A Duty to the Dead (21 page)

“I’m afraid it’s none of them, Mrs. Talbot. We’re trying to find anyone who might have known a young woman by the name of Lily Mercer. She worked here in this house as an upstairs maid for a time some fourteen years ago.”

“And why do you wish to find this young person?” Mrs. Talbot asked, her eyes narrowing. “Is it in her interest or yours, this search?”

“Mine,” I admitted. “I never knew Lily Mercer. But her family moved to New Zealand, and so I’m unable to contact them. I was hoping one of your present staff might remember her. Lieutenant Philips is as interested as I am to learn more about the girl. One of his friends was accused of harming her, you see, and I’d like to know if it is true, or if he was falsely accused.”

We had discussed in the cab coming here what to admit to and what not.

Mrs. Talbot considered us a moment, then picked up the silver bell at her elbow. The maid who had admitted us answered the summons. Mrs. Talbot sent the maid belowstairs to question the staff.

Mrs. Talbot, meanwhile, turned her attention to me.

“You are doing nothing to help with the war, Miss Crawford?”

I could see myself leaving here as part of any number of committees, or dispatched to Hampshire to grow vegetables on the lawns of some great estate.

“I was serving on
Britannic,
Mrs. Talbot, when she went down,
and my arm was broken when she was struck. I can’t return to duty until it’s fully healed.”

She nodded approvingly. At that moment there was a tap at the door, and the maid was back.

“There’s the laundress, Mrs. Talbot. She remembers the young person in question.”

“Then bring her here.”

“If you’ll forgive me, she might be more comfortable speaking to us in the servants’ hall,” I suggested quickly.

But Mrs. Talbot wouldn’t hear of it. “Nonsense. Bring her here, Mattie.”

And in due course, Mattie returned with the laundress. She might have been young and pretty fourteen years ago, but hard work had toughened her skin and reddened her hands and taken away her youth.

Her name, Mattie informed us, was Daisy.

“Hallo, Daisy,” I said. “It’s kind of you to speak to us. We’re concerned about Lily Mercer. Did you know her?”

“She’s dead,” Daisy answered bluntly. She was clearly ill at ease.

“Yes, I know that. But as her family has left England, I’m hoping to find someone who can tell me a little about her.”

“We was employed here, when this house was let to visitors to London. That was when Mr. Horner owned it, and didn’t want to live here anymore. He said it was haunted by his wife’s ghost. Which is absurd, o’ course. But he believed it. And so we stayed on as staff, those that chose to stay, and went with the house, so to speak. When Mr. Horner died of his grief, the house was sold to Mrs. Talbot’s brother, and then she inherited it from him.”

“What happened to the rest of the staff?”

“Some stayed. Others gave in their notice.”

“Tell me about Lily?”

“There’s nothing to tell. She died here—” Her eyes slid toward Mrs. Talbot’s face. “And soon after, her family went away. Like you said.”

I tried another approach, but Daisy remained tight-lipped. I was surprised that she’d even admitted she knew Lily. I thought it likely that curiosity had got the better of her, and she was here to satisfy it. Or see if there was anything in it for herself?

“Speak up, Daisy, the lady and the gentleman want to hear what you have to say.”

But Daisy stuck to her story, and that was that.

We thanked Mrs. Talbot after she was dismissed, and Mattie came to see us to the door.

“Damn!” Peregrine said as it shut behind us.

The snow was a little thicker, but not intending to last. I thought the temperature had eased up a very little.

We were about to walk toward the corner in search of a cab when the tradesman’s door opened and closed quietly, and there was Daisy, a shawl thrown over her head, coming quickly toward us.

“Miss!”

I stopped, my hand on Peregrine’s arm. “Daisy?”

“Yes, Miss. I’m sorry, but we were all sworn to secrecy when Lily died. Mr. Horner didn’t want the story getting about, scaring off people wanting to let the house for the Season. I couldn’t tell Mrs. Talbot, could I?”

“No, of course not.” I looked around, searching for somewhere we could stand and talk without freezing to death. But there was no place except the square and we didn’t have a key.

“Did you like Lily?” I asked, trying to learn as much as possible while Daisy was in the mood to talk to us. But she hesitated, and I said, “There’s five pounds for you, as a reward for helping us.”

Her eyes lit with avarice. “Thank you, Miss, I could use the money.”

I took a five-pound note from my purse but held on to it.

