Dody McCleland 02 - Antidote to Murder Read online

  “Done.” Klassen slapped Pike on the back. Pike’s knee locked and he almost fell over. Damned knee. No longer just a reminder of the war, the pain would forever dog him as an opportunity not taken—in more ways than one. “Margaretha will be delighted.”

  “Shall I still have a word with the gentleman from the front row?” Pike asked.

  “Please. But you must not put him off; he may have influential friends, and we need all the sponsors we can get.”

  “He obviously wants to impress Margaretha.”

  “As does Rear Admiral Millbank, a much more likely candidate, I think. If she pleases him, he will guarantee more bookings in the north of the country and, with luck, the Army and Navy Club, too.”

  “The admiral won’t find fault with the performance, I’m sure.”

  “The contracts rest on more than the stage show. I need not tell you that.” And then Klassen’s eyes widened and he whispered, “Don’t turn now, but the gentleman in question, the admiral, has just entered the hall.”

  “Is he carrying his briefcase?”

  “Yes, Captain, cuffed to his wrist as usual. He must be a very important man.”

  Or a pompous fool, Pike thought, one who endeavours to appear more important than he is. Pike did not need to turn; he knew the rotund, snowy-haired Admiral Millbank well enough by sight. He doubted he would be recognised, but pulled his bowler over his brow just in case and feigned to notice something on one of the seats, a piece of litter perhaps, some distance from the admiral’s rolling approach.

  As Pike moved away, Klassen spoke through the side of his mouth. “Find out how useful that tall man might be. See what he has to offer us. I’ll deal with the admiral.”

  Pike nodded, resigned. So now he was to be Margaretha’s pimp. Well, he had done worse. He made his way down the side of the hall, his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, just as the admiral boomed out a dinner invitation to Klassen and the “dear lady.”

  Pushing sordid thoughts aside, Pike allowed himself the luxury of contemplating his new role in the exotic show. The greater part of the performance consisted of bits and pieces of music and dance that Margaretha had picked up during her travels in the East, but the climax was undoubtedly the Dance of the Seven Veils, borrowed from the Strauss opera. Any musician would leap at the chance to be musical director of this piece, even if it was only an excerpt. A part of him hoped he would find nothing incriminating against Margaretha and her troupe. If he did, the show was doomed to a limited season.

  He passed through the hall’s empty front entrance and found the man from the front row in the street, gazing longingly at a poster recently tacked to the exterior wall. The man stood fixed to the spot and stared as if mesmerised by Margaretha’s image.

  Pike cleared his throat to get the man’s attention and tipped the rim of his bowler. “Good afternoon, sir, I hope you enjoyed the rehearsal.”

  The man tore his gaze from the poster and stepped back. He was gallows tall and his face was flushed.

  “Yes, I did, thank you,” he stuttered, taking a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopping his brow with it. An ugly scar, like crumpled tissue paper, creased the side of his head and extended to the outer rim of his left ear. “You are the piano player?”

  Pike put out his hand. “They call me the captain.”

  “That is all?”

  “All that is necessary.”

  The man looked at Pike, one fraud regarding another. “Archibald Van Noort.” The whites of his eyes, Pike noticed, were jaundiced yellow.

  “You are Dutch, too?” Pike nodded to the poster.

  “No, British with Dutch ancestry,” he said, his eyes drawn once more to the poster of the near-naked woman. He should enjoy it while he can, Pike thought. It wouldn’t be long before someone concerned about public decency ripped it down.

  “Did she like the flowers?” Van Noort asked.

  “Her manager was taking them to her as I was leaving.”

  “Just now I saw another man—a naval officer?—enter the theatre.”

  “Rear Admiral Millbank, one of the organisers from the Army and Navy Club. He’s thinking of making a booking.” Pike’s reply was open, responsive. If he wanted to glean anything of interest from this man, he would have to give something first.

  Traffic rattled by, the jingle of harnesses, the sighs and gasps of motor vehicles. “Ah,” was all the man said.

