The Detective Wore Silk Drawers

CHAPTER 15

The first intimation of anything exceptional that afternoon in Groombridge was a sound carried on the wind, too faint even to be noticeable when there was a flurry of dry leaves along the street. But it persisted and was heard increasingly clearly, allusive as the resonance in a seashell. Tricks of acoustics in the uneven landscape produced a confusion of sounds supplanting each other from moment to moment: the unmistakable grate of carriage wheels; snatches of music-hall choruses; clattering hooves; unexpectedly clear conversations.

Most of the inhabitants were in the High Street peering towards Tunbridge Wells before the first vehicle appeared. A cart, with men walking beside it. Disappointingly commonplace. But next to turn the distant bend and come fully into view was a gleaming park phaeton with several passengers, and riders in attendance. It was the leader of an extraordinary parade of London life several hundred yards in length that gradually emerged from among the trees lining the road. Broughams and hansoms trundled in formation towards the village as though it were the cabstand in Pall Mall. Members of the gigmanity drove among them, their silk hats flashing intermittently as they passed under the avenue of beeches. Alongside rode numerous horsemen, and a few bicyclists endeavouring to maintain balance and conversation. Most impressive of all, choking the road as far back as one could see, trooped up to a thousand men of the labouring class. A number of others, practised from street urchin days, adhered to the sides of the larger carriages. The huge majority relied on chorusing and good-natured swearing to relieve their footslog. More formidably, sections towards the front carried cudgels ripped from trees along the route. In the thick of them rode the gentry, serene and unperturbed as travellers on a mediaeval pilgrimage.

Only a handful of spectators retreated indoors. The rest were held by curiosity. More than a thousand marching Londoners from every social class, costers almost shoulder to shoulder with stockbrokers: what momentous cause could possibly have united them? The answer was supplied (to those observant enough to see it) by the wagon at the head of the parade. Besides some dozen unpaying passengers it contained coils of rope, six-foot stakes, mallets and several wooden buckets. Anyone old enough to have heard of a set-to with the raw ’uns knew the impedimenta and could recognize the cart that led the patrons to a “safe locality,” within reach of several county boundaries, where interfering magistrates could not hound them for long.

Three men rode in the grey phaeton. One was obviously to be the protagonist, from the attention he was receiving. A persistent struggling throng moved with the carriage, straining to touch him, his clothes, or just the coachwork, as though contact bestowed some association with his power. For he was a huge man, a Negro, and there was talk that he had never been beaten. For his part, he reclined awkwardly among the cushions, plainly hating the enforced inactivity and ignoring the rapture around him. His two companions in the phaeton compensated by shaking every hand within reach.

The racket of shouting and chanting should have struck panic into Groombridge, without the appalling appearance of the roughs in such numbers. In parts of the home counties prize-fighting mobs were ingrained in popular folklore with plagues and witches. Old men told tales of huge groups of roughs and bloods looting and ravaging whole villages unfortunate enough to lie in their route. Strangely, though, the damage resulting from the present invasion was negligible. Two or three windows were idly shattered and one hysterical terrier retired limping. There were plenty of threats with an unbroken flow of East End invective, but even the brandishing of the roughs’ “twigs” had little conviction. For if they looked like a regiment in disarray, in reality an inner discipline governed their conduct. Every one of them saw the need to keep on the move towards the secret venue. Even the necessary taking of drinks at the Lion was a snatch-and-gulp performance. The return would be different. Shutters would be closed and doors bolted then.

The Negro’s adversary rode several carriages behind in a closed brougham with two others, presumably his second and bottleholder. He, too, had his supporters clustering about the cab, but their behaviour was more inquisitive than enthusiastic, possibly because it was difficult to see him. If it really were he facing forward-and nobody seemed to know him for certain-he looked disturbingly jaundiced.

¦ “No right to be on the box at all, that man,” ejaculated Cribb. “If a cabby can’t cross from Fenchurch Street to London Bridge inside ten minutes, he shouldn’t have a license. Now, where’s the constable on duty?”