Daisy said, her words coming quickly, “She didn’t just die here, did she? She was murdered. The staff had the evening off, except for Lily, who was set to looking after the little boys. But she was to meet
the young man she was walking out with, and she wasn’t happy about missing him. Still, she went upstairs to see the lads to bed. It was the last time I saw her. She hadn’t come back down again, by the time I was leaving. Later we heard that one of the lads had killed her, that he’d used his pocketknife on her, mutilating her something fierce. But I don’t see how that can be, do you? A pocketknife? He must have come down to the kitchen for something larger. At any rate, the family left London sudden-like, and Mr. Horner paid off any of us that wanted to leave, but swore us all to secrecy. Bad for business, he said. That’s what murder was.” She finished, eyeing the five-pound note.

“What was Lily like?”

“She was always out for herself. Always looking to better herself. She’d study the photographs in the London
Gazette,
and carry herself like them, head up, back straight, and copy their style of clothes for her day off. Silk purse out o’ a sow’s ear, that’s what it was, and her telling me that my hands were too big and my fingers too thick. And how was I to help that, I ask you, when I was the laundress!” Her grievance might have been old but it was fresh. “She had a temper too.”

“Was Lily good to the children in her care?”

Daisy shrugged. “I can’t say. But I remember one of the lads leaned over the upstairs railing one day and called her a nasty name, and she told him he was a monster and God would see to him one day.”

I could feel Peregrine stirring beside me.

“Which one? Do you remember?”

“Lord if I know,” she said,
“I
was never abovestairs. We come home at eleven that night, as we was told to do, to be ready for church service the next morning, and there was police everywhere, and Mrs. Graham crying as if she’d never stop, and Mr. Graham was pacing, his face black as Satan, and I don’t know where the lads were, but I heard they’d been clapped up in their rooms. I
came to the servants’ door to bring hot water to the housekeeper, and I could hear Mrs. Graham begging them not to take her son from her.”

Mr. Graham—Peregrine’s father—was long dead by that time. It must have been Robert who was pacing.

“Do you remember anything else?” I asked.

“They said someone had cleaned away most of the blood before the police got there. That was strange, wasn’t it, but Mrs. Graham claimed she couldn’t have the poor girl seen like that, it was indecent and horrid. All I know is, there was three sheets missing, the next time I counted the wash, and I got the blame for ruining them and hiding it.”

“Did you go to the services for Lily? Did you see her family there? How did they take their daughter’s death?”

“There wasn’t no one but her mother, her sister, and her brother. There was no church service that I heard of. And I asked.” She was stamping her feet against the cold now, and casting anxious glances at the door behind her, as if half afraid someone would see her talking with us. “It was the talk of the servants’ hall. Everyone felt she didn’t deserve to be abandoned like she was, by her own family. I heard they went out to New Zealand before she was hardly cold. If it had been my daughter, now, I’d have had her ashes and taken her with me.”

“Perhaps they did,” I said. Part of the agreement with the Graham solicitor, to remove all traces of the girl, even a gravestone?

I couldn’t imagine such thoroughness to protect Peregrine, already in the asylum. It would make more sense if the murderer had been Arthur.

I gave the woman the five-pound note, and she bobbed her head, thanking me, and quietly opened the door. With a glance into the passage behind her, she said, “I said I didn’t know one boy from the other, and it’s true. But the one that killed her, he was the apple of his mother’s eye. It like to have killed her too.”

Waiting for a cab, Daisy’s voice echoed in my ears. “…He was the apple of his mother’s eye…”

Even under great stress, I couldn’t envision Mrs. Graham referring to her stepson in that fashion. But she had called Arthur her favorite.

Stop now,
I told myself. Arthur’s dead, and what good will it do to bring down his reputation now? He can’t be punished, and if there’s judgment beyond the grave, he’s long since been judged.

But what about the man beside me? He would never have his freedom or his reputation restored.

Jonathan I could accept as a murderer. Wasn’t that odd? His callousness was only too evident, and for all I knew about murderers, that must count as one of the indications that a man could kill. But he was a soldier now, and bitter, and disillusioned. He might have been very different before the war.

Peregrine spoke, startling me.

“I was never the apple of her eye….”

“What was she to tell the police, then? That she welcomed her stepson as a murderer?” My voice was harsher than I had expected.

He looked down at me. “You don’t want it to be anyone else.”

“You told me you didn’t doubt that you’d killed that poor girl.”

