The Burning Issue of the Day Page 13

  ‘If the earl knew what was going on, that would give him a motive, too,’ said Miss Caudle. ‘He would want to protect his family’s reputation, after all. He might have threatened to cut his son off if he found more evidence of gambling debts, but I doubt it was from a desire to protect his son or his own fortune. It seems more likely to me that he’d want to stop the boy’s gambling to shield the family from the ignominy of his prodigal son losing everything on a hand of cards.’

  ‘What we need,’ I said, ‘is to start work on crossing some of these names off the list.’

  ‘Finding and testing alibis would help,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I rather think that if we were to press Oswald Crane, we might spook him into giving up an alibi just to get rid of us.’

  ‘I’ll leave that one to you,’ said Miss Caudle. ‘You seem to have the knack of getting on his nerves. If any of us can do it, you can.’

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘It’s not much of a talent but I shall be sure to add “irking pompous company directors” to my list of accomplishments in Who’s Who.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Miss Caudle. ‘Hinkley has already supplied an alibi, hasn’t he? That was rather neatly done, by the way, that nonsense about the boxing match.’

  ‘One does what one can,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘It’s a bit flimsy as alibis go, but it shouldn’t be too tricky to find out whether he really was working late at the office all last week.’

  ‘What about the Honourable Jimmy?’ I said. ‘Are we counting him as a suspect, and what are we going to do about investigating him?’

  ‘I think that might be one for Georgie Bickle,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I’d be surprised if she didn’t know her way around the world frequented by minor nobles in Bristol. We’ll call on her tomorrow.’

  ‘And I’ll take a tilt at Nathaniel Morefield,’ said Miss Caudle. ‘There’s a charity function coming up and I’m reasonably certain I’ve seen his name on the list of honoured guests. I’ll see if I can set up an interview – he’s the sort who’ll want to make sure people know he’s a doer of good works. Would you two like to come along, Lady Summerford and Miss Maybee with two e’s?’

  ‘I think I’d better sit that one out,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘He’s more likely to know that there’s no such couple as Sir Philip and Lady Summerford, and I can’t be certain he hasn’t at least seen me before, though I don’t recall ever actually meeting him. You’re welcome to go along, though, Flo, if you want to.’

  ‘I’d be happy to,’ I said. ‘As Nelly Maybee with two e’s?’

  ‘I like the sound of her,’ said Miss Caudle with a smile. ‘I’m sure we can concoct a reason for her being there.’

  ‘That’s our plan, then,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Can we tempt you to some more cake?’

  Lady Hardcastle telephoned Lady Bickle first thing on Monday morning and arranged to meet her at the shop. We arrived in Clifton just after eleven to find Lady Bickle, Beattie Challenger, and Marisol Rojas – all in their finest white dresses – behind the counter of the WSPU shop. They greeted us warmly.

  ‘Do you have news?’ asked Lady Bickle when the round of cheek-kissing had finally come to an end.

  ‘Some,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Should we talk upstairs? I don’t want to be overheard by casual shoppers.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘Oh, but that means one of you will have to miss out. We’ll tell you everything, I promise.’

  ‘I don’t mind staying down here,’ said Marisol.

  ‘Nor do I,’ said Miss Challenger.

  ‘Grab a coin from the till and we’ll toss for it,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘Marisol, you call.’

  ‘Heads,’ she said.

  ‘Tails, I’m afraid,’ said Lady Bickle as she looked at the coin. ‘But we really will tell you everything.’

  We trooped upstairs and into the office. I looked out of the window at the City Art Gallery opposite and wondered why we never visited it. Lady Bickle took the swivel chair at the desk while Lady Hardcastle and Miss Challenger sat on the sofa. I’d been very uncomfortable squashed in the middle of the sofa last time so I opted instead to perch on its arm, next to Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘What’s been happening?’ said Lady Bickle. ‘We’ve been on tenterhooks since you went into town on Friday. Did Miss Caudle have anything useful to tell you?’

  Lady Hardcastle succinctly recounted the details of Miss Caudle’s discoveries and of our meeting with the property developer, Redvers Hinkley. Between us we told of the party on Saturday evening and my earwigging on the Men’s League members while they rebuffed the Honourable Jimmy’s pleas for financial help. I let Lady Hardcastle explain the link between everyone we’d met so far and the corrupt councillor, Nathaniel Morefield.

  ‘That’s astonishing,’ said Lady Bickle when we had finished.

  ‘Remarkable,’ agreed Miss Challenger. ‘He was quite the bloodhound, this Christian Brookfield, wasn’t he? That’s quite a nest he uncovered.’

  ‘He does seem to have been rather dogged, doesn’t he?’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘That notebook seems to have been a bit of a treasure trove,’ said Miss Challenger. ‘It’s a pity he didn’t record more details before he . . . you know . . .’

  ‘Oh, we’re nowhere near the end of it – there’s still so much more to come,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Miss Caudle is working as fast as she can in between her other obligations, but it’s still slow going.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘What happens next?’

