A Study In Scarlet Women Page 21

  Hodges, when called in to the drawing room to answer questions, immediately repudiated Mrs. Cornish’s claims. “Maybe I did roll my eyes at Tommy Dunn a few times, but only because it was bordering on unseemly, how often he showed off that watch fob. A grown man ought to know better. I left the servants’ hall that day after supper because it was about to rain and I remembered I’d left my window open a crack—I was back five minutes later. And it wasn’t Tommy Dunn Mrs. Meek was talking to at that time, it was Becky Birtle.”

  A thought came to Treadles. “You are sure it wasn’t Miss Birtle speaking with Mr. Dunn?”

  “As far as I could tell, those two had nothing to say to each other.”

  This was odd. In a household full of older people, they were the only two youngsters. “Has it always been like that?”

  “Not always. When Becky first arrived, she talked a good deal to Tommy Dunn. And he was helpful to her. But then it all changed. He used to stay after supper to hear us talk—never said much himself but wanted to listen, especially if we brought up places we’d been and sights we’d seen. Not long after Becky came, he stopped. Just left at the end of supper and went back to his own room.”

  This fit with the supposition that Tommy Dunn had perhaps been sweet on Becky Birtle—and disappointed in his affection.

  “Is there anything else you can tell us, Mr. Hodges, that might help us in our investigation?”

  Hodges thought for a moment. “When I came back from my holiday for the inquest, the whisky decanter in Mr. Sackville’s bedroom was gone.”

  “Did you look for it?”

  “I asked Mrs. Cornish. She said she’d looked all over the house and couldn’t find it.”

  Whisky would have been a good means of administering arsenic. In fact, anything would have been a good means of administering arsenic. It was not for nothing that arsenic had been a favorite weapon in the poisoner’s arsenal. The powder was odorless and tasteless, easy to disguise in food and beverage. Not to mention, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning closely matched those of cholera—and in places where the water supply was not in question, could be blamed on gastric attacks.

  “I might as well let you know, Mr. Hodges, that arsenic was found in Mr. Sackville’s body.”

  Hodges’s hands closed into fists. He exhaled heavily a few times. “The tricks with the strychnine were ghastly enough. Arsenic, too?”

  “Arsenic, too. How frequently did Mr. Sackville take his whisky?”

  “Almost—” Hodges blew out another shaky breath. “Almost every day, but he never took more than a thimbleful or two.”

  “On what occasions did he not take it?”

  “When the weather was warm, he might ask to have a glass of wine instead. The cellar keeps the wine cool.”

  “I believe I’ve asked you this before, but let me ask you again, Mr. Hodges. Do you know of anyone—specifically, anyone in this house—who might have wished Mr. Sackville dead?”

  A muscle leaped at the corner of Hodges’s jaw, but his answer was firm. “No.”

  “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted him to suffer?”

  The gastric attacks Mr. Sackville had endured in recent months were most likely not gastric attacks at all, but the effects of arsenic.

  Hodges unclenched and clenched his hands again. “No, Inspector. We don’t have that sort of lowlife in this house.”

  Tommy Dunn echoed that opinion. “Ain’t no master more generous than Mr. Sackville. And a new master mayn’t even want us to work for him. Why would anyone hurt him?”

  He made a valid point. For a servant to poison the master of the house was for him to endanger his own livelihood, especially in a hired house like this, with no one coming to inherit the property. The next tenant might very well bring a full complement of retainers.

  Treadles asked Dunn about Mr. Hodges leaving the servants’ hall while Mrs. Meek and someone else discussed the merits of the house and of the master.

  “Was that you or was that Becky Birtle?”

  “Must have been Becky. Don’t remember nothing like that.”

  “Weren’t you there?”

  “No. Went back to me own room after supper.”

  “I understand you didn’t get on with Becky Birtle.”

  Hostility darkened Tommy Dunn’s face. “She thinks too much of herself, that girl.”

  There was an excess of antagonism in his expression; a high opinion of herself couldn’t be the only thing that bothered him about Becky Birtle.

