The Advocate's Wife (23 page)

‘It’ll do no harm, Sir Arthur,’ said Dr Trevor, as soon as the office door was closed, ‘to let Porteous continue to think that it
was the Queen who interested you in his case. He doesn’t know that you’re a specialist in mental states.’

Trevor noted that the eminent court physician had chosen to come down to Chelford Grange in country tweeds. It was, he thought wryly, the kind of thing that Sir Arthur Carew-Field would do to proclaim his renown to the world. For himself, he was content to wear sober but smart black on all professional occasions.

‘And you had intended to call upon my services, Trevor?’

‘Yes. I’d been considering Porteous’s case for over a year. At first, I thought his curious lapses were due to irascibility resulting from the burden of his work—’

‘No, Trevor, it was not that. I encouraged him to talk to me while he was at Gower Street, and very soon he was saying the same things to me as he had said to you. I simply had to mention the idea of opposition to his wishes, or recall the name of one of his past opponents at the Bar, to trigger off well-defined
incidents
of catatonic spasm.’

Dr Trevor relaxed. Really, it was such a change to converse with a man who spoke the same language as himself. There was no need now for soothing platitudes or the reassurance of
half-truths
. Perhaps Carew-Field felt the same way.

‘I had wondered whether those sudden diatribes of Porteous’s were incidents of catatonia,’ said Trevor. ‘But I think Porteous was more on his guard before the attempted assassination. Certainly the verbal violence of those incidents – mysterious obstacles lying in his path, to be crushed and annihilated, and so forth – that verbal violence, I say, was totally out of character.’

‘Perhaps you can see now, Trevor, why I was so quick to suggest Chelford Grange. Your suggestion of Malvern was an excellent one, but I had good and sufficient reasons for choosing this place for Sir William’s convalescence.’

Sir Arthur had been looking out of the window while he spoke. He still gazed thoughtfully across the leaf-strewn lawns, and the acres of pine woods surrounding the sanatorium, until his eyes rested on the pink brick turrets and towers of a building lying about a mile away from Chelford Grange.

Dr Trevor followed his colleague’s glance. His face assumed a sudden alertness.

‘Broadfield? Do you think it’s as bad as that?’

‘I do. There are two of him, Trevor! For years he has shut out the capacity for violence, presumably following an incident of extreme trauma. Now, that capacity has begun to assume a personality of its own, a dark and dangerous companion walking in step with the great advocate and family man. Yes; there are two of him, now.’

Trevor said nothing for a while. It was his turn to gaze out of the window at the pink brick mansion a mile away through the trees. Broadfield…

‘It was much the same kind of thing that had begun to unsettle my view of Sir William over the last twelve months,’ he said. ‘He was in very good physical health, so that my visits were rare. But on several occasions I happened to mention a name – on one
occasion
, it was that of Mr Gideon Raikes, the collector – and he reacted in a way that showed all the classical symptoms of
schizophrenic
stupor. It is very sinister. And very sad.’

‘Have you spoken to Lady Porteous about this matter?’ asked Sir Arthur.

‘No. I think one must be very sure of oneself over things like that. I shall tell her only if our suspicions develop into certainties.’

Trevor pursed his lips, and sighed.

‘Delusions … When I think of that, Sir Arthur, I find myself rearranging some of my attitudes to Sir William Porteous. His crusade for Justice – I can see it now, perhaps, as an obsessive mania. Do you think these delusions of his are a temporary
aberration
?’

‘No, Trevor. Sadly, I don’t. I’ve tested him, you see. A series of carefully devised stimuli produced the inevitable catatonic responses. He can no longer conceal these delusions. The wall between fantasy and reality is beginning to crumble.’

‘Could it not be a result of the vile attempt upon his life?’

‘Oh, no. I’ve seen this particular kind of lunacy before. It’s something of far longer standing than the explosion. There’s something very deep there which is slowly withdrawing him from the real world. We must just wait and see. In the
meanwhile
’ – he nodded towards the window – ‘there’s a convenient place of safety to hand if, as I fear, the worst happens.’

Arnold Box turned out of Oxford Street into Box’s Cigar Divan and Hair Cutting Rooms, and went upstairs to the skylit den with its tiny fireplace, where Toby Box sat in his old armchair. He had been dozing, and opened his eyes in surprise as his son came into the little room.

