Bruce Alexander - The Price of Murder

The man who had loomed so large in the doorway now seemed to shrink before our eyes. “I didn’t mean no offense by it,” said he, stepping aside and opening the door wide.

Clarissa and I exchanged glances. I noted that she had pursed her lips that she might not break into snickers. I winked; she winked back.

“Jeremy?”

With that Sir John called me into action. In a trice, I was by his side, my arm extended that he might grasp it as we followed the man up the stairs to the first and then to the second floor. All during our climb, our guide talked ceaselessly.

“Aw, it’s a terrible thing, ain’t it?” said he, throwing the words back over his shoulder to us. “She come back in the middle of the night just weepin’ and cryin’ something terrible, and wakin’ up half the house. For myself-my room is right there next to where Mrs. Hooker dosses-I heard her right off. I was up and on my feet and sticking my head out my door even before she opened up to find out who was there.”

“What time of the night was this?” asked Sir John.

“Oh, I don’t know, round three, four o’clock at night, I reckon.”

“Could you be a bit more exact than that?”

“Oh I s’pose I could. It must have been closer to four than three, ’cause it wasn’t long till I heard the church bells strike four.”

We kept climbing. It was not long till we heard something of a buzz above us. There was little to say between us: each had his own notion of the number of people who waited above. Yet none, I think, was prepared for the many we saw crowded round the Hooker door. And there must indeed have been more inside, for the attention of those in the hall was directed past the threshold and into the apartment. I will say for them, however, that, for such a group, they were reasonably quiet-listening.

“. . and then did I at last admit to myself,” came a familiar voice, “that I could do naught but jump.” (It was Elizabeth, the heroine of her own story.)

“Brave girl!” responded one of the audience in the hall.

“You showed good English pluck, dearie. Didn’t she, all?”

And to that there sounded a great affirmative chorus, even a scattering of applause from her listeners.

“So I did what had to be done-and I jumped? !”

Then did the scattering swell to an ovation, the like of which I had heard exceeded only at Mr. Garrick’s Drury Lane Theatre.

We were not at their level, and though the crowd of people at the door, male and female, was even larger than I had expected, they were remarkably well behaved.

“How many would you say there are?” Sir John whispered.

“There are a good many, surely more than twenty,” I replied sotto voce. “Twenty-five at least.”

“I shall count on you to make a path for me.”

This was a task that so often came to me that I had developed a method for clearing the way for the magistrate. I did, first of all, speak in a voice much louder than was my wont. I kept in sight (though, naturally, I never used) the cosh that Mr. Marsden had given me; and, in general, I chose my words carefully.

“Make way, one and all,” I shouted, “for Sir John Fielding, magistrate of the Bow Street Court. All who dare impede him in the discharge of his duties by thought, word, or deed, do so at their own risk. All here are answerable to him and punishable by jail terms of up to ninety days to be served in Newgate.”

Having thus said my piece, I felt a little like the crier for some Oriental potentate. And, indeed, that could not have been far from the impression I created, for all fell silent and opened the way before us three to the Hooker rooms. Did I say that all fell silent? Not quite, I fear, for, behind me, I heard a few ill-suppressed giggles and knew they could only have come from Mistress Clarissa Roundtree.

Even Elizabeth seemed to hang upon my words. She half-lay upon a love seat, ensconced beneath a comforter. Her mouth was half-open as she regarded the three of us.

“Clarissa,” said she, “how nice of you to come and bring. . your. . your employer.”

“Jeremy,” said Sir John, “close the door that we may have some modicum of privacy as we question Mistress Hooker.”

As I turned to do as he bade me, Elizabeth jumped up from the little nest she had made for herself upon the love seat and waved dramatically at the crowd outside the door.

“Friends,” said she, “I ask you to remain, and I shall finish the story. You will hear all!”

There were unhappy groans as I shut the door.

“Mother,” Elizabeth called out, “do you think they will stay?”

Mrs. Hooker came forth from a dark corner of the room. “’Twould be better, daughter, if they did not. Your worry should be naught but making sure all is told to Sir John.”

“Thank you for that bit of advice, Mrs. Hooker. Your daughter would be well-advised to follow it.” He turned left and right as if he were looking round the room. “I have the sense that the room is in disorder. Has the furniture been moved?”

“It has, Sir John,” said I. (I was long past wondering how he managed such feats.)

“Then move things back again, will you?”

With a little help from Clarissa, and Elizabeth pointing the way, we managed to do just that.

“Now bring me a chair.”

I placed one under him and indicated to Elizabeth that she was to resume her place upon the love seat just opposite Sir John.

“Are we ready to proceed?” he asked. Then, hearing our assent, he began. “Elizabeth, we are aware that you attended Easter dinner with Mistress Quigley at the home of your aunt and uncle in Wapping. Is that correct?”

She hesitated, then said, “Yes sir.”

I glanced over at Clarissa. She, in turn, nodded toward Elizabeth’s mother. The woman was visibly shocked. Nothing of this was known to her.

Sir John took the girl through all that we had learned of her actions up to and including the moment that she departed from Kathleen Quigley at the Theatre Royal and took off across Covent Garden in the company of the two young gallants.

When she acknowledged that this, too, was true, it was altogether too much for the Widow Hooker. She had suffered in silence up to then. Now she cried out her daughter’s name as you might wail the name of one who was lost, near dead, or drowning.

Sir John turned to her. “I must caution you against making such a disturbance again. If you do, you must suffer the consequences. Is that clear?”

She said that it was, yet even so, she whimpered and sniffled all through the interrogation. Afterward, he conceded to me that his threat to her was but so much bluffing, and that the mother’s presence was probably a good thing, for she served as a balance to the stern manner he had adopted.

“My question to you, Mistress Hooker-and I charge you to speak only the truth in answering-is this: What happened to you after you left your friend, Mistress Quigley?”

“The two young men, as I should have known, were black-guards, plain and simple,” said she. “No sooner was I separated from Kathleen than the two of them fell to arguing between themselves about me.”

“About you? In what way?”

“Well, the whole question seemed to be whether or not I would do.”

“Do? Again, in what way?”

“Whether I would-how shall I put it? — make the grade. Whether I should, well, qualify.”

“Qualify for what?”

“That is what I earnestly sought to discover. They talked of me as if I were not present, as if I were an animal of some sort.”

“I don’t quite understand,” said Sir John.

“Well, Dick-he was the one on my left-kept repeating that my bosom was not of sufficient size to be interesting. Bobby-it was him on my right-he insisted it was. Or, what he said in all truth was that it didn’t make much difference. Dick said I wasn’t pretty enough. Pretty enough for what, I wanted to know.”