Thackeray spotted a helmet near the timetable board and inwardly implored its wearer to be competent. He could not remember Cribb in a more peppery state.

“You! How long’ve you been on duty?”

The young officer looked at Cribb, torn for a moment between an indignant “Who d’you think you’re talking to?”

and “Too bloody long for my liking, mate.” The warning flash in Thackeray’s eyes saved him.

“Since eight this morning. Can I ’elp you, guvnor?”

“Cribb. C.I.D.” The constable stiffened. “A strong party of the fancy came through this morning. You saw them?”

He recalled them well enough, a rowdy contingent, probably bound for a race meeting, he had decided. “Why, yes, about twelve-thirty, er-”

“Sergeant,” Cribb informed him. “Which platform?”

“Two, I think-”

“Think? Thinking ain’t good enough for me, Constable!

Which train?”

Providence had placed the timetable nearby. “Must ’ave been the twelve-forty-eight, Sergeant, Sydenham, Croydon and Reigate Junction.”

“Next one out’s two-eighteen,” added Thackeray.

In ten minutes they sat in a crowded third-class carriage watching the housetops of Bermondsey and New Cross pass by the window. Afternoon sunshine filtered through the grimy glass onto the nodding faces opposite-a fat, flushed woman in dolman jacket and a hat supporting a small stuffed bird and satin cherries that rocked with the train; and her two pale sons clutching and systematically emptying bags of jujubes. In the corner a wide-awake hat had tilted forward to muffle its owner’s snores. Thackeray screwed up his handkerchief in his pocket and thought about Henry Jago.

“If he’s innocent,” said Cribb, unprompted “-and that’s what you’ll have assumed, being the generous-hearted cove you are-then you must give me someone else to arrest.”

Thackeray nodded. Cribb’s favourite game: find me a murderer and I’ll show you how wrong you can be. At least it would provide distraction.

“I’ll try, Sarge.” Thackeray spoke at first with his hand guarding his mouth. When the other passengers displayed no interest at all, it slipped slowly down to his lap. “It seems to me that there are three possible suspects from what we know, and that’s mainly from Jago’s letters.”

“Which could be nothing but. . Never mind,” said Cribb. “Continue.”

“Well, there’s Morgan-the black, D’Estin and Vibart.

They all had motives of a kind. The Ebony unquestionably hated being in her power-you remarked on that yourself that night when you watched her massaging him. I find myself wondering whether she had something over him and was blackmailing him. Not for money directly, but for the service he offered-as a fighter, I mean.”

“Quite so,” assented Cribb.

“Now, D’Estin, to my thinking, had an altogether different motive. From what Jago told us of his manner towards Mrs. Vibart-remembering that he was only a trainer-I don’t think it can be doubted that he was-how can I put it-on more than friendly terms with the lady.”

Cribb raised an eyebrow. “Plausible, Constable, plausible.”

“They had adjoining rooms when Jago moved in, Sarge.

Then there was that argument and D’Estin had to move his things to another part of the house. Now that suggests a lover spurned to me.”

“Crime of passion,” said Cribb.

“Exactly!”

“And Vibart?”

“Ah, yes. Vibart. Now he never seemed to hold his sister-in-law in much regard, and from his point of view I can understand why. When his brother died, she became the owner of Radstock Hall and all the estate. Edmund got nothing out of it, and wouldn’t until she died.”

“Motive: inheritance,” said Cribb. He glanced out at one of the Croydon halts. “Those are your three, then. Which one?”

“Well, I think we can discount the Ebony.”

“Why should that be?”

Thackeray looked at Cribb in disappointment. Wasn’t it obvious? “From Jago’s account of it he was quitting Radstock Hall. He’s been living in the East End for a week, hasn’t he? I don’t see how he could have broken training to go back to Essex and murder Mrs. Vibart, Sarge. Besides, there wasn’t any signs of a break-in. We checked the doors and windows.”

“Very well. Go on. Now you’re down to passion and inheritance.”

“And there I stop, I’m afraid,” admitted Thackeray.