  “Did you feel a sense of affection for her before your sentiments turned?”

  The young man snorted. “What? You asking if I fancied her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never. She’s a scrawny girl—bony like a goat. Didn’t do a thing for me.”

  “Then why did you come to dislike her?”

  Dunn shrugged, but his jaw was held so tight a vein bulged on his neck. “Like I said, she gave herself airs.”

  Something had happened to derail a once friendly enough association, but Treadles was not going to get it from Dunn.

  “Do you know anything about a whisky decanter that’s gone missing?

  “Caught Mrs. Cornish in my room looking for it. She said she didn’t think I took it, but someone might have hid it under my bed or something. Can’t say I believe her.”

  Treadles did not enjoy this aspect of his work. A murder investigation unearthed not only deeply held, obsessively nursed grievances, but a plethora of everyday resentments. The undercurrents that would have otherwise remained beneath the surface for the foreseeable future.

  One didn’t need to be naive to enjoy the idea of a harmonious household, where the master was gentlemanly and considerate and the servants dutiful to their employer and kind to one another. To not believe in the possibility was to become the kind of cynic who suspected every ordinary establishment of seething with acrimony and discontent.

  And Robert Treadles had been such a fortunate man—he owed it to himself not to go down the all-too-easy route of skepticism and disenchantment.

  As there was nothing to be gained by interviewing Jenny Price again, Treadles called in Mrs. Meek, who arrived in a high state.

  “Is it true, Inspector, that Mr. Sackville had been poisoned with arsenic?”

  Treadles had expected that the news would have spread. “I’d like to know who came to you with the information.”

  It might help him judge the differing degrees of rapports among the servants.

  “Nobody came and told me. Mrs. Cornish looked all shaken when she walked past the kitchen. So I followed her and asked what was the matter. She told me. It was such awful news that I asked both Mr. Hodges and Tommy Dunn, too, because I didn’t want to believe it.”

  She stared at Treadles, as if still hoping that he would reassure her otherwise.

  “It is true,” he said softly.

  Immediately her gaze shifted to Sergeant MacDonald. The latter nodded, closing the last avenue of denial.

  Mrs. Meek slowly sank into a chair. “But that’s evil. Evil.”

  Treadles gave her a moment to collect herself. “According to the answers you provided last time, when you reached Mr. Sackville’s bedroom, one of the first things you did was to open the curtains. Is that correct?”

  She looked at him in bafflement. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Please answer the question. Did you open the curtains?”

  “I did.”

  “You are sure they weren’t already open?”

  Mrs. Meek sat up straighter—she bristled with the injured dignity of someone about to defend her integrity. “I am completely sure, Inspector. We all rushed to Mr. Sackville’s bedside. ‘Feel him, feel him,’ Becky was yelling. So I did, and his temperature was all wrong. I looked up at Mrs. Cornish. But she wasn’t looking at
him. She was looking at the curtains. I remember this very clearly. It was still dim inside the room, but light was already seeping in around the edges of the drapes, halolike, if you will. Then Mrs. Cornish pulled open the curtains on her side and I did the same on the window closer to me.”

  There was an innocence to Mrs. Meek’s reply, a resolute lack of insinuation.

  Treadles was reminded of his own obliviousness to the significance of the curtains. A thought occurred to him. “Have you ever worked in any other position in a household, Mrs. Meek?”

  “No, Inspector. I was always the cook. Cook’s assistant early on, and then the cook.”

  Perhaps she truly was plainly stating the facts. Perhaps she herself didn’t understand the import of what she had revealed.

  “How would you describe Becky Birtle?”

  “Becky? She’s a bit of a handful. I don’t mind a high-spirited girl myself but I think Mrs. Cornish was frustrated with her.”

  “Is she an attractive girl?”

  “Not beautiful, but most girls that age are rather pretty—first bloom of youth.”

  “Is there a picture of her anywhere in the house?”

