An Appetite for Murder (9 page)

There was a smart double rap on the door of the office and a gentleman was admitted. He was neither tall nor short nor was he plump or slender, but compensated for this lack of distinction in his form by sporting a beautifully groomed beard of horticultural proportions, tinged at the margins with a less than natural red. He was neatly attired after the manner of a clerk, with a large leather document case tucked under his arm, from which he extracted some invoices, laying them on the desk. Although from Frances’ point of view they were upside down, the printed illustrations announced them to be more related to gentleman’s attire than business matters.

‘Thank you Yeldon,’ said Finn, picking up the packet of letters from the desk and handing them to the new arrival. ‘Could you deliver these and also arrange for two bottles of Apollinaris Water to be sent tomorrow?’

‘At once, sir,’ said Mr Yeldon, casting a look of intense curiosity at Frances, then, turning swiftly on his heel, he departed.

Frances, from her days as her father’s assistant in the chemists shop, was familiar with Apollinaris Water; a naturally sparkling table water from a German spa, noted for its healthful digestive properties. She could not help but wonder what young Mr Finn ate to make him so large. It was a condition one saw all too often in middle aged and less active persons, but more rarely in the young. Did he gorge himself on beefsteaks and bonbons and then resort to digestives to repair what he had done? Or was the medical man who declared that water made one fat actually correct? It was all very puzzling.

Frances examined the list of names in her notebook. ‘By the time you joined your uncle’s company Mr Whibley and Mr Elliott had left,’ she said. ‘Did you ever meet them?’

‘No, although I knew of them, of course, as men who had once been employed here and had moved up in the world. And now poor Whibley is gone.’ He shook his head. ‘He was a great smoker, I understand. Cigars – they were the death of him in my opinion. I could never abide the smell of them, something for which my dear wife is very grateful, as she cannot endure them either.’ He gave an affectionate glance at the portrait on his desk, and touched the scrollwork on the frame with gentle fingertips. ‘Oh I know there are those who say he died from excessive corpulence, but I do not agree; a good round belly on a man can be a fine thing if it does not weigh him down.’ He patted his stomach. ‘I shall certainly not be “banting”,’ he added with a smile, ‘that seems a most unwise proceeding.’

Seeing Frances eyeing the back of the picture frame, he turned it towards her. The portrait was of a pretty, young, bright-eyed woman of slender build, with a chubby child on one knee and a chubby baby in the crook of her arm. ‘My dear girl Alice and the children,’ said Finn, with evident pride.

‘How delightful,’ said Frances, with more enthusiasm than she actually felt, ‘may I see?’ As she reached out for the portrait, she grasped, as if by chance, one of Mr Finn’s jotted notes, and quickly apologised and returned it to him. The handwriting, she observed, was quite unlike that of any of the letters written to the
Chronicle
.

She permitted the doting husband and father a few moments to replace the picture at the correct angle before she went on. ‘Can you tell me anything about Mr Minster, who was once employed here and left to become a publican?’

‘I have never met him.’

‘And Mr Browne?’

‘Poor Browne, yes. He retired with failing health not long after I arrived. He was not an old man, only about fifty, I believe, but he was found to have a cancer of the stomach and wasted away to nothing before he died.’

‘I don’t suppose you know what became of the unfortunate Mr Gibson?’

‘My uncle only said that he was an invalid in the care of relatives. He must be dead by now.’

‘And Timmy the messenger boy?’

Finn shook his head. ‘I can’t say. I don’t believe there was a boy of that name when I first came here.’

Frances produced her folder of letters. ‘I must ask you to look at some letters now and tell me if you can identify the writer, they are the originals of some correspondence sent to the
Chronicle
after Mr Whibley’s death.’

‘People are so exercised on the question of diet, a matter which I feel should be left to a man’s common sense,’ said Mr Finn, as he looked through the letters with no trace of recognition on his face. ‘And whatever one might believe about organisations like the Pure Food Society, and the vegetarians, who seem to be well-meaning if a little eccentric, it is no reason to descend into personal insult and unfounded accusations which can only cheapen the argument. Sometimes even clever men can be like children squabbling at play.’ He handed back the folder. ‘No, I can’t say I know who wrote any of these.’

‘So do you dissociate yourself from the sentiments in the letter written by Sanitas?’ asked Frances.

‘I do indeed,’ he assured her. ‘I suppose you might imagine that I am the very man to have written such a letter, but I did not and would never have done so.’

Frances had been careful to make no allusion to young Mr Finn’s size, but it appeared, as he rubbed his belly almost affectionately, that he was rather proud of it.

‘Look here,’ said Fred Minster, aggressively, ‘I know what you’re after, and it’s not as if there wasn’t any whispering going on at the time, but I’ll show you the papers and then you can see for yourself. Do I
look
like a rich man?’

He did not, but Frances felt that it would not be polite to say so, and thus said nothing. The Cooper’s Arms was a small establishment that had once been a private house. Downstairs the front and back parlours had been combined by the expedient of knocking down most of the intervening wall into a long taproom with tables placed almost edge-to-edge where thirty or forty people might crowd together over their beer and pies. Mr Minster and his wife, when not dispensing refreshment, lived in the rooms above.

No one who met Mr Minster would imagine that he had ever been a clerk. There was no sign of it in either his dress or his manner, both of which were coarser than necessary. He looked like a labourer who had just downed tools for the day and gone for a foaming glass to wet his throat. Perhaps, thought Frances, Mr Minster had deliberately cultivated this appearance to make his particular class of customers feel at home. They would not appreciate being served their beer by someone who looked as though he could manage a good copperplate. The Cooper’s Arms was not a salubrious establishment, and Frances would not have gone there without both an appointment and the assurance that Mrs Minster would personally admit her and take her straight up to the parlour. Even passing quickly through the taproom, she found the smell of stale beer, cheap pastry, and unwashed clothes and bodies almost overpowering. There were women there too, in dresses unsuited to the daytime, and they did not look content.

