“ ’E said, ‘We’ll go hif you say so, but wot’ll you do hif the spirits don’t come with us? My missus says they was ’ere before we came, and she knows. She knows ’ow to make ’em be’ave, too, and I guess you don’t—you hain’t seen the pranks they can play when they gets frisky or hif they don’t take a fancy to you. Noises hain’t near the worst of hit. This place sat hempty near six months before we come and took hit—hever hask yourself why? Maybe hit was them there spirits.’ And ’e ’ad me by the short ’airs, there, ’e did. Better a tenant wot gets halong with the spirits than none at all—not with the landlord comin’ by and haskin’ why hit hain’t been let.”
“So you let him stay,” said Mr. Clemens, with a sad but sympathetic expression. “Well, I reckon you didn’t have much choice, so I can’t blame you. The landlord won’t hear anything about it from me, you can be sure. Now, about that business last night—did you see or hear anything unusual yesterday?”
“Not hif you don’t call them ’orrible noises hunusual,” said Johnson. “I saw McPhee and that Irish fellow wot works for ’im set hout for somewheres, just before teatime.”
“Did you notice when they came back?”
“No, sorry, guv’nor,” said Johnson. “It just so ’appened I was on the step when they went out, I never saw ’em return. Then the noises started, the usual time, and hit seemed there was a bit more goin’ hup and downstairs than usual. Me an’ the missus, we shut our hears and went to bed, and then this morning we learn a gentleman was killed hup there. A sorry thing, says I.”
“How did you hear about the killing?” said Mr. Clemens.
“The constable came by this mornin’, after breakfast,” Johnson said. “ ’E wanted to know hif we’d ’eard or seen anything, same as you gentlemen. We told ’im pretty much wot I’ve told you. And that’s that, pretty much.”
“Well, I reckon we’ve found what we need to, then,” said my employer. “Cabot, can you think of anything I haven’t asked Mr. Johnson?”
I studied my notebook a moment, then said, “No, not at the moment. Perhaps we’ll think of something when we’ve talked to some of the other witnesses.”
“Yes, of course,” said Mr. Clemens. “Well, Mr. Johnson, we thank you for your cooperation, and we’ll be in touch if there’s anything else we think you can help us with. Can you get in touch with us if you think of anything you’ve overlooked? Give him our address, Cabot.” I scrawled it on a sheet of notebook paper, tore it out, and gave it to Johnson, who took it and nodded.
“Now, we’ve got some other people to speak to today,” said Mr. Clemens. “If you could let us out the front way . . .”
“Yes, sir,” said Johnson, eagerly. He led us through a plainly furnished flat that smelled of boiling cabbage—I caught a quick glimpse of a dowdily dressed middle-aged woman, his wife I guessed—and showed us out at the front of the building. The door closed behind us, and Mr. Clemens and I looked at one another.
“I’ll be damned,” said my employer, staring back at the building. “I wouldn’t have thought we could get away with it. I figured we were in real trouble when that fellow showed up with the pitchfork, but he turned out to be tame enough, didn’t he? By the time we finished, I reckon he’d have given us the family jewels, if I’d asked him politely enough.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Still, I’m just as glad he didn’t call the constable—we’d have been hard-pressed to explain things to him.”
“Well, we’ve bluffed our way out of that pickle,” Mr. Clemens said. He brushed his hands together as if washing them, then pointed down the street to our right. “Now, let’s go see if we can find Cedric Villiers at home—we’ve barely started, and there’s still a killer to catch.”
14
It was not quite fifteen minutes’ walk from the McPhees’ flat to Cedric Villiers’s home—or it would have been, if I’d been walking it on my own. At Mr. Clemens’s leisurely pace, it was closer to half an hour before we found ourselves outside Villiers’s picturesque cottage on Godfrey Street, not far from Chelsea Green. Actually, to call it “picturesque” would be an understatement—the entire street was lined with homes that looked as if an artist had designed them. Given what I had seen of Villiers’s tastes, this was exactly the kind of neighborhood where I would have expected him to live.
“This looks to be a very pleasant place to live,” I said. “Something about it strikes me as particularly English.”
“Yes, very clean and well kept up,” said Mr. Clemens. Then, after a rueful glance down at his soiled trousers: “Better kept up than I am just this moment, I’m afraid. Maybe I should have gone home and changed clothes. But we’re here, so let’s see if he’s home. Now that we’ve walked all this way, we shouldn’t waste the opportunity.”
We opened the little wooden gate in the boxwood hedge that fronted the house, went up a short walk to the front porch, and I rang the bell. After a short interval, the door opened and we found a long-nosed man in a dark old-fashioned suit with a supercilious air peering out at us. “Good day, gentlemen. May I help you?” he said, in a voice that could have been set up as a model of sheer hauteur.
“Yes, tell Mr. Villiers that Samuel L. Clemens would like to see him. I assume he’s at home?”
“Perhaps, sir. I shall return directly,” said the man. His glance fell upon the smudges on Mr. Clemens’s coat and trousers, and his eyebrow rose a barely perceptible fraction. His eye lingered on the dirty clothes just a moment longer than necessary. Then he turned and disappeared within.
“Perhaps?” said Mr. Clemens. “Hell, if
