A Case of Spirits

CHAPTER 12

Pursuing Miss Probert had a beneficial effect on Thackeray. Trailing a suspect was a duty he had performed more times than he cared to remember, but suspects with trim figures and elegant deportment were rare. Trailing was not quite the word to describe his sprightly step along Hill Street. He moved like a man twenty years his junior.

The difficulty was in convincing himself that she was a suspect at all. A young woman who devoted so much of her time to distributing food to the impoverished was not his notion of a murderess, however incriminating Cribb might regard the presence of a brush and comb in her basket. A dagger or a tin of weed-killer Thackeray was ready to be impressed by, but a brush and comb? He grinned to himself as he threaded his way through the shoppers of Richmond.

By crossing the street he gave himself a longer view of the pavement Alice Probert travelled along. An additional advantage of this parallel route was that she was unlikely to suspect his presence. People always supposed that if anyone chose to follow them they would automatically use the same side of the street.

He spotted her at once, waiting to cross at the junction with Red Lion Street. A young constable on traffic duty waved two four-wheelers past before halting a cart to allow her to cross. She nodded her thanks and stepped forward. She would be easy to keep in sight, with that bar of white on the trimming of her hat. She was not paying the smallest attention to Thackeray’s side of the street, but he went through the motions of making sure there were other pedestrians between himself and his quarry and occasionally altering his stride to take advantage of the cover of a passing vehicle.

Across Red Lion Street she stopped to exchange words with an older woman in a grey coat who had obviously been shopping, for an elderly manservant weighed down with parcels had stopped at the same time and stood patiently some yards behind her. It occurred to Thackeray that Alice must be well known in Richmond, at least among the well-to-do. Whatever felonies she intended with her brush and comb she was going to find it difficult to avoid being recognised. He stopped beside a tobacconist’s and waited, like the man with the parcels, for the end of the conversation.

Several minutes later, she took her leave of the woman in grey and moved on towards the point where Hill Street curved to the right and became George Street. To the left was Richmond Green, to the right the Parish Church, and ahead, beyond the Quadrant, the railway station. She chose none of these directions. Instead, she opened the door of a shop on the right and went inside. Thackeray stepped briskly ahead and drew level with the shop. It was a milliner’s. He thought of the brush and comb and smiled broadly. Cribb has not included a hat-shop in his calculations.

The window of the shop was arranged on the principle that the more goods one displayed, the greater was the chance of engaging the attention of a customer. From Thackeray’s side of the street the hats in their rows looked not too different from the arrangement of apples in the greengrocer’s next door.

He prepared to wait again. Five minutes passed by the clock over the jeweller’s midway along George Street. He was rather charmed by this little interlude in Alice Probert’s charitable excursion. Much as he admired young women with social consciences, he liked to be assured that they occasionally slipped into a milliner’s and tried on hats.

After another five minutes cold feet were beginning to occupy him more than saintly women. Nobody had gone into the shop since Alice, and only one customer, dressed in brown, had emerged. The stream of traffic and pedestrians coursed past him, emphasising how inactive he was. Then the disquieting thought came to him that there might be another entrance at the back of the shop, with access from Red Lion Street. He crossed the street in the direction of the greengrocer’s and turned and walked past the milliner’s, with the merest glance through the window. To his mortification there was nobody inside but a shop-assistant arranging a bonnet on a stand.

He turned about and pushed open the door. The assistant was a girl of thirteen or so. Her eyes opened wide at the arrival of an unaccompanied man in the shop. ‘May I help you, sir?’ she said, more as an expression of surprise than a promise of assistance.

‘I hope so. I was looking for my-er-niece. I thought she came in here to try on a hat a few minutes ago.’

‘You must be mistaken, sir. We haven’t had a customer in here for half an hour.’

Half an hour? It had not been that long. ‘I’m sure she came in,’ Thackeray insisted. ‘There ain’t a back door to the shop, is there?’

‘No, sir. Perhaps if you could tell me how madam was dressed. .’

‘Dark green coat,’ said Thackeray. He was good at descriptions. ‘Hat the same colour, trimmed with white.

And she was carrying a basket of oranges.’

‘Oh!’ said the girl, as if the clouds had rolled away. ‘Wait a moment.’ She crossed to a chest of drawers and took out a large purple hat. ‘Was madam’s hat in this style, but green in colour?’

