The American Boy (15 page)

“What of Mr Frant's hat and gloves? How did he come here? And why should he come at that time of evening?”

“If we knew the answers to those questions, Mr Shield, we would no doubt know the identity of the murderer. We found the hat beside the body. It is in the shed now, and has Mr Frant's name inside. And the gloves were beneath the body itself.”

“That is odd, is it not, sir?”

“How so?”

“That a man should remove his gloves on such a cold night.”

“The affair as a whole is a tissue of strange and contradictory circumstances. Mr Frant's pockets had been emptied. Yet the ring was left on his finger.” Grout rubbed his pointed nose, whose tip was pink with cold. “The principal weapon might have been a hammer or a similar instrument,” he went on, the words tumbling out at such a rate that I realised that he, too, was not unmoved by the dreadful sight on the trestle table. “Though it is possible that the assailant also used a brick.”

He scrambled out of the cellar and we walked slowly back towards the shed.

“They may have come here on foot,” Grout said. “But more likely they rode or drove. Someone will have seen them on the way.”

“Ruined men can be driven to desperate measures, and it is not impossible that one of those whom Mr Frant injured has had his mind overturned by his troubles, and has sought revenge.”

Grout gave me a long look. “Or this might be the work of a jealous lover. Or a madman.”

There was nothing more for me to do at Wellington-terrace. As Mr Grout drove me back to school, I sat in silence beside him, my mind too full for conversation. We passed the flask to and fro between us. It was empty by the time we drew up outside the Manor House School.

I said, “May I tell Mr Bransby what has passed?”

Grout shrugged. “He either knows or surmises everything you or I could tell him. So will the whole neighbourhood in an hour or two.”

“There is the matter of the boy. Mr Frant's son.”

“Indeed. Mr Bransby must do what he thinks fit on that head.” He bobbed his nose towards me. “I do not know how the magistrates will proceed, and if I did know, it would not be proper for me to tell you. However, there will be an inquest, and you may be required to attend. In the meantime, though –” he spread his arms wide “– there will be talk. That much I do know.”

In the evening of that terrible day, I smoked a pipe with Dansey in the garden after the boys were in bed. We walked up and down, huddled in our greatcoats. Soon after my return, Mr Bransby had summoned Charlie Frant. The boy had not been seen since. A message had been sent for Edgar Allan to take his friend's possessions to Mr Bransby's side of the house.

“It is said a man has been arrested already,” Dansey said softly.

“Who?”

“I do not know.”

I bowed my head. “But why did the murderer mutilate the body?”

“A man in search of revenge is a man out of his senses. If it was revenge.”

“Yes, but the hands?”

“In Arabia, they cut off the thief's hands. We used to do it here, I believe, or something similar. Crushing the hands in the manner you described might be another form of the practice. Perhaps Mr Frant's killer believed his victim was a thief.”

Our pipes hissed and bubbled. At the foot of the garden, we turned, and stood for a moment under the shelter of the trees looking back at the house.

Dansey sighed. “Come what may, this affair will make a considerable noise in the world. Pray do not think me impertinent if I speak for a moment in the character of a friend, but I would advise you to keep your own counsel.”

“I am obliged to you. But why do you make such a point of this?”

“I hardly know. The Frants are great folk. When great folk fall, they bring down smaller folk in their train.” He sucked on his pipe. “It is a thousand pities you were called upon to identify the body. You should not have had to appear in this matter at all.”

I shrugged, trying unsuccessfully to push from my mind the memory of that bloodied carcass I had seen in the morning. “Shall we go in? It grows cold.”

“As you wish.”

It seemed to me that there was a note of regret in Dansey's voice. We walked slowly back to the house – slowly, because his footsteps lagged. The moon was very bright, and our feet crunched on the silver lawn. The house reared up in front of us, the moon full on its garden front.

Dansey laid a hand on my arm. “Tom? I may call you that, may I not? Pray call me Ned. I do not wish –”

“Hush,” I said. “Look – someone is watching us. Do you see? The third attic from the left.”

