The Crimson Rooms (45 page)

Meredith came back alone quarter of an hour later and sat beside me, feet neatly pressed together, hands folded on her bag. “I should have intervened sooner,” she said. “I could tell the baby was very sick. The staff tell me there is an epidemic of measles at the moment. There aren’t enough nurses.”

“Will the child live?”

“I hope so.”

An administrator came at last and perhaps because of the recent drama, Meredith was given the attention due one professional by another. For once the Breen & Balcombe letter was not needed. There was no record of a Stella Hobhouse or indeed any other girl roughly her age attending the hospital on a Tuesday or Wednesday night in mid-April.

As we left, I noticed that the bounce had gone from Meredith’s step and she murmured, perhaps to herself: “Yes, yes, I know. I hear it so plainly.”

“What is it?” I asked.

She laughed. “Nothing. Hospitals. It feels as if I was being drawn back. And I don’t want to be, I hoped I’d left them behind.”

“But if it’s your vocation.” In the circumstances, I wondered if my choice of word was a little tactless. “Meredith?”

“It wasn’t just your brother. I was sick to my stomach. It was obscene, what we did, patch men up so they could go back and get killed. It was the opposite of medicine. I was sick of it.”

Theo Wolfe had little more luck than we,
though what with his pocketful of half-crowns, well-bred drawl, and the suggestion in his bearing that he had all the time in the world and just saw no reason for going away unless he was given the answers he required, he had found that most of the very exclusive art dealers on his list were prepared to cooperate: the trouble was, they didn’t come up with an answer. By showing copies of Carole Mangan’s descriptions (immaculately typed by Miss Drake) and the bronze dancer, he discovered half a dozen or so possible candidates for her purchaser—in fact one, the white-haired gentleman with the mustache, had apparently bought the dancer no less than three times from three different places, if the salesmen were to be believed. Wolfe even acquired names and addresses for four of the buyers who fitted Carole’s descriptions of Stella’s admirers.

He then took a taxi to Lyons, lay in wait for Miss Carole Mangan to leave work, gave her, by way of a reference, my name and a card from Breen & Balcombe, and swept her away to stake out the gentleman purchasers one by one, to see if she might recognize a regular visitor at the café. None was.

The next day, Friday, Wolfe returned to Smedley’s of Piccadilly, where the salesman had assured him he’d consult his records after work, and come up with the identity of the gentleman who’d bought a bronze dancer and who matched the third description on Carole’s list. As Wolfe told us later, he entered the emporium with a spring in his step, convinced this was the one, skirted a somewhat obscene picture of a laughing Egyptian girl and, by way of shocking contrast, a vast oil painting of the Vorticist School, and approached the desk. Today a woman was seated there, browsing a catalog. Dressed in a cream linen frock with a brown collar, she treated Wolfe with indifference once she realized he had no intention of buying. When he asked for the salesman of the previous day, she said the man in question had not turned up for work. Wolfe then confided that he needed to speak to him on urgent business and could he have a forwarding address, but the cream-linen woman said she had no knowledge of his whereabouts, could not be expected to dig out bits of information for all and sundry, but would leave a note for the manager, currently on a buying expedition in Paris, if required.

At last, by means of flattery coupled with a ten-shilling note and the hint of a threat to do with obstructing police business, she was persuaded to rifle through a filing cabinet, produce a log book, and come up with the address of the former employee, in Isleworth.

Here Wolfe found a tall, run-down house owned by a desperately thin landlady who said that the man in question, a Mr. Rintoul, had gone.

“Gone where?” asked Wolfe.

She presumed, on his holidays. He’d not said much but then he never did. Left with his suitcase that morning.

“Surely you must have some idea where he went.”

No idea. But he liked the sea, as she recalled. There was a cousin somewhere in the West Country.

Would anyone else know his whereabouts, did he have any relatives locally, might Wolfe have a quick look in his room to see if he’d left a forwarding address?

Certainly not. Who did Wolfe think he was?

“The salesman has disappeared,” said Breen during a gloomy late-afternoon conference, “and coincidence always makes me uneasy. But on the other hand, it’s hard to see that he would take us much further, even if we found him. The police don’t know we are looking for the purchaser of a bronze dancer, let alone a mythical lover, so it’s a very long leap to suggest that this shady figure might in some way be connected with the murder other than to provide Wheeler with his motive.”

In other areas, too, the collective endeavors of Breen & Balcombe had drawn a blank. Miss Drake had persuaded the wife of Stella’s doctor to disclose that Miss Hobhouse’s health had been good and that there were no gynecological issues, and Wolfe had got a crony in the police to trawl through the records of stations in Central London for the Tuesday or Wednesday in mid-April identified by Carole, but found no trace of Stella.

“I’m convinced now that Wheeler will be found guilty next week,” said Breen, “so much so that I’m beginning to regret my decision to let you sit in on the trial, Miss Gifford. You won’t learn as much about advocacy as I’d hoped. How, in the circumstances, could a jury come to a verdict of innocence?”

W
hen the firm of Breen & Balcombe
arrived at the Aylesbury Assizes, we had to force our way through a swarm of excited ladies in second-best hats, waiting to be admitted to the public gallery of the courthouse in the old town hall. I glimpsed Mrs. Hobhouse in her funeral garments, and daughter Julie gripping the handles of the wheelchair to which her husband now seemed to be permanently confined. There was no sign yet of the Wheelers.

