The Crimson Rooms (21 page)

The court was ordered to rise and the bench of three magistrates entered, self-important with the prospect of dealing with a murder rather than just the watering-down of milk by a local farmer, next case on the list. Wheeler, handcuffed between two policemen, was led into the dock and there was a frisson among the observers, a scratching of pencils on paper as the press sprang into action, and I heard a sob. When I glanced around again, Wheeler’s eyes were wet because he’d seen his family and Sir David Hardynge, who smiled with great kindness. I turned back hastily to face front—any movement of my head meant that I risked meeting Thorne’s eye.

The entire proceedings were thrown into sharp relief by my disproportionate and ungovernable reaction to Thorne. I was actually trembling, and the side of my body nearest him, which he might have reached out and touched, ached. And though Wheeler should have had my full attention, my mind instead was processing several impressions, each of extraordinary clarity. I felt, more than at any time of my life, significant, though I wore, as ever, a gray suit and misshapen hat. I felt, acutely, the proximity of Breen and Wolfe, and, behind me, Thorne. And this heightened consciousness played on my comprehension of what was taking place: I regarded the tragedy of Stella Wheeler and her workaday husband in the light of what was happening to me as I stood in front of Thorne, a man whom I had met only twice but who had the power to change the color of air.

Meanwhile the hearing proceeded. The defendant was identified as Stephen Anthony Wheeler, date of birth September 14, 1888, aged thirty-six. The indictment was read out: That on May 17, 1924, at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon, the defendant Stephen Anthony Wheeler had, with malice aforethought, murdered his wife, Stella Jane Wheeler, formerly Hobhouse, by shooting her once in the breast with a single bullet, at close range, with his revolver.

Dead silence in the courtroom.

“Are we ready to take a plea, Mr. Breen?”

“We are, Mr. Clerk.”

“Stephen Anthony Wheeler, to the offense of murder with malice aforethought, do you plead guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty.” Another ripple of excitement as the legal machine rolled on. An early date was set for committal proceedings to the Aylesbury Assizes, bail was refused. A woman sobbed in the public gallery. “No, no, no,” she moaned, “it can’t be true.” In less than ten minutes the prisoner was removed to the cells—he did not look again to the public gallery—and the hearing was over. At once there was a bustle in the courtroom as the spectators and press filed out; Thorne crossed to Hardynge’s side, held open the door for him, and they left the courtroom together.

“Very well,” said Breen. “Divide and rule. Wolfe, you and Miss Gifford are to speak to the Hobhouse clan, I’ll deal with the Wheelers. And at eleven-thirty we’re to meet with Thorne in the King’s Arms.”

So Wolfe and I drew Stella’s parents aside and interviewed them in a little room kept for the use of victims. The mother, pale and tremulous, was slender, barely forty, with hair neatly cropped under a heavy hat. Her elegant mourning clothes showed considerable attention to detail; the gloves fastened from wrist to thumb with a dozen tiny buttons, a handkerchief edged with black in her fist and her slim shoes immaculately polished. The father was much less fine-featured, slight of build, a chauffeur by profession. He turned his hat around and around and said that he might lose his job over all this, he’d already had three days off work, today was the fourth, and there was the funeral still to come.

Also present was a married daughter, Julie Leamington, three years older than Stella, and for the first time I glimpsed what the dead girl might have looked like. Julie was a dressmaker and, like her mother, impeccably turned out though she had inherited the father’s prominent nose, small mouth, and wide-set pondering eyes, so that her appearance, in the uncertain light of the witness room, was Madonna-like. She was very slender, with a long, delicate neck and fine hands. Unlike her parents, who were so engrossed by their tragedy that they seemed not to have noticed that I was a woman, Julie regarded me with considerable curiosity and suspicion.

Wolfe, who proceeded to surprise and impress me with his handling of the interview, did not act so much with tact as with the easygoing indifference of the wellborn. When he was offering his condolences, his detachment contrived to be professional rather than offensive—I suspect he bestowed the same degree of sympathy on these parents bereft of a daughter as he might on a friend who’d lost a bet. The effect was to quell any potentially emotional outbursts, at least at first. His frame was comfortingly large, his smile amiable, though at the same time managing to convey that he was communicating with the Hobhouse family across a considerable social divide. “I expect the police have been asking you all sorts,” he said.

