The Curse of the Norwich Mermaid

A Gentleman Detective Mystery

Evelyn James

Red Raven Publications 2025

www.sophie-jackson.com

Contents

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Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

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Chapter One

The gravestone bore the bitter details of a life lost too soon.

Houston Fairchild.

1844 – 1898.

Though gone from our lives, still held in our hearts.

Colonel Bainbridge stared at the lump of stone that marked where his dearest friend now lay, turning to bones and dust in the ground.

Houston would have told him moping over a grave was pointless, an act of self-indulgent torment. Bainbridge was almost amused as he heard the American’s voice as clear as day in his mind, telling him he should not be grieving over a hole in the ground.

Bainbridge would never get over the loss of Fairchild. He knew that deep in his heart, and the ache burned away at him. Some days he wondered how long he could live with such pain within him. Wouldn’t it be fairer for him to simply slip away? For his old body to finally decide it had had enough, and to allow him peace.

Still, each morning he awoke to face the day once more without Houston, and each morning he battled through. There were even some days when he forgot about the empty space within him, and the agony of loss that nagged at his heart.

Houston had been so much more than merely a friend, but in a world that had very strict views on what was and was not allowable, Bainbridge had no one he could express his true feelings to. He knew people thought him curious, maybe even eccentric, for the grief he showed for a man who was just his business partner, but they would never truly know what Houston had meant to him.

Bainbridge had not been to the grave in weeks. It might even be months, he reflected to himself, since he had strolled along the gravel path, and paused before this particular plot. The grass around the stone was overgrown, and the weeds were sprouting all around, but Bainbridge fancied that was nicer than the neatly trimmed plots either side. Houston had never been one for formality, and the rugged, slightly unruly appearance of his grave suited him.

Why was he here today?

Bainbridge had asked himself that question more than once since he had entered the cemetery, and wander along the familiar path. There had been no real plan in his mind when he rose that morning and decided to visit his old friend’s last resting place, just an inkling that this was where he needed to come.

About a month ago, his niece had been wandering in the garden as the last dregs of winter were finally lifting, revealing the spring to come. She had come across a fallen tree at the very bottom, that neither of them had noticed before – Bainbridge not being much of a gardener, and his garden being quite extensive. Within she had discovered an old box, half-ruined by the elements, and intended to be hidden in the trunk to remain a secret. She had brought it indoors to show Bainbridge the contents, which she had easily accessed due to the decayed nature of the box lid.

Bainbridge’s innocent curiosity at the sight of the mysterious box – natural enough in a detective – had been immediately replaced by horror, and a feeling of intense foreboding, when he picked up the first article within, and realised it was in the hand of his former business partner.

The box had been hidden by Fairchild. When, precisely, was unclear, though some of the papers it held were dated not long before the fateful accident that had snatched him from this world.

The question that dogged Bainbridge was why? Why had Fairchild hidden this box away from the world – away from Bainbridge?

The colonel had always supposed there were no secrets between him and his friend. They had worked together so long, and seen the dark sides of each other, shared the sort of experiences that led to the exchanging of confidences which could never be heard by anyone else. They had worked together, and separately, but they were always aware of one another’s cases.

To suddenly realise Fairchild had been up to something without saying a word to his closest friend was disturbing.

More than disturbing.

It hurt.

Bainbridge had suspected something was amiss the day Houston had died. He had been in a bank that he did not use. It was, in fact, Bainbridge’s bank. They both kept separate banking accounts, splitting the money they made from the cases they worked together between them. To this day, Bainbridge had been unable to find a reason as to why Houston would go to that bank.

The rest of the sorry saga was forcefully engrained into his memory. Houston managed to be at the wrong bank, at the exact time a bank robbery was undertaken, and in the ensuing drama, he was shot twice in the chest. Houston died on the tiled floor of the bank, surrounded by strangers, while Bainbridge was taking a lazy nap at home.

Bainbridge still felt an inexplicable guilt for not being there, as if somehow he could have made a difference if he had followed Houston that day, been there with him in the bank. Maybe he would have been the one shot instead of his friend, and that would have ended his suffering at once, rather than leaving him to endure the constant misery of living without his friend.

Houston’s murderer was never apprehended, and two years later, Bainbridge was beginning to think the culprit would never see justice, at least not in this existence.

And then the box had appeared, almost as if Fairchild had set it before them, nudging Bainbridge out of his depressed lethargy, to insist he take a closer look at things.

Was that it?

Was Houston giving him a nudge in the right direction? Did he even want to be nudged?

All the worries and ramifications from finding that box had brought Bainbridge to the cemetery, to stand before a slab of grey granite, and try to commune with the dead. A practice he considered superstitious nonsense under any other circumstance.

Bainbridge narrowed his eyes at the gravestone.

Here he was, a man past his prime, his girth fast expanding, while the athleticism of his youth was fast declining. Once he had been a cavalryman who could ride for days without a thought, now his knees groaned when he rose from a chair. He felt as though he had outlived his usefulness, and all he had to look forward to was a slow decline into invalidity and senility.

Houston would have said something sharp about such self-pity, knocked him out of his doldrums, and made him get back to the act of living.

“But you aren’t here anymore, Houston,” Bainbridge whispered to the grave, the familiar sense of anger that always came after his aching grief now overwhelming him. “You had the audacity to die before me. I shall never forgive you for that.”

A shadow drifted over the sun in the sky. Blue skies had graced Bainbridge’s walk to the cemetery, but now spring was returning to form, and there was a hint of rain in the air. Bainbridge did not move, though he felt the chill of the wind, a shiver running down his spine.

The world had fallen into silence around him, except for the steady singing of the birds in the trees, and the distant scraping of a shovel. For a brief moment, Bainbridge felt tears prick his eyes, but he was not a man who cried or openly displayed his emotions, and he wiped them away as if they had never been.

When he looked up again, the water dabbed from his cheeks, he saw that a robin had landed atop the gravestone and was perched looking at him in the charming way such birds did. It tipped its head, and there seemed such intelligence in its gaze as it studied the sorrowful colonel.

“There is an old story that robins are the souls of our departed loved ones and show themselves to us as a means of reminding us they are not truly gone,” Bainbridge said to the bird, unabashed that he was speaking to a feathered creature.

The robin tipped its head again in the opposite direction, then fluttered away, the stern look in its black as jet eye engrained in Bainbridge’s mind like a silent rebuke. If Houston were to reappear as a robin, it would certainly be one with such a look of disapproval in its gaze at the colonel’s morbid musings.

“Colonel Bainbridge.”

The voice rang out so suddenly it startled the colonel, and for a wistful second he thought it must have come from the bird, then sanity returned to him, and he spun around to see the cemetery’s caretaker wandering over to him. A shovel flipped up on his shoulder, the man appeared to have been doing some simple work around the graves.

“Haven’t seen you around in a while, sir.”

“Ah… no, I…” Bainbridge glanced at the untended grave, feeling an unnecessary sense of guilt over its shabbiness.

Houston would have laughed to see him so put out. Just a stone over a hole, he would have said. No point making it a shrine.

“Had I known you were coming, I would have given your friend’s grave a spruce up,” the caretaker continued.

“That is not necessary,” Bainbridge said with more authority in his tone than he had thought he could muster. “Houston would not have cared for an overly neat grave. He liked things wild, if you see what I mean.”

“I do that,” the caretaker nodded. “American, wasn’t he? Proper wilderness fellow. Can’t imagine he would be the sort for pristinely cut grass and fresh roses laid on his grave.”

Bainbridge glanced at the grave with its dainty wildflowers, ones that were just blooming for the first time that year and attracting the odd bee. Suddenly, it seemed to him that this was exactly what Houston would have wanted.

“No, Houston was not one for formality. He liked his life, and his world, to come at him as it was.”

“Pity about his passing,” the caretaker mumbled. “I say that often as I walk past this spot. Pity he was taken too soon.”

“Indeed,” Bainbridge said, his brief amusement fading back to melancholy.

“Still, this is a placed filled with lives cut too short,” the caretaker shrugged, apparently oblivious to Bainbridge’s gloom. “See over there? We have a funeral this afternoon, and I was supervising the gravedigging. Young lady, only in her twenties, lost to the consumption.”

“How dreadful,” Bainbridge mumbled without really paying attention.

He didn’t want to hear about others’ sorrows, he wanted to bury himself in his own. Maybe that was selfish, or foolish, but it was how he felt.

“Never mind, though, we all go to a better place, don’t we?”

Bainbridge was roused by the caretaker’s words.

“I don’t know, do we?” he said gloomily.

“Of course!” the caretaker chuckled. “We all get our second chance, I reckon.”

The caretaker’s easy-going approach to death was getting on Bainbridge’s nerves. He made his excuses, and began to walk away, back to the gates of the cemetery, to head home. Only now did he really notice the drop in temperature, and the grey clouds scudding overhead. He had not brought an umbrella to protect himself from rain showers.

He was just exiting the gates and thinking how he would be wet before he made it home, when the first fat drops of a spring squall struck his shoulder, and almost at the same time, he heard the harshly comical hoot of a car horn.

Bainbridge glanced up to see who happened to own the vehicle attached to the horn, and spied his niece, Victoria Bovington, parked alongside the kerb.

“There you are, Julius,” she declared. “I was worried about you. You suddenly vanished after breakfast. Mrs Huggins suggested I would find you here.”

“That woman knows me better than I know myself,” Bainbridge muttered under his breath.

“She said it was something to do with the way you had put extra sugar in your tea this morning,” Victoria frowned as she considered the odd words of their housekeeper.

“I always take extra sugar on a day I believe I am going to do a lot of walking,” Bainbridge responded as he approached the car. “I suppose I don’t exactly do a lot of walking to anywhere other than the cemetery these days.”

Victoria smiled at him gently.

“Get in, it is about to rain.”

She leaned over from the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door.

Bainbridge hauled himself inside, no grace to his movements, but for once he did not care if he looked ungainly. He was more interested in being inside, in the dry, before the heavens really did open upon him.

As if on cue, the clouds suddenly deposited all their rain down on the world as he pulled closed the door. The droplets thudded on the leather roof of the car, and a few bounced through the open sides, there being no windows to protect passengers from the elements, other than the windscreen in front of them.

“Are you quite all right?” Victoria asked once he was settled in his seat.

“Never better,” Bainbridge huffed.

“It’s this business with that box again, isn’t it?”

“The box of papers is of no consequence,” Bainbridge responded.

“You have not looked at those papers since I first found them. I had expected you to have read through the lot and analysed them for clues.”

“Please, Vicky, let us not talk about this.”

Bainbridge scowled out of the windscreen. Victoria had the good sense to not push the matter.

“I might have something to take your mind off things,” she replied instead.

“I do not need my mind being taken off anything,” Bainbridge huffed.

“Well, that is good to hear. Then I suppose I should say, I believe I have a case for us, and it may actually pay well for once.”

Bainbridge did not mean to be distracted by this information. He had intended to indulge his maudlin grief for the remainder of the day, perhaps the remainder of the week, but Victoria’s words tapped into his curiosity, and he could not help himself.

“A case?”

“I received a visit while you were out. I shall explain on the way, but the gentleman who has hired us is both wealthy and very upset. I therefore accepted the case at once.”

“Wisely done,” Bainbridge said. “The combination of emotional discord and great wealth is usually a promising one for the private detective.”

“As soon as I had assured the gentleman we would undertake the case, I came to find you at once. We have an appointment of sorts, with a rather odd mystery.”

“Now you have my full attention, please explain more.”

Victoria carefully, and rather slowly, pulled the car away from the kerb.

“You must promise not to laugh, of course.”

“Why would I laugh?” Bainbridge huffed.

His niece smiled at him.

“Because we have been asked to investigate a sighting of a mermaid, of all things.”

Chapter Two

Mr Dugoni was Italian by birth, but British by inclination. He had lived in Norwich since he was a small boy, after his parents had decided to settle in the county. His father had been a rather successful businessman, specialising in exotic goods he imported through his contacts in the old homeland.

Exotic, at least, to the locals of Norfolk. To Italians they were rather mundane, everyday items.

That made the situation even better, for the senior Mr Dugoni could purchase items cheaply, and sell them on for a decent profit.

His son had taken over the business about ten years ago, allowing his parents to indulge in a peaceful retirement. They had opted to move to Bournemouth to live out their days. His mother had always had a fondness for the place, after she had visited it on a holiday. Mr Dugoni was not concerned about their departure; he could travel to see them when necessary, and he had his own family to keep him busy.

In the style of his father, he did not sit on his laurels and simply allow the business to tick over. He began expanding, which was when he acquired the Lady Guinevere, a handsome barge that had been made for a gentleman to cruise around the Norfolk Broads. She was luxurious in her lavish brass and wood décor, and she made the perfect accommodation for Dugoni’s newest venture – he had turned her into a floating restaurant, and entertained people nightly in the unusual surroundings.

Lamplit in the evening, the Lady Guinevere was a sight to behold. The menu was equally enticing, with a range of Italian dishes that tempted the palates of even the most reticent of English gentlemen.

The restaurant had been open just over a year, and had been doing well so far, bringing in Mr Dugoni enough money to justify the rather heavy outlay he had initially made on the barge. He had been happy that everything was going his way, until a fortnight ago, when the most peculiar of things occurred.

That night he was meant to have a full house of diners. It had been necessary to turn people away, a thing no restaurant owner likes to do, but full was full. The tables were laid out, and ready for service, the musicians he employed were primed for entertaining the diners, and his chefs and waiting staff were ready for action.

There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary that evening, until just before the restaurant was due to open, when one of his waiters came up to Mr Dugoni and politely suggested he glance out of the window.

Dugoni, made curious by the young man’s anxious demeanour, had wandered to the rear of the barge, and glanced out towards the waters of the river Wensum. In the gloom of the night, he saw the flickering of a lamp which appeared to be burning on the water. He narrowed his eyes, frowning. There must be another boat out there, but who was trying to navigate these waters in the dark?

Fearing his restaurant might be struck by the new vessel, which was sailing virtually blind aside from the feeble lamp, he sent out two of his waiters to make sure the lanterns at the back of the barge were illuminated, and to be ready with long poles to push the boat away if it veered too close to his vessel.

It turned out Mr Dugoni had nothing to fear from a passing ship, for whatever was out on the water, it was not moving.

When several minutes had passed without the light either growing nearer or further away, Dugoni joined his staff on the viewing deck at the back of the barge, pressing himself into the cramped space. He leaned forward over the railing and peered into the darkness.

What was out there?

Dugoni was not easily spooked, but some of his staff were, and they began to whisper about ghosts and evil spirits. He quelled this talk fiercely, threatening to dismiss the next man who spoke such nonsense aloud. He stifled the initial panic, but he knew it was only a matter of time before the men began muttering about it again, once his back was turned.

He gazed out across the water, trying to work out a shape he could just see silhouetted in the light.

Suddenly, a new light flared. One much brighter than the first, and the object was illuminated. It was not a boat.

Dugoni could hardly believe his eyes when he saw what appeared to be a rock that had suddenly floated into the middle of the river. Upon the rock – and Dugoni could not deny what he saw even though he tried to – was a woman combing her long, golden hair.

She sat curled up in the tiny circle of lamplight and seemed oblivious to their presence. Dugoni was about to shout out and ask if she needed any help, thinking they had found themselves with an escaped lunatic before them, when one of his men suddenly gave a cry.

“A mermaid!” he yelled in Italian.

Dugoni nearly reacted by clouting the man about the head with his fist, but when the words made it to his ears, they immediately made sense of the one thing he had been looking at that had failed to be processed by his tired mind.

The figure on the rock had a tail!

Dugoni gaped as he studied the sight before him. A female figure with long blonde hair, which she was methodically combing out and draping over her exposed torso – scantily clad as far as he could tell – while, where her legs ought to have been, there was nothing but a scaly tail.

The next moment the woman started to sing in a softly lilting voice that sent panic through his staff.

“A siren come to lure us to our doom!”

“The mermaids sing to men to drown them!”

“Holy Mother of God, protect us from this demon!”

Dugoni was not a religious man. Technically, he was Roman Catholic, but aside from the odd appearance at mass and having a figure of the Virgin Mary in the hallway of his house, he did not hold with religion. He found it inconvenient to business. He couldn’t afford the time, simply put.

And as he did not hold with religion, he certainly did not hold with mythical beings who appeared out of nowhere to disrupt his life.

“Who are you?” he yelled over the railing at the figure in the water.

There was no response from the mermaid, who continued to blithely comb her hair, apparently indifferent to their presence.

“You are causing a hazard in a waterway!” Dugoni shouted next, hoping to attract the figure’s attention.

Around him his staff were muttering and crossing themselves, though no man was brave enough to reiterate aloud their fears that a demon had arrived on their doorstep in the form of a mermaid.

“I shall call the police!” Dugoni tried at last, eliciting nothing from the mermaid, but earning groans of sorrow and despondency from his staff, who fancied this was a sure way to encourage the demon’s wrath.

Grumbling to himself about the idiocy of certain people, Dugoni stormed back into his barge, and sent out one of the lads who washed the dishes to alert the police. In the meantime, a number of his customers had arrived, and were wondering why there was no one to greet them as they loitered around the base of the barge’s gangplank.

Dugoni’s staff were still acting beside themselves on the back of his vessel, so he took charge of making sure his guests were brought aboard and settled in their seats. He was fortunate that the angle of his barge prevented people from seeing the mermaid, and so he could pretend that nothing untoward was happening.

With brute force and bullying, he managed to get his waiting staff back into action. His head chef, who was far too absorbed with the practicalities of cooking to be disturbed by the alleged supernatural, was still at work and had kept his own subordinates firmly under his control, so there was no issue regarding the food.

The evening eventually settled down into a relative calm, and though Dugoni glanced once or twice out at the mermaid, who seemed content to continue her evening grooming routine upon the river, on the whole he managed to forget all about her.

When a police constable finally arrived, he was hastily ushered to the side of the barge, so the guests did not see him, and the figure in the water pointed out to him. In hindsight, Dugoni regretted involving the police. The constable could do nothing from a legal point of view about the person in the water, unless they were drowning, which they clearly were not, and though Dugoni moaned about hazards to passing canal boats, the constable was unimpressed, declaring that was a matter for the people in charge of the waterways and not him.

Dugoni was convinced it was the constable who told people about the presence of the mermaid, for no one from his own vessel had departed, and the customers had yet to see her, but within an hour there was a gathering of onlookers at the side of the river, staring out at the creature in the water.

The crowd only grew over the course of the next hour, and by the time Dugoni’s customers were finishing their dessert and paying their bills, it was impossible not to notice that something was going on. Before Dugoni could prevent it, his diners were departing to see for themselves what was happening.

By the end of the evening, when he was closing up the barge and making sure all the plates and cutlery were being washed up, there was a sizeable crowd just next to his restaurant. Much to his indignation, some of the less desirable elements thought it would be a good idea to climb on his vessel to try and get a better view of the mermaid. He had to have them chased away.

It was then it had dawned on Dugoni that he could not leave his barge that evening, not with so many people lurking about and the potential for more onlookers to climb aboard. He could not risk his property.

And so he stayed that night, on guard at the back of his barge, along with his chef who was unmoved by the whole affair, but keen to keep his kitchen safe from any potential thieves.

In the early hours of the morning, the light over the mermaid suddenly dimmed, and darkness fell across the water. It was no longer possible to view the mysterious creature, and with the dimming of the light, the crowd slowly dispersed. Dugoni stayed as alert as possible for the remainder of the night, hoping to find out the solution to this nightmare in the morning, but when the first light of dawn rose, he looked across the river and discovered that not only was the mermaid gone, but so was her rocky perch.

“I thought I heard some splashing,” the cook said with a shrug, before declaring he was off home to get some sleep.

Dugoni stared at the water, wondering what he had witnessed, hoping it was some bizarre prank that would not be repeated.

His hopes were sadly in vain. The very next night, the mermaid returned under the cover of darkness. Her rock reappeared, and her light. In anticipation of the arrival, a number of gawkers had already found their way to the riverside and were waiting eagerly.

Dugoni looked at them in distaste, noting that the majority were of the working classes, and most looked highly disreputable. By the time the barge opened for business, the crowd was swamping the riverbank, and now loitering around his vessel, making it inconvenient for Dugoni’s diners to venture into the restaurant. They were jostled and harangued as they made for the gangplank, and the inevitable happened sooner rather than later. One gentleman arrived at the door of the barge, felt in his pocket, and declared he had been robbed.

Dugoni had anticipated such a possibility. Wherever there were large crowds, there would always be pickpockets taking advantage. The commotion that followed was disastrous for his evening’s business. Outraged that such a thing had occurred, and blaming Dugoni for allowing the crowd to flock around his barge – though he had very little say in that matter – the disgruntled gentleman departed angrily. It was not long before other guests followed suit. It was not just fear of being robbed, there were concerns about some of the ‘ruffians’ lurking outside the barge, and the crowd had now started to sing and chatter loudly, treating the whole spectacle like a sideshow at the fair. The noise was discordant and boisterous, disrupting the usually relaxing ambience of the interior of the barge.

Guests departed before they even reached the main course, fleeing as if their lives were in peril, and Dugoni watched in despondent horror as he saw his takings for that evening evaporate.

The crowd grew bigger. Dugoni manned his guard post yet again that night and had to more than once threaten a person with one of the heavy cast iron ladles from the kitchen to get them off his vessel. And just as the night before, in the early hours the light dimmed, and by dawn the mermaid was gone.

Dugoni did not hold out hope this time that it would be the last he saw of the creature. The next evening, and the evening after that, the mermaid made its appearance. His bookings dwindled, his guests cancelled their reservations, and his restaurant suddenly became empty.

That was when Dugoni knew he had to do something. His own efforts to get the police involved, or to tackle the mermaid himself had failed. He had even borrowed a rowing boat to try to sail out to the disruptive figure, but this had only earned him a scream from the mermaid, who dived elegantly into the water. Angered that their viewing had been disrupted, and furious Dugoni had upset the pretty maiden, the crowd then pelted him with rocks and nearly sank his boat.

There was nothing else for it. The desperate Italian turned to the two people who might just be able to solve this mystery and save his business – Colonel Bainbridge and his niece, Victoria Bovington.

Having explained his crisis to Victoria when he found her home alone, he had headed back to his restaurant, in the hope that he might have customers that night, and Vicky had set out to find her uncle.

That was how they now happened to be on the tail of a mermaid who was haunting the river Wensum and causing poor Mr Dugoni a great deal of bother.

Chapter Three

Bainbridge mulled over the matter as they headed along the road, the rain slowly easing outside.

“Mermaids,” he said to himself. “Now, that is a new one.”

“It is a new one to all of us. I don’t think I have ever heard of such a thing. Poor Mr Dugoni looked as though he was on the verge of a heart malfunction when he explained the matter to me. He is very distressed.”

“The obvious conclusion is that someone wishes him ill and is performing this remarkable hoax to cause him bother.”

“How long can he survive without any customers, do you suppose?”

“I doubt very long, considering the outlay he made on the barge, and the narrow margins for restaurants to turn a profit. He will have the mooring fees to consider as well, no doubt he pays a pretty penny for a prime spot along the waterfront.”

“His reputation will be the worst affected. Once such a story like this spreads, it will make it very hard for him to open up somewhere else.”

“Exactly,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “It would prove a very effective way of destroying his enterprise and ensuring he stays out of the restaurant business in the future.”

“So, we find out who would wish Mr Dugoni harm in such a manner, and we have our mermaid?”

“Maybe,” Bainbridge said noncommittally.

Victoria glanced at him, trying to work out what was going through his head. She had been worried about his absence that day, and even more concerned when Mrs Huggins had informed her she suspected Bainbridge had gone to the cemetery to look at Fairchild’s grave. She had thought they were coming through his shock and morbidity at her finding the papers in the garden. She now saw she had been wrong.

They pulled up alongside a road near the riverbank, then had to abandon the car to follow a footpath down to the mooring of the floating restaurant. Mr Dugoni spied them from a window of the vessel, having been on the lookout for them ever since he reached his barge. He hastened out of the door and down the gangplank, eager to greet them.

He was a small man with incredibly black hair, which looked like it had been slicked down with boot polish. He was neither handsome nor ugly, finding that middle place of indifferent appearance that tended to be the norm for the majority of the population. He had a thin black moustache and wore a pinstripe suit that spoke of fine tailoring and a sense of flare. He rushed over to them as if his life were in peril.

“You came! Thank goodness. I feared you would consider me a fool, just like everyone else. All this talk of mermaids has people laughing at me.”

Dugoni might have been of Italian extract, but he spoke with a broad Norfolk accent.

“I take all pleas for help seriously,” Bainbridge reassured him. “My niece has explained to me the crisis you are facing. I must say it is a first for me to be involved in hunting a mermaid.”

Dugoni pulled a face.

“Mermaid,” he snorted. “Did Miss Bovington explain to you all my efforts to reach the mermaid, and prove the deception?”

“She did,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “It seems you have done everything feasible, under the circumstances. There is just one thing left to do.”

“What is that?” Dugoni asked, expecting some nugget of wisdom from the great detective.

“Close up your restaurant.”

Dugoni’s face fell, and he stumbled back a pace as if Bainbridge had landed a blow upon him.

“Close my restaurant?”

“You are losing money hand over fist while you remain open, and if the goal of this mermaid is to see you shut down then let us give them that satisfaction. Better than constantly encouraging a crowd of people to this riverbank where, sooner or later, something serious will occur,” Bainbridge huffed as he looked up and down the bank he was referring to. “I am amazed nothing has happened so far. There are no railings along the bank, and it would be easy for someone to stumble into the water. In the dark, they might swiftly drown. For public safety, as well as to stop this nonsense, you need to shut your restaurant, Mr Dugoni.”

The Italian was mortified by the news.

“I have bookings for tonight,” he mumbled.

“And will they attend? Surely, after all you have been through, it is obvious that the odds of you having diners tonight is slim. Why waste your money by purchasing and cooking food that will not be consumed or paid for, not to mention the wages you will have to pay your staff for working tonight, and the cost in oil and candles to light your vessel.”

Dugoni looked bleak but the colonel’s words made perfect sense. After trying to form some sort of protest, he conceded it was the most logical thing to do and headed back onto his barge to make the arrangements.

He motioned for the two detectives to follow him.

“It has been absolutely years since I had some good Italian food,” Bainbridge remarked as they entered the main dining room of the barge. He took in a deep inhale of air, soaking up the faded scents of the meals from the night before. “I used to love it. All the pasta and cheese sauce.”

“Italians are very fond of vegetables,” Victoria responded, a typical ploy in their casual exchanges about diet.

Victoria was fond of fresh fruit and vegetables, Bainbridge was not. His opinion on a meal that did not consist of stodgy pastry, a good deal of meat, and some form of thick sauce or gravy, was not repeatable in polite company.

Despite this, Victoria often prodded him about his nutritional blindness and had even attempted to encourage the colonel to try a salad, to no avail. There were some battles a person was not destined to win.

Bainbridge glanced around the tables of the restaurant, in the vain hope Mr Dugoni might have overheard his remark and would be inclined to start preparing a meal for him. Bainbridge was always thinking with his stomach. Unfortunately for him, Dugoni was too overwhelmed with considering shutting his restaurant to pay attention to the statement.

Victoria headed over to a window at the far side of the room and glanced out at the river beyond.

“Whoever is doing this must have to moor up their special island,” she said.

Bainbridge sauntered over to join her.

“A good observation. It seems once in place, the mermaid’s rocky perch never moves or drifts with the current from its spot, implying it is fixed in some manner.”

“An anchor?”

“Could be,” Bainbridge concurred. “Or the device is being moored to the far bank.”

Mr Dugoni reappeared from the kitchen and walked over to them.

“It is done. I have told the staff to go home, and I have sent messages out to all my guests for tonight and tomorrow that we will not be opening.”

“It is for the best, Mr Dugoni,” Bainbridge consoled him. “There is a real issue with public safety concerning this whole charade. You would not want to be responsible for either one of your diners, or someone on the banks, suffering a mischief over this.”

Dugoni did not think the onlookers who were disrupting his business deserved much in the way of his consideration, but he said nothing.

“What are you going to do to find out who is behind this?” he demanded.

“First things first, we need to discuss who might wish to disrupt your newest business venture. If this is being done in an effort to shut you down, then logically the person behind it has a grievance against you.”

Dugoni’s shoulder sagged as he deflated.

“I have rivals, of course I do. My father built up his business with ruthless efficiency, and I have followed in his footsteps. Our success has naturally meant the demise of other people’s fortunes, that is how things work. You cannot have two identical businesses with equal success, it is just not the way things are.”

“Can you think of anyone in particular who might have a grudge against you? It will likely be a personal grievance for them to have gone to such efforts to destroy you.”

Dugoni was glum. A list of names ran through his head, people who he had seen out of business by his own practices. He had never done anything immoral, but he had always worked harder than anyone else and been forceful with promoting his businesses. Those who were not so aggressive in their determination to succeed had fallen by the wayside.

“I can think of a few names,” he reluctantly admitted.

“Perhaps you can write them down for us?” Bainbridge suggested.

Dugoni obeyed, and within ten minutes they had a list of five names of people the businessman thought had the most reason to be against him.

“We shall begin investigating this matter at once,” Bainbridge assured him. “I intend to have a stroll along the riverbank to see if we can get some clues as to the perpetrator, then our next move will be to return here tonight to witness this mermaid for ourselves.”

Dugoni bleakly nodded his head and expressed his hope they would solve the mystery swiftly. Bainbridge was disappointed they were not offered food before they departed, but he forgave the man this failing as he was obviously very unhappy.

Outside the barge, they first strolled to the right of the vessel, to look across the river to where the mermaid performed her act.

“Do you suppose the people who come here actually think they are seeing a real mermaid?” Victoria asked her uncle.

“I have no doubt some of them believe they are seeing a real mythic sea creature, however mystical and impossible it may seem,” Bainbridge replied. “Have you never been to the fair and seen one of their ghoulish sideshows purporting to have all manner of weird and wonderful creatures inside?”

“I can’t say I have,” Victoria pulled a face at the notion.

She had never attended a fair in her life and could not see the appeal of wandering around a sideshow looking at nonsensical displays.

“I have been to a few,” Bainbridge responded. “In fact, I went to a sort of fair in India during my time in the army, and there was a tent with a very similar display there too. Nearly all such shows have a token mermaid. Usually a tiny thing preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.”

“What are you saying, Julius?”

“Not that mermaids exist, naturally,” Bainbridge chuckled. “But that someone with a creative mind, who is good with a needle and thread, can sew together some quite remarkable things to present to the world as real monsters. And there are people who truly believe they have seen infant mermaids in these sideshows, and do not question their authenticity.”

“That does not say much for the system of education in this country,” Victoria frowned.

“I think it says more about humanity’s innate desire to believe in the extraordinary. It is the reason we have religion after all. Believing in a supernatural entity who created this entire world is rather more farfetched that believing a woman might have a fish tail.”

Victoria gave him a stern look. She might not be a regular church goer, but she considered herself a Christian, and did not take kindly to him making such remarks.

“Do not compare the two,” she informed him sharply.

“I meant no offence. I have no ill-will towards God. I merely wanted to clarify how the human mind is capable of believing in the most irrational of things without scientific evidence. You cannot dismiss a person who believes in a mermaid, if you believe in a deity who cannot be seen or touched or even contacted directly.”

“You are being irreligious, Julius, and I do not like it.”

Bainbridge knew when to back off. He had seen similar expressions on his sister’s – Victoria’s mother – face. He knew such looks generally did not bode well for him, and it was best to know when to surrender and admit defeat.

“I wonder if that is how our mermaid is securing their perch every night,” he now pointed across to the opposite bank to change the subject, motioning to a ring that was fitted into the bank, in an area partly lined with brick to shore up the edges.

“It would be logical,” Victoria nodded her head, prepared to let the matter drop as well. “It would mean they could float exactly where Mr Dugoni saw them.”

“Someone has planned this out very carefully,” Bainbridge mused. “It is really quite extraordinary. Hopefully, we shall learn more when we return tonight. Until then, I believe luncheon is calling us.”

Victoria did not protest. She was merely glad to see her uncle was feeling better and that the new case had absorbed his attention. She had been deeply worried about his demeanour of late and had feared he was falling into a black fugue of depression. To see him so eager to pursue a mystery cheered her up no end.

“Does Mrs Huggins believe in the supernatural?” Victoria asked him as they headed back to the car.

She was referring to Bainbridge’s housekeeper, who kept them fed and watered, and also ruled their household with something of an iron will.

“I do not believe I have ever questioned her on the subject,” Bainbridge replied. “Why do you ask?”

“She puts out a bowl of milk and biscuits every night on the doorstep,” Victoria replied. “The milk I can imagine being for a local cat, but the biscuits I cannot explain.”

“Perhaps you should ask her?”

Victoria cast a quick look at her uncle, checking to see if this was sarcasm. Asking Mrs Huggins about her personal quirks was dangerous territory.

“I do not believe that would be wise, do you?” she responded.

Bainbridge merely smiled.

“It seems to me a detective must ask questions even when it might not be wise.”

“You are toying with me now, Julius. I refuse to be drawn into this game.” Victoria shook her head. “Mrs Huggins may have her secrets, and she is welcome to them.”

Bainbridge continued to smirk as he walked behind his niece, failing to mention that certain other creatures that lurked in the night had a taste for biscuits and milk, and that Mrs Huggins had always had a fondness for foxes.

Sometimes it was more entertaining to leave his niece wondering, though he supposed he was slightly wicked to do so.

Chapter Four

Mrs Huggins had prepared a fitting repast for them when they returned home. There were sandwiches and scones, freshly made cake, and a large pot of tea. None of the food appealed to Victoria who preferred to eat lightly.

