The Ghosts of Ardenthwaite (The Northminster Mysteries Book 5) Read online

  Then among the women standing listening to the music, he seemed to see Laura again, as real as she had been in the carriage that afternoon driving from Holbroke, but now she was not tender. She looked across at him and he saw the cold, hard look of reproach in her eyes. She was as angry as Kate had been submissive.

  He turned away quickly, closing his eyes; the light in the room was unbearable, his head was aching and he felt he was going to be sick. He had not had a violent headache in some months but it seemed he was under attack now.

  “Giles, are you quite well?” He heard his sister’s voice, and felt her hand on his arm. “You look terrible.”

  “Just one of those heads –” he managed to say.

  “Oh no, not again!” she said. “Lamb has gone for the carriage, which is just as well. You are coming home with us.”

  Chapter Seven

  Major Vernon’s headaches had been a cause of concern for some months in the wake of his wife’s death, but he had not complained of them recently. Felix, still feeling unsteady himself after the events at the Guildhall, was shown into a cool, darkened bedroom at the Treasurer’s House, where Major Vernon was lying flat on his back.

  “Did you take some laudanum?”

  “Yes, three grains at about seven o’clock, I think. Sally made a note of the time. And about a quart of green tea, which does seem to help.”

  “And how is it now?”

  “If I lie still, in the dark, it is bearable. I think I have slept a little. What time is it?”

  “About nine-thirty. I’m sorry I was not here sooner. I was at the Infirmary. I probably should not have gone; Mr Harper said as much,” Felix said, sitting down in the easy chair by the bed. “I had a strange turn at the Guildhall as well.” He reached for Major Vernon’s hand and took his pulse. He stretched at the same time and felt his forehead.

  “You did?”

  “Your pulse is regular, and there is no sign of fever at present. Have you felt unnaturally hot or cold?”

  “No, not this time. Just nausea with the pain, as previously. It seems to be passing, though.”

  “You had better stay put, just to be on the safe side,” Felix said. “Was there anything else, sir, anything you cannot quite account for?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because of what happened to me at Ardenthwaite – what I thought I saw. Some of which was explicable, it seems, but the rest of it – my strange behaviour, for example. Why I was driven out of my bed. I wonder if this is not related.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have not had one of these attacks for some time, and yet, here we are, a week after that business, which had me raving. Perhaps there was some effect on you after all. As if we had been poisoned.”

  “That is quite a wild hypothesis.”

  “Yes, but I have no other. It might be some substance that acts at different rates on different physiques and temperaments. I did drink a great deal that night. Perhaps that hastened and intensified the effect.”

  “A poison that could make a man act out of character? Are you aware of any such thing?”

  “No, but there is plenty I don’t know. I shall have to pursue it.”

  “Or, we put the fear of God into Parham,” said Major Vernon, sitting up quickly, “and see if will he admit to anything! Oh dear Lord –” he exclaimed and lay down again, wincing.

  “Steady now, sir,” said Felix.

  “Yes, yes,” said the Major, breathing hard and closing his eyes. “I will not attempt that again. A poison of some sort. It makes a great deal of sense. I admit I’ve not been quite straight with you, Carswell. I think my mind has been playing tricks on me as well, and I certainly have not been –” He broke off and covered his eyes. “Today I think I lost my mind. I can’t describe it as anything else.”

  “At the Guildhall?”

  “No, earlier,” said Major Vernon. “Of course, I may be clutching this straw you are offering me in order that I might excuse myself.”

  “Excuse yourself?” said Felix.

  The door opened and Canon Fforde came into the room, somewhat to Felix’s relief, as he did not at that moment have any real wish to become a father-confessor to Major Vernon. The gravity of the Major’s manner was alarming enough.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Canon Fforde, “but could you spare a moment to look at Tom, when you are done, Mr Carswell? He has – well, you will see soon enough.”

  “Is he all right?” Major Vernon said.

