The Price of Murder

down to the track so early in the morning. I had news for him.

“Yesterday, just after I saw you in the Good Queen Bess, we saw your sister.”

“Alice? I wasn’t just a-leading you on, now was I? Did you catch her?”

“No, she got away from us-or not that exactly. Constable Patley, who knows her by sight, saw her through the tap-room window. But by the time we got outside, she was nowhere in sight.”

“But you’re sure it was her?”

“Oh, I’m sure as long as Mr. Patley is-and he is truly sure.”

“I’d like to meet him.”

“And he’d like to meet you. There’s not much about horse racing he doesn’t know.”

“That so?”

“He was a horse soldier, he was. I hope to find him there in the tap-room, eating breakfast.”

“Hope” was the operative word in that statement, for while it was true that I hoped to find him there, I had no certainty of it. Thus was I surprised and gratified to see him there in the tap-room, just beginning what looked to be a considerable breakfast, eggs and all. I pointed him out to Mr. Deuteronomy, then ushered him over that I might introduce the two men. When Mr. Patley saw us approaching through the crowd, his mouth dropped open in surprise, and he rose in awe to accept the honor that was about to be bestowed upon him.

“Mr. Patley,” said I to him, “I have the pleasure to present to you Mr. Deuteronomy Plummer.”

He was quite speechless, so overcome that when the jockey offered him his hand, all he could do was stare down at it for an embarrassing length of time until he realized at last that Mr. Deuteronomy wished to shake hands with him. Then did he grasp it and pump the hand so hard I feared he might do it damage. Mr. Patley urged us to sit down and waved over the serving woman.

What passed during the next hour or so was a fascinating discussion of Mr. Deuteronomy’s career as a race rider, of which I understood only about half, at most. I simply hadn’t the background in racing to comprehend many of the questions asked and the answers given. Nor could I be so bold as to attempt to reproduce any part of it here. What I can offer the reader, however (and which may be somewhat more germane to the matter at hand), is the comparatively brief conversation that the two had regarding Deuteronomy’s sister, Alice.

This postscript to the main body of their talk occurred after the last bite of breakfast had been eaten and the final cup of coffee had been downed. I recall that a lull came, and, in the course of it, Mr. Deuteronomy leaned back and fixed the constable with a most piercing look.

“I understand, Mr. Patley,” said he, “that you met my sister a day or two after her daughter, Maggie, was taken away.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Plummer, sir.”

“And she claimed that Maggie had been stolen?”

“True, sir.”

“Why do you suppose she did that?”

“Ah, well. I wondered that m’self. And the best I could come up with is this: If she said that her daughter had been stolen, then whatever happened to the girl, she would be free of blame. Children are bought, sold, and stolen every day in London, but still, buying and selling them is against the law.”

“I recall,” said I, “that Sir John once said that it is considered as slavery in the sense that it is commerce in human beings.”

“And if someone should just happen to notice that Maggie was no longer about and that your sister was somewhat richer, they might point the finger at her, but nothing could be proved, for, after all, she’d reported that her child had been stolen from her.”

“But that was what happened, was it not?” said Mr. Deuteronomy. “Someone did envy her that she had become richer of a sudden, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” said I, “’twas her neighbor next door, Katy Tiddle, the day before she was murdered. Yet she herself was in on it in some way, and that, I’m sure, was what got her killed.”

Deuteronomy Plummer nodded at that, and he did keep his silence for what seemed a very long time. At last he turned to me and said, “What do you think about this?”

“First of all, from what I’ve heard from you and from others about your sister, I’d say she was not bright enough to think of that matter of reporting Maggie stolen.”

“Oh, I agree with you there,” said he. “What sense she had, left her with all that gin she drank. Must’ve been that Katy Tiddle, or someone a bit higher up the ladder.”

“And it was Katy Tiddle from whom I took the pistol, the one that must be a mate to that one brought in to the shop of Joseph Griffin, Gunsmith, by your Mr. Bennett.”

“Yes, well, I’ve spoken to him about that, and he doesn’t know a thing about it, so he says. Can’t imagine how that pistol came into her possession.”

“And you accept that, do you?”

“Oh yes.”

He was, it seemed to me, a bit too quick with his assurances.

“I’ve a question for you,” said Mr. Patley to Deuteronomy.

“And what is that?”

“How did it come that you were so certain that your sister would be here in Newmarket around race day? I was glad when Jeremy here invited me along, but I didn’t expect for a minute that we would find her in this great mob of people-the main reason being I didn’t think that she’d be here, didn’t think there was a chance of it. But here we come, Jeremy and me, and we catch sight of her first day.”

“So I hear. But truth to tell, I was sure she’d be here because she told me she would be.”

“Told you she’d be here?” Patley repeated, somewhat amazed.

“Yes, it was two or three years ago, maybe three or four. Anyways, I’d located her at last, and I’d been riding in races round London for about a year. We was on better terms then, mostly because of little Maggie. She was the sweetest little thing you ever did see back then-small for her age and she couldn’t talk much, but so pretty and just as affectionate as she could be. Took my heart away, she did.

“Anyways, as I said, we was on better terms then, and I took them both to the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, celebrating something or other. Alice kept Maggie quiet giving her little sips of gin-watered down o’course. So the two of them was both gettin’ pretty tipsy, and we hadn’t had a thing to eat yet. Alice was actin’ more silly and sentimental by the minute. Pretty soon she started talkin’ about Maggie’s father. Seems that when she ran off from the farm-the family farm-she wandered round for a while, then come upon Newmarket just as they were gettin’ ready for the races here. Well, for a country girl run away from home there couldn’t be anything more exciting than this here-most particularly when she met a young fella about her age, so tall and fair she’d never seen nothin’ like him ever before. She was just carried away by him, she was.

“‘Oh, Deuteronomy,’ she says to me. ‘He took my maidenhead, yet never was one so freely given. We was together a month or so, then we had our first quarrel-just a little lover’s tiff was all it was, but I got all carried away and left for London right off.’

“But she promised me right then that if ever she got a little money ahead she would go right back up to Newmarket and make another baby with her tall, straw-haired young fellow. That was how she put it. She promised me.”

The rest of that day went much like the one before. We searched for Alice Plummer-without result. There was but this alteration in our plan. Whereas we had spent the morning looking for her between our inn and the track below, we spent the afternoon exploring the area above the Good Queen Bess; for after all, was she not coming down the hill when Constable Patley spied her through the tap-room window? So she was-and so there was naught to do but go higher and search more industriously. Yet how large or small the town of Newmarket was had to play some part in all this. It was not a place of immense size, after all. True, its population had been swollen many times over, but we could cover the space of it in not much more than a couple of hours. And so we wandered through that area upon the hill above and saw that it was much like the area that surrounded the inn. There were inns, stables, houses, no shops to speak of, but many tents, lean-tos, and other temporary shelters. It appeared to me as if the good burghers of Newmarket were making a pretty penny from this notable event, now a feature of the racing calendar.

I recall remarking on this to Mr. Patley in the midst of our searches, and he responded, “Well, it ain’t bad as