A Corpse in Shining Armour (20 page)

‘So you’d have the wrongdoers in uniform too, or the police in plain clothes?’

‘I think the latter would be more practical, don’t you? Some of us, at least. It will come, I’m sure.’

‘If I may say so, you strike me as a very unusual policeman,’ I said.

He laughed.

‘I don’t intend to be patrolling the streets of London by night all the rest of my life, if that’s what you mean. Still, night
duty has its interest.’

Something about the way he said it made me wary.

‘Oh?’

‘I’ve been talking to a colleague who was on patrol in Bond Street on the night of the Monday before last. That’s the night
before Mr Brinkburn made that regrettable discovery at Pratt’s, if you remember.’

I said nothing.

‘It was around two o’clock in the morning,’ he went on. ‘Our duties include keeping an eye on the doorways and windows of
premises, in case anybody is attempting to break in. My colleague disturbed somebody at the side door of Pratt’s.’

‘Trying to break in?’

‘Certainly loitering in a suspicious manner. My colleague shone his lamp on him and he ran off to a gig parked round the corner
and drove away at speed. On close inspection, it turned out that he had been trying to force the lock.’

‘I’m sure Bond Street attracts a lot of thieves,’ I said.

‘At a shop dealing in armour? And a thief in a gig? I asked my colleague to describe the man. He only had a fleeting view,
of course, but his account was interesting. He said the person was a young gentleman with very dark hair.’

He emphasised the word ‘gentleman’. We walked on a few strides.

‘I saw the younger Mr Brinkburn at the inquest,’ Constable Bevan said. ‘He has dark hair. I gather that his brother’s is lighter.’

‘Half the men in London have dark hair,’ I said.

Constable Bevan nodded, as if he’d expected my reaction.

‘Quite so. We mustn’t jump to conclusions, must we? Shall you be going back to Buckinghamshire, Miss Lane?’

‘That’s my business, Constable Bevan.’

I let my heel press lightly against Rancie’s flank and she moved instantly into her faster walking pace, leaving him behind
in a few strides. He had been intolerably familiar, but what annoyed me more was his obvious belief that I was close to Miles
Brinkburn.

When I got home, there was another annoyance of the same kind, in the form of a note from Celia, with two rectangles of deckle-edged
pasteboard enclosed in it. The date was that day’s.

Dearest Elizabeth,

Are you back in town yet? I’ve had no answer to the note I sent you in the country, so perhaps it missed you. I’m still confined
to my sofa and am almost dying of boredom. Philip and I were invited to the Fair Ladies ball at Lady D’s this evening, but
that tyrant of a doctor won’t hear of my going even if I promise faithfully not to dance, and of course dear Philip won’t
go without me, even though I told him he should and at least bring me back a few crumbs of gossip. So I am enclosing our tickets
in case you can make use of them. I know one is not supposed to pass them on, but everybody does and there’ll be such a scrimmage
there that nobody will ever notice. If you do make use of them, you are to visit me tomorrow without fail and bring me not
just crumbs but whole slices of gossip, especially about you know who and you know who else, who have definitely been invited.
Please do not fail your affectionate friend,

Celia

I was about to throw the tickets away then, on second thoughts, tucked them into my reticule. If Celia had seen that, she’d
have drawn quite the wrong conclusion.

Amos drove into the yard at five minutes to five in a black-lacquered phaeton with cream leather upholstery and primrose yellow
wheel spokes, drawn by a strawberry roan cob. He wore his brown top hat with a silver cockade, and his neckcloth and the rosebud
in his buttonhole were yellow to match the wheel spokes. He swung himself down to hand me to my seat.

‘I’m not sure I can live up to all this splendour,’ I said.

He grinned, spun the phaeton in a circle as tight as a good skater’s on ice and off we went by Mount Street and Park Lane,
along Piccadilly at a spanking trot and down Haymarket. For all my worries, I couldn’t help feeling in holiday mood as we
bowled along overtaking less nimble vehicles. London on a fine June evening makes you feel more alive than any other city
in the world and I’ve always loved the circus from the time my brother Tom and I were taken there as children. At the far
end of Whitehall, I stopped myself from looking to the right at the sad wreckage the fire had made of the lovely old palace
of Westminster, like a rotten tooth in a beloved face. We trotted on across Westminster Bridge, with the river glinting in
the sun beneath us. I hadn’t needed to ask Amos where we were heading. What other circus would it be than Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre?