“So I did. I still don’t doubt it. But it would be comforting in the dark of the night to think that someone believed in
me.”

I felt the blow of that comment almost physically. “I’m sorry—”

“But you aren’t, are you? You’re afraid that it might have been Arthur, and you were half in love with my brother, weren’t you?”

“No. But I was fond enough of him to want to believe he couldn’t have killed anyone.” Even as I spoke the words, I was ashamed.

He reached into the pocket of his coat and brought out something that caught the light from the nearest streetlamp.

It was the pistol. It had been there all along, and I had almost stopped believing in it.

“It wasn’t Jonathan’s. I lied to you there. It was in the pocket of the good doctor’s coat. I think he was afraid of us, his patients. And so he went armed, in case.”

“But that’s disgusting! A doctor would never—”

“You haven’t spent a great deal of time in a madhouse, have you? Barton’s Asylum has a locked ward where the most dangerous patients are kept. I was there, in the beginning. Until Dr. Sinclair ordered me to be moved to another floor where I was kept in a locked room by myself. Do you have any idea what it was like for a fourteen-year-old boy to be at the mercy of what must surely have been the most depraved men? I fought one off one night, screaming for help, and help never came. That’s when I gave up all hope.”

If that was true, I thought, then Peregrine Graham had been lucky to come out of that place sane.

He was holding out the weapon to me. “Take it. I was going to use it on myself, if they tried to return me to Barton’s.”

“I don’t want it. Put it away, Peregrine, before someone sees it!”

I could tell he was smiling, a flash of white teeth under the shadow of his cap. But not in amusement. The pistol disappeared. “Yes, of course. I might still need to shoot Mrs. Hennessey.”

There was such bitterness in his voice that I said, “I’m not about to carry a weapon in my pocket—besides, the pocket isn’t big enough. When we are back at the flat—”

“What are we to do now? Will you call your father, or the police?”

“No, this isn’t finished. I’m going back to Owlhurst, and I’m going to see the rector’s journals.”

“Not alone. I’m going with you. What have I to lose?”

G
ETTING THERE WAS
easier said than done. Once more we hired Mr. Owens and his motorcar to drive us from Tonbridge to Owlhurst. As we passed Barton’s Asylum, I could see Peregrine’s shoulders tense. He was in the seat beside Mr. Owens, and it was another five miles before he relaxed again.

I directed Mr. Owens to the hotel in Owlhurst, a part of the little village I hadn’t seen before. The Rose and Thorn was a small Georgian hotel with a handsome reception and lounge where two or three other travelers were enjoying their tea.

No one took note of the young soldier with me, and we were given two rooms overlooking the street.

My intention was to visit the rector, and ask him to let me borrow the journals to read in my room, which I could then share with Peregrine. And so I walked down the High Street toward the church, my mind on what to say to him to explain this sudden reappearance.

And the first person I encountered was the doctor.

Dr. Philips stopped in his tracks.

“Am I dreaming?” he asked with a smile. “I never expected to see you again. We used you terribly, didn’t we?”

“I was only doing my duty,” I said lightly. “How is Sally Booker?”

“Her mother took her to visit a cousin in Oxford. Probably for the best. What brings you back again? The Grahams?”

“I’ve come on my own account, actually. Did you hear about Peregrine Graham’s escape?”

“My God, yes. The village was in turmoil. The general thinking was, he would come here to wreak havoc on his family. Jonathan was as grim as I’d ever seen him, and Owlhurst was combed by the police. It was thought Peregrine might try to live in the wood where the owls are. That proved to be a false lead. A watch was kept on the house. And then word came that he’d gone to Dover. They lost track of him there. One young soldier went missing, and it was thought that he’d been killed for his uniform and that Peregrine had reached France, posing as the missing man. But then that soldier turned up—apparently he’d had second thoughts at the last minute and gone to Canterbury to wed his sweetheart there before embarking. Later a body washed ashore, rather decomposed, but Jonathan went to identify it anyway. He couldn’t be sure it was Peregrine, or so I was told. But the hunt was called off. The police had other matters demanding their attention, and the feeling was, the poor man couldn’t have survived very long in this weather, out in the open. In his shoes, I wouldn’t have gone back to the asylum, once out of it. And the sea is merciful.”

“That’s a very compassionate opinion.”

“Is it? That’s the way Ted Booker chose.”

“Did they actually declare Peregrine dead?” I asked, thinking what that might mean to the living Peregrine.

