A Donation of Murder Page 11

  Pike stood up. ‘Thank you, Mr Chapman.’

  The assistant manager opened the door for Pike, then closed it again. ‘Good God, he’s there, he’s there — in the foyer, near the Christmas tree!’

  ‘Step away from the door, please, sir,’ Pike ordered so he could peer through the crack. He saw a broad-shouldered man with slick, centre-parted black hair and a crooked nose, looking at the jewels adorning the tree. The face was as familiar as the name. Pike’s hunch was correct, he had been in one of the mugshot albums. Pike made a mental note to get Singh onto it as soon as possible. James’s hands were in his pockets, a habit that Pike’s father had whipped out of him as soon as he was old enough to wear long trousers. Poor form indeed.

  ‘Are you going to arrest him?’ Chapman asked. ‘If you do, please don’t do it in the foyer. We’ve had enough public excitement for one day.’

  ‘I have nothing to arrest him for.’

  ‘Talk to him, then?’

  ‘No, not yet.’ Pike continued to watch.

  James said a few words to the guard near the tree and the guard replied. Then he disappeared in the direction of the cloakroom. He returned a few minutes later shrugging into a heavy overcoat and plonking a trilby on his head. Dressed for the cold, he swaggered towards the hotel’s front entrance.

  Having no time to retrieve his own hat and coat, Pike grabbed an umbrella from the hatstand.‘May I borrow this, please?’ Without waiting for a reply, he took the umbrella and left the manager’s office. After giving James a twenty-second start he stepped from the hotel. Some of the wind had died, but without his coat it was bitterly cold. He opened the umbrella and began to follow the man who liked to be known as Malcolm James.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘I tried to resuscitate Mr Sachs but I think he was dead before he hit the ground,’ Dody said to Sergeant Singh as they watched Alfred wheel the body of Thomas Beauchamp to the mortuary slab.

  Dody did her best to keep her voice level, a task she always found easier within the mortuary than outside it. It was as if an invisible veil of professionalism enveloped her as soon as she pushed through the heavy swing doors. In the mortuary, the sharp tragedies of life that affected her as keenly as anyone else became blunted and manageable, smothered by her obsessive need to investigate and learn.

  ‘So, the theft of the necklace has been the direct or indirect cause of five deaths,’ Singh said in a voice heavy with emotion. ‘I wonder what His Majesty thinks about the bauble now?’

  ‘That’s a good question. I hope the necklace has lost some of its shine for him.’

  ‘I hope so too, Doctor.’ Singh moved to assist Alfred transfer the body from the trolley to the slab.

  ‘Stay where you are, Sergeant, you must not use that injured arm,’ Dody insisted, moving Singh aside and taking the dead young man by the ankles. ‘Where was the body found?’

  ‘In a drainage ditch on the eastern edge of Hyde Park — no attempt was made to hide it.’

  Dody took this in. The crime was committed by someone either stupid or confident enough to not worry about being caught. She and Alfred lifted him with ease — the boy was not much more than skin and bone.

  Dody noticed the calf wound. ‘Nasty,’ she said, ‘but not fatal. The bullet has passed through the muscle and out the other side. Your chances of retrieving it are negligible, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No need to find it, Doctor, it was a police bullet. The Chief Inspector witnessed the shooting himself,’ Singh said.

  Dody frowned. Pike had not told her that he had been involved in any shooting. He was protecting her, she supposed, finding the thought mildly irritating. He must have learned by now that she was not to be wrapped in cotton wool. She would bring the subject up with him later.

  It didn’t take her long to conclude that the boy had been killed by a single gunshot wound to the back of the head.

  ‘From close range,’ she explained to Singh as Alfred pulled the sheet back over the body. ‘There are powder burns around the edge of the wound. It looks like the bullet was from a pistol,’ she said, handing over a glass specimen jar containing the flattened bullet she had extracted. ‘Perhaps it was from the same pistol used against the other three dead men,’ she said. ‘You’d better take it to your ballistic expert.’

  Pike had tutored her to some extent in ballistics, one of the new forensic disciplines that he had embraced wholeheartedly. Her lessons had included firing shots into a hay bale to compare the patterns left on the bullets by different guns. He showed her how each weapon left its own individual mark — a bit like fingerprints, he had explained.