  They stepped closer to the wall to allow a sandwich-board man to pass. The man wore the blue uniform of a Prussian soldier with a spiked helmet, his board advertising the latest invasion book. The country was obsessed with German spies, and not all of it was unwarranted, in Pike’s opinion. There had been several sightings recently of mysterious airships floating over the east and south coasts near military installations, and several foreigners had been caught taking photographs at navy shipyards. There was even rumour that a heavily manned German vessel had been seen navigating the Humber, though it was long gone by the time the relevant authorities caught wind of it.

  Pike looked to Van Noort for the faint flick of an eye, an increase in respiration—any kind of reaction at all—but saw nothing.

  “I expect she’ll send you a note,” Pike said to fill the awkward silence.

  The man’s mouth twitched. “A note. Yes.”

  Pike snapped off his sleeve holders, shrugged into his worn suit jacket, and turned to leave. Getting to know this man and his motives was not going to be easy.

  “Wait,” Van Noort called as Pike began to make his way to the tram stop; miraculously these vehicles had not yet been affected by the strikes. “I have to ask you something.” He looked directly at Pike. Away from Margaretha’s image and no longer dazzled by it, he seemed quite lucid. “Forgive me for asking, but your knee is giving you trouble. I can tell by the way you walk, yet when you play the piano, it doesn’t seem to worry you at all. I am a doctor, you see; I have an interest in such things. Are you aware that it is often possible to have those kinds of injuries repaired?”

  Pike had not expected this. The man did not match his idea of a doctor at all. Then again, neither had Dody upon first meeting.

  “No,” he replied curtly. Assignment or not, he was sick of the attention his knee attracted.

  “Shrapnel?”

  Pike nodded. He was wondering if the doctor’s disfiguring scar might also be a result of the war when a ragged boy of eleven or twelve appeared from the alley beside the theatre and tugged at the tall man’s sleeve. “C’mon, Doc, it’s time to go. ’Aven’t you been ’angin’ round ’ere long enough? We got work to do.”

  The boy passed between them. Pike felt the quick press of a hand against his jacket pocket.

  “Just a minute, Jack; it’s rude to interrupt,” the doctor said.

  The boy stepped away, put his hands on his hips, and began tapping his bare foot on the path. What was this all about? Pike wondered. The boy could not possibly be Van Noort’s son. Did the doctor employ him to run errands—was he a courier of secrets?

  Van Noort ignored the impudent child, saying to Pike, “I was in the army long enough, South Africa actually, to recognise a man of military bearing. It is not just your title that gives you away.”

  Strange that Pike was finding out more about this man now when he had ceased to try—or was it, perhaps, the other way around? “Van Noort,” he pondered. “I thought your name was familiar.”

  “Yes, Dutch name, British Army, Boer War. You are bound to remember.”

  Pike paused for thought, wondering if perhaps they had even met. He felt a sudden burning sensation in his knee; saw the inside of a hospital tent pitched directly onto the veldt, the grass slick with gore. He closed his eyes briefly. If Van Noort had been a doctor in the war, this memory would be something they shared.

  Van Noort frowned. “Captain, are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes, fine, thank you.” Pike maintained a grip by focusing on his next course of action. He hurriedly bade the pair g
ood afternoon, returned to the cool entrance of the hall, and patted down his pockets. As he had suspected, his wallet was gone, stolen by the urchin. Luckily his warrant card wasn’t in it. He noted the direction the oddly matched pair were going in the hall’s front mirror and took off at a fast pace, leaving the building through its back entrance and rejoining the street some way ahead.

  He waited in a doorway as they approached, then stepped out directly in front of them. His sudden appearance startled the man and terrified the boy, bleaching his face of all colour.

  Pike said nothing but pressed down on the boy’s shoulder with one hand, gesturing “give it over” with the other.

  The boy swallowed and looked from Pike to Van Noort.

  The doctor’s face grew stern. Pike wondered if Jack was in for a clip behind the ear and prepared to intervene. But the doctor’s lingering look of disappointment seemed to have more of an effect on the boy than any amount of cuffing. He turned down his mouth and dropped his head.

  “Not again, Jack,” Van Noort said with a sigh.