Once we were over the river, Amos turned into the yard of an inn, had a word with the ostler, and left the cob and phaeton
in his care. We strolled together to Astley’s and Amos insisted on paying for seats in one of the boxes in the middle of the
house. Astley’s prides itself on being a theatre and circus combined, so first we had to sit through a comedy about two young
lovers and a wicked guardian who wanted to marry the girl to a rich old man instead. I found it tedious, but Amos laughed.
At last the lovers were united, the scenery cleared away and the area became a circus ring, with a troop of horse acrobats
whooping on, dressed as Red Indians, riding bareback with long feather head-dresses streaming out behind them. Their tricks
were amazing: hanging down at full gallop to pick up flags from the sawdust with their teeth, ankles locked round their horses’
necks, leaping on and off each other’s mounts and forming a pyramid of ten riders on the backs of two cantering horses. Three
of the horses were piebalds and Amos craned forward for a closer look at them, then shook his head.

The Indians were followed by a comic routine between a clown and the riding master who was dressed like a cavalryman in white
breeches and frogged jacket, then a girl acrobat in ballerina costume, pirouetting and somersaulting on the broad back of
a dapple grey. After her, more clowns, a whole troop of them this time. They chased round the ring, assaulting each other
with cardboard truncheons, strings of sausages, buckets of water.

One of the clowns fell over backwards, pretending to be knocked unconscious. To laughs and cheers from the audience, a doctor’s
cart came galloping to his rescue.

‘There we are.’

Amos gave a sigh of satisfaction. The cart was rectangular and might at a pinch be described as coffin-shaped, drawn by a
piebald cob. The doctor, in black top hat and white make-up, opened the lid and produced a giant syringe and a gallon-sized
bottle of red medicine. He managed the routine neatly, although his left arm hung useless at his side. The victim was revived
and, after more comic business, the doctor’s cart galloped out. As it passed beneath us, the angle of the gaslight showed
a butterfly-shaped brand on a dark patch of the horse’s hindquarters. We stayed for the rest of the performance because it
would have been impossible to get out from where we were sitting without creating a disturbance and, as Amos said, the doctor
wouldn’t be going anywhere. After the finale, as soon as the audience began to move, Amos cleared a path through them and
I followed him into the street.

‘There’ll be a back way in,’ Amos said.

There was, surrounded by street urchins trying to get a look at the horses and riders. We walked past them to a yard at the
rear of the arena, full of horses and performers. The rectangular cart was standing by the wall with the piebald, unharnessed,
eating from a bucket beside it. The man who’d played the doctor was watching it, still in his chalky make-up and smoking a
clay pipe.

Amos walked up to him.

‘Didn’t I see you in Bond Street, day before yesterday?’

The man jumped and dropped his pipe, but caught it deftly on its way to the ground.

‘What’s it to you?’

‘Just interested,’ Amos said. ‘Nice horse you’ve got.’

The man glanced from Amos to me and back again, wondering what to make of us. I decided to leave the questioning to Amos.

‘There’s plenty of people don’t care for coloured horses,’ Amos said. ‘I reckon most of them have got more sense than the
rest.’

‘Horse sense,’ the man said, grinning uneasily at his own joke. ‘And most horses have got more sense than most humans.’

Amos laughed, took a pigskin tobacco pouch from his pocket, opened it and held it out to the man.

‘Like a fill-up?’

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

They filled up their pipes, lit them and puffed away for a while without saying anything. The man was visibly relaxing. After
a few minutes, Amos introduced himself and gathered in return that the man’s name was Stanley Best.

‘I know the gentleman who owns the armour,’ Amos said.

‘Armour?’

‘That was what was in the crates you and your friend collected. Didn’t you know that?’

Stanley shrugged.

‘Didn’t know and didn’t care.’

‘Did you have to take it far?’ Amos said.

‘Belle Sauvage, Ludgate Hill, to await collection.’

