Death at the Devil's Tavern (43 page)

The Blind Beak ignored her entirely, merely saying, ‘Would you now continue, Mr Rawlings,' to be echoed by Samuel adding, ‘Damme, what a tale!'

John spoke again. ‘I thought at first that Roger might have killed his father in a passion but it soon became obvious that this was not so. And the idea of Amelia murdering for gain was equally untenable. For the fact remains that Miss Lambourn has gained nothing. Under the terms of Sir William's new will, which he was to have signed on the night of his death, his wife was to have become his principal heiress. But Sir William never got to the lawyer's office because he was called away to meet someone. Someone who, according to Mrs Lydia Hartfield, had been blackmailing him for some while. Therefore, the decision the Public Office had to make was as to whether Sir William was killed in a fit of fury or in order to stop him signing the new will, a will which would, effectively, have taken both his fortune and his business out of family hands.'

‘And which did you decide upon?' asked Julian curiously.

‘Neither really, for we believe that the motive was a combination of the two.'

‘Roger murdered him,' said Lady Hodkin forcefully, ‘just so that he could have that dirty little doxie to himself.'

‘Watch your language, Madam,' growled the beau. ‘Mr Rawlings thinks differently.'

‘He never said so.'

‘Yes he did.'

‘Quiet!' boomed the Blind Beak. ‘Pay attention, all of you.' He took up the story. ‘It was obvious to the Public Office that Sir William was murdered on the night before his wedding and it therefore became vital that we should discover where he went and whom he saw during those last fatal hours. Yet investigation showed that
every one of you
– and that includes yourself, Lady Hodkin – seemed to have something to hide during the relevant time. Mrs Lydia, for example, followed Sir William, ostensibly to confront his blackmailer, then disappeared for the rest of the night.'

‘Murderess!' yelled the old woman.

‘Oh be silent,' Lydia answered furiously. ‘I spent that night in the arms of a good man and true, a man whom I love, so call me whore by all means, but a killer I am not.'

She turned towards Mr Fielding who, just as if he could see she was looking at him, said, ‘Go on.'

‘I had known for some time that my father-in-law was being blackmailed,' Lydia continued spiritedly. ‘It started while Lady Hartfield was alive and my guess was that the threat was to reveal his illicit affair to the world. As the family already knew about it, but the business community did not, my suspicion alighted on Valentine Randolph. Oh forgive me, my darling.'

‘My darling?' Roger repeated incredulously. ‘Are you sleeping with Randolph then?'

‘Of course I am,' she answered, her stunning mouth forming into a smile. ‘I've told you, I love him. I would go to the ends of the earth with him.'

‘Continue your discourse, Madam,' instructed the Magistrate severely.

‘I followed Sir William to Redriff but there he vanished. In fact, I was lost, wandering about alone and rather frightened, when I suddenly came across Valentine, who took me to The Angel and there we spent the night together.'

‘Didn't you regard it as suspicious that he was in the area?' Hugh asked.

‘Not at all,' Lydia retorted angrily, ‘he lives there, if you remember.' Valentine interrupted. ‘The fact is that I was looking for Sir William. He was to have met me in The Spread Eagle for a celebratory drink but did not arrive. Thinking he might have gone straight to The Angel, where he had booked to spend the night, I was making my way there to see if I could locate him.'

‘I find that almost too much of a coincidence.'

‘Would you also find it a coincidence that your grandmother went missing for an hour that very night?' John asked pointedly. ‘That your brother Roger cannot satisfactorily account for himself? That Julian and Juliette were wandering round London disguised as one another? That Miss Hesther Hodkin's statement of where she was cannot be verified? That your own wife was seen stalking round the grounds of Kirby Hall just as if she were waiting to meet someone?'

Hugh looked abashed. ‘I'm sorry. I didn't realise all that.'

‘No, you wouldn't, would you?' said Luke nastily. ‘So quick to put the blame on everyone else.'

‘Gentlemen, please.' Mr Fielding's voice drowned all others. ‘So, with so much deceit abounding, it was left to those trying to solve the puzzle to decide, firstly, who the blackmailer might possibly be, and, secondly, who would benefit most from Sir William's death, providing he did not sign his new will. There was another point too, the murder of the poor wretched oyster girl.'

