Authors: Kim Wright
“Nothing about today was a picnic, was it?” Tom said, and with that game little joke, they began. The two men were slowly lowered down the well, clutching their evidence cases to their chests and kicking the vines loose as they descended. Morass appeared to have broken through several layers of greenery in his fall, but the well was still choked with vegetation, which the boys dispatched as best they could. When they at last reached the point where Morass lay, Rayley called for a halt and Seal and Trevor stopped lowering.
“Work fast,” Rayley called down the well. There were no trees or walls nearby to help anchor the rope so the men up top were going to have to simply hold on while the two down below gathered their evidence.
“Don’t worry,” came Tom’s tense reply. “We shall.”
He untied his medical kit from the end of his rope while Davy was likewise freeing his examination kit from his own. Tom checked Morass’s face for the foam and spittle which so often indicate poison, but found none, and a quick inventory of the man’s limbs revealed no broken bones. In fact, there was no evidence of blood or bruising anywhere. It would appear that Morass had sat down on the edge of the well wall and simply toppled backward. His fall had been a relatively gentle one, the vegetation first slowing and the ultimately halting his progress. At this depth, Tom thought, looking up, any cry for help would have doubtlessly been heard, and to test his theory he called up to the men above. They responded readily, and even when Rayley ventured further away, almost halfway down the hill, he could still hear Tom’s cries.
“So he was likely either dead or unconscious when he fell,” Rayley said to Trevor as he walked back. Trevor merely nodded, blinking the sweat from his eyes. The strain of holding Tom on the rope was taking its toll, but Rayley did not bother offering to spell him. They both knew that if Trevor had grown tired with the effort, it would likely defeat Rayley within minutes. There was no need to further contribute to the ever-growing body count of Cawnpore.
“Or that’s what the rockslide was for,” Seal offered, struggling to control his own breath. “A distraction. Noise to cover the shouts.”
Rayley shook his head. “A distraction, surely, but if the murderer was trying to use a rockslide to obscure his victim’s cries for help, the timing would have had to be perfect. Too perfect. And Morass looks so much at peace that I don’t think he struggled at all. No kicking or shouting, no efforts to climb, which would have likely only made him drop farther. Tom is probably right. He went into the well either heavily drugged or already dead.”
Trevor nodded, and shifted the rope slightly in his hands.
Down below, Davy’s search was proving more fruitful than Tom’s, for he had found a drinking glass clutched in Morass’s chubby hand. An odd thing in itself, for any man caught in the act of falling would likely release whatever he held in an instinctive effort to try and stop himself. Morass, however, had clutched his beer glass to the bitter end and when Davy carefully loosened it from his grip and held it to the light above, he could see that the glass bore fingerprints. Impossible to verify until he was able to dust the glass in a more suitable setting, but even in this preliminary perusal, Davy could see that there were the prints you would expect – the full beefy thumb and fingers of Morass himself, placed precisely where a drinker would have put them – and also another set. Smaller, lighter, made by someone who had touched the glass but likely not gripped it.
“Good work, man,” Davy murmured, using his tongs to carefully wrap the glass in a cotton cloth.
“Thank you,” Tom murmured back in erroneous reply. “And see here, there’s something else in his pocket.”
“What’s that?” Rayley called from above.
“He was holding a glass when he fell,” Tom called back. “And there are a hundred pounds in the inner pocket of his jacket. Rather much for a servant of the Raj, wouldn’t you say?”
“Rather much indeed,” muttered Seal, now shifting the rope which was sustaining Davy. He too was showing signs of strain – not merely the weight of the rope, but also the dawning knowledge that his rival had most likely died because he had learned something that Seal had not.
“Drop the other rope,” Tom called.
Rayley tossed the end of a third rope down the well which Davy and Tom tied to Morass’s belt and then looped around his arms and legs and tied again. They signaled when the task was done and then the others hauled them up. It was an inelegant process, smacking both men against the stone wall of the well at several points, but Davy valiantly held on to the drinking glass, which he was already coming to regard as Morass’s final legacy to the case. After Tom and Davy had been hauled over the side of the well, they both sat for a moment on the ground, catching their breath and rubbing their wounds. Then they rose and, in silence, all five men turned their dwindling collective strength to reeling in Morass. When he too was back on the adobe bricks of the courtyard, they all dropped down to their bums and simply sat, gasping for air. Rayley brought a canteen which was passed around, and finally Tom and Davy began picking at their rope harnesses.
