Authors: Kim Wright
“So your wife never knew what happened in Cawnpore?”
“Very little of it.”
“By which you mean she never knew that you stood passively by and watched her first husband die.”
“My marriage to Rose has been…complex. As I would imagine are all marriages of long standing.”
True, but I will wager that few unions begin with the tortured history of this one,
Rayley thought.
Dear God, what a miserable household it must have been for all these years. So many memories to contend with, so many ghosts hovering in every corner.
Weaver attempted to clear his throat, with very little apparent success.
He has been talking for some time,
Rayley thought,
and vocalizing things which have, for half a lifetime, gone unspoken.
These facts might have made Rayley feel sympathy for anyone else, but it was hard to muster any compassion for the figure sitting before him now, old and frail though the man was. Old and frail and – for Tom was likely right – suffering mightily without the medicinal comforts he had found within his wife’s bottle of reddish-brown powder.
“Are you quite well, Secretary-General?” Rayley asked coolly. “Would a visit from your family doctor render you better able to withstand the rigors of interrogation?”
Weaver looked at him with watery eyes. “What the devil do you mean by that?”
“We know that your wife took daily doses of laudanum. We think it is highly likely that you did as well.”
To Rayley’s surprise, the man laughed. “Everyone in Bombay takes laudanum.”
“You see no shame in it?”
“Comparatively speaking, no I do not.”
“So may I assume that you did not attempt to hide your usage from your household staff?”
Weaver gave another ugly cough. “There is no point in attempting to hide anything from one’s household staff. No man is a hero to his valet, as I believe some writer once said and I suppose that fact would be especially true in my case.” But the change in questioning did spark a certain level of interest, for Weaver turned to face Rayley more fully and continued. “But yes, everyone within my household was aware that on certain challenging mornings, I would take a sip or two of Rose’s draught. What of it?”
“For your sake, that is a good thing.”
“Why? Because it allows you to paint me as even more of a degenerate than you already believe me to be?”
Rayley shook his head. “Our working theory is that the poison which killed Rose and Sang was likely administered through her morning medication. If it was also known that you shared her cup on a regular basis, there is a possibility that the poison was meant for you.” When Weaver responded to this news with little more than a blank stare. Rayley elaborated. “A clever lawyer could use this fact to create doubt in the mind of a jury. Enough doubt to have you exonerated.”
“Exonerated? Is that what I am to be?”
“Of this latest crime, yes. Perhaps. No one can ever truly say.”
“And am I ever to be forgiven of my previous failings?”
“I do not know,” Rayley said. “But I rather doubt it, because it would seem that everyone who might have forgiven you is dead. You might someday find a way to forgive yourself, but I cannot see how. “
“Nor can I,” said Weaver. He cleared his throat a final time and struggled to straighten himself within his seat, to become once again the very model of military bearing. “So now I sit here before you, Detective Abrams. The lone survivor of Cawnpore. The monster of the Raj. A wretched excuse for an officer, or a friend. But I have cooperated in every way that you have requested, have answered every question and confessed every sin. When shall I see my Geraldine?”
Chapter Sixteen
A Tea House in Bombay
9:20 AM
“Yes, Benson and I were working together,” Morass said. “He came to me the first day he was in Bombay and offered me a deal. He claimed that he simply wanted enough evidence to get Secretary-General Weaver out of jail and assured me that if I helped him accrue it, he would in turn help me find the true killer. And he further promised, of course, that I would get singular credit for solving the case.”
The three men had sat in the small tea room for some time going through the notebook, and Morass had readily acknowledged that Benson’s calculations on the poison dosages were based on information he himself had provided.
“According to Tom, you knew at once that the poison was from the suicide tree,” Trevor said. “What made you so certain?”
“Do you mind if I swap this tea for a beer?”
“Not at all,” said Trevor. “Assuming we can find a place that will pull a pint at this unlikely hour.”
With a grin, Morass waved at the woman leaning morosely against the counter, who disappeared behind a small curtain and promptly returned with a mug of froth. “Proprietors in the British section of Bombay,” Morass said by way of explanation, “most often serve multiple functions. This fine lady will not only provide both a pint and a cuppa upon request, but would probably also be willing to pull a tooth or measure us for boots.”
“Indeed,” said Trevor, studying his own cup. The pint looked tempting, but it was not yet midmorning and he had to keep up a certain standard for Davy. “I believe we were speaking of the poison?”
