The Crimson Rooms (20 page)

“The thing is, as I told you before, we can barely make ends meet here. We are quite ready to house you and Edmund for as long as you like, but none of us has a specific allowance. Prudence has some savings, I believe, but very little. We’re all having to scrimp and make do.”

Her eyes had hardened. “Well, I’m afraid I am not prepared to go on like that. I have been making do since Edmund was born, and I cannot stand it any longer.” She piled things back into her bag, and I felt sorry that her pleasure in them had been tainted by our conversation. But I was also aware that her movements were a little clumsy and wondered if alcohol was behind her shrillness.

“Shall we speak again tomorrow,” I asked, “when we’re not both tired?”

“Tomorrow you’ll be out again, into your wonderful world where you are significant, Evelyn, and I shall be cooped up here in these terrible rooms. I must have some money. I’m not asking for much. Twenty pounds a month is what your father used to send me, but I don’t expect anything like that. Half would do.”

“That is still a huge amount, almost as much as I pay the girls.”

“Then I have come to a new prison. Worse than being at home. Have you any idea how it feels to be so confined? Perhaps I should find other lodgings, in fact it’s possible that there may be a room in Hadley Waters’s house.”

“I should be very sorry if you were to take Edmund away. That’s not what I want.”

“Evelyn, it’s not for me to tell you how to run your affairs, but I’ve been thinking, couldn’t you raise money on this house?” She had changed tack again and now spoke more softly. “Perhaps you could borrow money against its value or let a room.” (Her voice did not falter, although we both knew the only empty room was James’s.) “And it’s beyond me why your mother pays for two women to cook and clean when she and Prudence sit around all day and complain about the cost of everything.”

“It’s what they were brought up to do. They don’t know any other way. It would be cruel to expect them, or indeed Min and Rose, to change now.”

She was very still, watching me, and my heart beat faster, because I knew she was weighing something up in her mind. Sure enough, she next said, “I have something to show you,” and she opened the door, crossed the landing, and disappeared into her own room while I picked up the nude, who had an overbite and a weak chin, and wondered what new blow was about to fall.

When Meredith came back, she stood so close that I could pick out the individual strands of embroidery silk on her coat. From a little leather wallet she withdrew a scrap of paper, stained and soft, which she handled with her fingertips and cradled in her palm lest it break apart at the creases. When she passed it to me, gentle as if it were a fragile living thing, a wounded butterfly, I began to weep.

“He wrote it while he was dying,” she said. “They found it in his hand when they recovered his body and they brought it to me.”

On the paper was one word, very faint, scrawled with a blunt pencil and smeared with dirt. I knew the writing, I would have known it in any circumstances. The word was, in fact, a name:
Meredith
.

T
he next morning,
I obediently took the train to Amersham in good time for Stephen Wheeler’s hearing. Much to my relief, I was an hour ahead of Prudence, who would later travel the same line on an annual birthday visit to her old home.

It was a haunted journey. From a smeary window identical to this, Stella Wheeler had gazed at the lanes and hayfields of Middlesex with, I suspected, no great interest in the bucolic pleasures they offered. Everything I had learned of her so far suggested a girl who had preferred the city to the country; her family home had been in the suburb of Acton, and she had chosen to work in central London. I guessed (though I’d seen no details) that the costume she’d worn for the fateful picnic had been planned rather in accordance with a fashion-book fantasy of what ladies might wear in the country than with a mind for practicality. And I imagined that Stella would have sat opposite her husband instead of beside him, with the picnic basket on the floor between them. Perhaps Carole’s wistful
I would have married him
and her comment that Stella had taken her suitor somewhat for granted had convinced me that the affection between the Wheelers had been rather greater on his side than hers.

And as for Wheeler, what had been in his mind as he journeyed to the farthest reaches of the Metropolitan Line? What murderous thoughts? Perhaps none at all. Perhaps, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he’d simply anticipated a picnic with his new bride, a pint or two in a country pub, and a return in the late afternoon, refreshed and sunburned, for a night of marital harmony—I shunned the word
passion
as being too Ethel M. Dell—at home in Harrow and Wealdstone.

Unlike other ladies on the train, I had to uphold the pretense that I was an articled clerk with a future before her, so I somewhat self-consciously opened my briefcase (inherited from Father) and removed my notes from the day before. Perhaps I could use the fact that I had won Carole Mangan’s trust to buy more time in Breen’s employ. I had no idea how deeply Breen was hurt but I imagined that he was the sort never to forget a slight. And because I felt unable to apologize, I was in a double bind: I wanted to work for him but at what cost? Must it be always on his terms, regardless of a conflict with my conscience or the damage he might choose to inflict to my dignity as a lawyer?

The Lyons tea-shop notes occupied me for a while but my mind would stray to the previous night. It was almost as if Meredith had stage-managed the sequence of events: the child on the bottom stair, his head on my shoulder, her renewed request for money, and the subsequent suggestion that she should leave. I couldn’t possibly let Edmund go now he’d allowed me to put him to bed. And surely to do so would be a betrayal of James. My brother’s tortuous death was a raw wound in my consciousness, the pain made more acute by the addition of one small detail, the scrap of paper unspeakably stained. What had it cost him, with his one good arm, to extract the paper and pencil from his pocket and scrawl her name? Only hers.

Later, as I reached the courthouse door, I expected the usual chilly reception from staff and fellow lawyers but instead an usher actually bowed. “Miss Gifford, I presume? I have a message for you, ma’am. Mr. Breen says if you would be so kind, could you join him downstairs in the cells?” At least he was courteous as he led the way, although unable to resist a conspiratorial twinkle as if he were playing a parlor game.

