Antidote to Murder Read online

  Dody agreed, to a point. “The annoying thing is that with a little education and a knowledge of the preventatives, the problem could so easily have been averted and no one would need to bother with Widow Welch’s.” She pushed her unfinished meal away. The fish was too fishy for her taste, the white sauce almost rancid. London was in the grip of strikes, and fresh produce and ice were in short supply. “So I’ve decided to start conducting education classes in the Clinic.”

  “Sounds like a jolly good idea to me,” Florence said. “Young women must be educated not to yield in the first place. As woman is morally superior to man, it is up to her to be the stronger of the two.”

  “Indeed. But I hope to take my course a bit further than that and give the women some knowledge of the preventatives, too.”

  Florence gave Dody a determined look. “Preventatives do nothing but further loosen the slackened reins of male desire, Dody. As Christabel would say: ‘Votes for women, chastity for men.’ This is why we need the vote—why we need women members of parliament. A greater female say would not only temper matters of sexual morality; women’s natural compassion would have a more humanising influence on every sphere of humanity, at home, our politics abroad . . .”

  Although Florence and she shared many of the same convictions, Dody had no time for the violent nature of the campaign waged by her sister’s Bloomsbury group and the Pankhursts or, for that matter, many of the members’ narrow-minded attitudes towards birth control and morality. If Dody could have got away with closing her eyes instead of her ears, she might have been listening to a reverend mother addressing a novice. Her wealthy, beautiful sister, dressed in her lilac satin teagown and spouting ideology of the most reactionary kind, never ceased to amaze her.

  Dody stifled a yawn. Florence should have been enjoying the summer season with other young ladies of her class, attending balls and fancy-dress parties, polo matches, and regattas. Instead, when not plotting, typing, or folding pamphlets in their townhouse, she was doing the same in one of the often dingy dwellings of her coconspirators. Or worse, some would say, doing what she did now: enjoying the company of her unfashionable elder sister. Most young ladies were advised to give Dody—the “Beastly Science” doctor who refused to wear a corset or allow her maid to do her hair—a wide berth. She smiled to herself; they shared a tight bond despite their differences. But enough was enough.

  “Florence, please, I’m hot and I have a headache,” she said. “Your principles are all very well, but they don’t actually solve the problem of young women butchering themselves or being left with babies they can’t care for.”

  Florence could not argue with that. Her face softened. “You have no appetite? Don’t tell me your cholera has returned? Few families seem to have escaped it this year. Sir Anton Frobisher had it, his cook had it—the household was in turmoil for a while. Lady Harriet was at her wits’ end. Remind me, I must pay her a call and see how they are getting on.”

  “For me it’s the heat this time, I’m sure of it.”

  “Yes, ghastly, isn’t it?” Florence used her napkin to flap at her face with unladylike vigour. “Plays havoc with the digestion. Look, Dody, I admire you for your stand, I really do, but it just doesn’t sit comfortably with me.”

  “The practice of birth control is not illegal in this country.”

  “But the public advocating of it is,” Florence said.

  “Which is why I plan to provide verbal instruction only.” Dody paused to smile at her sister. “Besides, when have you been worried about what is legal or not?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Surely you can understand my point of view?”

  “Of course, we are both entitled to our opinions.”

  Florence relaxed back into her chair and returned Dody’s smile. “Well, at least you have found something to throw your passions into, something that will take your mind off Pike.”

  Dody almost choked on the piece of bread she was nibbling. “Pike—what has he got to do with all this?”

  “I take it you have still had no word?”

  Dody turned back to the view.

  “When I think of all the trouble you went to, to book him into that hospital,” Florence went on, “arranging treatment from the best surgeon in London, and all he did was bolt. War hero indeed! You have every right to be angry.”

  Dody did not like to hear Pike criticised this way. She might speak against him, but it was another matter to hear him criticised by someone else. She had thought her temper recovered, but now she felt unsettled again: she could not help taking his behaviour personally. She was a rational woman—a trained scientist—yet the turmoil she had experienced since meeting him the previous year was apparently resistant to all logic.

  Most of her patients held her medical knowledge in high regard and took her advice without question or compromise. But here was someone whom she herself held in high regard paying no more heed to her medical advice than he might to any High Street quack. She shook her head in an effort to send the conflicting thoughts flying; she had already resolved that she had no time for this. Let him keep his distance.

  “Dody! Dody, speak to me,” Florence was saying. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset.”

  “War does strange things to men,” was all Dody could think to say.

  * * *

  They travelled home in the new open-topped Benz, driven by their former coachman, Fletcher. The traffic was congested and motorcars honked impatiently at the slower horse-drawn vehicles. At Hyde Park Corner there was an altercation for right of way between a whip-wielding hansom driver and a goggled motorist. A scuffle ensued and traffic ground to a standstill around Wellington Arch, until two policemen arrived on bicycles to break up the mêlée. The cabby, obviously beyond rational thought, struck one of the bobbies on the helmet, his whip, decorated with ribbons of coronation colours, flying about like a madwoman’s hair.