“With reservations. Until new information comes along.”

“Oh.”

“You said Peregrine brought you here?”

For an instant I was so stunned, I couldn’t speak. Then I realized that Dr. Philips had drawn conclusions from the direction the conversation had taken.

“Actually I wanted to ask the rector a question. Nothing to do
with the Grahams.” At least, not directly…it wasn’t a complete fabrication.

“I promise I won’t drag you to my surgery every other day. At least not this visit. We’ve got a new nurse, an older woman who seems to be steady as a rock. And thank God for that.”

He had turned to walk with me toward the rectory, and after a moment he said, “Speaking of reservations. I must admit I’ve got my own about Ted Booker’s death. I’ve kept that to myself. I’d appreciate it if you did the same.”

I stopped in the middle of the street, right in front of a woman pushing twins in a pram. “Reservations. That’s a strong word.”

“Look, come and have tea with me, will you? There’s no one I can speak to here, without stirring up the devil of a fuss, and I can’t afford to do that. But you’ll leave Owlhurst, and carry my secrets safely away with you.” The last he said with a quirk of an eyebrow, and laughed.

“Back to war, you mean.”

We went into the little tea shop within sight of the hotel and ordered tea and small sandwiches.

“I’ve not had my breakfast,” Dr. Philips said ruefully. “Another lying-in. I can almost count on a baby arriving nine months after the soldier husband came home on leave. And this one was an eight months’ wonder. Still, it had his father’s nose, according to the fond grandmother, and who am I to tell the world otherwise?”

When the tea had come and we were alone in the corner of the shop, watching the cold wind bowl down the street in gusts that had men clamping a hand on their hats and women’s skirts blowing about their ankles, Dr. Philips began in a low voice, “Do you remember the smudged footprint I saw in the passage the morning I found Ted Booker dead?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I’ve given a great deal of thought to that footprint. And it worries me.”

I told him about the conversation I’d had with Jonathan, but he shrugged it off. “All the more reason, if Booker was asleep, to wonder about this print. I have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Denton, Sally’s mother, must have come to see him, and she distressed him to the point that he finished the botched job.”

“Oh, dear God.” I remembered my conversation with Mrs. Denton, and I thought she might well have come and undone all the good I’d felt I’d accomplished. Or had I simply been congratulating myself over my skills, and not seen the fact that Ted Booker was trying to put my mind at ease, not the other way around?

“I can’t believe—I mean, that’s tantamount to murder!” I whispered.

Dr. Philips looked around, then said softly, “I doubt she knew what the outcome could have been.”

“But she’d watched him for weeks—she’d seen how fragile his state of mind was—she
did
know. She told me that both her daughter and her grandson would be better off if Ted had blown his head off with that shotgun.”

“Yes, but what am I to do about this?” Dr. Philips asked, leaning back in his chair, lines of worry etching his face in the pale light from the windows. “Do I go to the police? What if I’m wrong? I’ve caused trouble for her for nothing. And it wouldn’t do my own reputation here any good. A good many people sympathized with Sally and her mother. They knew Booker could be violent, and they forgot he was a soldier who had been wounded in spirit rather than flesh.”

“Did you speak to the rector?”

“No. He’s not—worldly?—and would feel obliged to go to Mrs. Denton and pray over the state of her soul. What good would that do either of them?”

“I take your point,” I answered slowly. “And you can’t go to the police.” I sighed and watched a small boy racing down the street, spirits high as he and his dog chased a goose that had escaped from the farmer’s wife lumbering in their wake. “Ted Booker is dead.
Nothing is going to bring him back again. And he’d probably refuse to come, even if by some miracle he could be offered the chance. And Sally is probably better off. She’d never learn to cope with his moodiness, even if he tried to heal.”

“Are you saying I should just keep my mouth shut and try to forget this whole business?”

“No, of course you can’t do either. But since the only proof is a footprint that was there then and now isn’t, there’s nothing concrete to support your suspicion. And you did give testimony at the inquest that Ted Booker was not in his right mind. You’d be changing that, in a sense. I don’t see that you can accomplish anything by raising the issue. In time, Mrs. Denton’s conscience might get the best of her.”

“A deathbed confession? I was hoping you might have a brilliant idea I could use,” he said. “I’ve exhausted even my own patience.”

“If Mrs. Denton meant no harm,” I said, “then while it was foolish to visit Ted so soon after his attempt at suicide, she might have wanted assurances.” I added, “However glad she might be now, to have him dead, it will come to haunt her.”

