SV - 03 - Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments (14 page)

After dismissing the eunuchs, I again drew the couch close to her, and without further ceremony lifted up her clothes. How lovely white was her round belly and ivory delicate-formed thighs! The mount of love, just above the temple of Venus, covered with beautiful black hair. . . .

Verity put the volume down and, picking up the other, glanced at its title:
Venus Schoolmistress: or, Birchen Sports.
He shook his head thoughtfully.

'Poor young gentleman,' he said aloud. There was something loathsome in the duty of dredging the furtive, trivial lusts of the dead in this manner. However, the four books had occupied the greater part of the concealed compartment in the bureau. They were unremarkable in themselves, the broken-down little shops of Holywell Street, just north of the Strand, thrived on such editions of aged erotica. Yet it saddened Verity to think that the books might in some way sully the reputation of the dead Lord Henry Jervis with his unrealized ambition to take Holy Orders.

Beside the books there were four glass-plate photographs, positive prints of a kind which required a sheet of white paper behind them to see them clearly, and an envelope containing what would no doubt be an old love-letter. Verity picked up the four glass plates with care. They were all chipped or broken in some way. Two of them had had a strip of glass sheared away, converting the oblong to a square, a third had lost a triangle at one comer. The fourth was accidentally chipped but the image appeared complete. Verity drew a sheet of white paper from one of the bureau pigeon-holes and slid it behind the first plate.

His heart sank. It was all to be worse than ever he or Richard Jervis could have expected. There were two figures in the picture, the man naked and flat on his back, his neck and head missing where the end of the plate had been sheared away. The girl who knelt astride his legs was petite, trimly-rounded and olive-skinned, her tawny blonde hair worn down her back with the aid of a comb. Her head was lowered to her partner's loins, eyes closed and lips pouting, while she spread her thighs for the man's fingers with their two distinctive rings. The man himself was distinguished by a white forked streak where his left thigh and belly joined. It might be a scar or a blemish on the plate. Of the girl's identity there could be no doubt.

'Simona!'
said Verity softly, and looked again. In the background was a blurred oval shape. Blurred it might be, but he knew it for the finishing bath in Charley Wag's private apartment at Ramiro's. As for the man in the picture, Verity had seen the Wag naked and knew that the pale, undeveloped body was not Charley's. But it must have been a most important client for Charley to have made both his private bath and his own girl available.

The second plate confirmed his suspicions. Simona and Stefania, the latter with paler body and shock of dark hair, lay naked, nuzzling one another's mouths. They seemed to be on a low divan, a man standing over them, his head and shoulders missing again where the end of the plate had been broken off. But the white fork at the join of left thigh and belly was there again, confirming it as the scar of an old injury.

The third plate had suffered no more than an accidental chip. It seemed to Verity the most mysterious of all. There was no man in it, merely a girl who was fully dressed in a theatrical costume which suggested the part of a page to a knight errant in some mock-tournament. He studied the snub-nosed, narrow-eyed insolence of her expression, the sturdy figure of a fifteen-year-old tomboy, fair hair spread loose across her shoulders.

'Now her I have seen,' he said gently. 'Youngest doxy in Ned Roper's flash 'ouse a year or two back. Name of Miss Elaine.'

He studied the picture again. There was little in it that even the Vice Society could have taken exception to. Elaine was in three-quarter profile, though her head was turned towards the camera a little more. She wore a 'doublet' fashioned from a blouse. The lower part of her 'armour' consisted of very tight trousers in grey-blue material. From the style of the costume, Verity had no doubt that the girl formed part of a display which gulls and yokels paid willingly to watch. The plate showed her as a broad-hipped, sturdy-thighed youngster, the grey-blue trousers stretched smooth over her figure and nipped in narrowly at the waist. From the rear, Elaine's bottom appeared a near-perfect circle, the tight cloth creasing deeply under the full cheeks. It was unlikely, Verity thought, that many of the spectators were much interested in the finer points of jousting or the ways of ancient chivalry. He laid the third plate aside and took up the final one.

