The Scandal at 23 Mount Street (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 9) (23 page)

‘Well, yes, that’s what it
says
,’ conceded Freddy. ‘Whether that’s what actually happened is another matter altogether.’

‘Do you mean you think he arranged the weather deliberately?’ said Angela. ‘Rather clever of him, if so.’

‘Of course not,’ said Freddy. ‘But you must admit it’s been tremendously convenient for him. Why, the man seems to have more lives than a cat.’

He spoke carelessly, but in reality he was watching Angela closely, since he half-suspected that she might know something about it. He might have saved himself the bother, however, for Angela knew nothing and told herself she wanted to know nothing—although she could not prevent herself from reading everything she could about the incident, or wondering where Valencourt was now.

‘Still, they’ll catch him soon enough,’ Freddy went on. ‘He can’t get far in this weather.’

‘I dare say you’re right,’ said Angela politely. ‘Is that why you came, to tell me the news?’

‘No,’ said Freddy, with some appearance of triumph. ‘As a matter of fact, I came to tell you that I’ve found the girl.’

‘Oh,’ said Angela in surprise. ‘Who is she?’

But she saw that Freddy had no intention of telling her the name without first relating his cleverness in finding it out, and so she listened with every appearance of interest as he told her of what he had been doing for the past week. He had returned to the White Star offices, he said, and had obtained from his friend there the name of the chief steward who had travelled on board the
Homeric
as it carried Davie Marchmont inexorably towards his final destination. Unfortunately, the steward could not remember much about what had happened on that voyage, although he did remember Davie Marchmont very well, given what had happened to him subsequently. Freddy questioned the steward further but got little more out of him, and he was about to give it up when he remembered what Angela had said. Had there been a lady with a child on the ship, he asked. No, there had been no children on board, the steward was sure of that—although he did remember that there had been some talk about one young girl, who was keeping herself well wrapped up but who as far as he could tell was quite obviously expecting. At that, Freddy’s ears pricked up and he asked whether the steward could remember her name. The steward racked his brains and at length hazarded that it might have been a foreign name, perhaps Dutch. Van Diemen, possibly? Freddy consulted his notebook, in which he had written the list of women on board. There was a Callie Vandermeer. Might that be she? At that the steward said ‘Ah!’ and nodded vigorously. She was the one, all right. They had talked about her because she was a Miss, but she had been so sweet and gentle, so polite to all the crew, that nobody had had the heart to be anything other than sympathetic to her plight.

‘Where is she now?’ said Angela.

‘Still here,’ said Freddy. ‘I looked through all the return passenger lists and asked at the Embassy, but found no trace of her having ever gone back to the United States. That stumped me, rather, until I remembered the baby. It’s taken me a week of talking to middle-aged matrons—who to a woman regarded me as the devil incarnate until I managed to convince them that my interest in distressed young ladies was not personal—but this morning I finally got a letter from a place in Whitechapel to say that they have the woman in question and can we please come and get her. I say, Angela, one can’t help feeling sorry for these poor girls. Some of these homes for Unspeakable Women are rather awful. It’s been a harrowing few days, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘I imagine it has,’ said Angela, who had been fortunate enough to have friends to help her all those years ago. ‘Well, if you’re sure she’s the person we’re looking for, then I suppose we had better go and talk to her.’

So it was that Angela and Freddy found themselves on their way to Whitechapel on a freezing January morning, in search of the killer of Davie Marchmont. The Bentley had been rejected as inappropriate, for they did not wish to make themselves conspicuous, and so they took a taxi. It deposited them outside a large, Victorian building in grey stone that seemed designed specifically to intimidate, for inscribed above the door were the words, ‘The Lord Hath Chastened Me Sore: But He Hath Not Given Me Over Unto Death.’