She was a lady of fashion, which meant she was constantly fretting about her weight. From a young age she had been raised to worry about her waistline, and to rely only upon the minimum of corseting to achieve the figure that was fashionable for the day.

Such habits die hard, and Victoria might be said to have a very mild eating disorder, in a similar fashion to her uncle, who was a glutton of the first order. Where he could not stop eating, she struggled to start.

These days she ate better than she used to, partly because it was hard to ignore her uncle’s example when he sat at the table and gorged himself, and partly because her strenuous investigative activities caused her to work up an appetite. Even so, she restrained herself to a single ham sandwich, and a cup of tea, acutely aware that Mrs Huggins slathered on the butter when she made such things and was not one to slice her bread thinly.

After dinner had been consumed, Bainbridge declared he was going to have a nap to prepared himself for the evening ahead. Victoria was glad to see he was behaving in his usual fashion and quietly took herself away to the library where she had her own project on which she was working.

The discovery of the box of papers in the tree outside had been something of a shock for them all, and she knew it had upset Bainbridge deeply. He was troubled that his dearest friend had kept secrets from him, and he was afraid of what those secrets might be. Victoria was removed from the situation, which meant she was able to look at the matter with curiosity rather than concern, and while her uncle had decided the papers were too damaged by the elements to be of worth, she had determined to work her way through them and decipher their contents.

It had certainly not been an easy task. The weather had been cruel to the paper, and the ink had faded or run when it became wet. Some of the papers had stuck together, and it had been necessary to gently ease them apart before setting them before the fire to dry.

Fairchild wrote in a spidery hand that would have been difficult to read even if the paper were not stained, ripped, and smudged. He was clearly not someone who felt it necessary to keep his hand legible for the sake of whomever came later to read his notes. Victoria concluded that he had intended these papers for his personal use, hence their scrawled nature, but she could not rule out the possibility that the terrible writing had also been intended as a sort of insurance against the wrong person reading them. Just as when Fairchild had hidden those same papers in an old tree, he had made the notes difficult to read in case something happened to him.

Had he always planned on Bainbridge coming along to pick up the pieces when he was gone?

Over the course of the past few weeks, Victoria had taken an hour or so out of each day to set about the task of transcribing the letters. It had been a daunting task to begin with, but over the course of her sessions, she had slowly begun to get a feel for the late detective’s style of writing, and she was steadily getting through the documents he had left behind. There were unfortunate gaps in the writing where the paper was too damaged for her to make things out, but there was enough remaining to gradually paint a picture of what Fairchild had been up to before his untimely death.

She was piecing together a rather badly torn letter, and transcribing its contents, when her uncle unexpectedly joined her in the library. She looked up guiltily. There had never been anything said to infer she should not touch these papers, but she still felt as though she was going behind his back by doing so.

Bainbridge walked over to the table without saying a word and observed what she was doing.

“I thought you were taking a nap?” Victoria said, trying to ignore the stern look on his face.

“I was, and I have,” Bainbridge replied. “I slept for close to an hour.”

Victoria now looked up at the grandfather clock stood near the door and realised the time. She had been so absorbed in her work, she had failed to notice the chiming of the clock or register how long she had been frowning over this particular paper.

“I wondered what you had been up to in here all these weeks,” Bainbridge said. “You have been very busy, I see.”

He picked up her pile of notes from the previously transcribed letters.

“I thought you wouldn’t mind if I made a start,” Victoria said uncomfortably, not really sure of that at all. “I thought you might one day like to read through these papers, and it would be better if they were properly transcribed for you.”

Bainbridge did not respond. He was reading the first transcription. Victoria quickly rushed through her memory to remember what that top document was all about. It was a moment before she recalled it was an article Fairchild had written about a family in America. The piece was more notes than a cohesive retelling of a case, but it seemed to have been designed to be read by someone else in the future.

Fairchild had spent his younger years in the service of the Pinkerton agency in the United States of America. He had learned his detective skills through them, and from the little Victoria had gathered from her uncle, he had been one of their most successful agents. Yet, he had left the country rather suddenly and reappeared in England. He had never fully explained to Bainbridge what had prompted the move.

Fairchild apparently had no family in the States and was therefore free to pick up sticks and disappear at will. Still, it was somewhat odd that he had abandoned a successful career and come to England with no prospects, no contacts, and no idea of how he was going to make his living going forward. Luck had placed him in the path of Bainbridge, who was just beginning to dabble in the private investigation business himself.

“This must have been one of Fairchild’s old cases,” Bainbridge glanced through the article. “He never told me about this one. Houston was always rather a closed book about his life in America. I always felt he had deep regrets about his time there.”

“The case he wrote up rings no bells with me, and I did check your archives to see if there was any reference to it in your files.”

Bainbridge kept an extensive archive of newspaper articles in his library. He collected items of interest, and criminal cases he heard about through the press, in various scrapbooks on the shelves. He held to the idea that there was no knowing when such things might be useful in a later case. His archive had an extensive card catalogue to serve its needs and was ready to be referenced at any time.

But, despite this wealth of information, Bainbridge did not recognise the story either.

He now sat at the table in the library, opposite his niece, and read through the piece again.

“The Pettigrews of Massachusetts,” he read the title. “Fairchild had to solve the matter of a missing heir to the family fortune.”

“Abel Pettigrew,” Victoria concurred. “Heir to a substantial mining operation, and an even bigger family estate. He was just turned twenty-one when he suddenly vanished, and the family were beside themselves, desperate for him to be found.”

Bainbridge was silent for a few moments while he browsed the article.

“Fairchild does not mention if he found him or not. This is written almost as if he was still in the middle of the investigation.”

“Maybe he was. Maybe this was a draft version of a report he gave to one of his superiors at the Pinkerton Agency?”

“It could be,” Bainbridge agreed thoughtfully. “Have you found any other papers that relate to this matter.”

“The document I am currently transcribing appears to be a family tree for the Pettigrew family,” Victoria replied. “I don’t know why Fairchild would have hidden these papers in a tree in the garden.”

“They do not seem particularly important, I must admit,” Bainbridge agreed. “The case occurred some twenty years ago, several of the senior members of the Pettigrew family are probably deceased.”

“The papers in the box were quite a mix of things,” Victoria continued. “One appeared to be an expenses sheet, though it was badly damaged, and I struggled to make heads nor tails of it. Another was referencing a similar case that had happened in London, this time it seemed Fairchild was trying to track down a woman. I assumed he was working on another missing person’s case when he passed.”

Bainbridge was going through the documents she had so far transcribed, the frown on his face deepening as he went.

“What were you up to, Houston?” he mumbled to himself.

“I still have quite a few papers to go through,” Victoria explained, somewhat apologetically. “I have been rather slow with the whole thing. What with the papers being damaged, and Fairchild’s rather archaic handwriting, I confess I have struggled.”

“Houston did have the most appalling handwriting,” Bainbridge smiled to himself in fond memory of his friend. “He would leave notes for Mrs Huggins, and they would drive her to distraction because most of the time she could not read a word. I swear he did it on purpose sometimes.”

Victoria waited a moment to see if Bainbridge would say anything more. He was sorting out her transcriptions and laying them before him in some sort of order, though she was not clear how he had settled on the arrangement.

“You are not upset I am doing this?” she asked after a moment.

“Vicky, you are free to do as you please,” Bainbridge responded. “I confess I have been keeping my head in the sand over this matter. I did not want to think about things too hard, but I am glad to see you had more sense. Houston did not leave these papers behind to be forgotten. He wanted them to be found, and he wanted them to be read.”

“Do you think so?”

“I know it,” Bainbridge said firmly. “Houston had an amazing memory. He never made notes for himself when working a case. He always dazzled me by how he could keep so much information in his head and not muddle it up. The only reason he would have written down this information was if he intended for me to see it.”

The colonel paused. Victoria knew what was on his mind, the same thought had just occurred to her when Bainbridge had spoken about Houston needing no notes.

“He feared something might happen to him,” Bainbridge said solemnly. “So, he left behind this, but why did he leave it in a spot that was so hard for me to find?”

“Maybe he intended to leave other clues for you to be able to locate the box, but he ran out of time sooner than he expected,” Victoria suggested.

“That is possible,” Bainbridge placed the papers back into a pile. “I always knew there were things in Houston’s past that haunted him, that he did not care to talk about. As a former army man, I could well imagine the demons that stalked him. I have done things in my youth that I bitterly regret, and that I knew I would regret at the time. Houston was much the same.”

“The difference being it seems one of those regrets managed to get Fairchild killed,” Victoria responded. “I am starting to think, Julius, that it was not an accident he was shot in that bank. That it was not an act of opportunity. Someone was after him. Someone set out to murder him.”

Bainbridge was quiet a moment, then he lifted his head and met her gaze. “You are right, that is exactly what happened. Someone murdered my friend in cold blood, and I have been neglectful in tracking down that person and bringing them to justice.”

“Not neglectful, you were grieving,” Victoria consoled him softly.

“And if I had paid less attention to my grief, and more to the information around me, then I would have had this box before the weather damaged its contents. What might be lost due to my indifference to this matter?”

Bainbridge’s misery over Fairchild’s loss had fast turned to guilt, and now anger, at himself.

“This is no time for recriminations. They will serve no use to anyone. I suggest we keep at these papers, and we work out the story that Fairchild wanted us to unravel,” Victoria told him, determined not to let her uncle wallow in his own self-pity. “If the roles were reversed, Fairchild would not be beating himself up, he would be asking himself what he could do to bring your killer to justice.”

“I think you do not appreciate Houston as well as you imagine,” Bainbridge had a smile creeping onto his face. “For a start, he would be tight with whisky right at this moment and be keen to drink himself into a stupor as soon as the chance presented itself. Houston was never good with emotion, even worse than me, indeed.”

Bainbridge hesitated. His mind swept back to the cemetery when he had stood by Houston’s grave and wished it might have been him who had perished rather than his friend. Now it occurred to him that, had that been the case, Houston would have struggled far worse with the grief and guilt than he had. Houston had never been good at expressing how he felt or for going easy on himself. Maybe, after all, it was just as well it was the colonel who was standing on this side of things rather than his old friend.

“Might I help you with the transcriptions?” Bainbridge asked next.

Victoria was only too glad to have his assistance, and to see him willing to be involved. She showed him the paper she was working on with the family tree for the Pettigrew lineage. She pointed out the areas she was having difficulty with, partly because of Houston’s handwriting, partly because she did not recognise the names the Pettigrews’ liked to assign to their offspring.

Bainbridge took the paper and offered some suggestions. Between them, they gradually unravelled the family tree, minus the few names that had been obliterated by water stains. When it was done, Victoria looked across the paper.

“Do you suppose this case was about inheritance fraud?” she suggested.

“You think Abel Pettigrew was not the rightful heir to the fortune?”

Victoria tapped her pencil on the piece of paper with the copied family tree.

“I am not sure, but there is something here.”

“There is,” Bainbridge agreed. “And I swear, on Houston’s grave, I shall unravel this mystery and finally bring peace to his memory.”

Chapter Five

There was a strange thrill of excitement running through Victoria as they headed back to the river to witness the return of the mysterious mermaid. She knew it was all a load of nonsense, of course, but the thrill came from knowing they were about to unravel a very peculiar mystery.

As they drove to their destination, she could not help but imagine the scene as the mermaid was revealed to be a regular person right in front of the crowd, and the whole ploy unmasked.

Bainbridge was rather broody in comparison, thinking too much about the discovery of the papers back at their home, and what they might mean. Who were the Pettigrew family, and why did Houston find it necessary to hide paperwork relating to them? He was deep in his thoughts when they finally pulled up alongside the road, near the Wensum, and headed down to Mr Dugoni’s barge.

The restaurant was closed up, only one light glowing in a window. A sign on the door declared that they were closed for the foreseeable future. There were a handful of people loitering along the riverbank, waiting for the arrival of the mermaid, though they were too early as yet. It was still light enough that the mermaid could not arrive without risking being seen before they were ready.

Bainbridge and Victoria walked to the door of the restaurant and knocked. When no one responded, they headed along the side of the barge to the window where they could see a light and gently tapped on the glass. A short moment later, Mr Dugoni’s head appeared.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, looking as if they had disturbed him from a nap.

Ruffling his hair up as he tried to focus, he shuffled from the room and unlocked the barge doors for them. Once inside, in the flimsy glow from a single oil lamp, it was plain to see that Dugoni had indeed been sleeping. Cushions and a blanket were strewn across the floor nearest the window they had tapped upon.

“I don’t dare leave the place unguarded,” he muttered as he saw their eyes lingering on his bedding. “But I am exhausted.”

He gave a deep yawn as if just the reminder of his weariness was enough to send him back into slumber.

“No sign of the mermaid as yet,” Bainbridge declared, heading of his own volition through a door at the far side of the room, which proved to lead into the kitchen area.

There was another door across the room which led onto the rear deck of the barge. He headed outside, and stood on the wooden planks, watching the river water. There was no sign of anyone on the water, and the river seemed eerily still, as if anticipating what was to come.

“How do you plan on nabbing this mermaid?” Dugoni asked, now joining him on the deck.

“Nabbing them?” Bainbridge asked, bemused.

“Yes, aren’t you going to sally forth and arrest the person, or something? Private detectives can do that sort of thing, can’t they?”

“Do either of us look like the sort of people who would willingly jump into a river to try to detain a person?” Victoria asked as she came up behind him.

Dugoni took a good look at the pair of detectives he had hired, and it dawned on him that neither was the type to go for a cold swim. Victoria was dressed finely in a pale violet dress with white lace and black embroidered detail, while Bainbridge was wearing a brown suit with pale yellow waistcoat. In his top pocket was a red handkerchief, and hanging on a chain was a smart pocket watch. Dugoni gave a groan.

“Then how are you going to find out who is behind this?” he declared, tetchily.

“By following the clues revealed to us,” Bainbridge replied cheerfully, unmoved by his client’s discord. “There is no call for getting wet, though if you really desire it, I imagine I could persuade one of the onlookers gathering on the bank to have a shot at catching the fiend. A shilling should do the trick.”

Victoria nudged him hard with her elbow. They did not have a shilling to spare. As usual they were rather pinched for funds, and there was no room for casting money away.

“If you recall, Julius, when Mr Dugoni attempted to nab the mermaid, she made a speedy escape in the river. I imagine she will do the exact same thing the second anyone enters the water to draw near to her.”

“Good point, Vicky. You see, Mr Dugoni, there is no call for anyone to go about getting wet. This fellow won’t allow themselves to be caught easily.”

Dugoni had to agree their logic was sound, but it did not make him feel any better. He watched the water rippling against the back of the barge for a while, then gave another protracted sigh.

“I suppose you would like some coffee?”

“I would be delighted,” Bainbridge assured him.

“I prefer tea,” Victoria interjected.

Dugoni went into his kitchen to brew the various beverages, and the pair of detectives remained where they were until the evening started to become chill, and an unhealthy swarm of midges began to circulate up from the river water. Having batted away a handful of the tiny insects that were intent on tasting his blood, Bainbridge retreated into the kitchen. Victoria was not far behind him.

“The mermaid is late tonight,” Dugoni said, a look of some relief crossing his features. “Maybe it is over!”

Just as he said this, a cry went up from the bank, and Victoria glanced out of the nearest window.

“I believe you talked our mermaid up. There is something moving in the water.”

Bainbridge joined her, while Dugoni muttered a few choice swear words under his breath. Outside, the river was moving in a new fashion, the ripples pushing sideways as if something were cutting through the water. A moment later, there was a sound such as wood creaking, and the rattle of a chain.

“He has moored up,” Bainbridge whispered to his niece.

She nodded her head at him and continued staring outside.

For a few seconds there was nothing more, then a lantern glimmered dimly. It appeared to be held on a long pole that attached to the rock the mermaid was now sitting upon. The whole construction looked to Victoria like something out of a theatre production, but the crowd on the bank were clearly delighted and awed by the scene.

The mermaid was perched on her rock and began the laborious process of combing her long tresses of fair hair. After a moment, she began to sing as well, in a high pitch that edged on the cusp of being painful to the ears.

Far from the mystical siren everyone had told them about, Victoria fancied the mermaid looked like a cheap and tawdry music hall act, and her singing was far from beautiful. She found it grated a little on her nerves, and she unconsciously clenched her teeth together at the abuse of her ears.

In contrast, the mermaid’s audience on the riverbank seemed delighted at the scene, and were beginning to cheer her on, asking for more tunes.

“They will carry on like that all night, given the chance,” Dugoni said glumly.

They settled down for a long wait, Dugoni’s coffee keeping him and Bainbridge alert, while Victoria made do with her tea. The time ticked by, with the only interruption the occasional attempts made by an onlooker to climb onto the barge, which Dugoni dissuaded by the judicial waving of the kitchen ladle.

It was not quite midnight when a moan of disappointment rang out across the river. Victoria was the first to glance outside and see that the mermaid’s lantern had been extinguished, and it appeared the hoaxer was leaving.

“Is this the usual time they depart?” she asked Dugoni.

“No, they usually do not leave until I have finished serving for the evening, and we open quite late. I am not usually shut until three in the morning.”

“It would seem the mermaid no longer feels it necessary to disturb your peace,” Bainbridge remarked. “The shutting of your restaurant appears to have had the affect we desired.”

“Then, whomever this person is, they are deliberately targeting my business?” Dugoni asked.

“It would seem so.”

Victoria had risen from her chair and had walked out onto the back deck of the barge. There she stood and tried to peer through the darkness to see any sign of the mermaid leaving. But all she could make out were indistinct shadows, that might have formed shapes but equally could have been her imagination fooling her.

Whatever the case, the mermaid had departed.

“We have done all we can here tonight, Mr Dugoni,” Bainbridge rose from his seat as Victoria returned. “Tomorrow we will begin our investigation in earnest, as we try to determine who would wish this harm against you.”

Dugoni looked disappointed that nothing much had happened that evening. He had clearly hoped Bainbridge and Victoria would have solved the mystery there and then, but he had to accept that he would need to be patient for a while longer.

“How soon can I open my restaurant again?” he asked.

“Give it a week,” Bainbridge informed him. “Time enough for us to unravel this case.”

Dugoni pulled a face at the news but accepted there was nothing else he could do. He walked them back through the barge and to the main door.

“You will solve this?” he asked, desperation lacing his voice.

“Mr Dugoni, I do not take on cases I feel I cannot resolve in one way or another,” Bainbridge reassured him, though in truth he took on every case that came his way under the assumption they were all solvable with him investigating them.

Dugoni wished them well, explaining he would wait on his barge for a while longer to make sure the crowd had dispersed, and then he would head home.

The crowd of spectators was already starting to thin now they realised the performance was over. Victoria narrowed her eyes in their direction.

“Do people have nothing better to do than linger on a riverbank all evening?”

“Some people do not, and this is the best entertainment they can come across.”

Victoria felt a tad sorry for the onlookers, who had nothing better to do than spend the night standing by a river and watching a performer pretending to be a mermaid.

“They cannot afford to go to a music hall,” Bainbridge elaborated. “This is a piece of entertainment they are getting for free.”

Victoria understood, and followed him back along the riverbank, away from the crowd. However, Bainbridge did not go up the steep steps that led to where the car was parked when they came to the spot, instead he carried on along the path.

“Where are you headed?”

“I want to get to the other side of the river and take a look at things from a different angle,” Bainbridge replied. “I believe there is a footbridge not much further along.”

‘Not much further’ proved to be nearly a mile, and Bainbridge was regretting his decision by the time they reached the bridge, but he had made the choice and was not prepared to go back on the matter now. The footbridge was made of cast iron and wooden boards. It was tall enough to allow the low barges and canalboats that ventured down this part of the river to pass underneath.

Crossing the bridge, they turned back on themselves and headed along the path to the spot where the mermaid usually sang her melodies. On this side of the bank, there were mooring hooks set into a stone wall, and from one of these Bainbridge noted that a new length of rope was hanging. In the flimsy moonlight, which was casting more shadow than light, he was able to point out with his stick where the rope dangled into the water.

“I daresay there is a hook on the end, which can be attached to the underneath of that rock our mermaid appears on.”

“I am tempted to remove that rope here and now, and scupper their plans,” Victoria huffed, kneeling down, and reaching forward to grab the rope.

She swiftly discovered she was not able to reach down far enough, at least not without causing more damage to her dress than she was prepared for.

“It hardly matters,” Bainbridge informed her. “I think the mermaid will abandon their efforts now they have achieved their purpose of forcing Dugoni to shut up his restaurant.”

“But when he reopens they were surely return?”

“Perhaps, but we might be able to look at putting in some precautions to avoid that before then. In any case, I intend to have discovered the culprit in the meantime, rendering their actions pointless.”

Victoria admired her uncle’s confidence and was pleased to see him so cheerful once again, but she had to admit she somewhat doubted his abilities. He was a good detective, no doubt about that, but surely it was arrogance to state he would have this case solved in a week? Victoria was more pragmatic – or pessimistic, depending on your outlook – and thought they should not make such guarantees.

But what was done was done.

They headed back towards the footbridge, Bainbridge looking rather weary now and dragging his feet. He was not a man used to walking great distances these days. Victoria would have suggested he wait while she fetched the car and found a way to come and collect him, except she had no idea how to get the vehicle across to this side of the river and feared she would become hopelessly lost in the dark. She only had two pathetic lamps on the front of her car, which cast the most mundane of yellow glows about a foot out ahead, and that was if she could get them to light, which was a process requiring matches and a good deal of patience. She decided that it would be imprudent to abandon her uncle in the dark while she tried to fetch the vehicle to him, not least because she was slightly uneasy walking alone in the depths of night.

They managed the footbridge slowly and returned to the car sometime later. Bainbridge was too exhausted to even complain about his aching feet and knees. Victoria helped him into the passenger seat and then set about the business of lighting the front lamps.

“This reminds me why I do not like going out after dark, except if it is to dinner,” Bainbridge muttered.

“I shall remember that in future,” Victoria grumbled, having already struck through three matches, and burned her fingers. “We did not have to come out tonight. We could have avoided it.”

“No, we had to show Mr Dugoni our moral support,” Bainbridge reflected.

The lanterns at last lit, Victoria clambered into the car and took them home, risking going at 3mph to get them back sooner rather than later.

“I am assuming we shall not be making an early start tomorrow morning?” she asked.

“I am thinking of having breakfast in bed,” Bainbridge replied in answer.

“Yes, I suspected as much,” Victoria mumbled.

Bainbridge chose to ignore her comment.

“You will get old too, Vicky.”

Victoria said nothing. She very much doubted she would still be a detective at Bainbridge’s age. She had every intention of earning enough to set herself up in a decent retirement. Maybe she would spend the days writing up her cases into entertaining works of semi-fiction for the reading public?

She just had to work out some of the details, such as how she would earn enough money in the first place to afford her such a luxury.

Chapter Six

Bainbridge stuck to his word, and the following morning he remained in bed and was served his breakfast there by an irate Mrs Huggins, who was angry he had been out so late the night before and made himself feel unwell.

Victoria could hear the housekeeper berating her uncle for his actions, and the colonel accepting her criticism stoically, as long as it meant he could have his breakfast in bed. Victoria hastened to keep out of the way, knowing that she would be liable to incur some of Mrs Huggins’ wrath if she were not careful, and being keen to avoid starting her day by being yelled at.

She made her way to the library, determined to get a better understanding of the Pettigrew case that Fairchild had left them to investigate. She had mostly deciphered the family tree for the Pettigrew family, but that still left her with a question as to why Fairchild had felt it necessary to write it out in the first place, and what significance it had to the disappearance of Abel Pettigrew.

She sat at the library table, working through some more of the papers, taking her time to transcribe the contents and hoping there would be some further clue to the mystery within them, when she heard the ringing of the doorbell. She did not move, assuming Mrs Huggins would answer it.

After a moment, the bell rang again. Funny how a doorbell ringing could reveal the urgency, or lack of it, which the person summoning them was feeling. Since Mrs Huggins had not responded on the first occasion, and the second summons gave the impression the person on the doorstep was desperate to be seen, Victoria left her work and headed to the hallway.

There was still no sign of Mrs Huggins as she opened the door and found herself face-to-face with a white-haired gentleman, who boggled at her with eyes that were round with anguish.

“I need to see Colonel Bainbridge at once!” he declared and gave every indication that he was prepared to barge past Victoria to achieve his goal.

Victoria might not be as imposing as Mrs Huggins, but she had observed how the woman handled people like this, and she managed to do her best to fill the doorway and give no quarter.

“You have called rather too early,” she informed the man. “My uncle is still in bed.”

“Still in bed?” the older man checked his pocket watch. “But it is half past nine! I would have been at work over an hour by now.”

“Which raises the obvious question of why you are not at work?” Victoria countered.

The man huffed and puffed but was beginning to appreciate he was not going to get anywhere unless he calmed down and spoke to her sensibly.

“Did you say the colonel was your uncle?”

“Yes,” Victoria replied calmly. “I am his niece, Victoria Bovington. I am also his partner in his detective agency.”

“A woman working as a detective,” the man tutted under his breath.

“You could of course talk to me, save yourself a wasted journey. But if you are inclined to think a woman of no value as a detective, I suggest you leave and return later. My uncle will have probably risen by midday, though he will then want his luncheon. You might call back around two this afternoon?”

Victoria was laying things on thick to alarm the gentleman; her uncle would never spend that much of the day in bed unless he was ill. But her visitor was not to know that.

“I cannot possibly call back. I have so much to do today as it is,” the gentleman declared plaintively.

“As I say, you are welcome to air your grievances to me, and I shall endeavour to assist you.”

The man looked torn. One part of him was appalled at the thought of revealing his woes to a woman, the other part was nagging him about all the tasks he had yet to do that day, and the time he was wasting. Ultimately, it was this part that won him over.

“I shall speak with you, as there is simply nothing else for it,” he huffed ungraciously.

Victoria finally invited him in, and showed him through to the front drawing room, the one which caught the morning sun and was always bright and cheery.

“Perhaps you would care to introduce yourself?” she said as she showed the man to one of the sofas in the room.

“My name is Mr Wainwright,” the gentleman responded. “Of Wainwright’s Emporium. You may have heard of us?”

“I am afraid, I have not,” Victoria responded.

Wainwright looked disappointed by this statement but didn’t let it deter him.

“The emporium is a large bazaar selling everything and anything you can imagine. Our goods are imported from across the empire, and we only supply the best and most exotic of items to our customers.”

Wainwright paused.

“Or at least, we did.”

“Something has happened?” Victoria asked, thinking she was not sure how to find the time to investigate a third case on top of the two they were already looking into. She did not want to have to put Fairchild’s mystery onto the back burner, if she could help it, but at the same time, she could not forego the extra money this case might bring in.

“We operate out of a warehouse down near the river. It makes it easy to bring new goods in and out. We have turned the place out very smartly, and it looks just like a regular shop. We are very popular with the middle classes and the upwardly mobile. We even sometimes get lords and ladies visiting who are looking for that extra special something as a gift for someone.”

Wainwright paused in singing the praises of his emporium.

“We were doing so well,” he groaned. “I thought I had finally made a success of myself. Then it all went wrong about a fortnight ago. We had opened up as usual, and all seemed as it did every day, then someone said there was a person singing outside. I did not pay much heed, until my customers started to depart, and I thought I ought to see what was happening. I headed outside and, across the water, on the far side of the river, I saw to my astonishment a mermaid!”

Victoria’s eyes widened at the statement.

“I hardly believed it either,” Mr Wainwright nodded at her expression. “But there she was, with a long scaly tail, and combing her golden hair. She was perched on an old mooring dock across the water, and she was singing. I thought I must be seeing things, but other people were aware of her too. I watched their faces as we all realised what we were seeing. She was a vision out of a fairytale!

“Magical, it seemed at first. I began to think at once how I could use this to promote the emporium. Such a spectacle was going to draw a crowd, and I was imagining I could use that to encourage people into my shop. I had such plans running through my mind!”

“I take it that situation did not last long?” Victoria interrupted.

“No,” Wainwright became morose. “The crowds certainly came, but many of the people were not the sort who could afford my goods, and as the riff-raff began to appear, so it deterred my usual customers. I am sorry to say that a spate of pickpocketing also ensued. By the end of the first week, instead of my sales increasing, I was making a loss. By the end of the second, I saw no recourse but to close up my premises until I could fathom what this mermaid was, and why she was there.

“I had already summoned the police, who had taken no interest in the matter. I had sent some of my workers to the far bank to see if they could capture her, to no avail. She dived into the water when anyone came too close. The only option was to temporarily close. I had shut my doors for no more than a couple of days when the mermaid vanished and has not been seen near my warehouse since.

“I thought about opening again, but I am nervous about the creature reappearing. Then I heard through a friend about a similar situation occurring to Mr Dugoni’s restaurant, and that he had hired a detective to look into the matter. I thought to myself I should approach said detective and explain what had happened to me.”

“How very curious,” Victoria said, thinking fast about what this told them about the mermaid. “Do you have a connection with Mr Dugoni?”

“I do not know him. I have never eaten at his restaurant.”

Wainwright was shaking his head vigorously.

“Honestly, I cannot see why the pair of us would be targeted, but quite clearly targeted is what we are.”

Victoria had to agree with him. The matter had now become more complicated. Could it be someone had a grudge against both Mr Dugoni and Mr Wainwright? And if so, what was it?

Victoria remembered the list of names Mr Dugoni had given them of people who might wish him ill. She fetched it and ran through the names with Mr Wainwright, but none rang a bell, and it seemed they did not have an enemy in common.

“My information is important, isn’t it?” Wainwright demanded.

“It is certainly curious. I cannot see the link between the two cases at the moment, but that hardly means there is not one.”

Wainwright looked relieved by this information.

“Look, I have to go. I am in the middle of reopening the emporium, and I cannot spare any more time on this matter, but I thought this might help you, and anything that aids you in solving this case for Dugoni, also aids me.”

Wainwright rose from the sofa. He was done with the matter and had no intention of staying any longer. He made such haste to depart that it bordered on being rude, and he barely gave Victoria a farewell as he hurried off to whatever task he had next on his agenda. Victoria could see why the man might have attracted some enemies, but she could not see how that tied in with Mr Dugoni.

Once Wainwright had gone, she headed upstairs to tell her uncle of this latest development.

Bainbridge was out of bed but still in his dressing gown when Victoria arrived. The room smelt of bacon and sausages, and Victoria would have liked to have opened a window. Bainbridge seemed unaware of the stale stench that filled his boudoir and had been quite happily contemplating his third cup of tea when his niece knocked on the door.

“Good morning, Vicky, how are you today?”

“Perfectly fine, what about you?”

“I feel duly recovered from my exertions of last night,” Bainbridge responded. “Breakfast in bed is very restorative. Now, why have you hastened up here? Did I hear the doorbell ringing earlier?”

“You did, and we have had a visitor.”

Victoria went on to explain the arrival of Mr Wainwright, and his confession of being also haunted by a mermaid who was forcing away all his customers.

“Now that is very interesting,” Bainbridge rubbed at his chin. “There we were, thinking this was an isolated incident just involving Mr Dugoni, but now I am wondering if there is more to this matter than we have realised.”

“It seems to me tracking down Mr Dugoni’s enemies could be a dead end. None of the names he mentioned to us were recognised by Mr Wainwright, It would seem the two did not share an enemy in common.”

“I think you are correct. This new information suggests this is not a personal attack against Mr Dugoni, but something more elaborate.”

Bainbridge rose from the bed and placed his empty teacup on a chest of drawers.

“I shall get dressed at once, and then we must visit the police station.”

“The police station? Why?”

“I would like to know if they have received any other reports about a mermaid running amok in the city. If they have, we may find ourselves with a better idea of what is going on.”

Victoria did not argue with his logic. She left him in peace to dress and ready himself for the day. It was nearly an hour later before they were actually driving to the police station to see if Inspector Dougal was in, and able to spare them some of his time.

Inspector Dougal had risen to his position relatively young in life. Only in his thirties, he had proven himself a first-rate detective and been promoted speedily through the ranks. He combined a passion for scientific discovery with practical detective work, which ensured he had an impressive track record for solving crimes. He was popular among the constables, always cheerful and eager for adventure, and he had a crush on Victoria.

She, in contrast, barely noticed him. This was not forced indifference; she genuinely did not pay much heed to his presence, other than as a friend to Bainbridge, and a useful accomplice, at times, on a case.

If pressed, she would have admitted that he was a handsome fellow and had a charming manner, but beyond that she had not given him a great deal of consideration. Unrequited love was a terrible thing in a policeman, and Bainbridge was hoping that one day Dougal would realise his niece was oblivious to his presence and more interested in becoming a detective in her own right than she was in romantic entanglements.

They found Dougal in his office performing an experiment with what appeared to be a pig’s heart. Despite having lined the floor with newspaper, in an effort to limit the mess he was going to make, Dougal had already splattered blood on the rug. As they entered the room, having knocked and been invited in, they saw the detective ramming a short penknife into the pig’s heart, and producing another splatter of blood.

“Oh my,” Victoria frowned at the grisly sight.

Dougal had been sprayed with blood in his efforts to stab the heart, and there was a speckling of red running across his cheek. He smiled at them as they entered.

“Excuse the mess, I am trying to work out if a penknife could be sufficient to kill a man if stabbed through his heart.”

Bainbridge wandered over to the experiment, keen as always to investigate a bit of science.

“And what is your conclusion?”

“Currently, it is rather inconclusive,” Dougal admitted. “You can indeed puncture the heart with a penknife and cause serious harm, but I am troubled by the impact clothing and the physique of a person might have on the matter. Further experiments will be required.”

Dougal removed the heart from the table in the centre of the room, where he had been performing his trials, and placed it in a sheet of butcher’s paper before returning it to a box. He wiped his hands on an old handkerchief before giving them his undivided attention.

“How may I help you?”