The window belonged to the chamber Morley and Quird had shared with Charlie Frant. We quickened our pace, and a moment later passed into the house.

“Moonlight plays strange tricks,” Dansey said.

I shook my head. “I saw a face. Just for a moment.”

That night I slept dreamlessly, though I had feared my nightmares of carnage would return after the sight I had seen in Jacob Orton's shed.

In my waking hours, the school itself was better than any medicine. For the next few days, our lives continued their placid course, seemingly unchanged. Nevertheless, news continued to reach us from the outside world. The man who had been taken into custody was the brother of the builder, Mr Owens, who had committed suicide. The brother was said to be subject to fits of ungovernable rage; reputable witnesses had heard him utter threats against Henry Frant, whom he held responsible for his brother's suicide; he was a violent man, and had nearly killed a neighbour whom he suspected of making sheep's eyes at his wife. But the following day, the magistrates ordered his release. It transpired that he had spent the evening of the night in question drinking at his uncle's house, and had shared a bed with his cousin; and so his family would give him an alibi.

The inquest came and went. I was not called to give evidence, much to my relief and to Mr Bransby's. Mr Frant's confidential clerk, a man named Arndale who had known him for the better part of twenty years, had no hesitation in identifying the body as his master's. The jury brought in a verdict of murder against person or persons unknown.

Despite the horrific manner of his death, there were few expressions of grief for Mr Frant or of sympathy for his widow. As information emerged about the collapse of Wavenhoe's Bank and the reasons for it, the public prints hastened to condemn him.

The extent of Frant's depredations was never known for certain, but I heard sums ranging from £200,000 to upwards of half a million. Many of the bank's customers, secure in the good name of Wavenhoe's, had appointed Mr Wavenhoe and Mr Frant as their trustees. As such, Frant had purchased hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of stock in the three per cent Consols. In the last three years, he had forged powers of attorney enabling him to sell this stock. Mr Wavenhoe had signed the documents put before him, though doubtless he was unaware of their significance. The name of a third partner, another of the trustees, had been forged on all occasions, as had several of the subscribing witnesses. Mr Frant had converted the proceeds from these sales to his own use, retaining sufficient funds to allow him to pay dividends to the bank's customers, thereby preventing their suspicions from being aroused.

Arndale, Frant's clerk, claimed to have known nothing of this. (Dansey thought the man had avoided prosecution by co-operating with the authorities.) Arndale confirmed that the house had been badly hit by the withdrawal of Mr Carswall's capital. He also testified that the bank had made many advances to speculative builders, which had rendered necessary a system of discounting, and that Mr Frant had subsequently been obliged to make further advances to these persons, in order to secure the sums in which they already stood indebted. In addition, rumours continued to circulate to the effect that Mr Frant had been addicted to play, and that he had lost large sums of money at cards and at dice in private houses.

“Whoever killed him did the hangman a favour,” Dansey said. “If Frant weren't already dead, they'd have tried him for forgery and sent him to the gallows for uttering.”

At the time there was much speculation as to whether Mrs Frant had been privy to her husband's schemes. Some found her doubly guilty by association, for was she not the wife of one partner and the niece of another? Not everyone agreed.

“A man does not discuss his business dealings with his wife,” Dansey argued. “No, she is guilty merely by association. The public prefers a living scapegoat, if at all possible.”

What made matters worse was that Mrs Frant had no one to speak in her defence. Mr Carswall had given her the shelter of his roof but he remained silent on this head and on all others. She was said to be suffering from a fever, her spirits quite overthrown by the double tragedy of her husband's murder and the revelation of his crimes.

As for Charlie, he stumbled like an automaton through the days. I wondered that Mr Carswall did not remove him from the school. Boys are unpredictable creatures. I had expected his schoolfellows would bait him, that they would make him suffer for his father's crimes. Instead, most of them left him alone. Indeed, when they did not ignore him, they handled him with a certain rough kindness. He looked ill, and they dealt with him as though he were. Edgar Allan rarely left his side. The young American treated his friend with a solicitude and a delicacy of sentiment which was unusual in one so young.