‘Surely that's not connected,' asked Amelia, speaking for the first time.

‘Not only is it very closely connected,' answered John, ‘it is the key factor in the entire mystery.'

‘How so?' said Maud.

‘During the brawl in The Devil's Tavern, the brawl between your husband and Luke Challon, the brawl in which Roger, Julian and Valentine were all attempting to intervene with varying degrees of success, Kitty Perkins, the victim, recognised one of the men and began to make a remark, a remark which she was never able to finish, but a remark to the effect that she had seen one of them in a place where she would never have expected him to be.'

‘So?'

‘So this evidence of hers, had she lived to give it, was obviously important enough to ensure that she must be silenced for ever.'

‘Four key things then,' put in the Blind Beak. ‘Who knew sufficient about Sir William's business and love affairs to be able to blackmail him? Who would lose all if the second will were to be signed? Who had sufficient access to Sir William's office to steal Mr Randolph's stick and use it as a murder weapon? Who was somewhere so strange that his very being there must name him murderer?'

Valentine Randolph spoke again. ‘I suppose that I, as his office manager, knew most about his commercial ventures. And I was certainly aware that Sir William had a mistress. And the use of my stick makes things look very black for me, I realise that.'

Luke came in. ‘I knew just as much. I was his confidential secretary. Further I had free range of the office at any time.'

Realising that everyone was staring at him, Roger said, ‘Well, obviously, as I introduced them, I knew everything about his relationship with Amelia. But I didn't take the damned stick. I've got one of my own. Anyway, I understood little of Father's business dealings.'

‘You understood enough to boost your funds by blackmail, you mollying dog,' screamed Lady Hodkin, silent for an unnervingly long time, but now clearly having gathered sufficient strength to come back in on the attack.

‘I deny it,' shrieked the beau.

‘Well, I may be the biggest fool in Christendom and thoughtlessly have put my sister at risk,' said Julian heatedly, ‘but I would never stoop to extortion, particularly from my own father. As for the stick, I know nothing about it.'

‘Never the less,' said the Blind Beak relentlessly, ‘somebody did, and somebody killed, not one, but two people. Mr Rawlings.'

‘Before the murder of Kitty a portrait was beginning to build in my mind, a portrait of someone both avaricious and ambitious, of someone capable of lashing out in a rage, of someone who above all loved power. Ideas began to come to me. Memories of a conversation I had overheard, in which a man told a woman that something had gone terribly wrong; of an eye witness declaring that a female had been acting strangely, only for that female to deny it; of a missing button by a gravestone, not fancy enough for most men to wear, only those who adopt a plain and God-fearing attitude to life.

‘But, as Mr Fielding said, the real key lay with harmless little Kitty. She had seen someone somewhere out of place, so I determined to find out where that place might be. Her uncle told me that they had recently moored at Gravesend overnight, after a bad storm had shaken them up at sea. Kitty had gone ashore to have a drink and sell oysters, and had made for the inn, The Belle Sauvage. And it is to that particular inn that the coaches from the Kent coast come to drop their passengers to catch the ferry into London. So how easy it would be for anyone crossing the Channel to be put ashore at Dover, or anywhere adjacent, pick up a postchaise, then the common tilt boat, and be in London days before the ship on which he was sailing arrived at the Legal Quays.'

There was a terrible silence during which Benjamin Rudge loomed in the doorway leading to the staircase and Samuel Swann quietly rose to his feet.

Hugh burst out laughing. ‘I take it that this fiction is directed at me?'

‘Yes,' John answered seriously, ‘it is. For only you answer all four of the criteria that the Public Office is seeking.'

‘But I told you, I was at sea when my father was murdered.'

‘No, you weren't. You were put off at the coast and you got to London in the manner I've just described. The only thing that went wrong was that Kitty Perkins, who knew you well by sight, saw you at The Belle Sauvage and wondered what you were doing there.'

