A Corpse in Shining Armour (6 page)

‘What is it?’ said Miles. ‘What’s happening?’

His view of the crate was screened by Pratt. He sounded impatient. When nobody answered he pushed past Pratt then came to
a sudden halt.

‘Oh God.’

In spite of the heat of the day, I was shivering. I told myself:
You’ve seen worse than this
. It was true, but that didn’t make it any better. I wanted to look away, but there was a terrible fascination about that
head. The shavings had settled now, just at the arch of the eyebrows. The skin of the forehead was shiny and tight-stretched,
with a small liver-coloured birthmark shaped like a map of Ireland on what would have been the hairline when the person was
younger. A man, certainly. A man going bald but not grey yet. A middle-aged man who did not go to expensive barbers. I wished
my mind would stop working like that, coolly forming conclusions while the rest of me shivered. It registered too that there
had been a peculiar tone about Miles’s ‘Oh God’. It sounded like recognition as well as shock.

To his credit, Pratt must have been cool enough to notice that too.

‘Do you know him, sir?’

Miles retched out a ‘yes’. Then added, ‘I think so.’

‘We’d better get him out.’

When it was clear that he’d get no practical help from Miles, Pratt reached into the packing case. The head flopped forward.
The hair at the back of it was black and clotted.

I thought:
Head wounds bleed a lot. There’s no blood on the shavings, so he was dead before they nailed him up in the crate.
It seemed a relief to know he hadn’t been shut up in there alive and suffocated. I don’t think I said anything out loud,
but I must have made some movement that reminded Pratt I was there.

‘Get the lady out of here,’ he said to the apprentice.

In fact, the apprentice needed help far more than I did. He looked near to fainting and I had to guide him towards the door
to the shop. Just before we got there, he leaned over and vomited. I jumped aside in time or it would have been all over my
shoes. When I glanced back, the body was out of the case and Pratt had laid it on the floor, surrounded by pieces of Sir Gilbert’s
armour. It was a man in black trousers and jacket and what looked like a coarse, yellowish shirt. He seemed rather shorter
than average and younger than I’d guessed, perhaps in his mid thirties. Above the retchings and gaspings of the lad, I heard
Pratt repeat his question:

‘Do you know him, sir?’

And Miles Brinkburn’s answer, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying:

‘It’s Handy. My father’s servant, Handy.’

I’d have liked to hear more, but had the apprentice to look after. Several well-dressed gentlemen took backward steps as I
propelled him through the door into the shop. I sat him down in a chair meant for customers and told the gauntlet salesman
to bring him a glass of water. The man looked so horrified at this breach of protocol that I thought it was just as well he
didn’t know what was happening in the workshop. He was still dithering when the door from the workshop opened and Pratt told
him to go and find a policeman.

‘A policeman, sir? Has something been stolen?’

‘Just go and do it,’ Pratt said.

The man gulped and left the shop at a run. Pratt went back into the workshop. Before he closed the door after him, I heard
a snatch of Miles’s voice, saying shouldn’t they wait before calling the police? Wait for what? I wondered. The customers
were asking each other and me what was happening. I had no idea, I said. One of the gentlemen said his armour was out in the
workshop and he hoped to goodness it wasn’t one of the things stolen. He showed signs of wanting to go through for a look,
but luckily the shop assistant was back within minutes with a police constable in tow. There are always plenty of police in
Bond Street. The assistant opened the door and let him through to the workroom. The customer worrying about his armour tried
to follow, but Pratt barred the way.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. A situation has arisen and we are having to close for the afternoon. Our apologies. We shall be open
tomorrow morning as usual. No, sir, I assure you that there’s been no robbery. Nothing is missing, nothing at all. An accident,
that’s all.’

They filed out, slowly and reluctantly. I was lingering with the last of them when the door to the workroom opened again and
Pratt came out.

‘Miss…Miss Lane, is it? I do apologise most sincerely, but for some reason the constable wishes to speak to you. If I may
send him out to you…’

‘I’ll come in,’ I said and walked past him, through the door and into the workroom. Partly it was an act of bravado to prove
to myself that my nerves were under control, partly that I was curious about the reaction of Miles Brinkburn. He was sitting
on a chair at one of the work benches by the wall, head bent, arms hanging between his legs. He stood up and looked at me
with the expression of a dog in a rainstorm, hungry for pity, and started apologising for bringing me into this. The constable
cut across him, polite but authoritative. If he was surprised that I’d come into the room instead of waiting outside, he didn’t
show it.

