The Burning Issue of the Day Read online

  ‘We could have done with you down there on Tuesday night,’ said the inspector. ‘I asked the same question and got a load of mumbling equivocation for my pains. The short answer is, no, no one thought of that at the time. It’s more than possible that any number of people could have slipped out into the night to avoid either the danger and hard work of helping or the inconvenience of being called as a witness.’

  ‘That’s disappointing.’

  ‘A few of the pavement pounders down at the Bridewell might have that inscribed as a motto on their helmet badges,’ he said. ‘“Bristol Police Force – That’s Disappointing”. Still, there’s nothing to be done now – we just have to work with what information we have.’

  I smiled. ‘How was the fire started?’ I asked.

  ‘They smashed the shop window and threw in a bundle of paraffin-soaked rags. One match and the whole place went up pretty quickly. They’re old buildings down there. Plenty of old, dry timbers.’

  ‘You’d have thought someone would have heard that. Or seen it. It would have taken a minute or two to get all that done.’

  ‘Everyone was in bed or in the pub,’ he said. ‘There are no “passers-by” at that time of night. Not down on Thomas Street, at any rate.’

  ‘And there were suffragette leaflets strewn about the place,’ I said. ‘The newspaper reported that much.’

  ‘Just so,’ said the inspector. ‘I did note one strange thing that no one else picked up on. The leaflets proclaimed themselves to be the work of the “Woman Social and Political Union”, rather than “Women’s”. An easy mistake to make on the part of a printer, I suppose, but odd that no one spotted it on a campaign leaflet.’

  ‘Perhaps it was too late to change it,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps. Then there was the “signed note” pinned to a nearby shop door, written in block capitals, as I said before.’

  ‘When was Lizzie Worrel arrested?’

  ‘The next day. We had no record of an E Worrel, and it took a trip to the WSPU shop on Queen’s Road first thing on Wednesday morning to find out who she was. She was arrested there and then.’

  Lady Hardcastle handed the file back to the inspector. ‘They did a very thorough and very professional job,’ she said. ‘Witnesses were found and interviewed, statements collated, evidence collected. The only accusation that can be levelled at your colleagues is that they didn’t trouble to look into the veracity of the so-called confession.’

  ‘That was going to be my next question, actually,’ I said. ‘They suppose that Lizzie Worrel was so keen to claim responsibility for the arson on behalf of the suffragettes that she left a signed confession at the scene of the crime. But why has she so vehemently denied it ever since?’

  ‘Because when she set the fire it was just arson, but by the time she was arrested it was murder?’ suggested Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘I thought that,’ said the inspector, ‘so I checked the times. The body wasn’t discovered until after Lizzie Worrel had been arrested. All anyone knew at the time was that it was arson.’

  ‘And it never occurred to anyone to wonder why someone who was a member of an organization that thrives on being arrested and imprisoned would set a fire, leave self-incriminating evidence, and then deny it nine hours later,’ I said.

  ‘I share your doubts,’ said the inspector. ‘I really do.’

  With our coffees finished and our cakes eaten, we left the inspector to his official duties and returned to the Rover. To Lady Hardcastle’s relief, it hadn’t rolled down towards Park Street, and I set about starting the engine while she made herself comfortable in the driving seat.

  ‘My turn to drive, I think,’ she said.

  I reluctantly conceded that it was, and enjoyed the uneventful ride back to Littleton Cotterell. Once home, I checked with Edna that there were no domestic crises brewing, and with Miss Jones that there was some dinner cooking. Both assured me that everything was in hand and Miss Jones had even made some soup for lunch.

  ‘I didn’t know if you’d be eatin’ in town, but I thought soup would keep even if you didn’t have it today.’

  ‘You’re a marvel,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Have you and Edna eaten?’

  ‘We have, thank you, miss. Edna don’t let it go past midday without botherin’ me for sommat to eat.’

  ‘Thank you for looking after her,’ I said with a smile. ‘How’s your real mother these days?’

  ‘She’s fine, thank you. She’ll outlast us all, despite her problems.’