Victoria was feeling slightly queasy at the sight of so much blood. She was not typically one to be squeamish, unless a corpse was involved, but the pig’s heart had made an odd, soft sound when the inspector had pierced it with the knife, which seemed to echo in her head. She fancied she would not get that noise out of her mind for some time.

Bainbridge was rarely queasy, and he immediately began to regale Dougal with their own problem.

“We are looking into this mystery of a mermaid harassing local businessmen along the river. We have been employed by Mr Dugoni.”

“Oh, him,” Dougal said, his smile fading. “He has been quite the nuisance to us. Refused to take no for an answer when we told him we could do nothing about a mermaid in the river. There is no law saying a person cannot float in water, singing and combing their hair.”

“Quite. But you must also appreciate that the poor man has been placed in quite a pickle by the situation.”

“I never said I was not sympathetic to his plight, just that I can do nothing about it,” Dougal shrugged. “But I imagine the reason you have come to me is because you have discovered something of further interest in the matter?”

“I have indeed, and I wanted to ask you if Mr Dugoni is the only person who has reported this mermaid causing them bother?”

Dougal frowned.

“Now you mention it, his is not the sole report we have had. Nothing has made it up to me other than Mr Dugoni’s complaint, but I am aware of talk among my constables about a mysterious mermaid making appearances all over the city.”

“That is what I feared,” Bainbridge mused. “I would like to know of all these reported sightings.”

“That should be no issue, it is all the men downstairs are talking about. They are all waiting to see who gets the next summons to try to arrest the creature. What are your thoughts on the matter?”

“I have a couple of theories about the motives of this mermaid, but nothing concrete until I am able to compile some more reports,” Bainbridge replied. “I believe this could be an attempt to hoax people out of money, for one, though as yet no one has apparently made a great profit from the scheme. Another possibility is that it is a publicity stunt, and we shall eventually discover the mermaid is part of some advertising project for a local company.”

“Oh yes, like that event a few years ago, when knitted black cats suddenly started appearing all over the place, and people began collecting them,” Dougal recalled. “Turned out it was a ploy to make people aware of a new department shop being opened in the city.”

“I remember that,” Victoria interjected. “I had a friend who collected several of the cats. It became an obsession among certain people.”

“Wasn’t there a thing where if you collected so many cats you could earn a discount at the shop when it opened?” Dougal mulled. “I suppose it was one way of drawing people in.”

“True, but if that were the case, I should expect something to have been mentioned by now in regard to the mermaid,” Victoria added. “From what we are hearing, she appears to have been popping up for weeks, yet no one has laid claim to her.”

“Nor have the newspapers mentioned it,” Bainbridge pondered. “I must admit that is shabby on their part, unless they fancied it was too ridiculous to report.”

“If it is a publicity stunt, then it is a poor show that they are damaging other people’s businesses in the process,” Victoria added. “Mr Dugoni and Mr Wainwright have both been impacted by this mermaid.”

“We ought to learn who else might have been affected,” Bainbridge concurred. “Dougal, might we speak to your constables about this matter?”

“You are welcome to; I am intrigued now myself.”

The inspector showed them back down the stairs and to a large room at the back of the station where constables spent time writing up any notes on cases or waited between patrols. There was always a cup of tea being brewed, and the room had a scent of damp feet and wet wool from the coppers’ uniforms.

Victoria drew the usual round of furtive glances as she entered, though this was immediately tempered by the arrival of the inspector.

“You all know Colonel Bainbridge,” Dougal said to the collected men. “He is investigating this matter of a mermaid in Norwich and would like to know of any sightings you have been summoned to around the city.”

The constables barely had to think before they started to regale Bainbridge with stories about their own encounters with the mermaid. He hastily grabbed up a piece of paper and a pencil and took details as he was bombarded with information. While Bainbridge was in his element receiving new clues, Inspector Dougal offered Victoria a cup of tea.

She almost turned him down, however, she was still feeling somewhat out of sorts from the sight of the mutilated pig’s heart upstairs, and a cup of tea would hopefully restore her nerves.

“You look rather pale,” Dougal mentioned as he poured her tea into a blue cup, the sort made from heavy porcelain and designed to withstand being dropped and knocked about. “I apologise for the scene I made upstairs.”

“I am perfectly fine,” Victoria said defensively.

“Naturally, you are a detective,” Dougal agreed hastily, realising his faux pas.

Victoria could be rather sensitive about her deficiencies when it came to handling certain grisly scenes. Victoria noticed how he fell silent, and for once she felt bad about snapping. The inspector had not deserved her wrath.

“I am working hard to overcome my personal disgust at such things,” she said, taking the cup from him. “I fear I have a long way to go, and I know that when I struggle around such a scene I am immediately labelled as a weak-willed woman. It makes me somewhat sharp. I am the one who should apologise to you, Inspector.”

Dougal was surprised by the unexpected apology, and the fact Victoria had actually acknowledged his feelings on the matter. He was rather used to Victoria being somewhat dismissive of him.

“Personally, I think you do extraordinarily well. There are plenty of men who pass through the training process only to falter once they are out on the beat because they cannot endure the sight of blood.”

Victoria had nothing to say in response. It was one thing for a man to quail at the sight of blood and quite another for a woman. People were often dismissive of a young woman trying to investigate crime, the instant she faltered, they were quick to see this as vindication of their doubts.

“Never mind, anyway,” Dougal said quietly, now offering Victoria a biscuit from a tin sat next to the stove. “I don’t suppose my experiments will prove anything. My superiors think I am rather eccentric with my efforts, and humour me because I tend to be rather good at solving crimes. But not much of what I do up in my office ever makes it into a court of law.”

“That’s a pity,” Victoria said, finding herself taking a good look at the man before her.

For two years she had worked occasionally with Dougal without really paying attention to him. He had just been there, in the background. When she had set out to become a detective, she had been recovering from the discovery that her fiancé Sven had been having an affair with the Tuttles’ governess. Her sense of betrayal and shame had made her antagonistic towards men of a certain age for a time. She had been bitterly hurt and, as the saying goes, once bitten, twice shy.

A few months ago, she had encountered Sven again, unexpectedly. This had enabled her to work out some of the emotions that had lingered after his betrayal. She had been able to forgive him and move on. She understood now why things had occurred and could even accept that everything had worked out for the best.

A new sense of peace was flowing through Victoria, and with that understanding came a fresh set of eyes for the world around her. She was just beginning to notice Inspector Dougal, to really see him for the first time. She amazed herself at being so blind for so long.

“What have I done now?” Dougal asked anxiously.

“What do you mean?”

“You are frowning at me.”

Victoria turned her gaze away sharply.

“I was lost in thought,” she apologised. “My uncle seems to be having some success with his mermaid sightings.”

The change of subject enabled her to get her thoughts back in order. Victoria reminded herself that she was a detective and was not interesting in thinking about men. She had had enough of all that nonsense with Sven. She had a career now, as remarkable as that was.

Still, out of the corner of her eye she found herself watching Inspector Dougal and noting that he had a strong jawline and rather nice eyes.

“I think I have all your sightings now,” Bainbridge held up a hand to cease the verbal barrage of mermaid sightings being yelled out at him.

The constables fell silent.

“It seems our mermaid has been rather busy, appearing in all manner of places,” Bainbridge mused over the paper in his hands. “We have sightings in every part of the city where the river winds.”

“And along with that creature comes the trouble,” one of the constables called out. “I have attended two locations so far, and there has been problems with pickpocketing at each.”

“That does seem to be the biggest concern with the mermaid,” Bainbridge nodded as more voices rang out to tell him about sightings of the mermaid constables had attended due to people having their belongings stolen.

“Inspector Dougal, might I have a word?” Bainbridge turned back to the policeman.

Dougal moved away from the stove and Victoria followed. She abandoned her cup of tea, barely touched, as they headed back upstairs to the inspector’s office.

“You have a new theory, Bainbridge?” Dougal asked once they were inside, and the door shut.

“I do, and I think it explains all the circumstances before us,” the colonel settled into a chair in the room. “I think this mermaid is a diversion to attract a large crowd of people to a specific location and enable another person to rob them.”

“The pickpockets working the crowd!” Victoria immediately understood. “Mr Dugoni mentioned that his customers had been robbed, and that was one of the reasons that people would no longer attend his restaurant.”

“Every location the mermaid has appeared there have been similar reports. Typically she seems to target places where people with money are already gathered, and when they begin to take an interest in her, an accomplice slips in and robs them. If you were to correlate reports of pickpocketing with reports of the mermaid I am sure you would see a clear link.”

“Fascinating,” Dougal said, somewhat upset he had failed to realise this for himself. “I should have paid closer attention.”

“You had no real reason to,” Bainbridge reassured him. “Pickpocketing is a fact of life in our city, and no doubt you get many reports about it every day, not to mention the many incidents that are not reported by the victims. The link was deliberately overshadowed by the mermaid’s arrival, which confused things.”

“Not the first time such a scheme has been enacted,” Dougal agreed. “We all know the usual tricks, the man with the pea and walnut shell game luring in onlookers to have their pockets filched.”

“The pea and walnut trick?” Victoria asked.

“An old game to deprive people of money,” Bainbridge responded. “A dried pea and three empty halves of walnut shells are employed. The operator shows the pea and places a walnut shell over it, then moves it around with the other three and asks the player to pick the one beneath which lies the pea. There are various ways the game is used to fleece people of their money.

“The game operator might offer the player a bet on finding the pea and allow him to win a few times to gain his confidence, before he convinces him to lay down a substantial bet, and tricks him into losing his money. The other way is how the inspector describes. The game is merely a distraction to draw people close, and to keep them occupied while an accomplice steals from their pockets.”

“Such cunning,” Victoria reflected. “The criminal mind can be remarkably clever.”

“Shame they do not employ their wits in a useful direction,” Dougal stated ironically. “But I have never heard of the mermaid game before.”

“A new twist on the old,” Bainbridge concurred. “I suppose the pea and shell game had become rather old hat.”

“At least we can inform Mr Dugoni that this does not appear to be a direct attack on his business,” Victoria noted. “Now the crowds are not being drawn to his barge, he should see the mermaid disappear for good.”

“That is how the mermaid is avoiding being linked to these crimes, the regular change of location is proving useful to keeping them anonymous,” Bainbridge nodded his head.

“I need to take a closer look at this now I know there is a real crime being committed,” Dougal frowned, annoyed he had failed to notice what was going on before him on this occasion.

“Do not berate yourself too harshly,” Bainbridge told him kindly. “You are very busy, as always, and catching pickpockets falls rather low on the list of crimes you have to solve.”

“It is still my business to stop them,” Dougal would not be consoled.

Bainbridge and Victoria had already taken up too much of his time and politely excused themselves. With the mermaid mystery largely solved, and Mr Dugoni unlikely to be bothered by the matter again, it seemed they had concluded their case and could now concentrate on the matter of Fairchild’s papers.

“You were correct,” she said to her uncle as they headed for the car.

“Correct in what?”

“You said you would have this solved before a week had passed.”

Bainbridge beamed with pride. It did not take much to stoke his ego.

Chapter Seven

They headed for home, intending to return to Mr Dugoni later that evening, when he would most likely be back at his restaurant. Bainbridge fancied an early tea, and Victoria was still feeling the weariness from the night before, so was content to spend the afternoon quietly reading a book. There once was a time she would have danced the night away, but now such adventures were in the past. In any case, back then she would not have proceeded to rise before eleven the following day, so she was not actually spending any more time in bed, if anything, she was spending considerably less time resting.

Still, it made her feel old to sit around and contemplate taking an afternoon nap, like her uncle.

They had not long settled down, when there was a fierce knocking at the front door. Victoria gave a small groan.

“Not another person come to report this mermaid fiasco to us!”

Mrs Huggins was quick to hurry to the door, so they did not have to move. They heard her speaking to someone, but the voices were too low for them to decipher what was being said. A moment later, Mrs Huggins appeared at the drawing room door looking somewhat alarmed.

“There is a police constable on the doorstep, saying the inspector wants you to come at once.”

Bainbridge was immediately intrigued; they had barely left the police station, yet something clearly had occurred, and it seemed likely it had something to do with their recent adventures with the mysterious mermaid.

“We must go at once, Vicky.”

Victoria was already rising and grabbing up her driving gloves, which she had deposited on a table beside her when she first came in. She was as alarmed as her uncle by the sudden summons, though her mind was on the possibility that this could have something to do with their recent discoveries regarding the murder of Houston Fairchild.

A moment after that thought had crossed her mind, she realised it was highly unlikely to be the case. Dougal would not have rushed them out of the house because he discovered some clue in the cold case, he would have visited them this evening. No, whatever they were being summoned for, it was clearly very important and required their immediate attention.

They met the constable on the doorstep, and he smiled at them.

“The inspector wants me to guide you to him. He has a body he thinks you should see.”

“Then guide us you must, but there is only room for two in the car, therefore you shall have to stand on the running board,” Bainbridge explained. “You have good balance, I presume, young man.”

The constable glanced at the car, which he had walked past to reach the front door of their house. His curiosity about the vehicle was apparent, and he was all too eager to take a ride on it. The thought of being able to travel somewhere without the need for horses was too exciting to ignore, and even having to perch on the flimsy running board that ran along the base of the car did not bother him.

With the constable installed, precariously, at the side of the car, and Bainbridge and Victoria comfortably seated, they followed the young man’s directions as they headed towards the scene of the crime. The constable was enthusiastic about the drive. Bainbridge sensed he would have liked for them to have gone faster, but Victoria was a cautious driver at the best of times, and even more so when she had someone clinging to the side of her vehicle. Even if the constable fell off, at the gentle speed they were travelling, he would not be seriously harmed. It therefore took them longer than if they had used a carriage, or even ridden bicycles, to reach the scene of the crime they had been summoned to.

The constable did not care, as this gave him extra time on the car, and Bainbridge had a hunch he directed them to take a longer route to the location to increase the time he was able to spend on the vehicle. It was no matter, of course, the dead man was going nowhere.

Inspector Dougal was stood outside a boarding house in a row of properties that looked on the cusp of falling down. There was a shabbiness to the whole street, and the only thing preventing the area being described a slum was the roadway itself, which was surprisingly wide. Clearly, these homes had once been of a better class. Now they were falling into disrepair and housed three or four families apiece.

The arrival of the car was watched by a number of the residents of the road, who stood on doorsteps or loitered in the middle of the street, trying to get a look at what was going on. The amount of men who were milling around suggested this was an area where people struggled to find work.

“You took longer than I expected,” Dougal called as they arrived.

He had a bleak look on his face, which filled Victoria with a sense of dread.

“I was trying not to kill your constable,” she responded, as the constable in question jumped from the running board and headed over to a pair of his colleagues with a broad smile on his face.

He immediately started regaling them with his recent adventure, making sure to add a few flourishes to impress them further. Bainbridge was amused at the scene and suspected, in the near future, Victoria would have further constables hoping to catch a ride on her car.

He descended to the ground in his usual haphazard fashion, something akin to a walrus attempting to elegantly descend a flight of stairs while stood upright. Once safely on the dirt of the road, he joined Victoria as they approached Inspector Dougal.

“What do you have for us?” Bainbridge asked.

“A dead man. I think you may be interested in what we found among his belongings,” Dougal motioned for them to follow him, and then led the way into the house.

He showed them up a flight of rickety stairs, their movements being watched from the front room by a family of five, including three small children with dark, hollow eyes,

Victoria aimed not to look in their direction, feeling unnerved by the intensity of their gaze upon her.

They came to a room at the top of the stairs with a scratched door standing partly open. There were flies fluttering around the entranceway, and Dougal tried to batter them out of the way as he entered the room first. He paused suddenly on the threshold.

“Just to let you know, there is some blood and the corpse rather looks… unpleasant.”

Victoria knew he said this for her benefit, giving her the chance to prepare herself, though he had the decency not to direct the comment at her, and it might just as easily have been aimed at her uncle. She took a deep breath and told herself that, whatever greeted her within the room, she would not faint or allow her stomach to overcome her.

Dougal finally moved out of the way and allowed them inside.

Lying sprawled on the floor, his feet partly under the bed as the room was not very big, was a man in his late twenties. He was a thin-faced fellow, though some of the hollowness of his cheeks was a result of being recently deceased. A thin cord was wrapped tightly around his neck, and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Broken blood vessels in the whites told the grim story of his suffocation. One hand was still clutching at the cord, his thumb wedged between one of the loops of the rope in an effort to save himself, but the murderer had been so intent even this effort had failed, and it was likely his thumb had been broken in the process.

The blood Dougal had mentioned had been caused by the victim suffering a busted nose, and there was more blood clotted around his mouth, possibly from biting his tongue. It seemed he had put up a fight in his efforts to survive, and traces of blood dotted the bed and the floor. In the end, however, it had not been enough to save the fellow from his doom.

“Poor chap,” Bainbridge leaned against the end of the bed and studied the corpse. “Looks like he died fighting.”

“His name was John Hallet,” Dougal explained. “His landlady was able to identify him. She summoned the aid of a constable when she found him like this. He was late paying his daily penny to board here, and she entered his room to demand it. She seems quite the iron-hearted lady, all told, but this particular scene clearly upset her deeply.”

“Did she hear anything at all? This attack could hardly have been quiet,” Bainbridge pointed out.

“She says she heard nothing, but one of my constables who patrols this way says she is a heavy drinker, and so was probably sound asleep when this occurred, and would not have risen if the house were on fire.”

“Ah, well that would explain it. She has a room on this floor?”

“Yes, she has the front room and rents out every other space, including the attic floor above,” Dougal glanced at Victoria. “It is not a pretty scene, is it?”

Victoria had been making a sound effort to keep her wilder emotions under control and glanced up at the comment. She thought she had been doing rather well to prevent herself from either being overcome by nausea or having to fall down in a faint. Both things embarrassed her deeply, and she was ashamed that her body failed her in this regard. She had been so absorbed with forcing herself to look upon the corpse of Mr Hallet, without so much as thinking of gagging, that she had not heard the inspector’s words until his direct comment jogged her from her thoughts.

“I have seen worse,” she declared quickly, then she had to swallow because the distraction to her concentration had opened up the very real possibility of her being sick.

“Why have you summoned us here, Dougal?” Bainbridge now asked.

“Ah, well, when we searched the room, we found something we thought might interest you.”

Dougal careful stepped over the corpse and went to a cupboard at the far end of the room. It was a worn-out thing, much like all the rest of the furniture in the room and took up an alarming amount of space in the small quarters. Dougal pulled the door open and fumbled inside to reveal a shiny glimpse of fabric. When he pulled out the item, and presented the entire thing to them, it was plain to see it was a mermaid’s tail, or at least what someone supposed a mermaid’s tail looked like.

In the flesh, it was a rough looking thing, constructed mainly from sailcloth which was resilient to water, and painted with a variety of colours to imitate scales. Attached in various spots were circles of thin tin that had been crudely cut out, and sew on with fishing wire, to make the tail appear to sparkle at a distance.

“Well, well,” Bainbridge remarked at the sight.

Dougal was not done. He placed the tail on the floor and then went back to the cupboard from which he retrieved a long, fair wig. Much like the tail, it was a crudely made item, the sort worn at fairs and fetes by mummers. It was stiff from being repeatedly wet, and might have been mistaken for a mop head, if they had not been already looking for such an item and realised what it truly was.

The two items of costume stunk of stale water and filled the room with a noxious damp odour.

“As you see, Mr Hallet here, was our mermaid,” Dougal concluded his demonstration. “I can only surmise that his business partner determined to murder him, perhaps some quarrel over their share of the profits from the scheme.”

“So, the mermaid was a man all along,” Victoria said, mildly disappointed. “But people heard him singing.”

“You have never heard a fellow with a high-pitched singing voice?” Bainbridge replied to her.

“I suppose,” Victoria frowned. “And it does make better sense that it was a man out on the water rather than a woman. I did wonder how any woman could be convinced to parade herself in the water like that with people watching.”

“That would not have mattered to Hallet, he had nothing to concern himself about should his wig happen to flutter inappropriately,” Dougal added with a smirk. “I just thought you would be interested, seeing as this clearly brings a conclusion to your case.”

“It does indeed,” Bainbridge concurred, though the look on his face said otherwise.

Victoria sensed he was not entirely satisfied with this finale to their adventure.

“I shall try to locate his killer, of course, but right now I don’t have much to go on. I shall try to identify his known associates, but I can tell you at once the people in this district will not go out of their way to help a policeman.”

Victoria heard the inflection in the inspector’s voice.

“You think you will not be able to get any useful information on this matter?”

“More than likely,” Dougal responded to her. “This will be added to the many unsolved cases I have sitting in a file back at the station. Sadly, it is the way of things. I may never know who was assisting this fellow and acting as his pickpocket.”

Bainbridge was silent, but his thoughtful expression, and the way he was rubbing his chin, told Victoria that he was thinking hard and already contemplating becoming distracted from their case. After all, they had only been hired to stop Mr Dugoni’s troubles, they had not been hired to investigate why the merman had been murdered. They had resolved the matter succinctly and, for once, quite efficiently. Now, it was surely time to end things and focus on Fairchild’s mystery instead.

Bainbridge finally lifted his head, a new light of determination in his eyes.

“I think I shall speak with Mr Hallet’s landlady before we depart.”

Chapter Eight

Mrs Cameron had resided in the same house since she was married, and that had been nearly thirty years ago. Her husband was long deceased, taken away by an infected limb caused by a work accident. She had survived as best she could by renting out the rooms of the house and had mastered her grief by drinking. She was fond of gin, and had several bottles, in various states of emptiness, dotted about her tiny room.

Here she kept all her worldly possessions. The fine bed she had been given by her parents on her wedding, her old chest of drawers, the three porcelain novelty figurines her late husband had saved up for, and purchased for her birthday, when they were young.

In a bottom drawer, she even retained the veil she had worn at her wedding, along with some other bits and pieces that were reminders of dreams that had never happened. The handsewn christening gown, the knitted baby blanket, and booties. Things created when she fancied they would have a purpose and that had never made it out of the drawer since.

Mrs Cameron had once had so many dreams, now she simply spent her days sitting on her bed, remembering the past and regretting every moment of it.

She stared at Bainbridge with bleak eyes when he entered the room followed by Victoria. Dougal might have described her as iron-hearted but, in reality, that was a façade created by a life of woe. Mrs Cameron felt things very deeply, and her heart ached from the losses of her life, she was broken within, and that made her keep the world at bay for fear she might be wounded even further.

“I can’t help you,” she declared to them the moment they entered.

“We have not yet asked you a question, dear lady,” Bainbridge said politely.

He always became the obsequious gentleman when confronted with a lady who was liable to be difficult.

“You want to know if I heard anything last night when poor Mr Hallet died, and I shall tell you the same as I told the police. I heard nothing.”

Mrs Cameron reached behind her and produced a bottle of gin, which she proceeded to take a glug from.

“No matter, I am not here to ask you if you heard the poor man’s final struggle. I was curious about the fellow before he died.”

Mrs Cameron scowled at him.

“Why would you want to know about Hallet?”

“Are you aware of what the inspector found in Mr Hallet’s wardrobe?”

Mrs Cameron had an uneasy look in her eyes. She took comfort from the bottle of gin, which she clutched harder and took another swig from.

“Look, I do not care to pay heed to the morals of the people I house here. It wouldn’t pay for me to be precious about such things. He was a nice enough man, and I did not care to pry into his business.”

“You did not know about the mermaid tail and wig?” Victoria asked.

Mrs Cameron gave a visible shudder.

“As I say, what that gentleman did in private was his own business, and as long as he paid me my penny a day, I did not care. I suppose, in hindsight, I always suspected it would end up causing trouble for us both.”

“Mrs Cameron, I find myself mildly confused,” Bainbridge spoke. “What precisely did you think Mr Hallet was getting up to?”

Mrs Cameron’s eyes went wide, she took another swig from the bottle and swayed uneasily on her bed.

“My old man would have been horrified if he knew what I was allowing to happen under his roof. Very upstanding he was, very respectable, and look where that got us? And now here I am, disgracing him by becoming a drunken sot, and allowing all many of ungodly business to occur under my roof.”

“Are you referring to Mr Hallet’s involvement in the pickpocketing scandal?” Victoria asked.

Mrs Cameron blinked at her, and it was quite obvious she was not referring to that.

“What?”

“Mr Hallet was wearing that costume to draw crowds, which his companion could then pickpocket,” Victoria elaborated.

Mrs Cameron stared at her as if she had said something truly remarkable. She took a deep breath.

“Oh, you do not know the relief you have brought to me by saying that!”

Victoria was bemused.

“Precisely what did you suppose the gentleman was doing?” Bainbridge asked.

Mrs Cameron now blushed, her cheeks flushing a deep purple red.

“I feel ashamed to say it, now I know how wrong I was. I just made an assumption. It was because that friend of his used to spend so much time with him. They were always together in the room, often late into the night. I thought I should really be charging more if they were sharing the room, but I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with Mr Hallet. I didn’t want to know what he was about.”

“Was this friend male or female?” Bainbridge asked.

Victoria cast a strange look in his direction.

“Male,” Mrs Cameron’s cheeks deepened as she recalled the things she had imagined as she lay in her bed, and how she had drunk deeper from the gin bottle to try to eradicate the thoughts. “Nice looking lad, too. Hazel brown hair and innocent eyes. He was always happy to give me a hand around the house if I needed it. He helped me with some sewing, one time, when my curtains fell to pieces, and I could not afford new ones. I was in such tears over it, and he said I was not to fret, and he would have them sewn back up in a jiffy. He was such a sweet lad; I could not allow my mind to think wicked things of him.”

“I don’t suppose you know his name?” Bainbridge asked her gently. “He ought to be informed of his companion’s death, and I think it would be better to come from someone sympathetic rather than the police. They can be… blunt about these things.”

Bainbridge ignored the fact that Victoria was watching him closely, he was trying to pretend he could not feel her eyes boring into him.

“I do know his name. Mohammad Hassan. Did I mention he was foreign? Not that I am against people from other countries, and as I say he was so very sweet and kind. I thought to myself, if only a few more of our English boys were like him, widows like me would not have such a hard time. And then I felt wicked for thinking such a thing. My husband would never have allowed him in this house.”

Mrs Cameron supped from her bottle again and the tears fell down her cheeks.

“I liked him, and I feel dreadful about it, but I used to feel better when he spoke to me, like he saw beneath this old wreck of a body I have, to the person I could have been.”

“I am very sorry for your loss,” Bainbridge said, referring not only to the demise of her husband, but to her clear grief over her lost tenant. He sensed that there had been a fragile friendship between Hallet, Hassan and Mrs Cameron that the woman had clung to as badly as she clung to her gin.

“Do you think Hassan did it?” Mrs Cameron asked now. “Murdered him?”

“Was he here last night?” Victoria asked instead.

Mrs Cameron shook her head.

“It’s the night he goes to the special temple thing,” she said. “His parents are very religious, or so he tells me. Not that Hassan much cares, but they insist he attends the temple once a week with them. It isn’t like a church, you know. Women can’t go right in. I suppose you can’t expect much from these foreign religions.”

“I am assuming Mr Hassan is a Muslim, and therefore goes to a mosque,” Bainbridge said. “I served in the army in various parts of the world, and I met a few Muslims in my time. Do you happen to know where we might find Hassan?”

Mrs Cameron shook her head.

“I never took his address, why would I? He was always here, anyway. But if you ask around, you shan’t have trouble finding him. Not many people he could be mistaken for around these parts.”

Mrs Cameron started to sob harder.

“I won’t ever see him again, will I? Now Mr Hallet has died.”

Her grief for the loss of her friendship with Hassan was poignant and painful to watch. Victoria wanted to comfort the woman but had no idea how. She was not very adept at dealing with tricky emotions. In the end, it was her uncle who stepped into the breach and offered the woman his handkerchief.

“There, there, Mrs Cameron. Life is certainly unfair at times.”

Mrs Cameron took the handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.

“I won’t be able to get the image of Mr Hallet lying there, with eyes boggling out of his sockets, from my mind any time soon. I thought I had seen death in all its forms. I nursed my husband through his last sickness, and that was a wicked thing to watch. But to see that poor man strangled like that, and the fear and pain on his face, I shudder at it. If only I had not been so drunk, maybe I would have heard and been able to help him.”

“You cannot berate yourself like that,” Bainbridge consoled her. “More than likely you would have ended up being hurt yourself.”

“And what would that have mattered?” Mrs Cameron sobbed. “I am old, and I have little left to live for. I survive, that’s all, and God sees fit to keep me alive even though I wish he would just end my days for me, and then I could have some peace and be back with my old man. Hallet had a future, I was sure of it, not me. If I had just been able to help him.

“No more of this talk, Mrs Cameron. You are not responsible, and as terrible as this all is, you cannot take the blame upon yourself.”

Mrs Cameron was crying into the handkerchief, her terrible grief unstoppable as she flooded the cloth with tears.

“The police won’t do anything, you know they won’t,” she said. “Once they know what Mr Hallet was like, they won’t care. Or maybe they will arrest Hassan just because he is foreign, and they always think foreigners are murderers. I cannot bear the thought.”

Bainbridge reached out and clasped her hand.

“My dear woman, I assure you I shall not allow such a thing to occur. I shall personally look into this matter and find out what really happened to Mr Hallet. If Hassan is innocent of this crime, I shall prove it and bring the real culprit to justice.”

Mrs Cameron looked up from her tears. She was bemused by his offer.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because it is the right thing to do, Mrs Cameron, and because I do not believe that two men who are dear, close friends deserve to be labelled as criminals.”

Mrs Cameron gulped back on a sob and clasped his hand in return, her fingers digging into his flesh.

“You are a good man. How you came to be here today I do not know, but I am so glad you are. I shall give you anything if you can find the truth of this and bring peace to my poor Mr Hallet.”

“You need give me nothing,” Bainbridge promised her. “This is my duty.”

He squeezed her hand one last time then moved away, leaving her with his handkerchief.

“Come along, Vicky. We have a mystery to solve.”

Victoria wanted to remark that they were still solving two others, though the Dugoni case was essentially at an end, but she had been moved by Mrs Cameron’s emotion as well, and so she said nothing and followed her uncle into the hallway.

The police surgeon had arrived to take a look at the body, and two constables were ready with a stretcher to remove Mr Hallet from the premises as soon as he was done. Dougal was lurking on the landing, but he did not enquire from Bainbridge if he had gathered any information from Mrs Cameron, he merely nodded at them.

“She is very distressed, poor woman,” Bainbridge said as he drew close. “Mrs Cameron has not had an easy life.”

“Easy life or not, finding a dead man like that in the room of your house is going to upset you,” Dougal reflected. “I shall do my best to bring his killer to justice, you know that Bainbridge.”

“I do, my friend, and I value your efforts. Now, I must be getting along as I have my own case to wrap up.”

Bainbridge shuffled past him and made his slow progress down the stairs. Victoria squeezed past Dougal too, catching his eyes as she went. There was not much space on the narrow landing, and even with him pressing himself against the wall, they had to brush by one another as she slipped by. She felt awkward knowing that her uncle had withheld information from the inspector about what they had just been told by Mrs Cameron, but she was not about to say anything. Bainbridge had his reasons for keeping silent, and she was not going to go against that decision, though she would press him to explain himself as soon as she got the chance.

“Take care, Miss Bovington,” Dougal said politely as she stood at the head of the stairs.

“You can call me Victoria,” Victoria smiled back. “You know that. And, I will.”

With her farewell made, she headed outside and found Bainbridge already speaking to some of the residents of the road who were milling about the house. Victoria cast a wary eye over her car to assure herself it was still in one piece, though the odds of anyone defiling it while the police were present were slim.

Bainbridge wandered back over to her.

“I have an address for Mr Hassan, it seems he was a familiar face around this district and known to a few people. It is not far away and therefore we might consider walking?”

It had to be close if Bainbridge was suggesting they use their own legs for volition rather than the car. Victoria agreed, as walking would do them both good. Bainbridge pointed out the direction they should head, and they began to walk away, leaving the car in the safety of the police cordon.

She had questions for her uncle, but she was finding them difficult to formulate. Perhaps their conversation with Mr Hassan would open up an opportunity for her to discuss what was really on her mind.

But, right at that moment, she was not ready to say the things she felt in her heart.

Chapter Nine

Mohammad Hassan worked for a coal merchant. He drove the wagon that delivered their goods to the various customers they supplied. He was often travelling about the neighbourhood during the day, and so it was the case that, when they arrived at his home which he shared with his aging parents, they found he was not present.

The senior Mr Hassan answered the door and looked curiously at the gentleman on his doorstep.

“Mr Hassan, I hoped to speak with your son, Mohammad?”

It turned out Mr Hassan did not speak English. Fortunately, Bainbridge had picked up a smattering of Arabic in his travels, and though it was a patchy conversation, he was able to determine where Mohammad might be found at that point in the day. His father was naturally concerned about what was going on. Bainbridge did his best to reassure him that he merely had some sad news concerning a mutual acquaintance he needed to impart to Mohammad, and it was nothing that would cause the lad harm.

That was perhaps stretching the truth. If Mrs Cameron’s hunch about their relationship was anything to go by, then Mohammad would be deeply hurt by the news he was about to receive, but Bainbridge could not say that to his father. The Muslim religion was as strict as the Christian Church about certain activities.

Thanking Mr Hassan for his time, and promising they were not bringing any trouble to his son, they set off for the coal merchant’s warehouse a few streets away to wait for Mohammad to appear so they could talk with him.

Victoria noted her uncle was walking slower as they continued, and the extended journey was taking its toll. He was leaning heavier and heavier on his walking stick.

“We should have gone back for the car,” she remarked.

“I used to walk for miles and miles,” Bainbridge countered. “I never had the luxury of a car before you came along, and a coach was outside of my budget. I walked the length and breadth of this city. And I could do it again if I needed to.”

Victoria opted not to correct him; she could see this was one of those discussions which would end in an argument if she were not careful.

