The Hidden Man (4 page)

‘Because of the wig, Titus. We do not have it. The wig is missing.'

Before I had time to fully consider this point, another voice had joined the argument.

‘And so is his dog missing,' said Hazelbury.

Turning in surprise, for I had quite forgotten Hazelbury was there, I saw that the Chief Cashier was revived, and looking considerably more alert.

‘What dog, Mr Hazelbury?' I asked.

‘Mr Pimbo's terrier, Sir, Suez. It came to the office with him every day, without fail. It must have been here today, though I do not see it.'

The remembrance of Pimbo's bothersome dog came back to me, snuffling and yelping around my shoes at the post office. I turned, intending to relate this to Fidelis, and saw that he had again begun to prowl around the room and was now standing in contemplation before the oak door beside the fireplace, which I now noticed was very slightly ajar. Before I could speak he had pulled it open.

‘What's in here? Ah! The strong room.'

The open door revealed a second very different sort of door immediately behind it – an iron-barred gate, such as is commonly used at Newgate and other prisons to prevent escape. In this case the purpose was a contrary one: to bar entry to any that did not have a key or, in this case, two keys. The gate was secured by a pair of formidable locks, above and below an equally large ring-handled latch.

‘Aye, it's the strong room, is that,' confirmed Hazelbury.

‘So I see,' said Fidelis. ‘And what does it contain?'

A voice booming behind us forestalled the Chief Cashier's response.

‘Our treasure, Sir! Or so it better. I mean the Corporation's treasure.'

We all turned and saw the resplendent figure of Mayor Grimshaw filling the doorway.

‘To be even more specific,' Grimshaw went on, advancing into the room, ‘I expect it to, and trust it will, contain our finances for the coming Guild.'

Despite this confident assertion the Mayor's lips were rigidly pursed, as if braced against unwelcome news. He advanced into the room and looked over the corpse of Phillip Pimbo, like a man happening upon the remains of a dead horse beside the highway. He wrinkled his nose.

‘We have just had word of this at the Moot Hall. Shot himself, has he?'

‘It seems possible,' I replied, ‘though from a Coroner's point of view we will need to know why he—'

Grimshaw sharply interrupted me.

‘I don't much care about your point of view, Cragg. You may rummage around looking for your causes and motives, if you have to.
I
must think only of the safety of that money, which is
my
duty. When a man does away with himself, it stinks of one thing – his failure in business. In the case of this goldsmith, such a thing makes me sorely and severely uneasy. Sorely and severely.'

The Mayor went to the strong room gate and peered through its bars. The room was windowless and dark, and he could see nothing more than some shelving and the presence of a number of stout chests. Pointing his finger through the thick bars he addressed Hazelbury.

‘I want your reassurance that the town's money is safe inside one of those chests? Is it? Is it?'

‘Well, Sir, that is not quite such a simple matter as you may suppose—'

‘SIMPLE?' roared the Mayor. ‘This is not a matter of simple! It is one of very grave consequences. Will you please get the gate open, so that we may look for our money?'

Hazelbury bowed his head, in a mourning way.

‘That isn't a simple matter either, Mr Grimshaw,' he said almost in a whisper. ‘For I do not have the sole power to open this gate. It has, as you see, two locks. Here at the office we have but one key, and Mr Pimbo keeps the other.'

 

Chapter Three

R
OBERT HAZELBURY DARTED
out of the room and came back a moment later with a brass key at least four inches long. He went to the strong room door, fitted the key into the lower of the two locks and turned it. The mechanism made a sound like a plop and the lock was released.

‘So where's Pimbo's?' barked the Mayor. ‘Fetch it and we can get this door open.'

‘That would be irregular, Sir. Without Mr Pimbo the strong room cannot be opened. That is our strict rule here.'

Grimshaw was quick to propose a way around this problem.

‘As Mayor, I shall take the responsibility upon myself. Fetch the other key, Hazelbury, and I shall act Pimbo's part.'

Hazelbury shook his head, and stood his ground.

‘Even if I had both keys I am not authorized to act by myself. It must be Mr Pimbo who turns the upper lock.'

‘He's right in law,' I put in. ‘Pimbo's key must only be turned by Pimbo.'