‘That’s the one!’ said Thackeray.

‘She got it here last week,’ said the girl. ‘It matched her coat beautifully. But she came in fifteen minutes ago to visit Miss Barkway, the manageress. She comes almost every day. She is not a customer, sir. She is a personal friend of Miss Barkway. You are related to her, sir?’

‘I’m her Uncle Edward,’ said Thackeray at once. ‘Where is she now? Through there?’ He pointed to a door he had noticed behind a full-length mirror.

‘That leads upstairs to Miss Barkway’s rooms,’ said the girl in a whisper. ‘The lady always goes straight upstairs and comes down after five minutes in different clothes. I really don’t know why. Perhaps you do. She left the shop a few minutes before you came in. Didn’t you notice her? But of course you wouldn’t if you expected to see her in the green hat. She was wearing brown. And she always covers her face with a veil.’

‘Oh glory!’ said Thackeray, remembering the figure he had seen come out of the shop. ‘Did you by any chance notice which way she went?’

‘I can’t say I was watching her today, but I’ve sometimes seen her cross the street and go through Golden Court towards Richmond Green. It’s a little paved passage-’

‘I’m obliged to you, miss,’ he said, already opening the door. He put his hand in his pocket and found sixpence. ‘I can trust you not to say anything about this to Miss Barkway, can’t I?’

Golden Court was lined with small, interesting shops where people lingered and reflected, indifferent to the activity of George Street. Thackeray’s arrival on the scene, running, was met with looks of the sort traction-engines receive when they pass through small villages. Concerned only with the possibility that Alice had given him the slip, he clattered heavy-footed through the passage. Richmond Green opened to him at the end, some ten acres of turf bordered by a narrow road, with elegant houses beyond. A hundred yards ahead was the figure of a woman in brown carrying a basket. As he watched, she turned left and entered one of the buildings fronting the Green.

For an instant before he started after her, Thackeray sensed that someone else was coming after him through Golden Court. It was no more than a fleeting impression and at this moment it mattered to him less than the necessity of fixing in his mind which house Alice Probert had entered. He did not look behind him. Instead he crossed the Green to the three-storeyed terrace Alice had entered. It was an example of the period when terraces were built as gentlemen’s residences rather than workmen’s cottages. Indeed, as he approached the tall gate of the end house she had gone into, and looked through the wrought-iron work at the Roman pilasters and frieze that framed the front door, and at the five bays on each of the upper floors, he felt bound to ask himself what the poor of Richmond were doing behind such an exterior. And why Alice Probert chose to clothe herself in brown and wear a veil before she visited there.

He reckoned a minute had passed since she had gone inside, but there was no movement behind the ground floor windows. He waited another two minutes, as if admiring the lines of the building, as people must often have done, and then moved on. It seemed likely that Alice was being received in a room at the rear of the house, and he wanted to confirm the fact. There was no tradesmen’s entrance at the side, so he continued a few yards along the pavement until he came to a red-brick arch, which a board informed him had been the gateway to the long-demolished Richmond Palace. He went through into Old Palace Yard, turning left at a building named The Trumpeter’s House. A short way ahead he recognised the rear of the terrace, surrounded by a tall brick wall. He located an unlocked gate and entered the garden. There was a small shed to his left, close to the house, a woodstore, he decided, and a suitable place to shelter inside briefly. It did house wood, but in the form of picture-frames, several stacked against the wall and another half-constructed, supported on a carpenter’s bench. An oil-painting lay nearby, presumably after being measured for its frame. It was a still life of two vegetable marrows.

He sat on the edge of the bench and considered what to do next. He had no authority to enter the house. He discounted the idea of speaking to the servants. It was safer to work alone, from outside. He would begin by making discreet observations through the windows.

He crept from the hut with a stealth that would not have disgraced a Red Indian and flitted from window to window at the rear of the house. Discouragingly, this bold manoeuvre yielded no return. The first windows he reached were so coated with condensation that the room behind could only be the kitchen, and the rest were shuttered. If he wanted to persist with the investigation he would need to raise himself by some means to the level of the first floor. He looked round for a ladder. None was available. But it is difficult to keep a Scotland Yard man down when he is determined to go up. Adjoining the back of the house was a concrete path and between the path and a small lawn was a wooden trellis supporting a Virginia creeper.