They nodded.

“You must feel utterly bemused by it all, as are we, we must admit. But we need to get to the bottom of this so we can account for the dreadful thing that happened to your daughter. So if you don’t mind, we’ll try and put a few pieces of the jigsaw in place. Could you bear it? Very well, can we just clarify first of all one or two things. I think Mr. Wheeler rolled up at your place on the Saturday night? How did he seem to you?”

Mrs. Hobhouse pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and spoke through the cloth. “We welcomed him. I can’t bear to think of it. We could tell he was out of sorts. Panting, you know, flushed after his bicycle ride. We wondered afterward if he was the worse for drink. Turns out he’d come to us fresh from murdering our child.”

My pitying respect for Mrs. Hobhouse was growing by the minute. I saw her as a woman jolted out of a quiet existence by this violent event, but determined to play her part well. Her bearing suggested a self-conscious desire to be dignified in her grief, as if she was an actress thrust before an audience despite being somewhat unsure of her lines.

“Mr. Wheeler denies that he killed her, Mrs. Hobhouse,” said Wolfe. “We mustn’t lose sight of that. I was wondering, is there anything more you could tell us about Stella, the type of girl she was?”

Hobhouse, who I decided was the weaker partner, spoke emphatically, “She were a lovely girl. Quiet. Worked hard at that restaurant of hers. Loved to dance. Couldn’t wait to be married.”

“She was a child, I believe, when she first knew Stephen.”

“He used to come over and play with her when she was no more than a babe,” said Mrs. Hobhouse, “take her for rides in a go-cart, which was a thing she loved. Our families were bound up together by church connections. Stephen adored our Stell. He wrote to her all through the war. I didn’t think it was appropriate, her being so young, but it was wartime after all, so I hadn’t the heart to stop her sending letters back. And she stayed loyal to him afterward, which is to her credit though I always thought she could have done better. She had several admirers, not all of them fit for marriage, it’s true, but she didn’t need to marry
him
. She was by no means desperate.”

“Any admirer in particular?”

“None special, as I told the police.”

“Do you think Stella was happy?”

“Happy in what?”

“Her choice, you know, her marriage.”

“Oh, she was happy enough. Our Stell was the type of girl who had to be wed. She was restless at home. But I wanted her to be sure in her own mind. I asked her a few times, the last was on the night before her wedding. I said, ‘Are you sure, Stell?’ and she was cross with me, she said what did I think she was putting us to all that trouble and expense for, if she wasn’t sure? She was very fierce as she always was when she’d fixed her mind on something.”

“Mrs. Hobhouse, the way you’re talking makes me think you had your doubts about the wisdom of your daughter’s marriage?”

“I thought she was very young and he was quite old by comparison, but she had set her heart on it and that was that.”

“She was lucky to have him,” the sister said suddenly, an odd remark—though the waitress Carole Mangan had said much the same—given that Stella was now dead, apparently by her husband’s hand. “At least he was alive, with only three fingers missing. Had the luck of the devil in that war, he did. I lost first one fiancé, then another.”

“You’re happy enough with Michael, aren’t you, Julie?” asked her mother.

“He wasn’t my first choice.” I noticed that Julie was resting her palm on her stomach and wondered if she was expecting a child.

“Yes, but Michael isn’t moody like Stephen was,” said Mrs. Hobhouse. “Stephen did have awfully bad moods.”

There was a pause. “That’s frightfully interesting, Mrs. Hobhouse,” said Wolfe, examining his nib. “Mr. Wheeler was moody, you say?”

“Only since the war and very rarely then. He was the sweetest-natured boy before that. Far too soft for our Stell, I sometimes thought. She was a girl who needed keeping in line. But I do blame the war for the fact he did get very low from time to time, Stell said. I believe he could have opted for home duties, you know, after he was gassed, but no, he would go back. I used to think they should pass a law that took a man out of the trenches once he’d survived for, say, two years.”