  ‘I’m sure she will. She’s a remarkable woman – do give her my regards, won’t you.’

  ‘And mine,’ said Lady Hardcastle, who had arrived unseen and unannounced.

  ‘Thank you both,’ said Miss Jones.

  ‘Sorry to barge in on you,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I was wondering if there was anything to eat.’

  ‘I was just tellin’ Miss Armstrong as how there’s some soup.’

  ‘Really? Splendidly wonderful. I’ll be in the dining room, salivating.’

  ‘You paint such an attractive picture,’ I said. ‘Give us a minute or two and I’ll bring it through. Bread?’

  She was already out the door. ‘Yes, please,’ she called from the hall. ‘And a cloth for the dribble.’

  Lunch passed in a blur of slurping, interrupted briefly by our recounting of the details of the morning’s meetings. Satisfied that our recollections tallied and that we agreed on the facts of the case so far, I was despatched to the drawing room to update the crime board while Lady Hardcastle withdrew to her study to ponder the puzzle of Brookfield’s notebook.

  I started a ‘timeline’ on the crime board – something Lady Hardcastle had used to great effect while we were trying to find out who had killed Frank Pickering when we first arrived in the village.

  We knew that a regular at the pub, Bill Priddy, had left to walk home at about a quarter to midnight. The fire was already well established so it must have been started anything up to half an hour earlier. I put the time at a quarter past eleven until we knew any different. The fire brigade and the police arrived promptly once they’d been summoned so I put their arrival at no later than a quarter past midnight. All the witnesses who could be found were questioned by, I guessed, one o’clock.

  Nothing had happened then until the investigating detective had called at the WSPU shop when it opened at nine o’clock. He arrested Lizzie Worrel immediately. By ‘mid-morning’ the burned-out building had been searched so I put that at eleven o’clock.

  So far, that was all we knew.

  I put Christian Brookfield’s age and family details next to his placeholder sketch and sat in an armchair to contemplate the case so far. And, so far, there wasn’t one. I was about to get up and see if Lady Hardcastle had made any progress when she burst in through the door.

  ‘Eureka!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘You can get a bit whiffy yourself on a warm day,’ I said.

  ‘Very droll,’ she said. ‘But shush, I think I’ve found a way into Brookfield’s code. It’s childishly simple, really. I half thought it might be, though. It had to be, didn’t it? The idea was to make his notes difficult for someone else to read, but the encryption method still had to be straightforward enough that he didn’t have to spend all night encoding everything. He also had to be able to read it himself without too much effort. I’ve been all round the houses trying all manner of complex stratagems. But really it was staring me in the face all along. I had the answer myself when we were talking to Georgie and the Caudle woman, but I was too wrapped up in the imagined complexities to see it.’

  She stood in front of me, silently grinning.

  ‘Well?’ I said, when it became apparent that there was nothing else on its way.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. The solution. Let’s take that bit you read out at the shop.’

  She went to the blackboard and wrote, ‘Doesn’t hit / dee ezby yoe weff / ticket price.’

  ‘Now, when I was explaining things to Georgie – she’
s a lovely girl, don’t you think? A good deal younger than one might expect for an eminent surgeon’s wife, but so sharp.’

  I smiled and nodded. ‘A charming young woman,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes, sorry, I was talking about the code, wasn’t I?’ She stood by the board, pointing to her recent scribblings like a schoolmistress. ‘So, you can see that the segment you pointed out is two plaintext words, a section of gibberish, and then two more ordinary English words. The gibberish is probably the cipher, but the letter frequencies are all wrong. I couldn’t make any sense of it until I was musing on my earlier explanation. Pitman’s, I said, is phonetic. And what do you get if you say that section out loud?’

  ‘Dee ezby yoe weff,’ I said. ‘Ohhhh. D-S-B-O-F.’

  ‘Quite so. And that turns out to be a simple Caesar cipher, a substitution cipher – the sort a busy journalist could do in his head as he went along – for C-R-A-N-E. You see? Just shifting each letter one along.’ She wrote ‘Crane’ underneath the section of gibberish.