  ‘Apparently the jeweller’s niece was killed by the driver of the getaway vehicle and he used a pistol too,’ Dody added.

  As Pike had not yet had the chance to talk to Singh, Dody gave his sergeant the gist of the interview with Sachs.

  ‘The bullet used on the young lady, Miss Levi, is also with the ballistic expert. We should be hearing from him soon, I expect,’ Singh said after Dody had finished her recount.

  ‘May I take the body away now, Doctor?’ Alfred asked.

  Dody shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t quite finished.’

  She picked up the index card on which the details of the autopsy were recorded. It always saddened her to have to summarise the ending of a life in so few words, especially as this was the only epitaph this unfortunate young man was likely to get.

  She wrote ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘malnourished’ on the index card. She palpated the neck. The glands felt normal with no hardness or swelling. She dug her fingers into each side of the boy’s jaw and prised open his mouth to perform the routine check of teeth.

  ‘Tilt the overhead light, please, Alfred,’ she said.

  Alfred shone the clear beam into the boy’s mouth. The tongue was blocking her view of the back of the throat and Dody had to use a spatula to press it down to see the back teeth. She skimmed past the decaying molars, transfixed as she was at the strange set of teeth stacked beneath the soft palate. Surely the lad was too young for false teeth?

  Still pressing the tongue down with the spatula, she used a hooked probe and pulled at the nearest ‘tooth.’ There was a dull clunk as the probe made contact with something metallic.

  ‘Hullo, what’s this?’ she said as she hooked the mystery object, then tugged it, pulling out the several links of chain interspersed with tiny pearls that had been rammed deep into the back of the dead boy’s throat.

  ‘Goodness me!’ Singh exclaimed as Dody reeled in her find. The last item on the chain consisted of a huge pair-shaped pearl, bigger than any she had seen. After clattering the necklace into a kidney dish, she took it to the sink, rinsed it and held the huge pearl up to the light. First she saw a calm, iridescent sea. Then, when she moved the pearl, she saw silver and white satin. Turning it again, the white satin took on overtones of pink. The depth and beauty of this gem was like nothing the dull mortuary walls had ever before seen, and Dody found herself mesmerised.

  But a boy, a young woman, and three men had been callously murdered for this necklace, and an old man sent to his grave through grief and anxiety. Despite the tragedies, Dody could not help marvelling at her discovery. Even the small pearls in the chain were of remarkable quality, as was the filigree from which the pearl pendant hung. To her untrained eyes it seemed just as fine as the Faberge pieces her family was so familiar with.

  But her eyes kept returning to the pure smoothness of La Peregrina, pure and untampered, as Nature had made it. A richer or silkier pearl Dody had never seen, with a provenance as fascinating as any of the British Crown Jewels. For a moment she imagined the pearl pendant against her own throat, hanging from the linked chain . . .

  ‘Is this the real necklace or the counterfeit?’ Singh asked, breaking into her fantasy.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Dody said, shaking herself, then reaching into a ragbag near the sink for something soft to wrap the necklace in. ‘If it is the counterfeit, then Sachs has done a ma
gnificent job.’ She slipped the necklace inside an old sock and bound it into a parcel with a strip of fabric. ‘But how did the necklace get into the boy’s throat?’ she asked Singh. ‘Did he hide it there himself or did his killer cruelly shove it down?’ She shivered at the thought, hoping that if that had been the case, it had been put there post mortem.

  ‘Who knows?’ Singh said. ‘I will take it to Scotland Yard immediately and hand it over to the superintendent. I expect he will get the experts to examine it.’

  Dody handed the rag package over with reluctance. She would have liked to have handed it to Pike in person — just imagine the look on his face when he saw this!

  Alfred wheeled the body away and Singh left with the necklace. Dody washed her hands, finished some paperwork in the office and telephoned Fletcher to take her home. It was dark by the time she reached her front door. She was looking forward to a bath, a simple supper and an early bed. Tomorrow was Sunday, and if no urgent cases were delivered to the mortuary, she would sleep in, take the day off and prepare for the intimate New Year’s party she had planned for Violet and Pike.

