Bruce Alexander - The Price of Murder

“To Deuteronomy’s rooms? No, I never have. Do you see the way up?”

Both of us studied the façade of the building, but try as we might, we saw no way up-until we ventured down the left side and discovered a sort of side entrance to the upper floor.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” said Patley. “Go on up there, rap upon the door, and if he comes to open it, give me a wave.”

I did it just so. And when Mr. Deuteronomy appeared, I gave to Mr. Patley, at the foot of the stairs, a great wave. He called his farewell to me and departed.

“Your partner down there?” Deuteronomy asked.

“He was. He thought it would be a bit safer for me, considering what I was carrying, if he were along.”

Having said that, I passed to him the cloth bag, heavy with banknotes, which I had been guarding since the day before. Then did I make a movement toward the stairs.

“Wait,” said he. “Come inside. I’ve someone wants to talk with you.”

Curious, I followed him down the hall to the second door, the one toward the rear. He opened it and waved me inside. There I found Mr. Bennett awaiting me. I had not seen him since those early-morning exercise sessions wherein Deuteronomy put Pegasus through his paces. Bennett, the trainer, would observe and make a few suggestions and would answer the questions I put to him. And though he always seemed guarded and somewhat ill at ease, I liked the man well enough. (Strange it was to perceive how long ago and far away all this did seem to me at that moment.)

“Mr. Bennett,” said I politely, “how happy I am to greet you in London. I hope that you had a good journey here from Newmarket.”

He seemed even more ill at ease than I remembered. His eyes shifted to Deuteronomy and then back to me two or three times in as many seconds. He rose and touched hands with me-one could hardly call it more than that-and returned quickly to his chair. Tense and strained, he wanted little to do with such amenities.

“You work for Sir John Fielding, don’t you? At the Bow Street Court?”

“Why, yes I do.”

“Well,” said he, “I’ve got a confession to make. Only it ain’t just mine, not even mostly mine, as you’ll see. But I know the facts, ’cause I was involved in it, so I’m the only one can tell it. Besides, Deuteronomy here says I got to.”

I settled into a chair nearby, and Mr. Deuteronomy sat down in another. We prepared to listen to his tale. I know not how many times he had heard it, but I, hearing it for the first time, sat quite transfixed by what he told. This is what I heard:

“Now I’m a fairly simple man, truth be told,” he began. “I come here from the country-out of Wiltshire, as it was. I didn’t know much, but I knew horses. Otherwise I’d never have got to work at Lord Lamford’s, or maybe just as a porter, or whatever. It was mainly Deuteronomy Plummer here, who got me the job. He knew he needed help managing this string of horses, and most of those sent out from the big house didn’t know a thing about them and were frightened of them.

“So we worked on them together for over a year. He’d ride the horses each Sunday in races round London and exercise them and do whatever need be done. The stable boys and me fed them, kept them well and happy. And if that had been all there was to the job, we’d have been just as happy as any could be. But we had Lord Lamford to contend with, too. First, there was his ‘suggestions,’ as he called them, which were really orders, and they could come any time of the day or night. Right away it was drop anything you might happen to be tending to and do whatever little thing he might happen to want you to do. That dueling pistol I took into Griffin’s in London was a good example. We were doing trials, Mr. Deuteronomy and I, out in the little course we’d set up in the west pasture, preparing Pegasus for racing. Anyway, Lord Lamford had to have that pistol fixed, no matter what, and it couldn’t wait. He knew I didn’t know my way round London, but he sent me out with it.”

I had listened in silence up to that moment, but when he mentioned the pistol I recalled that I had one of the two in question in my pocket at that very moment. I fetched it forth and handed it over to him, taking care to caution that it was loaded. He laid it down carefully upon a small table next to his chair.

“I guess you know what happened to this one, the one that didn’t need no work done on it. I loaned it to Katy Tiddle, and there it sat with her. Might never have got it back, if she hadn’t got herself murdered.

“But anyway, that wasn’t the worst of it with Lord Lamford. The worst was his personal habits, his ‘amusements,’ as he called them. There never was a Lady Lamford, but I don’t know that he would have been any different if there had been a wife, because in my opinion the man wasn’t right in his head. Maybe one of those mad doctors they got at Bedlam could have done something with him-but prob’ly not.”

“Tell me about his ‘amusements,’” said I to him.

At that, he sighed. “Well, I might as well get to it, for that’s what this is all about. I’d been there near a year when I started to hear rumors and little hints from the big-house staff about him-how he liked them young and didn’t care how much he had to pay, and so on. But I didn’t really understand what they meant by young until one day this little girl-couldn’t have been more than five or six-must’ve escaped from where they kept her locked up and come down to see the ‘horsies.’ I could tell by the way she talked that she was from London. Then this old bat, the housekeeper, she comes down and slaps her good and proper and tells her that Lord Lamford is going to be very unhappy with her. And so on. She told her that if she ever did this again, she couldn’t be his queen anymore. I could never quite figure out what he did when he was through with them. There must have been-oh, I don’t know how many in the time I was there. The truth is, I didn’t want to know. I looked the other way.

“But Lord Lamford must have had some idea how I felt about him. Maybe I was a little careless and spoke out in front of one of them in the big house, and the word was passed on. Or maybe I wore the wrong sort of expression too often when I looked upon him, for truth to tell, the man disgusted me something horrible.

“Anyway, he seemed determined to bring me into it, and he did it the worst way he could-by making me part of his crime from first to last. About a month ago he come out from the house at the end of the day just to tell me he had a request of me-a ‘request’ was even stronger than a ‘suggestion. ’ It meant, if you didn’t do it, and do it right, you might as well just leave and not come back. He told me to ride to Bermondsey and go halfway cross London Bridge. There I’d meet a fella named Hogg who had something for me to bring back to the big house. That’s how he put it.

“Well, I did just like he said, and there at the midpoint in London Bridge, I come across the man named Hogg sheltering against the cold and holding on to the hand of a little girl. I thought she was about five or six, but later on I found out she was all of eight years.”

“She always was small for her age,” put in Mr. Deuteronomy, thus confirming what I had suspected.

Bennett nodded. “That’s right, Deuteronomy,” said he. “Just like I told you, it was Maggie, your niece.” Then did he return to his tale: “This fella didn’t say more than four or five words, just ‘Here’s what you came for.’ Then he lifted her up to me, and I held her close against the cold, ’cause by now ’twas after dark, and I feared she might catch a chill. She was quite the charmer, she was. She said she’d never been up top a horse before. And I told her I took care of the horses, and she wanted to know all about that, and so that was just about all we talked about all the way back to the big house.”