pants are soaked through and Mrs. Ward will go mad when she sees the mud.”
Orlando kissed Jonty as promised, and very nice it was, then brushed him down as best he could. “We
should ring Wilson. He needs to come up and hear what we’ve found out.”
“You do that. I’ll organise a little something to give us strength for the ordeal.”
Jonty found their housekeeper mending trouser cuffs. He enquired whether a pot of tea could be
available when the constabulary arrived and if there might also be a cake blockaded in the pantry which could be let out.
Both enquiries being successful he was about to depart when a firm female voice said, “Dr. Stewart, I think you and Dr. Coppersmith had both better change your suits. You look like you’ve been searching for the sources of the Amazon. On foot.”
“How on earth do you do it?” Wilson laid his hat on the sideboard and scratched his balding head. He
thought he’d gone beyond amazement at these two, but they’d excelled themselves this time. “My
colleagues have been trying all this time to put a name to one or other of those mysterious visitors. Then you find the pair of them simultaneously and without the slightest effort.”
77
Charlie Cochrane
“That’s not quite right. I’ll admit we knew about Rhodes before, although we didn’t have anything
more than suspicion and hunches, certainly not enough to justify passing his name on to you. But finding Kermode involved a lot of legwork on Papa’s behalf.” Jonty wore a belligerent grin. He was enjoying
getting one over on the police again, especially after their last meeting.
“Oh, so there are three of you involved now, are there? Holmes, Watson and Lestrade?”
“Cuff, Cuff and Cuff more like, although without the roses.” Orlando was also enjoying the
discomfort on his guests’ faces. “Perhaps we can now restrict our investigations to two men.”
“Unless there’s a third unknown person who sneaked in through that shrubbery when the others were
engaged, doing the deed in between Kermode leaving and Rhodes’s departure. Your Mr. Taylor perhaps.”
Wilson grinned.
Jonty groaned. “I can’t take it. It’s more like some Drury Lane farce than real life, people coming and going everywhere. My mind can only cope with two entities and if you want to introduce a third I’ll ignore it. Look, I had a perfectly clear theory. Kermode had gone to Dorking, where he confronted Jardine. Taylor was there already, got into another row about this imminent confession and did his lordship in. Kermode went home, confessed all to his mother, who then located Taylor and beat him up for not having repented.
Mrs. Ward confirms that she’s just the sort of woman to do it, which is as good as a judge’s ruling.”
“I’m afraid that all goes out of the window now we know it was Rhodes down in Dorking.” Orlando
spoke as if he were talking to a four-year-old, which made Jonty thump his arm.
“I know that, you clot, and I’m trying to work out a whole new theorem, sans Taylor. That’s why I
don’t want him put back into the equation.” He looked pleadingly at Wilson. “This is becoming far too complicated, isn’t it? In our admittedly limited experience, murder tends to be relatively simple.”
“And in mine,” the inspector concurred. “So we have two men with Jardine, each of whom might
have had cause to kill him, either in vengeance or to stop him making their secret public knowledge.”
“But what about Taylor? We’re still no nearer solving his murder, unless it really was Mrs. Kermode
in avenging angel mode.” Why was it that every step they took forward in this case was followed by
another three back?
“What about Rhodes?” Sergeant Cohen suddenly spoke up, his large, bovine face becoming animated.
“He might have worried that Taylor would be going to confess all, as well. Especially if he knew that you two had been to visit.” The idea struck the company like a blow. No one had so far suggested that Jonty’s call on Taylor might have acted as a catalyst in the man’s demise.
“You’re right,” Jonty ventured at last. “We’d begun to stir up a hornet’s nest, asking questions left right and centre. I wonder if it was old Rhodes who visited Waite’s, as well, pretending to be a newspaper reporter. Now there’s food for thought.”
“I’ve some more things for you to chew over—you’re not the only ones who can make progress, you
know.” Wilson smiled, enjoying the badinage and byplay with these two clever young men. It would make 78
Lessons in Power
any policeman’s job much more satisfying. “We’ve found out that two men were seen going into Taylor’s house the morning he died. Not you two, I hasten to add.” There was a puckish tone to his voice. “The first was a youngish chap. We’ll have to see if you recognise the description as matching Kermode, Dr. Stewart.
