Chapter 9
The carriage had barely rounded the corner of Lower Warberry Road before Charlotte produced a small silver hip flask, from somewhere about her person. Unscrewing the top, she held it out towards her brother.
‘Now you produce this?’ Henry’s indignation didn’t stop him from taking the flask.
‘Now, your nose looks like something Albert might have run over,’ his sibling retorted.
Arabella, sitting across from her father in the rocking darkness of the carriage, regarded his face with considerable concern.
He looked as though he’d lost an argument with a brick wall.
Both eyes were swollen to approximate half-moons, vivid purple against his pale skin, and his nose, never an insignificant feature, now appeared to be occupying more of his face than before.
‘Papa,’ she said carefully, ‘what actually happened?’
‘I fell,’ Henry stated.
‘He used me as a ladder,’ Charlotte corrected simultaneously.
Henry lowered the flask. ‘That is not what—’
‘He hung out of a window,’ Charlotte elaborated, entirely undeterred, ‘with Albert holding his legs – much like a wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, the wall was much closer than either of them anticipated.’
‘Did Albert let him go?’ Alexandra breathed in horror.
‘Albert,’ said Henry with considerable dignity, ‘did not let me go. Albert lowered me. In a controlled fashion.’
‘Your head hit the wall,’ Charlotte countered.
‘Thank you, Charlotte. That will do.’
Rhys made a sound that in a lesser man would have been a laugh.
‘And you’re sure it isn’t broken?’ Arabella persisted.
‘My dignity certainly is,’ Henry muttered, taking another pull from the flask before handing it back and closing his eyes. Seconds later, he emitted a soft snore.
‘What exactly was in that letter that Papa gave the Chief Inspector?’ Alexandra asked her aunt.
‘It was a letter,’ Charlotte answered. ‘Written by Margaret Finch to someone named John Thorpe’. She went on to recount what was in it and why they believed it important.
As they spoke, the carriage left the seafront behind, now heading along the new road towards Paignton. The sea was still visible in the distance, catching what remained of the moon.
Bella stared out towards it while she tried to concentrate on her aunt’s words - John Thorpe and a child named Fanny and the documents currently residing in her father’s battered jacket.
She wasn’t entirely successful, however since her mind kept returning to the expression on Benedict Hartley’s face as he watched them depart – standing alone at the window of a house containing a dead woman, the lamplight throwing a long shadow across the floor just before he shut the door.
She wondered what he was doing now, telling herself it was simply professional concern, entirely consistent with the shared nature of the investigation. Absolutely nothing to do with what had happened earlier…
It was well past ten o’clock by the time Albert finally turned the carriage onto Goodrington Road and Simla House came into view, warm light showing in several downstairs windows.
The younger Shackleford sisters had already been dispatched to Cliff House in Lord Tavistock’s carriage, though the only way they could be persuaded not to follow them to Torquay was the promise of a full disclosure on the morrow.
On climbing down, Henry instructed Albert to return immediately back to Cliff House. The coach driver's protests were overruled. ‘If you don’t need your bed, Ned and Max certainly do,’ Arabella declared.
It was Rhys’s housekeeper, Mrs Dobbin, who opened the door. Other than a slight widening of her eyes, she regarded the assembled party with the swiftly learned composure of anyone finding themselves employed in the immediate vicinity of the Shacklefords.
‘My lord,’ she acknowledged. ‘Miss Arabella, Miss Alexandra.’ She considered Henry’s face without comment.
‘I’ve taken the liberty of laying a cold supper in the dining room, and there is a fire lit in the study.
Mr Shackleford,’ she added with admirable composure, ‘I wonder if you might care to step into the kitchen for a moment. Mrs Brown was at the Infirmary for twenty years before she came to us.’
Henry opened his mouth to declare himself perfectly well, at the exact same moment as Charlotte took him firmly by his elbow, murmuring, ‘That would be most kind, Mrs Dobbin.’
Instinctively knowing that arguing with his sibling when she was in such a belligerent mood might well see him with another part of his anatomy undergoing treatment, Henry reluctantly acquiesced. Not, however, before handing the wadge of documents from his pocket to Rhys.
By the time Charlotte reappeared fifteen minutes later, looking as though she'd been sucking a lemon, the documents had been laid out on the large writing desk in Rhys’s study. Bella took her tight lips to mean that her father had not been an entirely willing patient.
