The Crimson Rooms (34 page)

I
arrived at the office of Breen & Balcombe
very wet and hungry, my fingers itching to take up a pen and do routine work, to keep myself steady after the turmoil of the art party and its consequences. But the minute I let myself into the hall, Breen’s voice rang from his study: “Gifford.”

“Mr. Breen.”

His office, that strangely metamorphic place, had transformed itself into a no-nonsense hub of business and he was in the kind of mood when an interview with him could go either way; he would spark fire one minute, be reasonable the next. A vast document on heavy parchment was spread before him and a pencil tucked behind his ear as he played to the hilt the part of overworked lawyer. There was no sign of tea, whiskey, or any of the other Friday treats.

“Door,” he yelled. I shut the door. “Now where have you been?” he said on a long sigh, as if I could have been to the Antipodes, for all he knew.

“To Stella Wheeler’s funeral, as I . . .”

“And what was the value of that? Remind me.”

“Her mother asked me to be there. I didn’t think . . .”

“It seems to me you’ve done a lot of not thinking recently, Miss Gifford. I have a letter here from Miss Buckley, matron of the Good Samaritan Home, copied to the chairman of the board of trustees, Bishop Ogilvie. Here it is, two close-written pages on the subject of your unprofessional and provocative conduct.”

“I had no choice, sir.”

“Hah.”

“I think if you’d been there, if you’d seen the children with their mother . . .”

“You see, this is it. When I told them I might take you on my colleagues said to me, steer clear of the woman, any woman. You’re mad, Breen, to consider it even. Women cannot see the wood for the trees, they said. Or to put it in the words of a particularly eloquent journalist: ‘Women see through a stone wall what is not on the other side.’
Personally
you might well have felt pity for the children, Miss Gifford,
professionally
you had no right to do anything other than your duty as a legal representative. As it is you’ve probably set the cause back irretrievably. Miss Buckley writes that you used threats against her.”

“I merely pointed out . . .”

“The entire affair shows a lamentable lack of judgment.”

“Mr. Breen, I could not bear to see those children suffer. We must rescue them—they are in danger of being sent to Canada or Australia if we don’t. I saw a notice of sailing on the notice board. My friend Miss Morrison says it’s common practice to ship foundlings abroad.”

“What are you talking about?
Canada
. Don’t be so ridiculous. How old did you say the Marchant girls were?”

“Seven and five, which I admit seems young to be migrated, but apparently some are. And they’ll be sent there one day, possibly, if we don’t get them back.”

“Well, you’ve just raised the stakes on that. Miss Buckley also states that you removed something from her office. I’m assuming that is simply not true.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as I took the documents bearing the names of board members and the list titled CANADIAN OUTFITS FOR GIRLS from my briefcase. As I unfolded them, Breen sank his head in his hands, recovered, picked up the papers, studied them, and tossed them down again. “You are in serious trouble, Miss Gifford. You could be struck off for this. It constitutes a complete breach of trust, professional misconduct, the lot. What were you thinking of? You could have copied them out.”

“There wasn’t time.”

“I suspect our only option will be to grovel. I hate that. Tell me again what you meant . . .
Canada
.”

“Miss Morrison says that some children are migrated overseas and adopted. But it may be worse. I’ve heard that some children are forced to work as domestic servants or farmhands. Others are mistreated.”

“I’ll get Wolfe to look into it. You stay clear. Don’t even breathe until I give you permission. Off you go now, for God’s sake. It’s likely the police will be here any moment to arrest you for theft so before they arrive you might as well draw up a couple of affidavits for me.”

Instead I sat in the chair by his desk and lifted my sodden briefcase onto my lap. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you, sir. I brought it from Stella Wheeler’s bedroom.”

He gaped. “You didn’t steal it.”

“No, no, I gave Mrs. Hobhouse a receipt.”

I took the statue from the briefcase and stood it on his desk. Then, for good measure, I unfolded the ticket I’d found in Stella’s sponge bag. Breen threw himself back in his chair, twiddled his thumbs, and looked at the dancer from under his lids. In the meantime, the room had changed, as if the statue had drawn all the feeble light from a drizzly afternoon to itself and Breen’s office was merely a backdrop. He leaned forward and advanced his chin close. “Now that, I’ll admit, is fascinating.”

I breathed more freely as I watched him adopt a new pose, that of fine-art connoisseur. He didn’t touch the statue at first but got up and walked slowly around the desk so that he could view her from every angle. Then he sat down again and picked her up delicately by the plinth to study her, head to toe. “You are right, she is beautiful. Utterly. Modern. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out where she was bought. A limited edition I shouldn’t wonder, French, you have to admire the French, not a Bourdelle but possibly a copy. Probably worth fifty pounds or so, quite outside our little waitress’s league.”

“And then there’s this. If you remember, I found it in Stella Wheeler’s sponge bag when we went to the house.”

“As I said at the time, possibly significant, possibly not. When all’s said and done it’s a cloakroom ticket.”