  Dody held tight to her sister’s gown as Florence leaned out of the Benz to boo and hiss at the police as they led the cabby away. She wouldn’t put it past Florence to leap from their motorcar and join the fracas. At last they were moving again. Dody glanced at her fob and willed Fletcher to drive faster. She needed some time at home to put the finishing touches to a research proposal she planned on presenting to Dr. Spilsbury in a few days’ time.

  Once they were driving peacefully again, Florence tightened the broad tie of her motoring hat and dropped her head into a novel, the pages barely stirring in the weak draught. In honour of the coronation, the suffragettes had temporarily ceased their violent protests, and with little else to occupy her mind, Florence had taken to reading novels of a popular nature. This one involved secret agents and the German threat, which Dody felt was grossly exaggerated by the press for no other purpose than to distract the population from the troubles at home. She glanced at the book’s cover: The Riddle of the Sands—one of the better written, so she had heard. She smiled to herself. Despite her antiestablishment convictions, her sister was still a patriot at heart.

  Fletcher turned from the congested Euston Road into their quiet street and dropped the sisters outside their front door before taking the car to the mews to be garaged. Home was one of a series of roomy Georgian townhouses that formed a semicircular terrace fronting Cartwright Gardens: a miniature version of Bath’s Royal Crescent, Dody always liked to think.

  The house and trappings were paid for by their mother with money she had inherited and which, out of respect for his wife, their father had laid no claim to—even though he was usually against money spent on what he saw as “frippery.”

  Dody and Florence passed between white columns standing sentry on the porch and entered the house through the colourful leadlight front door. They found themselves immediately beset by a terrible weeping and wailing.

  “Good Lord,” Dody said, exchanging worried glances with her sister. “What on earth is going on? Has so
meone died?”

  There was an agitated thumping on the basement stairs and the door leading from the kitchen was flung open by their parlour maid, Annie, her face as white as her lace cap, her hair sticking out at all angles as though she had suffered an electric shock.

  “Ever so sorry, misses,” the girl said, “I couldn’t meet you at the door—we’re having a dreadful time downstairs. Cook’s lost her rag and threatening to hand in her notice. She wants poor Lucy to clobber ’em with the rolling pin and Lucy’s refusing, saying clobbering rats is not what a scullery maid’s paid for, and I says we need to call the rat catcher—”

  Florence covered her mouth with her hands. “Rats? Downstairs? In our kitchen? How revolting!”

  Realising at last what must have happened, Dody shot the maid a sharp look. “Annie, I told you not to clean my study. In fact, I asked you not to go into that room at all.”

  “You’ve been keeping rats in your study?” Florence exclaimed. “Dody, how could you?”

  “In preparation for some research . . .”

  “I only took a little peep, miss, opened the cage door. Then one of their scaly tails brushed through my fingers and I panicked and the cage fell off the table. They must have been hungry ’cos they rushed in a mob down the stairs and headed straight for the kitchen.”

  Dody had difficulty maintaining a straight face. She asked Annie to fetch the cage from her study.

  Florence collapsed onto the hall chair.

  “Come on, I need your help,” Dody said as she headed with the wire cage to the kitchen.

  “You don’t need me; you need the Pied Piper.”

  Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats they were not—they were special laboratory rats, a new line developed for scientific purposes by the Wistar Institute, and Dody had had them shipped all the way from America. They were precious and not only for their rarity. Dody found that she had become quite fond of the docile creatures with their soft white fur and beady pink eyes. Although her rats were destined for inevitable euthanasia, she could not abide the thought of their senseless clobbering with a rolling pin.

  She had less trouble coaxing them back into the cage with a hunk of bread than she had settling the servants’ nerves. Lucy was instructed to make Cook a strong cup of tea laced with medicinal brandy and then assist Annie with the tidying and disinfecting of the kitchen.

  Florence was waiting in the hall for her return. Dody could not help herself. With a flourish, she produced a particularly robust specimen from behind her back. “Florence, meet Edward, my favourite, named after our late king.”

  Dody had never seen Florence mount the stairs with such speed, and she laughed for the first time in weeks.

  Chapter Four

  SATURDAY 12 AUGUST

  Margaretha paused as her handmaiden took hold of the edge of her veil. The piano player struck three sharp chords and out she spun, twisting her way to the edge of the splintered stage to dance seductively for the lone man in the front row, who rewarded her with a shudder and an intake of breath.

  She kept her eyes on him as she danced, her remaining veils floating about and enhancing her succulent curves. It must help to have someone in the audience to focus on, the pianist supposed, although this was not the face he would imagine her choosing. Tall, gaunt, and yellow-eyed—not even Gabriel Klassen’s type—this lone member of the audience must have crossed her manager’s palm generously to be allowed in for the rehearsal.

  Tomorrow they would rehearse with the full orchestra. Gabriel Klassen was in the shadows at the back of the hall now, writing notes, organising the publicity posters and the costumes for the sham Indian musicians. Once, apparently, at a show in Rome, the musicians had sweated so much their brown greasepaint had run and they’d arrived onstage looking like a band of lepers. The piano player smiled at the conjured image. Gabriel had better not make that mistake again—the Londoners were a tough crowd to please.