But Dr. Philips was more realistic. “I doubt it. Well, I’ve burdened you, and neither of us has come up with a solution. Still, I’m relieved in a way. It helps to talk through one’s troubles.”

I wished I could talk through my own. But I dared not tell this man that the missing Peregrine Graham was alive and probably standing at a window not fifty yards from where we sat.

He paid for our tea and he saw me as far as the rectory before returning to his surgery.

The rector was quite surprised to find me at his door. He offered me tea, but I refused as politely as I could.

“What brings you here, my dear? I know a troubled spirit when I see it. If I can help—”

“I’ve been thinking,” I said, careful how I began, “about the journals your predecessor kept. Do you think—would you mind if I read
them? I attended Peregrine Graham when he was ill, and now they tell me he’s dead. It would do no harm if I learned more about the crime that put him where he was.”

“They reported that he’d stolen a pistol from the asylum,” the rector said, “and they feel he must have used it on himself. How sad. I asked Mrs. Graham if perhaps she would consider a memorial of some sort—a private service, a marker in the churchyard, whatever might suit the family. But she felt that it would be rather—a reminder of something the family preferred to leave as a closed subject.”

“You mean the family didn’t wish to inter the—er—remains?”

“Jonathan Graham couldn’t be sure, you see. I expect Mrs. Graham felt that a memorial would be rather—premature.”

And the family of Lily Mercer had been paid to emigrate to New Zealand. I wondered suddenly if they had prospered there, or if the change had made them wretched.

“I can appreciate the Graham family’s feelings, though I don’t share in them,” I replied. “But for the sake of my own conscience, I’d like to know why I felt that the man I treated had—er—paid for his sins and deserved credit for that.”

“I see.” He hesitated. “The journals were solely for the purpose of guidance. I’m reluctant to take a broader view of my charge to keep them private.”

“And private they should remain. I’ll be taking up my new assignment shortly, and there’s no harm I could do, surely—even inadvertently.”

After a moment he went up the stairs and I sat there, looking across the churchyard to what I could see of the Graham house. Timothy limped through the gate at the far end of the churchyard and paused for a moment at a fresh grave, the earth still raw, waiting for spring to give it new life. And then he went back the way he’d come.

Ted Booker’s grave? Or a friend who’d died in the war? At this distance, it was hard to tell.

The rector returned with several bound books in his hands and said, “These cover a longer period before and after the time you’re interested in. But short of tearing out the pages, there is little I can do but to trust to your good faith.”

“It won’t be misplaced, I promise you.”

After a few more minutes of conversation, he gave me a small case to carry the books, and I took my leave.

He saw me to the door, and I could feel him gazing after me as I walked back the way I’d come.

Peregrine must have seen me walking in his direction, and as I waited to cross the High Street he must have come to meet me, because I found him waiting at the top of the hotel stairs, his gaze going directly to the box under my arm. I shook my head, and he followed me in silence to my room, where we pulled the tea table to the window and I opened the box.

The bound books were a little musty, as if they’d been stored on a study shelf for years.

I opened the first, after asking Peregrine if he knew the date of the murder. And of course he did, it was seared in his memory forever. But the volume I opened was a later date, and so I tried the second in the stack.

It covered the right period. I skimmed over comments about the births and deaths and marriages of various Owlhurst inhabitants, about the business of the parish, and a brief record of whatever had happened on a particular date that was notable. I saw that the owner of The Rose and Thorn had died and his son had taken over management of the hotel, that the man who cleaned the stained glass in the church had fallen to his death one morning, as his ladder tipped over. Many rectors were amateur historians, more passionate than trained, and their privately published works were often very readable.

Moving on, I came to the comment “Mrs. Graham departed for London this morning, and I shall have my choice of the offertory
hymn while she is away. Very kind of her.” I thought that last was a dry commentary rather than an expression of real gratitude.

I was already learning that the rector, Mr. Craig, had a tendency toward tongue-in-cheek remarks. And so I was prepared to see an additional remark on the first Sunday of her absence, where he wrote, “The service went smoothly and there were several people who spoke kindly about the anthem. If I were a betting man…”

I interpreted that to mean that the people who spoke kindly would also say something to Mrs. Graham on her return.

There were more entries, and then a lapse of a day, and when the writer took up his pen again, it was with shock and disbelief.