“I think I understand what Mrs Cameron was implying about Mohammad and John Hallet,” she said at last.

“Would you care to elaborate?” her uncle asked, testing her.

Victoria frowned.

“I am not so naïve I do not know when a person is suggesting that two men had an unholy relationship,” she declared crossly, then she hesitated. “That was what she was implying?”

“It was,” Bainbridge concurred. “But I do not think I would call it unholy.”

Victoria flinched. The word had come out without her thinking about it and, if she was correct in her thinking about her uncle and Fairchild, then it was a crass comment to make.

“You are quite correct. I used the worst term imaginable. Unconventional would have been the better one.”

Bainbridge gave her a soft smile.

“And what do you make of such unconventional relationships?” he asked.

Victoria had to pause to consider this. In truth, she had never really given the matter much thought. It was not something that had really filtered into her world, which up until she had joined her uncle as a detective had been largely female-centric. She had heard talk about men with certain inclinations, and she was aware of women who had similar quirks, though that always seemed a very different matter. Perhaps because the former was illegal, the latter not.

She allowed the notion to settle into her mind further, to determine what sort of reaction it might spark.

“I do not believe I have much of an opinion on the matter,” she declared at last. “I have never really given the subject much thought.”

“I am heartened to hear that,” her uncle replied. “It is always best to keep an open-mind on subjects that one does not know much about.”

Victoria wondered if now was the moment to broach the question she really wanted to ask, but her nerve failed her yet again, and suddenly they were outside the coal merchants before she had the chance to mention it.

The property was busy with various wagons going out with coal, while others were returning with new loads. Customers were wandering into a small office to pay their bills or make orders, and all around the yard of the warehouse were men with sacks and shovels, moving coal around, readying it to be delivered or to take care of a fresh load just arrived.

Bainbridge stood on the pavement before the gates of the warehouse and watched them for a while.

“Do we go in and ask for Hassan?” Victoria enquired.

“They shall not be able to tell us where he is,” Bainbridge responded. “I suggest we wait for his return. We shall surely recognise him easily enough.”

He glanced around him and spied a low wall opposite the gates of the warehouse.

“I suggest we position ourselves over there.”

They crossed the road and settled on the wall, Bainbridge propping his hands one atop the other on his stick as he sat down to wait. Victoria paced for a few moments, then sat down beside him.

“Hassan might have murdered Hallet,” she said in barely a whisper. “Things like that happen. People argue.”

“That may be the case,” Bainbridge agreed. “But I would prefer to assume he knows nothing of what occurred, and we are therefore here to do him a service by informing him of his friend’s demise. I know all too well how it feels to have that news broken to you.”

Victoria felt this was an opening, either intentional or accidental, for her to ask more, and decided she had to take the opportunity.

“Did you and Houston have an…. unconventional relationship?”

Bainbridge gave a snort of amusement.

“You have been wanting to ask me that all morning.”

“Yes, I have. Will you answer the question?”

Bainbridge gave a big sigh and gazed across the road.

“Houston meant the world to me, Vicky. We were extremely close and yes, I loved him. But, we were never more than friends.”

Victoria paused for a moment.

“Did he love you?”

“That is a good question. Honestly, I like to imagine he did. But we were men of our time, and we never spoke of our feelings towards one another. Maybe, in another life, we might have been like Hassan and Hallet, but we were not raised to consider such a thing possible.”

Victoria sat and contemplated this information for a while, processing what she had been told, and what she felt about it.

“I am sorry you could not be as close to each other as you ought to have been,” she said at last. “I cannot see what you would have been doing wrong if you had done so. I know how society thinks; that marriage between a man and a woman is the only form of true love, but I cannot stand the hypocrisy of such a notion. After all, look at the state of the marriage market among my friends. People marry for money, not love. How is that worthier, or more Christian, than someone being with a person they truly cherish, even if that individual is the same gender as them?”

“You make a fair point, Vicky, but the world is as it is. Even Mrs Huggins would disown me if she knew how I truly felt about Houston.”

“Do you think she does not already know?”

“She might suspect,” Bainbridge replied. “But as long as she sees no proof with her two eyes, she is prepared to overlook the matter and pretend it is nothing.”

“Well, that is a shame on her,” Victoria huffed.

They sat in silence for a while, both lost in their thoughts.

“Do you feel better now you have asked me?” Bainbridge said after a while.

“I don’t think ‘feeling better’ is quite the phrase. I wanted to know. I… I sensed there was more to your grief than merely the loss of a friend,” Victoria hesitated over her next words. “I imagine it was very difficult suffering your grief and knowing you could tell no one just how truly devasted you were, because of the ridiculous notion of shame it might bring. You should not have had to suffer that alone and, now I am fully aware, please feel free to talk to me about this matter just as if you were discussing the grief you felt for a beloved wife.”

Bainbridge tapped his stick on the pavement.

“I am of a generation who were trained not to speak of their emotions. I am not sure I would know how to begin.”

“My offer stands. Anytime you wish to talk about it, really talk about it, I shall be ready to hear you out.”

Silence fell between them again.

“That is why you said you would come here and speak to Hassan, isn’t it?” Victoria said when a good ten minutes had elapsed. “Because, if Mrs Cameron is correct, you know exactly how he will be feeling and how he cannot express himself to anyone else.”

“When I break this news to him, his heart will be torn in two and he shall have no one to turn to,” Bainbridge nodded. “No one will acknowledge his grief. Therefore, I intend to acknowledge it. I have been in his shoes, and I know how it feels.”

“What if he is responsible for Hallet’s death?”

“Then we shall take heed of his reaction, and if necessary we shall turn him in to the police. Love is not an excuse for murder.”

Victoria nodded her head.

“I would argue that to murder someone you purport to love proves you never loved them at all.”

“There is that too.”

They had been sat some time, and Bainbridge’s back was growing stiff, when at last they saw the arrival of a coal wagon being driven by a gentleman who was clearly not a pasty, pale Englishman. As he was pulling the empty wagon into the yard, Victoria and Bainbridge headed across the road to intercept him.

No one paid them much heed as they entered the yard, assuming they were customers come to make an order or pay a bill. Hassan had hitched this horse to the wall and was letting it take a drink from a bucket, while men around him started to reload his wagon. He was walking to the office to get the list of next deliveries when Bainbridge and Victoria stopped him.

“Apologies for interrupting your work, Mr Hassan, but might we have a word with you?” Bainbridge said.

The look on his face immediately told Hassan something was wrong, and the panic flared in his eyes.

“Is it my mother?” he asked, revealing he retained a slight accent though his English was flawless.

“No, she is well, as far as I know,” Bainbridge promised him. “I am afraid, I have some bad news regarding Mr Hallet.”

Hassan’s face fell, but he had enough composure to motion for them to head to a quiet corner of the yard, where they could talk without being overheard.

“I knew it was going to happen someday,” he pulled a face. “They arrested him, then?”

Hassan was under the mistaken impression that his friend had finally fallen foul of his pickpocket scheme, Victoria felt awful they would have to reveal that the truth was even worse than that.

“The police are involved,” Bainbridge said carefully. “But this is not about the pickpocketing scheme, as such. Though, the police are now aware that Mr Hallet was responsible for the mermaid hoax being performed about the city.”

“I told him it was stupid idea, but he wouldn’t listen,” Hassan was cross his wise words had been ignored. “He wanted some quick money, and he thought it was a funny trick. I said he would be better off coming to work here. I could have got him a job.”

Hassan looked like he was going to rant about his friend’s flaws for a while, and they needed to break the sad news of Hallet’s death to him, rather than allow him to remain ignorant any longer.

“Mr Hassan,” Victoria interrupted his diatribe. “Mr Hallet has been found dead.”

Hassan froze, the look in his eyes one of terror mingled with disbelief.

“What?”

“Someone murdered your friend last night,” Bainbridge explained to him as gently as he could. There was no good way to tell someone a loved one had been murdered. “He was strangled in the room of his boarding house.”

Hassan took a step away from them, as if they were demons come to torment him.

“No,” he said in a hiss. “You are lying.”

“Why would we lie about that?” Victoria asked in despair. “Do you consider us so evil?”

Hassan’s eyes were flicking about the yard, looking anywhere but at them. Suddenly, he moved past them.

“I have deliveries to make,” he said, heading purposefully for the office.

“Mr Hassan, we would like to talk to you further,” Victoria called, but Hassan refused to turn around and look at her.

She was about to follow him when she felt her uncle’s hand on her arm.

“He needs time to think,” he said. “This is news he will struggle with.”

“But we need to talk to him, ask him about last night, and where he was.”

“He needs time,” Bainbridge repeated. “But, I think he will talk to us, in the end.”

Hassan had vanished into the building. He reappeared a moment later with a list of new deliveries, and headed to his freshly loaded wagon, all the time ignoring Bainbridge and Victoria. As Hassan was out of the way, Bainbridge walked to the office and headed inside. He left one of his business cards with the clerk, and a short note for Mr Hassan, asking that he be given it when he finished work for the day. Then he left the building and found Victoria.

“Time we headed home.”

“But…”

“Trust me, Vicky, sometimes you do not need to hammer away at people. Instead, you need to give them time. Mr Hassan will come to us.”

Victoria was not entirely convinced. But, as the delivery driver was already moving his refreshed horse away from the wall and heading out again, she saw her uncle’s point.

“He needs to know we are trying to help,” she said despondently, as he left the yard.

“He will learn that soon enough,” Bainbridge promised her.

Chapter Ten

There was no choice but to return home once again. Bainbridge was convinced that Hassan would come to them when the time was right. Victoria was less convinced, but she kept quiet on the subject. Mrs Huggins had been baking scones when they arrived back at the house, and Bainbridge was content that all was right in his world. It was a relief to see him back to his usual self. Victoria felt he was a far cry from the man she had found at the graveyard, mourning his old friend.

His revelation about his true relationship with Houston had come as a surprise, though not as great a one as Victoria might have expected. Something had told her their connection was deeper than simple friendship. Though she knew friends could love one another deeply too, but this, this had been beyond that.

Bainbridge had been a bachelor all his life but, more to the point, there had never been a woman on the scene. No lady friends, no infatuations. Not even in his younger days, had Bainbridge dabbled in the sort of dalliances expected of a gentleman, especially one who is in the army. Victoria had never given it a thought before, but now it did make sense. Bainbridge had never had a woman on his arm because he had never cared to.

Victoria wondered if her mother suspected his true nature and, if so, was that one of the reasons she kept a distance between herself and her older brother? Then again, her mother probably did not think such things occurred outside of bad novels and newspaper articles, so that was an unlikely scenario, and Bainbridge could be annoying enough to have earned her ire without revealing any such quirks to her.

Victoria retreated to the library once more, partly to collect her thoughts on what she had just learned, and partly to dive into the Pettigrew case again. There were still papers to transcribe. She had left the worst damaged ones to the end, and perhaps among them would be a hint of what was going on with the whole affair, and why Houston had felt so desperate to keep it a secret.

She had not been there more than an hour, struggling over one of the letters, and feeling as if she would never decipher it, when she heard her name being called. Appearing at the door of the library, she found her uncle looking for her.

“Vicky, we have a guest.”

The look in his eyes, and the rather dramatic way he waggled his eyebrows, gave her a good hint as to who the visitor was. She followed her uncle to the front drawing room and found Mohammad Hassan sitting uncomfortably on the sofa, looking as though the last place he wished to be was inside their house.

But he had come, and that was what mattered.

Hassan jumped to his feet as she entered and politely gave her a bow.

“You do not need to be formal around my niece,” Bainbridge waved off his efforts. “She is not that sort of woman.”

Victoria rather fancied she was that sort of woman but decided to let the matter slide. Or rather, she would have words after their guest had departed.

“A lady is always a lady,” Hassan said politely, refusing to sit until Victoria had taken a chair.

“And manners maketh the man,” Victoria responded once settled into an armchair. “You are quite charming, Mr Hassan, and I appreciate that.”

Hassan merely shrugged and settled back onto the sofa. Though settled was not really the term for what he was attempting; he looked as though he was desperate to jump off the chair and run out of the room.

“I assume you received my calling card and note, which is why you have appeared here?” Bainbridge began.

“I did,” Hassan grimaced. “You caught me by surprise at the yard. No one knows about my association with John there.”

“I understand,” Bainbridge replied sympathetically. “I have seen enough of Mr Hallet’s life to realise he was criminally inclined.”

Hassan looked pained by the statement. Victoria thought it was a hurtful thing to say when her uncle knew about his real relationship with Hallet and was sympathetic towards it.

“Having your employer know you are friends with a gentleman who runs a pickpocketing scheme, would not be good for your prospects,” Bainbridge continued, as if he had not noticed Hassan’s upset.

Hassan relaxed a fraction, realising what the colonel was talking about.

“Y… yes. He hung around with some very disreputable people. Nothing I said to him would change that.”

Bainbridge settled back further into his chair, making himself very comfortable.

“Did Mr Hallet come up with the scheme to pickpocket onlookers while they watched his mermaid performance on his own?”

Hassan shrugged again.

“I don’t know if I am honest. He never really discussed the matter much with me, as he knew I would disapprove. I could have got him proper work, and he would not have had to do such things, but John always had other ideas.”

“It is quite extraordinary to dress up as a mermaid,” Victoria interjected. “Certainly not your traditional pickpocket distraction.”

“He said all the other methods had been done to death,” Hassan replied. “He said, if you wanted to avoid the police getting wind of it immediately, it had to be something different, something subtle because it was so audacious.”

“And truly that is what he achieved,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “Even we did not perceive what the true purpose of his disguise was until it was too late.”

Hassan was quiet a moment, staring at his hands. He took a shaky breath.

“Your card stated that you are a detective?”

“We are both detectives,” Victoria quickly clarified. “The reason we were searching for Mr Hallet, was because we have been employed by one of the people who was affected by his activities. We were not expecting to find him, in all fairness, but then the police inspector summoned us.”

“You saw him?” Hassan had not lifted his eyes. “When… when he was already dead?”

“We did,” Victoria said softly.

“What did he look like?”

Victoria glanced at her uncle. She was not sure what to say, and she was not the greatest at being tactful with her words in such a situation as this. Bainbridge, thankfully, stepped to the fore.

“He had been strangled, Mr Hassan. He had put up a good fight, but ultimately he had not succeeded in resisting his assailant. It was not a scene any loved one should have to witness, and I dare say you should be grateful it was not you who stumbled across his corpse. You do not need such an image to be the last you had of your dear friend.”

Hassan lifted his deep brown eyes to Bainbridge, meeting the colonel’s own watery blue ones. Some hint of understanding passed between them, as if they were recognising the sameness of their souls.

“You understand?”

“Mr Hassan, I lost my dearest of friends in a similar manner. He walked out my front door and was shot a few hours later. I understand the grief you are enduring, especially when it is impossible for you to share that grief with others. No one, not Hallet’s family, nor your own, can truly appreciate how close you were to each other, or the love you shared. In that regard, yes, I understand.”

Hassan paused, studying the colonel as if looking for a hint he was lying. Victoria stayed perfectly quiet, now was not the moment to interrupt her uncle. She saw for the first time the reality of the grief Bainbridge had endured, and was still enduring, mirrored in the younger man’s demeanour. She wanted to reach out to them both and comfort them, but did not know how.

Young, fashionable ladies were not raised to know how to comfort men who were experiencing the sort of grief produced by a love that cannot be spoken about.

“You do understand,” Hassan finally sighed. “I hardly thought I would find someone who could know what I am going through.”

“The loss is bad enough, the inability to speak about it with others is even worse,” Bainbridge concurred. “I should point out that my niece is also understanding. She is a very forward-thinking young lady, and I am most proud of her lack of prejudices, and her understanding that a man’s heart is not always led to a woman.”

Hassan glanced at Victoria, who had been stunned by her uncle’s praise, and did not know what to say immediately. Hassan smiled at her.

“I knew you were a true lady when we first met,” he nodded his head.

Victoria found herself falling into his eyes. He was a very handsome young man, and so gentle in his demeanour. She could imagine any young girl being delighted to be swept up into his arms and invited to dance. She gulped, not sure quite how to respond to the unexpected praise, and a little unsure if she deserved it.

She was not going to question her uncle’s relationship with Houston Fairchild, she found it sweet on some level, but a part of her was still driven by the prejudices of her age, and she found it hard to start thinking that other men had similar associations.

“John did not deserve to die,” Hassan was back to the subject that cut him so deeply.

He pulled a face as he spoke, his anguish suddenly apparent.

“I agree, Mr Hassan,” Bainbridge responded. “My reason for seeking you out was because the landlady at your friend’s boarding house informed me of your closeness to Mr Hallet, and it seemed inappropriate for you to find out the news of his demise from the police or neighbourhood gossip. By the way, Mrs Cameron is also deeply distressed by what occurred. She found his body.”

“Oh dear,” Hassan sighed. “That must have been awful for her.”

“She spoke highly of you and Mr Hallet. I believe she would be most aggrieved to lose your friendship and would be quite willing to be a compassionate listener to your grief, if you would wish it.”

Hassan found a fragile smile coming to his lips.

“She is a good woman, behind the drink,” he said. “I feel sorry for her. She was never meant to be alone. I shall go to her as soon as we finish here.”

Hassan’s face folded into an elegant look of consternation.

“What are the police doing to find John’s murderer?”

“Everything they can, which, realistically, is not a lot, considering the circles your friend moved in. Such circles are not inclined to speak to the police.”

“Then, they do not think they will solve his murder?”

“Sadly, that may be the case,” Bainbridge explained. “I am on good terms with the police inspector, and he has been most candid on the topic. The likelihood of him solving this crime is low, due to the difficulty of getting people to speak to him, and also the pressure he faces from his superiors to focus on higher priority cases.”

“Cases involving people with money,” Hassan said bleakly. “And those not involving the immoral.”

“I suppose that is a fair comment,” Bainbridge said. “I would like to think the inspector is more open minded than that.”

“Did your friend’s murder get solved?” Hassan asked sharply.

Bainbridge was not expecting the question and for a second he froze.

“No,” he admitted at last. “We are still seeking an answer.”

“That is what I thought. No one wants to help people like us. They say we deserve things like this.”

“That is not really the case with my situation,” Bainbridge countered, defending Dougal.

“You may not like to suppose that is how things are, but the reality is, that is how all these policemen think,” Hassan said firmly.

“You are being unfair on a man you have never met,” Victoria said quietly. “Inspector Dougal is very kind and understanding, but he has his hands tied by what he can and cannot do. It is not his fault people will not always speak to a policeman.”

Hassan did not look convinced, but he had been raised not to argue with a lady, so he turned his attention back to Bainbridge.

“Can I hire you to find who killed John?”

“I did not ask you here to tout for work,” Bainbridge said carefully. “I just wanted to offer you a sympathetic ear.”

“I appreciate that, and my question stands, can I hire you?”

Bainbridge hesitated. Having already been of a mind to look further into the demise of Mr Hallet, it seemed somewhat inappropriate to now have his friend offering to pay them for the investigation.

“You can hire us,” Victoria spoke quickly.

She did not have her uncle’s qualms, and she knew the true state of their bank balance.

“That is a relief,” Hassan said, his words echoing a visible relaxing of his shoulders. “Then, I am hiring you to find the man who murdered my friend.”

The room fell quiet after he had spoken. They were all taking in the situation.

“I should visit Mrs Cameron now,” Hassan eventually spoke.

He rose and bowed again to Victoria, before turning to Bainbridge to shake his hand.

“Wait, do you know the name of the other person involved in Hallet’s pickpocket scheme?” Bainbridge asked.

Hassan shook his head.

“I didn’t want to know, and John had enough sense not to tell me. He knew how much I disapproved.”

Bainbridge saw Hassan out of the house, while Victoria remained where she was, mulling over their new situation.

When her uncle returned, his face was bleak.

“We should not be asking money from him.”

“Just because he is grieving?” Victoria responded. “That would rather eliminate most of our paying clients.”

Bainbridge shook his head.

“It is not right to use his grief in that way.”

“We are not using his grief, we are being paid for doing our job, just as Dougal is being paid to do his.”

“But I was happy to investigate this for nothing,” Bainbridge was looking more upset than Victoria had anticipated.

“Money makes the world go around,” she replied. “And we need money Bainbridge. If you were a rich man, then you could investigate every case you wanted to without charge, but you are not, and we have already concluded Mr Dugoni’s case. His bill will be small, and we need something else. We shall not overcharge Mr Hassan, but we have to be realistic. After all, our sole other case is not going to provide us with any income.”

Bainbridge raised an eyebrow at the mention of the Pettigrew case but, right in that moment, his mind was not in a place where he cared to think too long on it. Too many strong emotions had been stirred up by the sorrow of Mr Hassan.

“I would have paid every penny I owned to find the killer of Houston,” Bainbridge reflected.

“Fortunately, you will not need to, because together we shall find out what happened to him,” Victoria stood and placed a hand on her uncle’s shoulder. “That is why we have to make a living wherever we can.”

Bainbridge sighed, knowing she had a point but not liking it.

“After dinner, we need to search out Mr Hallet’s associate,” he resolved himself to action.

“After dinner,” Victoria agreed.

Chapter Eleven

They drove back to the area of Norwich where Hallet had lived and died. The evening was starting to draw on, and the road had a gloomy look to it. It was not an area that benefited from street lighting, and the shadows were already stretching deeply across the road. There was a single light glowing in the window of Mrs Cameron’s house, from a downstairs window. The landlady’s personal bedroom was darkened, and there was no sign of her.

“I wonder if Hassan spoke to her?” Victoria said as she parked the car.

“I believe him to be a young man of his word, with a good heart,” Bainbridge responded, going through his usual clownish routine of descending from the car.

Car manufacturers had simply not designed their creations with men like him in mind. He tumbled down to the ground with the least amount of grace possible and righted himself with as much dignity as was feasible after such a spectacle.

No one was really watching them. The road had grown quieter now the police had vanished. A few people were still in the street, doing nothing much other than watching the world go by. Others had already retreated inside for the day or had headed off to the local pub, where they would drink away their sorrows until closing time.

“Where do we begin?” Victoria asked her uncle.

Bainbridge pointed with his stick to the glowing light in the downstairs window.

“The other tenants in this property are the most likely candidates to know who was associating with Mr Hallet,” he explained. “We begin with them.”

The door of the boarding house was not locked, and they entered easily. The first door on their immediate left was shut, but there were quiet sounds within indicating the residents were present. Bainbridge walked to the door, and tapped lightly on the scratched wood, which did not appear to have had a coat of paint or vanish in many a year. The room beyond fell into immediate silence.

“Could we have a word?” Bainbridge called through the wood. “It is about poor Mr Hallet.”

The silence continued. The residents within had spied Victoria and Bainbridge speaking with Inspector Dougal, and were as likely to distrust them, as they were to distrust the police.

“We are trying to help Mr Hassan,” Bainbridge decided to try a different tactic and see if that garnered him anything. “He has asked us to discover who killed his friend.”

Bainbridge was hoping that, just as Mrs Cameron had been charmed by the young Muslim, so his friend’s neighbours had also been taken by him.

After a moment, he heard movement within the room that suggested he had been correct. The door was opened by a man wearing a shabby waistcoat and with his hair a mess. He had a dark, unkept beard and a turn in his right eye.

He studied them awkwardly, his gaze appearing to fall somewhere to the left of Victoria when he was looking at Bainbridge.

“Mr Hassan was a nice enough fellow, for a foreigner,” the man said. “Not so sure about his friend though.”

“Mr Hallet? You did not care for him?” Bainbridge asked.

“Not so much, did not care…” the man glanced back into the room, at a woman who was sitting on the edge of a bed.

She was nursing a young child, who appeared to be teething, and was making griping noises to itself. She gave a nod to her husband to encourage him on.

“Mr Hallet was no bother to us, and he always was friendly, and doffed his hat to my wife. But we knew he did not earn his money in a respectable fashion. We might be poor, and fallen on bad times, but I still endeavour to earn our bread through legitimate work.”

“I understand,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “Mr Hallet certainly had fallen into some wicked habits, as far as we are aware.”

“It is not exactly a surprise he was murdered. He hung out with crooks, and crooks are always killing one another.”

Bainbridge was not sure that was quite true, but did not contradict the fellow.

“I wonder if you happened to know who Mr Hallet’s associate was in his criminal activities? We are aware that Mr Hassan had nothing to do with him, disliked him as much as you do, in fact.”

“Mr Hassan is a real gentleman,” the woman called from behind her husband. “He is always so polite and well-mannered. I would be proud if my boy turned out just like him.”

Bainbridge reflected that the woman might not be quite so proud if she knew precisely what Hassan was like, which was a sad statement of fact, considering he was clearly a decent fellow.

“He is all right, is Hassan,” the husband declared. “So many men come around these parts and try to get friendly with my wife when I am away. They think because she is a young woman alone, she will be willing to do anything. She gets accosted all the time by some of the oafs in this street, but not Hassan. In fact, one time he saw her being annoyed by two fellows, who would not take her refusal to talk to them for an answer, and he intervened and walked her all the way home.”

“I always feel safe with Mr Hassan,” the woman declared. “Safer with him than with an Englishman! What is the world coming to?”

“Indeed, my dear,” Bainbridge nodded to her through the door. “But back to my enquiry, do you happen to know who was working with Mr Hallet?”

The husband did not hesitate.

“His name is Dickie Grace,” he declared. “Right little toerag, that one. Into all manner of trouble. His mother doesn’t care, just lets him run wild. His father… well, there are a dozen men who could claim the title but don’t care to. I hated seeing him coming into the house and going upstairs. Knew it meant he was only up to trouble, but Mrs Cameron never saw him, and so she never cared.”

“How could she see him when she was always drunk?” snapped the woman. “Honestly, that woman would be so much better off if she gave up the demon drink.”

“She is drunk right now,” the husband concurred. “Heard her slumping onto her bed about a half hour ago, and that is a sure sign she is unconscious.”

“Did you see Mr Grace arrive here last night?” Bainbridge asked.

The man nodded his head keenly.

“He waltzed in the door about seven. Most of the time, we don’t close our door unless we are sleeping, the room gets so stuffy, and I prefer to see who is about. Mrs Cameron never locks the front door, but I will put the bolt across at midnight, just to be safe. Of course, sometimes, one of the other tenants, or a visitor of theirs, comes down and unbolts it again to leave, but it is the best I can do.”

“Did you see Mr Grace leave?” Bainbridge asked.

The man shook his head.

“The little one is having a bad time teething, so we went to bed early,” he answered. “I suppose it was no more than nine. I would have usually tried to stay awake so I could get up and lock the door later, but I was more exhausted than I realised.”

“I take it you also did not hear any commotion coming from upstairs?” Bainbridge added.

The man now frowned, and he glanced back at his wife. She met his look and gave him a firm nod.

“Tell them.”

The man sighed.

“I don’t know the time precisely. The babe had just woken us again. I was half asleep, but I thought I heard some banging and crashing upstairs. The baby was wailing so loud it was hard to say.”

“I didn’t hear the bangs, but when my husband mentioned them, I thought it might have been that noise which woke the child, instead of his teeth,” the woman declared.

“I was going to go storming up there and say something, but by the time we had settled the child again, everything was quiet, and it seemed pointless,” her husband added. “So, we went back to sleep.”

“You heard no one coming down the stairs?” Victoria asked.

The man shook his head.

“I realise now that we were hearing Mr Hallet fighting for his life, and I feel truly guilty we did nothing. Maybe, if I had gone up there at once, I could have saved him.”

“It was hardly your fault,” Bainbridge reassured him. “You had your hands full and were not to know what was occurring.”

The man did not look satisfied with his statement, and his wife looked equally morose. They might not have agreed with Mr Hallet’s lifestyle, but they were good people, and would have aided their neighbour, if they had realised the dire situation he was in.

“Do you think Dickie did it?” the woman asked.

“I think he is certainly someone we need to speak to,” Bainbridge replied, noncommittally.

“This time of the evening, you’ll likely find him down at The Old Man. It’s a shabby pub, with cheap beer, but he doesn’t go anywhere else,” the man informed him. “I have heard him mention the place so many times when he has been leaving here.”

“Thank you, we shall try to locate him there,” Bainbridge responded. “I hope your baby feels better soon. There is nothing so dire than teething at that age. Poor little mite.”

“Thank you, sir,” the woman nodded her head to him. “I hope, if we ever meet again, you will find us in better circumstances and not forced to shelter among criminals.”

Her husband echoed her statement with a grimace, then he shuffled back into the room and closed the door. Victoria and Bainbridge headed for the car.

“All the signs are pointing to Dickie Grace as our murderer,” Victoria reflected as they climbed inside.

“Perhaps,” Bainbridge responded.

They drove off along the road. Bainbridge had a rough idea where the pub they would find Dickie in was located. He seemed to know of all the drinking establishments in Norwich. When Victoria asked him about it, he gave a smile.

“It pays to know about these places. I do a lot of work in them. The Old Man is the resort of many a criminal. It is a meeting place of thieves and fences, of muggers and murderers. If you want someone to do something nefarious for you, you head there to find them.”

“Oh joy,” Victoria grumbled. “Just where I want to spend my evening.”

“The perils of being a private detective,” Bainbridge smirked at her. “It cannot all be champagne and evening soirees.”

“When has it been that, exactly?”

Bainbridge was chuckling harder.

“Just turn down this next right and pull up alongside the pavement. The car will be perfectly fine left here.”

Victoria was not entirely convinced by his statement, but she obeyed his command and brought the car to a stop next to the pavement. They descended and headed along the road for a few paces, before turning into a meaner alleyway that rapidly narrowed into a barely negotiable passage between two buildings. Victoria was trying hard not to think about her dress rubbing up against the walls either side of her and was relieved when they exited into a courtyard formed by three buildings meeting around a square. The courtyard was empty aside from a broken-down cart and several piles of stinking rubbish.

The buildings on their right and left did not have doors leading onto the courtyard, but the one immediately opposite did, and a sign above it declared it was The Old Man. Whoever had made the sign, had done so in the crudest fashion possible. It was merely a wooden plank with black paint scrawled across it to declare the name. The letters were uneven and badly written, as if the paintbrush so employed had been of a dismal quality. It did not fill Victoria with much confidence in the place.

“Keep an eye on any valuables you are carrying,” Bainbridge said to his niece as they crossed the courtyard and headed to the pub.

“This is a place where you can be robbed ten times before you reach the bar.”

“I am beginning to feel uneasy about entering,” Victoria said, thinking that it struck her as the sort of place where a woman’s space was not respected, and she was liable to have hands feeling into more places than just her pockets. Remembering how the woman back in the boarding house had mentioned being often molested by men in the area, Victoria did not think this boded well for her entering the pub, and before they had reached the door, she had removed a hairpin from her head to hide in one hand, while the other was tucked tightly around her purse in her dress pocket.

Luckily, as things would have it, it proved unnecessary for them to go inside. Just as they were heading to the door, a young man was flung outside into the courtyard at their feet.

“If you don’t have the money to pay for your drink, don’t come here, Dickie!” yelled the thrower, who then marched back into the pub and slammed the door.

On the ground, a youth groaned, having fallen badly when flung outside. Blood trickled down his lip from a broken nose and he was taking his time getting back up.

“Dickie Grace?” Bainbridge asked the fallen individual.

Dickie looked up at them, still making soft moaning sounds.

“Who wants to know?” he growled, though there was not much heart in the noise.

Fate had truly been kind to them that day. Their suspect had literally fallen at their feet. Bainbridge grinned at his niece.

“I say, Vicky, why don’t you help the young man to sit on that broken cart while I go inside and get him something medicinal to aid his nose. It’s the least we can do.”

Dickie narrowed his eyes at them, not sure what was going on, but also too drunk, and in too much pain, to give it deep thought.

“Who are you?” he asked as Victoria stepped towards him.

“Just consider us Good Samaritans,” Victoria informed him. “Ones who are very interested in mermaids.”

Chapter Twelve

Dickie Grace was an ugly sort of fellow. The type who had the face of a criminal, if such a thing was possible. Another way of putting it would be that he had a face only a mother could love, and it was debatable if Mother Grace much cared for him either.

Once propped up on the broken cart that was leaning against the wall with one wheel fallen off, he took a good long look at Victoria through his bloodshot eyes. He had a narrow face that petered to a point around his mouth, causing his already rickety teeth to jumble around his jawline. You might fancy that someone had squashed his head in a vice at some point, that was the sort of appearance he gave. He had a mean glint to his eyes and a calculating expression. Even through his drunken haze, and the pounding in his nose, he was already assessing Victoria and realising that one of his saviours was a rather beautiful and elegantly dressed woman.

He had no shame in ogling her, taking in every line of her outfit without any concern for how it might make her feel. Victoria had the unhappy thought that he was probably also thinking about how she looked without her clothing on. She gave him a sharp punch on the arm.

“Ow!”

“Have some manners,” Victoria declared to him.

“I haven’t said anything!”

“Your eyes were saying a lot!” Victoria retorted. “Maybe you should try to spend less time looking, and more time considering what just occurred.”

Dickie huffed.

“The landlord is always getting a bee in his bonnet about things,” he shrugged his shoulders. “I am good for the money, just not today.”

“And how, precisely, are you good for the money, now that your pickpocket scheme has fallen to pieces?”

Dickie’s face suddenly crumbled into a look of alarm.

“What did you say?”

“Oh,” Victoria took a closer look at his expression, trying to determine if what he was saying was truthful or a good pretence. She could not be sure either way. “You are unaware of what has befallen Mr Hallet?”

Before the youth could answer, Bainbridge had reappeared with a pint of beer and a wet cloth. The latter he gave to Dickie to press to his nose and ease some of the bleeding. It was cold enough to have the effect of stemming the blood flow. When Dickie reached out his other hand for the beer glass, Bainbridge looked at him in surprise.

