Chapter 10 #2
Mr. Mathers scrubbed his sideburns as he thought. “I see how it is. I argued with Chester shortly before the murder, therefore I’m a suspect.”
“We have to consider all possibilities. What did you argue about?”
Mr. Mathers sighed. “Money. I needed it, and he’d suddenly acquired a lot of it.” He huffed. “Or perhaps he hadn’t. I don’t know anymore.”
“You’re referring to Blackheart’s treasure,” I said. “According to several sources, Mr. Bradbury boasted about knowing its location.”
“That’s right. He told me he’d worked out the clues Arkwright laid out in the book he wrote decades ago.
Apparently interviewing Arkwright helped Chester decipher the clues.
Knowing the author meant knowing how his mind worked, so Chester claimed.
” Mr. Mathers knew more about Mr. Bradbury’s boast than most.
“On Sunday, you didn’t speak to him at all. You left his lodging house annoyed. So how do you know that much?”
“He wrote to me.”
“Do you still have the letter?” Harry asked.
“I threw it out after returning here on Sunday. I no longer felt it held any value.” He shook his head, his gaze turning distant.
“The boast was most likely an attention-seeking exercise that seems to have backfired spectacularly. That’s what I think now, anyway.
When I received his letter, I believed it was exactly as it appeared—a letter from an old university friend who wanted to share his good fortune with the only person who befriended him back then. ”
“So you called on him on Sunday to ask him for a loan,” Harry prompted.
“That was my second visit. The first was several days earlier.”
“Did you see anyone else at the house that time?”
“No. We talked in the sitting room of his lodging house, which he used as a study. I told him I needed some money and asked for a loan. He asked what it was for, then refused.”
“On what grounds?” Harry asked.
Mr. Mathers tapped his right foot on the floor. I couldn’t take my gaze off his polished black shoes. “I’d rather not say.”
“Then it wasn’t for daily living expenses. You’d tell me if it was.”
Mr. Mathers’s tapping foot increased its tempo. “I can’t tell you.”
Harry watched him closely, which made Mr. Mathers shift awkwardly in the chair. “Are you involved in something you can’t handle?” Harry went on. “Something that meant you couldn’t ask your father for a loan?”
Mr. Mathers snorted. “He’s the last person who’d give me money for this.”
“If you need my help—”
“I don’t.” Mr. Mathers cleared his throat.
“But thank you, Harry. It’s delicate and highly sensitive, for both me and the others involved.
All I can tell you is that I had to tell Chester because he insisted on knowing before giving me the loan, then he refused anyway.
Now I presume he refused because there was no money, not because of what I was going to do with it. ”
Harry continued to watch him, and Mr. Mathers continued to squirm.
I asked the obvious question. “Why do you think he lied about the money? To everyone, and to you in particular. He wrote to you. That’s quite specifically targeted.”
“For the attention. He wanted people to like him, to need him, and he thought wealth was the answer. Or perhaps the story of Blackheart’s missing treasure was the appeal, not so much the money itself, if you get my meaning.
Why did he write to me specifically?” Mr. Mathers shrugged.
“To get one up on me, I presume. He felt intellectually superior to me at Cambridge. He was my intellectual superior. Yet I had an easier time of it. I made friends, I got invited to private dinners and parties, whereas he struggled socially. Perhaps he thought it was my privileged background that gave me that advantage over him. These are just guesses, Miss Fox. I honestly don’t know why he bragged to me about something he didn’t have. ”
“You assumed he was telling the truth when you received his letter,” Harry said, “and when you called on him both times. So why do you now believe he was lying about the treasure?”
“It was something I overheard the fellow lodger say after I departed on Sunday.”
“Symond?”
“I don’t know his name. We weren’t introduced.
He joined the landlady in the entrance hall to see what was going on.
I admit I became a little upset that Chester wasn’t home.
I raised my voice with her, which I regret.
Anyway, I left but remained on the porch a few moments to gather myself.
I heard them talking about me through the door.
The landlady told him she believed I’d come to borrow money having heard that Chester was going to be rich, and the lodger scoffed.
He told her he didn’t believe Chester had found the pirate treasure because he didn’t believe it existed in the first place.
He said it was a fiction made up by Arkwright all those years ago to sell more copies of his book, and that only fools believed it.
On the journey back here, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.
The more I thought about it, the more I believed he was right.
I feel like a naive fool for ever thinking there was a treasure.
Of course it must have been a fiction made up by Arkwright, or perhaps by Blackheart himself when he spoke to Arkwright.
It’s so fanciful it must be fake. Besides, it would have been found by now, if it existed.