‘I believe this is meant to be one of the less awful places,’ said Freddy, as Angela shivered in the bitter wind and looked about her. He stepped forward and pressed the bell, which was shortly answered by an elderly nun who greeted them kindly and invited them to come in. Inside was barely any warmer than outside, and Angela did not take off her gloves. The nun led them down a long, bare corridor, around which their footsteps echoed loudly, and then into a tiny office, where they were interviewed by another nun—a sterner one this time—and finally escorted up three flights of stairs and into a large room that held ten beds and seemed to serve as a kind of dormitory. Each bed held a woman and an infant, and the noise of crying could be heard from some way away. Freddy averted his eyes as they were led through to one end of the room. Here in a corner was another bed, shut away behind a thin curtain.

‘Visitors to see you,’ said the stern nun, and pulled the curtain aside. ‘You may have half an hour,’ she said to Angela and Freddy, as though she intended to throw them out by force if they outstayed their welcome. They thanked her and she left, her footsteps tip-tapping towards the door.

Lying in the bed was a young woman holding a baby. She was pale, and her clothes hung off her as though she had been ill. She looked up at them questioningly.

‘Miss Vandermeer?’ said Angela.

‘Yes?’ she replied in a soft American accent. Her eyes were large and brown and her face wore a habitually sweet expression. It was hard to believe that this woman could have killed Davie Marchmont.

‘My name is Angela Marchmont,’ said Angela. ‘I’ve come to ask you about Davie.’

She looked at them for a moment, and then down at the bed.

‘I guess I knew somebody would come eventually,’ she said.

It had begun to snow again. The windows of the dormitory were large and high, but they could see the flakes against the grey of the building opposite.

‘Are you his wife?’ said Callie Vandermeer, looking back up at Angela.

‘Yes,’ said Angela.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl, and two tears appeared in the corners of her eyes and began to roll down her cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry.’

It was impossible to be stiff in the face of such obvious grief. Freddy brought out a handkerchief and handed it to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said, dabbing her eyes. ‘But I don’t deserve your kindness, as you can see.’ She looked down at the baby, which opened its eyes sleepily and then closed them again. ‘He nearly died,’ she said. ‘And so did I, they tell me. But he’s so much stronger now. In a few days, when he’s well enough, they’ll take him away from me.’

‘Shouldn’t you rather keep him?’ said Freddy.

‘I’d like to,’ she said. ‘But how can I support him, here? I don’t have the money to get back home. Davie took care of all that.’

‘Don’t you have family?’ said Angela.

‘Only an aunt,’ said Callie. ‘She’d take me in, but she doesn’t have a great deal of money and I’d be too ashamed to ask her to pay for my passage. I’m sorry,’ she said again to Angela. ‘I’d give anything to go back and do things differently, but I loved him, you see. He said we’d get married and be happy, and I believed him. I guess you were the one to find him. I’m sorry I was such a coward. I know I oughtn’t to have left him but I didn’t know what to do, and then I got sick and they took me away and brought me here. I only wish I could help in some way, but I don’t suppose there’s much I can do after all this time. I hope there wasn’t too much trouble.’

Her expression was open and innocent, and it was evident she had no idea that Angela had been arrested and put on trial for murder. Angela and Freddy glanced at one another.

‘There was a little trouble, yes,’ said Angela at last. ‘That’s why we’re here. We want to know exactly what happened that evening. It’s rather important.’

Callie looked down and with her free hand smoothed the thin bedclothes.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know where to begin.’

‘You met Davie in the States, I presume,’ said Angela.

‘Yes,’ said Callie. ‘I was in the park and he picked up something I’d dropped, and we got to talking. He was so kind and cheerful that I couldn’t help but fall in love with him right away, and he told me he felt the same. I knew pretty quickly that he wasn’t—wasn’t the best of men, but he mostly treated me well, and I guess I was dazzled by him, and I thought that with a little time and patience he would change. Not long after we met he asked me to marry him and I said yes, and for a little while I was happy, but time went on and he said nothing more about it, and then I found out I was going to have a baby, so I told him we had to get married immediately. It was then that he confessed to me that he was already married. I’d had no idea of it and it came as a horrible shock. He was terribly sorry for what he’d done and said he hadn’t meant to lie to me, and that he still wanted to get married, but that he would have to divorce his wife first. He said they’d been living separately for years, and that she was English and had gone back to London, so we’d have to go there and speak to her. He didn’t have much money—only just enough to cover the trip there, he said, but his wife was wealthy and would happily agree to a divorce and give him some money too, although it wouldn’t be enough for us to live on. Then he laughed and said something about how it didn’t matter anyway, because he had another plan in reserve and was minded to carry it out if she wasn’t nice to him, and then we’d be set for life. I didn’t know what he meant, but he was always saying things I didn’t understand and then laughing, and so I thought it was just one of his usual jokes.