  The boy sniffed, reached into the pocket of his oversized breeches, and handed Pike back his wallet, his gaze remaining fixed on a pile of cigarette butts near the gutter.

  “What do you say to the gentleman, Jack?” Van Noort prompted.

  “Sorry, sir. It won’t ’appen again.”

  As the boy continued to study the dirty pavement, Pike and Van Noort exchanged barely perceptible smiles. Van Noort said, “The boy cannot help how he was brought up. We are trying to change all that, aren’t we, Jack? The eighth commandment—remind me, please.”

  “Thou shalt not steal,” Jack mumbled.

  Pike wondered if he’d been set up; had the man, anxious to learn more about him, goaded the boy into stealing his wallet? Was the image of kindly guardian to troublesome waif an act? If it was, it was a very convincing one.

  “Exactly, thou shall not steal,” Van Noort said to the boy. “Run along now and I’ll meet you at work. On your way call in at your mother’s and tell her where you are going so she won’t worry.” Both men watched Jack disappear into the crowd. “Though I very much doubt she will,” he added quietly.

  A packed tram pulled up at the stop. “This is mine.” Pike grasped the bar and swung aboard. “I’ll see if I can arrange a meeting between you and Margaretha.”

  “I would be most grateful, sir.” Van Noort paused. “Margaretha,” he said as if savouring the texture of her name on his tongue. “So beautiful—why must she go by that ugly stage name?”

  Pike looked down at the tall man with the yellowed eyes. The tram’s bell rang. “Mata Hari?” Pike shrugged as the tram began to glide. “More exotic, I suppose.”

  Chapter Five

  MONDAY 14 AUGUST

  Dody left home earlier than usual and missed meeting up with Florence at the breakfast table. Although the sky hung pale and low and the temperatures remained sultry, she found that some of her languor had lifted. Tomorrow she was to present her research proposal to Spilsbury. It was not a genuine proposal per se; junior doctors such as herself and her colleague, Dr. Henry Everard, would never be given that kind of opportunity. But their mentor had thought it good practice for them to see what the groundwork of such work entailed; and if their proposals had merit, he’d said, he might hand them to a senior researcher for perusal.

  Dody was cautiously optimistic that her paper would be well received. Spilsbury would not be as excited as she was—though with Spilsbury, one never quite knew—but she hoped it might raise her in his estimation and perhaps increase her responsibilities at the mortuary.

  Even though the project would probably never happen, she could not help fantasising—seeing herself working in the famous laboratory at St. Mary’s, its modern equipment at her disposal, surrounded by cages of valuable Wistar rats.

  But for peace of mind, she needed a second opinion, which was why she had telephoned her old friend and chemistry tutor, Vladimir Borislav, to ask if he would mind checking some of her chemical formulas before she handed the paper in.

  Despite the prestigious girls’ boarding school Dody had attended, she had not been taught the required mathematics and science subjects for a medical degree, which meant extra swotting to pass her university entrance exams and some floundering during her first years of medicine. If not for Mr. Borislav’s extra tuition, she might never have passed her pharmacology subjects.

  Borislav’s background as the son of Russian immigrants and her family’s connections to Moscow had given them reason enough to continue a distant but amiable acquaintance—and since the Women’s Clinic had opened down the road from his shop, she had been seeing more of the chemist recently than she had for several years.

  Borislav must have heard the Benz idling in the street outside and opened the door of his ground-floor flat before she’d had the chance to raise the knocker.

  He greeted her in European fashion with a kiss on each cheek.

  “You’re looking very well, cool and well. Yellow is certainly your colour,” he said.

  Dody wore a pale, buttery-hued cotton blouse with a stiff white collar. Her skirt was of a darker shade and a match for the ribbon she wore around her boater.

  She smiled, thanked him for the compliment, turned back to the street, and waved at Fletcher to tell him she would not be long, then stepped through the door Borislav held open for her.