“This is for me,” he declared and took a deep sip. “Not bad. Considering the location, The Old Man supplies a rather fine beverage.”

Dickie looked disgruntled but there was not much he could say. His thoughts now swung back to what Victoria had just told him.

“Did you say something has happened to John?”

“He appears not to know,” Victoria remarked to her uncle.

Bainbridge dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief.

“How curious. And here I was, certain he would be fully aware of the calamity.”

“Has he been arrested?” Dickie’s eyes widened and panic swept over him.

Victoria was now convinced he was not acting. He really did not know what had happened to Hallet.

“I can safely say he has not been arrested, though he is technically in the care of the police,” Victoria stated. “Mr Hallet was murdered last night.”

Dickie’s mouth fell open, revealing that the remainder of the teeth in his head were in just as bad a state as the one’s they had already seen.

“Dead?”

“Strangled,” Bainbridge took another sup of his beer. “I thought you would know, seeing as you went to visit him last night.”

“I never killed him,” Dickie declared, his mind spinning. “I was just popping by to give him his share of our takings, and to discuss what we were going to do next.”

“The mermaid scheme,” Victoria nodded her head. “That has been quite profitable for you both.”

Dickie blushed as he realised how obvious he had been.

“You know all about that too?”

“Not exactly hard to work out,” Bainbridge answered. “Your friend kept his fish tail and wig in his wardrobe, and the police found them when they were looking around for clues as to who killed him.”

Dickie gulped hard.

“Do they know about me?”

“Not yet,” Bainbridge replied. “We only discovered your name this evening.”

“And, who are you?”

Bainbridge grinned at him.

“I am so glad you asked. My name is Colonel Bainbridge, this is my niece, Victoria Bovington, and we are private detectives tasked with discovering who killed Mr Hallet.”

“Private detectives?” Dickie had clearly never heard of such a thing.

“What time did you leave Mr Hallet last night?” Victoria changed the subject.

“I don’t really know,” Dickie shrugged. “I don’t keep track of the time. It was late, probably somewhere close to midnight.”

“And you had just been chatting?” Bainbridge pressed him.

“Why would we do anything else? We had just finished up our latest game… erm…”

“We know all about poor Mr Dugoni, and him losing business because of you,” Victoria told him sternly. “No need to play coy.”

Dickie sighed.

“That pitch dried up faster than we thought it would. We had hoped to get another week out of things near that barge, but once the restaurant closed up, there was no point hanging around. We were deciding where to try next last night, while taking stock of our earnings.”

“Earnings,” Victoria huffed. “That is rich.”

Dickie was unmoved, his brain too busy focusing on what they had just told him.

“Someone murdered John, after I left?”

“It would seem so,” Bainbridge responded. “Hallet was strangled with a thin cord, not without putting up quite the fight, I might add.”

Dickie had lost the colour from his face, he was pressing the cloth tight to his nose.

“I’m a dead man,” he said in a bleak voice.

“No, you are most definitely alive,” Victoria retorted. “That is why you are bleeding so profusely.”

“You don’t get it,” Dickie snarled at her. “If they killed John, they will come for me too. I have to get out of here.”

He was about to jump off the cart and disappear. Bainbridge put out his walking stick, pressing it into the man’s belly to keep him where he was.

“Not so fast, who is likely to come after you?”

Dickie pulled a face at him. Had he been a braver youth he might have shoved the colonel out of the way, it would not have taken much effort, but Dickie Grace was a coward down to his core, and did not want to get into a fight, even with an elderly man and his niece.

“Mr Yardarm,” he declared. “He runs all the local pickpocket operations around the city. He is a fence first and foremost, but everyone knows if you want to steal in this town, you have to sell your stuff through him, and he takes his cut. Else he gets angry.”

“And you decided to cut him out,” Victoria understood.

“Selling the stuff ourselves brought in better profits!” Dickie declared as if it must be obvious. “And every penny counts in business.”

“This is hardly a business,” Victoria growled at him again.

Dickie was not listening.

“Never thought Mr Yardarm would go this far. Just thought he would warn us off, maybe get us beaten up. To kill John…” Dickie became despondent.

“This Mr Yardarm, has he threatened you?” Bainbridge asked.

“Repeatedly,” Dickie responded. “He said he would have someone break our fingers if we did not start bringing our goods to him. He did not like how successful we were.”

“Your scheme was certainly inventive,” Victoria responded.

“Thank you,” Dickie preened at the praise. “I can’t take the credit. John came up with the notion. Said he had seen this performer once, when he went to the seaside years ago, acting the part of a mermaid out at sea. People were all gawping at him, and then someone realised their pockets had been picked. John thought it was a clever idea.”

“Harder to pull off when you are inland, with only rivers to access,” Bainbridge observed.

“It wasn’t so bad. We made a little raft that John could swim under to bring him to a good spot. Like one of those diving bells. It was hollow and domed, so it kept the air inside, and John could swim beneath it without splashing and being seen. Other places, we could use old docks or such things, instead.”

“You put a lot of effort into the affair,” Bainbridge replied.

“It was paying us a good profit, so why not?” Dickie smiled at the memory. “We bought some nice trinkets from the scheme.”

“But you did not think to appease Mr Yardarm?” Victoria suggested. “It might have been wisest. Though, why I am suggesting such a thing as wisdom to a man who made a career out of robbing people?”

“Mr Yardarm is only powerful because he has people to enforce things for him. I said we could do better than him, and ultimately take over from him,” Dickie’s mind flicked to those words he had said so glibly in the comfort and safety of Hallet’s room.

He had grown cocky. They had both grown cocky, and then this had happened. He could hardly believe it had occurred, that Yardarm had gone so far. All he knew, was that he would be a dead man as well if he did not get away as fast as possible – and yet, where would he go?

“Look, you have to protect me!” he turned to his two unlikely saviours.

“Us?” Victoria was appalled.

“Yes! You are clearly well-off. You can hide me somewhere Yardarm would not dare to look! If I keep hanging around these streets, he will find me soon enough, and I will be doomed! I don’t want to die, please!”

He clasped his hands before him to beg, dropping the handkerchief from his nose. Victoria was repulsed by the sight of the man’s bloody, ugly face and the cringing expression it bore. She took a pace back.

“We are under no obligation to protect you, Mr Grace. You have made the bed you must lie in,” Bainbridge said stiffly. “Had you actually murdered Mr Hallet, we would have been forced to take you into custody to present you to the police. But that is not the case. In fact, your best option would be to walk to the police station and present yourself to Inspector Dougal as the partner in Mr Hallet’s scheme.”

“But, I will go to prison!” Dickie cried.

“Better than being dead,” Bainbridge responded. “If you really fear for your safety, then it would be your best chance. You can tell the police about this Mr Yardarm and have them deal with him.”

“He has contacts with the police, how do you think he avoids being arrested?” Dickie glared at them. “I can’t believe you even suggested something so stupid!”

Bainbridge was not inclined to discuss the matter further, they had what they desired from Dickie Grace; a further lead in the mystery of Hallet’s death.

“Well, where do we find this Mr Yardarm?” Victoria asked her uncle.

“I have no idea,” Bainbridge responded.

“I thought you knew every underworld place this city had,” Victoria said, amused.

“Just the ones that serve beer,” Bainbridge chortled.

Dickie glanced between the two of them, bemused at everything he had heard and struggling to comprehend that his two helpers had now simply abandoned him.

“That’s it? You don’t care what becomes of me?”

“Not particularly,” Bainbridge replied. “We are here to investigate who killed Mr Hallet, and if you are absolutely sure it was not you, then we have nothing more to discuss.”

“Of course it was not me!” Dickie yelled.

Bainbridge nodded his head.

“As I feared, and so there is nothing more for us to do. Here, why don’t you finish this, it is all paid for.”

Bainbridge handed him his half full pint glass. Dickie stared at the drink, unsure what to say. His whole world had been rocked, and the revelations of the danger he was facing had made him unhappily sober. He finally decided that his only option was to drown his sorrows, like he always did, and chugged back the beer.

Bainbridge and Victoria were already walking away.

“Do you think he might be murdered?” Victoria asked as they left, a pang of conscience coming over her.

“If I said yes, would you want to bring him back to our house to be under our protection?”

Victoria shuddered at the thought.

“No,” she said firmly.

“That’s what I thought. For the moment, I am not inclined to imagine Dickie is in danger. It is nearly a whole day since his companion was killed and he is still walking around freely. I think if Mr Yardarm wanted him dead, he would have had him murdered by now.”

“Then why did Mr Yardarm have Hallet killed?”

“A good question, and one only the man himself can answer. I think I know someone who can point us in his direction.”

They were making their way back through the narrow passage, which had grown darker since they had first walked through it. Victoria hated how tight it seemed, and her only consolation was that at least no one could accost her easily without her seeing them coming. Bainbridge did not seem to have the same qualms. He emerged on the other side and checked his pocket watch.

“We shall have to travel a little way to meet my contact. Is your car sufficiently fuelled?”

“I always keep her topped up,” Victoria replied. “And I have a spare bottle of petroleum stashed away.”

“It is a ‘she’ now, is it?”

Victoria knew her uncle was chuckling to himself.

“Ships are always female. I see no reason a car should be any different.”

“I don’t think coaches have a gender,” Bainbridge was still amused.

“Coaches are a different matter, they are just a box drawn by horses. Ships and cars travel by their own volition.”

“And so they require being assigned a sex?”

Victoria scowled at him.

“Must you always ask so many questions?”

“I was merely curious,” Bainbridge replied, pretending to be hurt though his amusement denied it.

“Just tell me where to drive us to next,” Victoria declared, hopping up into the car.

Bainbridge followed suit, though with far less elegance and speed. Then he was pointing out the way to go, and they began their search for the elusive and dangerous Mr Yardarm.

Chapter Thirteen

Bainbridge knew some quite curious people. This was especially true when he was investigating cases that took him into the criminal territory of Norwich.

Mr Portobello was one such curious individual. With his stark white hair, which stood out from the sides of his head, and his hunched back, he was like the pixie in some grim fairytale that spun straw into gold.

It was an unfair assessment, as Victoria swiftly discovered, for the man was actually a very nice fellow who had a passion for cats. His home was filled with them, mostly strays who came to his residence to have food and drink, and the warmth of his small fire. In this kingdom of cats, he was quite the king and seemed completely happy in his realm.

Mr Portobello was one of those people whose work tends to take them to the edge of what is legal without ever actually crossing into the criminal. That was why he knew the sort of people the police would be interested in, but who they could not touch due to a lack of evidence. If Mr Portobello were asked, he could probably supply them with that evidence, but he was not the sort of person who would rat out his friends and so, unless someone was causing harm to another person or, worse, an animal, he kept out of their business and his mouth shut.

His only exception was Bainbridge because they had an understanding. Bainbridge had helped him out years ago, when some of his cats started to disappear and Mr Portobello had no one else to turn to. He had learned about Bainbridge through a friend of a friend and approached him, begging for help, while explaining he had no means of paying for it.

Bainbridge, as always, was happy to help a person in need for free and delved into the case on Mr Portobello’s behalf. He had discovered the cats were being lured away and captured by a gang running a dog fighting ring. Sadly, many of the animals had already perished, but Bainbridge was able to save the remainder and had made sure that the ring could not continue. Mr Portobello had been eternally grateful, and for that reason, he readily agreed to supply Bainbridge with information whenever he needed it.

Now they sat in his cosy home, surrounded by cats, while Mr Portobello fussed about trying to find his teapot so he could make them tea. He eventually discovered it tucked behind a dirty white cat. The teacups were similarly found beneath other felines, and Victoria knew at once that she would not be drinking anything that was poured into those receptacles.

“What can I do for you, Bainbridge?” Portobello asked as he set a kettle to boil and did his best to remove cat hair from his teacups.

“I am looking for a man called Mr Yardarm,” Bainbridge replied.

“You don’t want to go looking for him,” Portobello shook his head. “Not a nice fellow, not nice at all.”

“We need to find him, unfortunately. He may be responsible for a young man’s death.”

“Oh dear,” Mr Portobello paused in his efforts to improve his porcelain. “That is a very sad thing indeed. I don’t like people being hurt, Colonel.”

“I know, Jeremiah, and it is truly a sad affair. The young man was strangled in his room, and the likelihood seems it was at the orders of Mr Yardarm.”

“You won’t get much from him, that I can tell you,” Portobello shook his head. “The man is a closed book, never says anything to anyone. The police have tried to pin him for numerous crimes over the years without success.”

“I hold out some hope I might be able to persuade him to talk to me,” Bainbridge responded, though he was fully aware that was a very slim hope indeed.

Portobello thought about things for a while, then he came to a decision.

“I can point you in the direction of Yardarm, but I am not sure I can do it in good conscience. Perhaps you would care to tell me more about this matter, before I decide whether to send you into the lion’s den or not.”

“That is a fair compromise,” Bainbridge agreed.

“I am investigating the death of John Hallet, a rather enterprising pickpocket, who seems to have fallen foul of Mr Yardarm due to ignoring the unwritten rule in this city that all pickpockets must fence their goods through him.”

“That sounds like Yardarm,” Portobello nodded. “Never heard of this Mr Hallet, though.”

“You perhaps would know his associate better, Dickie Grace?”

Portobello gave a dismissive snort.

“I know him, sort of child that throws stones at cats. Never had anything to do with him, except to chase him away a few times.”

“He was working with Mr Hallet and is now convinced he shall be next on Mr Yardarm’s list of people to be dealt with.”

“I shall not shed a tear if he were to end up in the river,” Portobello sniffed. “Still, people can’t go around killing other people. The world will come to trouble if such a thing were allowed. I suppose I ought to tell you how to find him.”

Portobello still looked unconvinced and was glad of the distraction of the whistling kettle. He spent several moments longer than necessary filling the teapot, so he could consider exactly what he was being asked to do, and whether he would agree.

“Did Mr Hallet have family?”

“He had a very dear friend who is bereft by his loss,” Bainbridge explained. “I do not know more about his family.”

Portobello blew out his cheeks and finally gave in.

“Look, to find Mr Yardarm, your best bet is to go with someone who works with him and can lead you to his location. He moves around a lot because it is better that way.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Bainbridge concurred.

“I shall send out a message that you need someone to show you to him, and I shall get you a guide. I have people who owe me a favour or two, who will be willing to help.”

“Thank you, Jeremiah, I do really appreciate this.”

Portobello looked as though he had signed Bainbridge’s death warrant, but he said no more. The tea was at last ready, and he handed them each a cup. Victoria looked at hers, which was swimming with cat hair, and tried not to gag. Bainbridge made no indication that he had noticed the condition of the tea and gulped his down without hesitation.

Mr Portobello departed for a while, saying he would seek out a guide for them. He left them with the cats, and Victoria discovered it was simple enough to give one of the creatures her cup of tea to finish for her.

“Is it wise to seek out this Yardarm fellow?”

“Wisdom does not come into it. This is about necessity. The fellow can help us, at the least, and he may be the killer of poor Hallet.”

“And if he is, what precisely are we going to do about it?”

Victoria carefully moved a cat that was trying to sit on her lap, noticing her gloves were now covered in its fur.

“I haven’t determined that yet,” Bainbridge replied to her question. “It very much depends on what we discover when we speak to Mr Yardarm, but that is a matter we shall consider later.”

“If we have no evidence he killed Hallet, we can do nothing.”

“You are quite correct, and it may be a case that we discover the truth without being able to do anything about it, such things do occur. But we shall never know unless we try.”

Victoria was unconvinced by this, but her uncle seemed quite confident in his assessment. They waited for a while longer, before Mr Portobello returned with a young woman behind him.

“This is Rosie,” he informed them, indicating the woman, who was probably around the same age as Victoria. “She knows where Mr Yardarm is and is willing to take you to him.”

Bainbridge rose and gave a gentlemanly bow to Rosie.

“Delighted to meet you,” he said. “And I much appreciate you helping us.”

Rosie said nothing, her eyes flicking to Mr Portobello, looking like one of his cats who was wary of being kicked. There was something slightly feral about her demeanour. Victoria found herself feeling for her pocket once again, and confirming her purse was still safe and sound.

“We best get going,” Rosie said in a low voice. “He will only be drinking at the place I last saw him for a little while.”

She turned towards the door, not waiting to see if they followed her. Mr Portobello gave them one last nod as they departed, a worried look on his face that did not fill Victoria with confidence. Bainbridge was in his element, however, and seemed quite delighted to be on this adventure.

“Tell me, Rosie, how do you come to know Mr Yardarm?” he asked the woman as they walked.

Rosie gave him a glare that implied questions were not part of this arrangement, then she conceded to speak to him.

“He knows my pa.”

“Ah, a family friend!”

Rosie gave a huff and started to move faster, so that Bainbridge had to hasten to keep up and was too out of breath to ask her any further questions.

They moved into the dark streets and back alleys of this area of the city, Rosie their flitting guide to the winding and twisting labyrinth. Victoria had a terrible thought that they would never be able to find their way out again and could imagine herself lost in this place for hours.

Bainbridge showed no similar signs of concern, but then he never did. He took things as they came and rarely thought about how they might go wrong. He drove Victoria insane in that regard.

They finally came to a tiny building that abutted the back of an old warehouse. Lights burning in the windows were the only hint that it was occupied. There was no sign to indicate its purpose, but from the number of voices within, and the smell of booze and smoke on the air, it seemed to be an unlicensed pub.

Rosie paused just outside the door.

“He is in there, at least that’s where he last was,” she informed them before she disappeared as quickly as she had arrived.

“Delightful young lady,” Bainbridge observed. “Such a talker, couldn’t get a word in edgeways.”

Smiling to himself, he tapped politely on the door of the building, which had the immediate effect of causing the people within to fall silent. Victoria’s stomach turned over at the sudden doom-laden silence. She glanced around her, half expecting someone to jump out at them and cosh them over the heads.

Nothing like that happened. Instead, someone walked to the door and opened it very carefully, until just a fraction of light filtered in through the crack. The face at the doorway was that of a man, who looked as badly fed as the rest of the population in this area. He took a long look at the newcomers, assessing them, and clearly deciding they were not what he had expected at all.

“We are wishing to speak to Mr Yardarm,” Bainbridge informed him.

The man opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. He closed the door in their faces, and they heard his feet retreating inside.

“I imagine this is an illegal gambling den,” Bainbridge observed to his niece. “Hence the great need for caution about who is allowed to enter. No doubt there is a special knock for those in the know, and I am not one of them.”

Victoria was glancing around her, anxious that they were out in the open and exposed to who knew what danger. She pulled her arms around herself and tried to pretend she was not afraid. What would her mother say if she knew where she was right at that moment?

Feeling unsettled by the sudden thought of her mother’s disdain, she was glad when the door opened again and distracted her.

“Mr Yardarm says he wants to see you,” the man at the door informed them.

He still looked as if he didn’t trust them, but he allowed them to enter the building which was barely bigger than a shed. It was filled with one large table, which was constructed from a barrel with a wooden plank across the top. Around it sat five men, who were gambling on a game of cards and smoking relentlessly. The smoke drifted into the air and was choking to the newcomers. Victoria was close to coughing.

“So, you want to see me?”

At the far side of the table sat an older man wearing a smartly cut yellow tweed suit. He had an extravagant moustache and a sinister smile that revealed neat white teeth. Mr Yardarm did not look a criminal, as such, he had an aura of respectability around him, but there was something about the way he looked at a person that told you more than his appearance. He was calculating as he studied them, working them out.

“Good evening, Mr Yardarm, yes, I am looking for you. I do apologise for disturbing your game of cards,” Bainbridge, as ever, was polite as polite could be.

He believed you got more with a carrot than a stick and fancied you could diffuse most dangerous situations by a cheerful and polite manner.

Mr Yardarm took a good long look at him, his eyes narrowing. He might have been more suspicious if it was not for the presence of Victoria, who looked quite the quintessential genteel English lady. He could not fathom what these two might want from him.

“If you want to talk we best go into my office,” he stated, rising and moving away from the table. “Game’s over lads.”

His command had the other card players getting up and departing, some taking up handfuls of coins, while others removed the cards they had been playing with. The only people left after they were gone was Mr Yardarm and the man who had opened the door to them in the first place.

“Now we can talk,” Yardarm smiled at them in an unfriendly manner. “What do you want with me?”

“It is really quite simple,” Bainbridge smiled back. “I want to ask you about a young man it appears you had murdered.”

Chapter Fourteen

Victoria could have sworn she had not noticed the young man behind her moving, yet some instinct she did not know she had suddenly kicked in, and she spun just as he was about to grab her arms, stabbing him through the hand with the hatpin she had been carrying ever since they left the pub. He bellowed in pain and astonishment as she jabbed at him with such force he feared the pin might go completely through his hand and come out the other side. Before he could do anything else, Victoria kicked him as hard as she could in the shin, and then shoved him with both hands, sending him toppling backwards, where he cracked his head against a stool and fell to the ground unconscious.

Yardarm observed this little performance unmoved.

“I appear to have underestimated you two.”

“She went to a girls’ school,” Bainbridge said in way of explanation. “Amazing what they teach them these days.”

“Quite, I shall bear that in mind, in future,” Yardarm settled himself back down in the chair he had so recently left. “I suppose I brought that on myself.”

“We were being nice,” Victoria snapped at him. “There was no call for your goon to set upon us.”

“He reacted a little pre-emptively, I admit, but you had just accused me of murder,” Yardarm gave her a hurt look. “That was rather uncalled for too.”

“Not if you are guilty of what we have just stated,” Bainbridge responded.

He made his way to one of the chairs near the makeshift table and sat down.

“That is better, we walked such a long way to find you.”

“Oh dear, ought I to be easier to discover,” Mr Yardarm sneered.

“If you were, I dare say we would not be in this situation, considering the police would be glad to locate you.”

Mr Yardarm snorted.

“They have nothing on me. Just rumours and speculation.”

“That is sometimes all they need, but, no matter. I want to talk to you about a young man named Mr John Hallet.”

“What about him?” Yardarm asked.

Before he could answer, Victoria spoke.

“Is there a little brandy about? I have had quite the evening and could do with something to take the edge off.”

“My dear, since when did you become a drinker?” her uncle clucked at her.

“Since my dear uncle insists on taking me into dens of thieves and I have to knock a man unconscious. Also, I do not think I can take back that hatpin. It is going to be covered in blood, and I shall never be able to use it again in good faith.”

Yardarm narrowed his eyes at her, then he gave a laugh.

“This is a very novel occasion for me, never had the likes of you come hunting for me before. If the lady would like a brandy, I can arrange that.”

He rose from his seat yet again and went to a stack of boxes near the corner of the room. He removed a bottle and showed it to her. It was labelled as being a high-quality brandy, the sort you might find in a fine gentleman’s home. Mr Yardarm then found her a glass and poured her a measure.

“Didn’t take you for a brandy man,” Bainbridge observed.

“I can only take so much beer and gin, after a while I want something smoother.”

He handed the drink to Victoria, and she politely thanked him, before taking a sip.

“Now, let’s get back to this business of me killing someone, shall we?” Yardarm sat for the second time.

“Yes, let’s get this over and done with,” Bainbridge agreed. “John Hallet was murdered in his room last night, strangled to death, and his associate, Dickie Grave, believes you are likely to be responsible.”

“Oh, Dickie does, does he?” Yardarm chuckled. “That little fellow thinks he knows everything. He has been a thorn in my side for many a year.”

“Then you do have a grievance against him?” Bainbridge pressed him.

“A grievance against Dickie, not against this Hallet fellow.”

Yardarm gave a shrug and poured himself a glass of brandy.

“Are you saying you had nothing to do with the death of Mr Hallet?”

Yardarm pulled a face.

“Yes, I am.”

“But you knew about their pickpocketing scheme?” Victoria asked.

“Yes, of course I did. It was quite the setup. I liked the notion, though a little fanciful for my tastes. I like the classics, you know? Having my lads work the races, or the old preacher in the square distraction. Still, got to admire their ingenuity.”

“They were cutting you out of their takings,” Bainbridge reminded him.

“That was inconvenient,” Yardarm agreed. “But it was not the end of the world and not something I would have a man murdered over. Not sure who gave you the idea I was prone to having people killed, but I have never ordered anything of the sort. I am a peaceable fellow, and I prefer not to cross the line into murder if I can help it.”

“Dickie Grace seemed convinced you would commit murder if you had to,” Victoria said gruffly.

“Dickie Grace is an idiot who thinks more highly of himself than he deserves. He worked for me for a time, but he was always trying to sneak extra from his share. I had to let him go.”

“You just, let him go?” Victoria queried incredulously.

“Well, some of my fellows might have had a word or two with him. They can get rather protective of me, but that is not my fault, is it?”

“Who will rid me of this quarrelsome priest?” Bainbridge paraphrased. “A suggestion, but not an order. I see how things work with you, Mr Yardarm.”

Yardarm grinned at him.

“In any case, I had nothing to do with Hallet’s death,” Yardarm persisted. “I was actually thinking I might try to recruit him at some point. Clever fellow, really. Bit theatrical, perhaps, but certainly had the police looking the other way, oblivious to what he was up to. That’s half the secret of it all, of course, misdirection.”

“Are you sure you might not have hinted to one of your colleagues about wanting something done about him,” Bainbridge suggested.

“Quite sure,” Yardarm promised him. “Though, I suppose it is hard for you to believe me. I am just a terrible old rogue, aren’t I?”

He chuckled happily to himself.

“You should not be so glib about a man’s death,” Victoria scolded him. “It is a terrible thing. No one should have their lives snatched from them.”

Yardarm took a good look at her.

“Just precisely why are you two out here in the slums asking me questions? Shouldn’t you be at a dance somewhere?” he pointed at Victoria. “And you look like you should be sleeping beside a fireplace.”

This last he directed at Bainbridge, and it was clearly meant as an insult, though Bainbridge took it as a compliment.

“I must admit I do like my hearthside in the evenings but needs must. Mr Hallet’s friends are very distraught by what has occurred, and I promised I would help them discover the truth.”

Yardarm raised an eyebrow, baffled by the pair.

From the floor came a small groan, and it seemed the goon Victoria had knocked out was rousing.

“You must be able to tell me something about this affair,” Bainbridge persisted. “You have to have been keeping an eye on Hallet, just in case he started to interfere with your business?”

“You think me that cunning?”

“I know it. You had someone watching Hallet to know what he was about. You would have made a move as soon as you felt he was doing something that would damage your own work.”

Yardarm’s grin had returned, but he said nothing.

“Tell me who was watching him, and let me speak to them, maybe they saw something that night,” Bainbridge persisted.

“I don’t see why I should help you,” Yardarm sneered. “Why would I put myself in such peril?”

Victoria was moving across the floor, heading to the downed fellow. She was feeling a tad guilty about what she had done. She had reacted out of fear but had not meant to seriously hurt him. When his eyes flickered open, and he looked up at her, his first instinct was to snarl and clasp his hands around her throat.

Before he could, Victoria offered him the remains of her brandy.

“Sorry I knocked you cold.”

The man stared at her, bemused by this statement.

“You took me by surprise, that’s all. Here, I shall remove the hatpin.”

Ignoring the sounds of protest coming from behind him as his niece set to removing the hatpin from the fallen thug, Bainbridge continued to badger Mr Yardarm.

“If you are innocent in all this, helping me is a sensible way to go about things. It will prove your innocence better than anything.”

“Prove my innocence to whom?” Yardarm snorted. “I do not believe I have to prove myself to anyone.”

“You will prove it to me and that is a very wise thing. I appreciate I do not look particularly intimidating, and you might suppose I am here at your mercy, but I have a far longer reach than you might imagine, and I would not be afraid to use it to bring you down. Now, I would prefer not to become involved in all this, the way I see things, if you were to be removed, someone would just fill your place, and I am not here to help out thieves. Therefore, you assist me, and I am quite prepared to leave you well alone.”

“You are threatening me?” Yardarm laughed in amusement. “An old man and a feeble girl!”

“A feeble girl who knocked out your guard,” Bainbridge pointed out. “And an old man who has some friends in dubious places. Friends even you would not care to upset.”

Yardarm was going to laugh again, but something in Bainbridge’s tone made him hesitate. He glanced behind the colonel to where Victoria was assisting his guard onto a stool and fussing around his hand. The man was simpering and looked close to blubbing as she nursed and consoled him.

He had never seen one of his men act that way before. It was as if something about the sudden danger these two innocuous looking people brought with them was more terrifying than if they had rushed in with an army of policemen.

“I merely want to find the real killer,” Bainbridge persisted. “You would be best off to assist me in that regard.”

“Stop telling me what I would be best off doing,” Yardarm snapped.

Bainbridge sat back in his chair with a look of, ‘well, I tried,’ and that made things all the worse. It was like he knew something Yardarm did not, and it gave the fence chills. The more he thought about it, the crazier it seemed that these two would have come here all alone. Just walked into a den of thieves, without a thought for their safety.

It occurred to him that this was all a bluff, that outside there must be others waiting for the right cue to strike. There would be men with guns and wooden bats, ready to break his arms and legs.

This was a trap, a setup he had waltzed right into because it had seemed so extraordinary. The bumbling old man and his pretty niece, who had just happened to find him. He had thought they were idiots, the gormless sort of dolts that do mindlessly stupid things because they have no concept of the real harm the world can do them.

But the girl had knocked down a man he had seen hold off a trio of attackers with nothing more than his fists, and the old man was sitting there looking so calmly confident.

Yardarm found himself starting to sweat. His eyes flicked to the shuttered windows of the room. How many assailants were out there, waiting in the shadows for him? And here he was, having sent all his men away, thinking this was a joke, a bit of fun. Never realising the danger.

Yardarm flinched at the thought of what might be awaiting him when he left the shed if he did not help these two.

“Look, if I assist you, I want a promise no harm is going to come to me,” he said to Bainbridge.

The colonel had lost interest a few moments ago and had been idly checking his pocket watch, debating whether he would have hot tea or cocoa when he got home. This had unnerved Yardarm further, as he thought it indicated the man had given his subordinates a time for when to attack if he did not give some prearranged signal. It was the sort of thing Yardarm would do.

Now convinced there was a dozen men lurking outside with brickbats and other weapons, he hastened to appease his unexpected guests.

“No harm will befall you,” Bainbridge said, putting away his watch. “I already stated that.”

Yardarm nodded his head, looking relived by the confirmation.

“Just remember that I was helpful to you, I want no trouble.”

“And I shall give no trouble.”

Behind them, they could hear Victoria arguing lightly with the goon about who should take the hatpin. Victoria was reluctant to have it back, but the thug was determined to return it to her.

“Look, the fellow you want is called Stephens. I have had him watching Hallet for the last week. He reports back regularly to me. If anyone saw what happened to the man that night, it would be him.”

“And how do I find Stephens?” Bainbridge asked.

“Well, it is more a case of him finding you. He doesn’t have a fixed address.”

Bainbridge shook his head.

“Not good enough, I am not telling you my address, for you to send him to me as you please. We need to arrange a meeting, right now, and you shall take me to him.”

Yardarm’s eyes widened, his mind flicking to all those imagined assailants lurking outside. He gulped and then nodded his head.

“Look, here is what I shall do. I shall send Eddie out to find him and bring him here.”

Eddie was the goon who had taken Victoria’s hatpin to the hand.

Bainbridge considered this suggestion.

“The problem I have with that, is Eddie might go off and simply round up more of your men to descend on us here. I really do not want this to turn into a brawl, it would be most inconvenient.”

“Of course, of course!” Yardarm held up his hands, trying to express how he would never do such a thing. “How about this, your niece goes with Eddie and finds Stephens?”

Bainbridge frowned, before he could protest this notion Yardarm added.

“Eddie will ensure her safety, I swear on my life.”

“Any harm comes to Victoria, I shall have to do something most disagreeable,” Bainbridge said calmly, though he had no real idea of what that might be.

Yardarm’s imagination quickly filled in the blanks.

“No, I understand. Eddie will watch over her. Right, Eddie?”

Eddie nodded his head keenly. He was already smitten with Victoria and would vow to watch over her with his life if necessary. No woman had ever knocked him out before, and then graciously wrapped his hand in a handkerchief and given him brandy. She had not stopped apologising either, and he fancied he was a touch in love with her.

“Eddie, please go with the young lady to find Stephens,” Yardarm added. “Oh, and Eddie, please hurry.”

Chapter Fifteen

Eddie escorted Victoria through the city streets as if she were the Queen of Sheba and he her noble retainer. Any time someone looked at her in a way he did not like, he puffed up his chest and scowled at them until they fled. Victoria rather liked having a bodyguard, it was rather like when she used to walk out on the arm of Sven, and she knew he would take care of her no matter what occurred. He had always been strong and brave, if there had ever been any chance of danger, such as when they came out of the theatre late at night, she had known he would protect her.

Eddie scuttled ahead and motioned her onwards. The night was growing late, and Victoria was feeling the steady exhaustion of their adventures creeping up on her. The excitement of knocking Eddie down had given her a surge, which was now rapidly fading. She would have liked to have been heading home, rather than on the hunt for another witness in their case, but she supposed this was her life now.

Just last night, she had been sitting in a fancy floating restaurant drinking high class coffee, now here she was, prowling the dark, unlit backstreets with a man who, not so long ago, had been trying to grab and restrain her.

She did not trust Eddie, but she did trust his loyalty to Mr Yardarm. She hoped the old fence had not decided to pull a trick on her uncle, and Bainbridge was now in trouble. She trusted the colonel could look after himself, but it was still a troubling thought he might be in peril.

Deeper and deeper they roamed into the night, and Victoria was close to believing this was a ploy to snatch her away, and was thinking of the terrible things a man might do to a woman alone, when Eddie came to a sharp halt before a doorway.

“Pretty sure he is here, miss,” Eddie declared.

