Imogen Robertson - Anatomy of Murder

“And where is Mr. Alexis Duchateau’s shop? Is he resident in Italy?” Crowther asked, a little impatient.

Gillis smothered a yawn. “Dear Lord, no. Why would you think that? The French are the experts in this area. These teeth came from Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. Nowhere else.”

Mr. Palmer found that his thoughts turned over better in his head when he could move rather than stare at the walls of his office at the Admiralty. He knew the ways well enough to walk without paying much attention to his immediate surroundings, instead thinking over his various stratagems and those he suspected might be in play against himself and his masters. He was just returning to the building and deciding how best to arrange a private meeting with Mrs. Westerman and Mr. Crowther when he realized he was about to trip over a small and very pale-faced lad who was looking fearfully up at the building’s imposing frontage.

“Can I help you, boy?”

The boy started. “I’m looking for the Admiralty Board. The head clerk.” He reached into the waistband of his breeches and pulled out a piece of paper, only slightly crumpled. “I’ve got a note.” He then noticed the paper was bent and began to try and smooth it against his thin chest. Mr. Palmer thought this treatment might do it more harm than good and put out his hand.

“That’s Mr. Jacobs, I shall give it to him.” Once he had hold of the paper he flicked it open. The wife of one of the clerks had died suddenly and the man was requesting a half-day to bury her on the morrow. “Very well. Tell Mr. Mitchell he has the permission.” He reached into his purse and pulled out a shilling and put it into the boy’s hand. His fingers shut over it smartly and he turned to hurry out into the road again. Mr. Palmer frowned.

“Boy!” The lad turned again and came back with great reluctance. When he had got close enough he opened his palm and offered the coin up again.

“I knew you didn’t mean to give me a whole shilling.” His face was so sorry Mr. Palmer couldn’t fully conceal a smile.

“No, boy. You may keep the coin. I just wanted to ask how his wife died. Was she with child?”

“Broke her skull,” the boy said rather miserably. “So he says, anyway.”

Mr. Palmer, his head full of Fitzraven, simply nodded. “Indeed. Convey our regrets and sympathies,” and when the boy looked entirely blank: “I mean tell him the gentlemen here say they are sorry for his loss.”

The clouds on the boy’s face cleared and he trotted out into the road.

Mrs. Westerman had been oddly subdued on their journey back to Berkeley Square, and had retired to her room as soon as the household had dined, complaining of a headache. Crowther shut himself in the library in an ill humor and wondered briefly if she had been thinking of her husband again.

Mrs. Westerman was very rarely ill, but since her husband had returned she had suffered headaches with greater frequency. It irritated Crowther that she was now unavailable at times when he wished for her company, and he hoped that as her husband’s health improved, her own would do the same. Her indisposition was not the only reason for his souring mood, however. The discovery that Fitzraven had been strangled rather than drowned had been a professional disappointment. It would have been of interest to add to the literature on the state of a body after drowning, to see if the pink foam in the throat he had observed in some animal experiments was present, for example, but a throttling was ordinary. Equally, an active investigation into a death ran counter to his habits of solitary study. It put him out among people far more than he liked, or was used to. However, he had agreed to help Mr. Palmer and serve his king, so with a slight growl in his own throat he went to work composing and sending a large number of notes, then awaiting their replies in the comfort of the library. Thus he avoided at least the perils of conversation for some hours. If he realized the inconvenience he caused in Graves’s household by sending off its staff to several corners of the city bearing his requests, he gave no sign of it. He had enough left of those habits of command that he had developed in his youth to ignore completely what it did not suit him to see, and his rather brittle mood made him even less likely to consider the convenience of others than usual.

His activities caused enough upset in the house for the housekeeper, Mrs. Martin, to be more than a little shocked when she came back from her half-day and found her domain downstairs to be in nothing like its usual order.

“It’s no good frowning at me, Mrs. Martin,” said the cook over her shoulder as she tried to assemble a nursery tea in a battlefield of unwashed crockery and the wreckage from the preparation and serving of dinner. “Mr. Crowther’s been sending ’em out one after the other since we cleared table, and you know what they’re like. They’re all, ‘Ooh, we’re helping solve a murder, Cook!’ as if they are heroes and heroines in a storybook. Alice and Cecily sent themselves into hysterics imagining they might be carrying a letter of accusation to the killer himself, but when I told them they should wait till Philip or Gregory got back and let them do the carrying of notes, if they were that nervous, they looked daggers at me and rushed out of the place so fast they hardly had time to fasten their cloaks.”

She pulled open the bread drawer and began to attack the loaf she found there with a sharp knife. She was an experienced cutter, but Crowther might have questioned the delicacy of her movements. “I’m sorry this Mr. Fitzraven fellow is dead, but I wish he had just got stupid drunk and fallen in the river like a decent man. I have no idea what I am feeding those little kiddies with this evening, and if Mr. Graves and Mrs. Service want to give supper to their guests tonight, we’ll have to send to the chophouse. There’s not a clean pan left to roast in anywhere in the kitchen, and Mary should have been mending this evening, not setting fires.”

Mrs. Martin did not reply, but put on her apron. The vigor with which she began to scrub the half-empty dishes was eloquent enough. She had been very pleased to gain her position at Berkeley Square, since she was still rather young to have such responsibility, and most would have thought her a little delicate in her appearance for such a role. However, Graves had liked her, Mrs. Service was pleased with her references, and her generous pay meant her only child could be comfortably boarded in Putney. Yet things had changed. The household she presided over was now twice the size it had been, and up and down the streets around Berkeley Square the talk was all Mrs. Westerman and Crowther and murder. Biting her lip, she picked up another dish, which, albeit very elegant, seemed designed only to catch brown scraps of gravy in its corners and nurse them.

The young people’s tea was a great success, fortunately, and Lord Thornleigh, his sister and their friends spent much of it in debate trying to think what good deed they had done to deserve their bread and butter being cut so thick.

Crowther had been lucky in Graves’s choice of servants. Each one of his messengers returned with communications, written and verbal, for which he thanked them sincerely. They then resumed their duties with a certain energy-enough to make Mrs. Service remark when she put her head around the door that Crowther had managed to do them all a power of good. He had looked at her with surprise. She did not try to explain, but withdrew to go about her own business and that of the children with a smile of her own.

When Harriet found him out as the evening deepened and the candles settled coins of light around them, he was seated behind Graves’s desk with a number of pieces of paper arrayed about him, a frown of concentration on his face.