less what I’m doing.” Why was he sounding so hearty, I wondered? Over the telephone he’d been in a state of agitation.
“This whole thing is taking rather longer than I’d anticipated.”
“I have nothing else on at the moment. Couldn’t fly for a while, now, anyway.”
“Again, sorry.”
“You didn’t crash the crate, I did.”
“After someone took a shot-” I stopped; this was getting us nowhere. “What did you need to tell me about Robert Goodman?”
“That’s not his name.”
“I never imagined it was.”
“Then you know who he is?”
I shook my head, since the family whose house we had motored away from was one I did not know personally and Holmes had neither investigated, nor investigated for. “I’d have to look him up in
“The Honourable Winfred Stanley Moreton. His father’s an earl.”
“Should I know him?”
“His name was all over the newspapers this spring.”
“I’ve been out of the country. What did he do?”
“He’s nuts!”
“That, too, is fairly self-evident.”
“I don’t mean just cheerfully fruitcake, I mean loony-bin nuts. Straight-jacket and locked doors nuts. And, he’s a fairy.”
Since for days now I’d been thinking of Goodman as Puck, this assessment hardly surprised me. However, it appeared that was not what Javitz meant.
“And, he was involved in a murder, with one of his fairy friends.”
That word got my attention.
“Murder? Goodman?”
“His name is-”
“Yes, yes. He was tried for murder?”
“This spring. Well, no, not him, but a friend of his-Johnny McAlpin-was tried for murder, and everyone seemed to think that Goodman-Moreton-knew more about it than he was saying.”
“Mr Javitz, you really need to explain this to me.”
He tried, but the legal details were rather fuzzy in his mind. The sensational details, however, were quite clear.
The death itself had occurred in the summer of 1917, in Edinburgh. The victim was a middle-aged man well known as an habitue of the sorts of clubs where the singers are boys dressed up as girls. The murder went unsolved all those years, until this past January, when the newly jilted boyfriend of Johnny McAlpin started telling his friends how McAlpin had once drunkenly bragged about killing the man and getting away with it.
The police heard, and arrested McAlpin. He, in an attempt to spread the blame as thinly as possible, named every friend he could think of-including Win Moreton, who was among those dragged in to testify.
Bearded and wild-haired and sounding more than a little unbalanced, Goodman made quite a splash on the stand. He refused to acknowledge the name “Moreton,” would say only that McAlpin had once been his friend, and was narrowly saved from being gaoled for contempt of court when his sister brought to light a file concerning her brother’s history: Moreton had indeed known McAlpin, the two men having both drunk at the same pub during April and May, 1917, but Moreton had left Edinburgh in June, three weeks before the murder, and there was no evidence that he had been back.
Moreton was a decorated hero, in Edinburgh for treatment of shell shock that spring, but had never been violent even at his most disturbed.
McAlpin alone was convicted. However, the trial of the Honorable Winfred Moreton in the court of public opinion, had been both loud and unequivocal: He had to be guilty of something, and murder would do as well as any other charge.
The story itself sounded more colourful than factual, so I finally interrupted Javitz to ask how he’d heard all this.
He bent down and pulled an oversized envelope from the carpet-bag, thrusting it into my hands. I unlooped the fastener and looked in at a mess of pages, newspaper clippings, letters, and pocket diaries. I eased a few out of the pile, and read enough to catch the drift of their meaning.
Meanwhile, Javitz was explaining how he had come across this, after the boy in the house had told him who “Goodman” was: He’d gone to the butler who took him to the housekeeper who showed him a clipping she kept in one of her ledgers and then, when he demanded to know more, led him to the butler’s pantry and the collection in the envelope.
“You stole this?” I asked.
“Borrowed it-send it back to them if you want. But I needed you to see, and understand.” The earlier heartiness had gone; he shifted, his leg troubling him.
I closed the envelope, trying to follow the currents. I felt that Javitz was honestly concerned at the idea of permitting a madman and accused murderer near Estelle. I also thought that he was more than a little worried at letting a man with dubious relationships near to his own person. I couldn’t imagine what threat the five-and-a-half- foot-tall Goodman might be to a strapping six-footer, but sex and sensibility do not always go hand in hand.
Beyond his concern, however, I thought I detected traces of embarrassment, which I had seen in him before. He was a captain in the RAF, a hero and man of action, who had permitted me to shove him to the back with the children. That he had uncomplainingly set aside his personal dignity for the sake of a child-and moreover, continued to do so-was a sign of his true valiant nature. Reasoned argument would be no help, since his mind was already delivering that. I needed a means of permitting the man to retain his self-respect.
I let his story and his explanation fade away, watching Estelle solemnly constructing a Dolly-sized hut out of some twigs and dry grasses. Then I sat back.
“I can’t tell you whether these newspaper charges are substantiated, although I’ll find out. However, we still need to decide where to put you-and, if you honestly don’t mind, Estelle. It shouldn’t be for more than a day, at the most two.”
He settled a bit, which allowed his embarrassment to come closer to the surface. When he realised I was not about to accuse him of cowardice or point out his irrational fear of a man who had never so much as looked at him sideways, he relaxed. Suddenly he sat up and dug out his watch. “You have to be at the funeral in, what, three hours?”
“A little more than that.”
“Then you don’t have time to spend on me and the kid,” he said.
I exhaled in relief: If assuaging his guilt drove him to volunteer for nanny duty, who was I to argue? I hastened to assure him, “Three hours is plenty. Tell me, how do you feel about Kent?”
It took me half an hour to locate a taxi with a driver who was not only taciturn, but willing to take a fare all the way to Tunbridge Wells. I put on an American accent and explained that my injured brother was shy of conversation but willing to pay generously for silence, and that he and his daughter needed to go to the largest hotel in the town. Tunbridge Wells was a watering hole and tourist destination busy enough to render even this unusual pair-large American male and tiny Eurasian child-slightly less than instantaneously the centre of attention.
I told Javitz to explain to the concierge that the luggage had gone astray on the ship, and gave him enough cash to clothe and feed himself and the child for two days, as well as distribute the sorts of tips that guarantee happy, hence silent, hotel staff.
But I admit, it was with a great deal of trepidation that I watched the taxicab pull away.
Forty minutes later and dressed in my funeral clothes, I walked up the steps to the unlikely address for Peter James West. To my surprise, the warehouse showed signs of an inner transformation, with added windows and doors geared for humans rather than lorry-loads of goods. I grasped the polished brass of the lion’s head knocker and let it fall sharply against its brass plate. The sound echoed through the building within, and I waited for footsteps.
