The Dorset House Affair (6 page)

She’ll faint in a minute if I keep questioning her, thought Box. And there’s a strange, unfocused look about her eyes…. Is she drugged? He made to move Elizabeth de Bellefort gently aside, but she suddenly screamed with what sounded like unbearable anguish, and pressed herself with even greater determination against the door.

‘Alain! Alain!’ she screamed, but her brother was nowhere in sight. The vestibule was now crowded with anxious guests, and people were relaying the dramatic scene to others out of sight and earshot. Then Major Edwin Claygate, Maurice’s elder brother, suddenly appeared, and on seeing him the frantic young woman uttered a final shriek and collapsed in a dead faint.

What if that loud report, and its confirming echo, had, after all, been the noise of a pistol shot coming from the garden passage, which that young woman had been so desperate to guard? What had she to conceal? What had she done?

In a moment the Dorset House people would take care of that unfortunate young lady, and a doctor would be sent for. There was other work for him to do.

Box threw open the door leading into the garden passage.

4

Murder in Mind

T
he passage was empty. No corpse lay there, shot through the heart by a bullet from a revolver. No discarded weapon had been flung away by a decamping murderer. The murmur of conversation and the occasional peal of laughter came to his ear from the few guests who had chosen to linger in the garden.

What could have made that frantic young woman so
determined
to bar his entry to the garden passage? What danger – or terror – had she imagined would be lurking there?

The narrow, brick-walled passage extended some thirty feet from the vestibule door to the exit into Cowper’s Lane. It was lit by a line of flaring gas-jets spaced along the right-hand wall, their flames shaking and trembling in the breeze blowing through the row of open windows opposite them. The place was filled with the acrid reek of gunpowder.

The passage was as he remembered it, paved with terracotta tiles, which had been partly covered in coir matting. Particles of dry shale had been scattered here and there, perhaps from one of the garden paths, but there were no bloodstains, no marks of a dead man having been dragged by his heels towards the far door into the lane. Halfway along the passage, the cupboards and chairs that he had seen when Tom Fallon had opened the door for him, formed a little island in the empty expanse of tiled floor.

Box walked slowly along the passage, listening to his boots
echoing on the tiles. The gaslights dipped and hissed in the draught from the windows. The door to his left at the bottom of the passage, which gave access to the rear gardens of Dorset House, was closed, but not locked. The door into Cowper’s Lane was locked, and the key to the lock was hanging on a screw fixed to the right-hand door post.

Box looked round him, and uttered a sigh of vexation. He must resist the temptation to look for clues to a fantasy situation conjured up by his own professional leanings. There was nothing in this passage to suggest any kind of foul play.

Perhaps that young lady had had too much champagne? Even ladies of quality were known to get tipsy occasionally. Should he slip away, unobtrusively, and leave the family and their guests to their own preoccupations? It was nearly half past ten, and he was due off watch at eleven. Yes, he’d do that, but there’d be no harm done if he were to take a look beyond that closed door. He took the key down from its hook, turned the lock, and stepped out into Cowper’s Lane.

The cool night air was a refreshing contrast to the overheated atmosphere of Dorset House. The lane was crowded with departing guests, making their way to a line of cabs stretching away into the darkness along the garden wall. The air rang with the excited buzz of conversations heightened by the strength of Field Marshal Claygate’s champagne. Some cab drivers were busy settling their clients into the vehicles, while others stood in knots against the opposite wall of the lane, smoking and chatting. It was altogether a dramatic contrast to the quiet little lane dozing in the sun that Box had first encountered on the Tuesday past.

‘Why, if it ain’t Mr Box,’ said a cheerful voice, and Box turned to see Tom Fallon the groom standing at the entrance to the Dorset House stables, where lamps glowed in the yard. ‘How are you, sir? Did they give you any champagne?’

‘They did, Tom,’ said Box, ‘and also some smoked salmon sandwiches, all of which I consumed in a kind of cubby-hole
under the back stairs by the kitchens. Quite a hive of activity here in the lane, tonight, isn’t it?’

‘It is. What you see back here, Mr Box, are the guests who come by cab. They book a hansom for eleven, and traipse down here along the carriage drive from the front of the house when old Sir John calls time. Of course, the carriage folk are met in Dorset Gardens by their own coachmen, as you’d expect. But a lot of these people…. Well, they’re all fastened up tight in boiled shirts and evening suits, but they’re not what we’d call Quality. Government clerks, and people like that, most of them.’

‘But they are invited guests, aren’t they?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom Fallon, and Box saw him smile. ‘They’re guests all right – most of them. But they’re invited in batches, if you know what I mean. The field marshal has deep purposes of his own in inviting a lot of these folk, as is well known, but they’re not the kind that he’d normally want to get their knees under his dining-table.’

Box laughed, and the friendly ostler followed suit.

‘What a snob you are, Tom Fallon!’ said Box. ‘Mind you, I’m beginning to see what you mean. Those two men over there, now, look as though they’re supporting each other in case they both fall down. Dear me! One of them’s started to sing—’

‘That’s what I mean, Mr Box. They’ve drunk too much of the master’s champagne. They can behave themselves well enough while they’re in the house, but once they get out into the air, the fumes mount to their heads and they behave like that. See – their cabbie’s taken charge of them, and bundled them both into his cab.’

As Tom was talking, another groom joined them from the yard. He was a young, sharp-featured lad of not much more than twenty.

