It seemed I was simply not going to get anyone to take spies seriously. ‘All right, what about this mysterious visitor Dettmer says he saw? We have an incredibly good description – male, not old, slimmer than Mr Salmond and probably dark. Should be able to pick him up in a matter of hours,’ I said bitterly.
‘Let’s see who does fit anyway,’ Luc suggested.
‘Half the young men in Salmond’s section, the Comte – ’
‘Bromley, Talbot’s man,’ Garrick offered.
‘Rather a large number of men who George would have known from the particular clubs he belonged to,’ James said.
That would be the gay clubs and meeting places, I presumed. Which reminded me of a thought I’d had while waiting for the Inquest jury. ‘We haven’t thought of another man in George’s life,’ I said. ‘Was there someone before Talbot who might have been so distressed by a break-up that George would feel conscience-stricken about it? Or anyone who was still in love with him, or obsessed, who might have attacked Talbot out of jealousy?’
James shook his head. ‘His previous particular companion was in the army. It all rather died a death with him being away so much. Perfectly amiable from all accounts.’
‘Which leaver irrational obsession or jealousy,’ I said, making another heading. I pinned that up and brooded over the dark/slimmish/youngish list. ‘Sir Thomas is thin and dark, if not young.’ I added him and then went and ate cake. It seemed to be that kind of day.
Chapter Nine
The thirteenth continued to live up to its date. The boards stared back at us blankly, Garrick and I wrestled with the coded ledgers to little effect, James went off to his tailor and Luc to one of his clubs. He explained that
he was going to be asking pertinent questions but I was becoming restless at being excluded from all these masculine haunts. The breeches that I had worn before were still in the clothes press but I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could pass as a male in broad daylight.
Garrick and I cheered ourselves up with another cookery session and produced toad in the hole, with very splendid sausages, followed by apple crumble and custard. I explained the concept of comfort food and I think he approved. Certainly the combined effect of Yorkshire pudding and a hefty sweet was enough to send me to bed early and off into a deep sleep, which ought, by rights, to have produced revelatory dreams. It didn’t.
Nor did I wake to a man in my bed, which didn’t help my mood any the next morning. Luc was eating breakfast when I emerged from my room. I rather suspected he had a thick head, but I didn’t ask. By the time he was into his third cup of coffee and I’d eaten my second sausage (they really were very good) I’d come to the conclusion that he was not so much hung-over as bracing himself for the inquest.
This was going to be a rather different matter to the previous one. For a start he was going to have to explain how he managed to go from a suicide to a murder scene in one morning. If I’d read about it in the paper I’d be immediately suspicious. Then he had to hide all knowledge that Coates and Talbot knew each other and, on top of that, keep me out of it.
‘The Coroner might want to call you to the stand,’ he said abruptly.
‘Same Coroner?’ Luc nodded. ‘He looked reasonable and I can stick to the story we created at the time. The only problem I can see is if they ask me for my address. What do I say?’
‘Hell. Garrick!’
‘My lord?’
‘Send a message to Thompson. I need a house in Hill Street by noon. No-one will check while the inquest is in progress,’ he added when I looked a question. ‘Thompson’s my solicitor. And Garrick, tell him it doesn’t matter what it is like, just get one.’
‘That was very masterful,’ I remarked, tongue in cheek. ‘What if there isn’t one to rent?’
‘Then he’ll buy one or make a tenant an irresistible offer to move out.’
Yes, well, the past is a different country, as someone once said, and aristocrats certainly did it differently then.
The second inquest was much the same as the first, for a bit. A local pub, a bleak function room, a jury all in their Sunday best, torn between self-importance and nerves. But this time, with a gruesome murder the subject of the hearing, there was a jostling crowd of onlookers.
I sat squashed up against Garrick, watching the jury led out to view the body. They shuffled back looking decidedly green after twenty minutes. George Coates’s body must have been reasonably easy for the undertaker to lay out in a respectable manner, but there wasn’t a great deal one could do with a skull that had been stove-in, I imagine.
Bromley, the manservant, gave evidence of identity and recounted what he had done that morning up to the point that we arrived. He was fish-belly white, his hands shaking, but he managed to give his evidence reasonably coherently.
Then Luc was called and explained how we had come to be there, calling to make an appointment for me with a well-known doctor.
‘Extraordinary that you should encounter violent death twice in one morning, my lord,’ the Coroner observed.
‘Indeed. And it was most distressing that I should, all unwitting, take my young female relative to the very scene,’ Luc said.
Despite this ‘coincidence’ the Coroner did not seem to find his story unconvincing. James and Garrick took their turns on the stand and were questioned in detail, but not in any hostile manner. James volunteered the fact that he knew Talbot slightly socially, but that he would not have described him as a close friend, merely an acquaintance. He could suggest no possible motive for the crime, except perhaps that a burglar had been disturbed.
I held my breath, but the Coroner did not decide to call me, instead summoning a Doctor Philpott to the stand to give evidence on the cause of death. Talbot had been dead perhaps six to ten hours before he first examined him, he declared. That put the time of death some time either side of eight in the morning. He found no signs of disease or injury on the body except for the head wounds which he proceeded to describe in detail. One juror and a member of the audience fainted.