  ‘I’m glad you asked that,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We’d rather like you to lend a hand.’

  ‘Me?’ said Lady Bickle with some surprise. ‘Oh, I say, how exciting. Hugger-mugger stuff? Will I need dark clothes and a jemmy?’

  Lady Hardcastle laughed. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘We need your social connections. More specifically, your card-playing connections. You told us you have a regular bridge game with . . .’

  ‘Lady Hooper,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you. With Lady Hooper. Do you by any chance know of any, shall we say, less genteel card schools in your part of town? Something discreet and suitable for the minor nobility, but where the stakes are a little higher?’

  ‘If such places exist,’ said Lady Bickle with a mischievous glint in her eye, ‘I should be breaking the rules of discretion were I to confirm their existence . . .’

  ‘But?’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘But it happens that I know Jimmy Stansbridge personally, so I don’t have to betray anything. Do you want me to have a word?’

  ‘That would be most helpful,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘If you could somehow bring your conversation round to where he was on the evening of Tuesday the twenty-fifth, we might be able, as our constabulary friends put it, to “eliminate him from our enquiries”.’

  ‘Or put him squarely in the middle of them,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘We can’t assume he’s innocent just because he’s one of the nobs.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘For good or ill, we need to know where he was that night.’

  ‘I think I can do it without arousing suspicion,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘I haven’t been to one of those card schools – whose existence I can neither confirm nor deny – for some weeks. If I’ve ever been at all. I could say I’d been at a particular game that night and was disappointed not to see him. He’ll most likely give up his whereabouts while expressing his regrets at having missed me.’

  ‘As long as you don’t pick the game he actually attended,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘That would be awkward, wouldn’t it? I’ll need to double-check before I make my approach. It’s all right – I know a few people.’

  ‘People who may, or may not, be involved in card games that may, or may not, exist?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘those ones.’

  I happened to glance at Beattie Challenger during this exchange and she seemed to be struggling to mask her di
staste – I began to suspect that she disapproved of Lady Bickle’s flippant attitude to rule-breaking. It was not the way, I surmised, that she believed proper ladies should behave.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘That’s one thing off the list. Thank you.’

  ‘What else is on your list?’ asked Lady Bickle.

  ‘More prodding and poking,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I have been given the enjoyable task of attempting to goad Mr Oswald Crane into offering up either a confession or an alibi.’

  ‘And I shall be joining Miss Caudle in her attempts to get some useful information from Councillor Nathaniel Morefield.’

  ‘He’s a nasty little man,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘On top of everything else, he’s a member of the Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. Not that that makes him a nasty little man, of course. But it doesn’t help.’

  ‘What are you doing about the other chap?’ asked Miss Challenger.

  ‘Which other . . . oh, Redvers Hinkley?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘The property chap?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Challenger. ‘Don’t you need to check him again?’

  ‘We do need to check his alibi, yes,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘The trouble is, he says he was working late at the office all that week and we’ve not yet come up with a solid way of checking whether that’s true. All ideas are welcome on that one.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll come up with something,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘A couple of clever old sticks like you.’

  ‘I’m sure we shall,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But for the moment, we’ll have to take him at his word.’

  ‘What are you up to next?’ asked Lady Bickle.

  ‘To tell the truth, we’re rather at a loose end. Until our various meetings have been arranged, there’s not a lot for us to do. I don’t suppose anyone fancies joining us for coffee?’

  ‘That would be a lovely idea, but we regretfully have to decline, I’m afraid. We have rather a lot of leaflets to distribute and I have to make sure that all the arrangements are in place for our regular “at home” meeting this evening.’

  ‘Some other time, then,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘We should love to,’ said Lady Bickle. ‘I say, you’re most welcome to come along to the meeting this evening if you wish. I’m sure you’d enjoy it. Seven o’clock at the Victoria Rooms.’

  ‘We’ll check the diary over coffee,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  We left them to their leaflets and walked up into Clifton village in search of coffee.

  Despite our growing familiarity with Clifton and its environs, we decided not to hunt for an alternative coffee shop and opted, instead, for the familiarity of the local branch of Crane’s. A waitress showed us to a table and took Lady Hardcastle’s order: ‘A pot of coffee for two, and two of the most enormous, stickiest, most wickedly indulgent cream-filled buns in the place, please.’

  While Lady Hardcastle fussed about in her handbag looking for her notebook, I cast an eye about the room. I’d long since stopped feeling the need to scan our surroundings for possible threats, and no longer bothered to make certain we had a clear escape route, but the quick appraising look round the room was a hard habit to break.

  The two elderly ladies at the next table seemed to be old friends, listing the names of recently lost contemporaries and lightening the mood by sharing increasingly boastful news of the achievements of their grandchildren. The couple sitting behind Lady Hardcastle were obviously very much in love and, even more obviously, very much married to other people.

  The two men in the far corner were . . .

  ‘Did you spot the two men at the table by the window when we came in?’ I said quietly.