  ‘That’s rather clever,’ I said. ‘And it meets all your requirements – he can write it quickly and read it back without getting a notepad out. What about the other parts?’

  ‘They’re a little trickier. Or a little easier, depending on your point of view. They’re word puzzles. I posited that a journalist like Brookfield must have a facility with words and language. There was a possibility, I thought, that he might be a little bit playful with it – his reported lack of a sense of humour notwithstanding. So, take these first two words: “Doesn’t hit”. What happens if something doesn’t hit?’

  ‘It misses?’ I suggested.

  ‘I say, you’re much quicker at this than I am. Yes, let’s try “Misses”.’ She wrote the word beneath the ‘clue’. ‘Now what about the ticket price?’

  ‘Tickets,’ I said. ‘Tickets . . . Theatre tickets? Bus tickets? Train tickets? Ticket price . . . Cost of admission? The fare?’

  ‘I should have come out here earlier. Let’s try “A Fare”.’ She wrote it down. The line beneath the code now read, ‘Misses Crane A Fare.’

  ‘Missus Crane Affair?’ I said.

  ‘Without the rest of the entry, it wasn’t possible to say for sure, but once you have the context it turns out that that’s exactly it. He has quite a bit of evidence in this section about Mrs Crane having an illicit liaison with a man, but sadly he hadn’t quite worked out who before he put this bit down on paper. We need more of the notebook.’

  ‘Does it say who this Mrs Crane is?’ I asked. ‘Might she have wanted to silence him? Or might Mr Crane have feared for his own reputation?’

  ‘Yes, no, and yes. In that order. He makes it plain that the Mr Crane whose wife is out enjoying convivial society with someone other than her husband is the same Crane who owns the coffee-importing business and several coffee houses in the city. One of which, quite by coincidence, we visited this morning. Brookfield suggests in his notes that the scandal, if it broke, would do Mrs Crane little harm but could ruin Oswald Crane. He has, by all accounts, been quite vocal on the subject of marital fidelity and has said that husbands should take the blame if their wives stray.’

  ‘We need to speak to this Oswald Crane chap, then,’ I said.

  ‘We do, indeed. Miss Caudle will have to arrange a meeting. I shall telephone her immediately.’

  Chapter Five

  It took Dinah Caudle just two days to arrange a meeting with Mr Oswald Crane on Thursday morning on the pretext that she wished to write an article about him. So that Lady Hardcastle and I could also attend, she had asked if she could bring her trainee along. He had been reluctant at first until she explained that her ‘trainee’ was a titled lady ‘of middle years’ who wished to contribute to the society pages. He had practically fallen over himself to accommodate us once he believed he might be mentioned in the society pages.

  ‘Luckily,’ said Lady Hardcastle as we walked along High Street towards our meeting place on Corn Street, ‘one can almost always rely on the snobbery of businessmen. They’ll do anything to be thought of as part of the smart set.’

  ‘I’ve seen the smart set at close quarters,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be associated with cutthroats and streetwalkers any day. Present company excepted, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘And I can’t say I disagree with you, but for today we need to play up to it. I shall be quite the glamorousest, dizziest member of the smart set, and his key to the sort of social recognition he’s always thought was his due.’

  ‘Glamorousest?’ I said.

  ‘Shush. Did we give you a name?’

  We considered that there was a small risk of Lady Hardcastle’s name being recognized. She wasn’t vain enough to imagine that everyone had heard of her, but she had been mentioned in several newspaper stories over the past two years so her name might ring bells. Consequently, we had decided that she would be Lady Summerford for the day. I hadn’t anticipated being introduced by name so I’d not troubled to come up with an alias.

  ‘We didn’t,’ I said. ‘I’m just a ’umble servant girl. We couldn’t afford names when I was growin’ up. I’m still savin’ up for a name of me own.’

  ‘You shall be Nelly Maybee,’ she said. ‘With two e’s.’

  ‘It has possibilities,’ I said. ‘You rescued me from a life of petty crime in the Cardiff slums. Oh, oh, with hints that I might not have been quite so morally upstanding as a young woman ought to be.’

