Peter Lovesey - The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

They manifestly confirmed the Sergeant’s deduction. He turned to look at the still-open safe in the wall.

“Theft?” murmured Thackeray, as he replaced the sheets in the basket.

“Could be.” Cribb was already at the window, examining the sill. “But the murderer came through the door, in my opinion.” He tapped his nose with his forefinger as though it might lead him independently to the vital clue. Then he surprised Thackeray. “She was a very handsome woman, and I’m sorry she was knifed, but she’s likely to distract us at the moment. It’s Quinton’s murderer I need to find. If Jago’s half the detective he ought to be, he’ll know who murdered Mrs. Vibart. We’ve barely twenty minutes now, Thackeray.

Carry on the search for evidence of Matthew Quinton.”

Really! With a scarcely veiled shrug of the shoulders, Thackeray went off to search the other bedrooms. If he found a corpse in each one, he doubted whether it would impress Cribb in his present mood. He heard him return downstairs.

It was methodical, Thackeray reasoned, to go to the farthest room first and work back towards the staircase, so he followed the corridor as far as he could and opened the door facing him, not without a discreet knock. Rarely had he seen such disorder in a respectable house; he might have stepped into a common lodging house in H Division. An unmade bed was piled with newspapers and sheets of music. The Canterbury which should have held the music, a fine papier-mache rack inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was empty and upside-down on the washstand, among shaving mugs and empty wine bottles. Thackeray stepped into the room, taking care not to crush a china dog lying in his path, but denting a copper kettle with his other foot. Scarcely a foot of flooring was not occupied by discarded clothes or ornaments ousted from the mantelpiece. The drawers, when he examined them, were practically empty; all the clothes, he supposed, were scattered about the room. Even the organ-a deuced eccentric item of furniture for a bedroom, but supposedly the occupant was a devoted musician-served as a coathanger, for a nightshirt was suspended on one candleholder and a tall hat on the other. He pulled open the hinged doors at the front and peered into the mechanism.

Pianos had been known to harbour vital evidence on occasions; why not organs? This one, though, had nothing more sinister than dust and dead flies. Thackeray brushed his sleeve, took a last look in the wardrobe, and abandoned the room.

He moved to the next, D’Estin’s, by the size of the suits in the wardrobe. By contrast, exceedingly tidy-fit for an officer’s inspection. He had to search to find any personal items other than clothes. On top of the chest of drawers was a gun case, empty. The case of butterflies on the mantelpiece had long lost its ornamental quality; as he moved it to look behind, a fritillary and its pin dropped to join the other casualties at the bottom of the case. He gave his attention to the suits, feeling (with a slight twinge of shame) into the pockets for letters. They contained nothing but handkerchiefs and small change. D’Estin was either singularly careful or totally friendless.

The next bedroom had obviously been unused, so after a cursory search Thackeray moved on to one which had certainly been slept in. The bedclothes were still flung back, and would remain so now that the servants had gone away.

Under the bed was a portmanteau, which he dragged out in some expectation. He soon unfastened the straps and pulled back the lid. There was a framed picture inside, face downwards. Quinton? He turned it over. Blondin. He was in Henry Jago’s room.

Thackeray was never sure afterwards why he felt an impulse when he got up from his knees to lift the pillow of Jago’s bed. But he remembered for the rest of his career the shock of discovering there a large bundle of five-pound notes. There must have been a hundred on the mattress, loosely tied with string. A hundred fivers! Jago, he knew, came from a well-to-do family, but how could he possibly have taken so much to Radstock Hall? And why? It was equivalent to six years’ pay! He dropped the pillow.

“Sergeant!”

Cribb came up like a surfacing dolphin. “Found something?”

Gingerly, Thackeray lifted the edge of the pillow again, ready to admit to hallucination. The bundle remained there.

He almost whispered, “Jago.” For the present he was stunned by the monstrous implications.

Cribb packed up the notes and riffled the edges speculatively across his palm. Then he put them in his pocket. “Precious little time,” he said. “Better look at the next room.”

Thackeray gladly went, tacitly agreeing that, whatever his discovery meant, there were dangers in trying to account for it. If corruption were involved, it was as contagious as cholera.

When three chief inspectors could be brought to trial, what were the chances of a sergeant and two constables?

Ten minutes later he sat glumly on the window seat at the head of the stairs with Cribb, having found none of the evidence they needed.

“It’s in this place somewhere,” Cribb said, “and all together. I’ve done every deuced room downstairs, including the servants’ quarters. Even felt the panelling in the hall.

These old buildings-” He broke off and galloped downstairs, watched in amazement by Thackeray. Then he commenced reclimbing the stairs on his hands and knees, tapping each one. “Should have thought of it,” he shouted up as he worked. “Tudor building. Priest’s hole. There was a Catholic priest who spent his life touring the country constructing the things. They’d use the roof as a chapel and have a hiding place for the priest close by. Usually in the stairs.” He tapped at the wood with increasing agitation as he neared the top of the stairs. They sounded consistently solid. He reached the last stair, thumped at it like a bailiff, and then straightened up, more surprised than disappointed. “Set of blasted Protestants,” he said as he sat with Thackeray again, surveying his reddened knuckles.

He withdrew his watch, studied it, and shook his head.

“Can you ride a horse?” he asked unexpectedly.

“A horse? I’ve sat in a saddle once or twice, Sarge, but I can’t claim to have much experience.”

“Must be a pair of hacks in the stables,” Cribb explained.

“You remember D’Estin and company riding out to the Meanix fight?”

Like a scene from his childhood. “Certainly, Sarge.”

“We can give ourselves another twenty minutes, then.”

Thackeray said nothing. Personally he doubted whether twenty minutes more at Radstock Hall were worth saddle soreness for a week. He put his hands on the edge of the window seat to raise himself for a further search, although he did not know where. As he did so, there was a sound from inside, a dull thud.

“Did you look in here?” demanded Cribb.

Thackeray nodded. Of course he had. Wasn’t it an obvious place? “Just bedding, Sergeant. Sheets and pillowcases.

I lifted them all out. There’s nothing else in there.”

“I believe you,” said Cribb. All the same, he pulled back the hasp that secured the lid of the window seat and lifted it.

There was nothing inside.

Thackeray blinked. “It’s impossible! There were sheets-”

“False bottom.” Cribb was already on his knees groping at the sides of the interior for a release catch. “It opened up and they slid underneath.”

But in spite of his methodical probing of the sides and bottom, the trick would not work for Cribb. The chest, which was about five feet in length, two feet wide and the same in depth, was built of solid oak. It would not be easy to smash one’s way through.

“Give me your hat.”

Mystified, Thackeray handed over his bowler. Cribb dropped it into the window seat and closed the lid. Then he opened it. The hat was still there.