“Oh, I could construct theories from here to Reigate Junction if you like, but I don’t see myself reaching any strong conclusion. One of ’em did it, and wants to implicate Jago by planting the money in his bed, but I couldn’t say who.”

“Capital deductions,” remarked Cribb. “I’d say you’ve got the answer there unless. .” He stopped and regarded the unlit oil lamp swinging above them.

“Unless, Sarge?”

“Unless we accept the obvious.”

Thackeray looked away. Like Cribb, he preferred not to discuss the obvious.

¦ However freely Jago’s eyes moved about the sights around him-the crowd wedged ten or twelve deep, carriages drawn up behind as makeshift grandstands, a spinney of chestnuts screening the sun and forming two sides of a natural arena- they were drawn back to the Ebony’s hands. For the first time he appreciated their size, the breadth of their span, the beam-like thickness of the wrists supporting them and, most pertinent, the shape of the bone structure. As a youth he had been taken round the College of Surgeons by a doctor-uncle, and a plaster cast of one of Tom King’s arms had been pointed out. The memory of its extraordinary size remained clearly with him.

Certainly the Ebony’s forearm development was less pronounced, but the fists themselves were arguably more formidable. There was little more on them than skin and bone from wrist to fingertips. Such was the prominence of the skeletal structure that even while the hands rested lightly over the knees, the knuckles were deeply crenellated, as vicious a natural characteristic as the pointing of a shark’s teeth. In more than a dozen meal times at Radstock Hall, when the Ebony had sat opposite him, Jago had not noticed the size or singular formation of those hands. All his anxieties until this moment had been centred on his adversary’s superior weight and height.

The preliminaries had been got over mercifully fast once the field had been located, stakes set up and the crowd settled- with some encouragement from the cudgel bearers.

D’Estin had looked after the ritual of throwing in the hat to make the challenge and tossing for choice of corner, and Vibart had nominated their umpire. Then Beckett, who was acting as the Ebony’s second, had selected the second umpire, and a neutral referee was agreed upon. The right of the second to inspect the opponent’s drawers for improper substances was a rule seldom enforced, but Beckett crossed the ring on that pretext to remind Jago of his obligation to stay conscious for twenty-six rounds. The referee made the announcement-almost anticlimax when Jago failed at first to respond to the name of Quinton-and then sent the two fighters back to their corners. The next call to the centre would be the summons to scratch.

Like a dying man, Jago found his thoughts in the last seconds racing over the incidents from his past. Just a few weeks before, these men, Beckett and Foster, who supported the Ebony against him, had existed only as names on the files he kept at Scotland Yard. Now, like the playing cards in “Alice,” they had sprung offensively alive, and by a strange reversal the people who mattered in his life were distorted in his memory or all but obliterated. Lydia’s face became Isabel’s whenever he tried to think of it; Thackeray, like the Cheshire cat, appeared occasionally, grinning, with parts of him liable to vanish; Cribb communicated only in riddles.

There was no need to pinch himself. Soon enough the attention of those monstrous knuckles would tell him whether he was dreaming.

Where was Cribb?

“Seconds leave the ring, please. Are you ready? Time!”

“What station’s this, porter?”

“Tonbridge, mate. You getting out? I can’t ’old the train for you, you know.”

In answer, Cribb closed the window.

“Tonbridge, Sarge?” echoed Thackeray. “That ain’t Tun-bridge Wells, is it? The stationmaster at Reigate definitely thought the roughs was making for Tunbridge Wells.”

“He’d better be right. That’s Kent. My information was Surrey.”

“In that case they ought to have got out at Reigate Junction, Sarge, and the stationmaster would have seen them. He positively said he hadn’t.”

“When it comes to prize fighting, Constable, there’s a devil of a lot of queer-sightedness among members of the public. I hope your stationmaster was right. Best we can do is stay aboard till Tunbridge Wells. Good thing Jago’s game and can look after himself.”

