Portrait of Peril Page 9

  “No, it was from Richard Trevelyan,” I say.

  Jean makes a sour face. “That foppish buffoon! Did he tell you that we’re evil bitches who are out to crush people’s hearts? Did he send you here to twist our knickers and smear mud on us in your newspaper?”

  I blink at her language, which is at odds with her accent and gentlewomanly appearance, but I have to smile. Hers isn’t a completely inaccurate description of Mr. Trevelyan. “Not exactly.” And though she’s a murder suspect, I can’t help liking her for her outspokenness. “We’re investigating the murder of Charles Firth. Have you heard about it?”

  “I couldn’t not have heard. The story is all over town.”

  Women gather around to listen while they sip their tea and nibble scones, meat pies, and currant buns. The “ghosts” stand close to Jean. Diana Kelly has taken off her rubber skullcap, and the fair hair pinned atop her head contrasts vividly with the green face paint.

  “When we asked if he had any enemies, Mr. Trevelyan mentioned you,” I tell Jean.

  “Well.” Jean sounds amused. “I suppose the shoe fits.”

  We’ve reached the refreshment table, and Mick loads up his plate. “So why’d you hate Mr. Firth?”

  “Men of his kind prey on vulnerable people, mostly women. They’re like leeches who bleed their victims dry.” Jean’s three accomplices murmur in agreement. “I’ve made it my business to pour salt on the rich, bloated leeches, so they’ll shrivel up and die before they can take advantage of anyone else.”

  She speaks with such vehemence that I can’t believe her business is merely a noble act of charity. “Did they prey on you?”

  “Not me personally, but someone very dear to me.” Jean takes a deep breath, as if fortifying herself to relive a painful episode. “My mother was the heiress to a railroad fortune. She and my father liked to travel abroad, so I was raised by my nanny. Her name was Hilda. I loved her as if she were my mother. She stayed with me until I was twelve, when my parents sent me to school in France. I saw Hilda only when I came back to England during holidays. After I finished school, when I came back for good, I found her living in a slum in Shoreditch. She was seriously ill. She confessed that my parents had given her a generous sum when she left their employ, but she’d paid it all to a medium who called herself Countess Tatiana. The woman purported to be reincarnated from a Russian noblewoman, and she received messages from Hilda’s dead brother. Hogwash!”

  Jean fairly spits the last word. “By that time, my parents had died, and I’d inherited their fortune. I moved Hilda into my house and paid doctors to treat her. But it was too late.” Jean’s amber eyes shine with tears. “Hilda’s friends came to her funeral, and I learned that some of them had been cheated too. I realized there must be scores of charlatans and innocent victims. So I established the Society. It was something good I could do with my inheritance.”

  I respect her for her wish to do good rather than fritter away the money on parties, dresses, and gold-digging men, but her sense of justice is flawed. “It wasn’t Charles Firth who cheated your nanny.”

  “Yeah,” Mick says, “so why not go after the real crook?”

  “She flew the coop,” Jean says regretfully. “If I’d been able to get my hands on her, I’d have made her sorry, believe me. But after I established the Society, I met plenty of Charles Firth’s victims. Some are here today.” She extends her hand to Emily, Ruth, and Diana. “Tell everyone what Charles Firth did to you.”

  “He charged me ten pounds for a picture of me with the ghost of my late husband.” Diana Kelly has an Irish lilt to her voice and pretty features under the ghoulish face paint. “The ghost looked just like my husband did in the only picture I had of him. I kept the picture in my hope chest. When I looked for it there, it was gone. Mr. Firth must have stolen it. I asked Mr. Firth to give me my money back, but he wouldn’t. He said the ghost in his photograph was real and I must have misplaced my husband’s picture.” Diana scowls; she looks like an angry green goblin. “That was money I needed after I lost my job as a maid at the hotel. Don’t ask me what I had to do to feed my children until I found another. And now I haven’t any picture of my husband except the fake ghost one. The bastard!”