He stepped back and estimated the height of the first floor window nearest the trellis. It was some fourteen feet above the ground. He examined the trellis. It was formed in six-inch squares. He counted twenty squares from the ground to the top. As a structure it was sturdy enough to support a Virginia creeper, but would it take a climber of fifteen stone?

He walked round to the side facing the lawn and gripped two of the upright laths and set his right boot on the lowest cross-piece and gently transferred the weight of his body from the ground to the trellis. It held, so he slotted his left boot into the space above and began a slow ascent. He would not have been surprised at any stage to hear the rending of wood, but happily for the cause of law and order he reached the top without incident.

The most difficult part was still to come. The window-sill was between three and four feet higher than the last crosspiece of the trellis. He would be obliged to raise himself above the level of the structure without any other support, and since it was set back a yard or so from the house it would be inviting disaster to reach out for the sill.

He considered the possibility of sitting astride the trellis and attempting to stand up, but he foresaw a problem in securing an adequate foothold. It was slightly less hazardous, he decided, to remain facing the house, lodge both feet on the fourth cross-lag piece from the top and, by straightening his body and pressing his knees against the topmost lath, achieve an upright stance. This he tried, gripping the top of the trellis with his hands until he felt sufficiently secure to let go and raise himself for a glimpse through the window.

It was only a glimpse, but there was something to see this time. The moment when he became perpendicular coincided with a rare shaft of November sunlight, and he was given a highlighted view of the back of a man in shirt-sleeves, standing close to the window putting up an artist’s easel. It made him remember the frames in the shed below, and the still-life painting of marrows. In this fleeting first look, he had time for no more than an impression of the rest of the room. The sun caught the curved edge of a white globe at the other end. He concluded that it was the porcelain shade of a table lamp. He lowered himself and gripped the top of the trellis again.

After a suitable pause he rose for a second look. In those few seconds, the sun had gone in, so the surfaces it caught were less sharply defined, but because the light was more diffused and the shadows less pronounced, it was actually possible to see more of the interior. Thackeray therefore looked past the artist to see what his subject was, and his eyes returned to the white globe. He now saw that it was not what he had supposed. Unless his unusual position was producing symptoms of vertigo, there was not one white surface, spherical in shape, but two, adjacent to each other. They were not porcelain globes, nor were they part of a paraffin lamp. They were part of Miss Alice Probert, and she was standing quite still on a kind of pedestal, or podium. She was wearing no clothes at all.

For a moment after this discovery, Thackeray teetered at the top of the trellis, his equilibrium dreadfully imperilled. By shooting out his arms and using them like a tightrope walker, he succeeded in recovering sufficiently to carry out the drill every constable learns at the start of his career: that facts must always be checked. He looked through the window for the third time.

There was no disputing the fact that there was a man at an easel in the room or that a young woman was posing naked in front of him. It is difficult, of course, positively to identify somebody in a state of nature whom you have met clothed for the first time the same morning, but Thackeray was as certain as he could be that he was looking at Alice Probert. True, she was in half-profile, or rather her face was (he was trying to ignore the rest of her, which apart from general indications as to stature was more distracting than helpful to the process of identification), and her black hair had been unpinned and allowed to lie loosely over her shoulders, but her piercing blue eyes (mercifully focused on the wall), the slight pertness of her nose and cheekbones and the way she held her head were conclusive, in his opinion. Having done all that duty required, Thackeray relaxed his knees and resumed his handhold on the trellis. This was fortunate, because he was immediately subjected to a second shock, a voice from below him in the garden.

‘If you have quite finished up there, I’ll trouble you to come down here and explain what you are doing.’ It was a young man’s voice and it carried authority and, unless Thackeray was mistaken, intimations of hostility.

He looked down, but was unable to recognise the speaker through the Virginia creeper, which had been comprehensively disarranged in the last minutes. He decided it was probably safest to give an account of himself on terra firma, so he clambered down as swiftly as the plant would permit him.

His discoverer was young, as he had supposed, certainly not more than twenty-five, and tall. He was wearing an ulster and billycock. His face was unusually long in shape, dominated by a large mouth, and teeth which looked as though they would not fit into the space available. Thackeray could not decide which member of the animal kingdom he was reminded of, except that it was not domestic.