‘Why, Arnold! So here you are again! What is it this time? More reminiscences?’

‘How are you, Pa? Is the leg any better?’

Toby Box looked down at his legs. As always, he wore
knee-breeches
, and now, the thick bandages binding the left leg could be seen beneath the fabric. He shook his head.

‘It’s no better, Arnold. It’s no good me saying otherwise. Dr Hooper came the other evening, and sat with me for an hour after he’d done the dressings. He talked to me, sitting in that chair where you are now. When he’d finished, I agreed to see Mr Howard Paul. That’s the way things are.’

Inspector Box was quiet for a moment, gazing at the glowing coals of the fire. He had always known that the leg would have to come off, but somehow hearing his suspicion verified was a shock.

‘Mr Howard Paul will do the operation at the Royal Free Hospital, in Gray’s Inn Road. Some time after Christmas, Dr Hooper thinks. So what was it you wanted to ask me, Arnold?’

Inspector Box’s eyes gleamed with appreciation. Retired and wounded he may be, but Toby Box was still a policeman at heart.

‘It’s just this, Pa. One day, not very long ago, a man got up in a restaurant here in Oxford Street, and showed another man a watch that he had. This other man denied knowing this watch, and the first man sat down again. The first man was James Hungerford, a flour-merchant, later done to death by Albert John Davidson. Who was the second man?’

Old Mr Box stretched out his arm and opened the narrow door beside the fireplace.

‘Sadie! Come up, will you? Detective Inspector Box is here!’

In a few moments Sadie appeared, clutching a tea towel. She smiled at Inspector Box and stood waiting for instructions. Box
repeated the gist of the story about the two men and the watch.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Box, we heard about that. It was in Addy’s Dining-Rooms, just two shops down from us. Ever so
embarrassed
the man was! Ted Lewis told our Sam about it. Ted’s one of the waiters at Addy’s.’

‘What happened exactly, Sadie?’

‘Well, this respectable man got up from his table and went across to the other gentleman. “I think you must remember this watch, sir”, he said, “as you threw it away in the Serpentine, half a lifetime ago!” Ted stopped to hear what the other gentleman said. It was such a funny thing to be happening! Other diners had stopped eating to listen to the conversation. “Sir”, said the other man, “I think you must be mistaken. It’s a very fine watch, no doubt, but I have never owned it. Good day to you”.’

‘And what did the first man do, Sadie? Did Ted Lewis tell you?’

‘Yes, Mr Box. The first man blushed red, and returned to his seat. Everybody went back to eating their dinners. I think they were all sorry for the man with the watch, who’d obviously made a mistake. The other gentleman left soon afterwards.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ said Box, ‘that Ted knew who the men were?’

‘Well, he didn’t know the first man, the man with the watch, but the other man was very well known. It was the gentleman who was blown up in his carriage – Sir William Porteous.’

Mellow afternoon sun lit up one side of Moravia Court, presenting Inspector Box with a riot of glowing red brick. The general impression of Petty Allmain was of inward-turning seclusion, a huddle of neat eighteenth-century streets, conspiring together to conserve each other’s secrets.

Box stood on the sunny pavement, and looked into a
many-paned
shop window. A host of things looked back at him – paper-wrapped blocks of household soap arranged in a pyramid on a stand, brown glazed earthernware teapots, boxes of Price’s Patent Candles, and night-lights in little glass jars. He suddenly recalled moments in his childhood, when he would stare
wistfully
into pie-shop windows at the unaffordable, and therefore unattainable.

Box opened the door of 8 Moravia Court, and entered Mrs
Jessie Warlock’s chandler’s shop. How normal, how
ordinary
,
it felt in this little London backwater! The shop groaned beneath the weight of its stock. There were ranks of mops, iron mop buckets, clothes-horses, shelves of brightly-labelled packets and boxes, and a floor covered in sacks of seed, and scrubbing-sand, and coils of clothes-line. The air held the mingled scents of lamp oil, paraffin, and soap. The atmosphere was somehow more real and reassuring than the sophistication of Grosvenor Square and Queen Adelaide Gate.

‘And what may you be wanting?’

A woman’s voice, deep and peremptory, came to Box from behind a sort of counter at the rear of the shop. Like every other part of the premises, it was piled high with goods for sale, and it was only by looking past the piled-up boxes of flypapers and firelighters that Box was able to see the still, stout woman sitting on a high-backed chair, engaged in counting a heap of copper coins piled up on the counter.