By the time I got back to my room, I was convinced the money was all a fake, and Chester Bradbury knew it.
I threw out his letter and decided never to see him again.
What sort of friend goes out of his way to make me think he’d come into money? ”
He must have realized how he sounded, because he quickly reassured us he didn’t kill Chester. “I was annoyed with him, and confused as to why he’d lie to me, but I wasn’t angry. I didn’t kill him,” he said again.
According to Mrs. Jeffry and Mr. Symond, he had been angry when they saw him. Could his anger have dissipated after hearing Mr. Symond’s doubts about the existence of the treasure? Or was it inflamed by the notion that his friend had lied?
Harry gave nothing away as he listened with a bland expression. He didn’t even nod along, or acknowledge Mr. Mathers’s declaration in any way.
Perhaps it was an interrogation tactic. If it was, it worked. Mr. Mathers eventually broke the strained silence. “You believe me, don’t you, Harry?”
Harry came to life as if he were an automaton that had been wound up. He smiled. “Of course. I know you’re not capable of violence. The police can’t take my word for it, however, so I have to ask you this—where were you on Tuesday before a quarter to one?”
“I went to the city to meet some acquaintances. I was with them for two hours, leaving about noon. I walked to a nearby park to think, then caught a train back here. I arrived at the house at two.”
“Can I have the names of your acquaintances?”
“No.”
Harry waited. I watched as the two men stared at each other, neither blinking.
And then Mr. Mathers did blink. “I can’t tell you because they shouldn’t be seen together, and I shouldn’t be seen with them. I trust you not to leak the information, Harry, but I don’t trust the police.”
“Which park?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Which park did you sit in to think after your meeting?”
Mr. Mathers swallowed. “Regent’s Park.”
Regent’s Park was quite close to the lodging house in Bloomsbury.
“I’m afraid no one saw me there, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, Miss Fox.”
“If Harry trusts you, then so do I.”
Mr. Mathers eyed Harry a moment before studying his hands in his lap.
The footman entered carrying a silver salver. Mr. Mathers sprang up and collected the invitations on the tray. He handed one to Harry and another to me.
“I look forward to seeing you both tonight.” His earlier enthusiasm was nowhere in sight, but he still managed a smile, albeit a strained one.
Harry and I bade him good day and the footman saw us out.
I waited until we were some distance from the house before asking Harry for his thoughts. “Do you believe him?”
“I’m not sure. I want to, but…” He shook his head and sighed.
“Go on.”
“I wouldn’t have thought him capable of violence, but I haven’t seen him in a year.
He may have changed, especially if he’s experiencing financial difficulty as well as pressure from his family.
Desperate men sometimes do terrible things,” he added quietly.
“And Archie would be feeling very desperate if he owes money to some bad people.”
I remembered when Floyd owed money to unscrupulous men after getting into debt. Their terms were unreasonable and their methods violent. Floyd had indeed been desperate to extricate himself from the debt at the time.
“You think Mathers is gambling?” I asked Harry.
“I can’t think what else it would be.”
I rested my hand on his arm and rubbed my thumb on his sleeve. “Did you notice his shoes?”
He frowned at me. “I completely forgot about that. Did you?”
“They’re about the same size as the print left in the soil, but we won’t know for certain without measuring one of his shoes and comparing it to the photograph.”
“We’ll do it tonight.”
“How? We can’t just sneak out of the ballroom and enter his bedchamber. We don’t even know where it is.” I glanced over my shoulder at the house. “There must be several bedrooms.”
“We’ll think of something.”
We continued toward the station, walking slowly since we had nowhere in particular to be, and simply because we were enjoying one another’s company.
Despite the chilly air, it wasn’t unpleasant.
A light breeze rustled the burnished autumn leaves clinging to branches overhead, and the sun made brief appearances.
During one such appearance, I tilted my face toward the warmth and closed my eyes.
I was still holding onto Harry, so knew he would steer me.
He steered me to a stop and turned me to face him. I opened my eyes to see him studying me with an intensity that sent my heart fluttering.
“You’re beautiful, Cleo,” he murmured.
I cupped his face and gently pulled him down for a kiss.
* * *
We decided to go our separate ways for the afternoon. We had no more leads to follow. Not one. Harry decided to return to his flat to see Goliath and read more of the Blackheart biography. He hadn’t definitely decided if the treasure was a fabrication yet.
I decided to approach the same topic from a different angle. I wanted to speak to Louis Arkwright, and this time I wouldn’t take no for an answer.
But it wasn’t Louis Arkwright who sent everything into a spin at the hotel that afternoon.