The Advocate's Wife (11 page)

Sergeant Knollys suddenly spoke, and his voice, low but powerful, seemed to reverberate through the shrouded room.

‘Would you say, ma’am, that there was anything unusual about Miss Garbutt? Anything that puzzled you at all? You had known her for – what? – five years. Did she ever confide a secret to you?’

Mrs Stockmayer had all but recovered from the shock. She began to take an interest in the investigation partly for its own sake.

‘Well, Sergeant Knollys, I was very fond of Garbutt. She could talk about the latest plays and novels in a natural, unforced manner. She could speak French, too. She told me once that she’d been awarded a bursary to St Margaret’s School for Girls, in Bloomsbury. She could be very close and secretive, you know, and at times, she betrayed a cynical view of the world that was not very – well, not very nice. But when you ask me whether Garbutt ever confided a secret to me – well, the answer must be no.’

‘Did Miss Garbutt ever mention any relatives, ma’am?’

‘She didn’t often speak about her own family, Mr Box, and for a long time I assumed that all her relations were dead. But earlier this year – when was it? – some time late in March, she told me that an uncle had died, and that she was going to look through his effects. Until that time, I hadn’t known that she’d had any living relatives.’

‘And she went to school in Bloomsbury. Would you say that she was a Londoner?’

‘Well, yes, presumably. I mean, she never suggested that she
wasn’t
a Londoner. But she was very reserved about her origins, Inspector. I realized that she didn’t want to dwell on her past history, and I never asked any questions.’

Box glanced at Sergeant Knollys, who produced a note book. It was time to put down in writing what Mrs Stockmayer was telling them, She saw the sergeant begin writing. The action seemed to unlock her memory of past conversations with her lady’s maid.

I’ll tell you what I can remember, Inspector, if you think it’s got some bearing on this terrible business. The uncle that she mentioned had lived in straitened circumstances, apparently, in a couple of rooms. She mentioned where it was he’d lived. Yes! Garlick Hill. Somewhere vaguely near the Mansion House. I remember it, because it seemed such an odd name for a street. Alphonse – my husband – cannot abide garlic.’

Knollys’ pencil moved rapidly over the pages of his note book. He had contrived in some way to accommodate his massive frame to the small gilt chair, though from time to time he gave a little wince of discomfort. With pencil poised, he asked Mrs Stockmayer a question.

‘This uncle, ma’am – did Miss Garbutt ever mention his name?’

‘No. She just called him her uncle. When she came back from Garlick Hill, she told me that there hadn’t been anything worth retrieving, and that she’d sold everything to a broker.’

Mrs Stockmayer smiled, rather wistfully.

‘When she said “broker”, you know, I was rather surprised. But later, I realized that she hadn’t meant a stockbroker; it was a pawnbroker. There was …’

Mrs Stockmayer’s voice trailed away for a while. Evidently, she could not think and speak at the same time. Box and Knollys waited for her to continue.

‘Garbutt would talk to me, you know,’ she said at last, ‘usually in here, in the evenings, when Alphonse was still at business. We’d sit here, with just the fire lit, and perhaps a shaded oil lamp. I’d do a bit of embroidery, and Garbutt would talk to me in her quiet, slightly sardonic voice. And over a long period of time, I gathered an impression that her early years had been ones of struggle. I don’t mean that she was necessarily poor, but that she had to strive valiantly to maintain a certain standing in society. I admired her for that.’

Inspector Box sat for a while, thinking over what Mrs Stockmayer had told them. The ghostly, shrouded room, its white dust sheets catching the sun, was the right kind of place to recall these memories of a dead woman.

Mrs Stockmayer began the preliminaries of rising from her chair. The conversation had drawn to a natural close. Box and Knollys got to their feet.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Box. ‘I hope that you and Mr Stockmayer have an enjoyable time in Austria. You’ve been of enormous help to us.’

‘I’m absolutely devastated by the news of Garbutt’s death, Inspector. My husband, too, will be very upset. People like Garbutt deserve better of life. Have you been to Bardley? There’s hardly anybody living there at all. It’s just quiet, and peaceful. Who could have done such a dreadful thing? Perhaps it was some madman. Go down there, Mr Box, and speak to our friend Mrs Courtney at Bardley Lodge. Her late husband, you know, was one of Mr Stockmayer’s partners. She has a cool, detached approach to life. If poor Garbutt said or did anything that could throw light on this terrible murder, you may be sure that Mary Courtney will have taken note of it.’