He had been ‘pretty sure’ at the last two doors they had stopped at. Both had proven to be empty of Stephens. Victoria dearly hoped this was the last door they would have to knock at. She was beginning to feel the pinch of fear upon her heart, and she desperately wanted to be back with her uncle.

Better still, she would like to be safely in her bed at home.

Eddie rapped on the wooden door, which looked like it might cave under the knocking. A female voice called out from within, asking what he wanted.

“Mr Yardarm needs to see Stephens!” Eddie called.

Apparently, this was a secret code that had everyone opening their doors at once. It had worked at the last two places, if only so someone could declare that Stephens was not inside. It worked here too. The door was swung open and a man stepped out into the darkness.

“What does Mr Yardarm want?” he asked, a tremble in his voice.

Victoria assumed this was Stephens. He looked anxious enough to be the fellow. It occurred to her that the man knew Hallet was dead, which meant he had deliberately failed to report the matter to Yardarm. Now he feared Mr Yardarm had learned the truth and wanted to discuss with him the neglect of his duty.

“You have to come at once,” Eddie said, giving the man no ounce of reassurance.

Looking as if he was heading to his execution, Stephens followed Eddie as he returned to Victoria.

Stephens glanced at her in surprise but was clever enough not to query her presence. He was already in enough trouble for neglecting to tell his master about the dead pickpocket.

“I was going to come over in the morning,” he said to them, as they headed back along the route they had just come. “I swear it. Everything happened so fast, and I was watching the place when the police arrived, so I scarpered. I went back later and poked around, only to learn Hallet was dead. It was getting late by then, and I thought it could all wait until morning.”

Victoria wondered if Stephens had also calculated the delay would result in him being paid for the handful of hours he had waited to report the matter, without actually doing his job. She supposed he was being paid for his act of vigilance. She doubted he did it for nothing, even if he was afraid of Mr Yardarm, he was still in his employ.

Eddie did not care about Stephens’ mumbled excuses. He did not care about the situation at all. He was focused on returning them to Yardarm with Victoria’s safety guaranteed.

Stephens, therefore, pinned his hopes for mercy on Victoria.

“You believe me, don’t you?”

He reached out for her arm to get her attention, and she shook him off furiously.

“Unhand me!”

Eddie spun around on his heel – he had been just a few steps ahead – without saying a word, he grabbed Stephens by the shoulders and slammed him against the nearest wall.

“The only reason I am not knocking your lights out for touching the lady is because it would be a nuisance to have to drag you all the way to Mr Yardarm, got it?”

“Y…yes,” Stephens stuttered, completely bemused by what was going on.

“It is quite all right, Eddie, I am unharmed. I was merely annoyed,” Victoria spoke calmly to defuse the situation.

She had not expected Eddie to react in the way he had.

He stepped back from Stephens, then turned and nodded to Victoria.

“No problem, miss. He gives you any bother, just shout and I shall deal with him.”

Stephens whimpered. Victoria gave him a sympathetic smile, then hastened to follow Eddie, who was marching off again. It seemed to take longer to work their way back to the gambling den than it had taken to search for Stephens. Victoria knew she was completely lost before they finally came to the spot where the single-roomed structure jutted against the warehouse. Had Eddie abandoned her on their journey, she would not have known the first direction to turn.

Stephens was nearly in tears of terror as they arrived at the building and Eddie opened the door. Victoria wanted to console him but was not quite sure what to say or do that would avoid triggering another attack by her guardsman on the poor fellow. She decided it was better to just let things take their course.

After all, it was not her fault Stephens had neglected his duty.

Inside the shed, they found that Bainbridge and Yardarm had come to a companionable understanding and were discussing stories of their youthful adventures over glasses of brandy.

“And then, I turned around and there is this elephant painted with every colour under the sun staring at me with its tiny, enraged eyes! And I said to the corporal next to me, well, it seems we have found the source of our troubles, but heaven help me if I know what to do about it!”

Yardarm laughed heartily as Bainbridge finished one of his army anecdotes. Victoria was never sure if the stories he told were genuine or some fanciful fabrication he made up on the spot to impress people. Either way, they usually worked.

“Mr Yardarm, we found him,” Eddie said proudly from the doorway.

Yardarm looked up. His face was red from laughing and his eyes glistened with tears. He had clearly been enjoying his evening. At the sight of Stephens, all the humour drained from his face, and he rose to his feet to glare at the fellow.

“I had to learn from strangers that the man I sent you to watch is dead!”

Stephens bit at his lip and stumbled towards his employer.

“I… I was going to come over in the morning. It was late when I learned what had happened.”

“I imagine you ran away at the first sight of the police,” Yardarm snorted. “About typical. I gave you a simple job and you failed me.”

“I am so sorry,” Stephens whimpered. “I was going to come, I really was.”

“Now, now, that is not important anymore,” Bainbridge interceded on the behalf of the terrified young man. “We merely want to know what you saw last night when Hallet died.”

“What I saw?” Stephens said in bemusement.

“Or rather, who you saw,” Bainbridge continued. “Who entered the property last night? You must have seen the killer, Mr Stephens.”

No one ever addressed Stephens with an honorific, not since he had left school when he was eight, and the only time his name had been prefixed with ‘mister’ back then was usually when the headmaster wanted to cane him. He stared at Bainbridge, trying to comprehend what was going on.

Much like Yardarm earlier, he was trying to fathom how this aged gentleman, and his pretty niece, had ended up here, commanding all their attention.

“Who did you see enter the boarding house,” Mr Yardarm rephrased the question when Stephens failed to respond at once.

“Oh,” Stephens blinked, trying to refocus. “I saw Dickie Grace.”

“No good, we have already spoken to him, and I am satisfied he is not our killer,” Bainbridge shook his head. “He seemed genuinely surprised that Hallet was dead, and as I have already mentioned, he was the one who declared you were responsible for the act, Mr Yardarm.”

“Disagreeable fellow,” Yardarm growled. “I shall have to have words with him at some point about spreading such filthy lies about me.”

“I would suggest it just be a word, so as to not confirm those filthy lies as truth,” Victoria remarked.

Yardarm gave her a surly look, then remembered his earlier fears. Over the half hour he had come to know Bainbridge, he had managed to shake off some of his concerns, but the old man seemed so blithe and relaxed in his company that he was firmly convinced there must be men waiting outside to come to his aid, should he give the word. No one would be so oblivious to danger otherwise, unless they were so assured of their safety.

“Never mind all that,” Bainbridge interjected. “Did you see anyone else enter the property?”

Stephens frowned.

“I did see someone, but if you are going to ask me who it was, I am going to tell you I don’t know their name.”

“Try harder, Stephens,” Yardarm growled.

Stephens took a deep breath.

“The man I saw was foreign. It was getting late, but I could just make out that he was dark skinned, not like Dickie. He entered the house a few moments after Dickie left. He wasn’t in there very long and then he reappeared. He stopped outside and looked up and down the road. That was when I could see his skin was brown, and he weren’t English. Then he walked off.”

Victoria’s eyes fell on Bainbridge, but he refused to meet her gaze. There was an obvious answer to who Stephens had seen entering the house, but he did not want to speak it.

“Thank you, you have been as helpful as you could be,” Bainbridge responded to him. “I presume you were unaware of any struggle occurring in the property?”

“Nothing bad seemed to have happened,” Stephens shook his head. “Only when the police arrived in the morning did I realise something was amiss. That landlady was screaming murder out of the front door, and someone fetched a constable.”

“And you no doubt legged it as fast as you could,” Yardarm sneered.

Stephens winced.

“Wouldn’t be good to be caught, Mr Yardarm, would it? I should have come straight here, I know I should, but I thought I would find out the full story before I bothered you and…”

“Enough, you are boring me,” Yardarm waved a hand at him to shut him up. “Go home Stephens, it is late.”

Stephens did not need to be told twice. He headed out of the door as fast as he could.

“There, are you satisfied?” Yardarm asked his guests.

“I suppose it is the best we can expect,” Bainbridge shrugged. “Might I impose on your guardsman again to escort us out of this area? It is getting very dark now, and I think it might be wise to have a little protection.”

Yardarm stared at him.

“But… but what about…”

He stopped himself.

“What about what?” Bainbridge asked.

Yardarm did not respond. Stating that he had assumed Bainbridge had guards waiting outside for him would only humiliate him further.

“You came here all alone?” he hissed under his breath.

“Naturally,” Bainbridge responded. “What else did you think?”

Yardarm clenched his fists together, furious he had spent the last couple of hours believing his wellbeing was in danger when the stupid old man before him had really come to face him all alone.

“Escort them out of here, Eddie,” he said, barely able to contain his rage.

Bainbridge smiled at him.

“Thank you for a very interesting evening, I shall hold this in fond memory for some time.”

Yardarm wanted to spit in his eye, but he kept calm as Victoria and Bainbridge left him alone. With the slamming of the door, he sunk into a chair and doused his humiliation with another glass of brandy. No one could ever get word of how scared he had been made to feel by an aging army colonel, who creaked and groaned when he moved from his chair. He was so embarrassed. He did not think he would be able to stomach the shame.

He drank another glass of brandy and tried to pretend he had never met either of them.

Meanwhile, Eddie was good to the word of his master and escorted them back through the alleyways. Bainbridge turned out to have memorised the route back to where they had left the car, surprising Victoria, who had thought they would be completely lost.

Within a short time, they were back at the vehicle, and she realised they had never been as far from the streets she was familiar with as she had first feared.

“Take care, miss,” Eddie said, shuffling his feet and looking reluctant to leave the new love of his life.

“Take care of that hand, Eddie,” Victoria replied. “And, sorry, again.”

“Thanks for the hatpin,” Eddie added. “I don’t know what I shall do with it, but I shall always remember you for it, and if you want to come fetch it at any time, you know where to find me.”

Victoria almost pointed out she had no idea where to find him, then decided it was better she did not.

“Goodbye, Eddie.”

The young man shuffled away into the darkness, while she set about the unappealing task of lighting the lamps of the car.

“You have an admirer,” Bainbridge remarked as he made his way into the vehicle.

It was always difficult to clamber aboard in the dark, with the handholds and seat far harder to make out.

“Oh, shush,” Victoria responded. “What do you make of Stephens’ confession?”

“About a foreign gentleman going to the house after Dickie Grace had gone?” Bainbridge frowned. “It does make one wonder, but before we accuse Mr Hassan, we have to consider that he is the one paying us to investigate this crime.”

“He is indeed,” Victoria nodded. “Which makes me wonder whether it was him, or someone who knew him?”

“A family member, you mean?” Bainbridge paused. “I have considered the possibility. But let us discuss this further tomorrow. Right now, I need my bed.”

Bainbridge yawned as he spoke, revealing his genuine exhaustion. Victoria finished with the lights and climbed into the car. They headed off into the darkness, the slow pace no faster than walking. Before long, Bainbridge’s head was nodding down onto his chest and he was sound asleep, leaving Victoria alone with her thoughts.

She was thinking of Hassan and the sorrow he had seemed to feel for the loss of Hallet. She was also thinking of how he had loved Mr Hallet, and how families could become very angry about such forms of love. Had someone close to Mr Hassan decided to deal with his indiscretions in a final, decisive manner?

That was a question they would have to solve in the morning.

Chapter Sixteen

“I have been thinking,” Bainbridge said when they were at the breakfast table the following morning. “It cannot have been Hassan who killed Hallet.”

Victoria had been mulling over the matter all night, getting very little sleep as a consequence. She glanced up at her uncle.

“Why do you say that?”

“For two reasons that both come back to the fight,” Bainbridge replied. “Hallet put up a considerable battle with his killer, and I cannot imagine the murderer got away unscathed, yet there was no sign on Hassan that he had been in a fight.”

“A good point, but perhaps Hallet did not actually retaliate against his attacker?”

“That is a fair observation,” Bainbridge agreed. “It might be supposed the punch to his face was intended to knock him back while the killer got to work, which leaves us with another problem. Such an action tells us that the killer expected it to be hard to get Hallet in a position where he could strangle him from behind. The perpetrator did not believe Hallet would willingly turn his back on him. That, again, absolves Hassan, a man Hallet trusted.”

“Two reasons why it was not Hassan,” Victoria nodded. “You make a fair case, but we still have Stephens witnessing a foreign gentleman coming to the house. They must have been waiting for Dickie Grace to leave so they could find Hallet alone.”

“We are faced with the possibility that someone from within Hassan’s personal circle was responsible for this crime.”

Victoria nudged her porridge about her bowl. Mrs Huggins had put honey and cream in it again, despite Victoria specifically asking for only water. Her ongoing dietary battles with the housekeeper did not seem likely to come to an end anytime soon.

“You think his father could have done it?”

“Perhaps, or a close relative. I am not sure how much of an extended family Mr Hassan has in this country, but one thing I am sure of, if his parents were to learn of his true relationship with Mr Hallet, it would be considered a great source of shame to them, and something drastic might be done about it.”

“His parents are very religious,” Victoria nodded. “And even an English gentleman’s family might consider doing something similar to avoid a scandal falling upon them.”

“Exactly. We live in a difficult time for such feelings, and though Hassan states his secret was unknown, I find myself doubting that. Mrs Cameron was well aware of the situation, after all.”

“We should speak to Mr Hassan again, lay this new evidence before him, and see what he says.”

“A good idea, Vicky,” Bainbridge agreed. “I have no doubt this will come as a terrible shock to him, but we cannot ignore the matter.”

They finished breakfast and headed on their way back to the coal yard where Hassan worked. They found him in the process of making sure his wagon was ready to make his deliveries. When he saw them, his face filled with a hope they were about to swiftly shatter.

“We have no news for you as yet, Mr Hassan,” Bainbridge said, wanting to ease the blow as quickly as he could. “But we do have some questions.”

Hassan nodded his head in understanding, then he motioned to his wagon.

“I have deliveries to make.”

“Maybe we could ride with you?” Victoria suggested. “Talk as you work?”

Hassan considered this acceptable, and they climbed onto the front bench of his wagon. It was something of a squeeze, but they all managed to make themselves comfortable before Hassan made a clicking noise with his tongue, and flicked the reins, to set off his hard-working horse on his rounds.

“What do you want to ask me?”

“Firstly,” Bainbridge began. “I have to enquire whether you saw Mr Hallet on the night he died.”

This was not the question Victoria thought her uncle was going to ask after their discussion that morning. But when he did ask it, and Hassan felt silent, she knew it was the right question to begin with.

“I was there,” Hassan said softly. “How did you know?”

“It is something of a long story, but Mr Hallet had upset certain people with his illegal activities, and they had stationed someone to watch his home. This watcher witnessed a foreign gentleman enter and leave the house, not long after Dickie Grace departed.”

“Then there is no point denying I was there,” Hassan shook his head. “It was late, but I wanted to see him. I had had a bad day and needed his company. It was nothing more than that. We didn’t fight, and he was alive and well when I left.”

“I believe you,” Bainbridge reassured him. “That leaves us in an awkward position, however, because the person watching the house saw no one else enter or leave, at least by the front door. Is there a back way out of the house?”

“You would have to go through a room occupied by some of Mrs Cameron’s tenants,” Hassan responded.

“Not practical, then,” Bainbridge nodded. “Which brings us to one single conclusion. Someone within that house killed Mr Hallet.”

Hassan made a stifled sob and, for a second, his hands fell loose on the reins.

“Why would they?”

“I don’t know,” Bainbridge admitted.

“Does your family know anything about Mr Hallet?” Victoria asked, deciding that though her uncle had ruled out an intruder it was still a valid consideration.

“My family? No, they would be horrified.”

“Would they do something to Mr Hallet?” Victoria asked.

Hassan was appalled at the question.

“My family are not murderers! They would feel their honour had been impugned and would probably send me back to Persia, where we come from, that is it. I don’t suppose my father would ever speak to me again.”

“They never understand,” Bainbridge said softly. “Love is love.”

Hassan gave a tiny nod of his head, acknowledging the sentiment.

“Then, it must have been someone in that house, but who and why?” Victoria shook her head.

“Did anyone have a grievance against Mr Hallet?” Bainbridge asked.

“Not that I am aware, he kept himself to himself,” Hassan shrugged. “He liked to speak with Mrs Cameron, and he used to flirt with all the women who came to the house. It was his way of deflecting attention. He was a bit of a horror for it, actually. Once or twice, I had to mention he should not get carried away.”

“What sorts of things did he do?” Victoria asked.

“The sort of things he fancied a regular fellow would do,” Hassan replied. “He tried to snatch kisses, grab their hands. A couple of times he got carried away and was a little too intimate when touching them. It meant nothing to him, you see, but it upset them. That was not right. I told him so.”

“You are a man of dignity and honour, Mr Hassan, and your actions demonstrate that. We received a glowing report of your behaviour from the couple who live in the front room of the boarding house.”

“Mr and Mrs Deal,” Hassan nodded his head. “He is out of work and not happy about it. He is a good carpenter, but there was some sort of problem at his last place of employment, and now he is stuck at home, with no money and the sickly baby.”

“The poor thing is teething,” Victoria recalled.

“No, it is unwell,” Hassan responded. “Mrs Deal told me that. She said it needs a doctor, but they do not have the money. I spied her one day in her room weeping, and asked her what the matter was, then she told me. She feared the little one would die and she could see no way of making things better.”

“I am so sorry to hear that,” Bainbridge said quietly, it was never nice to hear of a sick child, especially when there was no hope of help.

“Mrs Deal has a tough time of things. She is pretty and she speaks well, which sets her out from the other women in the neighbourhood. The Deals lived in a better place before he lost his job, and some people think she has airs and graces, but that is not it. She gets pursued a lot by the fellows in the road who think it is a good game to torment her and try to get her attention. I have had to intervene more than once,” Hassan suddenly blushed. “She was one of the women John tried to cuddle. He was imitating the other men he had seen in the street. They had egged him on to do it, when he was a little drunk, and John was always scared if he did not act that way people would suspect him.”

“So he ignored his good manners and decency, and molested Mrs Deal for the sake of keeping face with such men,” Victoria snorted.

“Yes, I am sorry to say that is the truth of the matter,” Hassan responded.

“Mrs Deal was so upset because she thought he was a gentleman, and having to live in the house with him it made her nervous. He scared her a little by how he rushed up behind her and grabbed her. That was why I was so angry with him and told him so. He tried to brush it off, saying he would have done nothing, but that was not the point.”

“Poor Mrs Deal, she would be glad to get out of the neighbourhood,” Victoria sighed.

Her mind had flashed back to the night before, when she had been so nervous walking around the back streets, fearing someone might try to take advantage of her. At least she had Eddie’s protection for part of the night and had then been able to escape home. Mrs Deal had none of that.

“There is no bolt on the door of their room, and no one locks the front door,” Hassan continued. “Mrs Deal gets so nervous when her husband is out looking for work. She is afraid someone will come into the room when he is away, and she will be unable to do anything to stop them.”

“That is truly terrible,” Bainbridge was horrified. “That cannot be allowed to continue.”

“I agree,” Hassan nodded. “I think about if it was my mother placed in such a situation. It is horrible. I told Hallet we should watch out for her. It was only the right thing to do when she is so alone. After a while, I think I convinced him of this, and he agreed he would go and apologise to her at some point. He promised he would never behave in that manner again.”

They became quiet as the horse’s hooves clipped on the cobbles. Hassan brought them to a halt outside a shop and excused himself to make a delivery.

“Do you believe him?” Victoria asked her uncle once he had departed.

“That he just visited Hallet? Yes, I believe him.”

“Why did he lie?”

That was a good question, and when Hassan was back on the bench, Bainbridge broached the topic with him.

“Why did you fail to tell us you saw Hallet on the night he died?”

Hassan dipped his head forward, shame coming over him.

“I was afraid you would think I had done something to him. You already knew about our relationship, I was afraid you would think, because I was capable of that, I would be capable of murder too.”

“Mr Hassan, if you are not already aware that I do not consider what you did a criminal matter, then I am deeply hurt,” Bainbridge huffed. “We would not have suspected you.”

“Except, you did suspect me,” Hassan pointed out.

“We would not have suspected you for long,” Bainbridge corrected himself.

“What are you going to do now?” Hassan asked after a few moments.

“We keep digging,” Victoria assured him. “There will be some solution to this puzzle.”

“Now we know the killer came from inside the house, that opens fresh possibilities, though in this instant I see no motive for the crime,” Bainbridge added.

“Dickie Grace and Mr Yardarm had such good motives,” Victoria sighed. “Maybe we were wrong about Dickie? Oh no, of course, Hassan went into the house after him.”

“And John was alive and well,” Hassan confirmed.

He fell silent, thinking about that night, and wishing he could go back in time and be with his companion yet again. Curled up in his arms, telling him his woes, feeling safe. And yet, not long after that, John had been slain.

“We will unravel this,” Bainbridge placed a hand on Hassan’s arm. “I will find justice for you, and for Mr Hallet.”

“Thank you,” Hassan said, his throat tight with emotion. “Thank you.”

Chapter Seventeen

“We will head back to the house and determine who was around on the night Hallet died and might have had a reason to hurt him,” Bainbridge concluded, after they had had an enjoyable ride on Hassan’s coal cart.

After the emotions that had been stirred up by the talk of Mr Hallet’s death, they had managed to lift Hassan out of his grief temporarily by discussing his work and life as a Muslim in the city of Norwich. He had a number of stories to tell, he had faced more than one form of prejudice in his time, but overall he enjoyed being in the city and living in England. He would not care to go elsewhere.

He delivered them back to Victoria’s car and departed on his next batch of deliveries. There was a heavy look upon his face as he left, a sadness that nothing they could do would ease. The pain in his heart was just too great, but he smiled at them and thanked them again for all their efforts.

Victoria drove back to the boarding house where Hallet had died. It was time to have a good chat with the landlady and determine who might have wished her tenant ill.

“We have more than one motive for the crime,” Victoria observed, as she drove the car. “There is Mr Hallet’s criminal activities, then his relationship with Hassan, and lastly we have the possibility that he upset someone with a jealous nature by his attentions to the women about the street.”

“The irony being that he was endeavouring to protect himself from harm in doing so,” Bainbridge tutted.

“Did you ever do anything like that?” Victoria asked, awkwardly. “I mean, flirt with young ladies to distract people from…”

“I knew what you meant,” Bainbridge said when she faltered. “And, to answer your question, yes, in my younger days I would go to dances and find a lady to partner with. It seemed the natural thing to do, only as I grew older did I realise that it was not truly who I was. I denied who I really was for a long time, Vicky, much longer than Hallet and Hassan. I assumed all men had a tendency to feel as I did, why shouldn’t I, when no one talked about such things and boarding schools unwittingly encourage manly love? In any case, I found myself trying to play the role that was expected of me, and then I joined the army, and it seemed ridiculous.”

“Was there ever anyone other than Houston?” Victoria asked next, wondering if this was a question too far.

Bainbridge took a deep breath.

“I am not sure it is possible to say there really was anything between me and Houston. But no, there was never anyone before who I shared my feelings with in that way. Quite frankly, Vicky, I did not talk about this sort of thing with Houston. We just had an unspoken understanding.”

Victoria frowned, in her experience, unspoken understandings were often different for the respective people involved in them, and what one person thought was meant by it was not the same as what the other thought. But how was she to say what the true relationship between Houston and her uncle had been? Fairchild was dead and could never say what he had felt.

“Did Fairchild ever have female companions?” Victoria asked.

“Houston was a terrible flirt with women,” Bainbridge smirked. “It was part of his detective style, he informed me. But, as for being in a relationship with one, certainly never once he was in England, who knows when he was in America? We all have to follow our own path to know who we truly are.”

Bainbridge paused.

“You are wondering if I am making this all up, that Houston was a regular man, and I am the only odd one here.”

“I never said that.”

“You were thinking it.”

Victoria could not deny it.

“I suppose it is a fair point, when we do not have Houston to discuss the matter with, but I can assure you, Vicky, we shared something. It might not have been dramatic or particularly expressive, but it was special in its own rather stifled way.”

“I believe you,” Victoria promised him, reaching out to lay a hand on his arm. “That is why, when we have done with all this, we must find out more about this Pettigrew affair and finally bring you some resolution.”

Bainbridge nodded his head.

“Houston never gave up on me. He never would have given up on solving my death if I was the one shot. Meeting Hassan, it has reminded me of the intensity of feelings such events bring out, and how it can be painful to seek justice.”

“Yet, seek it we must,” Victoria assured him.

They had reached the road where the boarding house stood and were drawing the attention of the neighbours once more. Victoria made sure the car was safely parked and descended to the pavement. She noted that several people were watching her, as if they anticipated her arrival to signal the appearance of the police for a second day running. She wondered who among the fellows who were idling around and gawking at her were the ones who had molested the unfortunate Mrs Deal. She would like to have a word with them about the way a true gentleman behaved and what she thought about their antics.

Her uncle found his way to the road and hobbled around to join her. Riding on a coal cart had been pleasurable, but he was now starting to feel the stiffness in his joints from being bumped around. The thing had had no suspension, whatsoever.

“Ready to start the next phase of this investigation?” Victoria asked him.

“Always ready, my dear,” Bainbridge assured her. “Onwards and upwards.”

They headed to the front door and were greeted almost immediately by Mrs Cameron, herself, who had presumably seen them arrive.

“Do you have news?” she asked, her face was blotchy from crying, and she was already rather drunk.

“We have some,” Bainbridge informed her. “Perhaps we could talk with you in private?”

The landlady assured them they could and escorted them upstairs to her private room. She motioned for them to sit down on her bed, while she paced about the floor.

“I haven’t slept since it happened,” she explained to them.

Though they both fancied she had probably drunk enough gin to result in what passed for sleeping.

“Mr Hallet was such a good man. He was regular for paying, most of the time. I haven’t the heart to clear out his room and rent it to someone new, even though I could do with the money. It seems disrespectful.”

“Has Mr Hassan been to visit you?” Victoria asked.

The woman nodded her head vigorously.

“He told me he had hired you to find out who killed Mr Hallet. I was beside myself when he explained the situation. That poor man. I have told him he could take the room for free if he desired, but he will not leave his parents. His mother is quite unwell, I understand, and his father doesn’t speak a word of English, so the poor dears would be in such a pickle without their son.”

“It sounds as though Mr Hassan has quite a complicated life,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “This situation is not making it any easier, of course.”

“Would you like to sit down with us?” Victoria asked, the woman’s pacing rather putting her own nerves on edge.

“No, I cannot sit. Such a terrible thing to happen under my own roof. I keep thinking, if only I had been better at ensuring the front door was locked at night, none of this would have happened. My husband would have never been so incautious. He was a good man, such a good man.”

The landlady pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. The item of cloth was soiled and looked already damp with tears. Victoria would have offered her own, except she was rather short of them and could not afford to hand them out. Handkerchiefs were the sort of thing you never really considered until you ran out of them.

“I want to hear what you have discovered,” Mrs Cameron determined. “Was it this Dickie Grace, Hassan told me of, who did it for my poor Mr Hallet?”

“It is somewhat more complicated than that,” Bainbridge said, feeling awkward about the information he was about to impart. “Mrs Cameron, it would make me feel better if you were to sit while we explained what we have discovered.”

“I cannot, I simply cannot,” the woman paced back and forth determinedly. “It is all such a nightmare.”

Bainbridge took a deep breath.

“Mrs Cameron, we have explored several avenues in regard to the demise of your tenant, Mr Hallet, and we have found ourselves reaching one unfortunate conclusion. He was not murdered as a consequence of his criminal activities, nor was Dickie Grace involved in his demise. We have proof that Dickie left this house while Mr Hallet was alive and well.”

Bainbridge paused because the next part was going to throw the woman into a dither, and he was not sure how to handle that.

“We have found ourselves reaching, by a process of logic and elimination, one unhappy conclusion. The killer of Mr Hallet was someone who was already in this house at the time of the crime. They did not enter from the outside, nor did they leave this house after they had committed this most heinous of acts.”

Mrs Cameron reacted as he had feared and was overcome, almost sinking to the floor in her horror and grief. Victoria was fast to her feet, going to her aid.

“One of my own tenants did this?” Mrs Cameron wailed, clinging to Victoria’s arm when she reached her.

“It would appear to be the only logical solution to the crime. Yet we cannot state what the motivation for his death was and that leaves us in an awkward position,” Victoria calmly explained. “Perhaps, Mrs Cameron, you could offer us some suggestion of why one of your other tenants would wish harm on Mr Hallet.”

“No, no, it cannot be,” Mrs Cameron sobbed. “My husband always said renting out rooms was the devil’s work. He said it always brought trouble, and no respectable person would do it, but I was so poor, and I had no other choice. All these years nothing bad has happened, and I have had all sorts could through my doors.”

“Why don’t you sit on the bed?” Victoria tried to help the woman up, but she was a dead weight, and it was impossible to move her.

“I should have known I would bring this trouble down on myself. My husband would have been mortified if he knew what I was doing, God rest his soul. I am a terrible person. Truly terrible.”

“Now, now, Mrs Cameron,” Bainbridge interrupted her self-pity. “You are far from being a terrible person. You have had to live according to your means and that is all. You must not be so harsh on yourself. I can see that you have tried your hardest, and I am sure your husband would appreciate that too, if he could know.”

The landlady said nothing, the handkerchief was back out, and she covered her face and wept into it.

“He would have been ashamed of me.”

“No, don’t say that,” Victoria countered.

“I drink too much, and I shame him with my actions,” the woman would not back down from her wallowing. “I could have made something more of myself, had I not succumbed to the bottle. But I missed him so much. Isn’t it really his fault for leaving me?”

She burst into tears, and there was nothing Victoria could say to bring her around. All she could do was crouch beside her and wait for her to finish her hysterical episode. Sooner or later, she would run out of tears, and then they could get back to the business of discussing the death of Mr Hallet.

The weeping continued for longer than either of them had anticipated, and Victoria found herself pinned against the woman as she sobbed onto her shoulder. The sound of her distress brought a new arrival to the room.

Mrs Deal knocked on the door and asked if everything was all right. Bainbridge rose from the bed to let her in, hoping the woman might be able to help the landlady. Maybe there was a secret way to calm the woman down. Mrs Deal entered and saw Mrs Cameron huddled on the floor. She pulled a face.

“Oh dear, she is having one of her moments,. I feared as much,” Mrs Deal sighed and joined Victoria.

Between them, they were able to gather up Mrs Cameron and bring her to the bed, where they rolled her onto the mattress. She flopped onto her back with a heavy sigh.

“She will be like this for a while,” Mrs Deal said, talking from experience. “I am sorry you had to see her this way. It is very sad and distressing for her.”

“Mrs Cameron has a quite serious drinking problem, I understand,” Bainbridge remarked.

Mrs Deal shrugged her shoulders.

“Wouldn’t you if this were what life had brought you to? Sometimes I amaze myself that I have not turned to drink.”

Mrs Cameron was now beginning to quieten. Her hysteria was wearing off, replaced with a state of torpor. She stared at the ceiling, as if looking through the plaster to the heavens above and her departed husband. She sniffed, then shut her eyes.

“She needs to sleep it off,” Mrs Deal told them, a polite suggestion to leave the room in her voice.

They obeyed as there was nothing else to do. The woman was clearly in no state to talk to them further. Mrs Deal followed them from the bedroom, carefully shutting the door behind them.

“She has not been right since Mr Hallet died. It has shaken us all up.”

“As it naturally would,” Bainbridge nodded at her. “The death of a man just across the hall from a person would be deeply distressing.”

“Are you any closer to finding out who did it?” Mrs Deal asked, her eyes growing round with anxiety. “Mrs Cameron told me you were looking into the matter.”

“We have come a step closer,” Bainbridge promised her. “But we still have a long way to go. We had hoped to have some questions answered by Mrs Cameron, but that appears impossible.”

Mrs Deal’s face hardened with resolve.

“Maybe I can help you. I want to know who did this as much as Mrs Cameron. I can hardly sleep soundly in my bed knowing that a murderer is walking around and able to enter this house as he pleases. It would be a weight off my mind to help you solve this.”

Bainbridge glanced at his niece. Mrs Deal might not have been their first choice for their questions about the death of Mr Hallet, but she could be useful, nonetheless.

“We would be grateful for your assistance,” Bainbridge assure her.

“Then you best come down to my room. I left the baby sleeping, for once.”

Mrs Deal turned toward the staircase and led the way to her own little corner of the world.

Chapter Eighteen

Mrs Deal’s room consisted of a bed and a smaller cot where the children slept. She had three, a boy and a girl, of five and seven, and then the baby, who was just seven months old. Currently, the older children were out with their father. He was once again looking for work and had taken the children partly to get them out of their mother’s hair for a while, and partly as it might convince an employer to give him a chance if they saw he had mouths to feed.

Mrs Deal told them a bit of their story as she made tea in the small hearth of the room. There was nowhere to sit, other than to perch on the windowsill, which Bainbridge and Victoria did.

Mrs Deal’s father had been a postman. He earned reasonable money, but she had a lot of siblings, which meant a lot of mouths to feed. Bucking the trend of most lower-class families, all the children bar one survived their infancy and grew up to be robust individuals. Their father insisted they go to school, rather than work, and so the family was always struggling.

Mrs Deal was the oldest girl, and she had felt it beholden on her to find a way to relieve the family of the burden of her care as soon as she could. That was when she met her husband, George.

George was a carpenter’s apprentice and looked to have a good future before him. They walked out until he had finished his apprenticeship and then were married. At first, things went extremely well, and they lived happily, with enough money to afford a nice home with two rooms and even a little garden. But George had a tendency to speak his mind.

“He always has been fond of voicing his opinions,” Mrs Deal sighed. “Most of them are right, mind you, just they are not popular with the people who employ him.”

George protested the working hours at his first job, saying that he and his fellows were being exploited. Then a man was hurt while working, and George started a protest about working conditions.