‘I’d been ill and I didn’t want to travel, but he insisted and so I came with him. When we got to London he said that to save money he would go to a friend of his, and he put me in a cheap hotel. For a few days I didn’t see very much of him, and spent the days wandering around London by myself—as much as I could, at any rate, because I still wasn’t well. By that time I was getting a little fed up with him, to be truthful. I didn’t feel he was treating me as he ought, and I made up my mind to tell him so and insist that we go back to New York as soon as possible. So I did, and to my surprise he agreed. He said we’d go back on Sunday and be married immediately on our return, but first he had to carry out his little plan.’

Here she stopped to attend to the child, and Angela and Freddy glanced at one another again. Then Callie looked up.

‘I know you must think I’m stupid,’ she said. ‘I ought to have realized what he meant when he said we’d be married right away. I don’t know how long a divorce takes, but I do know it’s more than just a few days. But I’d always done what he said, and I trusted him, so I went along with it. On the Saturday night he met me outside the hotel and we went to an apartment in Mayfair. I guess that was yours,’ she said to Angela, who nodded. ‘He let himself in with a key and we went up to the top floor. It was a little late and I didn’t know why he wanted to bring me anyway, because I didn’t think you’d be exactly pleased to see me, but he told me to be quiet and that you knew all about me and didn’t mind, and that we were going to negotiate a payment. At that point I still had no idea what he was planning, and even when he took the gun out of the drawer I didn’t realize what it meant.’

She paused to wipe away the tears, which had started to fall again.

‘How could I have been so blind?’ she said. ‘Mrs. Marchmont, I swear I wouldn’t have let him do it. He would have listened to me, I know he would.’

‘He was planning to kill Angela,’ said Freddy.

Callie nodded.

‘There was a life insurance policy,’ she said. ‘Davie said you’d taken it out years ago when you were first married, and that you’d probably forgotten all about it by now.’

‘Yes, I had,’ said Angela. ‘It was worth rather a lot, as I recall.’

‘That’s what he said,’ said Callie.

The tears were falling freely now, and they waited patiently as she struggled to bring herself under control.

‘When I realized what he meant to do I was horrified. I knew he could be a little bad at times, but I had no idea he would resort to murder. I told him I wanted no part of it, and that he’d better let me leave right away. At that he laughed and told me not to be so silly, because I was already a part of it whether I liked it or not, and which would I prefer? To marry him and have a father for the baby and plenty of money, or to be alone and destitute, because that’s what I’d certainly be if I insisted on crossing him. At that I said I didn’t care about being alone, but I wouldn’t be a party to murder and I was going to warn you whatever happened. Then I went to leave, but he stopped me and held the gun to my head and said I was to go nowhere; that I was in with him to the end, and that I was to do what he said. At that I must have started crying, because he became kind again and said he hadn’t meant it; that he’d only been joking and he’d never dream of hurting me. Then he started to try and persuade me.’ She looked up at Angela. ‘He said you were a bad woman and that you had other men and had treated him cruelly. He said that nobody would miss you and that if you died then we would be free. I still couldn’t believe it, and I told him so. I said even if he did it, how did he expect to get away with it? The police would know right away that he was the one who’d killed her. Then he laughed and said he had his own insurance policy, and he showed me a glove and said he’d taken it from a man he was pretty sure was your lover. He said he would leave it at the scene of the crime and the man would get the blame and it would serve you both right. He said it would be easy, and started to show me. He went to stand behind the sofa and said, “Look, we’ll hide here, and then when she comes in, I’ll—I’ll—”’

She broke off and gazed at the two of them, her eyes wide and frightened.

‘He had the gun in his hand when he was showing me, and his head was turned towards me,’ she whispered.