I remembered that the Belle Sauvage was another of the big coaching inns.

‘Who was it addressed to?’ Amos said.

‘Who wants to know? We wasn’t stealing it. My friend had a note, giving us the authority.’

‘Who from?’

‘You’re asking a lot of questions. What’s it got to do with you?’

Amos plunged his hand into a pocket and brought it out holding a handful of coins. Stan’s eyes went to them.

‘You get gentlemen playing jokes on other gentlemen,’ Amos said. ‘Maybe your gentleman’s playing games with mine.’

‘Maybe.’

Amos spun a sovereign into the air. Stan’s good hand came up and caught it, quick as a swallow taking a gnat.

‘Wasn’t addressed to anybody,’ Stan said. ‘We just had to leave it there, that’s all.’

Amos nodded, as if he’d guessed that.

‘Your friend who drove you to Bond Street, is he in the circus too?’

‘One of the Red Indians. I was too, till I got ridden over and this happened.’

He flapped his useless left arm like a penguin’s wing. Amos spun another sovereign and Stan plucked it from the air, deftly
as the first.

‘Play this game all night, if you like.’

‘Who was the gentleman told you to collect the armour?’ Amos said.

‘We never met him. It was a fellow acting for him.’

‘What happened?’

Stan waited for another sovereign but Amos’s hand went back into his pocket.

‘There’s a place we drink at,’ Stan said at last. ‘You get all sorts there. One night, there was this fellow in there we hadn’t
seen before, putting it around he’d pay good money for somebody who’d do little jobs for him, no questions asked.’

‘Against the law little jobs?’

‘That’s what everybody thought. They were all stringing him on, laughing at him behind their hands. So my friend and I let
him buy us a beer or two and we ask him what he wants. We were having him on. If it had been against the law, we didn’t want
nothing to do with it.’

‘Stands to reason,’ Amos said, straight-faced.

‘Only it turns out it wasn’t. This fellow works for a gentleman who wants to play a joke on another gentleman, like you said.
All we have to do is run errands now and then, and not ask questions. He says do we have access to a horse and cart, and we
say yes.’

‘You didn’t mention it was a circus horse and a clown’s cart?’

‘Why should we? He didn’t ask. So we say, all right, and he goes away and says he’ll let his gentleman know and we’ll be hearing
from him. For a long time, there’s nothing and we forget about it. Then last Saturday there’s a note waiting for us at the
public house, saying we’re to collect the crates on Monday and take them to the Belle Sauvage, like I said. We’re to give
the note to the man at the shop, to let him know it’s above board.’

‘Who signed the note?’

‘Couldn’t make it out. Began with D or might have been B.’

‘Was there money with it?’

‘A few quid.’

‘How many quid?’

‘Five times more than I’ve had from you.’

‘Ten pounds, for a little job like that?’

Stan looked defensive.

‘The fellow said there was money in it if we did what we were told.’

Amos glanced at me. There was no doubt in my mind that the fellow in the public house had been acting on behalf of one of
the Brinkburn brothers. The question was which. I tried a question of my own.

‘And the man never said anything about who his employer was?’

Stan hesitated, less at ease with me than with Amos.

‘No.’

‘You said it was a long time from when he approached you to when the message came about collecting the crates. How long?’

Stan wrinkled his forehead and seemed to be counting up in his mind.

‘A good three weeks, I’d say. Back at the start of the month or even late May.’

‘Can you describe him? Was he tall?’

He looked at Amos. Another sovereign flipped through the air into his hand.

‘No, short as what I am.’

Below average height, then.

‘How old?’

‘Not young. Thirty or a bit more.’

‘What did he look like.’

‘Nothing remarkable.’

‘You must remember something. What colour was his hair?’

He thought about it.

‘He didn’t have much of it. I remember noticing that when he pushed his cap back. He was bald up to the top of his head and
he had this funny mark where the hair would have been.’

‘What?’

I must have yelped it out because he looked startled.

‘Funny mark?’ I said. ‘What sort of funny mark? Was it the colour of a liver chestnut horse?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘And this shape?’

I picked up his whip from where it was leaning against the wall and used the end of it to draw a rough outline of the map
of Ireland in the dust.