This woman’s stock in trade, Box mused, seemed to have been arranged around her like a palisade, in order to keep enquirers at a safe distance. Behind her, a beaded curtain showed that there were other rooms beyond the shop.

‘You are Mrs Jessie Warlock? I am Detective Inspector Box, of Scotland Yard.’

‘I see. And are you going to show me your warrant, to prove it?’

Box silently handed over his card. Jessie Warlock held a pair of still folded glasses some way in front of her eyes, and read it carefully. Then she handed it back again, put the glasses down on the counter, and sighed.

‘You’d better sit down, Inspector Box. Yes, I’m Jessie Warlock. You’ll have come to ask questions about poor Amelia Garbutt, I expect. It’s been in all the papers, so I know what happened to her.’

‘What I’d like to know, Mrs Warlock—’

The shopkeeper held up a hand as though to fend off Box’s words.

‘I think it would be best, Inspector Box,’ she said, ‘if you were to sit there quietly for a while, and listen to what I have to say.
You look a chirpy kind of young man, much given, I expect, to asking questions. Well, there’s a lot to be said for listening, as well.’

Mrs Warlock joined her hands together, and leaned her elbows on the counter. Box noted the number of gold rings that she wore. She had a round, pale face, and the suspicion of a second chin in prospect. She wore a voluminous bombazine dress.

‘Amelia Garbutt and I, Inspector, were brought up in Speed Street, Spitalfields. Our families were neighbours, and we went to the same church school. Both families were very poor. Our fathers got work in Spitalfields Market when they could. Other times, they’d do labouring, or haul barrows – are you beginning to see the picture?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He knew the picture well enough: ever-present poverty warring with increasingly desperate respectability.

‘Well, Amelia was a very clever girl, and her teachers at the church school worked hard with her, so that she won a bursary to St Margaret’s School for Girls, in Bloomsbury. Amelia never looked back from that moment. She learnt mathematics, and French, and music, and when she left that school, at sixteen, she immediately began to work in high-class service with people of quality. She became a lady’s-maid, and eventually a lady companion in her own right. You’ll know all that, I expect.’

‘Yes, Mrs Warlock. I’m just wondering where your story is leading.’

‘It’s leading to a particular piece of information, Mr Box, which is this: people like Amelia live surrounded by elegance and comfort, but they have no homes of their own. When I was young, before ever I married my late husband, I carried my property around with me in the form of the gold rings that you see on my fingers. When money was short, then I’d pawn a ring – oh, you know all this kind of thing, or at least, you ought to know it. I married Mr Warlock, who owned this shop. When he died, the shop, and the house in which it is, passed to me. But I still keep the rings where you see them now. Habit, you see.’

‘But Miss Amelia Garbutt had no home of her own?’

‘No. So I let her regard this place as a home. She had a room
upstairs, overlooking the street. None of her ladies knew about this place. It was her secret. And this is where you’ll find
whatever
secrets she may have kept from others.’

Inspector Box drew Amelia Garbutt’s tapestry purse from his pocket, opened it, and placed the small bright key on the counter.

‘That, Mrs Warlock, is the key of a deed box.’

‘So it is! Well, Amelia had such a box, and it is still here, in her room upstairs.’

Jessie Warlock slid off her stool, and parted the bead curtain behind her.

‘You’d better come up,’ she said.

The inspector fitted the key into a japanned tin box that he had found at the bottom of a chest of drawers, and turned it. He lifted the lid. Inside, he found a savings bank book, which told him that Amelia Garbutt had amassed the sum of £38 over a period of six years. There was a certificate from a burial club, a sealed envelope, and a death certificate for Joseph Garbutt, aged 74, dated 14 March, 1892.

‘Would you know who Joseph Garbutt was, Mrs Warlock?’

‘He was her uncle. Her father’s brother. He was always a bit of a scapegrace, Mr Box. A mean-minded man, too fearful to break the law, but quite happy to abet others in doing so, if it put a few shillings his way. He’s dead now, so I can say that without fear of doing harm. He lived in a couple of rooms high over a shop in Garlick Hill. That family – the Garbutts – they just managed to hold their heads up, you know. They always lived on the edge of respectability. That’s why I was so proud of Amelia. She’d broken away from temptation.’