‘Are you telling this gent about our back-lane guests, Tom?’ he said. ‘There were three of them came staggering along the lane half an hour ago, two of them in full rig, with top hats and
greatcoats
,
and the third just in an evening suit. They were all laughing and singing, and the one in the middle looked as though he was dead to the world. Just fancy, they’d just come out of the house by the back door. They’d have been thrown out of any decent pub if they’d been in that state.’

‘What do you mean by that, my friend?’ asked Box, suddenly alert. ‘What do you mean by “came out by the back door”? Didn’t these three drunks come down the carriage drive at the side of the house, like everyone else?’

‘Well, guvnor, they may have done. But I fancied they’d stepped out into the lane from the garden passage, because I think I saw a shaft of light fall across the steps for a moment, and then
disappear
. But I could have been mistaken. Who are you, anyway, mister?’

‘This is the famous Inspector Box of Scotland Yard, Joe,’ said Tom Fallon. ‘He’s here to see fair play up at the house, so you keep a civil tongue in your head, do you hear? Well, it looks as though the lane’s clearing, now, and we can close the yard gates. Nice to have met you, Mr Box. Perhaps we’ll meet again, some time.’

‘Good night, Tom,’ said Box. ‘And by the way, young Joe, your three tipsy gents couldn’t have come out of the garden passage, because it was locked from the inside. I know, because I unlocked it just now to step out here. Well, I’d better be on my way. My overtime runs out at eleven.’

‘Money for old rope,’ laughed Tom Fallon. He and the lad called Joe turned back under the stable arch, and Arnold Box went back into the house.

Box found that the grand saloon was almost deserted, as most of the guests were assembled in the entrance hall or on the steps of the great Corinthian portico, waiting for their carriages to be driven up to the door. People were talking in low tones about the incident in the vestibule.

‘I’m not in the least surprised,’ one elderly lady was saying to another. ‘I happen to know something about Elizabeth de Bellefort. A friend of Lady Claygate told me about it in
confidence
. She’s French, of course,’ the lady continued, ‘but from a very good family, I’m told. Oh, there’s my husband at last! I thought I’d lost him.’

‘And what did your informant tell you about her?’ asked the second lady. ‘Of course, I shan’t tell anyone.’

‘Well, it was just that this Elizabeth de Bellefort has a history of odd behaviour – hallucinations, or something. She was always in and out of institutions when she was a girl. Perhaps it was that, tonight, in the vestibule? A vision, you know. She may have
imagined
that something unpleasant was lurking behind the door, and reacted accordingly.’

‘So that’s why Lady Claygate didn’t want Maurice to marry her! Well, well, I never knew that….’

Box watched as the first lady’s husband joined her and her friend. He was a stout, apoplectic man in his sixties, with an angry red face and protuberant eyes.

‘Ah! There you are, Maude, and you, Carrie. What an
extraordinary
business.’

‘You mean Mademoiselle de Beliefort’s vision?’ asked his wife.

‘Vision fiddlesticks. I’m talking of young Maurice Claygate. Hang it all, Maude, his father throws this grand affair for his birthday, and he doesn’t even stay till the end! He was supposed to make a little speech from the dais, and then we were to drink a final toast to him in old Claygate’s champagne. But no – damn it all, Maude, the fellow slopes off with his chums to play the gaming-tables till dawn! His brother Major Edwin Claygate had to make the speech in his place. Damn bad form….’

Within the half-hour, Dorset Gardens were deserted. It was time for Box to make his way back to King James’s Rents, where he would stay in the upstairs bunks for the night. The indiscreet letter from the French minister’s foolish wife would not leave his
possession
until he had handed it over to Sir Charles Napier next morning.

Field Marshal Claygate and his wife Margaret sat in the private parlour of Dorset House, and listened to the powerful, sinuous tones of Alain de Bellefort as he wove an elaborate apology for his sister’s hysterical behaviour in the vestibule. It was nearly midnight.

Earlier, a doctor had been summoned to examine the prostrate young woman, and he had agreed at once with her brother that she must have experienced a simple visual or auditory
hallucination
followed by a fainting fit. There was nothing to worry about. He had accepted a sovereign in payment for his brief consultation, and had hurried away.

‘I feel that I owe you both an apology and an explanation for my sister’s conduct this evening,’ said De Bellefort. ‘When we received your kind invitation to attend the birthday celebration, I allowed my eagerness to accept to overcome my prudence. Elizabeth, you see, had not been well in her mind for many months.’

‘You should have told, us, Alain,’ said the old field marshal. ‘We would have understood. Not well in her mind, you say? Dear me! Meanwhile, there’s no cause whatever to make an apology.’

‘Quite right,’ said Lady Claygate. ‘Poor girl! I expect the close atmosphere of the saloon, and the shattering noise of those
fireworks
contributed to the onset of that fit of hysterics.’

‘There’s rather more to it than that, Lady Claygate,’ De Bellefort continued. ‘Let me explain. When I was seventeen, and Elizabeth was twelve, a band of footpads waylaid me on the road as I was returning to the manor from the neighbouring town of Saint-Martin de Fontenay. I was carrying a bag containing the quarterly rent owed by tenants of ours. I took to my heels, and fled into a barn that lay just inside the demesne. The cutthroats –
for that is what they were – ran after me, and just as they reached the barn, my sister appeared from the house. Knowing what danger I was in, she spread-eagled herself across the barn doors, crying, “No, villains, you shall not get to him!”’