  Without looking round, she said, ‘Tallish chap with his back to the door; nervous, ratty fellow with him? Tall one neatly but not expensively dressed; ratty is unshaven and his clothes have seen better days. Ratty keeps touching his jacket pocket – probably a knife or a cosh. Why?’

  ‘The tallish one is Inspector Sunderland.’

  ‘Is it, by George? I wonder what he’s doing up here.’

  ‘Having a discreet chat with an informant, I should imagine,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t seem like the sort of place the ratty one would ordinarily visit, so it’s also not somewhere he’d be at risk of bumping into someone who knows him.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ she said. ‘We shall have to ask the inspector the next time we see him.’

  Our coffee arrived, accompanied by gargantuan sticky buns that far exceeded Lady Hardcastle’s facetious specifications.

  ‘Do you think we should have ordered one to share between us?’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense. Fortitude, young Florence. Brace yourself and dig in.’

  We began the not wholly unpleasant task of tackling the monumental pastries as we discussed the arson case. It wasn’t long before we moved on to the difficulties of checking our suspects’ alibis without having any authority to compel anyone to do anything, much less tell us the truth.

  We were about to merry-go-round our way through the same objections to the same ideas for the third time when the two men by the door rose to leave. Ratty scuttled out as fast as his spindly legs would carry him, and the inspector lingered for a while until he was out of sight. Once his coffee companion had gone, he turned back inside the shop and approached our table.

  ‘Good morning, ladies,’ he said.

  ‘How do you do, Inspector?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘What a surprise to see you. Fancy you dropping in here just as we were enjoying our coffee and cake. Join us, won’t you?’

  ‘Don’t give me that.’ He laughed. ‘You saw me when you came in.’

  ‘I saw your companion,’ she said. ‘It was Flo who spotted you.’

  ‘I might have known I’d bump into you, though,’ he said, drawing up a chair that he’d taken from a neighbouring table. ‘What with the WSPU shop being nearby and this being one of the best coffee shops in the area.’

  ‘Did we interrupt anything?’ I asked.

  ‘No, don’t worry. Weasel didn’t notice you and I didn’t let on that there was anyone here I knew.’

  ‘Weasel?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We had him down as Ratty.’

  ‘Jesse “Weasel” Weaver,’ he said. ‘Housebreaker of this parish and part-time copper’s nark.’

  ‘A handy fellow to know,’ she said. ‘Did he have any enticing titbits to share?’

  ‘Sadly not. I was hoping he might have heard some whispers about a particular case we’re working on. That I’m working on, I should say – there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for it down at the station.’

  ‘Sounds intriguing,’ I said. ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘I doubt you move in the right circles,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘It’s not got anything to do with house parties and stolen gems, nor dead farmers, or racing cars, or moving picture shows, for that matter. If I’m right, this is going to be the work of some very serious criminals.’

  ‘You’re doing little to lessen the intrigue,’ I said.

  ‘And you know little of the circles we move in,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We ran with some very shady types in our day.’

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard you tell the stories.’

  ‘At least half of them are true, too,’ I said.

  ‘Did you ever come across any gold thieves?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Let me see. We smuggled a box of gold coins out of Bratislava that time, didn’t we, dear?’

  ‘We did. And they weren’t exactly ours to start with, so in a sense . . .’

  ‘So in a sense you’re gold thieves yourselves,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should just arrest you both now to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Many have tried and failed,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But what gold is there in Bristol worth stealing? The city’s jewellers could barely muster a whole ingot between them, I should have thought.’

  ‘It’s not in Bristol yet,’ said the
inspector. ‘It’s due to arrive at the Avonmouth docks at the end of the month.’

  ‘From foreign parts?’ I asked.

  ‘The foreignest,’ he said. ‘If you happen to hear anything as you go about your business, do please let me know. Weasel knows nothing and I’m keen for all the intelligence I can get.’

  ‘As are we,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘How is the Worrel case coming along?’

  I quickly outlined our progress so far, with Lady Hardcastle providing additional details and observations.

  ‘You’re doing well,’ he said when we’d finished. ‘And so was Brookfield. I’ve often said we need to set up a police unit to deal with the likes of that lot. We’re chasing all over town nicking petty villains for their tuppenny-ha’penny crimes, while the likes of’ – he dropped his voice – ‘Redvers Blooming Hinkley and Nathaniel Blessed Morefield are skimming off hundreds – probably thousands – of pounds with their dodgy deals. I couldn’t care less about Lord Whatnot and his card games, though, I must say. And if I were married to Crane, I’d be looking elsewhere for love and companionship, too. But those other two . . .’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘If you want to help us nail Hinkley, you could press him for his whereabouts on the night of the fire. By his own account he was “working late at the office” and we have no way to check that.’

  ‘I’d love to help,’ he said. ‘But there’s not a lot more I can do than you’ve already done. He’s not officially under investigation so he’s got no reason to tell me anything, either, I’m afraid. I’ll put the feelers out and see if we can get him on fraud and corruption charges, though. Morefield, too.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to be taking a run at Morefield myself – or, I should say, with Miss Caudle – as soon as she’s arranged an interview,’ I said.