Grimshaw swung towards me and pointed at the corpse on the desk.

‘Has it escaped your attention that the man is
dead
, Cragg?'

‘Then you will need a magistrate's sanction, at the very least, to overturn the rule.'

‘That is easy. I am a magistrate, Cragg. I am Chief Magistrate. I hereby give myself permission.'

‘I do not think you can, with any legal propriety. Mr Pimbo's locked property is now under the protection of his executors, and at this stage we do not even know who they are.'

But Grimshaw was not prepared to let legal nicety get in his way.

‘Be damned to that. I must find that key. Hazelbury – help me!'

We all began to search the room. The key was not in the dead man's pockets. It was not on his writing table. It was not in any of the drawers of the pieces of furniture in the room. After a few minutes we admitted defeat.

‘Pimbo has spoken to me of a business partner,' I said, as we now stood uncertainly around the body, which still lay where it had been found. ‘One Moon, whom I believe to be a money-scrivener. Might he have the right of access to the strong room? Might he have a key?'

‘Moon, you say?' growled Grimshaw, turning to Hazelbury. ‘I remember Pimbo mentioning him when we talked about our investment. Said he was a very sound man. He must be sent for immediately, Hazelbury.'

Hazelbury flapped his hands to indicate a negative.

‘Like yourself, Sir, we in the shop have heard of Scrivener Moon, but we have never seen him. I don't believe he has ever been in Preston, and I'm sure he could never have had a key to Mr Pimbo's strong room. Never.'

Grimshaw persisted.

‘I must speak with him nevertheless. Where does he live? Not in Liverpool I hope.'

‘I understand he does. Mr Pimbo sometimes goes there – I'm sorry once again,
went
there – to hold discussions.'

Deliberately the Mayor paced up to the wall, where he found himself face-to-face with a scene from Hogarth's
Harlot's Progress
.

‘Liverpool is a cesspit of vice and double-dealing,' he said, more declaratively than ever. ‘I detest the place.'

I said, ‘It's strange, is it not, that Moon, so often and so publicly spoken of by Pimbo as his business partner, should not have been known here in Preston.'

Grimshaw was still looking at the engraving, his eyeballs moving from side to side to take in every detail. He produced a silk handkerchief and began mopping his brow.

‘I don't call that strange, I call it suspicious,' he said. ‘Pimbo lies shot dead by his own hand and we can't get into the strong room. There is cause for suspicion in that, even before we begin looking where it may fall. But when we do, I suggest that our suspicion will fall naturally upon Moon.'

He turned and began walking up and down, still sorely agitated. I noticed that he trod unheeding in the pool of blood left by Amity Thorn. This reminded me of her presence in the shop and, catching Fidelis's attention, I mouthed her name. He nodded and moved towards the door. I followed as the Mayor talked on.

‘We must learn more of this fellow,' he was saying. ‘Who knows of Mr Pimbo's affairs? We must speak with his mother, his lawyer.'

‘His dog would help us too,' murmured Fidelis as we escaped out of Pimbo's business room and into the shop. ‘If only we could find it.'

I took this to be a facetious remark and was surprised when Fidelis asked in the shop if anyone had seen the dog. None had.

‘But where is Amity?' I asked, not seeing her in the chair where she had been resting.

‘She's gone,' said a fair, well-made young man in an apron who stood leaning against one of the door-cheeks of the workshop. This was the shop's journeyman goldsmith, Michael Ambler. ‘She felt better and is walking herself home, or so she told us.'

‘I should fetch my horse and catch her up,' said Fidelis, making for the door.

‘So you should, Luke.'

I followed him into the street where, to tease him, I added,

‘Amity is certainly too pretty to be allowed to walk home without assistance.'

Fidelis was good-natured enough to laugh.

‘True. But also a blow to the head can have a delayed effect and there is nothing more I can do to help you here, not for the time being. We will talk of Pimbo's death later. I must take a proper look at the body, but not while the Mayor holds the field. And you should take some interest in what his mother has to say about the soundness of his business. You will be speaking with her?'

‘Yes, and searching his home for the strong room key too, if I can.'

‘Therefore let us meet at nine at Plumtree's.'