  She simply tutted. We’d played cloak-and-dagger roles many times before in far more dangerous situations than this and she knew me well enough to know that I’d not risk ruining the subterfuge by overdoing things. On this occasion, though, I suspected that a snob like Crane would affect not even to notice me, so I thought I could afford to have a little fun with my character’s history. I’d be the only one who’d know, after all.

  I had expected our meeting to be held in an ornately oak-panelled boardroom in a grand building in the heart of the business district of the city. There would be portraits of past chairmen on the walls, looking sternly and disapprovingly down at us as we sat at a gleaming mahogany table. I was disappointed, then, when I was told that we were to meet Mr Crane in one of his coffee houses. His first, admittedly, and the jewel of his coffee house empire, but a coffee house all the same.

  Dinah Caudle was already seated in the company of a small, spherical gentleman when we arrived. She acknowledged Lady Hardcastle and the man leapt to his feet. It didn’t make him much taller.

  ‘Lady Summerford, I presume,’ he said. His manner was as puffed up as the absurd moustache that graced his upper lip.

  ‘Lady Summerford,’ said Miss Caudle, ‘please allow me to introduce Mr Oswald Crane, coffee importer and owner of this magnificent shop. Mr Crane, this is Lady Summerford, the newest freelance writer for the society pages at the Bristol News.’

  ‘How do you do?’ they both said together.

  Mr Crane ostentatiously held a chair for ‘Lady Summerford’ and, just as ostentatiously, ignored me. I sat at a table nearby, close enough to overhear and far enough away to be forgotten about. I had a book with me which I pretended to read, while earwigging their conversation and embellishing Nelly Maybee’s story.

  It was a good thing I had something to keep my mind occupied – Mr Crane’s dreary conversation did little to hold my attention. He was both a bore and a boor. He was uncommonly well informed on the subject of the cultivation, harvesting, shipping, roasting, distribution, and preparation of coffee. He knew, too, about its advertising and packaging, having recently acquired a printing business for those very purposes.

  I knew all this because he was willing to share his knowledge at dismaying length without the faintest awareness of just how dull he was being. This wouldn’t have been so bad – enthusiasts can often be charming and fascinating once they warm to their subject – were it not also for his tendency towards the sort of opinionated oafishness that made it fortunate that none of us was armed.

>   At least, I didn’t think Lady Hardcastle was armed. She wasn’t wearing the holster hat I’d bought her for Christmas, which had a cunningly concealed compartment in the crown into which a derringer pistol would snugly fit – she’d made a joke about such an item of headwear a while ago, so I thought it would be amusing, and possibly useful, if she were actually to have one. But she did have an alarming tendency to slip her Browning pocket pistol into her handbag ‘because one never knows when it might come in useful’, so it was impossible to be certain that she was unarmed. Mr Crane’s comments about the locals who grew his coffee in Africa and the Americas, his opinions on the poor and needy at home, and most especially his views on women and their role in society, would surely have spelled his doom if she had been. I confess I felt my own sleeve once or twice in case I’d slipped a throwing knife in there and forgotten about it.

  Lady Hardcastle managed to appear as though she were hanging on his every word. She had emulated Miss Caudle and was taking copious notes as he spoke.

  ‘. . . and that’s another reason women shouldn’t be given the vote,’ he said, interrupting my daydreams about Nelly Maybee’s fledgling career as a pickpocket. ‘Too much intuition, d’you see? It’s all very well and good having instincts and intuition if you’re raising children or managing a household. Those are admirable traits in those circumstances. But politics, just like business, is about sound judgement, it’s about pushing aside feelings and fancies and replacing them with reason. I’m afraid women just don’t have the capacity for unsentimental, logical thought.’

  Miss Caudle had been scowling but, to her immense credit, managed to rearrange her features into a simpering smile by the time he glanced in her direction.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ she said. ‘Women just aren’t up to it. I think it would be catastrophic for the country if we got the vote. What do I know about international affairs, after all?’

  Lady Hardcastle, meanwhile, seemed to have grown weary of indulging him and proceeded instead to the real reason for the interview.