The second was an older man with a limp, and I can see from your faces that means something to you.”
“Rhodes has a limp, from an old sporting injury, or so his aunt told me. Who was the later of the two to leave Taylor’s?” Orlando knew what he wanted the answer to be.
“The man who was lame. Yet that’s not all I have to say. This will particularly amuse Dr. Stewart.
Angela Stafford doesn’t have a twin sister, but she does have a cousin who resembles her closely and with whom she used to swap places when they were at school. And the cousin has no alibi for the night of
Jardine’s murder. Is that enough entities for you?”
“More than enough.” Jonty groaned again. “I think she had that bloody cousin deliberately.”
79
Chapter Nine
Ensconced in his own bed, Jonty didn’t bother with either spectacles or book. He sat propped up on
the pillows with a glass of wine in his hand. Mrs. Ward would kill him when she found out he’d been such a slut, but he was beyond caring, and his mind was racing. “Orlando, I need to talk to you.”
“That sounds ominous. It’s how I address the dunderheads when they make a total mess of things.”
Orlando produced a sly little grin. “Have you found out about my other man?”
“Idiot. Look, I want to get my head entirely clear vis-à-vis Taylor and his visitors, now that we’ve
established the toings and froings at Dorking. A man with a limp—that has to be Rhodes. Please don’t tell me that there’s another lame man involved with this farrago.”
“Just about every person of the male persuasion who has reached our notice is as hale as Apollo
himself. Except that chap Rex and I refuse to believe he has anything to do with things. This is real life, not Conan Doyle. What about the other man who was seen near Taylor’s house?”
“Well, his general description would fit Kermode, but it could also apply to about a half a million
other blokes. It could even apply to Angela Stafford if she put on travesty.”
“Eh?”
Jonty cuffed his lover’s arm. “Your diction is appalling. What happened to
‘Pardon me, Dr.
Stewart’?”
“It died of a broken heart when all it got was a grunt in reply. Ow! That’s twice you’ve thumped me
tonight.”
“It’ll be more than that, the rate you’re going. To return to
nos moutons,
travesty. Angela Stafford in her brother’s britches, pretending to be a boy.”
“It’s a possibility, but she still doesn’t have a motive…oh, you’re joking aren’t you?” For all that
they’d known each other a year and a half, the number of times Orlando had been tricked must have
exceeded a hundred. There still seemed to be a time delay to the part of his brain which registered that his leg was being pulled.
“Well I was, really. You’re just so adorable when you allow yourself to be gulled.” Jonty caressed his lover’s cheek, letting his hand run down the angular lines of his jaw. “So we guess the man is Kermode.”
He frowned. “Except that he seems to have that dreaded thing, a genuine alibi for the murder of Taylor.”
“How do you know? Why didn’t you tell Wilson?”
Lessons in Power
“They’ll find out soon enough if it’s an inadequate one—I don’t want to spoil their fun. It was Mrs.
Ward who told me. She put two and two together when I was talking about Kermode—she really is a most
astute woman—and did a little enquiring among her network of gossips and tittle-tattlers on her day off, the same day I went to Norwich. It seems that Mother Kermode and her little boy have been in London on and off these last few months, looking, or so they said, for suitable premises for their new business venture.
They were in the capital when Jardine was killed, which we already knew, assuming we believe what the son said. They were also there the weekend that we were meeting the royals and Taylor was getting himself murdered. Mrs. W even established their whereabouts on that particular Sunday morning. The pair of them were in Brompton Oratory, enjoying the mass. Now that’s not a million miles away from where Taylor
lived.”
“Could someone slip out from mass and rejoin it?”
“I have no idea. If the service was very busy, perhaps. It’s not like St. Bride’s chapel where you’d be hard pressed to scuttle out, it being small and everyone with their beady eyes darting about. I suppose if there were a throng…although there might be sidesmen in the offing. Anyway, it puts him close.” Jonty put his arm round his lover, drew him down, manoeuvring to lie entwined together like a couple from one of Rubens’ saucier ventures.