The composition was so crowded that at first it was difficult to distinguish the subject. Presently it appeared as something enacted on a stage or dais with a half circle of spectators on the far side. The faces of these men and women were represented in miniature but quite distinctly. They were a fashionably-dressed group in evening clothes, some laughing at what they saw, others staring in dismay. The four men on the dais were naked, as was the girl, all four of them wearing goat-masks, which the girl did not.

Verity examined her, the slender but well-shaped body, the profile and colouring of Eastern beauty tempered by a childhood in the mean streets of Ratcliffe or Wapping. The dark hair rose in an elegant coiffure from her delicately-shaped neck and ears, her cat-like almond eyes lighting the fine oriental mask of her beauty. She knelt on all fours, the four men standing over her, one on each side, one before and one behind. Her slim young shoulders curved down to the velveteen lustre of coppery skin in the small of her back, the smooth paler ovals of her bottom narrowing to firm thighs and trim calves. Lynx-eyed, she turned her head to the spectators, as though their excitement at what she was showing them somehow intensified her own.

'Jolly!' said Verity aloud. 'Wherever there's mischief. . . .'

He paused and looked at the four men. One of them, at the girl's head, bore the same white fork at the joining of belly and thigh. The hand with the bloodstone ring and the gold was hidden by the girl's head, the fingers lost in the dark hair as they guided her face back. Rings might alter, Verity thought, scars never.

There remained only the sheet of paper in its envelope, addressed to Lord Henry Jervis at Bole Warren. Verity drew out the sheet of paper.

Sir - Not many years ago, a great injury was done by you to a poor woman, in consequence of which she died. It was well for you had there been no witness to your cowardice and your folly, if all had perished as that poor soul. I trust to inform you there is one who saw your every act, from first to last, and who lives to publish to the world what you have done. Such an object as you are, so base a villain, must disgrace the dignity of revenge, but yet there is justice requires a forfeit paid. In token of what I might tell of you, receive this ring and recollect where last you saw it and missed it. It shall cost you dear and, never fear, the reckoning shall reach you when next you hear from your faithful correspondent, Anonyma.

For half an hour Verity searched the secret compartment, the papers, envelopes, bureau, and every likely hiding-place for the ring. There was no sign of it. But then, he reflected, it could be any ring. He might find a dozen belonging to Lord Henry and never know which was mentioned by the mysterious lady of the letter. He looked again at the glass plates of the photographs. He must, of course, ask Mrs Butcher tactfully about the rings the young man wore and where precisely the wound might be that Lord Henry sustained when a battery of mortars at the Redan spewed its lethal hail of iron among his infantry. Yes, he thought, the question must be asked, but the answer could hardly be in doubt. The next interview with Richard Jervis was likely to be a difficult one. Far from undermining the evidence of accidental death and establishing a case of murder against persons as yet entirely unknown and unsuspected, Lord Henry Jervis seemed likely to join that procession of the rich and the titled who had embraced violent death in the past eighteen months rather than face the public humiliation which awaited them. It was no ordinary humiliation, for Charley Wag and his minions were artists in blackmail. The revelations which he held in store were precisely those for which each particular victim would die rather than endure.

It seemed to Verity that he might as well inform Richard Jervis at once and close the investigation into Lord Henry's death as speedily and decently as possible. Then he picked up the otherwise innocent plate of the girl Elaine in her tournament costume. For several minutes he stood in silence.

"ang on a bit,' he said at last. 'This don't fit. There's a screw loose somewhere.'

6

'And so,' said Verity in a tone of great secrecy, 'they was obligated to show me into the private apartments. And there, in a secret drawer, was photographs and a letter, compromising the late Lord 'enry Jervis as a coward and debauched wretch!'