Their aunt was carrying a glass of brandy, which she put down at Henry’s elbow when he appeared a minute behind her, a large piece of gauze secured across his nose with a strip of surgical tape.
‘Mrs Brown says it’s not broken,’ Charlotte declared, a not oft expressed relief in her voice. ‘I told him as much three hours ago, but he never listens to me.’
‘It feels broken,’ Henry countered through gritted teeth.
‘It simply covers such a large area of your face,’ Charlotte returned. ‘Which is not the same thing.’
‘It’s late,’ Alexandra interjected pleasantly. ‘Could we perhaps concentrate on the documents?’
With her customary sniff, Charlotte directed her brother’s gaze to the brandy and marched over to the desk.
Rhys had sorted the documents into rough chronological order, putting the four newest on the top.
‘The documents we found all appear to be lists of servants supplied by the agency, and the names and addresses of their placements,’ Henry informed them. ‘The majority date back as far as ten years, and may not be of much use, but we found several that are more recent.’
‘First things first,’ Rhys stated. He looked over at Henry, adding carefully, ‘My friend, while I have no wish to offend you, I cannot deny that you are beginning to resemble the fiendish monster from the book Frankenstein. You also look as though a puff of wind might blow you over. There is a bed made up for you, and Gladys is even now placing a warming pan between the sheets.’
Henry opened his mouth to protest, then shut it again. With a pained chuckle, he nodded his head. ‘There is no fool like an old fool,’ he murmured, climbing to his feet. ‘Perhaps you will inform Mrs Dobbin that I am ready to retire.’
‘She is waiting outside the door for you, Papa,’ Alexandra said gently.
After watching his slow progress for a second, Charlotte gave an irritated sigh before hurrying over to help…
Once the door was shut, Rhys divided the documents into four piles.
‘I think initially we should simply look for names in connection with the recent thefts,’ he suggested, handing a pile to each of them.
‘Look for lists of servants placed in the last twelve months.’ Obligingly, each of them worked through their pile of documents, squinting in the lamplight.
The only sound was the crackle of the fire and the occasional mumble.
It was Arabella who first noticed a name she recognised.
‘Mrs Dorothy Thomas,’ she said quietly, looking up. ‘A scullery maid was placed eight months ago. Name given as Eliza. Do we have a list of servants present during Mrs Thomas’s soiree?’
Rhys looked through the Torquay police file. ‘There was no one by the name Eliza listed among the servants questioned by the Torquay police.’ Arabella frowned and made a mark against the name. ‘Perhaps she will be present at the house tomorrow.’
By midnight they had found two more servant names that corresponded to the four robbery households. All listed as scullery maids, which was a good indication that they were young. However, none of them were present during the police interviews. Indeed, none of them were even mentioned.
Rhys regarded the three names he’d written down. Eliza. Jane. Maisie. ‘According to the agency records, they were all young women, though their dates of birth and backgrounds are listed as unknown.’
He looked up grimly. ‘He looked at Charlotte. ‘And now they appear to have vanished.’
‘I think we could be jumping to conclusions,’ Alexandra protested. ‘Just because they weren’t mentioned doesn’t mean something bad has happened.’ Even to herself, her voice didn’t sound convincing.
‘I feel as though we are going off at a tangent,’ Arabella frowned.
‘We were looking for servants that could have been involved in the thefts. It’s as if these three were not even part of the households at the time of the robberies -even though according to these records, they should have been.
Were they even taken on as servants, or are these records simply for show? ’
‘It’s the same as the children from Winner Street,’ Charlotte said. Her usual acerbity was entirely missing, and there was a flatness in her voice.
Alexandra grimaced and looked back down at the document in front of her.
There were approximately another ten more entries that she hadn’t yet checked.
Seconds later, her heart thudded. ‘Fanny,’ she almost shouted.
‘A girl named Fanny was apparently placed with Mrs Lavinia Pettigrew as a scullery maid four months ago.’ She looked up.
‘There was no sign and no mention of her during our visit.’
‘But she has to be the same Fanny mentioned in Margaret Finch’s letter.’
Arabella slept badly and was up before seven, which might well have alarmed her aunt had Charlotte herself not already been up for an hour, sitting in Simla House’s morning room with a pot of tea and the lists they’d been perusing the night before laid out in front of her.
Charlotte looked up and frowned. ‘You look dreadful,’ she said without preamble. ‘Did you sleep at all?’