“Do you think Holmes and Watson have occasion to lie together like this?”
“Dr. Coppersmith, what an extraordinary question!” Trust Orlando to shatter the artistic fantasy with such an incongruous suggestion.
“Is it? When I read the stories I can’t help but be struck by the degree of affection between them,
stated and implied.”
“That’s a valid point, I’ll grant you. I suspect, however, that Watson is far too much a ladies’ man for anything romantic to be happening between them. It would be more like a brotherly affection on his part.”
“And Holmes?” Orlando twisted around, nestled up into his lover’s neck. “I sometimes identify with
him, Jonty. It distresses me to think that he found no real love in his life.”
“You old soppy pants.” How could one man be so full of contrasts? Dr. Coppersmith—frightening to
his students, fierce with his enemies, daft as a brush at times. “But you’re quite right, you know. There’s something dark and unhappy in Sherlock’s soul that might just be linked up with denial of his true nature.
If he loves his Watson and either can’t manifest that love physically—he does strike me as being ascetic—
or finds that love can’t be reciprocated in anything other than friendship, it could drive any man to a seven per cent solution. Even you, had I come and stolen your chair then turned out to have a wife, a mistress and eleven children.” Jonty stopped, slapped his lover’s shoulder. “You’re a genius. Simply brilliant.”
“I know I am.” Orlando grinned. “But what have I done to particularly deserve the soubriquet now?”
Jonty smiled. “I’ll tell you afterwards.”
“After what?”
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Charlie Cochrane
“
Afterwards
.” Jonty ran his hand down his lover’s chest.
“You’ll tell me now or there won’t be any
before
to have an
afterwards
after. And don’t laugh.”
“I can’t help it. Such mangled English, as awful as one of my dunderheads might produce in an essay
on
As You Like It
. My genius boy. We’ve been looking at this case like the others we tackled, concentrating on revenge for yourself or a loved one, or a murder in order to cover up your misdemeanours. But what if it’s about love, Orlando? About an unrequited devotion for someone which can’t be manifest in contact with them? An affection which burns, tortures and eventually turns to violence?”
“Between?”
“Rhodes and Jardine. Or Rhodes and Taylor. Or both. What if my precious housemaster goaded those
boys into using me because he felt a desire for one or other of them and wasn’t capable of consummating it?”
Orlando thought a while, doodling on his lover’s chest and fiddling with the hairs he found there.
Jonty waited patiently, letting the immense brain grind small. “It could work, you know. He was obviously a lot closer to Jardine than he wanted to let on—you could tell that both from what he said and what he left unsaid. How about if Rhodes had grown jealous of the stream of men and women whom his lordship had
bedded? He even knew all about the night callers. A touch of
if I can’t have you, no one will
.”
“That’s possible I suppose. Or what if he felt aggrieved that Jardine had, in effect, renounced him
with this impending confession? You can be sure that he wouldn’t have been left untainted by any public declaration.”
Orlando closed his eyes, shuddering. “I wish you’d been there in Epsom—I was wrong not to take
you. You’d have been able to pick out the lies from the half truths. And Rhodes lied about Taylor, I realise that fact now. That little toerag never had a crisis of conscience, not if your man Kermode is to be
believed.”
“We need to see Rhodes together, Orlando. Settle this matter once and for all, by which I don’t just
mean the murders. And soon, preferably before the police get to him.”
“I know that. Tomorrow.” Orlando favoured his lover’s arm with the most gentle of kisses. It was
time for
befores
and he wasn’t going to turn his nose up at the offer. “We’ll leave early and spend the night in London if need be.”
“Very bold, very decisive. It’s no wonder your old rugby chums saw such a change in you.” Jonty
wriggled into the crook of Orlando’s arm and let his fingers start to doodle on the man’s breasts. “They must have thought you a canny player. I wonder what they’d say if they knew how good you were at this sort of mauling.”