  “Amen.” Ruth Lee, dark of hair, complexion, and eyes, holds up her violin and bow. “I play the fiddle round town; that’s how I earn my livin’. He saw me playin’ in a pub and struck up a conversation. When I told him my mum and dad are dead, he said he could take pictures of their ghosts. I gave him all the money I’d saved up. Well, he couldn’t’ve used Mum and Dad’s pictures from when they was alive—there ain’t none. The ghosts didn’t look like them. He used other folks as models.”

  I remember the costumes and masks at his studio. I can’t imagine why such a kind man turned to such a cruel trade.

  Ruth adds, “I had to pawn my fiddle, and I’m not ashamed to say where I got the money to get it back. I picked pockets.”

  Emily Hammond flings back her black veil, revealing a thin, lined face. She’s over forty, her hair salt and pepper, her large gray eyes brimming with pain and fury. “I was once a member of the SPS—the Society for Psychical Studies. I joined because I wanted to contact the spirit of a man I’d been secretly in love with when I was young.” She lowers her gaze, and her sallow complexion blushes pink. “His name was Gordon. I was his children’s governess. Many years later, I heard that he’d died in a boating accident. Charles Firth’s wife, Leonora, befriended me. She contacted him through automatic writing. Such wonderful messages! He said he’d been secretly in love with me too.” Emily smiles with joyous nostalgia. “But the messages weren’t enough. I wanted to see him. Leonora suggested that I hire her husband to take photographs of me with Gordon’s ghost. So I did. And he was just as I’d remembered, only more handsome.” She sighs, lifts her eyes skyward, and clasps her heart.

  I think she must have described her beloved to Leonora Firth, who passed the information to Mr. Firth, who found a lookalike model for the ghost he inserted into his photographs of Emily.

  “But then …” Emily flushes with rage. “I found out that Gordon is still alive! It was his brother who’d been killed in the accident. He couldn’t have sent me messages, and he couldn’t be the ghost in the photographs.” She sniffles and wipes her eyes.

  I remember how overjoyed I was to learn that my father wasn’t dead. In a bizarre reversal of my situation, Emily was devastated to learn the same about her beloved. I’m having trouble maintaining my good opinion of Mr. Firth, whose kindness to me doesn’t negate his cruelty to these women.

  “I told Leonora and Charles that they were despicable frauds,” Emily says. “I canceled my membership in the SPS and joined the Ladies’ Society for Rational Thought.”

  “And I’m glad to have you,” Jean says. “The more of us there are, the better the chances we have of putting the charlatans out of business for good.”

  The women gathered around us applaud. The idea of a crusade against Charles Firth troubles me, no matter that his actions justified it. “Well, Mr. Firth is certainly out of business for good,” I say. “Do we have you to thank for that?”

  The wide-eyed, openmouthed shock on the faces of Jean and her ghosts seems a second too late and quite overacted. Jean says, “If you mean, did we kill him, the very idea is bloody ridiculous!”

  “If you’re all innocent, then you won’t mind tellin’ us where you were the night before last,” Mick says.

  “I was at home with my invalid mother,” Emily says.

  “I spoke at a women’s club in Yorkshire that afternoon,” Jean says. “Diana came with me. We stayed for dinner and took the night train back to London.”

  “I played my fiddle at a party that lasted until about three in the morning,” Ruth says. “A bunch of us passed out on the floor and didn’t wake up till noon.”

  Mick and I exchange glances, noting that all these alibis leave room for doubt. The “ghost” in Charles Firth’s photograph could be a woman,
and who better than one that’s adept at pretending to be a ghost?

  “We’re not gangsters who settle disputes with a knife,” Jean says. “We prefer civil methods. I’ve been helping Ruth, Diana, and Emily bring a lawsuit against Charles Firth. I hired a solicitor to advise them and represent them in court. They were suing for a refund of their money plus compensation for their mental suffering. We thought we had a good chance of winning, and the publicity would have helped our campaign against hoaxers.” Jean finishes on a rueful note. “We can’t wring money out of a dead man. He was worth more to us alive.”

  I suppose Jean has a good point, but Mick says, “He didn’t take the money with him. I reckon he left it to his wife. You could sue her for it.”