  Annie was nowhere to be seen. Dody dumped her bag in the doorway and hung up her cape in the downstairs cloakroom. Focusing on her bath she hurried to the stairs, tripped and landed on her knees halfway up the first flight.

  ‘Of all the . . .’ She looked to see what she’d tripped over — an overstuffed carpetbag abandoned on the first stair. On the floor nearby stood two high leather boots and a teetering pile of hatboxes.

  ‘Dody, you’re home!’ came a cry from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Florence!’ Dody’s heart leaped with joy.

  Before she knew it, Florence was charging down the stairs, flinging herself into Dody’s arms and almost knocking her over.

  ‘I decided to come home for New Year,’ Florence said, breathy and excited. ‘I wanted to surprise you!’

  Dody laughed and hugged her sister tight, feeling the bones of Florence’s tiny frame through the silk kimono dressing gown already purloined from her own bedroom. ‘You’ve certainly done that. You nearly gave me a heart attack. How long are you home for?’

  ‘Permanently, I think.’ Florence paused. ‘I know all there is about flying aeroplanes now.’

  Not just aeroplanes, Dody suspected, holding her sister at arm’s length to read the wistful expression on her face. As she had expected, things with Doctor Lamb had not gone to plan.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Dody said.

  Annie came down the stairs, face beaming. Florence had always been her favourite, which was understandable — they were much closer in age. Sometimes Dody felt as if she was mother to both of them.

  ‘I’ve almost finished unpacking your trunk, Miss Florence. Shall I take these other things upstairs too?’

  ‘Yes, please, Annie, there’s a dear. Leave the flying boots though, and ask Fletcher to give them a polish, please.’

  ‘Certainly, miss.’

  Florence linked her arm through Dody’s. ‘Will you join me for a sherry? You look as if you could use one. Isn’t the weather beastly — almost as dismal as it was in Scotland. For a moment I was worried my train would be cancelled because of the snow.’

  ‘A sherry would be marvellous,’ Dody said, her sister’s sudden appearance making her forget for a moment her exhaustion and her worries.

  ‘Oh, Miss Dody?’ Annie called down from the first floor landing. ‘A letter came for you today, delivered by hand. It’s on the hall table.’

  Dody scooped up the letter as she passed it and put it on the drinks table.

  Before she poured the sherry she gave her sister another hug. ‘It’s good to have you home. Though I expect you’ll soon be rushing off to Kent to see Mother and Poppa?’

  ‘I’ve told Mother I’ll be down in a couple of days. I need to see the new waxwork of Shaw at Madame Tussaud’s and report to Mother about it — she wants to know the likeness. I just hope the old curmudgeon himself isn’t lurking nearby.’ Florence gave a defiant toss of her head. Their mother was a literary critic and their father a devoted Fabian and both knew George Bernard Shaw well. Florence had never forgiven the Great Man for complaining years ago to their parents about her high shrill voice and had boycotted his plays ever since.

  ‘So I’ll spend a few days in London first,’ Florence went on, ‘before I travel down to Kent. I need time to debrief — as we aeronauts say.’

  Dody took a sip of Dutch courage. ‘And how is Doctor Lamb?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Florence fell silent for all of three seconds. Dody was wondering if she’d asked after him too soon in the conversation when Florence replied. ‘He’s very nice and all that. But as a nerve doctor I began to wish he’d take some of his own nerve medicine. He was frightfully gloomy for most of the time: war this, war that. He seemed far more obsessed with the notion of war than most of the other Scots who spoke about nothing but their independence. I had no idea that a Royal Army Flying Corps had recently been formed, had you?’

  Dody shook her head.

  ‘Well, it turned out he wanted to be one of the first cabs off the rank, so to speak. If I’d known that was his intention I’d never have gone flying with him in the first place. And then, of course, whenever I tried to show some enthusiasm for it, I was reminded that as a woman I would never be able to fly for my country, or do this or do that . . .’

  ‘Surely you would never want to have anything to do with a war, Florence?’