  Mrs. Meek frowned. “N—oh, wait, I remember now. A traveling photographer came through recently. Mr. Hodges said that Mr. Sackville had paid for a photograph for the servants only the year before and wouldn’t pay for another one so soon. But Mrs. Cornish said she’d pay for one herself. So we dragged some chairs outside and sat for the photographer and he came back a few days later with a copy for Mrs. Cornish.”

  “Was Becky Birtle in the picture?”

  “Yes she was. Standing right behind me.”

  And yet Mrs. Cornish had been firm that there was no photograph of the girl in the house. Treadles made a note to speak to the housekeeper again before he left.

  “Mr. Hodges tells me that a whisky decanter went missing. Have you heard about it?”

  A knock came on the door. Even before Treadles answered, Constable Perkins, who had been assigned to accompany the detectives from Scotland Yard and facilitate matters for them, peeked in. The young man’s face was flush with excitement.

  “Inspector, Sergeant, a word please.”

  Treadles raised a brow. For the constable to interrupt an interview, it had better be important. He murmured a word of apology and left the room, MacDonald in his wake.

  “Inspector, the name Sergeant told me to check—”

  “What name, Sergeant?”

  “When I was searching Mrs. Meek’s room, sir,” said Sergeant MacDonald, “I found letters addressed to a Nancy Monk. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember. So I asked Constable Perkins to see if he could find out something more.”

  “One of the men at the station remembered right away,” said Perkins. “But we didn’t want to rush, so we sent a cable on the Wheatstone machine to Scotland Yard. And they cabled back and confirmed our suspicions.

  “Nancy Monk was the defendant in an arsenic poisoning trial twenty-five years ago. Everyone in the family died, except the master of the house, who was away on business. She took the stand to testify on her own behalf and the jury came away convinced that she cared a great deal for the little children. And since there was never any evidence of anything between the cook and the master—she had a young greengrocer she was planning to marry—she was acquitted.”

  And a quarter of a century later, she turned up in another case of arsenic poisoning.

  When Inspector Treadles returned, Mrs. Meek was rocking back and forth on her seat, her fingers clutched tightly around the armrests.

  Treadles got to the point. “Mrs. Meek, have you ever gone by another name?”

  All the blood drained from her face. “Why do you ask?”

  He simply waited.

  “I was framed!” Her voice shot up an entire octave, giving her words a jagged edge. “The man I worked for—it was him. His cousins had a sheep farm and they kept white arsenic for dressing the wool. A month before everyone died he visited his cousins. He mixed that arsenic into the spare jar of snipped-and-pounded sugar I kept in the cupboard. And of course he made sure to be away on business when the sugar in the kitchen jar ran out and I started using sugar from the other jar.

  “I brought the children milk with sugar and hot cocoa for the missus, like I did every morning. They also had buttered toast sprinkled with sugar. You can’t imagine their suffering that day. I was frantic with worry. But I never thought they were poisoned. And I never thought I’d be charged.

  “She wasn’t a pretty or clever woman. But she tried to make the best possible home for him. And the children were sweet and loved everything I cooked. I was happy to hear that their father, when he proposed to the daughter of a business associate less than a year later, was turned down. I was even happier to learn that he’d died on his cousin’s sheep farm, after he was gored by an angry ram. Perhaps God wasn’t blind and deaf after all.”

  She knotted her fingers together, fingers that were large and rough from work. “But if that was justice from above, it came too late for me. My young man, he believed that I was innocent, but his mother wouldn’t let him marry anyone who’d been through such a public trial—not to mention she was afraid I’d poison her. And I couldn’t stay in Lancashire anymore. I had to say good-bye to him, move far away, change my name, and make a new life for myself.

  The former Nancy Monk looked up at Treadles, her gaze direct and earnest. “I did not poison Mr. Sackville. And if you check with my previous employer—I served her for twenty years—you’ll find that I told the truth. She was sorry to see me go. And I’d have stayed on, but I’m not so young anymore and it was too much work feeding two dozen dyspeptic ladies day in and day out.”