First blood in the fourth, they had said. Well, they were wrong. The blood did not matter particularly. One expected it, even if it had come a little early and from the wrong source. What bothered Jago was the pressure on his neck, held firmly “in chancery” in the crook of the Ebony’s right arm. He did not, of course, pretend to himself that repeated uppercuts to his nose-which he was helpless at present to defend-were in any way encouraging. But they were at least delivered with some recognition that the fight was scheduled to last another twenty-four rounds. Their tendency was to flatten rather than fracture. No, it was the simultaneous flexing of the bicep against his neck that disconcerted Jago. Each time it happened, his vision was affected, so that instead of seeing one enormous set of knuckles approaching, he saw two. He could not be sure until contact was made which was the real one.

What the devil! A bunch jabbed deep into the tender area below his right eye, stretching the flesh across the rim of bone like a drumskin. Such was the pain that the splitting of skin actually came as relief. He blinked, and his eyelids dipped into the freshly made cut to spread a film of blood across the eye. This was calamitous! Never mind double vision-another blow like that could blind him altogether.

Mercifully the Ebony must have appreciated the gravity of the injury. He most decently relaxed his hold, crashed both fists onto the back of Jago’s neck, dropped him like a log, and so ended the round.

He lay face to the earth for perhaps four thankful seconds before half a bucket of cold water on the back of his head shocked him into full consciousness. A seering pain in the region of his scalp was soon accounted for; someone had grabbed a handful of his hair to jerk his face upwards for inspection. Vibart, talking to D’Estin across his back.

“Nothing too serious. We can move him.”

So he was moved, half dragged by the legs across the turf to the corner. Depressingly undignified, he vaguely registered.

Then, as he slumped on Vibart’s knee, more water, a dripping sponge that came to his face yellow, but moved away alarmingly crimson. D’Estin, clearly visible now, addressed him:

“Keep cool-headed, Jago. Use the length of your arm to hold him off. We agreed no suit in chancery, but if he’s tried it once, he’ll do it again. Let me see the cut. Lint, Vibart. Not so bad, you see. Hardly an inch long. I don’t like this mouse over the other eye, though. That’ll split next time he touches it. We’d better puncture it. Where’s the lancet, Vibart?”

“Have a nip of brandy and water,” suggested Vibart as he handed D’Estin the instrument. “There’s twenty-four bloody rounds to go, you know.”

“Are you seriously proposing that I should raise a party of men at half-past two on a Saturday afternoon? This is Tun-bridge Wells, Sergeant, not Scotland Yard. Three-quarters of my men are off duty, and that leaves four of us. I refuse to close the office to hare off after a bunch of London riffraff that might be over the county boundary by now. I’ve got the town to look after.”

He had to be an inspector. Anyone of lesser rank would have jumped to accommodate Sergeant Cribb.

“You could call them back on emergency duty, sir, if you’ll pardon me suggesting it.”

“Emergency?” From the inspector’s tone it was clear that the term was inappropriate to anything that happened in Tunbridge Wells. He was a huge man wedged behind a ridiculously small desk. Getting in there must have been a considerable feat of human engineering, certainly not to be performed more than once a day. “Listen to me, Sergeant- if you can stand still a moment. I happen to know where three of my best constables are this afternoon, and that is on the cricket field. The annual match against the men of Maidstone is taking place not ten minutes away from here, and it happens that two of my constables open the bowling for the town and the third keeps wicket. It would have to be a very grave emergency indeed for me to interrupt that.

Damn it, man, you’re asking me to destroy an entire career devoted to cultivating local good will.”

This was enough for Cribb. “I suggest to you, sir that you reconsider that point. I’m from Scotland Yard, as I told you, and I wouldn’t come asking you for support if it wasn’t more important than a Saturday cricket match. There are men among this bunch of riffraff, as you call ’em, who are under suspicion of several murders. If we don’t get out there with a group of able constables in the next half-hour, there’s going to be ugly questions asked when I get back to London.”

“I hope you’re not trying to intimidate me, Sergeant.”

“Not at all, sir. Simply stating facts. And this gentleman here,” Cribb jerked his thumb at Thackeray, “will no doubt have a clear record of our conversation, seeing that he’s been specially assigned to accompany me and make a full report to the Director of Criminal Investigation on the conduct of this inquiry.”