  “I’ll come at once,” said Felix. “I’ve disturbed you enough, sir. Rest is the best remedy for this. Oh, and more green tea, perhaps?”

  “I’ll get some sent up,” said Canon Fforde.

  They left the Major in peace, and went upstairs to the boy’s room. Tom was sitting on the bed in his shirt sleeves.

  “It’s nothing, Papa, truly,” said Tom.

  “Show Mr Carswell,” said Canon Fforde.

  The boy reluctantly took off his shirt. A makeshift bandage made from a handkerchief covered his upper left arm.

  “It’s nothing really, sir,” said Tom, covering it with his hand, as Felix went to examine it.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, gently removing the boy’s hand.

  “How’s Uncle Giles?” said Tom.

  “A little better,” said Felix, untying the handkerchief to reveal a dirty wad of torn cloth soaked through with blood and pus. “Oh, that’s charming,” he said, and ripped it off. Tom cried out of the shock of it. “And this is – how did you manage to do this?” Felix said seeing, the wound beneath in all its glory. It was about three inches by two, and suppurating nicely.

  “I suppose I must have cut myself on something,” Tom said.

  “You never could lie, Tom,” said Canon Fforde. “Which I suppose is a sign of goodness in you.”

  “It’s a wonder you haven’t got lock-jaw and a fever,” said Felix, picking up the candle and peering at it. “What did you do? It looks like you have been stabbing yourself with rusty needles.”

  “They weren’t rusty,” said Tom.

  “You were stabbing yourself with needles?” said Canon Fforde. “Why on Earth...?”

  “All the fellows at school are doing it,” said Tom. “It doesn’t usually go like this. I don’t know what went wrong. Murray and Barnes – theirs came out perfectly.”

  “Doing what?” said Canon Fforde.

  “Giving yourselves tattoos?” said Felix reaching for his bag. “Yes?”

  “Like a sailor?” said Canon Fforde. “And that’s the fashion at Rugby these days? Oh Tom, you –”

  “Like a criminal,” said Felix. “You should talk to your uncle about it. He’s been collecting criminal tattoos.”

  “He has?” said Tom with awe in his voice. “Murderers and so forth?”

  “So you want to look like a murderer!”

  “No, Papa, it’s not like that.”

  “And just because the rest of the herd is doing it, doesn’t mean you have to!” Canon Fforde went on. “You have your own mind, at least I thought you did.”

  “It’s not following the herd. It’s a way of being distinguished. And it is Latin – it’s a motto,” said Tom.

  “I don’t care if it’s New Testament Greek, it’s still wilfully stupid!”

  “I thought about having something in Greek. Or the Fforde family crest,” Tom went on. “Hibbert has a whole coat of arms.”

  “If he hasn’t died of blood poisoning yet!” said Canon Fforde.

  “If I cauterize it,” said Felix, “that should clear up any difficulty. It is just as well you have a strong constitution. Another day or two, well, who knows?”

  “You could have lost your arm!” said Canon Fforde. “Or died on the table having it amputated! When your mother hears about this –”

  “Does she have to know?” said Tom.

  “Yes,” said Canon Fforde.

  “I’ll never hear the end of it,” said Tom.

  “That�
��s the least you deserve, Tom Fforde! Yes, cauterize away, Mr Carswell!” said Canon Fforde. “If that’s what it takes.”

  With which he left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Tom look crestfallen. Canon Fforde was not easily angered.

  “Will it hurt much?” he said, as Felix began to lay out his tools.

  “I may be able to spare you that,” he said. “It may be that if I clean it up properly and put a decent dressing on it, it will heal up of its own accord. But you are very lucky, you know. It is on the cusp of being extremely dangerous.”

  Tom nodded and glanced again at the closed door.

  “I didn’t think he would be so...” he said.

  “He’s just concerned about you,” Felix said, dabbing the wound with alcohol. Tom screwed up his face.

  “Perhaps you should cauterize it. Perhaps I deserve it. It’s just that all the fellows are doing it, and I didn’t want to look like a prig and say no, did I? And Hibbert’s looks magnificent. They say women like them extremely.”