‘I am sorry to cause you any further distress, Miss Lane, but the coroner will need to know who was present when the body
was discovered.’

He seemed well spoken and intelligent for a mere constable. His grey eyes looked me in the face and I was sure he’d recognise
me if we met again. The body was on the floor behind him, covered with a caparison ornamented in black and silver chevrons
that must have been meant for the back of a warhorse.

I gave him my name and address and he wrote them down in his notebook.

‘I understand you were here at the invitation of Mr Brinkburn, Miss Lane?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask if you are a friend of the Brinkburn family?’

‘I met Mr Brinkburn for the first time yesterday.’

A flicker of surprise in the grey eyes.

‘And other members of the family?’

‘I have met no other members of the family.’

He was trying to place me, I could tell that. I was unmarried, with an address in Mayfair (he might not know that it was on
the unfashionable side) and I accepted invitations from gentlemen I’d only just met. The conclusion might seem obvious.

‘Had you met Mr Handy?’

‘The man in the crate? No, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen him before.’

That seemed to be all. He thanked me.

‘I’ll see Miss Lane to a cab,’ Miles said.

The constable shook his head.

‘I’d be grateful if you’d wait, sir. There are formalities. I’m sure Mr Pratt will take care of Miss Lane.’

Miles seemed about to protest. Pratt took my arm and I let him guide me towards the door. Miles called after him.

‘Pratt, will you get somebody to send for Lomax. Oliver Lomax of Lincoln’s Inn. He’ll know what to do.’

Pratt nodded and we went through to the shop. I told him I didn’t need a cab and walked into the sunlight of Bond Street,
wondering why Miles Brinkburn’s first coherent thought had been to summon a lawyer.

Back home in my room at Abel Yard, I opened the window to let in what passes for fresh air in London. It came in with the
familiar smells of sun-warmed grass from the park, of the cow byre where the yard’s resident herd of four Guernseys was kept,
of hot iron from the carriage mender’s workshop, with the usual faint whiff of cesspit underlying them. Still, it was sweeter
than the memory of that smell from the crate. I mixed some fresh ink and wrote a note to Jimmy Cuffs at the Cheshire Cheese,
Fleet Street, asking him to find out when and where the inquest into a servant named Handy would take place and let me know
by return. When I went back down to the yard, the boy who blew the bellows for the carriage mender’s forge was willing to
carry out the errand for sixpence.

Jimmy Cuffs was a man I’d met in one of my investigations. I suppose he might be described as a journalist of a kind, though
that was rather a grand title for his trade of picking up snippets from the coroners’ courts that might make a paragraph or
two in the newspapers. He was no taller than a twelve-year-old child and lurched along at a fast limp because of a club foot.
He must have had a lodging somewhere, but his seat in the corner of the Cheshire Cheese was his true residence and he was
always to be found there in the evenings. It was hard to tell his age and nobody knew his surname. Jimmy Cuffs was the name
given to him by the other scribblers who were his drinking companions, because once, when the coroners’ courts had been unusually
dull, he couldn’t afford to have his shirts washed, so took to wearing his rusty black jacket buttoned right to the neck,
with a pair of respectable white cuffs sticking out from the sleeves. Only the cuffs, with no shirt attached to them.

Jimmy Cuffs was a cultivated man. I’d seen him in St Martin’s Lane with his nose pressed to a bookshop window like a starving
boy at a pie shop. He claimed to know all the Odes of Horace by heart. Late one night, when business had taken me to Fleet
Street, I’d heard him trying to prove it by reciting one of them to a crowd of drunken friends. He was just as drunk himself
and had to cling to a lamp post to stay upright, but his Latin sounded as clear as Cicero’s. He and I were occasionally able
to do each other professional favours. Although I’d never betray a client’s confidence, I could sometimes put a story Jimmy’s
way that did him good and nobody else any harm.

