The Crimson Rooms (6 page)

With her spoon suspended between bowl and mouth, Meredith asked brightly: “So, tell me, Aunt Prudence—do you mind my calling you that, you are Edmund’s great-aunty, after all—how long did you say you have been living in this house?”

Prudence, whose neck was supported by the dozen or so rows of pin tucks in her collar, drew her elbows ever more tightly against her sides and made a great show of laying down her spoon and dabbing her lips before speaking. “Five years.”

“And before that?” asked Meredith.

“Before that,” I intervened, sensing that antagonism had already sprung up between the two women, “Prudence was still living in Buckinghamshire. After the war, when money was short, it became uneconomical to keep up both this house and her cottage, so she let the cottage and moved in with us. We were—are—very grateful for her company.”

“Well, it seems a very convenient arrangement for you all. And you,” Meredith added, addressing Grandmother, “Mrs. Melville, have you ever lived in the country?”

Grandmother didn’t hear the question until I had repeated it three times. “Certainly not. It would be far too quiet for me.”

“Grandmother has always loved London,” I said. “She knows it intimately. She used to be an actress, you know, before she was married, so she’s performed in some of its great theaters.” Mother sniffed; we should not be disclosing our somewhat disreputable family history to a stranger. Nonetheless, I plowed on: “And she marched through most of London’s streets, before the war.”

“Did you, Mrs. Melville? What was your cause? Personally, I have always been a very keen suffragist.”

But Prudence interrupted. Laying down her spoon, she leaned across the table and hissed: “It was a great sacrifice for me, leaving the country.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“I had a cottage with half an acre. I kept chickens. I was known by everyone in the village. My brother, Edmund’s grandfather, had been more than generous in supporting me, but after the war I knew that the family finances could not sustain two establishments.” This was presumably a scarcely veiled reminder to Meredith that Gifford money was tight and that she too ought to show some consideration. “When I left, a special service of thanksgiving was held in the church. I was given a eulogy—it can only be described as such—for my services to the congregation. I’d taught Sunday school for nearly forty years. I supervised the flowers. And there was a tribute to James because he was my nephew and a great favorite.”

Meredith, who had been staring wide-eyed during this outburst, laid down her spoon. “Do you know, I’m hoping the next course will be served soon. This boy is so sleepy his head is almost hitting the bowl. And yet he must eat, I don’t believe he’s had a proper meal since we left Toronto, and although you’ve tried with your soup, haven’t you, Edmund, mushrooms are not his favorite.”

“I’m afraid we’re not used to fussy eaters,” said Mother with a nervous glance at Prudence.

“Oh, now, it’s only that he’s never cared for soup.”

“Canada must be a very profligate country, if small boys are allowed to dictate the menu,” observed Prudence.

“He’s bound to like the fricassee,” said Mother. “Rose always manages to come up with something very tasty.”

But I was never to discover what Edmund thought of Rose’s fricassee, because at that moment the final drama of that momentous day began to unfold. There was a commotion in the hall, the door burst open, Min’s red face appeared, full of self-importance, and I was summoned outside. There in our hall was Mr. Breen, of all people, hat in hands, eyes ablaze with excitement, though I noted that he wasn’t so preoccupied that his glance failed to take in Meredith’s trunk, the potted fern, or the half-dozen men’s umbrellas in the coat stand.

“I’ve been called out,” he said in the casual tones he adopted when most agitated, “to Buckinghamshire where an old acquaintance of mine, an insurance clerk, has been arrested on suspicion of murder. You must come. Wolfe is out of town and I may need someone to take notes. Besides, you won’t get many other opportunities like this. On with your hat and off we go.”

I
sat beside Breen in the cab
, too stunned to do more than watch the familiar villas and terraces of Kilburn roll by. Though the sky was overcast, the streets were brightened by trees newly in full leaf. We stop-started past shuttered shop windows and locked yard gates, overtook omnibuses and horse-drawn carts, then ground to a halt behind a delivery lorry. On the pavements, a straggle of tradesmen and office clerks in crumpled suits and trilbies headed home. When we set off again at last, the horizon beyond the cab window began to expand, walls were replaced by fences, fences by hedgerows bordering lush suburban gardens, houses by farmland.

The moment we had cleared London traffic, Breen opened his briefcase and worked through a mountain of mail accumulated during his holiday, filing the contents into different categories to be examined the next day by Miss Drake, who would cut out and save every square inch of blank paper; the rest she would consign either to the stove or to the buff folders of clients’ papers.

But despite the intensity with which Breen seemed to peruse each document, I sensed he was so fired up that if we had to stop at another crossroad he would surely leap from the cab and run ahead to let other traffic know that this was an emergency, we were in a rush. It seemed to me I could smell the Highlands on him, a whiff of heather and soft rain that clung to his wiry hair and the fibers of his clothes. I, on the other hand, was feeling ever more displaced, unable to comprehend how I had been wrenched suddenly from the dining room at Clivedon Hall Gardens to the inside of a cab with Mr. Breen, and still reeling from the shock of seeing my dead brother’s mistress and child eating soup in our dining room.

“Did you have a pleasant holiday, Mr. Breen?” I asked, in some vague hope that if I observed the niceties, the evening might not slip even further out of control.

His head snapped up. “
Pleasant
. What kind of a tepid word is
pleasant
? But yes, I had a good holiday, thank you. I walked, I strode out. I breathed pure air. You should try it sometime.” He addressed me, as he often addressed a bench, with biting irony. I thought that he must be referring obliquely to the crowded hall at Clivedon Hall Gardens.