  “Women?” said Felix, smiling. “Aren’t you a bit too young to be thinking about that?”

  “I’m fifteen! And I bet that you –” He broke off, suddenly remembering himself. “Excuse me, sir.”

  “No, you’re right, I did.” Felix said. He had been fascinated by the fair sex from about the age of fourteen. At the same time he found himself imagining a fad for tattooing seizing the first year medical students at Edinburgh of his era. At sixteen, he would have been first in line with the needles, especially if it was reckoned to make a man out of a lad. That had always been the great endeavour: to pass for a man, when they were nothing but raw boys.

  Chapter Eight

  Although it might have been agreeable to unburden himself to Carswell, it could do no general good, Giles decided. It was just as well he had been called away. As for Carswell’s theory that they had both been poisoned, either deliberately or inadvertently – he realised he could not use that to absolve his sins. The only way he could put this thing right, or at least find some means to justify his actions, was to bring down the secret edifice of corruption that he had stumbled upon.

  He got up early, long before the household was stirring, finding his head much relieved. He left a note of thanks to his sister and brother-in-law and set out for the offices of the Northern Investigation Office.

  No one was yet at work there, and he had the liberty to scour about for paper and pursue his thoughts unhindered by company. There was on the top floor a reasonably sized garret, well-lit by skylights, but inconveniently accessed by an awkward stair and a door half the height of a man. It had been decided that it should be used for lumber, and being generally disregarded and overlooked, it suited Giles’ new purpose perfectly. He wanted a place apart, firstly to store and process what information came to hand, and secondly for the sake of discretion. It was important that they, whoever they might be, remained perfectly ignorant that the police had any inkling that they were being observed, to the extent that the police might even appear to be fools to them.

  The fewer the people who knew what he was doing, the better.

  Having furnished himself with a ream of foolscap, a thick, soft, carpenter’s pencil, a box of pins and a cone of twine, Giles knelt down on the bare boards (for there was no table nor chair) and began to make a list of likely criminal personalities. Some of these were easily eliminated as being simply not clever enough to oversee a business of such complexity as that brothel.

  The one name that kept recurring was that of George Bickley.

  So he wrote Bickley’s name in capitals and pinned it on the wall.

  On the adjacent wall he arranged papers inscribed with various names: Kate, Horatio Baxter and ‘Swallow’ (for the dead man). Then, he drew a rough approximation of the swallow tattoo, and pinned it above the names, and joined them with lengths of twine.

  He sat on the floor and gazed at this for some time, wondering where best to begin, and indeed how, until he was interrupted by the sound of Carswell’s voice, calling out for him on the landing below.

  “I’m up here!” he called back.

  A moment or two later, Carswell came in through the door, bent double as was necessary.

  “What are you doing up here?” he said.

  “Thinking.”

  “And you are recovered?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I was just at the Treasurer’s House. Your sister is beside herself. Your note –”

  “I will speak to her, I promise. And I am quite myself again, I assure you. Anyway, I am glad to see you. I need to talk to you. We have a great deal to do.”

  “I was hoping for some breakfast first.”

  “You didn’t eat at College Street?”

  “She was still abed, and I wasn’t going to risk her letting rip at me for waking her up, as if breakfast was a privilege, not what we pay our shillings for. I swear I am moving into The Black Bull. It may be more expensive, but at least Mrs Wilkes will not let us starve!”

  “You are right,” said Giles hauling himself up. “We will go and see what the Wilkes can do for us. We have left it too long. Holt has been grumbling at me. He will much prefer The Black Bull and I need to be comfortable. We have a lot of business coming our way.”

  “You won’t be comfortable in here,” said Carswell. “You can barely stand up. Were you looking for something?”

  “No, this is our new campaign headquarters, strange though it may seem.”

  “Very strange,” said Carswell. “What campaign is this, then?”

  “I will tell you at breakfast.”