Thackeray felt for his pencil.

The inspector moved.

“A better round, that,” said Vibart. “Some of this blood on your arms belongs to him, I think.”

“You leave the talking to me,” snapped D’Estin. “And watch what they’re doing in the other corner. If they’re using resin, we’ll appeal to the referee. Now listen to me, Jago.

You’re just a chopping block at the moment, and the crowd’s getting restless. You’ve got to come back at him. Use your legs.

You should be nippier on your feet than he is. Go for the throat. Good, straight punches with the knuckles pointed forward. Remember what the bastard did to Isabel.”

“Time!” called the referee.

Jago toppled to scratch where the Ebony waited to commence round seven.

¦Sergeant Cribb sat in the semi-darkness of the Tunbridge Wells police van with Thackeray and the three young men in cricket flannels. It was being driven at high speed along the road to Groombridge. Conversation at that level of vibration was difficult, but instructions had to be given.

“The driver should take us as close as possible-up to the ropes if he can. Then it’s the men in the ring I want, and the attendants. Never mind the rest. Bundle them in here as soon as you’ve got the bracelets on ’em. Then we’re driving back to Tunbridge Wells. And, Thackeray-”

“Yes, Sarge?”

“I want nothing said about us being at Radstock Hall this morning, or what we found there.”

Thackeray nodded sullenly. Cribb might have spared him that small humiliation in front of the local constables. The Sergeant was singularly uneasy, and he could understand why, but there ought to be some measure of confidence between them by now. Cribb hadn’t intimated even vaguely who it was he expected to charge with Mrs. Vibart’s murder.

“What about Jago, Sarge?”

“Jago? What about him?”

“He’ll be there in the ring, Sarge. Do we arrest him?”

“Of course we do! He’s prize fighting, ain’t he?”

Barely two-thirds of the way through, and he was so sore about the knuckles that every punch connecting with the Ebony brought more agony than it inflicted. Both fists were grotesquely swollen; they had an independent weight, like iron gloves. But they were flabby as joints of beef, and almost as raw. Their cutting edge had been blunted in the first quarter of an hour, turned to pulp in the next. And champions endured four hours of this!

The Ebony, for his part, had kept the fight alive by attacking the body, once the face was too lavishly ornamented with cuts and swellings. Two or three times he had allowed Jago to bring him to grass with a wrestler’s hold; once, for self-esteem, he tossed Jago heels over head against a side stake, and the crowd surged forward from the outer ring to see the damage. By good fortune it was minimal, and in the next round Jago had upset the backers by rocking the Ebony against his own corner post and bringing a trickle of blood from his ear.

Now, though, there was a change in Morgan’s tactics.

The lethal knuckles, rested by several rounds of obscure grappling, resumed the orthodox pose, taunting the victim in cobralike darting movements. The urgency directing them was inescapable. Jago waited, Argus-eyed. With eighteen rounds gone, the real fight was just beginning.

¦ “What have you stopped for now, Constable?” barked Cribb from inside the police van. The vehicle was quite stationary; the occupants, dressed as they were, might have been sitting in any pavilion waiting for a shower to pass.

“Crossroads, Sergeant. I don’t know whether to go on to Withyham or take the left turn into Ashdown Forest.”

“Look at the tracks, man, the tracks! We’re following a thousand or more blasted men and wagons. If you can’t see which route they took, you’d better come down and give the reins to me.”

The reassuring clatter of hooves began again.

“A thousand!” exclaimed the wicketkeeper, sweeping around for support. “How can we possibly take on a thousand roughs dressed like this?”

Cribb gave him a withering look. “You should know. Stand right up to ’em-and if you miss a catch, you’re for it.”

“How’s that, sir?” murmured Thackeray.

“Finish him!” screamed the crowd.

“He’s going! He’s going!”

“Look out! The blues!”

Jago sagged on the ropes, unable to visualize anything but general areas of light and shade. Mechanically his head continued to dodge and sway. Hands stilled his pawing fists.

“Told you I knew when to intervene,” said the voice of Sergeant Cribb.