  It had been a while since she had been inside her friend’s flat, and she found the place lighter and airier than she remembered, the nicotine-coloured walls now adorned with floral wallpaper and tiles in the entrance hall instead of uneven floorboards. The austere ancestors who had lined the wall were no longer in view, their space taken up by landscapes of fragile watercolours painted by Borislav’s late wife.

  A multibranched electric chandelier of modern design added to the new-look hall. The ponderous morning meant it was left on, catching the bright hues of the leadlight front door and daubing the walls and floor with jewels of colour.

  Borislav noticed her looking about and smiled. “The new electric system works wonders, yes?”

  “It does indeed.” His chemist shop must at last be going well, Dody thought, happy for him. She knew all about the years of struggle he had endured since the death of his wife, his neglect of the business, and its near collapse.

  “Yes, it’s taken a while, but I have at last lifted myself up by my bootstraps and given the shop and flat a revamp. You have not yet met my nephew, Joseph, have you? He is about your age and unmarried. I think you will like him.” The chemist’s eyes sparkled. Oh Lord, obviously it wasn’t only her mother who thought she’d been too long on the shelf.

  When Dody replied that no, she had not met his nephew, Borislav indicated his green velvet smoking jacket and the jaunty red fez with the gold tassel perched on his head. “As you can see, I am in no hurry for work. Joseph’s a reliable lad with a bright head on his shoulders and the shop’s in good hands. But enough chitchat. I believe you have something to show me? And I am also anxious for you to see my new parlour,” he added with a chuckle.

  Borislav’s housekeeper, who must have been warned of Dody’s arrival, appeared with a tea tray and led them to the parlour.

  Dody gathered her notes together while Borislav poured the tea. After she had accepted a cup and declined the shortcake, she presented her paper to him.

  He smiled, removed a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles from his top pocket, and began to flick through the pages.

  “The pertinent part is towards the end, Mr. Borislav; I just need you to make sure I have the correct formulas.”

  He frowned, turned to the back page, and nodded. “Yes, yes, very good,” he said, but with some reserve she noticed, puzzled.

  Dody decided she wanted a biscuit after all. She glanced around the room while he read more of her paper, unable to keep her gaze on his deepening frown. She took in the ornate mantel clock, flanked on each side by Staffordshire figurines, the pile of pharmaceutical jour
nals on an occasional table, and the upholstered chairs of red and white stripes. There was not much else to look at. Suddenly the small, newly decorated room felt stifling.

  “So, Dorothy, you want to see if rats fed a certain diet will have a greater or lesser propensity to develop particular types of tumours?” he eventually asked.

  “Indeed, but it is only the chemical formulas for the foodstuffs that I’d like you, please, to check. I did not expect you to have the time to read the whole thing.” After another nibble of her biscuit, Dody felt compelled to fill the silence that followed. “I am inspired by the work of Johannes Fibiger and his hypothesis that certain tumours are caused by external influences.”

  Borislav said nothing for a moment. He handed Dody back her papers and removed his glasses. “A worthy cause, I’m sure.”

  Dody attempted to allay her anxieties with a nervous laugh. “That’s all?”

  “As you know, I am no research scientist, or even a doctor, just a humble chemist. I cannot give you any advice on the paper itself, only assure you that your chemical formulas are quite correct.”

  A “but” seemed to hang in the air between them. Borislav was holding something back; she was sure of it. The ring of the telephone put an end to further conversation.

  When he returned from taking the call, he told her his special cold mixture was out of stock and that Joseph needed him to fetch some from the warehouse and bring it to the shop immediately. Borislav removed his fez and smoking jacket and replaced them with an outdoor coat and bowler from a hat stand in the hall.

  “I’m so sorry, Dorothy, but I really must go,” he said. “If there’s anything more you wish to discuss, you know where to find me.”

  She barely had time to thank him as he hurried her to the door, pecked her on the cheek, and apologised again for his hasty departure.

  Dody sank into the passenger seat of the Benz, her cautious optimism spoiled now by an undercurrent of unease. What was wrong with her paper? She and Borislav had known each other for ten years. He had never held back praise for her work—or criticism for that matter. She knew she could always count on him for an honest opinion. Why, then, was he holding back now?