‘And Mrs Maud Hartfield is also implicated, being an accessory after the fact,' stated John Fielding. ‘Do not deny it, Madam. You knew your husband was secretly returning from France in order to persuade Sir William, by force if necessary, not to sign his new will. However, you were not quite certain when. So you waited for him in the garden of Kirby Hall on the night he was about the filthy work of patricide. Then, when he
did
appear, you heard his confession that something had gone wrong and did nothing about it. You are as guilty as he is in the eyes of the law.'

‘No, no,' Maud shrieked.

‘Quiet,' Hugh snarled at her, and for the first time the Apothecary saw the wolf that lurked behind the crisply tanned features.

‘Did you strike your father in order to stop him signing his new will or did you just lose your temper?' John asked. ‘And did you deliberately steal the stick so that Valentine Randolph would be implicated, thus removing him from your path as well, or did you leave your own on the ship and simply take the first one that came to hand? Or don't you even know the answers yourself, you wretched man?'

‘I deny the entire tale invented by this idiot,' Hugh answered.

‘Deny away,' said the Blind Beak calmly. ‘You're still going to swing at Tyburn.'

‘What? On a thread of evidence that can never be proved? Don't be so ridiculous.'

‘You've forgotten one thing,' said John, pulling something from his pocket.

‘And what is that, pray?'

‘The button from your coat, the button that you dropped by the gravestone where you murdered Sir William Hartfield. Even now Mr Fielding's Runners are searching your clothes press in St James's Square to find the garment from which it came.'

‘And what if it is not there?'

‘Then,' said John, taking an enormous gamble, ‘I shall produce the potboy from The Spread Eagle who saw you taking Sir William's body down to the waterside, and ask him to identify you, face to face.'

The chance succeeded and Hugh let out a frantic cry, rushing not to the door leading to the staircase but to the balcony over the river.

‘Stop him!' shouted John, but only Nicholas Dawkins had the wit to move quickly enough and dived immediately after Hugh into the river which, at full flood, ran only a few feet below them.

As if released from a trance, everybody surged to the parapet and stood looking downwards to where two heads bobbed in the wild water beneath. But though Nicholas had obviously learned to swim well he was no match for Hugh, who struck out downstream with a powerful stroke. And then, almost like a creature from some avenging myth, the mudlark appeared in his coracle, riding the surface of the waves like a gull.

‘Which one?' he shouted to John through cupped hands.

‘The man, not the boy,' the Apothecary called back.

Without further ado, Fred headed straight for the swimmer, swinging a vicious looking boathook and catching Hugh a crunching blow to the head with it.

‘No more, you'll kill him,' John yelled.

Then he saw that revenge was indeed at work that day for the mighty river itself was taking charge of events. A freakish wave lifted Hugh's inert body high and crunched it into the hull of one of the tall ships dancing at anchor, splintering flesh and bone into pulp with the force of the blow. There was a terrible scream, though John was never sure afterwards from where it came, but at the sound of it most of the people on the balcony turned away their heads, so that only the Apothecary witnessed the moment when the mudlark hauled Nicholas out of the river and the two boys huddled together as Fred paddled furiously for the shore.

There was a sound behind him and John saw that Joe Jago had come to join him. The clerk's light blue eyes scanned the waterway. ‘All over,' he called to the Magistrate, who had remained seated in his oaken chair throughout the uproar.

‘Quite sure?'

‘Yes, Sir.'

‘“Full fathom five,”' quoted John Fielding.

‘“Ding dong bell,”' finished Joe Jago, and shook his head in disbelief at the way in which fate deals out the cards.

Dawn at Wapping, and the clear cold river reflecting the colours of the sky so vividly that it had transformed to a pink ribbon, as charming and delicate as any to be found on a pedlar's tray at a country fair. At first light the tide had swelled to full flood, so that now the mighty ships were hearing the call of the sea and were struggling to be set free from the moorings that held them captive. Up in the rigging, sailors were unfurling white clouds of canvas; the sightless eyes of figureheads surveyed the wild wide channel down which they must soon lead the way; and the air was full of the cry of gulls and the almost tangible sense of the great adventure that lay before them all.