“What form did his moods take?”

“Oh, you mustn’t make so much of a small thing,” cried the mother. “The fact is, he killed our Stell. And that’s not what you do when you get low, is it? Just because he went quiet sometimes doesn’t give him an excuse to kill her.”

“What about finances? Do you think the couple had any money worries?”

“I doubt it. They were short, of course, but Stephen was very careful with money. It’s one of the reasons it took him so long to marry her, he was saving up.”

“Mrs. Hobhouse,” I said, “could you tell us when you last saw Stella?”

Tears spilled over her lids. “She came for tea and to fetch the picnic basket in the week before she died. She was excited about the picnic, poor soul. I offered to go over to her and help her get the house nice, but she didn’t seem to want that. She said she liked to come home and go upstairs to her own room and look at her old things and I thought why not, after all she’s still a child.”

“What kind of things did she keep in her room?”

“Oh, you know. Dolls. Old clothes. We never got ’round to clearing it after she was married. We didn’t have time.”

“Would you mind, I wonder, so that I could get to know better what Stella was like, if I came and had a look at her bedroom sometime?” The mother nodded. “I went to see where Stella worked, you know, at Lyons. Apparently she had a wonderful record, never ill, never late. You must have been proud of her.”

“She was a very good girl. But we brought up both the girls to be conscientious.”

“Good job,” said Julie sullenly. “Looks like I’ll be slaving away till the end of my days.
He’ll
never get off his backside and find work.”

“Julie,” said her mother sharply.

“I talked to Stella’s friend at work and she told me Stella had hardly been late once in all the years she’d worked there,” I said. “That’s an outstanding record.”

“Oh, I should think that’s an exaggeration,” said Mr. Hobhouse. “The buses and trams aren’t that reliable. You was always shouting at her to get up in the morning,” he reminded his wife.

“She was a very good girl,” insisted the mother. “I always knew where I was with Stell.”

“Come off it, Mum,” said Julie. “She was no saint. What about the night when she never came back at all because she missed the last train? Dancing down the Trocadero with her friends from work she was. You were worried sick.”

“When was that, I wonder?” asked Wolfe, adding tiny leaves to a line drawing of a weeping willow.

“Lord, I can’t remember. Some time in April, a couple of weeks before she were married.”

“Was Stephen with her?”

“Not that I know of. She was out dancing, is all, having a last fling. He knew she loved dancing. He liked to watch her when they were someplace together, being flat-footed himself.”

“Stell said not to tell him when she used to go down the Trocadero,” said Julie. “She knew he’d get into one of his states. He didn’t like her going down there.”

Now that the Hobhouses’ hitherto united front was fractured, the atmosphere in the room had soured. Nevertheless, their acquiescence thus far had surprised me. I tried to imagine how we would have reacted, a few days after the news of James’s death, had we been confronted by a barrage of questions from those trying to exonerate the German who had fired the shell. But the Hobhouse family had responded meekly to our probing, I guessed, because they had been schooled all their lives to do as they were told by professional people.

Half an hour later,
the firm of Breen & Balcombe met Nicholas Thorne over morning coffee in an upstairs private room at the King’s Arms, where Thorne achieved the difficult balancing act of showing deference to Breen’s reputation and experience while not in any way diminishing his own status. Nor did he reveal that he and I had parted on a very strained note the previous week, and I was conscious that a bond was created between us by the very fact that we chose not to share details of our meeting with the others. He sat in an easy chair, legs stretched before him, a diminutive coffee cup and saucer in his hand, indulging with Wolfe in the kind of male joshing that never failed to annoy me. In a rapid exchange, they established a network of common experience and acquaintance: Radley, was it? Ah no, Rugby man myself. Then Christ Church. Did you know Saint, Rentoul, Marshall Hall? Either Wolfe or Thorne had dined with the first, scouted for another, knew a friend of a friend whose sister had married a second cousin of Hall’s. Then their talk drifted on again: Poor old Jeffries . . . Colossal promise, brilliant career ahead of him . . . last days of the war . . . The brother survived. Not half so sharp . . .