The Dorset House Affair (18 page)

‘It's after four o'clock,' he said, ‘and Sergeant Knollys and I must get back to King James's Rents. If today's re-enactment echoes the reality, then Miss Elizabeth de Bellefort and her brother are both guilty of murder. In a case of this nature, there would be no obstruction placed in the way of justice by the French
authorities
, and they would be brought back to England for trial. Alain de Bellefort, if found guilty, would be hanged. Elizabeth de Bellefort would almost certainly be confined for life to Hanwell Asylum.'

It was on that sober and chilling note that the party broke up. Box watched as the two women were conducted from the saloon by Sergeant Knollys. Louise had glanced back at him, and he had seen the awe of him in her eyes. It was not often that she witnessed at first hand his exercise of the authority vested in him by the Crown.

As he crossed the great room to join the police officers who were writing up their reports, he was suddenly aware that he had missed something, some little detail of their experiment that he knew was vital, and which yet escaped his memory. Well, no doubt it would come to him in time. Meanwhile, he needed to sit down somewhere quiet, and review every detail of the Dorset House affair.

13

Harry the Greek's Last Story

O
n that particular Monday, Box elected to work an extra hour, taking him to a nine o'clock finish. By 7.30 it was dark, and a thin rain had begun to fall. Charlie, the night helper at King James's Rents, had arrived, and had built up a cheerful fire in the office grate. With luck, Box would be left in peace to catch up with a certain amount of paperwork that had
accumulated
since the beginning of the weekend.

New traffic proposals for the mess of roads at the Shaftesbury Avenue end of High Holborn, needing police approval; copies of magistrates' orders to close disorderly premises, requiring police inspection, and so on, and so forth. None of these things had anything to do with the detection of crime. Had the Bow Street Runners been obliged to stop work and attend to such mundane matters? Probably.

The swing door of the office was pushed open, and a burly police sergeant wearing a dripping cloak came into the room. His collar badges showed that he was from Lambeth Division, and therefore one of Superintendent Brannan's thirty-five sergeants working out of Lower Kennington Lane.

‘Detective Inspector Box? The constable in the front office said that you'd be in here. You've been looking for Harry the Greek, haven't you, sir? Well, he's over the river in St Thomas's Hospital, and asking for you by name.'

‘St Thomas's? What's the matter with him, Sergeant?'

‘I don't rightly know, sir, but they say he'll not last the night. I've a cab waiting outside, if you'll agree to come.'

Box was struggling into his overcoat while the sergeant was speaking.

‘What's your name, Sergeant?' he asked. ‘I don't think we've met before.'

‘James Green, sir, warrant number 428.'

‘Well, Sergeant Green, we'll avail ourselves of that cab, seeing the weather's turned wet.'

They hurried out of the office and down the steps into the cobbled square outside the Rents. In a moment they were in the cab, and making their way down Whitehall on their way to Westminster Bridge.

‘What can you tell me about this business?' asked Box, as they sat back in the horsehair seats. ‘How did Harry the Greek come to be in St Thomas's Hospital?'

‘He was found in Lewisham Street, sir, just off Storey's Gate, near Parliament Square. He was shouting and staggering, and carrying on, and then he collapsed. A passing doctor took one look at him and had him conveyed across the river to St Thomas's. He's in a bad way, they told me. Something to do with his brain.'

Box recalled the garrulous Sergeant Petrie telling him that Harry the Greek's landlady in Saffron Yard, Seven Dials, declared that he was ‘going barmy'. He remembered, too, the frantic,
staggering
mourner among the tombstones at Maurice Claygate's funeral. Something terrible had happened to the formerly smooth and persuasive Aristotle Stamfordis.

The cab crossed Westminster Bridge to the Surrey side. To their right, and facing the Houses of Parliament across the river, rose the magnificent buildings of St Thomas's Hospital, eight redbrick stone-faced pavilions, each of several storeys, and linked by arcades, stretching along the Albert Embankment in the direction of Lambeth Palace. It had been completed in 1871, and was
considered to be the finest hospital ever built in the capital. Its many windows glowed with the light of gas-lamps, banishing the gloom of the encroaching night.