In not much more than an hour, the bellows boy returned with his reply, written on the back of a few inches of newspaper proof
in his fine Italic hand:
Day after tomorrow, Thursday, 10 a.m. at Marylebone. Would have been tomorrow, but they have to wait for a witness to come
up from the country.

While I was reading this, Mrs Martley returned from her daily visit to Jenny and Daniel, with two warm pies for our supper
in her basket because she hadn’t had time to cook. I’d opened a bottle from our small store of claret in celebration of having
a case that might pay well and poured two glasses to go with the pie. As we ate and drank I asked her how Jenny was.

‘I’ve never known a woman so happy. Mr Suter fusses over her that much, he’ll hardly let her lift a finger. I told him not
to worry. She may be only a little scrap of a thing, but she’s strong as oak.’

‘The baby’s due soon, isn’t it?’

She gave me a reproachful look for not knowing.

‘Four weeks this Sunday. It’s often late with the first, especially if it’s going to be a boy. She’s carrying it high, so
…’

Tides of midwife’s technicalities drifted over my head. Mrs Martley had got over her reluctance to talk about such matters,
with me in my unmarried state. There were times when I wished she hadn’t. I thought about the Brinkburn family, and how the
death of Handy might affect my investigations.

‘…so I told her if she did it again I’d pitch her down the stairs and watch while she bounced.’

‘What?’

It took me a while to realise that she’d changed the subject. While I was away, she’d caught the waif Tabby inside our part
of the house.

‘Right up here in the parlour, looking round like somebody at the zoo. The girl’s so alive with lice and fleas it makes my
flesh creep to look at her.’

It made my flesh creep too. Still, I felt an interest in the girl.

‘Did she say what she was doing here?’

‘She said she wanted to know how people lived. Can you imagine the insolence of it? I told her I had a good mind to call the
beadle and have her put in the poorhouse.’

‘Oh, don’t do that.’

I didn’t want Tabby in the house uninvited either, but it sounded as if the girl had been guilty of nothing but curiosity.
Since that’s a sin of mine as well, it gave me something of a fellow feeling for her. I decided not to tell Mrs Martley about
the day’s events. She thoroughly disapproved of my way of earning a living, even though it did pay our rent and put food on
the table. A few months before, I’d lost patience and told her roundly that she must either accept it or go. To my surprise,
she stayed. To my even greater surprise, I was glad that she’d stayed. So we’d come to a truce on the subject. I tried not
to intrude my professional concerns on her, while she tried hard not to nag about my irregular comings and goings. When, after
the meal, I fetched my old black bonnet down from my room and asked her help in steaming it back into shape, she didn’t even
ask why I needed it at the height of summer.

Anybody may attend an inquest. It’s a public event like any other court case. Still, a woman among the spectators tends to
be conspicuous and I didn’t want to attract attention. I wore the re-shaped bonnet tilted well down to shade my face and a
black cloak, hoping to pass for some obscure mourning relative. The usher didn’t give me a second glance as I took my place
at the end of the back row in the stuffy courtroom. The windows were set so high that the dusty sunlight coming through them
made little difference to the dimness of the place. When Jimmy Cuffs limped in, I kept my head down. He walked past to a seat
at the front without noticing me. From the sideways glance I had of him, he looked to be the only cheerful person present.
The oddity of the body’s discovery combined with the current jousting mania should pay his wine and laundry bills for another
week. The coroner arrived and we all stood up. The jurors were sworn in and immediately sent out again for the formality of
viewing the body in a room next door. After a two-day delay in this heat, I didn’t envy them. Several were holding handkerchiefs
to their noses as they came back.

While most of the attention was on them, two men walked in and sat down on the end of my row, with eight chairs between us.
The elder one looked to be in his early fifties and had an air of distinction that set him apart from anybody else in the
room. He was slim and upright, with a firm profile, iron-grey hair and clean-shaven face. His black jacket and trousers were
finely tailored, his shoes crafted by a master boot-maker to flatter long and narrow feet. The younger man was Miles Brinkburn.
He too was carefully dressed in black, but in contrast to his companion he looked uncertain and ill at ease, all his vitality
and confidence gone. The coroner told the jury that the first business of the court was to establish the identity of the deceased.