  Emily, Ruth, and Diana laugh in derision. “We can hardly proceed with the lawsuit now,” Jean says. “Imagine the three of them testifying against him and demanding money from his widow after he’s been viciously murdered. The court’s sympathy would be all for him. They’d be sure to lose, and the bad publicity would undermine our mission.”

  I think she’s cleverly turned the circumstances to her advantage. I also think something is off about this conversation, but Jean speaks again before I have time to figure out what it is. “Charles Firth’s murder has only fed the public’s belief in the supernatural. At the train station this morning, all the conversation I heard was about sightings of ghosts. Even if we had killed him, we wouldn’t have made it look like a ghost did it and faked that photograph that’s in the Daily World.”

  Even as I admire her wits, I say, “Making it look like he was murdered by a ghost would have been a good way to cover up that you did it.”

  “We would rather he were still alive and we could make an example of him,” Jean says.

  “Besides, how would we have known that he was going to be in the church?” Emily demands.

  “There are other people who probably did know,” Jean says. “And we’re not the only ones at odds with Charles Firth. If you’re so keen to know who killed him, you should look at his own coterie—the Society for Psychical Studies. You’ll find he had plenty of enemies there.”

  * * *

  As we walk through the crowds in Oxford Circus toward the train station, Mick says, “Did you notice that they never said they didn’t kill him?”

  “I only noticed something was off,” I say. “Thank you for putting your finger on it.”

  “They didn’t actually say they didn’t know Firth would be in the church, either.”

  I feel compelled to contradict that, because I like Jean and sympathize with her friends. “I don’t see how they could have known. I hardly think he’d have told them his plans.” We now have four new suspects, but I don’t want any of them to be guilty. They’ve all suffered from the kind of fraud I despise, and in their own way, they’re as committed to justice as I am.

  “Yeah, well, if I was innocent, I would say it straight out.”

  “So would I,” I have to admit.

  “Maybe they thought they could fool us by doing hocus-pocus with words, like with the green paint and the fake hand. Well, I ain’t buyin’ it. I think one of ’em done it and the others were in on it.”

  If I want justice for Charles Firth, I can’t refuse to consider the possibility that Mick is right, and I also can’t let people who tried to ruin my former patron get away with his murder.

  “I’m gonna start checkin’ their alibis,” Mick says. Before we left the women, we obtained their addresses, the location of the pub where Rose had played the fiddle, and the name of the station where Jean and Diana had arrived on the train from Yorkshire.

  “Fine, but we shouldn’t ignore other leads,” I say. “I think it’s worth attending the meeting of the Society for Psychical Studies tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 10

  While Mick checks alibis, I take the train to Battersea. I want to be with my father as much as possible, to make up for our lost twenty-four years, and if Sally’s interview has produced any clues, maybe I won’t need to excavate the painful territory of my mother’s past.

  At the Gladstone Arms, when I knock on the door of his room, Sally answers, to my surprise. “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “Working on my interview with Father. Last night, I had to leave before we could finish.” Sally grimaces in annoyance. “You know Mrs. Webb expects me home by ten o’clock.”

  She lives in a lodging house for young ladies, run by the strict Mrs. Webb. Any lodger who drinks, stays out late, or indulges in other unseemly behavior will find herself locked out and her baggage on the stoop.

  When I enter the room, our father stands up from the table and smiles. “Sarah. I’m so happy you came back.” Sally beams, glad to have us all together again.

  I see a reason to appreciate Mrs. Webb’s curfew: I’m afraid of Sally spending too much time with our father. Unlike me, she’s convinced of his innocence, and she believes his every word is true. My doubt is like an invisible sliver in my finger, the skin sore because I keep picking at it. He seems the kind, gentle, trustworthy man I remember from my childhood, and I love him, but he contrived to cover up Ellen Casey’s murder, and how can we be sure he’s not deceiving us? The closer our relationship with him grows, the worse it will be for Sally if it turns out that he’s neither honest nor innocent.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at the Daily World?” I ask her.

  “I told the editor I wasn’t feeling well and left early.”

  I look askance at her because she’s risking her job.

