The Crimson Rooms (7 page)

An hour later, we left the police station with nothing achieved but an agreement that Breen would represent Wheeler when he appeared at Amersham Magistrates’ Court in the morning—which meant that, unless Wolfe rematerialized in time, I would have to deal with Leah Marchant’s bail proceedings single-handed.

What we did have, however, was a duplicate résumé of Wheeler’s war record and a copy of the police statement, which Breen passed me a page at a time so that I could read them, at great cost to my equilibrium, as the taxicab lurched back toward London.

The alleged facts of the Wheeler murder case were as follows:

On Sunday, May 18, 1924, at about seven-thirty in the morning, Police Constable Scrivener, asleep with his wife in Chesham’s police house, was roused by a violent knocking on the door. There in the porch was the defendant, Stephen Wheeler (a clerk working for Imperial Insurance), disheveled and out of breath, holding on to a bicycle. He told PC Scrivener that his wife of three weeks, Stella, aged twenty-two years (formerly a waitress at a Lyons tea shop in Regent Street, Central London), had gone missing, and that he’d last seen her at about one-thirty the previous afternoon when they had sat together on the hill above the church, eating corned-beef-and-pickle sandwiches.

As he spoke of the picnic, Wheeler had sobbed uncontrollably. “I wish I’d stayed with her,” he said, “but I had a thirst on me and fancied a beer. We had an argument, she said she didn’t want to go to a dirty pub but I may as well and she wasn’t bothered if I did so I said I’d just go down for a quick one and be back up, and I left her lying on the blanket in the shade.”

Wheeler had duly gone down to the Queen’s Head, where the landlord was somewhat lax about opening hours, so that it was nearly half past three when Wheeler, having drunk no more than a couple of pints, finally returned to the picnic spot to find the blanket and the basket exactly where he’d left them, but no sign of Stella apart from her hat.

Wheeler was not overly worried at first. In fact, he thought his wife must have wandered off for a little stroll, so he lay down and had a nap. When he woke an hour or so later, with a blistering headache due to the shade having moved and exposed his forehead to the full heat of the sun, she still wasn’t back, so he roamed about the hillside and nearby woodland, calling her name. Next he ran back to the town to see if he’d somehow missed her and she’d gone shopping on Chesham High Street. When he returned to the picnic spot, at about six, he reluctantly decided that she must have taken it upon herself to go home without him.

So he packed up the rug, the sandwich wrappers, and the hat, and made his lonely way back through town to Chesham Station, where he first waited forty minutes for the little steam shuttle to return from Chalfont and Latimer, then took another train back to Harrow-on-the-Hill, from whence he had to walk a mile or so to his home in Wealdstone. As he approached the house, his spirits rose because he thought Stella was bound to be in, but to his despair he found the door locked with the spare key still in its place under a loose brick in the backyard.

At this point, he had no idea what to do next. Though he had known Stella since she was a child—she was some fourteen years his junior—the couple were too recently wed for him to understand all her moods, and he thought perhaps she had been so offended by his departure for a beer that she had taken it upon herself to go home to her mother. So the exhausted man set off again, this time by bicycle to Acton. But when he got to his in-laws, he found no Stella. Afraid of alarming her parents, he told them that he happened to be passing after a day’s fishing trip with the chaps from work. Though they offered him a mug of cocoa and cheese on toast, he said he must get back.

Even then, at midnight, he still hoped that when he turned the corner of the street he would see lights burning, but the house was in darkness.

Next morning, after a sleepless night, he got up at dawn and bicycled back to Chesham. First he went to the picnic site. A light rain had fallen but otherwise the area was as he remembered, the grass still crushed from the weight of their bodies on the blanket. Convinced now that something terrible had happened to Stella, he ran down the hill and hammered on the door of the police house, hence a note made in the incident book at seven-thirty a.m. on Sunday, May 18.

Officer Scrivener said he would report the woman missing, and as soon as possible summon a couple of men from Amersham station to take a look at the picnic site—it being Sunday, of course, there would only be a skeleton staff. While registering Wheeler’s distress, Scrivener had the distinct impression that there were marital difficulties between husband and wife—Wheeler had seemed nervous when describing his last conversation with his wife. However, when Scrivener suggested that Stella might have perhaps run away, Wheeler had become agitated and insisted that she would do nothing of the kind and that he trusted her with his life. When asked what he intended to do next, Wheeler said that he would have another look around the hillside and Chesham town, then return home and hope that Stella would turn up there.