Downstairs in the interview room, I discovered that the firm of Breen & Balcombe had turned out in force while a police officer stood in one corner, hands folded, staring straight ahead like a parody of himself. Breen was seated at one side of a small, square table, left arm hooked over the back of his chair as he gazed piercingly at Wheeler, whose head was dropped in his hands. He was wearing the jacket in which he’d been arrested and a clean shirt, presumably one collected by Breen during our trip to the house in Byron Street. Wolfe was note-taker. I had never seen him sit full-square on a chair, he always contrived to balance on one buttock with the other leg thrown across his thigh or extended before him, a posture which gave the message that while everyone else might be taking these proceedings seriously, he really could not. I imagined that he had been lolling thus on the fringe of events since he was at school.

When I was introduced by the usher, Wheeler made no move but Breen snapped to his feet and pulled the fourth chair from the table while even Wolfe half rose and made a gesture, as if toasting me, with his pen.

“Miss Gifford,” said Breen, handing me into the chair with disturbing ceremony. “Stephen, this is the third member of our firm, Miss Gifford. She will be working on this case alongside me. Miss Gifford, you should know that Mr. Wheeler’s recollection is now clear and that he denies the charge of murder.”

My heart pounded with relief. I was not to be dismissed or cold-shouldered then; in fact, I was now formally included in the most exacting proceedings handled by Breen & Balcombe in living history. It was as if yesterday had been a triumph for me rather than a fiasco.

“So, Stephen, I’ll ask you again, was there anyone else you can think of in Stella’s life who could have had a motive for killing her?” Breen said.

Wheeler shook his close-cropped head upon which the hair grew dense as fur.

“As far as you were concerned, on the morning of her murder everything was as usual between you?”

“Yes.”

“And I know you’ve told the police already but when was the last time you’d seen the gun and the gloves?”

“They was in my shed. To be honest, I’d forgotten they was there. I moved into the house in January, to get it ready for Stell, and I didn’t really know what to do with that military stuff.” Wheeler’s voice was as dismal as his bearing and I doubted whether, even when times were good, he had spoken vigorously.

“Did Stella know about them?”

“Of course. I showed them to her when I took her ’round the house after I moved in. That was the last time I seen them.”

“Stephen, I know this is a very personal question, would you have said you and Stella were happy together?”

Breen spoke the word
happy
tentatively, as if it were in slightly poor taste, and by way of reply Wheeler huffed air through his nostrils and nodded three times, slowly. I thought I understood him well enough: since the start of war, the notion of happiness had seemed a distant thing, like a flash of sunlight in a dark wood. But I could not help thinking that, even setting aside the ten days of imprisonment accused of murder, Wheeler hardly cut a romantic figure, or one who was cut out to be a promising husband for a wayward girl bride. His body was bulky and round-shouldered, his neck short, and his face, though regular-featured, too fleshy to be striking. Hair grew thickly on his wrists and throat, and his left hand was badly disfigured, having lost all but the thumb and index finger.

“Miss Gifford, do you have any questions for Mr. Wheeler?” asked Breen.

“I have one question.” My female voice must have struck a chord with Wheeler, because he looked me full in the face for the first time, revealing eyes of a touchingly liquid gray. I drew a sharp breath, because I was reminded suddenly of other eyes, as desolate as Wheeler’s. James, toward the end of his last leave, had become increasingly detached, aquiver, like an unshelled mollusk, with the anticipation of going back. “Mr. Wheeler, what did Stella do all day while you were at work?” I asked softly.

“Looked after the house. Did the shopping and washing and things like that. What else would she do?” It was clear that he hadn’t liked the question, though he stared at me defiantly.

“Mr. Wolfe?” said Breen. “Anything else?”

Wolfe, in between doodling in the margin, had been dashing down notes in handwriting that would later have Miss Drake tut-tutting as she attempted to type them up. “The hat,” he said, in his asthmatic drawl, “I think your wife was wearing a hat on the picnic?”

“Of course.”

“Did she wear a hat most of the time or was she inclined to take it off when she could?”

“She didn’t like the sun on her face, if that’s what you mean.”

“I believe her hat was found with the picnic basket. We’ve seen it in the box of exhibits.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I mean, when you left her to go off for a drink, do you recall whether or not she was wearing her hat?”

“She was lying in the shade. She had her hands on her chest and she was holding the hat between them.” His mouth contorted at the memory and he bowed his head.

The hearing was due to begin in ten minutes, so we shook Wheeler’s too-soft hand and went upstairs to courtroom 1, which was crowded with press and spectators among whom our arrival caused quite a stir. I found myself sandwiched between Breen and Wolfe and realized that a conversation must have taken place between them to ensure my inclusion and protection. Though I did not look directly to my left, I glimpsed a number of women’s hats and realized that Wheeler’s family was probably present, perhaps Stella’s too. And then any further consideration of the Wheelers was pushed out of my head altogether, because I had caught sight of the black-clad figure folded into a lawyer’s bench behind me, Nicholas Thorne.

Before I could recover, Breen turned, gave him a nod, then whispered to me: “I understand you’ve met Thorne already. We’ve arranged a meeting after this hearing. Incidentally, Wheeler’s boss, Thorne’s prospective father-in-law, is also in court—over there to the left. Sir David Hardynge. It will do the case no harm if Imperial Insurance is prepared to supply Wheeler with a character reference and there’s even talk of them paying his costs.”

After a decent interval, I glanced across at the gentleman in the frock coat and pinstripes, very dapper, with thick silvery hair and a glossy mustache meticulously combed, his fingers folded lightly over the handle of a cane. His bright, curious gaze was partially concealed by the thick lenses of his spectacles, but as he glanced at the dock in anticipation of Wheeler’s appearance, he caught my eye and gave me the brisk, appraising stare of a powerful man.