‘Before you fabricate a story,’ said the young man, ‘I think I should inform you that I have been observing your movements for some considerable time, and it is useless to deny that you have been following Miss Probert about Richmond for the past three-quarters of an hour. I don’t know who you are, sir, or what your game is, but I’ll have you know that nobody is going to do that sort of thing without answering to me.’

‘Perhaps you’ll tell me who you are, then,’ said Thackeray.

‘Certainly. I am Captain Nye, Miss Probert’s fiance.’

‘I see. My name is Thackeray. It won’t mean much to you, sir.’

‘You’re damned right about that, Thackeray. The only things I know about you, I don’t like, and I demand an account of them. I don’t know what Richmond’s coming to when a young lady can’t move about without being pursued by a shabbily-dressed man old enough to be her father.’

‘I’d be obliged if you would leave my clothes out of this,’ said Thackeray, mustering what dignity he could. He was uncertain what he ought to say to Nye about his purpose in trailing Alice, but he was quite sure it would be a mistake to tell the whole truth, and he needed time to discover what would satisfy the Captain. Best, in the circumstances, to keep him talking. ‘Are you worried that I might have designs on your fiancee, then?’

‘You’re damned impertinent, sir!’ said Nye. ‘I ought to hand you over to the police. It might surprise you to know that the gentleman escorting Miss Probert down Richmond Hill this morning, when you were following them, was a detective-sergeant from Scotland Yard.’

‘My word!’ said Thackeray.

‘I don’t know what you said when you approached them by the Bridge. I suppose it was some form of begging. The sergeant very decently bought you some chestnuts, I noticed, but what sort of gratitude did you show? No sooner had the fellow got on a bus than you were away in pursuit of Miss Probert.’

‘The chestnuts was my reward for carrying her basket down the hill,’ said Thackeray.

‘That was your excuse, was it? A pity she didn’t see through you straight away. Unfortunately, my fiancee is one of the most generous-hearted girls alive. The basket you carried undoubtedly contained comestibles for the poor and needy. She devotes her life to charitable enterprises. I hope that makes you feel ashamed of your behaviour, sir.’

‘I was only looking at her,’ said Thackeray.

‘Oh, yes, I know the sort of thing men like you get up to. It’s quite harmless, you say, simply enjoying the sight of a pretty woman. Soon enough, you’re not just watching them walk by, you’re following them, and the next step is what I’ve caught you in the act of doing-peering through windows.’

‘I wanted to be sure it was Miss Probert,’ said Thackeray truthfully. ‘She went into the hat-shop and I was taken by surprise when she came out with a different set of clothes.’

‘Is it surprising?’ said Nye. ‘She visits some very seedy areas in her work. She can’t go into places like that dressed in plush hats and velvet coats, by Jove. They’d tear ’em off her back in parts of Twickenham.’

‘Why doesn’t she put on her brown clothes from the beginning then?’

‘There’s no mystery in it. She’s the daughter of a doctor. The Proberts are a well-known family on the Hill. People expect them to dress decently. That’s all there is to it. Look here, I’m damned if I’m going to account for everything to you. I want to know what you were doing at the top of that trellis.’

‘I was trying to look into that window,’ admitted Thackeray.

‘You were, eh?’ Nye came a step closer to Thackeray.

‘What did you expect to see?’

‘Not what was there, anyway.’

‘I’m damned sure of that,’ said Nye. ‘You’re a shameless brute, aren’t you? A Peeping Tom. See if this will close your nasty little eye!’ His clenched fist landed squarely in Thackeray’s face, with such speed and force that it toppled him over on to the lawn. ‘It may interest you to know,’ Nye went on, massaging his knuckles, ‘that this house is the meeting place of the Philanthropic Ladies of Richmond, and my fiancee comes here regularly. You’ll see nothing to your obnoxious taste at any of the windows here, by Jove! But if I ever find you within half a mile of that innocent girl, that sweet champion of the unfortunate, I’ll thrash you within an inch of your life!’

When Thackeray got up, Nye had already gone. He patted the skin round his eye with his fingertips. There was no bleeding, but he was going to have a black eye that would want some explaining at Paradise Street, and only for trying to do his duty. There was no justice in it.

He let himself out of the gate and walked through the courtyard and back past the terrace. At the last house his attention was taken by a small board attached to the railings. The name of the terrace was Maids of Honour Row.