“He ended up losing his job, that was the only result of him trying to stand up for people,” Mrs Deal shook her head. “And all those who had encouraged him to speak up back when he was working, were quick to disown him once he lost his job. It is a sad state of affairs.”

“And too frequent a problem, I fancy. Too often those who try to stand up for the downtrodden end up being cast aside and turned against by the very people they desired to help.”

Mrs Deal nodded her head, grateful someone else understood her woes. Things had gone from bad to worse after that. George had been dismissed without a reference and that made it hard for him to find further work. Word also spread about his reputation for speaking his mind, and that made employers think twice about taking him. It was not as if there was a shortage of carpenters and George Deal rapidly found he was unemployable.

“We moved to Norwich, thinking there would be more work and fewer people who would know what my George was like,” Mrs Deal added. “But the problems remain. There are too many men all looking for the same jobs. But, I know George will find something, eventually.”

Mrs Deal looked less confident of that than she stated. It was almost as if she fancied, even if her husband succeeded in finding a job, it would not be long before he would start speaking his mind again, and the work would vanish.

There was no consolation Bainbridge could offer her on the subject. The world was as it was, and they had to accept that. Maybe, if George Deal was a little more accepting, and tried to think of his family first before his fellow workers, then they would all be a lot happier.

Mrs Deal brought them tea in chipped cups that she proudly handed to them like they were best China. Victoria did not hesitate to take a sip from hers, unlike when she had been with Bainbridge’s cat friend. She wanted to show the woman that she was willing to accept tea from her and was not ashamed to drink with her.

The baby chose that moment to wake up with a ragged cry. It was a weak noise which spoke of a sickly infant with barely the energy to make a fuss. Mrs Deal hastened to the cot and lifted up the child, rocking it softly in her arms.

“Teething,” she said apologetically to them.

Bainbridge was solemn, Victoria recalled Hassan saying the child was sicker than merely teething and felt a dreadful pang of sorrow filling her. She wanted to offer some sort of comfort to Mrs Deal, but what words could she say that would make this situation any better?

The infant fell back into a tentative sleep, and Mrs Deal returned him to his crib.

“Best he rests,” she declared, pretending to them that the child was perfectly healthy and had not just appeared to fall into a stupor when she rocked it. “Now, we were going to talk?”

Bainbridge had finished his tea in a handful of slurps. He placed his cup beside him on the windowsill.

“We were indeed,” he told the woman. “We came to see Mrs Cameron because we now know the person who murdered Mr Hallet had to have been someone who was inside this house.”

“Another tenant?” Mrs Deal said in horror.

Her eyes went to the door of her room and the lack of a lock.

“I hate that we can do nothing to prevent people entering as they please,” she shuddered. “I have spoken to Mrs Cameron about having a system set out for the front door to be bolted at certain times of the night, but she has refused. I think she does not want the hassle of tenants turning up and being unable to enter.”

“She exchanges convenience for safety,” Victoria remarked.

Mrs Deal nodded.

“I shall be so glad when George gets some work and we can move away from here.”

She trembled after she spoke, as if her hope of being saved from this place was limited, and hard to conjure when she was faced with the reality of her situation.

“Can you think of anyone among the tenants here who might have had a grievance against Mr Hallet?” Bainbridge asked.

Mrs Deal frowned. She allowed the question to sink in before she responded.

“I don’t believe I do. We all get along as best we can. There are odd times of disagreement, but nothing that someone would murder over.”

Mrs Deal hadn’t met their eyes, and they sensed she was holding back.

“We have been informed of your unfortunate run in with Mr Hallet,” Victoria said quietly. “Hassan told us. He was furious about what his friend had done and rebuked him for it.”

“Hassan is such a good man,” Mrs Deal sighed and there was a hint that she had fallen for the charms of the handsome Muslim with his deep, dark eyes. “He always looks in on me when he comes over and asks how I am doing. He is such a gentleman.”

“Not like his friend, Mr Hallet?” Victoria persisted.

Mrs Deal fidgeted with her hands in her lap.

“I never could fathom how Mr Hassan could be such good friends with that man, they were so different. It wasn’t just that Hallet was involved in criminal things, which Mr Hassan quite clearly disapproved of, but it was the way Hallet behaved toward other people.”

“Towards ladies?” Victoria asked.

Mrs Deal nodded her head.

“You never knew where he was going to put his hands next. I dreaded meeting him on the stairs and having to walk past him because he would always touch me and wink. He acted as if I should be glad of the attention. I hated I could not lock my door. I was convinced one day he would try something worse.”

Mrs Deal hugged her arms around herself. There was no point trying to explain to her that her worst fears would never have come to pass, what consolation that might have given would not have changed the fear she had once lived in and would only have placed Hassan in a difficult position.

“Did your husband know about his attentions?” Bainbridge asked.

“No. George doesn’t need more woes on his shoulders. I almost told him after Mr Hallet had cornered me in the hallway and hugged me. He had caught me up in his arms and was laughing. He seemed to be doing it to impress the two workmen who rent the back room, though they just walked off. Then he let me go and turned away as if nothing had happened. But I had calmed down by the time my husband returned, and he was looking so worn down I simply could not bring myself to say anything.”

“The two workmen did nothing? Terrible fellows, the lot of them,” Bainbridge blustered. “Hallet for being a rogue and the others for not intervening.”

Mrs Deal wiped a tear that threatened to fall from her eye.

“I am not naïve, I know such things happen, but you don’t expect it to befall you in your own home.”

She sighed as she looked around her room. It was hard to call it a home, but it was all she had, and she would make the best of it.

“Maybe he played these antics on another woman, one who told someone who dealt with him permanently?” Victoria suggested.

“Maybe, but there are no other women resident in this house at the moment. Only Mrs Cameron and, honestly, I do not think she would care if Mr Hallet grabbed her. Half the time she is too drunk to know what anyone is doing.”

“What of these workmen in the back room?” Bainbridge asked, thinking that perhaps they needed to turn to their other motive. If Hallet had been trying to convince those workmen he was a man who desired the female sex, perhaps it was because they suspected something.

“I don’t have anything to do with them,” Mrs Deal responded. “They have always kept themselves to themselves.”

“Is anyone renting the attic room?” Victoria asked, remembering what she had heard earlier about the landlady even renting out her attic space.

“That would be Mr MacConnell,” Mrs Deal replied. “He likes to think of himself as an academic. I am not sure if he works, other than on his books about mathematics. He must have a little money coming in from somewhere, I suppose.”

There seemed no more information they could garner from Mrs Deal, she had told them little else than what Hassan had mentioned, though she had clarified the matter of her assault by Hallet. Victoria was beginning to dislike the dead man. She could have forgiven him for his criminal ventures, given the cleverness of his game and the victims being largely able to afford it, but she could not forgive his behaviour towards Mrs Deal. He had no call to behave in such a fashion, and to do so purely to protect himself. That made him the worst sort of rogue.

She wondered that Hassan could have cared for such a man, and a part of her thought that he was better off without him.

“We have taken up too much of your time,” Bainbridge informed Mrs Deal. “You have been most gracious.”

“I am sorry I could not be of more help. As we told you before, the night Mr Hallet died we were all sleeping. I was utterly exhausted. The baby had been very gripey the previous night, and I think I slept like the dead. I never even heard George get up to leave early the next morning to go looking for work. Sometimes he goes out before dawn, to catch some of the yards before they have started for the day. Once or twice, he has managed to earn a little that way, if one of the regular workers has failed to turn up. He has covered their work for the day, but it never turns into anything permanent.”

Mrs Deal sighed to herself, glancing at her surroundings.

“It will get better, I know it will,” she swore to herself.

Bainbridge repeated his excuses and rose with Victoria to leave. Before they departed the house, Bainbridge went to the back room and peered around the door to see if the neighbours were in, but there was no sign of them. Clearly they were out working.

“What about this Mr MacConnell?” Victoria suggested.

Bainbridge gave a woeful look to the staircase, the thought of clambering up it yet again filling him with despair.

“I suppose we should not neglect him,” he concurred, reluctantly.

They headed up the stairs and found a doorway that led to another narrow set, which twisted up to the narrow garrot that was the attic space. As they mounted the dark stairs, having to be careful where they placed each foot, they could hear someone muttering to themselves in the darkness above.

There was a door to the left of the landing when they reached the top, and they knocked on the pale wood. The voice within fell silent, then someone called out.

“I have paid my rent for today, Mrs Cameron.”

“It is not Mrs Cameron,” Bainbridge responded. “My name is Colonel Bainbridge, and I wondered if I could have a moment of your time to discuss your late neighbour, Mr Hallet?”

There was a shuffling inside the room, then the door was opened by a dishevelled looking man in a worn beige jacket. His hair was in a tangled mess around his head, and a pair of glasses perched on his nose.

“Did you say the late Mr Hallet?” he asked.

Bainbridge looked him directly in the eyes.

“Did you not know your neighbour was dead?”

“Good lord, no! What happened?”

Victoria made a coughing noise behind her uncle, bemused this man could be so oblivious to what had occurred.

“Mr Hallet was murdered,” Bainbridge informed him.

“Murdered!” Mr MacConnell said in amazement. “Good lord!”

Chapter Nineteen

The tiny attic space above the house had just one solitary window, which looked over the road – if you leaned far enough forward to peep over the edge of the roof. It had low, sloping beams, which made it impossible even for Victoria to stand upright in the corners of the room, and there was a plethora of spider’s webs hanging from the unswept ceiling. For Mr MacConnell, it was the perfect space for him to work on his ground-breaking theory concerning mathematics. He valued his peace and quiet and kept himself to himself.

His room consisted of a bare floor, a chair and table, a single bed, and a stove for when the weather was too cold. He never cooked for himself, preferring to rely on cold fodder, such as bread and dripping, or sometimes cheese. He didn’t actually eat much at all and certainly could not offer them a cup of tea as Mrs Deal had done.

His lone window did not have a curtain. Mr MacConnell preferred to rise with the dawn and go to bed with the setting sun. It saved on candles, and in the winter, it was best to curl up on the bed beneath the blanket and try to keep warm.

MacConnell was younger than Victoria had anticipated. From her brief glimpse in the gloom of the landing, she had thought him an older man, but in the clearer light of the room, it was plain he was only in his twenties. His academic nature, and the glasses on his nose, had a tendency to make him seem older, and he had a habit of hunching over his shoulders, but she was certain he was no more than a few years her senior.

Mr MacConnell showed them into his room after learning his neighbour had been murdered. As with the other rooms, there was limited space to sit, but he offered the chair by the table which Bainbridge gratefully took. Victoria had noted the state of the unmade bed, which was scattered with crumbs of bread, and papers filled with incomprehensible notes, and declined to take a spot on it, assuring Mr MacConnell she was quite happy to stand.

“I cannot fathom how such a terrible thing could have occurred under this roof!” MacConnell said once they were all settled. “I always thought Mrs Cameron ran a very respectable household.”

It seemed MacConnell was blind to the state of his landlady, and the premises she kept. Being up in his attic, it was easy for him to overlook what was happening downstairs.

“Do you ever leave your room?” Victoria asked him.

“Oh yes. Usually once a month,” Mr MacConnell informed her. “When I run out of paper and ink.”

“Aside from that, you never leave?” Bainbridge asked in astonishment.

“Why would I? I am working on my theorem that the number zero is a completely extraneous numeral and should be removed from all forms of mathematics immediately.”

“I would have thought that the zero was rather vital,” Bainbridge frowned.

“Oh, but it is not, and if we removed zero from the world would we not be all better off? Especially people who always say they have nothing. They could no longer have ‘nothing,’ thus they must have something. It would be such a great thing for mankind.”

Victoria revised her opinion of the gentleman; he was clearly rather short of a brain cell or two.

“I cannot see that working,” she stated.

“Which is why I must iron out the logic of it all. I shall present the matter in a book, and once enough academics have read it, I shall go to London and present the case to the Houses of Parliament, where I shall insist that we must remove the number zero at once from all officialdom and thus improve the world overnight.”

Victoria had no response to this and glanced at her uncle, who was looking equally baffled. But he had been in the army a lot of years and was familiar with dealing with intelligent imbeciles. He knew the best way forward was simply to ignore the matter.

“Anyway, we wanted to ask you if you remember anything about the night before last.”

“The night before last?” MacConnell pulled a face, as if he were struggling to follow their enquiry. “I suppose it was like any other night.”

“Except Mr Hallet died,” Bainbridge pointed out. “We wondered if you might have noticed something. Heard a noise, perhaps. Your attic runs across both Mrs Cameron and Mr Hallet’s rooms, and I doubt these floorboards do much to prevent sounds reaching you up here.”

As he spoke, they could hear the hearty snoring of Mrs Cameron from her bedroom. It seemed her emotion had left her exhausted, or she had found some more gin. She was sound asleep once more.

“I do hear quite a bit,” Mr MacConnell nodded his head. “It is a nuisance when I want to be getting on with my work. But most noises happen at night, when I am already in my bed, so it is not so bad. Sometimes I listen to people when I cannot sleep.”

“Were you listening the night before last?” Victoria asked him.

Again, MacConnell pulled that odd face.

“I suppose I was. Not much else to do when the sun goes down, but I find it hard to determine which night is which. Things muddle into themselves.”

Victoria resisted the urge to sigh at the academic. How could someone be so oblivious to what was going on around them?

“Maybe we should try this in another fashion,” Bainbridge interceded. “Do you recall hearing anything happening in Mr Hallet’s room?”

“I recall a lot of things happening in there,” MacConnell gave a derisive snort and pushed his glasses up his nose. “He often talks with another fellow, whose name is Dickie, about this scheme they have for making money. I listen to it and think I could improve their profits with a few tweaks to their figures, but I never tell them that.

“Then there is another man, I think his name is Mohammad. He comes often and they talk quietly. I believe they follow an exercise regime together, for when he is here, I often hear them performing rigorous athletics and getting out of breath.”

Victoria could not look at her uncle in that moment in time, she was not so naïve as to be unable to imagine the sort of ‘exercise regime’ Hallet and Hassan were following.

“Now I think about it, they had one of their exercise sessions the night before last,” MacConnell continued. “Yes, I recall it well because I was feeling a little queasy from my supper and so I was more alert than usual as I lay in my bed. I had been distracting myself by listening to Hallet’s conversation with the Dickie fellow, then he left, and Mohammad appeared. They spoke only briefly before they began their athletics.”

Bainbridge was looking rather uncomfortable at the discussion and was desperate for MacConnell to stop referring to the two young men’s exercise regime. Victoria jumped in to move on the conversation.

“After Mohammad had left, did you hear anything else?”

MacConnell became thoughtful as he considered what she was asking.

“Now you mention it, I did hear something. I confess I managed to fall asleep while they were exercising, my seeming indigestion having departed. I was awoken by a sharp sound, like something had fallen over. When I opened my eyes, the room seemed as normal, but below I could hear noises.”

“What sort of noises,” Bainbridge pressed him.

MacConnell pulled a helpless face as he tried to fathom how to explain what he had heard.

“I suppose, it was a gasping sound. Like someone trying to keep quiet when they wanted to speak,” he said. “And there was a noise such as things being moved about, the bed being kicked for instance. Nothing loud, not after the first bang. Then it went quiet.”

“You heard no raised voices?” Victoria asked him. “No argument?”

MacConnell blinked at her.

“I don’t think so, but I was asleep, so maybe.”

“Please, Mr MacConnell, it is most important you consider this question long and hard. You might be the only person who heard what happened to Mr Hallet.” Bainbridge beseeched him.

Without MacConnell, they had virtually nothing. They were finding it hard to pin someone down for the crime. There was no one to say who could have had a grievance, and who was driven to act upon it. Was it the workmen who appeared to suspect Hallet’s true nature? Could MacConnell himself have been party to the crime?

He seemed innocuous and innocent, but he had a madness to his manner when it came to discussing his theories. What if he had been distracted by the noise Hallet made and had finally had enough of the interruptions? He wanted peace and quiet, might he have gone to any length to achieve that, including murdering a man?

“I suppose, if I really think about it, I might have heard angry voices,” MacConnell said carefully. “But I won’t swear to that, I could be wrong.”

“What were these voices saying?” Bainbridge pressed.

“I am not sure.”

“Then how did you know they were angry?”

MacConnell pulled his brows together in a look of deep consternation.

“That is a good question, how did I come to that supposition,” he said. “I believe it was the intonation of the voices, and I think I recall hearing Mr Hallet instruct someone to leave his room at once, but it was done in a low hiss. Like when someone is furious but does not want to shout.”

“He was trying not to wake the rest of the house,” Victoria realised. “He knew the person and did not want to cause a scene.”

“Or he did not want anyone to overhear what they were arguing about,” Bainbridge postulated. “Mrs Deal mentioned him acting roughly towards her when the workmen were watching, as if he was putting on a performance for them and immediately left her alone when they departed. Perhaps the reason they did not rush to her aid was because they were satisfied she would be unharmed by Hallet.”

“You think they suspected his inclinations?” Victoria replied.

“Perhaps, these things can be difficult to hide, especially when a man is, ahem, engaged in athletics with a friend. Supposing one of those workmen overheard them or even saw something he should not have?”

Victoria strode towards her uncle, things starting to fall into place.

“These workmen suspected Hallet of being up to things with Hassan. On the night he died, Hassan paid a late visit for one reason alone, supposing they overheard and then finally decided to do something?”

“They might have seen Hassan leaving,” Bainbridge nodded. “They had no time to confront him, but they could confront their neighbour. I have seen people act in a very extreme way when they discover someone…”

Bainbridge glanced across at MacConnell who was listening to them fascinated.

“When they discover someone is conducting private athletics lessons in their room,” Bainbridge concluded. “Violence is not unheard of, maybe one of those men went upstairs to confront Hallet.”

“Maybe both of them went up,” Victoria countered.

“There was a fight, Hallet refusing to heed them or agree to stop seeing Hassan. The fight became more volatile, and someone pulled out a cord which they wrapped around his throat to throttle him.”

“Oh my!” MacConnell gasped when he heard how Hallet had died. “Then, what I heard, was…”

His eyes widened.

“Oh my.”

“It is a working theory, but viable nonetheless,” Bainbridge ignored the academic. “It fits the facts as they are presented to us. The killer came from within the house, they had a motive, and we have a suggestion that Hallet was trying to prove his manliness to the workmen using Mrs Deal as an unwitting stooge. The actions coming so soon after Hassan leaving would also fit into that theory. Someone decided to act when they realised what was going on.”

“But how to prove it?” Victoria said. “We have no proof of anything. No clue as to say which workman was involved, or if both worked together. No witness, aside from Mr MacConnell who cannot offer us a great deal more than that an argument occurred downstairs.”

“Oh my,” MacConnell repeated miserably.

“We keep digging, it is all we can do,” Bainbridge explained. “We shall return later this evening and speak to the workmen, perhaps one will reveal something, or they might feel badly enough about the affair to confess.”

“I doubt it,” Victoria huffed.

“A guilty conscience is hard to hide,” Bainbridge promised her. “But that is for later, right now, I fancy getting home and taking a nap.”

Bainbridge yawned to demonstrate his weariness. Mr MacConnell was watching them, trying to fathom what was occurring.

“I am very confused,” he said.

“It is nothing for you to fret about,” Bainbridge came forward and tapped his shoulder in a friendly fashion. “Go back to proving that the zero is of nought use to us and should be reduced to its own state of nothingness.”

MacConnell sensed he was being teased, but he could not quite see how.

“I shall,” he informed them warmly instead, as he escorted them to his door.

“You had been thinking that sentence up for ages, hadn’t you,” Victoria said to her uncle as they slowly made their way back downstairs.

“I thought I made rather good use of what was available to me,” Bainbridge beamed with delight. “Now, we are a step closer to resolving this horrid affair and I refuse to falter. Someone in this house is a murderer and we shall not be stopped from uncovering them.”

They were on the landing of the second staircase as he finished speaking, turning towards the next set of stairs. Mr Deal glanced up at them from the base of the staircase. He had returned from slogging the roads looking for work. His children had darted into the front room to see their mother, while he had paused in the hallway. It seemed he had overheard what Bainbridge had said and the look of alarm on his face was vivid.

“Someone in this house is a murderer,” he repeated softly, before he turned towards the room he shared with his family, entered, and shut the door.

“He shall be even more worried about putting that bolt across at night now,” Victoria remarked.

“You forget, Vicky, that bolt would have served no purpose, and would not have saved Mr Hallet.”

His niece acknowledged this comment with a tip of her head.

“I suppose he shall try to move his wife out of here, she has suffered enough in this place.”

“Easier said than done,” Bainbridge sighed. “Tragically, there are many women in the position Mrs Deal finds herself suffering, and many more who are even worse off. Society is unfair in so many regards.”

They continued down the last flight of stairs.

“I shall not forgive Hallet for tormenting Mrs Deal, even if his death was the result of someone taking against his real inclinations,” Victoria said quietly.

“I do not blame you, Vicky, what he did was uncalled for and completely reprehensible. But that is a matter for another day. After all, Mr Hallet can no longer molest anyone, which is perhaps the exact reason our killer dispatched him.”

Chapter Twenty

Victoria switched her mind from matters of Mr Hallet and his murder to the Pettigrew case when they had returned home. Prior to the information they had gathered that day, she had found herself comparing the murder of Houston Fairchild with that of Hallet, and how the resulting grief had affected those closest to the victims. But she was no longer thinking that way. She was sure Fairchild would never have behaved in the manner Hallet had done. He would not have used women to protect himself, treating them as unimportant, their feelings disregarded.

She had never really known Fairchild. She had met him on occasion, when she had visited her uncle at his home, but her mother had been very keen to keep her away from her uncle, perceiving him as a disgrace to the family with his detective antics. Even now, if Victoria mentioned his name to her mother in passing, she would become indignant and refuse to hear it.

Mrs Bovington was embarrassed by her older brother and his move into ‘business.’ She appreciated she had married money, and the family fortune her brother had inherited had been slim pickings at best, but she could not see why he had to choose to work for a living. Why not do something much more in keeping with his position in society and marry into wealth as she had done?

She had never approved of Houston because he was American and had once referred to her as ‘ma’am.’ She had never forgiven that slip.

Due to her mother’s influence, Victoria had not been able to spend as much time with her uncle as she would have liked growing up, and had mainly seen him at Christmas time, to which occasions Houston was pointedly not invited.

Victoria now wondered that her uncle had not taken more offence with his sister over this churlish act, but Bainbridge had always been very forgiving when it came to her mother. She was still his little sister, who he fancied he should look out for and indulge. Victoria feared it was these indulgences that had resulted in her mother being so self-absorbed and a harridan when it came to societal mores.

In any case, Fairchild had not been Hallet, just as Bainbridge could not be thought of as Hassan. There was a coincidental similarity due to their respective situations but that was as far as it went.

Leaving Bainbridge to have his nap, Victoria went to the library to begin the translation of the final papers. It was beginning to feel like an onerous task, and she was close to putting it off, but it had to be done. Those papers had not been left for them to find for no reason.

“Oh, Mr Fairchild, why could you have not been so kind as to type up your notes before you left them for us?” Victoria sighed as she sat at the table where the papers remained laid out.

She picked up her pencil, and a fresh sheet of paper, and began her work, hoping not to end up with another headache from piecing together the information bit by bit. She had been working for close to an hour when Mrs Huggins appeared near her elbow. She had been so absorbed in her work she had not noticed the woman’s presence until she was virtually leaning over her.

Victoria startled.

“Mrs Huggins, I did not see you come in.”

“I noticed,” Mrs Huggins was peering at the papers. “That is Mr Fairchild’s hand, I would recognise that scrawl anywhere.”

“It is,” Victoria replied to her.

“Why are the papers all damp and horrid?”

“I found them outside, in the garden, stashed in an old box. Fairchild must have hidden them away for safe keeping.”

Mrs Huggins frowned, then she leaned forward and picked up one of the papers.

“Why would he do a thing like that?”

“You tell me,” Victoria responded. “Was he a man who kept secrets often?”

Mrs Huggins shrugged her shoulders in a noncommittal fashion.

“He was a complicated man, much like your uncle. We did not always see eye-to-eye, but I thought he was a good friend to the colonel, and I valued that. I was heartbroken at his passing.”

She put the paper down and picked up another one.

“Pettigrew,” she read the name off the top of the paper.

“Fairchild was investigating a case involving the Pettigrew family in America. All these papers contain notes about the disappearance of Abel Pettigrew who was heir to the family fortune. Some of them are background details, such as the family tree, others are his working notes. But I cannot explain why he chose to hide them or why he kept all this from Julius.”

“This Abel Pettigrew vanished, did he?” Mrs Huggins was squinting her eyes as she now read one of the translations. She needed glasses but was too proud to admit it.

“Back when Mr Fairchild was working for that Pinkerton agency.”

“Yes,” Victoria responded, wishing the woman would leave her in peace.

Her head was starting to make that familiar pounding which indicated a good headache was brewing, but she hoped she might get a little more done before she had to give up for the day.

“I never thought about it before, but there might be something I ought to show you,” Mrs Huggins put down the paper she had been reading. “Wait here.”

“Where would I go?” Victoria muttered to herself as the housekeeper hurriedly departed.

She had no idea what had caused Mrs Huggins to become so excited, and in a way she did not care. She did not think the housekeeper could help her piece this puzzle together. She rubbed at her eyes and wondered if she was becoming rather obsessed with this matter. The Pettigrew business had seemed such a tantalising lead when she had first discovered the papers, now it just felt as though she was falling into a deep rabbit hole with every new thing she translated. What was the point of keeping secret a disappearance case that had happened decades ago in another country? What had Houston intended by hiding these documents?

She felt she was running around in circles and had decided to give the papers a rest for the time being when Mrs Huggins reappeared with a book in her hands.

“Mr Fairchild did not have much in the way of money when he passed, and his belongings were very much a man’s things, but when I was helping the colonel choose his funeral clothes we found a package tucked away in his wardrobe that was addressed to me. There was a note stating he wanted to give me something in memory of him, should he pass unexpectedly, and he bequeathed me this thing. I always felt it was rather odd.”

Mrs Huggins presented to Victoria the book she had been carrying. It was a rather flimsy volume with a soft black leather cover. Impressed on the black leather in gold were the words ‘Holy Bible.’

“I suppose it was the only thing Mr Fairchild thought I might want, seeing as how everything else was related to his business or his life in America, and I did not care to have his gun. Still, I always wondered at the gifting of it.”

Victoria placed the book on the table, wondering why the woman had given it to her.

“Perhaps he just wanted you to have something from him. A token?” Victoria suggested, rubbing again at her eyes.

“That is what I assumed, but I was rather unimpressed by this item for a very specific reason. Firstly, I never thought of Mr Fairchild as a religious man who carried a Bible. I might have had one or two clashes with him over the subject of the Church. But the thing that really annoyed me was that this Bible was not even his to gift me in the first place. Open it.”

Victoria felt harangued by the housekeeper but did not have the energy to argue. She opened the cover of the Bible and found herself on the first page. The words Holy Bible were printed in an elaborate decorative font across the page and surrounded by scrollwork. Of more interest, however, was the library plate that had been pasted on the inside of the front cover.

Such plates were added to books to indicate the library they belonged to. It could be done out of pride, or to prevent theft, and grand houses often had specially printed nameplates that were used in all their books.

This particular one had a decoration of swirls and a creature which looked somewhat like an otter but not quite, as if the person designing it had never seen such an animal. Then there was a printed line that said, this book belongs to, below which was a name.

A name that was not that of Houston Fairchild.

“This book belongs to Abel Pettigrew,” Victoria read the words, and her heart started to thump in her chest.

“You see why I was so annoyed with him. Giving me a Bible that was not his at all. I almost threw the thing away, except you don’t treat the good book in such a fashion, and giving it away seemed impossible. I would have felt as if someone thought I had stolen it, considering the nameplate is not in my name. So I kept it all these years, not knowing what to make of it. And then I saw those papers, and the name on them.”

Mrs Huggins paused and clasped her hands together. Her face was solemn.

“He gave me this for a purpose, and it was not about having something to remember him by, was it?”

“I don’t think so, Mrs Huggins,” Victoria said. “This has to be a clue in this case, and he left it to you knowing you would not discard it. I think he meant for us to find those papers in the tree far sooner than we actually did, and then this Bible would have made more sense.”

“I have thought badly of him over the years,” Mrs Huggins was abashed. “I said to myself, he didn’t really care about how I looked after him and I badmouthed him as being inconsiderate, when really he was doing his best to help the colonel, as always, and leaving me this because he knew something bad might happen and he thought I was the best person to keep this safe.”

“You can hardly blame yourself for not knowing, Mrs Huggins,” Victoria consoled her. “If he had really meant for you to deduce the purpose of the Bible he might have left a letter with it.”

“Mr Fairchild wasn’t one for spelling things out for you. He said you had to work things out for yourself.”

“And look at the inconvenience that has caused us?” Victoria tutted. “If Mr Fairchild were still alive, I would be having words with him about all this nonsense. A clear letter explaining all this mystery would have been far more useful than all these hints and secrets.”

“He must have fancied it was important to keep everything quiet,” Mrs Huggins reproached her, her own guilt for feeling bad about Houston deflecting now onto Victoria.

“He presumably thought someone else might see these documents before Bainbridge and could not afford to take the risk,” Victoria confirmed. “But who?”

“Lots of people came calling after he died, to console your uncle and to pay their respects. Maybe there was someone among them he didn’t trust?”

This was becoming more complicated by the minute. It seemed that all these years thinking Houston had died in a tragic misfortune during a bank robbery had blinded them to the fact he was working a case that appeared to have been dangerous enough to cost him his life.

But who would have cared about a person who went missing over twenty years ago in another country?

“Why did he have Abel’s Bible?” Victoria stared at the volume.

“That is a puzzle for you to work out rather than me,” Mrs Huggins huffed.

“Have you ever read it?”

“I have my own English Bible, I do not need another,” Mrs Huggins grumbled.

Then she stalked out of the room with nothing more to say.

Victoria studied the Bible she had just been given. How did Houston get hold of this and why was it important to the disappearance of Abel Pettigrew? More to the point, what was he doing digging up this case again all those years later, and in England?

A thought struck her.

Houston had come to England unexpectedly and never explained to Bainbridge why he had done so. He had left a lucrative job and the country he had grown up in to travel across an ocean for no obvious reason. Unless, that reason was because of a case.

She looked at the Bible again and the notes. What if Houston had come to England in pursuit of the final case he was on for the Pinkerton agency? He was searching for Abel Pettigrew and believed he had come to England, which was why he had followed, intending to solve the crime, and refusing to return home until he succeeded. And then he had fallen in with Bainbridge and things changed, not to mention he had clearly never resolved his final mystery.

Could it be that after all that time, Fairchild had finally found a lead in the Pettigrew disappearance case and it happened to be here in Norwich? Could that be why he was shot?

If it was true, then someone was either very keen to keep this Mr Pettigrew hidden or wanted whatever had caused him to disappear to remain a secret. They were so determined, they had travelled to another country to enforce their will and shot a man dead in a public place. But what was the purpose of the Bible?

Victoria flicked through the pages a few times, but nothing jumped out at her. It was just a book similar to many on the shelves of English homes. It had been well-thumbed and some of the pages were a little stained or torn, but that was hardly revealing. She stared at the nameplate in the front for a few moments, trying to conjure up an idea of what this was all about. Nothing sprang to mind, and she was hardly surprised.

Houston had not left this behind for her, or for Mrs Huggins, he had left this behind for Bainbridge, who he had faith in to solve this mystery on his behalf. He had wanted his old friend to conclude this mystery for him and that is what Bainbridge had to do.

If anyone could work out what was going through Houston’s mind in the weeks leading up to his death it would be his old friend, the man who loved him and, perhaps, the man he loved back. Victoria pressed her hand on top of the Bible, feeling a smile crossing her lips.

“We shall solve this Houston Fairchild,” she promised the empty room. “You do not have to fear.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Victoria did not waste time in showing the Bible to her uncle and explaining where it had come from. He turned the book over in his hands, looking at it with fascination. Then he rose from his seat and declared they had to get back to the boarding house. No more would he say on the subject, but Victora was not concerned. He placed the Bible next to his armchair and she saw him looking at it thoughtfully. She knew he was mulling over its meaning and that satisfied her.

They headed for the boarding house, hoping to finally put the Hallet case behind them. When they arrived the place looked as quiet as always; there was the glow of a candle in the Deals’ small apartment, but no sign of any other life. They entered through the front door, which was unlocked as always, and glanced around.

There was a faint smell of cooking and pipe smoke. The house was otherwise quiet, but Bainbridge was hopeful the workmen they wished to speak to were present. They headed to the back room, which had its door closed, and rapped on the wood. Unlike that morning, this time someone answered their summons, and they found themselves before a young man with a face pale from exhaustion. Dark, shadowy circles hung beneath his eyes and gave him the appearance of an unwell owl. He showed no real interest in their presence. All he cared about was falling into bed and sleeping.

“Could we speak with you for a few moments?” Bainbridge asked him. “It is about the death of your neighbour, Mr Hallet.”

The young man gave a sigh, then glanced back into the room.

“You up for talking about John, Martin?”

There was a muffled response from the room, which apparently was in the affirmative, and the man at the door allowed them to enter. The room had once been the kitchen of the house and that meant a fair chunk of the space was taken up by an old range. Two ragged cots formed sleeping space for the men, and as Hassan had mentioned, there was a back door, but it was blocked by one of the beds. Anyone trying to leave the house that way would have to climb over Martin, who was lying on the bed in front of the door.

“We just worked a double day at the factory,” the man who had invited them in explained.

Martin was slowly sitting up in bed, looking as weary as his friend. He gave a heavy cough that sounded gritty and unhealthy. Victoria tried not to wince at the sound, fearing what it must mean for the young man’s lungs.

“You want to talk about John?” Martin asked, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“Yes,” Bainbridge took the lead. “How well did you know him?”