Sergeant Albert Samson, who had been crouched forward in expectation of what was to be revealed, sat back against the buttoned leather of the cab seat.

'We
ll
!
' he said thoughtfully.

'I had it from Mrs Butcher afterwards,' Verity continued, 'how the rings was Lord Henry's rings that never left his hand and how the white mark at the top of his leg was just the exact wound 'is Lordship sustained on the explosion of a mortar before Sebastopol.'

Samson thought about this too.

'Well!' he said again, more softly. The cab jolted a little as they crossed Westminster Bridge towards Lambeth, the river crowded with barges drifting lazily, their long sweeps splashing the water astern as the bargees guided them. Men and women, their pink dresses and parasols bright in the afternoon sun, strolled across the pavements or loitered in the shell-like alcoves placed above the piers. On the box of the cab, Stringfellow sat with whip held idly and tall hat askew. Lightning, the ancient horse, clopped slowly towards the Surrey shore.

'It ain't half a mess,' said Verity thoughtfully. 'I been hired by poor Mr Richard who swears Lord Henry never died accidental but was foully murdered. Rumer the keeper, Mr Somerville the gunsmith, and Dr Jamieson all swear there was no way of murder. Now to cap it all I must tell Mr Richard that indeed it mayn't be an accident a-cos his brother had some reason for self-destruction. I shouldn't wonder if he wasn't to go off with apoplexy!'

Samson sucked his teeth. He said,

'You never thought, my son, that they might be using you, did you?'

'Whatcher mean?'

'Suppose your Mr Richard and even Captain Ransome knew Lord Henry had made away with himself. How better to draw attention from it than by raising a cry of murder, so that all the wagging tongues say if it wasn't murder then it must be accident. The thought of him doing away with himself ain't to be entertained even by the scandalous. They never reckoned that you might find evidence.'

Verity nodded.

'I 'ad some such thoughts, Mr Samson. Charley Wag wouldn't have blackmailed a broken-down old captain like Jack Ransome. It wouldn't answer any purpose. But then I 'eard that Captain Jack swore he was only there acting for a gentleman who was being blackmailed but didn't care to be seen visiting Charley. And then I got to thinking who that other man might be, Captain Jack being a member of the Jervis household.'

Samson chuckled.

'And Mr Richard, that acts so touchy and flares up like a new wick, he never had the goodness to name the party he thought had murdered Lord Henry?'

'I ain't been favoured with such statement, Mr Samson.'

It was Verity's first half-day off, which he had hoped to spend with Bella in Paddington Green. Instead, in his perplexity, he had sought the advice of Sergeant Samson, producing a tracing he had made of part of the blackmail note written to Lord Henry Jervis by Anonyma. Samson, from his investigation of the general blackmail conspiracy, had identified the writer as Miss Elaine who appeared in one of the photographs in tournament costume. Samson also swore that in the course of the afternoon the girl might be traced and questioned.

'You have no idea,' said Verity conversationally, 'how obliged I am to you, Mr Samson, for this. You and Mr Stringfellow, of course,' he concluded, glancing up at the box of the cab.

'I been watching Miss Elaine and a dozen little burners for months,' said Samson cheerily. 'It ain't no hardship to find her. 'owever, if you chose to return an obligation, you might go on telling what them girls was up to in the photographic plates.'

'I don't see 'ow they were done,' said Verity insistently, "ow all the parties was got to hold still for long enough to make an exposure. Two of 'em, with that Simona and that Stefania you was so sweet on, was at Charley Wag's baths. The other was odder still.'

'Jolly?' said Samson.

'Yes, in a place at night with a crowd looking on and four men in masks. Like sort of devil-worship. But 'ow did they do the picture in such conditions?'

'The way you go on about that little minx in the picture,' said Samson, smacking his lips at the thought of it. 'Them sly dark eyes and her gold skin, and that saucy bum stuck out I Wouldn't I give 'er turn and turn about!'