Inspector Box stood for a moment with his hand on the latch of the iron gate that would take him into the garden of Bardley Lodge. He was a man who felt most at home in the throng and press of great cities, but this isolated corner of Essex was
beginning
to exert its own peculiar charm. He looked at the house, a substantial, two storey dwelling of dark-red brick festooned with ivy. This was the type of house that well-to-do folk loved to call a ‘cottage’. It was, in fact, a compact but substantial dwelling standing in its own charming country garden.

A few hundred yards away, the railway line passed between embankments and under the Bardley Aqueduct. It was very quiet, but Box fancied that the smell of the sea was being borne to him on the faintest of breezes. He pushed open the gate to Mrs Courtney’s garden.

In answer to his knock on the door, an elderly maidservant showed him into a heavily furnished, comfortable room at the
rear of the house. A woman who, Box guessed, was not far off seventy years of age, sat in a high-backed chair near the fire. She was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, and had an open book on her knee.

‘Detective Inspector Box has arrived, ma’am,’ said the servant.

‘Very well, Ellen. You can bring tea in now. Sit down opposite me, Mr Box. I am Mary Courtney. Sergeant Bickerstaffe has told me all about your visit, and Hannah Stockmayer has written to me. So I know that you bring sad news.’

This woman, thought Box, has seen a good deal of life, and has grown accustomed to viewing it from a safe emotional distance. That was revealed in her detached, almost cynical way of speaking, and in the placid intelligence of her expression. There would, perhaps, be sympathy here for Amelia Garbutt, but no tears would be shed.

‘Mrs Courtney,’ said Box, without preamble, ‘my colleague Sergeant Bickerstaffe told me you insisted that Miss Garbutt did not own a green silk dress—’

Mrs Courtney held up a hand in what seemed to be amused denial.

‘You will appreciate, Inspector, that Isaac Bickerstaffe would interpret any guess from me as a Gospel truth! He is a genuine rustic of the “old retainer” type. I told the good man that I had never seen Garbutt wearing such a dress, and that she had not mentioned a green dress to me. That’s rather a different matter, as I think you’ll see.’

‘Miss Garbutt had not been with you long.’

‘That is true. We got on very well – I think we recognized a kind of mutual sympathy – but she was here for a mere matter of three weeks. A little more than three weeks, to be exact. And then, on Tuesday, the sixth, she disappeared.’

The door opened, and the maid, Ellen, wheeled in a trolley, from which she served tea to her mistress and her guest. She handed them plates, and served sandwiches and slices of slab cake. Then she left the room.

‘Thank you, ma’am, for giving me tea. It’s very kind of you. Much appreciated.’

Mrs Courtney smiled, but said nothing. Box glanced round
the room. There was a card table near his hostess’s chair, with two packs of cards standing on it. There was a very cluttered mantelpiece, bearing a massive black marble clock with a small round face, and a framed photograph of a grim-looking bearded man with piercing eyes, perhaps the late Mr Courtney.

‘And so, Mr Box, as I was telling you, Garbutt disappeared. Tuesday was her day off, you see, though for the time she was with me she’d stayed in the house, arranging her personal things. But that Tuesday, the sixth, she went out of the house in the evening, and didn’t come back. Her bed was not slept in, and something told me that all was not well. I reported the matter to Sergeant Bickerstaffe the next morning.’

‘What did you think of Miss Garbutt as a person? Would you say she was honest?’

Mrs Courtney flushed with vexation. She uttered a little hiss of annoyance.

‘Well, really, Mr Box, you can hardly expect me to answer such an odd question! Garbutt came to me from an old friend, Mrs Stockmayer. Hannah’s recommendation was quite enough for me. But there! I’m forgetting that your position obliges you to ask such questions. Garbutt had rather a forbidding manner. She did not smile easily, and this was disconcerting to some people. My friend Corinna wondered about her personal history – urged me, in fact, to make some discreet enquiries. Corinna’s brother, too, had his doubts about Garbutt … But there: poor Garbutt’s dead. She and I would have agreed very well together.’