Groping their way through heavy rain, the two officers entered the first of the great pavilions through a side door which led into a panelled vestibule. The air seemed heavy with the hospital smells of ether and chloroform. A distinguished, gentlemanly man in a frock coat saw them, and came out from an office, accompanied by a nursing sister. When he saw Sergeant Green, he gave him a glad smile of recognition.

‘Ah! Sergeant!' he said. ‘Is this Inspector Box whom you've brought with you? How are you, Inspector? I'm Dr Meredith Jones, a specialist in cerebral lesions. Our patient, Mr Aristotle Stamfordis, has been asking for you.'

‘What's the matter with him, Doctor?' asked Box. ‘My colleague here tells me that he's in a bad way.'

‘He's afflicted with a tumour on the brain,' said Dr Meredith Jones, ‘and I'm afraid that there is nothing that can be done for him. There are complications, and I doubt very much whether he will survive the night. He was frantic when they brought him in here, but we have calmed him down by administering laudanum and other substances, so that he's perfectly rational. Sister, will you take these officers to see the patient? I must get back to the wards.'

The sister, a capable woman in her forties, led them through an open ward, where some twenty patients lay in iron cots. At the end of the ward a small passage gave access to an isolated room with a window looking out on to the river. An unshaded
gas-mantle
, turned low, shed a pallid yellow light on to a single cot, where the elusive Aristotle Stamfordis lay.

‘I shall be outside the door, if you want me,' said the sister. ‘If you see a change for the worse, alert me at once.'

Harry the Greek's eyes were closed, but he opened them as soon as the sister left the room. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes
bright and feverish. When he spoke, his voice, weak and plaintive, came in little gasps. Box sat on a stool beside the stricken man. Sergeant Green sat on a chair near the window, and opened his notebook.

‘I saw you there, you know,' said Harry, when he realized that Box was in the room. ‘At Dorset House, I mean. “Strewth, what's
he
doing here?” I thought. I don't suppose you saw me, though.'

‘I saw you all right, Harry,' said Box. ‘You were dressed up as a footman, and bent on villain's work. I know all about what happened – about De Bellefort, and his murderous sister, and how you all conspired to encompass the death of Maurice Claygate. She killed him, and you and your mates are accessories to his murder.'

‘They tell me I'll not last the night,' Harry whispered, ‘and that's why I sent for you. It's lovely to see you – you're someone from the world I know. They're very kind here, but I've never had any truck with hospitals. I was always a dab hand at spinning out a plausible tale, Mr Box, but I think what I'm about to tell you tonight is going to be my last story!'

‘If you're going to tell me things about Dorset House, Harry,' said Box, ‘I need to caution you that anything you say might be used in evidence against you at a future trial. You're also entitled to have a solicitor present.'

‘Yes, yes, I know all about that, but it's too late now to be playing cat and mouse with the law. I've always been a villain, Mr Box, but sometimes I get plagued by conscience…. Are you still there? Can you hear me? That man De Bellefort came to see me at the beginning of the month. It was the first, or the second of September. Someone had given him my address in Seven Dials.'

‘And what did he want you to do, Harry? What was the job?'

‘He told me that he wanted me to impersonate a footman at Dorset House, and to deliver a message to a son of the house, Maurice Claygate. I was also to help out in other ways, he said, when called upon to do so. I was to get fifty pounds. God help me,
I should have stayed with Pinky Wiseman! Are you still there? Have they turned the gas down?'

Arnold Box took the dying man's hand in his. He looked around the cream-painted room, and at the framed picture of the Houses of Parliament above the patient's cot. Poor wretch, if he lived, he would be hanged as an accessory to murder; but it was more than likely that he would go out with the morning's tide, like the man in Dickens's story.

‘I know all about it, Harry,' said Box. ‘I know how you helped to lure that young man into the passage, and how, after he was shot, your friends carried his body out to the cab that you bought from Callaghan's cab yard in Old Compton Street. Was that what you wanted to tell me? I know that Mademoiselle de Bellefort shot poor Maurice Claygate dead—'

‘No!'