  She ignored Dody’s question. ‘I got so utterly fed up. I mean, I was just as good as the chaps, you know, but never got any credit for it. Anyway, I was presented with my pilot’s license the other day and decided then that it was time to vamoose. The whole flying business up there did nothing but re-ignite my desire for universal female suffrage. There’s plenty of suffragette activity afoot in London at the moment and I can’t wait to hear about it from the Bloomsbury division — get back into the fray and all that.’

  ‘What did you say? “Time to vamoose”?’ Dody asked to divert her sister from a potentially long suffragette spiel. Although Dody herself believed heart and soul in female emancipation, she had never been able to come to terms with the violent means by which the militants set about trying to obtain it.

  Florence smiled. ‘Vamoose is American for leave. We mixed with quite a few Americans up there. Now they were fun. One taught me how to tango — it’s a splendid new dance that’s all the rage across the pond.’

  Dody smiled at yet another term that was new to her.

  ‘I’ve bought the piano music for Pike so he can play while I teach the dance to you. How is Pike, by the way, and Violet?’ Florence asked, pausing to draw breath.

  ‘They are both well. Violet is enjoying her nursing and Pike is on the hunt for some jewel thieves.’

  ‘Not the La Peregrina necklace? The theft even made the papers in Scotland.’

  ‘La Peregrina, indeed.’

  Dody gave her sister a brief summary of the jewel heist and how she had found the necklace, or a clever imitation of it, stuffed down the throat of a dead boy. Florence wrinkled her nose. The wrinkled nose became a gasp of horror when Dody next told her sister about the woman who’d woken up on her autopsy slab.

  ‘You’d like Margaret, Florence, she’s full of vim and vigour.’ Dody rose to refill their glasses. She noticed the letter she’d left propped against the crystal decanter, tucked the fat envelope under her arm, poured the sherry — just a drop for herself — and returned to the couch.

  Florence continued to chatter about her adventures. While Dody listened she absently opened the envelope. To her surprise she pulled out a thick wad of banknotes.

  ‘Goodness me!’ she exclaimed, fanning out the notes.

  ‘Lor, look at all that,’ Florence remarked, wide eyed. ‘Where did that come from?’

  Dody read the enclosed note. ‘There’s no signature, though it says it’s for the clinic. I hadn’t got around to telling you that piece of bad news.
The clinic has debts of nearly six hundred pounds and is about to be closed.’

  ‘How much money is in the envelope?’

  Dody counted the money on her lap. ‘Six hundred pounds.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve found your guardian angel.’

  ‘Can it be from the Duchess, perhaps?’ Dody handed the note to Florence.

  ‘The donor obviously wants to remain anonymous, printing in capital letters like that,’ said Florence. ‘But what on earth’s the matter, Dody?’ she asked, two small parallel lines in her otherwise flawless complexion forming between her eyebrows. ‘Why the long face?’

  Dody shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. ‘I don’t know, it’s almost too good to be true, isn’t it?’ Florence’s words — your guardian angel — spun about in her mind, reminding her of Margaret’s religious zeal and how she’d kept on about not being worthy of Dody’s ‘miracle’.

  Dody examined the note again with increasing disquiet. She’d thrown Margaret’s thankyou note into the fire after she’d read it, so was unable to compare the two handwriting specimens. And, of course, the writing in the note from Margaret had been cursive.

  ‘Why must you over analyse everything so? This is a gift horse, Dody, don’t look it in the mouth. Rejoice!’ Florence raised her glass. ‘Think of all the women this will save. To the clinic, I say!’

  ‘But how do I know this money isn’t tainted?’ Dody asked, her teeth worrying at her bottom lip. ‘It could have come from anywhere. It could be blood money — the result of a heinous crime even.’

  Florence gave a so-what-if-it-is shrug.

  Dody forced a hesitant smile. Perhaps she was over analysing. No one had questioned the anonymous donation of one hundred pounds the clinic had received a few weeks ago, so why should this donation leave her feeling so uneasy? Because this was so much more. The person who donated it must be very wealthy indeed. And why send it to her? Dody wondered. Large donations were always sent to the non-medical ladies of the board, and, as far as she knew, they were never cash. It was dangerous to keep this much cash anywhere other than in a bank.