“We were not friends,” snapped the first man who was now sitting on the cot behind them.

“John was a creep,” Martin said, casting his eyes to one side as he spoke.

His expression confirmed to Bainbridge that these two had been aware of, or at least suspected, Mr Hallet’s inclinations, and that was the reason he had attempted to act so inappropriately with Mrs Deal before them.

“You saw him grab Mrs Deal and did nothing,” Victoria found the words came out harder than she had intended, but she was furious the two men had ignore what was being done to Mrs Deal right in front of them.

“He wasn’t going to do anything,” Martin said, looking sheepish now.

“She was not to know that, and his behaviour was upsetting enough as it was. You have no clue how it feels to be a vulnerable woman in a house of men,” Victoria scolded him. “A gentleman would have come to her aid and made sure she was safe.”

“Guess I am not a gentleman, then,” Martin growled, unimpressed by her words and not about to feel guilty for his actions.

“Mr Hallet was a man you disliked living here, under the same roof as you,” Bainbridge suggested. “You perhaps fancied he should be made to leave.”

Martin stared at him in sudden astonishment.

“How did you know…”

“He is guessing, Martin, leading you on, you big idiot.”

Victoria spun on the man behind them.

“I have not forgotten you were also present when Mrs Deal was assaulted. I am appalled by your cowardice, have you no shame? That woman could be your sister, or your wife, and she has a family to take care of.”

“Look, don’t yell at me,” the man put his hands up defensively. “It is not as though she doesn’t have a protector. That husband of hers would soon enough have knocked Hallet’s block off if she had just told him what John had done. He has a temper and a half when it comes to people around his wife. We thought it was best to stay out of things.”

“That does not change the fact that you did not like Mr Hallet living here,” Bainbridge persisted. “Perhaps you felt it was time he left?”

“I don’t like the way you are speaking,” the first man said, there was a threat in his voice, but he made no effort to move off the bed.

“Hallet died after someone picked a fight with him,” Bainbridge continued. “I do not believe it was a planned act. I think someone confronted him and things grew out of hand very swiftly. That person had to have come from among the tenants of this household, as we know for certain that no one left the house after Mr Hallet died.”

“What about that foreign fellow?” Martin piped up. “He was here that night, and he is just as bad as John was. Man like that wouldn’t think twice about killing. All those sorts are the same. They kill without thinking.”

Victoria cast him a withering glance.

“You really believe that?”

Martin dropped his head at the intensity of her stare. Victoria had the ability to look like an irate schoolteacher, big sister, and mother all at the same time, and her glare was inherited from Mrs Bovington who could have stopped a rampaging horse with it.

“We didn’t lay a finger on him,” the first man responded to the question. “We heard his friend leaving and we knew exactly what they had been doing, but quite frankly we were too exhausted to do anything about it. We don’t like what was going on under this roof, but we weren’t in a rush to do anything about it.”

Bainbridge turned back to face him.

“It is easy enough to say that, but how can we be sure you were so disinclined to act?”

“I don’t know,” the man shrugged, “But I can tell you that me and Martin were lying here, trying to get some sleep. It was a rough night, bad enough that child next door was wailing its head off again, but then Mr Deal was stomping about. He gets in a mood about the front door being left unlocked at night. Honestly, that man should just go to sleep, then maybe he would be in a better temper to find some work.”

“He is always trying to put the world to rights, or at least what he thinks is right,” Martin concurred. “He said he would come and have words with the factory foreman about us working such long hours. We told him to mind his own business. This is honest work and pays well. No matter if it means we have to work every hour under the sun.”

He gave another hearty cough, and Victoria could not help but think that Mr Deal had a fair point.

“You two will swear each other was present here all night?” Bainbridge asked now.

“We will!” the man on the bed snapped. “Now, if you don’t mind, we have answered enough stupid questions and want to get some sleep.”

He flopped down on the bed to punctuate his statement. Bainbridge did not move at once, he was thinking about all they had just heard.

“We aren’t murderers,” Martin said sullenly. “John Hallet was not a man we liked, or wanted here, but we wouldn’t kill him for it. We just stayed out of his way.”

Then he too flopped down on the bed and endeavoured to ignore them.

Bainbridge and Victoria left the room and closed the door. They paused in the hallway.

“We have a problem,” Bainbridge said quietly.

“Yes, they heard Mr Deal stomping about when he told us he never left his room,” Victoria glanced at her uncle. “You don’t think he might have done it?”

“That fellow said Deal has a temper when it comes to people mistreating his wife, and that if he had known what Hallet had done, he would have confronted him.”

“But Mrs Deal said she had not mentioned the matter to her husband.”

Bainbridge moved towards the door of the front room and politely knocked. He could hear the soft murmurings of the sickly babe, no longer the strength within it to make more than a muttered protest at its condition. Mr Deal opened the door looking frightened, and it was not because they were before him.

“The baby is dying,” he stared at them with reddened eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

Victoria moved past him into the room and glanced at Mrs Deal, who was sitting on her bed with the child in her arms. The baby looked pale and a little blue around the lips. The sight warned Victoria that it could not be long for this world. She made a decision.

“Mr Deal, you will come with me in my car at once, and we shall fetch a doctor.”

“I cannot afford one,” Deal’s face crumpled and quite clearly this was in part what was causing his anguish.

“We shall find a way,” Victoria swore to him. “Now, come along, my uncle shall keep a good watch over your wife.”

She ushered the poor man out of the house without another word and, within a few moments, Bainbridge heard the engine of her car as she drove off.

“He is beside himself,” Mrs Deal said to Bainbridge.

She had been through the whole tumult of grief and sorrow and come out the other side into a rational place of acceptance – at least for the time being. She was putting on a brave face for the older children, who were tucked up beneath blankets on the floor near the baby’s cot and were sound asleep.

Bainbridge entered the room and carefully sat down beside Mrs Deal on the bed. This took some careful engineering as the bed was low and his knees informed him that there was good chance, once he was down, he would not be getting up again without assistance.

“Mrs Deal, might I ask you a couple of questions while we sit here?”

Mrs Deal shrugged her shoulders to indicate he might as well. There was nothing else she could do but wait for the inevitable. She had long ago given up hope the child could be saved and her husband’s rush to the doctor did not seem to her to be worthwhile.

“What do you want to ask?”

“Were you aware of Mr Hallet’s true inclinations?”

“How do you mean?” Mrs Deal frowned at him.

“Mr Hallet, and I am afraid I cannot put this in any manner more sensitive, had no desire for women. He desired men. You have heard of such a thing as this?”

Mrs Deal’s eyes grew wide.

“Yes, I had heard of such wickedness, but never thought I would see such a thing,” her eyes wandered in the direction of the stairs which she could just see through the partly open door. “But, the way he behaved towards me!”

“It was an act to hide his true nature,” Bainbridge continued. “Your neighbours in the back room were aware of what he truly desired, and Mr Hallet was trying to fool them when he grabbed you. He behaved as a terrible rogue in an effort to hide what he really was.”

“Then, I was never in danger of real harm from him?” Mrs Deal considered this.

“That is not to say what he did was acceptable, Mrs Deal. He should not have done what he did, and you had every right to be angry with him and inform your husband.”

“I never told my husband,” Mrs Deal looked uneasy. “He overreacts to such things. He has always been protective of me. He has been worse since this business with no work and the baby being ill. His nerves are worn thin. I would not have put upon him the knowledge of what Hallet had done, as I know he would have confronted him.”

“He is a jealous man?”

“No, he trusts me, but he is protective,” Mrs Deal said firmly. “He just wants to keep me safe and that is very hard in a place like this. He is a good man, Colonel, but it was best he did not know about Hallet. He would have tried to have the man thrown out of this house and that would have ended badly, seeing as Mrs Cameron was very fond of him.”

“I see,” Bainbridge nodded. “Then, if your husband knew nothing about what Hallet had done, that changes things.”

Mrs Deal frowned at him, not understanding what he meant. Bainbridge did not intend to elaborate; he had run out of ideas as to who might have been responsible for the demise of Hallet. The workmen in the back room might have killed him because they did not like him, but they would defend each other, and without physical proof he could not prove anything.

Mr Deal would have had a reason to confront Hallet, but only if he had known about the incident with his wife, which she had stated she kept from him. That removed his motive, though it did not explain why he was walking around on the night of the murder.

“Your husband left this room on the night Mr Hallet died?” Bainbridge asked Mrs Deal.

“No, he was here all night,” she said firmly.

“Were you sleeping?”

“Yes. I slept soundly for once. I was so exhausted, I don’t think an earthquake could have woken me.”

“Then how do you know he was here all night?”

Mrs Deal looked at the colonel as if he was a fool.

“He told me so. He was so tired he didn’t even get up to put the bolt on the front door. He felt bad about that in the morning. I told him, he was not to fret, he had been here the whole time so there was nothing for me to worry about.”

Bainbridge said no more, but a thought was bubbling up in the back of his mind and it was not one he cared to test.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Victoria arrived back with a doctor within the hour. As there was not room for three people in the car, and Mr Deal had not been inclined to hang onto the running board as the constable had done, he had said he would walk back.

The doctor entered the room and took one quick glance at his patient. He nodded his head and dropped his medical bag on the floor, before crouching before Mrs Deal.

“May I?” he asked, motioning he wished to take the baby.

Mrs Deal relinquished her child reluctantly, the tears now welling in her eyes. The doctor began to examine the infant, talking softly to its mother as he went.

Bainbridge motioned to his niece that they should depart the room to make more space, then waggled his arm at Victoria indicating he was going to need help getting up. She clasped his arm firmly and helped him to his feet, gritting her teeth as she did so, then they both stumbled into the hallway.

“Where is Mr Deal?”

“Walking home,” Victoria answered.

She considered her options then sat down on the stairs. She looked utterly miserable, and her uncle moved closer.

“The child might live,” he told her.

“Mr Deal told me some more of their story as we drove along. I feel so sorry for him, Julius, he was only trying to make things right for the people he worked with. He really cares deeply about others, and it is so sad to see how the world has turned against him.”

Bainbridge said nothing, thinking if he was correct, then the situation was likely to get a whole lot sadder.

They were not stood around for long before Mr Deal appeared through the front door. He was breathless from running. Fortunately for him, Victoria rarely drove the car faster than 3mph and so he had not arrived much after the doctor. He glanced at them first, then started to go to the room.

“Give the doctor space to work,” Bainbridge said to him, reaching out to clasp his arm.

Mr Deal stepped back and stared at them, the agony of emotion vivid on his face. Bainbridge did not want to have the next conversation with him, but it was his duty, and as much as he hated it, he also fancied that while Mr Deal was in such an emotional state, it was perhaps the best time to broach the subject with him.

“Mr Deal, I have to ask you about Mr Hallet,” Bainbridge said, starting cautiously. “Were you aware of what he did to your wife?”

“What?” Mr Deal said, proving he was a very bad liar; his face revealed him.

“That is what I thought,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “How did you find out? Perhaps you were told by one of the workmen in the back room?”

“You have been speaking to them?”

“I suspected them of murdering Hallet,” Bainbridge shrugged. “It still may be a strong possibility, except they tell me they were both in their beds at the time he died and will not be shaken from that statement. They also told me they heard you leaving your room that night, even though you told me you had not. I might have supposed you were just trying to protect yourself from my suspicion, and that all you had done was rise to put the bolt across the door, except you lied to your wife as well, and that makes me wonder why.”

Mr Deal shook his head.

“You cannot really believe I had anything to do with that terrible thing?” he was not meeting their eyes.

“Mr Deal, I should first mention that I have no proof of anything. There are no physical clues to who killed Mr Hallet, and I certainly have no solid witnesses to the crime. Therefore, the only way it would be possible to solve this matter would be for the culprit to come forward and confess,” Bainbridge gave him a moment to let that sink in. “I am telling you this because I believe it is important you understand the position I am in. The only way I shall know the truth is if you tell me it, and I shall not be able to do anything with that answer, other than to make sure no one innocent suffers from this crime and that the people who cared about Mr Hallet know what happened.”

Mr Deal raised his eyes to the colonel and stared at him sorrowfully.

“All the way running back here, I was praying to God,” he said. “Begging him to save my boy. I promised I would tell the truth if he would just live.”

Mr Deal stared through the open door of the room at his wife and the doctor.

“I feel as though I am to blame for him being so ill. Because of my lies, and what I did. Maybe this is a punishment from God?”

“God does not do such things,” Bainbridge told him. “Besides, he would be punishing your wife as well. However, a confession may make your soul feel better.”

“If I confess, will God save my son?”

“I do not think this is a religious matter,” Bainbridge swore to him. “I do not believe God makes such bargains, especially with the lives of infants. If the child lives, it is because the doctor could save him, and luck was on your side. That is all.”

“And if he dies, it will weigh heavy on me that my wicked actions could have caused the Devil to find his way into our lives.”

Bainbridge pulled a face.

“I really do not believe that.”

Mr Deal was not listening.

“I should have told the police as soon as they arrived, but I was afraid. Not for myself, I can stomach any punishment they must mete out to me, but I was afraid for my family. What would become of them without me? I may not be able to offer them much, but at least they have a roof over their heads. If I am gone, what then?”

“It is a sound question, Mr Deal, and I do not know the answer to it. I also do not care to be your judge, that is down to your conscience,” Bainbridge paused. “It is true, then, that you murdered Mr Hallet?”

George Deal pulled a grimace of remorse and anguish, then he nodded his head at the colonel. Victoria groaned, having already feared this outcome, she still hated hearing the confirmation.

“He had grabbed my wife. I thought he might do worse another time. She is here alone with him so much,” Deal explained. “Who would protect her when I was not present? I only meant to scare him, so he would not try again.”

“How did you learn of the matter?” Bainbridge asked him. “Your wife did not inform you.”

“No, she chose to keep her silence on the subject. I know why, she thinks I am too rash,” Deal winced as he heard his own words. “She is correct. But Hallet came down that night to our room. It was after I heard his companion leaving. We keep odd hours around here and Hallet must have fancied we would be still awake, or maybe he just felt he needed to act there and then. He knocked on the door of our room and I answered.

“He looked embarrassed to see me, asked if he could speak to my wife and immediately I was concerned. I stepped out into the hallway and shut the door, so we could talk without disturbing my family. I wanted to know why he was there. It seems he had expected my wife to have told me everything and was surprised when I did not know. He told me what he had done and started apologising, but I was not about to hear it.

“I struck him. Just a slap, but he looked at me wild-eyed and fled to his room. I wasn’t done, I was going to make him pay for scaring my wife and make damn sure he never did it again, so I followed him upstairs. We scuffled in his room, I punched him in the face and broke his nose.”

Mr Deal hesitated, what had happened next still terrified him by how unexpected it had been. A monster had reared its head within him, and he still could not fathom what he had done.

“I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was how he kept protesting he had meant no harm. Maybe it was because I was tired and upset about the baby. Maybe it was because I am so angry no one will give me work. It just felt as if everything bubbled up and came out against Mr Hallet,” Deal clenched his fists. “I don’t know where the cord came from, but suddenly I had it around his throat, and he was choking. I only meant to scare him, I swear to that, but I lost my mind and before I knew it, Hallet was just hanging there, from the noose I had tight around his neck. I killed him.”

Deal slumped against the wall behind him, as the realisation sunk in.

“I killed a man.”

There was nothing Bainbridge could say to make things right, he was not inclined to console a murderer in any case. His thoughts were with the woman and children in the room to their right.

Bainbridge believed in justice, but he also believed in not punishing the innocent. What Deal had done was despicable and in a court of law there would be no question he would face the hangman, but that would leave a woman and her children destitute and who knew what would become of them?

Because Hallet had molested their mother, their father had killed him, and that would leave them starving in the street. Mrs Deal would be a victim twice over. Bainbridge simply could not stomach that.

“Mr Deal, your crime was a wicked one, no matter the circumstances,” Bainbridge told him. “But I would be lying if I said I could not understand what sparked you into action, and I am not about to condemn you here and now.”

“What do you mean?” Deal asked.

“I told you already, I have no proof of who committed this crime, only supposition, and your confession to me would hold no weight in court,” Bainbridge bent the truth a little on that, it would not be unheard of for a court to rely on a witness who had heard a confession of a crime to get a conviction. “The only way the police shall know of all this is if you go to them and tell them. I therefore intend to leave this upon your conscience. You must decide what to do, and weigh your options based on what might happen to your family if you were not around to aid them. That is all.”

Deal looked amazed at this statement.

“I thought you would turn me into the police!”

“No, that is not my intention,” Bainbridge said. “I think there has been more than enough drama this night as it is.”

He might have said more, but the doctor appeared at that moment. He glanced at Bainbridge, then moved towards Mr Deal.

“How is the babe?” Deal asked anxiously.

“The child is quite sick but has a robust constitution. I have supplied him with medicine and the rest shall be up to nature,” the doctor explained, then he glanced at Victoria. “Might you grant me a lift home, my dear?”

Victoria rose to drive him home.

“What of the bill?” Deal asked morosely.

“I shall send it to you, for you to deal with when it suits you,” the doctor said, proving he was more sympathetic to their plight than many in his position would be.

He left with Victoria. Bainbridge patted Mr Deal’s shoulder once they were gone.

“Go to your wife. Comfort her.”

“I asked God to save the baby, and if he did I would confess my crimes,” Deal looked at Bainbridge with hollow eyes. “And now he has.”

“And you confessed to me. If you must insist on perceiving this as a bargain, then at least accept you have fulfilled your part. Please, make no decisions in haste,” Bainbridge repeated. “Your family will need you long after this night.”

Deal did not appear to hear him. He turned away and went to the room to join his wife. Bainbridge sighed to himself and lowered himself to the stairs. Sometimes, solving a case was not to anyone’s benefit. He was still sitting there when Victoria returned. She pulled up in the car and entered the house to help her uncle back to his feet.

“What has Mr Deal decided to do?”

“I do not know,” Bainbridge replied. “Ultimately, only he can decide on this matter.”

“I thought we were out there to solve cases and bring killers to justice?”

“What sort of justice is it to leave a family to starve to death because of one rash act?” Bainbridge replied to his niece. “Besides, while we know that Hallet was not going to be more than a nuisance to Mrs Deal, neither she nor her husband were aware of that fact at the time of the crime. For all Mr Deal knew, he was destroying a man who was a very real threat to his family. Some might argue, he did what was necessary.”

They headed to the car, Bainbridge looking weighed down by everything that had occurred.

“Justice can be a very complicated thing,” Victoria reflected, giving him a hand to climb into the car as he looked like he might need it.

“Indeed,” Bainbridge nodded his head. “Which is why I like to suppose there is a higher power better equipped to deal with things like this than us. Otherwise, I would find it very hard to sleep at night.”

Bainbridge slumped back in his seat; the events of the evening having taken their toll. Victoria made sure the car’s lamps were lit and then drove them away, looking forward to her bed, though not looking forward to the thoughts that would torment here while she was lying there. She had no doubt her mind would go over and over what had just happened, and she would struggle to sleep.

Her uncle was right, sometimes there was no good resolution to a case, and finding the truth hurt worse than leaving the mystery.

Chapter Twenty-Three

They had a duty to Mr Hassan, and the following day Bainbridge sent him a note asking that he might call on them at his convenience. He spent the rest of the day composing a letter to Mr Dugoni informing him of the safe resolution of his case and that he would no longer be tormented by a mysterious mermaid. He also included his bill for the matter, hoping Victoria would be satisfied that he had charged a sufficient sum for their time and energy.

Mr Hassan did not arrive until the evening, and he was still slightly dusty from the coal he had been delivering.

“I came at once,” he told them, his brown eyes eager to hear what they had to tell him. “You know who killed John?”

“I do, Mr Hassan, but the matter is rather complex. Will you please come into the drawing room so we can talk properly?”

Hassan followed him into the drawing room where Victoria was sitting. He refused to take a chair, though he was offered, protesting his clothes were too dusty and he would stain the furniture.

“Please, tell me who murdered my friend.”

Bainbridge nodded his head, he had had plenty of time over the course of the day to decide how he would explain this to Hassan, now he laid out the matter before him, sparing no detail, including what he had been told by the workmen in the back room.

Victoria watched Hassan’s face as the varying emotions he felt at the information played across it. He scowled when he heard about Hallet’s actions once again, even though he had been the first to tell them about them, and he became bleak when he heard of Deal’s reaction to Hallet’s apology.

Bainbridge explained how they had come to the confession the night before, with the baby so ill and a doctor being summoned. How Deal had felt he was being punished by God for his actions and had made a promise to confess if the baby lived.

Hassan became sombre as the story continued, his heart torn in all directions. Victoria had already known he was a man of reason and honour, the way he behaved as the news was given to him only confirmed her opinion. When Bainbridge was finished, silence fell in the room.

Hassan took a deep breath, his eyes now on the floor. He had just heard a lot of information and was trying to formulate a response not driven by his immediate emotions. He was angry – furious – that Deal had stolen Hallet from him, but he was also angry at how Hallet had behaved towards Mrs Deal. He found it hard to forgive that, especially as his friend had been so glib on the matter.

He was finding it hard to know how he felt about everything or what he should do.

“Love is an emotion that brings great challenges,” Bainbridge said softly. “It makes us blind, sometimes, to the flaws of those we love. It makes us forgiving, when perhaps we should not be, and it makes us act out of rage and passion.”

Hassan lifted his head.

“Mr Deal acted out of love,” Hassan nodded. “He loves his wife dearly and he feared for her safety. I can understand how he feels. So often I have feared for the safety of John because of his criminal activities, and because of what we are. I have never thought I might kill for him, but who is to say what a man might be driven to if a situation presents no other option?”

“Mr Deal had an option,” Victoria reminded him.

“Perhaps, or perhaps not. To his mind, John was a dangerous individual who could cause great hurt to his wife,” Hassan shook his head. “Mrs Deal has suffered a lot, I have seen it, and I know how angry it made me when she was accosted. How much worse might it be for her husband, who feels guilt he cannot protect her or take her away from that place?”

“You are more generous than I might have been in your situation,” Bainbridge responded. “I should have wanted Deal to hang.”

“And as you mentioned, what would that achieve except cause grief to yet another family and leave them to suffer?” Hassan shook his head. “I would not want that burden upon me.”

Victoria was close to saying something along the lines that Hassan had deserved much better from life than John Hallet, but she was not sure it would be the right thing to say. She chewed on her lip to keep the words from slipping out.

“I am sorry I could not bring you peace with this matter, though I am afraid peace never comes from solving a murder, at least not to those who have lost a loved one,” Bainbridge spoke. “We must simply accept what we have achieved and know that the truth has been unearthed.”

“I have lived with one secret long enough,” Hassan agreed. “Adding another to it should not be an issue. Besides, it would be best if the police did not ask why I was there so late. Deal might end up revealing things about me I would prefer he did not if he were to confess.”

Hassan said this without conviction, but they understood he was trying to resolve this all in his mind and settle himself to silence.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked Bainbridge at last.

The colonel gave a slow smile.

“I find myself inclined towards the viewpoint that there is something after death. I hope one day to meet with Fairchild again.”

“Even though your relationship was… complicated?” Hassan asked.

“I have always thought God to be rather fond of sinners,” Bainbridge replied. “And I hope he shall be understanding.”

Hassan considered this for a while.

“I am not sure the God I am supposed to believe in is quite so generous, but perhaps I am wrong. I would like to be wrong.”

Hassan ran a hand over his chin.

“Thank you for all your help, I shall leave you in peace now.”

Victoria escorted him to the door; before he left, she placed a hand on his sleeve.

“You are a good man, Mr Hassan, and I believe you are deserving of kindness and fortune in this life.”

“What we are deserving of is very rarely what we receive,” Hassan gave her a sad smile.

“Perhaps,” Victoria said. “But you must not think yourself wicked. I have met men who would consider themselves honourable because they desire women, who are far more wicked than you. I should say life is much more faceted that something so simple as who one cares for.”

Hassan met her gaze with those soft eyes.

“You have been hurt in love, Miss Bovington?”

Victoria frowned.

“Yes, I have,” she admitted.

“Can I say, you do not deserve that either. You deserve a gentleman who appreciates your intelligence and your wit, and your rather intimidating independence.”

He grinned.

“You are too charming,” Victoria said, though she was really preening under his praise.

“Perhaps one day we can both find the people we deserve,” Hassan gave her a bow and started to step out the door.

“If you ever need friends, you are most welcome here,” Victoria called after him.

“I shall remember that, Miss Bovington,” Hassan responded. “And you shall always have a friend in me, should you need it.”

With that he was gone and Victoria headed back to the drawing room. Bainbridge glanced at her hand blackened with coal dust.

“Really, Vicky, the man is not for you.”

“Whatever can you mean?” Victoria scowled at him.

Bainbridge looked at her long and hard.

“You know what I mean. You have found Mr Hassan delightful company from the first we met him.”

“And he does not feel that way about me, so what is your point?” Victoria huffed, embarrassed her uncle had noticed the way she had sunk into the man’s eyes. “I merely extended a branch of friendship to him. You would do the same.”

Bainbridge did not respond, merely smiling.

“I have been thinking about the Bible Houston left behind,” he said to change the subject.

Victoria raised her eyes to him.

“And?”

“I asked myself why would Houston keep a book that served no purpose? To have taken such care with the thing without it having a meaning is unthinkable, especially as he went to such efforts to secrete it away. He bequeathed it to Mrs Huggins, perhaps to prevent it from being removed from his belongings after his passing. Of course, if he had known me at all, he should have realised I wouldn’t get rid of anything in this house belonging to him.”

“But he had to be sure in case Mrs Huggins persuaded you to be rid of some of his inconsequential items. The Bible might have seemed a pointless memento.”

“Or Houston fancied someone might come along and ask for it. We do not know the full extent of this mystery yet. Supposing he feared someone purporting to be a long-lost family member came to his funeral and then asked for something we would not miss as a token of him. Such as a Bible that did not even belong to him?”

“If that is correct, Houston was really worried about the people who were following him, yet no one ever did come here.”

“No, that is true,” Bainbridge replied. “At least as far as I am aware. The days after Houston died I was not in a good place, Vicky, and many people came through these doors. It would have been simple enough for them to take something.”

“We were just fortunate, then, that you discovered it first,” Victoria responded. “Meaning the Bible was placed in Mrs Huggins’ keeping.”

“Indeed,” Bainbridge tapped the Bible which was still sitting beside his chair. “Which brings me back to this little book. I have looked through it carefully and I have postulated a theory about its purpose.”

Victoria came closer and sat down on the sofa to his left.

“And what is that?”

“You noted it was apparently well-thumbed, and some pages torn or stained as if regularly read.”

“Yes,” Victoria nodded.

“Tell me, Vicky, how many men of the sort of standing that Abel Pettigrew was leave dirty finger marks on a book as important to them as this book appears to have been? The evidence, at first glance, suggested Mr Pettigrew was a very religious man, the sort who would take care over his Bible. The odd tear on the fine paper could happen from regular reading, but the finger marks are something else. They are not just careless, they suggest a man who was regularly reading this with dirty hands.”

“Not a man of wealth such as Pettigrew,” Victoria understood. “If you were to look at my mother’s personal Bible, which I know she reads often and takes to Church with her – for all the good it is doing her – you would see that it is pristine in comparison. But what does that all mean?”

“Fairchild worked for the Pinkertons, and they were not just a detective agency. They acted as bodyguards and were sent on some very discreet missions. The sort of thing that would require the exchange of information in secret.”

“I don’t understand what that means for the Bible?” Victoria frowned.

“I think this Bible is a book used as a code key,” Bainbridge said. “There are lots of methods of sending codes secretly between people, and some of the most effective require the persons sending and receiving the codes to have a book in common. This book becomes the key to unlocking any messages sent between them. Without it, the code cannot be broken.”

“A Bible is a rather obvious book for such a thing,” Victoria said.

“Except this is a specific Bible, with specific pages marked in the manner you observed. What might seem to be the innocuous fingerprints and scuffs of a somewhat careless but religious young man, are really indicators that those specific pages are important in unlocking whatever code Houston has left behind.”

“We have come across nothing in the papers we found that looked like a code.”

“No,” Bainbridge agreed. “Which makes me think we still have to find that item. We have part of the puzzle but not the whole. The other possibility is that within the marked pages there is a message I have yet to decipher, but I feel that is too vague and I am inclined to think there is something else out there.”

“Houston hid away one part of this problem, so perhaps he has hidden another part?” Victoria grasped what he was saying. “Then is this mystery to do with the disappearance of Pettigrew or is that inconsequential to the matter?”

“I do not know,” Bainbridge replied. “But I am beginning to wonder just what Abel Pettigrew might have been involved in. Was he some sort of spy and that was why he went missing?”

Victoria thought that was far-fetched considering Abel had been just a young man when he disappeared, but it would not be the first time they had encountered a spy in an unexpected place.

“We still have much work to do,” Bainbridge concluded. “Now this matter with Hallet is resolved, we can turn our attention to Houston’s problem. I am going to search his room, looking for anything that could be related to this Bible. A good code maker will place the information they wish to keep secret in a letter that seems innocent, rather than sharing something that is obvious gobbledegook, which someone else will realise is encoded. Maybe I have overlooked something.”

Bainbridge rose from his chair and set about on his new search for the code he was referring to. Victoria considered joining him but suspected this was a task he was best off undertaking alone.

She remained in the drawing room her thoughts on their recent case. A part of her wanted to travel back to the boarding house and discover how the Deals were faring, but she suspected that would be in poor taste. They had resolved the mystery for the sake of Hassan and now they had to leave the family to carry the consequences of what Mr Deal had done. It had to be his choice and his alone as to what he did, and Victoria could honestly not say what she thought he should do. Despite his crime, she knew his family needed him and so she was torn as to what true justice would be.

The evening was drawing on, the light fading in the drawing room. Her eyes skimmed outside to the garden fallen into darkness. She pondered her uncle and Fairchild, their life together. They had been happy in their companionship, a happiness that she had yet to know with someone else. The only love affair she could speak of was what she had with Sven, and that had ended in disaster.

She tutted to herself. Enough brooding. She still had documents to transcribe from Houston’s secret stash and that would keep her mind occupied far better than dwelling on things she could not change.

Maybe, one day, she would meet a man who suited her, or maybe she wouldn’t, whatever the case, sitting and thinking on it would change nothing.

Victoria rose to her feet determined to leave such musings behind. There was work to do helping her uncle unravel the mysteries of his lost partner and that was to be her focus.

Everything else would just have to wait.

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The Mystery of Cromwell's Skull

Lancelot Dunbar has inherited the house of his dreams and is looking forward to building a future for himself and his family, until he learns of the skull in the attic.
Can Bainbridge unravel the truth behind the mysterious skull in the attic, or will treachery deep within the household succeed in destroying Dunbar’s dreams for the future?

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The Return of Turpin

There is a highwayman stalking the roads and now a young girl has vanished. Are the two connected? Bainbridge and Victoria find themselves racing against time to locate the missing girl, but what other dark secrets might the highwayman's presence reveal?

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The Fatal Gathering

There is a highwayman stalking the roads and now a young girl has vanished. Are the two connected? Bainbridge and Victoria find themselves racing against time to locate the missing girl, but what other dark secrets might the highwayman's presence reveal?

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The Mystery of the Cursed Castle

Somewhere deep within the shadowy battlements of Bungay Castle, a phantom stalks, striking when people least expect it. The townspeople speak of a demon, of a legend come to life, but Colonel Bainbridge is convinced the ghost is a living, breathing person. No less evil for being a flesh and blood man.

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The Mystery of the Brewer's Suicide

Mr Ford has had a bad week, culminating in the discovery of a dead man’s hanging corpse. Things just seem to be going from bad to worse, as if someone is out to ruin his life. He needs fresh eyes to reveal the truth so he turns to Colonel Bainbridge and his niece, Victoria. Now the pair are out to find a killer who has no qualms about who they might hurt. But can they track down the mysterious poisoner before the whole of Norwich is under his thrall?

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Also by Evelyn James

The Clara Fitzgerald Mysteries

Memories of the Dead

One murder. Two suspects. Bad things happen when you mess around with a mother’s grief.

Clara Fitzgerald is struggling to make her name as a private detective in 1920s Brighton, when most people think women cannot solve crimes. Undaunted by the prejudice she faces, she sets out every day to her humble office in the hope someone will ask for her help.

Then she meets Mrs Wilton; a scatter-brained, emotional widow who believes her dead husband can lead her to lost treasure from beyond the grave. Ignoring her better judgement, Clara is drawn into the case. There is nothing she detests more than people abusing another’s grief and that is exactly what a fake psychic is doing to Mrs Wilton.

Wanting to help and understanding Mrs Wilton’s grief all too well, Clara makes a promise to aid her. But when matters take a dark twist, Clara finds herself accused of murder. Can she prove her innocence, along with proving herself as a detective?

Memories of the Dead is the first novel in this cosy, entertaining, historical murder mystery series by Evelyn James.

If you love engaging, quick-witted, no-nonsense female heroines solving dastardly, mind-boggling murders – and doing it all while armed with no more than a sharp hatpin or fire poker – then you’ll love Evelyn James’ page-turning, 1920s, detective series.

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About the Author

Evelyn James (aka Sophie Jackson) began her writing career in 2003 working in traditional publishing before embracing the world of ebooks and self-publishing. She has written over 80 books, available on a variety of platforms, both fiction and non-fiction.

You can find out more about Sophie’s various titles at her website www.sophie-jackson.com or connect through social media on Facebook www.facebook.com/SophieJacksonAuthor and if you fancy sending an email do so at sophiejackson.author@gmail.com

Copyright © 2025 by Evelyn James

No form of generative AI was used in the creation of this work

All rights reserved.

The moral right of Evelyn James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Evelyn James is a pen name for Sophie Jackson.

To contact about licensing or permission rights email sophiejackson.author@gmail.com