Harry the Greek grasped Box's hand so hard that he gasped with pain. He half raised himself on the cot, fixing his eyes on the inspector with a startling intensity.

‘No! It wasn't like that at all. Listen to what I have to say. There were four of us – me, and three others. I won't tell you their names, because I'm not a nark, and never was. Well, you know that, Mr Box. At the crucial moment, Miss de Bellefort slipped through the door into the passage. I stood in front of the door with my silver tray so that no one would see her go in, then I made my way back through the saloon and into the garden. In a moment I was through the garden door and in the passage. There she was, standing facing the vestibule door with the big revolver in her hand. Honestly, Mr Box, even then, before I knew what was afoot, I never thought she'd do the deed—'

‘You knew what was afoot, did you? You knew that murder had been plotted?'

‘I did. De Bellefort told us all about it. It was an affair of honour, he said, and I thought, well, that's foreigners for you! Where was I? Oh, yes. Two of my friends were hidden behind
some screens and cupboards halfway along the passage, and
he
was there, with them. De Bellefort, I mean. My third friend, who was stationed in the vestibule, had been detailed to close the door behind Maurice Claygate as soon as he entered the passage.'

Harry the Greek's voice, which had been little more than a whisper, suddenly rose to a kind of strangled shriek. Sergeant Green, who had been busy writing away in his notebook, looked up in surprise.

‘Then, as soon as his sister had turned to face the vestibule door, De Bellefort tiptoed from behind the screens, and I saw that he, too, had a pistol in his hand. He came up right behind his sister, and stood there, motionless, waiting for his victim to come through that door. I could hear the fireworks crashing and banging away in the garden.

‘After what seemed like an age, the door opened, and Maurice Claygate came into the passage. He stood transfixed, looking at the brother and sister. I don't think he could understand what was happening. But then he saw the sister's gun, and he told her to give it to him. He made as though to take it off her – we could see all this, from behind the screens – and when Miss de Bellefort fired,
her
brother
fired,
too
! There wasn't a second between the shots. Down he went in a heap on the floor. It was terrible!'

Harry the Greek licked his dry lips. He tried to place his hands over his eyes, but failed through lack of strength.

‘The brother fired as well?' said Box. ‘How could that be? There was only a single bullet lodged in the dead man's body.'

‘Don't you see?' cried the dying man. ‘
Her
gun had been loaded with
blanks
! It was her villainous brother who fired the fatal shot. He'd planned it all along. He told one of the others later that night. He'd always intended to redeem the family honour by shooting dead the violator of his sister – that's how he described Maurice Claygate. If they were caught in the act, she was to take the blame, as she would be found insane.'

Arnold Box recalled the mysterious ‘echo' that both he and
Elizabeth de Bellefort had heard. It had been no echo, but the sound of a second shot. So there had been two pistols, one of them held by her brother, the unseen presence behind Elizabeth that she had sensed as a demon. In a way, she was right: few young women would have so demonic a brother as Alain de Bellefort.

‘How was it that she just stood there, even when that brother of hers was so close behind her?'

‘He told that friend of mine – no! I'll name no names – that he'd given Miss Elizabeth a drink of calvados which he'd doctored with narcotics. She was in a kind of stupor all the time. And that's why I wanted to see you, Mr Box, before I die. She was innocent of Maurice Claygate's murder. Don't let her be hanged for something that she didn't do!'

‘I'll see to it, Harry,' said Box. ‘It's a terrible story. And I was right about the cab in the lane, wasn't I?'

‘It was terrible. We didn't know for certain, you see, whether he was really dead, or just wounded. I helped them carry him to the far door, and waited until they'd passed through. They were dressed as toffs, and no one questioned them as they helped their “drunken friend” to the cab. I locked the door to the lane behind them, hung up the key, and returned to the house through the garden.

‘I met those two, later, and they told me how they travelled together in the cab, with Claygate propped up between them. He began to bleed, and they realized that he was still alive. They had to sit there, in the dark, feeling the wet blood on the cab seat…. But by the time they reached the house in Soho, he was dead, right enough, and they fixed it to look like he'd gone there of his own accord. They didn't know till later that there was a dead woman in a room on the ground floor.