  The pianist slowed the tempo. Margaretha turned her back on her lone admirer and faced him. From the corner of his eye he saw her touch her breast beneath the floating veil. Despite his knowledge that the performance was now for him, he remained focused on the music and the way the sweat stuck his white shirt uncomfortably to his body. He would give her no satisfaction. He would not take his eyes from the music. He would not play one false note.

  Her handmaidens danced well, slinking to imaginary cymbals and bells. If they danced like this to a barely tuned piano in a rundown London hall, imagine how they would perform to a full orchestra at the Empire—better still, on the eagerly anticipated tour for the Army and Navy Club? He knew the thought of all those uniforms excited her: she had told him so as one of her many attempts to make him jealous.

  He raised the tempo again, heard the rattle of her coin-covered brassiere. Conscious of her small breasts, she never removed her top, leaving the silver coins to enhance the mystery. She knew well the thoughts of the hungry-eyed audience, their collective anticipation, their desperate hope that this performance might prove the exception to her rule.

  Margaretha glided on bare feet across the stage, her handmaidens following with choreographed steps. Another veil floated to the ground. The music swelled, her belly rolled. He threw a glance to determine her position on the stage, and she responded to it greedily. Arms extended, she flew across the stage and fell to her knees next to him, leaned backwards, arched her hips, and simulated masturbation.

  Matthew Pike dashed the sweat from his brow and returned to the musical score. It was a complicated piece.

  * * *

  Pike packed up the sheet music and slipped it between the sleeves of his leather case. From the wings he heard the sound of bright female laughter, Cockney voices. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He spun on the piano stool and found Gabriel Klassen all but hidden behind an extravagant bouquet of red roses.

  “Take these in to Margaretha, please, Captain.” Klassen’s guttural Dutch accent grated on Pike’s nerves, set his teeth on edge, and took him back to places he wished he could forget.

  “I am a piano player, not a delivery boy,” Pike said, reaching for his cane and climbing to his feet. “You’ll have to take them yourself—who are they from anyway?”

  Klassen sighed and placed the flowers on the piano. “She will not be pleased. They are from the gentleman in the front row. He is becoming a pest to her, I think. Such a face. He looks like a corpse.” The manager shuddered and Pike tried very hard not to sigh.

  “I’ll speak to him if you like. Is he waiting in the front entrance?”

  “You would rather speak to him than Margaretha? It must be a coward who is more frightened of a woman than of a man.” Klassen laughed nervously.

  Klassen was more on the money than Pike would let on. He was a coward, with one woman certainly. His thoughts threatened to wander to Dody, as they had constantly during the last few weeks. He knew that the longer he put off contacting her, the less likely she was to forgive him. But something illogical seemed to have taken hold of him—the fear of fear itself perhaps—and seized him in a grip that would not let up. He glanced at the flowers on the piano. Perhaps he should send Dody a gift, something to articulate the words he was unable to say. But what? God, how useless he felt.

  Klassen was looking expectantly at him. Pike flicked him a tight smile. “Tell me more about this man. I noticed he was here yesterday, too.”

  “He has been watching her since we arrived in London, sending her notes and flowers, giving me money to allow him to sit in on the rehearsals. He has already reserved a box for the first few nights of the performance.”

  “I wouldn’t worry. I’m sure Margaretha can take care of herself.”

  Klassen gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Ach. One lovesick admirer does not matter. It is not unusual; she attracts them wherever she goes. It’s everything e
lse that worries me. I told her we should never have changed the show, it’s causing nothing but trouble.”

  “Our London fathers are still making a fuss over the Dance of the Seven Veils?”

  “Indeed they are. Don’t they realise how much we are compromising? This is nothing like the original; it’s just a small portion of it. Nothing more risqué than any of the other acts she has danced countless times before on the London stage. But someone must have got to the musical director and frightened him off. He left me a note—his aunt is ill or some-such; he can no longer do the job—and the musicians are expected tomorrow.” Klassen threw up his hands. “Englishmen and their scruples.”

  Pike headed for the stage steps, showing with his turned back that the manager’s problems were of no concern of his. “Tomorrow you owe me a week’s pay.”

  Klassen followed him. “Captain, wait and tell me this: what were you doing when I came across you in the tavern?”

  Pike regarded him over his shoulder. “I was out of a job. I was about to ask the publican if he needed a piano player, but you got to me first.”

  “Yes, yes. And what will you do next week, when the orchestra starts, when we have no more need for an accompanist for rehearsals? Will you start whoring yourself in the public houses again?”

  “I take each day as it comes.” Pike’s footsteps rang on the steps at the edge of the stairs. He knew what Klassen was getting at—sensed what was coming next. He wondered how many of the hollow steps he would take before Klassen called him back: one . . . two . . . three . . .

  “Wait there, Captain. I have something more to ask you.” Klassen jumped like a dancer from the stage. “Margaretha and I, we both admire you greatly . . .” He licked dry lips.

  “Yes?” Pike wondered when he had picked up the habit of making people so nervous. It was a handy skill for the interrogation room, but it seemed to happen these days whether it was his intention or not.