now.” Mrs. Dobson put the tins in the oven and started clearing up. “And the geyser for the hot water, too, always ready to hand. When I remember all the carrying of coal, with coal dust everywhere, and blacking the range to stop it rusting, and the hot oven too hot and the cool oven too cool …” She went on reminiscing about the bad old days.

Daisy half-listened, wondering why Elsie had not yet returned. Surely she should be back by now with the unneeded brown sugar. Suppose she, too, had been attacked…. No, much more likely everyone was perfectly all right and she was having a good chin-wag with the Jessups’ cook. But what could she have to talk about if not the dead man in the garden?

“Where’s that dratted girl got to?” said Mrs. Dobson. “If I’d really needed that sugar, it’d be too late by now. Ah, sounds like her now.”

Elsie came in through the kitchen door from the paved area outside. “I didn’t see my sister, madam,” she announced, crossing the kitchen to deposit her dripping umbrella in the scullery. “Here’s your sugar, Mrs. Dobson. I didn’t say a word to Mrs. Innes about that out there in the garden, ’m, no matter what she asked me, but she’d a good deal to say on her own account, so I let her talk.”

“Oh?” Daisy didn’t exactly want to encourage servants’ gossip, but how else was she to find out what was going on?

The monosyllable was encouragement enough. “Seems Mr. Patrick came home last night from foreign parts. He’s been gone ever such a long time, not but what him and Mr. Jessup
don’t go off a-travelling for weeks on end every year, but they usually go together. Mr. Patrick’s old enough now to do business by himself, seemingly. But Mr. Aidan must’ve been waiting for him to get back to go off himself. He’s already left to visit some customers up north somewheres.”

“He left as soon as his brother came home?”

“Yes, ’m.”

“Did they have a disagreement? A quarrel?” Horrible possibilities raced through Daisy’s mind—but Aidan was the one who had disappeared, and Alec would have recognised his body.

“No, ’m. Leastways, my sister didn’t hear nothing like that, she told Mrs. Innes. The only thing is, Mrs. Aidan’s ever so upset. Crying her eyes out, poor thing, Mrs. Innes said. Course, Mr. Aidan’s the one that usually stays home, but it’s not like he’s going abroad, is it? And her always cheerful as anything.”

Daisy was so relieved to hear the Jessups were still in the land of the living, not, as in her direst imaginings, weltering in their own blood, that some time passed before she began to wonder what had so upset Audrey. She was in the nursery by then, so naturally her thoughts flew to the Jessup children. But Mrs. Innes would know if Marilyn or Percy was hurt or ill.

Could Audrey and Aidan have quarrelled unbeknownst to the servants, leading to his precipitate departure? More likely—if one did not know the couple. Daisy had seldom met a less quarrelsome, more peaceable, even-tempered pair.

Whatever the cause of her woes, Audrey might be glad of a shoulder to weep on other than her mother-in-law’s. Daisy just had to come up with an excuse to call next door, one that would satisfy both the Jessups and Alec.

Which left her right where she had started, except that she knew the Jessups were alive, thank heaven.

It was time to stop worrying about them and concentrate on the twins. Seated cross-legged on the nursery floor, she built an umpteenth tower of wooden blocks, which Oliver knocked down with as much delight as he had the first one.

“Gak!” he shouted.

Meanwhile, Miranda, in Daisy’s lap, turned the pages of a cloth picture book and chanted in a language of her own invention.

“Going to be a bookworm, that one,” said Nurse Gilpin disapprovingly.

“I do hope so,” said Daisy. “I was one myself.”

Sparring with Mrs. Gilpin, she almost managed to forget what was going on outside. Then Elsie came in.

“Madam, it’s that Mr. Crane on the telephone. He wants to speak to Mr. Fletcher. I told him he’s not here, but he says if he’s not here, why isn’t he at Scotland Yard, and I’m sure it’s not my place to say, so I thought maybe you’d better talk to him.”