I returned to the shop where Ambler was beckoning me. I crossed the shop and went into the room where he worked all sorts of metal, from gold to pewter, beating, bending and casting it to make anything from a snuffbox or a watch-case to a punchbowl. The bench at which he worked stood under a window giving light from the ginnel. On either side of this window were clipped his tools in a stratified array: both soft and hard mallets, planishing tools, shears, stamps, rasps, files, and many that I didn't know the name or function of. On the bench itself he was working a circular piece of silver, hammering it with infinite patience to raise it from flatness to the shape of a bowl.

The apprentice clerk to whom I'd nodded as I walked through the shop had looked fearful – pale-faced and with wide eyes – at the thought of the chill shadow that Pimbo's death had suddenly cast over his future. But Ambler's handsome face expressed neither surprise nor sorrow. Such is the effect of shock, too, sometimes.

‘How is it with master?' he asked, as he picked up his mallet and began once again to work the metal. ‘What said the doctor?'

‘That he is dead, Michael.'

‘Ah.'

Ambler swivelled around and stared at me, his eyes bright, and said with a lift in his voice as he returned to his work,

‘She's a bonny one all right, is Amity Thorn.'

I could only agree, while thinking Ambler spoke like a simpleton, though I knew that he wasn't one.

‘And she's got a bonny silver spoon, an' all. She was showing it around, saying she'd come to ask master its worth. He won't be telling you today, says I, not if what we hear is right.'

He was talking rapidly, though his voice was confidential, almost a murmur, so that I had to strain to hear him over the popping of his mallet.

‘So, says she, will
you
tell us? So she gets it out and I looks at it close, and it's a nice old spoon. I mean, proper silver, no question to it, and so-called an apostle spoon because the knob, which we more politely term the finial, is the cast figure of an apostle. Worth a good shilling or more is that, says I, and it's aged, too, such as some old antiquary would pay good money for. Where'd a poor girl like you get such a valuable? says I. She won't tell me. Just says she'll be back when we open again for business.'

‘Her husband's had an accident and can't work,' I put in. ‘She is looking to pawn it to raise some money, I believe.'

‘Oh, aye, likely she will. If the owner doesn't come forward and do her for larceny.'

‘Larceny?' I was taken by surprise. ‘What do you know of larceny?'

Ambler stopped tapping.

‘There is fair play and foul play, Mr Cragg, and I know what it is when a somewhat costly object is in the hands of a pauper.'

I waved my finger.

‘Now, young man, you know no such thing. It is presupposition.'

‘Well she was not born with it in her mouth, that's certain. So where
did
she get it?'

I shrugged.

‘What concern is that of mine, Michael? Or of yours, since she has not yet offered it for pawn. Leave these suspicions until she does, if she does. You have more pressing concerns here, I would have thought.'

We heard the Mayor's voice as he and Hazelbury emerged into the shop from the inner room.

‘If the key's neither in his desk nor his cabinet nor his clothing,' I heard Grimshaw saying, ‘and if you, Mr Hazelbury, do not have it, it must be at Pimbo's house. I shall send Mallender there immediately to conduct a search.'

I excused myself and went out to join them. The thought of our sergeant-constable, as clumsy in manner as he was in speech, turning the Pimbo house upside down, was not a congenial one. He would have little regard for the distressed mother, and even less for her servants.

‘Mr Grimshaw,' I put in, ‘we may spare Mr Mallender the trouble. I must go out to Cadley myself today. Allow me to enquire about the strong room key and if necessary have a look for it. It may be that a thoroughgoing search by the constabulary will be unnecessary.'

Grimshaw shot me with what he may have thought a penetrating glance, then grunted.

‘Very well, Cragg, I'll leave it to you. But I shall require your immediate report.'

He swept from the shop and I returned to the inner room, bringing Hazelbury and Ambler with me. We found every drawer and cupboard open and its contents hastily emptied onto the floor after the Mayor's attempts to find the missing key. The body too had been lifted up and deposited on the floor. I asked Ambler to send the apprentice out for a dust-sheet which, when it came, we draped over the late Phillip Pimbo. I then instructed the Chief Cashier to get the apprentice to wash away the blood and to have the door of the business room repaired so that it could be securely locked. Finally I picked up the pistol and powder flask, which still lay on the writing table.