  Carswell was right about The Black Bull. Mr and Mrs Wilkes were more than happy to accommodate them, and at a reasonable price. The establishment was an old-fashioned, respectable one, in a quiet street near the Minster, and Giles was given a large sitting room with a small bedroom adjoining, with which he could not find fault. Carswell had a similar arrangement nearby, perhaps rather grander in scale, for Mrs Wilkes seemed to have some ancient connection with Holbroke and was inclined to dote on Carswell.

  They were soon sitting down to a generous breakfast under a sunny window in Carswell’s new quarters. The coffee was almost as good as that made by Mrs Connolly, but naturally Giles did not mention that.

  “So what is this campaign?” Carswell said. “Are we at war?”

  “Very possibly.”

  “Against whom?”

  “That’s the great difficulty. I am not sure at present.”

  “I saw Bickley’s name up there.”

  “He is a strong candidate.”

  “Because of the manner of the attack on our dead man?”

  “There is a little more to it than that. There is a man in the cells at The Unicorn who has confessed to the attack, but it is a pat confession and I think he is using an alias.”

  “So you think someone else did it?”

  “No, I think he probably was involved in it, but he is confessing to order. He is a willing victim, making a sacrifice for the greater good, perhaps – or taking a punishment.”

  “How on earth do you make someone do that?”

  “He’s no common criminal. He has self-discipline. He has, I think, a powerful allegiance to this unseen group – the sort of loyalty a good soldier shows his regiment. I will have to wear him down and see if I can get him to tell me more. Furthermore, he has a swallow tattoo, just like our dead man – and he was touchy about it.”

  “Oh,” said Felix. “That’s interesting. So they are from the same group? One executing the other, and the other taking the blame for the execution? I still find it hard to believe a man would do that. The instinct for self-preservation is so strong.”

  “Of course, I may be wrong that it is an execution,” said Giles, refilling his coffee cup. “There may have been a quarrel between them over something else entirely – a woman, perhaps – and Baxter, our self-confessed murderer, killed out of anger, and this is his lieutenants turning him over
to the authorities.”

  “They must be very confident that he won’t say anything out of line, then,” Carswell pointed out.

  “True,” said Giles. “Or they have a low opinion of our intelligence, which is justified, given that they have been operating under our noses for the Lord knows how long! And I have missed every sign of it!”

  “You said it has been carefully concealed,” said Carswell. “And this city is large enough, and getting larger all the time. Where do you think they might be at work?”

  “Prostitution, in the first instance,” Giles said. “Expensive prostitution. Women kept in luxurious duress and their actions spied upon, and by implication, the clients spied upon as well, giving them the perfect opportunity to increase their income by blackmail. If a man can afford to patronise such an establishment, he will have a reputation as a respectable man to maintain, and can be prevailed upon for more money. But I cannot believe that it is just prostitution, although there seems to be plenty of money in that. Gambling is another sure-fire way of raising large amounts of money from those who can not resist the lure of a wager.”

  Giles got up from the table and looked out of the window. There was a pleasant view of the rooftops, and in the distance the spire of St Mary Magdalene’s and the quiet neighbourhood where Kate had taken him.

  “So where do we start?” Carswell said.

  “We need to cultivate our sources,” said Giles. “But in the first instance I need you to scour your books and find out what it was that made you so ill – and then, we must consider if it was deliberate or inadvertent.”

  “I have had a few further thoughts on that, last night,” said Carswell. “There are some interesting cases in the annals involving a mould on rye bread that seems to have driven entire villages mad, to the extent of burning innocent women as witches. Perhaps there was something we ate that had some analogous effect upon us.”

  “We got off lightly, then,” Giles said. “We have not burnt any witches yet.”

  -o-

  Felix returned to the Treasurer’s House and was able to reassure Mrs Fforde that her brother was quite well again. He did not tell her, however, that he was embarking on a war against an unseen criminal army, as that would alarm her. Instead he told her that they had settled in The Black Bull and that they had given up their lodgings in College Street.