  “We will most assuredly be checking with your previous employer,” said Treadles.

  Her distress was so palpable that he found it difficult to breathe. He wanted to believe her, but he could not allow his own sympathies to muddy the investigation.

  “And what do you intend to do in the meanwhile, Inspector?” Mrs. Meek’s shoulders slumped. “Arrest me?”

  Treadles sighed inwardly. “I do not plan to—yet. But I strongly caution you to remain in this house—or be considered a fugitive from the law.”

  Treadles did not forget about the photograph, but Mrs. Cornish had a ready explanation. “Becky took it with her when she left. She wanted to go home, but she was afraid her parents wouldn’t let her leave again. So she asked for the photograph as a memento.”

  Treadles nodded. “During my interviews with other members of the staff, I learned of a whisky decanter that you were searching for, Mrs. Cornish. You failed to mention it to me.”

  Mrs. Cornish sucked in a breath. “But that had nothing to do with the case. There’s never been any theft in this house for as long as I’ve been here and I was upset that as soon as Mr. Sackville died somebody thought it was all right to swipe something of his.”

  On the face of it, this was a plausible enough explanation. But then again, if one merely went by appearances, there would not be an investigation into Mr. Sackville’s death. “Did you ever find it?”

  “No,” said the housekeeper immediately.

  “Do let us know if it turns up.”

  “Of course, Inspector.” Mrs. Cornish smiled tightly. “Of course.”

  Sixteen

  The response to Sherlock Holmes’s advertisement in the papers was beyond anything Charlotte could have anticipated. Even Mrs. Watson declared herself more than gratified by the influx of inquiries.

  There were, as she had cautioned Charlotte, a number of letters that had nothing to do with perplexing issues that needed unraveling. Several missives scolded Sherlock Holmes for interfering in matters that were none of his concern—one purporting to be from a friend of Lady Amelia’s, another a relation of Lady Shrewsbury’s. A few others c
laimed friendship—and kinship—with the fictional Holmes, expressing hope for renewed acquaintance and perhaps some financial assistance. The ones that amused her the most were a half dozen or so marriage proposals, from women who didn’t want the singular genius of their time to lack the warmth and solicitude of a good wife.

  There was even a gentleman convinced that Holmes must be of the Uranian persuasion.

  Great men, in my observation, are more likely than not to harbor a deep love for other great men. I therefore urge you to join our society and together strive to overturn the prejudices that would condemn us and the barriers that would have us always be outsiders, fearful of discovery and banishment.

  “I would join his society in a heartbeat,” said Charlotte to Mrs. Watson, “but I fear I shall disappoint him bitterly.”

  A portion of the remaining inquiries were rejected right away as spurious.

  “This man asserts that he has an income of four thousand pounds a year and wants to know whether his fiancée is sincere in her affection for him or only for his money.” Mrs. Watson scoffed. “Look at this paper. I should be surprised if he has an income of four hundred pounds a year.”

  Another letter, from a young woman who worked in a florist shop and was puzzled by the conduct of a customer who always bought a single rose but suddenly bought a bouquet of yellow zinnias, seemed legitimate enough to Mrs. Watson. But Charlotte, after looking at it, declared it fabricated. “Lord Ingram is an accomplished calligrapher. And he has taught me that while it is possible for a person to master more than one style of handwriting, it takes a great deal of practice to achieve fluidity in the flow of the letters. And even when one does, there might still be noticeable hesitation at the beginnings and the ends of words. In fact, looking at the script, I would guess the writer to be working for a newspaper.”

  Mrs. Watson’s eyes widened—there had been a number of inquiries from the papers, wishing for a word with Mr. Holmes, which they’d promptly discarded. Charlotte grinned. “No, his handwriting didn’t tell me that, but the letter is postmarked very close to the premises of The Times. Our would-be trickster didn’t realize that he had better be more committed to his fraud if he wanted a face-to-face meeting with the mysterious Sherlock Holmes.”