“Ah yes,” said Morass, speckles of foam now dotting his mustache, the overall effect looking a bit like seaweed caught in a receding tide. “I have toiled here in the Bombay Presidency for eleven years, Detective, and have had quite a few opportunities to study the properties of the suicide tree.”
“As a murder weapon?”
Morass shook his shaggy head. “My first experience was with a young soldier who had dosed himself. Military life does not suit everyone, especially not military life in India. Apparently some local swami had told the miserable boy that if he took sap from the seed in a moderate amount he would sicken enough to be discharged and sent back to England. He was no more than eighteen, I would wager, and he gave it a try. His heart was indeed damaged but not stopped, at least not permanently, and he was shipped home to live out his life as a invalid. I daresay he began to regret his decision soon enough.” Morass shook his head. “But before he left, as he lay in the military hospital gaining enough strength for the voyage, he confessed all to a chaplain. The chaplain came to me, being the sort who was more afraid of his commander than his God, and I assured the lad he would not be prosecuted for desertion if he told me everything. He did, and was a good source of information. Explained to me precisely how much he had taken and how he had prepared it…After that I kept an eye out for the symptoms in subsequent cases.”
“You did not mention any of this to Henry Seal?” Trevor asked.
Morass sniggered. “Hardly. Fewer than six months on the continent and yet that one is striding around barking orders, just because he comes from the side of the Viceroy. Seal would be the last one I would tell.”
It is so much like life back in London,
Trevor thought.
All the different divisions, each protecting their own turf and each eager for the glory of the arrest. How many criminals have walked away because the local coppers resented the outside intrusion of Scotland Yard and failed to share every shred of evidence or every theory?
“The day I went to the Weaver house to dust for fingerprints I found a dropper,” Davy said. “That was how it was done, was it not? How the poison was mixed into the medicine, I mean?”
`
“Ah, lad, so you found a dropper, did you?” said Morass, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Well so did I. Yes, that most certainly was how it was done. Thanks to Benson, I knew that Mrs. Weaver liked her oblivion to come to her in a liquid form.” Morass lifted his mug and winked. “As I do myself, so cheers to the lady wherever her soul may be.”
“Who measured the dosage?” Trevor asked.
“According to Felix,” Morass said, “she had her nurse lay out the powder, which was later diluted with warm water to form a sort of broth. Can’t fathom how the old bird could manage the taste, but the point is that it would’ve been easy enough to add a bit of the toxin to the dosage. I found the dropper the first time I went to the Weaver house, all crusted at the tip. Between what the young soldier had told me about his half-fatal dosage all those years ago and the markings on the dropper, Benson was convinced he could figure out how much poison had been administered.”
“What was his reason for doing that?” Trevor asked mildly.
“You cannot guess?” Morass said, just as mildly. “But of course you can, and you are playing a game with me. Benson’s goal was not to prove poison as a means of death, or even that the poison had been mixed in Mrs. Weaver’s medication. This much would be self-evident if the case ever came before a judge and jury. No, his goal was to prove that the amount of poison had been calculated to kill a large man. The Secretary-General himself. To cast him as the intended victim and not the perpetrator.” He looked at Trevor keenly. “We were never sure of the actual dosages, you understand. I doubt anyone could have been. We were just trying to create enough reasonable doubt that the prison doors would swing open releasing Anthony Weaver. Then Benson’s client Michael Everlee could return to England with his family reputation unsullied. Benson, I assure you, did not give a whore’s ass why Rose Weaver had truly been killed or who might have done it.”
“Are you sure?” Trevor said, stung that a lowly military inspector would dismiss a Scotland Yard detective – or even a former one- so quickly. He remembered Benson’s thoughtful comments about history on the evening he was killed, and he had not seemed like a shallow or mercenary man. “His notes were quite detailed. As was his chart.”
Morass snorted. “Benson was merely the mathematician,” he said. “I was the detective.”
“You seem a strange pair to take up together at all,” Davy said. “If you do not mind me saying so, Sir.”
“I like you all the better for saying so,” said Morass, waving his empty mug in the direction of the woman, who once again disappeared behind the curtain. “Jonathan Benson was a fancy man who, if left to his druthers, would have undoubtedly preferred to partner up with Seal. Spend his time in India riding about in a carriage with the royal insignia on the side. But he knew that the Viceroy’s office would never stoop to work with a hired investigator, a man paid by the hour. Would never tell him what they knew. Assuming they did know anything, that is, which I doubt. So he threw his lot in with us boys on the military side, who had at least tried to mount a proper investigation.” Morass turned to Davy, who was drinking neither tea nor beer, but merely sitting with his hands folded in front of him, like a well-behaved child in church.