Burton Wainwright, whom I met for the first time in a lawyer’s conference room, deigned to take my hand and say what a novelty, no, a positive honor it was to come face-to-face at last with one of these legal women he’d heard so much about. I thought him an unpromising figure, massively built and so fat in the face that his jowls and chins hung well below the wings of his high collar. The bottom three buttons on his waistcoat failed to meet, and his trousers were old and rumpled. Yet he exuded an air of confident bonhomie, as if he had just enjoyed a very large, alcohol-laced lunch, and he shuffled his way so casually through a bundle of notes that I could only hope his confidence was not based on a fatalistic belief that the outcome of this trial was inevitable.

Because I was to be merely a spectator to proceedings, I did not accompany Wainwright and Breen to the cells; instead, Wolfe and I sat in the lawyers’ benches and waited. He bit at a hangnail, then opened a copy of the
Times
while I thought about Nicholas. The week stretched unendurably far ahead; surely there could be no possibility of a letter tonight, was he thinking of me or was he so absorbed by his fraud case that I had been pushed to the back of his mind? And at such a distance, would he remember only the worst of me—the arguments, my worn-down heels, the unruliness of my hair?

The prosecutor, Michael Warren, was a short, genial-faced man with slow delivery and an apparently playful twinkle in the eye, but the judge, Mr. Justice Weir (“Not good news,” said Breen, “Weir enjoys a reputation for hardheadedness.”) had cold eyes and unnaturally pale skin, drained of all color by the vibrant red of his robes. Wheeler was brought up to the dock, where he stood in what I guessed was his wedding suit, utterly dejected as his mother wept in the public gallery, the quill in her hat jolting with each sniff. Her husband was motionless, hat on knee, gazing into the middle distance.

The jury was sworn (there was one woman, dressed top to toe in brown, including a hideous hat like a pith helmet), and proceedings opened with exactly the same lack of drama that marked the start of any trial, from theft of an apple to treason.

“Stephen Wheeler,” said Warren, “is more than fourteen years older than was his young wife. Their families were friends through church, and the young boy, Wheeler, lacking siblings of his own, had always shown affection for the two little Hobhouse girls, Julie, the older sister, and Stella. This affection was demonstrated in delightfully innocent ways—his mother tells how he built the little girls a go-cart and bought treats at Christmas. Stella was twelve in 1914 when Wheeler went away to fight but she maintained a regular correspondence with him—letters which will form part of the defense case—no doubt motivated by the patriotic desire of a young girl to lift a soldier’s spirits. At the end of the war she was sixteen years old but Wheeler by all accounts made no attempt to court her at first, doubtless all too aware of the significant difference in age and experience. He had sustained an injury to his left hand and he might have considered that this disfiguration, albeit comparatively minor, had damaged still further his chances of winning a lovely young bride.

“But over the years affection apparently turned to romantic love. The couple were married this year, on April 26, when Wheeler was thirty-six, Stella twenty-two.

“Less than a month later, on Saturday, May 17, 1924, Stephen Wheeler, the defendant, and his new wife, Stella Jane Wheeler, traveled by a Metropolitan train from Harrow and Wealdstone in Middlesex to the town of Chesham in Buckinghamshire, in order to enjoy a picnic. After an early lunch, Wheeler left his wife alone while he went for a drink at a local hostelry. When he returned to the picnic spot some two or three hours later—we have only Wheeler’s recollection as to how much time actually elapsed—she was gone. The following day, when she had still not returned home, Mr. Wheeler at last raised the alarm. On the Monday morning, her body was found in the woods and nearby, in a separate shallow pit, were discovered Wheeler’s own military gloves and his Webley service revolver.

“Wheeler had a distinguished war record, and the prosecution does not seek to diminish that in any way. I cannot be alone in acknowledging the sadness of an event that has brought a man who served his country with such distinction to a court of law, charged with murder. However, Mr. Wheeler, or Corporal Wheeler as he then was, was responsible for one important lapse in discipline during his years of service, and one that he has freely admitted both to the police and to the senior army officer brought down to interview him. Unusually for a noncommissioned officer, Wheeler had been issued with a revolver because he volunteered for night patrols and raiding parties. At the end of the war, however, he omitted to surrender this weapon. The jury would be right in thinking that such an irregularity was not unusual in the huge demobilization that took place between 1918 and 1922 involving nearly two million young men, but the question they might well ask themselves is, What kind of person would wish to keep a revolver as a souvenir of the war? Papers, mess tins, medals, gloves, yes. A revolver?

“At any rate, the revolver found a home behind a rafter in the roof of Wheeler’s shed, tucked away, he says, in a tin box containing odds and ends. By Mr. Wheeler’s own admission, only he and his wife knew that the box was there. That box, when seized by police, was found to contain medals and documents but was empty of more significant contents—the revolver and the gloves—both of which were found buried close to Wheeler’s murdered wife.

“Another key element of the prosecution case is an insurance document, which will be produced for your perusal later. Wheeler purchased life insurance a month prior to his wedding, at a favorable rate, since he was a long-term employee at Imperial Insurance. On the death of a spouse, the survivor, under the terms of the policy, was entitled to the princely sum of ten thousand pounds.