It was not known how Wheeler spent the rest of Sunday, but in the meantime a couple of policemen went up the hill and had a look about but found nothing suspicious. The search was duly logged in the incident book. However, on Monday morning, a dog walker let her mongrel, Caspar, off its leash in woodland about three quarters of a mile from the Wheeler picnic spot. The dog disappeared for several minutes deep into the trees and failed to reemerge. When its owner went after it, calling its name, it suddenly sprang out with a woman’s shoe in its mouth. Urged on by the dog’s insistent yapping, the intrepid owner investigated further and discovered that the shoe had been attached to the foot of a young woman buried under a few inches of leaf mold and a pile of bracken. She’d been shot in the heart at close range. Later, a pair of army gloves and a revolver, again lightly covered with soil, were found nearby. The police, after rapid checks on Stephen Wheeler, discovered that he was an ex-army man. They therefore went immediately to his house to arrest him. He was not at home, but Scrivener had made a note of Wheeler’s occupation and place of work. Unlikely though it seemed that a man whose new wife had disappeared would choose to go to the office as usual, when they reached Imperial Insurance in Farringdon, there was Wheeler, at his desk. He was duly arrested on suspicion of murder. Wheeler’s colleagues viewed the proceedings with disbelief, their consternation shared by the management, including the company director, Sir David Hardynge, who happened to be in the building and was hastily alerted.

Having read the statement,
I rolled down the window and took gasps of the evening air in an effort to cure motion sickness. Breen, unusually, was completely still until we turned into Clivedon Hall Gardens. As I stepped from the cab, he said: “Don’t you be making too harsh or quick a judgment of Stephen Wheeler.”

“I had no intention . . .”

“He was a good person when I knew him. Heaven knows what the war did to him. I only drove ambulances for a couple of years and still came home with my nerves shot to pieces. Wheeler stuck it out almost for the duration. You keep an open mind until we find out the truth.”

“My mind is open, Mr. Breen.”

“Good, make sure it stays that way.”

A light had been left burning in the porch, but the rest of the house was in darkness. However, when I opened the door of my own room, I was startled by the sight of Meredith perched on the windowsill, in moonlight, knees to her chest, wearing a flowing robe drawn tight at the waist, her eyes huge and dark. “I thought I’d wait up for you. Did you see him? Did you see the murderer?”

I switched on the bedside light, flustered, even annoyed by her intrusion into my room. “I saw our client, Stephen Wheeler. He’s not been found guilty of murder yet.”

“What was he like?”

“Sad. Very.”

“What will happen next?”

“In the morning he’ll be brought to court. He won’t be granted bail. Then, when the police are ready, he’ll be arraigned—he’ll have the indictment read.”

“The indictment?”

“Charge. Then, if he pleads not guilty, a trial date will be fixed.”

“And what will you do in the meantime?”

“I’ll probably have nothing else to do with the case, except perhaps to shadow Mr. Breen.”

“It’s all so exciting. You are lucky.”

“I suppose I am. Wheeler isn’t, though.”

She studied me for a moment, then asked: “And tomorrow. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow I shall be working as usual.”

“I should like the opportunity to talk to you alone, away from this house. Might I buy you lunch?”

“I’m afraid I never take a lunch break.”

“But just this once, surely. I passed a department store on the bus today, Peter Jones, I’ll bet that has a restaurant. What do you say? One o’clock?”

Elfin in her flowing robe, head to one side, eyes fixed pleadingly on me, she was a strange addition to my bedroom. After all, it was rather touching that she’d stayed up for me. In any case I was too tired to argue, and at that moment, lunch in a department store seemed an exceptionally unreal prospect. It was now nearly twenty-four hours since I had slept, and in the midst of yearning for my bed and dreading the next morning’s court appearance on behalf of Leah Marchant, I found myself agreeing to meet Meredith punctually at one.

T
he following morning I traveled
to Shoreditch to represent Leah Marchant. Once more I visited her in the cells, once more she refused to cooperate with me because I was not Mr. Breen. Half an hour later, her case was called into court and she was brought up to the dock cuffed to a woman jailer, looking even more disheveled than the previous afternoon, with pins dangling from her hair and her eyes puffy. Her case was sufficiently unusual to have attracted a straggle of spectators in the public benches and I was conscious of a frisson of interest as I took my place in an advocates’ pew, facing the bench.

Months spent observing from the public galleries had made me familiar with magistrates’ courts; the smell of polish, freshly mixed ink, and the clash of body odors, defendants brought up from the cells with only hands and face washed, magistrates and lawyers scented with hair oil and shaving soap, the dim light filtering through windows set high up lest a prisoner be tempted to jump dock, the somewhat languid atmosphere generated by the constant to-ing and fro-ing of ushers, the swinging of the court doors and the inattention of lawyers lolling about waiting for their own cases to be called. Today the bench was occupied by a single stipendiary magistrate, whom I judged to be in his late sixties. The clerk, meanwhile, was a round little fellow with owlish spectacles through which he appeared to see very little.