  “It’s all right—I’ve finished my next three ladies’ feature stories.” She smiles proudly. “The editor says I’m his best writer.”

  She won’t be for long if she plays hooky too often. I fill her in on the latest developments in the murder investigation. Taking notes, she says, “This will make a marvelous story! I’ll get another byline. Do you think Sir Gerald will promote me to news reporter?”

  “Maybe.” What I’m thinking is that now Sally’s career hinges on the success of the investigation.

  “I didn’t think I would see you today,” our father says.

  “I came to find out how the interview is going,” I say.

  He gestures toward the table at Sally’s notebook, the pages covered with her handwriting. “We’ve gone over the day Ellen died. But I’m not sure it’s of any use.”

  I wonder if he’s told Sally everything.

  Sally hands me the notebook. “Read it, Sarah. Maybe you’ll spot a clue.”

  With considerable trepidation, I read. The account of how my father discovered what Lucas and my mother had done contains disturbing details he left out when he told me the facts. It describes the aftermath of the rape—the raw scratches on Lucas’s face where Ellen had clawed him while trying to fight him off; the blood oozing from between her legs as she lay dead on the kitchen floor; the expression on my mother’s face, horror-stricken yet satisfied.

  It’s hard to say which disturbs me more—these details, or what isn’t in Sally’s transcript.

  During my previous inquiries, I discovered that my father had photographed Ellen undressed, in seductive poses. He doesn’t know that I know. I can’t believe he’s forgotten, and I think he deliberately neglected to tell Sally. Our relationship with him is seeming all the riskier. I skim the section that describes the bargain he offered my mother, the objections from her and Lucas, and their eventual assent. It hurts so much to see in writing that she was willing to deprive me of my father in order to protect herself and Lucas. I’m still fervently thankful that I found my father, and I should give him the benefit of the doubt … for now. The transcript ends at the point where my father and Lucas carried Ellen’s body to the cellar and hid it in a trunk. The last sentence catches my attention.

  I look up, preparing to tell Sally and my father, seated across the table from me. The room is dim, and my father’s dark jacket recedes into the shadows. With his pale face and white hair and whiskers, he looks like a ghostly,
disembodied head hovering beside Sally, the effect startlingly similar to Charles Firth’s spirit photographs. Indeed, my father has haunted me as if he were a ghost. His absence has shaped my life. He’s the reason I stopped going to church: the parishioners shunned my mother and me because, I recently discovered, they thought he’d killed Ellen and we were guilty by association. He’s also the reason I’ve made few friends and I took so long to commit to marrying Barrett: I have an ingrained distrust of other people, and I’ve always feared that any man I love will abandon me. I hope my distrust of my father is based only on old history and old habits.

  I read aloud the last sentence of the transcript, in which my father is quoted as saying, “I told Lucas to come back at midnight and help me dispose of Ellen’s body. He went home to his lodgings at Forty-Nine Great Sutton Street, near the Cannon Brewery where he worked.” I say, “I didn’t know Lucas’s address until I read this.”

  I met Lucas only once, soon before my father disappeared. At the time I knew nothing about him. He was in our house one moment, fondling me on his lap, and gone the next, after my father ordered him to get out. Not until recently did Sally and I learn that Lucas was the one thing our father’s two disappearances had in common.

  “We could go to the house and see if anyone there remembers Lucas,” I say.

  “Yes, let’s!” Sally makes a visible effort to tamp down her excitement, not wanting to get her hopes up too much. “Of course, it’s been a long time. Everybody who knew Lucas could be gone now.”

  “The house may not even be there anymore.” Our father sounds defeated by years of believing that he’ll always be wanted for Ellen’s murder, a fugitive his whole life.

  “This clue is all we have right now.” I don’t tell them the other reason I’m eager to investigate and find evidence that will help us pin Ellen’s murder on Lucas. I’m hesitant to incriminate my mother in order to exonerate my father if there’s any chance she’s not guilty. My mother, in spite of every wrong she’s done, shouldn’t be blamed, even posthumously, for a murder she didn’t commit. That would an injustice to both her and Ellen Casey, and injustice is a sharp-edged stone, hard to swallow.