Delicacy of sentiment, however, was not a characteristic which could be attributed to either Morley or Quird. Nor was common decency. I came across them fighting with Allan and Frant in a corner of their schoolroom. Morley and Quird were so much older and so much heavier that it was not so much a fight as a massacre. For once, I intervened. I flogged Morley and Quird on the spot and ordered them to wait on me that evening, so that I might flog them again.

“Are you sure you want to do that, sir?” Morley asked softly when he and Quird appeared before me at the appointed time.

“I shall beat you all the more if you don't take that insolent smile off your face.”

“It's only, sir, that me and Quird happened to see you and Mr Dansey the other night.”

“Quird and I, Morley, Quird and I. The pronoun is part of a compound nominative plural.”

“Smoking under the trees, you were.”

“Then be damned to you for a pair of snivelling, spying scrubs,” I snarled, my rage boiling over. “And why were you not in bed, pray?”

Morley had the impudence to ignore my question. “And we saw you and him, sir, on other nights.”

I stared at him, my anger rapidly subsiding. A show of anger has its uses when you are dealing with boys, but ungovernable passion must always be deplored.

“Bend over,” I ordered.

He did not move. “Perhaps, sir, it is my duty to inform Mr Bransby. We must all listen to the voice of conscience. He abhors the practice of –”

“You may tell Mr Bransby what you like,” I said. “First, however, you will bend over and I shall thrash you as you've never been thrashed before.”

The smile vanished from Morley's broad, malevolent face. “This is most unwise, sir, if I may say so.”

The words were measured, but his voice rose into a squeak at the end when I hit him a backhanded blow across the mouth. He tried to protest but I caught him by the throat, swung him round and flung him across the chair that served as our place of execution. He did not move. I dragged up his coat-tails and flogged him. There was no anger in it now: I was cold and deliberate. One could not let a boy take such a haughty tone. By the time I let him go he could hardly walk, and Quird had to half carry him away.

Nevertheless the incident left me shaken, though Morley had richly deserved his beating. I had never flogged a boy so brutally before, or given way to my passions. I wondered if the murder of Henry Frant had affected me in ways I had not suspected.

What I did not even begin to suspect until later was that Morley may have known Dansey better than I did, and that his meaning had been quite other than I had supposed.

Nine days after the murder, on Saturday the 4th December, I received a summons to Mr Bransby's private room. He was not alone. Overflowing from an elbow chair beside the desk was the large, ungainly form of Mr Carswall. His daughter perched demurely on a sofa in front of the fire.

As I entered, Carswall glared up at me through tangled eyebrows and then down at the open watch in his hand. “You must make haste,” he said. “Otherwise we shall not get back to Town in daylight.”

Astonished, I looked from one man to the other.

“You are to accompany Charles Frant to Mr Carswall's,” Bransby said. “His father is to be buried on Monday.”

“I am a bastard,” Miss Carswall said to me on the Monday evening after Mr Frant's funeral.

I was so shocked by her immodesty I did not know how to reply. I glanced at the door, fearing it might be open, that her words had been overheard. At the time Miss Carswall and I were alone in the drawing room of her father's house in Margaret-street; Charlie had run upstairs to fetch a book.

She fixed me with her brown eyes. “Let us call things by their proper names. That is what I wished to tell you in Albemarle-street. The day when Charlie interrupted.”

“It is of no significance,” I said, feeling I must say something.

She stamped her foot. “Had you been a bastard yourself, you would know how foolish that sounds.”

“I beg your pardon. I did not make my meaning clear. I did not mean that it was of no significance to you, or indeed in the general scheme of things. I – I meant merely that it was of no significance to me.”

“You knew, sir, admit it. Someone had told you.”

Miss Carswall glared at me for a moment. She had the fair, almost translucent skin that so often goes with auburn hair. She looked captivating in a passion.