Alan Petrillo - Asylum Lane

“I – I – I was trying to spend less of the money I took from the trust.”

Round Freddy shook his head again. Criminals were relatively stupid, he thought, which is why they usually ended up caught. “Mr. Lund, I will continue to allow you your liberty as long as you give me your word that you will not approach the Dealer again until I tell you to do so.”

Lund stood up and pulled down on the bottom of his waistcoat. “All right. I shall do as you ask.”

After the banker had left, Round Freddy wondered what he was doing, accepting the word of a common embezzler. Police work made strange partners, he thought.

Goodwin crossed his legs and sank back into the soft leather of the armchair in the member’s room at the Lendal Club. A waiter brought him a glass of whiskey and set it on an oak table at the side of the chair.

“Will you be having someone join you today, sir?” the waiter inquired.

Goodwin picked up the week’s copy of the Hull Spectator. “I expect so. In a short while.”

When the waiter left, Goodwin flipped open the newspaper and raised it to study the shares notices. He was deeply into the columns of figures when he heard the squeaking sound of leather being sat upon. He lowered the Spectator and stared into the wide smile of the Dealer sitting across from him.

“How goes it, son? Do we continue to make money?”

Goodwin picked up his whiskey and raised the glass to his father. “As ever. That five thousand quid from the vicar has grown already.”

The Dealer attracted the attention of a waiter and ordered a double whiskey. “That is precisely the thing that I wanted to hear you say. This relationship between the vicar and Lund is practically incestuous. Why the two of them have nearly stripped every farthing from the poor young girl’s trust fund. But enough of that. Tell me about our shares and how they are faring.”

Goodwin eyed the printed columns and murmured the shares prices, adding now and again information about whether the shares were up or down. He fell silent as the waiter brought the Dealer’s whiskey. When the man departed, Goodwin put the newspaper down.

“We must be coming to the end of this trail of cash, don’t you think?”

The Dealer took a long sip of the whiskey and then smacked his lips. “Gawd, don’t you simply love good whiskey,” he said. Then, looking directly at Goodwin, he took a larger swallow and continued. “There’s more to be gained from the banker than I first realized. I doubled the buggar’s commission on the investment yesterday. The man sputtered and sounded off, but agreed. Once we’ve wrung him out, we can turn to his position at the bank and convince him to allow us to tap its reserves.”

Goodwin leaned forward in his chair, his eyes wide. “You mean take money from the bank, like common robbers?”

The Dealer waved his hand in the air between them. “No, Goodwin. Of course not. I mean getting him to embezzle the money for us.” The Dealer raised his glass. “To crime. Long may it pay.”

Round Freddy stood at the iron-barred door of the jail cell, his head cocked, studying Reverend Elsworth sitting on a stool in the corner, his head bowed. The vicar was a pitiful example of a man of the cloth, he thought. Embezzled funds from his niece’s trust fund. Wrongly placed her in Bootham Park Insane Asylum, claiming she was a threat to her own life. Conspired with Fletcher to do away with the young woman.

He heaved a sigh and turned the key in the heavy lock, sending a loud click throughout the close space.

Reverend Elsworth looked up at him and then lowered his head.

Two other individuals occupied the jail cell with the vicar. The first was a toothless vagrant who had been arrested for breaking into a carriage house and making his home there. The owners of the building objected to the vagrant’s unlawful possession of their property, as well as to his propensity for building a fire in the inside corner of the structure. They were lucky the Fire Brigade hadn’t had to be called out.

The second prisoner was a long, lean man with a narrow oval face and a pointed skull. He had been arrested for stealing furniture out of a home on Harrow Place while the owners were away on holiday. A curious neighbor, looking over the back garden, had seen the man dragging heavy furniture to his ancient four-wheeled cart and called police. The constables had caught him red-handed. Thus far, he had refused to speak.

Round Freddy motioned the vagrant and the burglar to the side of the cell and then locked the door behind him. He moved across the flagstone floor to the back of the cell and stood over the vicar.

“Reverend, you have done some heinous things, to be sure, but it is not too late to admit your wrongdoings.”

The vicar looked up at Round Freddy, his face expressionless. “You should be after the real criminals, instead of trying to fabricate crimes for upstanding citizens.”

Round Freddy arched his neck, a smile on his face. “Are you serious, vicar? You call yourself an upstanding citizen?”

“That I am.”

“Please tell me, then, how you would explain embezzling your niece’s trust fund, colluding with the banker, Lund. There’s also the matter of arranging Miss Waddington’s incarceration and then abduction from Bootham Park. And finally, ordering her murder.”

“I will agree that the young woman is dead, but there is nothing that I can do about it, nor was I involved.”

“But Fletcher told me before he died that you were the one who ordered him to kill Jane.”

“I shall deny I did so until I die.”

Round Freddy chuckled. “As I thought,” he said. “The pious ones never admit anything.”

He turned back toward the doorway to the jail’s outer rooms and called loudly, “All right sergeant. Bring her in here.”

The sounds of heavy bolts being thrown on the other side of the oak door resounded in the close space. Presently, the door swung open and Jane Waddington stepped through the opening and walked up to the iron bars.

“Uncle?”

The vicar’s eyes rounded in surprise and he half raised off the stool. “Jane? It cannot be. You are dead.”

“Ah, but that is where you are in error, vicar," Round Freddy said. "You had been assured by Mr. Fletcher that she had been killed. We even thought so ourselves for a while when we found the other woman’s body with her bag on it. But we quickly learned Jane was only in hiding in order to keep herself from further harm. And here she stands now.”

Reverend Elsworth had stood up and was staring bug-eyed at Jane. He took two steps toward her, his arm extended, before he sputtered and coughed, and then clutched his chest. The vicar fell to the stone floor, cracking his skull as he did.

Round Freddy quickly knelt next to the quaking man and loosened his neckpiece, but the vicar only sounded worse. He gargled a series of breaths and then sucked in a large gulp of air, only to not exhale at all.

Round Freddy reached down and put his forefinger against the side of the man’s throat. There was no pulse. The vicar was dead.

Lund locked the vault door and stuck the heavy key in his waistcoat pocket, its looped end peeking out of the pocket. The iron and steel vault door in the cellar of the Royal York Banking Society was the old-fashioned type that required a special key to lock and unlock it, yet Lund had full confidence in the reliability of the arrangement. Had not the vault served its customers for nearly thirty years. There was no need to renovate the premises and install one of the new vault doors that could only be opened at certain times of the day.

Lund trudged up the stone staircase to the ground floor and emerged into the corridor leading to what the clerks jokingly called the “money room.” It was the place where citizens either came to deposit funds with the bank or remove money from their accounts. And it was the place Lund enjoyed being every day because it was the place that had made him rich.