“The thing is, sir, I think it probably is significant because I’ve found out that Stella was a collector. She’d carefully tucked away a conker case and acorn cup and other little bits and pieces in such a remote part of her wardrobe at home that there was a good chance they would never be found. Her mother thought they were remnants of her childhood but they weren’t, they were freshly fallen. And now Carole, a waitress who worked with Stella, has told me that in April Stella stayed out a whole night and wouldn’t say where she’d been. She came into work next day with a stained coat and dirty shoes.”

“Well?”

“Well, don’t you think, Mr. Breen, that this all points to a love affair of some kind?”

“A love affair? She’d only been married a fortnight.” Despite his bluster—the words
love affair
were spoken incredulously, as if to say no one in their right mind would embark on such a thing—he didn’t appear to be much shocked but nodded as if this was what he’d been thinking all along.

“I’ve been pondering it for some time. And now Carole has given me a list of men who admired Stella, although she’s pretty sure none met her outside work.”

Breen’s face was a mask of incredulity. “Miss Gifford, a man’s life is hanging by a thread. A trial date has been fixed. And you have
been pondering
a theory that could change everything. If Wheeler had cause to be jealous he has a motive for murder, don’t you think?”

“I do. But what if Stella had become a nuisance to a rich admirer? Blackmail . . .”

He flung himself back in his chair and yelled:
“Wolfe.”

Miss Drake appeared. “Mr. Wolfe, as you may recall, has an interview with a colleague from the war office.”

“Curse the boy. Then we’ll meet first thing Monday, eight o’clock sharp. See he gets the message.”

When Miss Drake had gone, I said: “Don’t you think we should tell the police?”

Few things delighted Breen more than throwing obstructions in the way of the police, though he made a show of prevaricating by chewing his lip and looking at the ceiling. “In time. Not now. I don’t want them asking clod-hopping questions of our poor Mr. Wheeler. Things are not straightforward. We’ve had a report from Wheeler’s medical officer and we think there’s just a chance we may be able to run an argument of unfit to plead, after all, though it’s a very high threshold to cross. The defense has to convince a judge and jury that the defendant is incapable of understanding what is going on. There are many pitfalls. If we lose the argument and Wheeler, after trial, is found guilty, our chances of mitigating on the grounds of diminished responsibility are damaged because a jury has already decided he
is
of sound mind. At this stage, until we’ve clarified our line of defense and had a conference with Wainwright, I want to play all our cards close to our chest. And by the way, I had a call from Thorne. Says he’d like to take a look at the crime scene for the sake of completeness or some such nonsense. Damned nuisance he couldn’t have come with us the other day. I said you’d go with him on Monday afternoon, keep you out of mischief.” He stared at me blandly.

“No, I can’t,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No. I have too much work. I am at least a week behind with . . .”

“Wolfe can’t take him on account of his asthma, and I’ve far too much on so you’re all we’ve got, I’m afraid.” He threw a sheaf of documents across the table. “You should read this report from Wheeler’s medical officer. Despite the little matter of Miss Buckley of the Good Samaritans I’m minded to set you up for a cozy tête-à-tête with Stephen Wheeler, woman to man, see if you can get anything else out of him, especially now you suspect there was a third party in the marriage.”

Wheeler’s medical report shed
quite a different light on a man I had come to regard, hitherto, entirely as a victim of circumstance.

When recruited in August 1914, Wheeler was deemed of “inferior” health due to a slight weakness of the lungs (asthma, like Wolfe) and the fact that he was somewhat overweight and pigeon-toed (the examining MO noted that Wheeler had been confined to a desk ten hours a day since leaving school more than a dozen years previously), but was nonetheless considered fit enough to join up. Army life seemed to have been good for his health, because there were no other entries until an account of chlorine gas poisoning in 1915, which affected his already damaged lungs and resulted in severe bouts of coughing. A healthier man would have suffered less, wrote the MO, who added that Wheeler received the news that he was to be returned to England
without comment
.

This lack of responsiveness became a feature of the report. When he was again examined, prior to being sent back to France, it was noted that he showed no sign of emotion, either pleasure or distress, at the thought of being returned to the front line. Later, when treated for a slight wound to the foot sustained through a display of extreme carelessness by a private with an entrenching tool, the doctor noted that Wheeler made light of the pain, hoped the other chap wouldn’t be disciplined for it, and asked if he could be patched up by nightfall when he was due to go on patrol, a duty he seemed to relish despite its dangers.
Wheeler is one of the type of personalities who are much depended on by their fellows,
noted Doctor Reardon.
His behavior is utterly consistent, will never show an excess of emotion, notably fear, and even under heavy shelling remains calm.

When he was finally invalided out, due to the loss of three fingers on his left hand caused by handling a malfunctioning grenade, Wheeler had displayed some irritation that he would not see the war through to the end.

In a handwritten postscript to the typewritten report, Reardon had scrawled:
Wheeler was in many ways the ideal soldier, unflagging, always ready to volunteer for difficult tasks, utterly dependable, able to sleep and maintain normal functions in the most challenging conditions. When I was asked (along with other officers) to select men to perform the most taxing of duties, his was often the first name that came to mind. One of our regiment was convicted of desertion and firing on a military policeman while already on suspended sentence for a like offense. When Wheeler’s name was drawn for the firing party, I was relieved. I knew he could be relied on and that he would not flinch.