Yet, despite his uninviting mood, opportunities for a tête-à-tête with Breen were so rare that I thought I should not waste this chance. “Sir, I’d like to speak to you about a case that will be in court tomorrow, a woman called Leah Marchant, accused of kidnapping her own child. She wanted you to represent her because years ago, when she was a servant, you were kind to her.”

As I’d anticipated, Breen found this flattering portrait of himself irresistible. “You say she
was
a servant. What is she now?”

“Abandoned by her husband who’s a sailor—he was last seen more than two years ago. She’s now destitute. Accused of child abduction although the baby was her own. After Christmas, according to her notes, she was faced with starvation, having fraudulently claimed poor relief—she was earning a few shillings a week and hadn’t declared it. When the relief was withdrawn she surrendered the children, two little girls and a baby of one year, voluntarily to the care of a children’s home. Then she worked for a month or two and scrabbled together enough money to provide for them. But the home refuses to hand them back, on the grounds that she is not a fit parent; they say she drinks, that there is no father or other family members offering financial or moral help, and that she therefore has no means to support the children in the long term.”

“So this kidnap?”

“Mrs. Marchant discovered the address of the baby’s foster mother and followed her until the perambulator was left outside a butcher’s shop. Then she simply plucked the baby out and ran off. She only held him in her arms for about two minutes before she was captured.”

Breen picked up a letter, studied it with an extravagantly furrowed brow, then thrust it aside. “Well, certainly she should have bail if it was her own child. She’s hardly a threat to the public at large.”

“The police say there’s every danger she’ll go after him again. They say she’s in a poor mental state. There’s no surety and she’s as good as homeless.”

“What do you mean,
as good as
?”

“It’s what the police say.”

“Never go by what the police say. She’s either homeless or not. Have you tried to find her a hostel?”

“I haven’t had . . .”

“We can’t have our clients languishing in prison unnecessarily. It’s highly unlikely that a reasonable judge will ultimately imprison her for the offense of kidnapping her own child. She must have bail.”

“There is no certainty that she’ll be able to get him back legally. That’s why I don’t think the court will grant bail. I’ve studied the 1891 act which gives the courts the right not to grant custody to unfit parents . . .”

“At this moment I’m not interested in legal rights. The woman must be got off this ridiculous charge. We’ll go to court in the morning and have her bailed. Then you can put her in touch with some organization that will help her to earn money while we write to the prosecution. Good Lord, Miss Gifford, I took you on because I thought you’d be resourceful—I didn’t expect you to fall at the first hurdle. What about your friends at Toynbee? Miss Morrison. Have you talked to her? I’m sure she’ll have some ideas.”

“Yes, I could consult . . .”

“Well, do consult. Explore every avenue. Think through and around the problem, Miss Gifford. Use your contacts, limited though they be. I thought you women were good at talking. Nurture your acquaintances, you never know when you might need them. The accused man in this case of murder, Wheeler, for example, is an old acquaintance of mine and suddenly he needs me, all right. We were brought up more or less around the corner from each other, attended the same elementary school. The victim is his wife, shot in the breast at close range. Apparently they were on a
picnic
.” He spoke this last word with utter incredulity, as he might have said
a high wire
, and certainly I could not imagine the purposeful Mr. Breen, for whom the outdoors was territory to be mapped and traversed, indulging in anything so purely frivolous as a picnic. “Such a stroke of luck that when I got off the train at Kings Cross I thought I’d just call in at the office to pick up my post. And then, while I was there, this telephone call came about Stephen Wheeler. Of all people. The least offensive soul in the world. At school he was one of those stolid children who never stepped out of line.”

“What proof is there that he did it?”

“His army revolver and gloves were found buried near the body. There is a match between the bullet that killed her and his gun. That’s all I know.”

He resumed his reading and I was left to watch the deepening countryside; a timber-framed farmhouse, a shaggy haystack, and hedgerows blowsy with cow parsley. At the police station we swept through a cluster of onlookers, including a couple of reporters with notebooks, and spoke to the officer on the desk who was breathless with self-importance. In a few minutes we were ushered through to a cramped back office where the investigating sergeant sat behind a heap of papers, taking sips from a mug of tea.

“Wheeler’s not speaking,” he told us. “If only he’d help himself. He was full of words yesterday morning, apparently, when he came here to report her missing. But since we’ve arrested him, nothing except your name and details, Mr. Breen. I was hoping I’d have a full statement by now.”

“I’m very pleased he’s said nothing. As far as I’m concerned a client shows excellent sense in refusing to speak except in the presence of his lawyer. May we see him at once?”

Wheeler was slumped in his cell with his head in his hands. He was a stocky, soft-fleshed man of around forty with a surprisingly heavy beard for an insurance clerk, and ungainly hands, the heels of which he ground into his eye sockets so that I could not help wondering what image he attempted to blot out.

Breen was transformed when with a client; the hurry went out of him and his voice grew tender. But with Stephen Wheeler not even these strategies were successful. His head sank ever further and he wouldn’t speak. My notebook and pencil were redundant.

Only once, when Breen asked, “Tell me, Stephen, about the last time you saw your wife,” did he look up and allow us to see the expression of utter hopelessness in his swimming eyes. Then his head went down again.

After quarter of an hour or so, Wheeler was handcuffed between two policemen and escorted down a little corridor to a stifling interview room where space was so limited that I, being the most insignificant person present, had to stand with one foot in the passage. And there, beneath the grimy light of a single bulb, Wheeler was subjected to question after question, none of which he answered, not even to give his name or date of birth. By the time he was charged with murder, his head was so low that he might have been asleep except that occasionally a tear fell into his lap or he ran his sleeve under his nose.