“So what do we have?” gasped Trevor.
“He went into the well far easier than he came out,” Tom replied. “Dead when he fell, most likely.”
But Davy was shaking his head. “A dead man couldn’t have held the glass. And he did, he clutched it throughout the whole fall. That takes a lot of will.”
Trevor nodded, noting that even though they had been through far greater rigors, both Davy and Tom were speaking in complete sentences, while he could barely utter five consecutive words. He really needed to lay off the cheeses and take more exercise.
“There are prints on the glass, at least two sets visible to the naked eye,” Davy continued. “His own, of course, and a smaller lighter set. When I taught him how to print just yesterday I noticed he was a quick study. Grasped not only the technique, but also all the ways in which it could be used. I have no doubt he not only preserved the glass for our benefit, but that he also contrived to get this second set of prints on the glass. He wanted us to know who he was with at the end, you see.”
“He knew he was going to die?” Seal said with disbelief. “And his last act was to get the killer to touch a beer glass?”
“It’s the money that explains it all,” said Rayley. “Why would he carry such a vast sum on a picnic? But he wouldn’t, of course. That’s just the point. Someone must have given it to him here.”
“He was blackmailing the killer,” Trevor said flatly. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Are you sure?” asked Davy, his expression hidden as he fiddled with a knot.
Trevor glanced at the face of the dead man lying just beside them, sprawled across the bricks almost as if he was merely one more member of their exhausted party. “We know the man’s nature,” he said gently, for Davy was obviously resistant to the notion that his promising pupil in the art of fingerprinting had brought about his own death through greed. “If he sold information to Benson, it’s a small moral leap from that to blackmail. He undoubtedly wished to learn fingerprinting for just that purpose, so he could collect incriminating prints and thus hold even more control over the killer.”
“The hundred dollars seals it,” Rayley added, also without glee. “It would take a servant of the Raj a long time to collect that sum through honest labor. And in fact it may, along with the fingerprint, give us even more ammunition for an arrest and conviction. How many people among us today would have access to that sort of money?”
“Almost anyone from the Byculla Club,” Seal said.
“And Michael Everlee,” added Tom. “But neither the orphans nor the servants could likely produce such a sum.”
“Well, let us get the body back to Bombay for a more thorough exam,” Trevor said, struggling to his feet. “And a decent military burial too, when the time comes. For no matter the man’s ethical failings, he was quite a detective, for he has managed to give us our first clear motive of the entire case. His killer murdered him in order to prevent further attempts at extortion. And if that glass which Morass took such care to preserve on his way down and Davy took such care to preserve on his way up does indeed hold a clear print, then we must thank Hubert Morass for bringing closure to our little story…for being one of the few victims who have also managed to solve the case of their own murder. For he will have told us not only who killed him, but why.” Trevor stretched, thinking that between his tumble down the hill and the way his shoulders had knotted with the effort of holding the rope, he would be lucky if he could rise from his bed on the morrow. “Why are you frowning so, Davy? I said we would give the man his proper due and the military police will accept that Morass died in the line of duty.”
“Isn’t that, Sir,” said Davy, throwing the last of the criss-crossed ropes off his chest and also rising to his feet. “It’s just that I remembered something. A hundred pounds is exactly how much Miss Bainbridge gave to Miss Hoffman. Saw her write the check myself, you see, the day before yesterday.”
C
hapter Twenty
The Tucker House
11:17 PM
They were informed that they would very shortly be leaving Mrs. Tucker’s house. She wanted them packed and gone just after breakfast the next morning. The group of them brought death, she said.
Yes, of course, she understood that Rose Weaver’s murder predated their arrival in Bombay. She could hardly lay that one at their feet. But since then…an electrocution, a landslide, a swarm of wasps, and a poisoning, all in such short order? She had been an agreeable hostess, had she not? Been willing to present them in society – yes, even Detective Abrams, and did they remember that part? That she had risked her good name to bring him too within the hallowed gates of the Byculla Club? She had allowed them to turn her parlor into an interrogation room, to bring servants in the front door rather than through the back. To stir up strange potions in her teacups and mark all her windows with silica dust.
But a murder in the midst of a picnic had been the last straw. She had her reputation to consider. It was, in many ways, all she had left.
Geraldine had wheedled. Waved about handfuls of money. But Mrs. Tucker had stood firm. It was late, so she agreed not to turn them onto the streets at this godless hour. But come the first rays of morning, they must go.
So the members of the Thursday Night Murder Games Club found themselves again at the end of an exhausting day but unable to rest. Geraldine had sent a hastily-scribbled note to Mrs. Morrow, hoping against hope that her new friend might at least find room for her and Emma. The men had resigned themselves that they would have to stay in the barracks adjacent to the jail – an irony, that – for even a cursory inquiry about the sort of boarding houses where Benson and Morass had stayed had revealed that none of these fine establishments was willing to take Rayley.
“Just one more incentive to wrap this devil of a case up quickly,” Trevor said to Rayley and Davy just before he entered his room. “There were nearly forty people at that picnic and let us pray we won’t have to fingerprint them all. We shall start with Miss Hoffman and Adelaide, of course, and with any luck we shan’t have to go further… ” He paused and leaned against the doorframe of the room. “Despite having seen it myself, I find it hard to accept that Hubert Morass is dead. I remember him sitting there like a big-eyed baby, drinking his morning beer and swearing that he had told us everything he knew. Told us everything, my eye.”
“Rest while you can,” Rayley responded, also paused in the doorway to his own room. “For yes, tomorrow will bring a flurry of fingerprinting, including bringing the ink to people who will be offended by the gesture, who will argue with us and stall in a thousand ways, I’ll wager. “
“We have our letter from the –“
“Quite. We have our letter from the Queen. Which only means that they will submit, not that they will like it.”
“The hundred pounds, Sirs…” Davy said tentatively, his hand on the knob of his own door. “We are certain it is the result of blackmail?”
“I can think of no other reason Morass would be carrying that sort of sum to a picnic,” Trevor said. “He was undoubtedly killed just after he was paid off.”
“Troubling, that,” Rayley said. “Why wouldn’t the blackmailer, who is also presumably the killer, have taken the money back before he or she departed? It’s a tidy sum, so you think they would have been tempted to pull it from Morass’s pocket for its own sake. And beyond that, the killer must have realized he was leaving behind a crucial piece of evidence.”
“Interrupted in the act is all I can imagine,” Trevor said. “With so many people coming and going, that makes a certain sense. Or perhaps the poison hit Morass more quickly than anticipated…”
“But that’s another puzzle in and of itself, that poison,” Rayley said. “He must have imbibed it through the beer, of course, since he was the only one who drank it. But he had been drinking like a fish all morning, even during the ride out. Why did the poison take so long to hit him? Could it be that one of the tins of beer was tainted and the others were not?”
“Entirely possible,” said Trevor. “We can only give thanks that Tom didn’t join him in his cups. And speaking of Tom, I imagine he will be able to verify the poison once we get all the evidence moved to the jail tomorrow. It shall be our new base of operations.”
“What sort of studies does he plan?” Rayley asked. “They say the fruit of the suicide tree is beyond detection.”
“I can only imagine he plans to serve some luckless animal the dregs of the brew and see if it dies,” said Trevor. “And if it was indeed the beer, then the glass in Morass’s hand should tell us everything else we need to know. But for now, to bed with us all. This might be our last good night’s sleep for some time.”
***
The garden at night was cool. Whereas it seemed that in England there were only two seasons – miserable summer and even more miserable winter – in India there were also two: day and night. For no matter how blistering and nauseating the heat of the afternoon, it always seemed to give way to just this, the magic of the evening.
Wandering, seeking this solace for the last time, Tom found Emma in the middle of the garden, sitting on one of the scattered woven chairs. She held a candle in one hand and, in the other, a volume by Mary Flora Steel.
She was wearing her nightgown. Sufficient to cover the shape of her body in the darkness and yet it was improper that he should come upon her so. Improper that the two of them might be alone at this hour with only a single candle to remind them of reality and the birds so very loud.
“You are reading?” he said. That much was obvious, but a man had to start somewhere.
She let the book drop closed in her lap. She did not appear to be the least flustered at being found in her nightgown or the fact the two of them were so thoroughly alone. “It is only a romance,” she said airily. “I found in the bookcase. Some silly thing by a woman named Mrs. Steel, some trifle about a half-blood Indian prince and his unswerving devotion to the most ridiculous girl who ever left England. “
“Ah,” he said. “But is it diverting?”
“Surprisingly so. I know precisely how their tale will end and yet I cannot seem to resist reading it, line by line, right up until the last page and their final embrace.” She laughed. “I suppose you think it foolish of me to bring both book and candle to the garden.”