“I should like to learn this fingerprinting technique you boast of so freely,” he said, in a tone that was more of an order than a request. “None of the lads in my division have even seen a kit.”
“I can show you the basic technique,” Davy said. “How to lift a print when there is only one to be lifted and it’s nice and squarely placed. But I must warn you that the reality of a crime scene is often more complex. Multiple people might touch the item in question or they might grasp it or touch it indirectly so that you only have a partial print.”
“So you think a plain copper from the field canna do it? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I am a plain copper from the field,” Davy said, “and I believe Detective Welles will tell you I am the best on our team with the kit. I’m just saying it takes practice.”
“You said that Benson’s goal was to get Weaver out of jail and your goal was to get credit for the arrest,” Trevor said, shifting the subject back to the matter at hand. “And yet it seems the majority of your shared efforts were directed only toward the first objective, the exoneration of Weaver. Hardly seems fair.”
Morass shrugged his meaty shoulders. “We were but two days into the investigation when Benson was killed. Perhaps the man would have come around and helped me as I helped him. Hard to say.”
“You seem admirably sanguine about the inequities in the partnership,” Trevor said. “Did Benson offer you money? Payment for your information?”
“What if he did? The facts are still the facts.” Morass leaned back as the woman set the second mug of beer in front of him. “Twasn’t like it was a bribe or anything, so you need not look down your nose at the working man, Detective. Benson said it was only proper that he split his fee with me since we were splitting the work, and I figured that was as right a way to look at it as any.” Morass raised the mug and drank long and deep, then put it down with a clatter.
“And it isn’t as if anyone was trying to pin it on an innocent man,” he went on defensively, as if either Trevor or Davy had accused him of something. “Or let a bad one go free. I never for one moment thought that Anthony Weaver killed his wife and his manservant. Do you?”
“No,” Trevor admitted. “I don’t like the fellow, but even so… My guess is that the wrong man sits in jail.”
“So there you go.”
“And you are telling us everything?”
Morass smiled and picked up the mug. “Of course.”
Bollacks,
thought Trevor.
You play the fool with me just as you doubtlessly did with Seal, holding back twice as much as you give. But it is enough for now.
***
The Weaver House
10:20 AM
Emma and Geraldine stood on the broad porch of the Weaver house and watched Felix approach with the cook and the maid.
The cook and the maid,
Emma thought.
That is all anyone has ever called them, including me. I wonder if they even have names.
But as the three servants climbed the steep concrete stairs, she smiled in what she hoped was the same reassuring manner that she had seen Trevor use so many times. Felix led the way through the door. Doors, she should better say, for there were two of them: a heavy wooden one meant to lock out trouble, just as any house in London might have, and, behind it, a lighter door with a mesh panel in the front. Designed to allow a cooling breeze to pass through, she noted upon closer inspection, but to stop any flies or bugs from entering with it.
“Felix?” she said. “What do you call this thing? This door with a screen in it?”
“It is a screened door, Memsahib.”
“Ah,” Emma said. “Just so. Well, it is ingenious.”
The five of them moved through the foyer and formal sitting room toward the back of the house, where a broad kitchen seemed to serve as the buffer between the large airy bedrooms of the Weavers and the small, darkened rooms of their servants.
“Tell them to show us everything that was done on the morning Mrs. Weaver died,” Emma instructed, while Geraldine sat down upon a stool placed at a small work table and prepared to make notes. “Start with the moment they heard signs that the Secretary-General was awake.”
Felix chattered something and the two women promptly moved into action, doing a most effective pantomime of the events of a typical morning in the Weaver household. Evidently Anthony Weaver had been telling the truth about not breakfasting at home for Emma saw no evidence that either woman was preparing anything for him although Felix, entering into the action, quite dramatically acted out the eating of his own curry and then pretended to leave via a side door, presumably to prepare the carriage.
“So Mr. Weaver required nothing from the kitchen, am I reading that right?” Emma said to Felix, who hovered at the door. “Yet his departure was the signal to begin preparing a tray for his wife?”
“Yes, Memsahib,” Felix said. “See, they lay out tray and boil the water…”