‘You’ve mentioned a lady called Corinna—’

‘Her name is Lady Hardington, and she lives at Heath House. If you look out of that window, Mr Box, you’ll see a large white mansion in the distance, across the heath land. That is Heath House. It’s at a place called High Barrow. Lady Hardington and I are devotees of whist, and we often visit each other. She
entertains
a lot, because her late husband had been Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps. On the very night that poor Garbutt disappeared, Corinna held an evening reception for various notables. A grand affair it was, too, I believe. I’d been invited, but I decided not to go. I felt it would have been wrong to leave Garbutt alone in the house so soon after her arrival.’

Inspector Box declined a second cup of tea. He asked
permission
to examine Garbutt’s room, and Mrs Courtney rang for Ellen to show him the way.

Amelia Garbutt had not been able to impress her personality on the room that had been allotted to her. She had not lived there long enough to do so. The wardrobe held two sober dresses, but no topcoat. Box recalled Miss Whittaker’s assertion that Miss Garbutt would not have gone out of the house without a coat. There were few personal effects. A silver-backed, rather battered hair brush, a framed mirror, a string of jet beads, a Cairngorm brooch and a small tapestry purse seemed to comprise the totality of Amelia Garbutt’s possessions.

In the purse Box found a small key, which he recognized as the type used to lock and unlock one of those japanned tin deed boxes you bought for l/6d in ironmongers. The purse also contained a piece of folded-up paper, on which had been written,
Mrs
Jessie
Warlock,
8
Moravia
Court,
Petty
Allmain,
EC.

Box sat for a while, cradling the tapestry purse in his hands. Jessie Warlock, perhaps, was Amelia Garbutt’s friend, someone she wouldn’t have mentioned to Mrs Stockmayer. Perhaps she dated from the time of Garbutt’s early years of struggle. What exactly had Mrs Stockmayer meant by that? ‘I don’t mean that she was necessarily poor…’ If not poor, then what?

There was no japanned tin box in the room. Inspector Box scribbled a receipt to give to Mrs Courtney, and put the tapestry purse into his pocket.

It was a warm, quiet day, with no wind. Box skirted the gardens of Bardley Lodge, and emerged on to a grass track running beside the embankment of the canal. To his right he could just see the houses of Bishop’s Longhurst through the trees. Behind him, but out of sight, lay the hamlet of Bardley, and the
aqueduct
. It was time to explore the tract of land across which Amelia Garbutt had probably walked to keep some kind of appointment or tryst.

After a while, he found himself walking across flat,
uncultivated
heath land. There was a gleam of water in the distance. To
his left he saw the village of Sleadon, on the other side of the canal. Box left the track at this point and ventured across the stunted grass of the heath. In a minute or so he found himself on the edge of a dark, deep mere.

He stood still and surveyed the prospect. Not more than a hundred yards away he could see the well-maintained boundary walls of an estate, enclosing a large plantation of young trees. A vast white mansion sat in the midst, a house, Box judged, put up in the early 1800s, and adorned with stucco. It was very much bigger than Mrs Courtney’s residence. This, he had been told, was Heath House, the home of Lady Hardington. Further to the north, beyond the house, he could see the roofs and chimneys of the village of High Barrow, and the lock gates.

It was here at Sleadon, in the vicinity of this house, that the body of Amelia Garbutt had, in all likelihood, been lowered into the canal, where it had floated down to Bardley. Box walked along the edge of the mere, where reeds gathered thickly into clumps. He recalled Miss Whittaker’s surmise that Amelia Garbutt’s outer clothing may have been concealed. It had been not only a means of creating a mystery, but a prudent move to conceal the woman’s identity.

For nearly half an hour, Box explored the reed-beds along the edge of the mere, probing the dense clumps of vegetation with a length of wood that he had wrenched from the rotting remains of an old fence. Heath House, and the huddled dwellings of High Barrow, had almost receded to the horizon when his labours were rewarded. Hidden in the centre of a particularly tall bed of reeds he found a sodden bundle of clothing. With some difficulty Box untied the sleeves of a long green topcoat to reveal a small feathered hat and an evening handbag, its
rhinestones
glittering in the weak autumn sun.

Box re-tied the bundle, returned to the main track, and
carefully
hid his find beneath a heap of stones. He would collect it on the way back to Danesford. He had called there earlier in the day, and had talked with Sergeant Bickerstaffe, and his nephew, Joe.