“Not at all. The day was so confusing. Perhaps we all seek the comfort of a story whose ending we already know.”
“But it isn’t just tonight, for you see, I have come out in the garden each evening we’ve been in Bombay. It is my reward. A small payment for having survived the heat and clamor of the day.”
“I know. I have watched you.” Tom gestured toward the men’s side of the courtyard with the four glowing windows, lined up as regular and symmetrical as a line of soldiers. “I daresay we all have.”
She made no response to this, although she did glance in the direction of the windows.
“And I further daresay,” Tom went on, “that we have all dismissed the British gardens of Bombay too quickly. For they are the one common denominator of each place we have visited to date, are they not? Even the jail has a sort of mean garden, and it is easy to mock these patches of green as just one more example of Raj nostalgia, just one more doomed attempt to recreate England in the tropics. But then the sun falls and you see that what the gardeners have really engendered are little pockets of paradise within the city, places which are neither fully Indian nor fully English but rather exist as a world into themselves.”
Emma nodded, although the candle was now down at her waist and he likely could not see her face. “Tonight is the most appealing yet. Perhaps it is because the moon is finally full.”
“Ah, the moon,” Tom said, turning to look up at the sky. “Yes, but of course there would be one. Utterly and precisely round, as if a child has used the bottom of his drinking glass to draw it. This is the just sort of night when you would think Mrs. Tucker and her staff would move our beds into the garden and allow us a full viewing of the canopy above. Which makes me wonder if they ever do, or if this is just one more romantic claim our hostess makes to lure her boarders in just before she forces them back out. When we are expelled from this Eden tomorrow she will no doubt stand at the gate holding a fiery sword.”
Emma laughed. “I find it easy to picture. And with that thought, I should go back to my room. I must pack my things for Geraldine says…well, fiery sword or not, she seems under the impression that we shall be required to leave very early in the morning.”
“Do not go just yet. Sit a minute more and let us talk. It seems…” He hesitated, for trying to pull up the memory was like recalling a dream. “Something about you in that gown seems so familiar. You with your hair down and your feet bare and looking so different than you do in the light of day. It seems that we have sat together, just the two of us, like this before? Or am I wrong?”
“You are not wrong.”
He paused before speaking, both because he was not sure of the accuracy of the memory and because, even if he were right, there was no way of known how Emma might react. “Was it at Aunt Gerry’s house just after the Ripper took Mary? You were drugged and I was drunk and it was all such a muddle.”
Emma nodded again.
“I thought it was…I am sorry, Emma. It is nothing short of horrid that I could not remember until now.”
“But you have come close to remembering at times, have you not? At least bits and pieces? I have seen it in your face.”
“I kept assuring myself that I must have been wrong, mistaking a dream for reality.” He hesitated, compelled to ask the next question, even thought he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. “Was I –“
“You were gentle. I was willing. There is nothing to apologize for.”
“Nothing to apologize for?” he said, although her answer did bring him a bit of relief. “It would seem that I have everything in the world to apologize for.”
“I assure you, not at all.”
“You are too forgiving.”
“It is not a matter of forgiveness…That night is my fondest memory.”
“It is? I wish I could say the same.” Tom craned his head and looked up at the moon. Despite the fact that it was indeed full - almost mockingly so, as if Mary Flora Steel herself had ordered it up precisely for this occasion - the vegetation was so lush that he could not see Emma at all. Could not even guess if she was sitting or standing. If she was angry or smiling.
“Try as I have, I cannot bring the total image to mind,” he finally admitted. “And so the memory of that night is just one more thing that the liquor has taken from me. It sometimes seems that I watch my entire life from a distance. That I see it like a theatrical in which I am both the player and the audience.”
She did not answer. They sat in silence until he worked up the nerve to risk another question.
“Was that the only time?”
“So far.”
So far?
So far? Possibly the two most stunning words in the English language. Two syllables that were enough to send the world spinning, to turn a man’s life upside down.
“Lift your candle, Emma” he said. “Please. I want to see you.”
But she did not comply. Whatever was to happen next was evidently to be on her terms, and so he was left to stand there, weaving slightly on his feet and looking down into the darkness which had yielded her voice.
“You hesitate,” she said calmly, after a torturous pause. “Some caution or compulsion is holding you back. But you mustn’t think that I would make the same mistake as Gerry.”
“And what mistake is that?”