The upper apartments were better kept, showing that Mrs Minster had not entirely relinquished her status as the wife of a man who once wore a suit and clean collar to work.

‘I’ve got all the papers and that can be an end of it,’ said Minster, opening a drawer and pulling out a bundle of documents bound about with string. He untied the string and threw the bundle defiantly on the table. ‘See there!’

Frances felt from his manner that she was not the first person he had had to convince in this way. She examined the papers, which showed that in January 1867 the will of John Jones of Chippenham in Wiltshire, who had passed away the previous November, had been proved. All his estate – amounting in value to some two hundred pounds – had been left to his only grandchild Ann Minster, previously Jones. A Wiltshire solicitor had acted as executor, and there was correspondence relating to the payment of the sum. For all his coarse appearance and manners, Mr Minster, true to his earlier profession, wrote a neat and very clear hand.

‘So you see I didn’t rob the safe, and anyone who says I did is a liar!’ said Minster. ‘I’ve already got damages and an apology off someone who flapped his mouth when he shouldn’t have done, and I can do it again if need be!’

‘Thank you for showing me these,’ said Frances, politely.

‘No, it was Sweetman who took the money and half-killed poor old Gibson.’

‘What makes you so sure of it?’ asked Frances. ‘I have met Mr Sweetman and he does not appear to be the violent type.’

‘Who knows what a man might be driven to if he needs money?’ said Minster, flinging himself into a chair. ‘Oh I don’t deny I would have liked the money, we all would, but that’s not the same as
needing
it, is it? Needing it enough to go against your own nature and steal it. No, I knew he was in trouble when I saw him talking to old Sidebottom the moneylender, and only a desperate man ever did that.’

‘Are you sure he actually borrowed money from Mr Sidebottom?’

‘Oh yes, he admitted it. Said something about his sister and her doctor’s bills. I think Sweetman paid off Sidebottom with the stolen money. That’s why it was never found.’

‘And what did Mr Sidebottom have to say for himself?’

Minster gave a short bark of a laugh. ‘Nothing. Someone stuck him with a knife just after Sweetman was arrested. At least Sweetman can’t have done it, as he was in the cells, but then half of Bayswater wanted rid of
that
pestilence. Sidebottom had a nasty little book he kept in his coat pocket with notes of all the money going back and forth, but when they found him, it was gone. So it was one of his debtors who done him. Never did find out which one.’

‘I must agree,’ said Frances carefully, ‘that it would appear that Mr Sweetman could be seen as having a motive to commit the robbery, and also he had the means, since he held the key to the safe, but that is not proof, and I am surprised that the verdict went against him. Unless of course there is some other fact of which I am unaware. Why was he found guilty, Mr Minster? Why did his wife turn against him?’

Minster seemed calmer now that Frances was asking his opinion rather than challenging him. She suspected that his customers were very well behaved.

‘As to his wife, I don’t know. Perhaps he raised his hand to her and the children a bit too often, and she was pleased to be free of him. Now, I’m not averse to a man correcting his wife when she needs it – a little tap now and again is a husband’s privilege – but there are limits to how hard he ought to be. Maybe Sweetman stepped over the line.’ He gave a swift grin. ‘Maybe he stepped over it –
well
over it – just the other day. But the robbery; well first of all he had no alibi – concocted some story about being with his sister and she tried to lie for him, but got it all mixed up so it didn’t wash. It was Browne that done for him, though.’

‘Mr Browne, his colleague?’

‘That’s right. Browne was walking down the Grove that night. He saw the light was on in the office, and at first he didn’t think anything of it as he knew Gibson was working late. Then he saw a man standing at the outer door of the office, a man who looked at him and then ducked back in again. It was Sweetman.’

‘Perhaps he saw the real thief,’ said Frances. ‘That’s what Mr Sweetman thinks.’

‘That was what the defence tried to show, but the jury believed Browne. If I were you, Miss Doughty, I wouldn’t let myself be alone with Mr Sweetman in case he took against you. It’s the quiet ones you have to be worried about.’

‘He came to me a few days ago asking if I would look for his family,’ said Frances.

‘Yes, well he found his wife, didn’t he?’ Minster gave another little bark.

‘Do you happen to know where his son and daughter went? The only information I have is that they performed on the stage at the Bijou Theatre.’

‘Oh, I remember the old Bijou,’ said Minster. ‘All kinds of things there; plays, concerts, varieties.’

‘Do you recall Harold Froy the Jaunty Boy? He used to whistle.’

‘No. Is this some sort of a joke?’

‘Not at all. I was told that Benjamin Sweetman performed under that name.’

He pulled a face. ‘There was any number of acts, some of them you only ever saw the once, because if they were no good they didn’t get asked again. Can’t say as I remember any whistling boy.’

‘And a girl who sang of wanting to be a milkmaid?’

‘Oh
they
were a penny a dozen, if you get my meaning.’ He sniggered.

Frances did get his meaning and did not ask him to elaborate. As she left the Cooper’s Arms she could not help but wonder about Mr Minster’s views on maintaining domestic harmony. Judging by the appearance of Mrs Minster, a sturdy grim-faced woman with hands reddened by hard work, the publican’s opinions on the question were more likely to be theoretical than practical. Frances did not expect to marry, having neither beauty nor fortune, but she still entertained the occasional idle thought as to the manner of man she might choose if it was ever to prove possible. One of the Miss Dauntless adventures included an incident where a gallant gentleman rescued the heroine from certain death and claimed a kiss as his reward. It was a disturbing story and Frances tried not to read it too often.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN