Derby Day Read online

  *

  ‘Who has won?’ Mr Masterson demanded of a steward, as he came out of the back of the grandstand with Mr Happerton’s wrist wedged up under his arm.

  In the tumult the man did not understand him and tapped at his ear for the question to be repeated.

  ‘Who has won? Who has won the race?’ Mr Masterson bellowed again.

  ‘Why, the black ’un. Tiberius! Tiberius has won the Derby!’

  *

  Captain Raff staggered through the crowd. The people on either side of him surged forward and he looked at them dully. The thing in the inner pocket of his jacket was still quite concealed from view, and from time to time he pressed his hand against it and traced its outline with his finger. The vision of Baldino, faltering and nearly fallen onto her knees as the black horse sped by had now gone, together with the pictures of the grey crags and the distant lake, and all that remained was the people jostling his elbows and the crowd running up the hill. It was no good, he thought, he would have to sit down. There was a restaurant tent just before him, with the canvas flap of its door half open, and putting his head inside he discovered that it was empty, that although urns and plates stood arranged on the trestle at its further end, and there were any number of smaller tables strewn about the enclosed patch of grass, all the people had gone. Swaying a little as he moved across the trampled sward, which was scattered with fragments of bread and other refuse, he seized one of the chairs and sat down heavily, looked around him, put his head in his hands for a moment, sat up sharp, plunged his hand into his pocket and drew out the thing that lay concealed inside it.

  *

  ‘You had better keep the people out of that tent,’ said Policeman x to Policeman y five minutes later. ‘There is a poor fellow just cut his throat in there.’

  ‘What? Dead?’

  ‘Well, perhaps not. But there is blood all over him. Here!’

  They bore Captain Raff out of the tent on a rail, with the policeman’s cape thrown over his chest and his arm dangling behind him brokenly over the grass.

  *

  Two hours later a cab rolled up to the little house in Richmond and a number of gentlemen jumped out very anxious to have words with its lessee, whose address Mr Happerton had been prevailed upon to yield up. But there was no sign of Mr Pardew, nor, though a thorough search was conducted of its interior, any trace of his leavings, only Jemima, whom they found, very meek and respectful, cutting out pastry for a pie in the kitchen, a budgerigar singing in its cage and the dining-room table laid for a solitary supper.

  *

  Slowly the crowds disperse. Epsom High Street is so full of people that there is a danger of being trampled. Singly and severally, joyfully or despondently, resigned or matter-of-fact, the Derby throng ebbs, disperses and makes its way home. Mr Pritchett and his assistant go off to eat whitebait at the White Horse at Dorking. Mr McIvor, who has made twenty pounds, departs in triumph on the back seat of the Bird in Hand’s hired drag with a pair of butchers’ apprentices blowing cornets in his ear. Mr Mulligan and his companion are sauntering tipsily in the High Street, manifestly out of pocket but in high good humour. Major Rook, Mr Pigeon and their genteel companions roll away in their carriage to a performance at the Drury Lane Theatre, a late supper in the neat house off the Row, and a snug little game of blind hooky in the course of which Major Rook relieves his young friend of exactly £75, reflecting all the while that he will step round and see Mr Trant first thing just in case that gentleman should have decided to take one of his little holidays in Brighton. Mr Glenister hastens – in so far as anyone may hasten in these circumstances – to supper with his clerical friend. Captain Raff is with the coroner. Rosa goes home in tears in a succession of omnibuses.

  *

  Tall hat tilted back over his forehead, Mr Dorling strides over the wet grass. It is eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, and the rest of the family is at church, but the clerk of the course knows his duty. For an hour now he has been prowling the area around the grandstand, peering conscientiously into rubbish-wagons, issuing instructions to the men who are taking down the bunting from the grandstand pillars, and generally making himself useful. In truth there is not a great deal to do, and the weather is not satisfactory, but still Mr Dorling prowls and surveys and speculates. There is rain falling over the Surrey Hills and a line of blue-grey clouds over Dorking and Guildford: occasionally he raises his head to inspect them, as if they too could be parcelled up and taken away by the dirt-men and their wagons. Of all the elements, Mr Dorling is most suspicious of rain. It is all very melancholy and bleary.

  Up on the hill he can see the Gypsies marshalling their vans and the proprietors of the travelling booths dismantling their stalls. The werewolf, certified by the rubric beneath his cage to prefer human flesh, will howl no more, or not for another year. The two-headed baby has been returned to its shelf. Mr Dorling likes neither the Gypsies nor the showmen, would have them driven off and the ground given over to respectable folk, but a part of him recognises their suitability to the scene they swell, acknowledges that in their absence a proportion of the spectacle over which he presides would be lost. Besides, who are respectable folk? Mr Happerton’s capture, there in the grandstand, for all to see, with a Mayfair whore screaming to wake the dead at his side, is the talk of Epsom. Less noticed, but no less disagreeable to Mr Dorling, is a man who cut his throat in a deserted refreshment tent and was taken out dying with his head covered up in a blanket. By this Mr Dorling is genuinely outraged. The police, he feels, can deal with Mr Happerton, but for a man to destroy himself in a refreshment tent, and then to be dragged out before a thousand onlookers, is a kind of elemental throwing-over of the laws of hospitality, something that, if Mr Dorling had his way, would be prohibited by law.

  But there is a great deal, Mr Dorling concedes, that cannot be prohibited by law. Mr Happerton and men who destroy themselves in public places are merely infinitesimal specks among a shoal of doubtful ends and questionable behaviour. Somehow these thoughts remind him of the Derby crowd, which he sees again in his mind, as he has seen it a hundred times before, surging over the hill, the carriages drawn up at the rail, the girls’ white dresses gleaming in the sun. But the crowd has gone and will not return for another year. Above Dorking and Guildford the clouds are moving in again. Already the ground beneath Mr Dorling’s feet is turning treacherous. From up on the hill, borne on the breeze as the wind gets up, come the melancholy cries of the Gypsies saluting each other. Spread out before him, almost as far as the eye can see, a carpet of abandoned paper, trampled food, every conceivable thing, it seems, that a person could set down and forget, runs away towards the bracken. A yard away, not quite obliterated by the rain, there is a copy of his racecard. Obeying some inner prompting that he cannot wholly explain, he bends down and picks it up, turns it over and scans the list of riders and their mounts. It is quite unmarked, he sees, but that beneath the name of Tiberius, in bright red ink, someone has placed a solitary tick.

  XXVIII

  Afterwards

  How should a story end? For myself, I like the good to triumph and the wicked to be damned. But what about that very substantial number of men and women who belong to neither of these categories, who do a little good here and a little bad there, who are constrained by their situation, pressed into evil ways by force of circumstance, whose sins are venial, whose temperaments are flawed and whose victories, as a consequence, are sadly compromised. How should they be disposed of?

  Miss Pilkington’s Lectures on Light Literature (1867)

  IT IS ONE thing to arrest a man in plain view of a thousand racegoers and have him taken away by closed cab to a police cell in the West End of London, but it is quite another thing to have him brought to trial. And it is a third thing – the greatest thing of all – to ensure that his trial results in a conviction. All this Captain McTurk knew – it had been dinned into him by long and bitter experience – and even by the end of the day on which Mr Happerton had been pluck
ed from the Epsom grandstand he had taken steps to enable these second and third things to follow unhindered in the wake of the first. He spent the remainder of the weekend in his eyrie above Northumberland Avenue – poor Mr Hopkins was called back from his mama’s in Somersetshire – and the Monday morning found him closeted with a great legal eminence at the Home Office, canvassing the various felonies of which Mr Happerton might be found guilty. There were, Captain McTurk deposed, three distinct lines of attack: the matter of the forged bills, which he believed had been used as an instrument to ruin Mr Davenant and hasten his end; the sedative administered to Mr Gresham, which he maintained had been used to enfeeble him and rob him of his money; and the burglary of Mr Gallentin’s shop, by Mr Pardew, in which Captain McTurk imagined Mr Happerton to have been confederate. Put them together, and the case against Mr Happerton as one of the most audacious swindlers, poisoners and accessories to grand larceny, could surely be proved beyond doubt.

  But the great legal eminence, sitting snugly in his carpeted room, with one young man to bring him in his coffee and another to take his letters off to the post, and a newspaper on his desk offering the most sensational disclosures about Mr Happerton, counselled caution. In the matter of the forged bills, he thought that Captain McTurk might very probably secure a conviction, for the evidence – in particular the sheet of attempts on Mr Davenant’s signature – was so very strong, but when it came to the poisoned milk-and-arrowroot he shook his head.

  ‘Plenty of old gentlemen have a sleeping draught put in their milk,’ he suggested.

  ‘There is seven thousand pounds gone from Gresham’s account at Gurney’s,’ Captain McTurk declared, not quite liking to say where he had got this information. ‘It’s as plain as a pikestaff what the man was about.’

  ‘And yet old gentlemen very often give money to their sons-in-law, don’t they?’ proposed the great legal eminence, who certainly had done so himself. ‘If they approve of them, that is. And sometimes even if they don’t.’

  ‘There is his wife, who will swear the whole thing is a plot, done with her connivance,’ Captain McTurk protested.

  ‘I don’t doubt she will. But I think you would have great difficulty in proving it. That is all. Now, what about the robbery at Gallentin’s shop?’

  And here, too, Captain McTurk found that there was a difficulty. The difficulty was the absence of Mr Pardew, of whom, since the Saturday evening descent upon the house at Richmond, no trace had been found. Captain McTurk had had men watching the Channel ferries; he had an emissary at Paris, and descriptions of Pardew sent by electric telegraph to every capital in Europe; but having engaged in a previous pursuit of Mr Pardew that had taken him (or rather Mr Masterson) across the Atlantic Ocean and back again, he was not sanguine. All he had, in fact, in the absence of Mr Pardew and any evidence of Mr Pardew’s involvement in the crime, was a sheet of paper found in the cellar of the premises adjoining Mr Gallentin’s shop, consisting of a few sentences that might or might not have been written by Mr Happerton.

  ‘Let us say the letter was Happerton’s,’ the great legal eminence conceded. ‘There are a dozen ways in which it might have got there. Perhaps Pardew committed the crime – and I agree that the chance of his having done so is very strong. But it can’t be proved. And neither can it be proved that he has any connection with Happerton.’

  ‘There is his wife, again, who saw him coming out of Happerton’s study a day or so before the race.’

  ‘Women very often are mistaken about these things. If you take my tip, you’ll be very sparing in the use you make of Mrs Happerton. There is something odd going on there. Some spite or animus – I don’t know. Much better to give a jury a forged signature than a woman with a score to settle. If you take my advice, McTurk, you’ll give up the burglary and the poisoning and make your pitch on those bills. There’s not a jury in the country won’t convict him on them.’

  At this juncture there was an interruption, caused by the Home Secretary’s chief clerk dancing into the room with an urgent summons, and Captain McTurk, rising to his feet, with the headlines about Mr Happerton staring at him from the desktop, said that he would think about it. Then, coming back to Northumberland Avenue, where Mr Masterson had been at work on his behalf, he received a further piece of information that he thought might help to nail Mr Happerton to the slab. This was the discovery, by the Surrey Police, from certain papers found in the deceased’s jacket, that the man who had cut his throat in the refreshment tent at Epsom was Captain Raff. Captain McTurk and Mr Masterson were at Ryder Street within the half-hour – very bleak and blear it was, with the Emperor of Prussia ascending the stair in full court regalia – and the door of Captain Raff’s chambers broken in with a crowbar (the artists came out of their rooms and stared) but it was surprising how little that gentleman had left behind him. A cabin trunk full of dirty laundry and a stack of bills (unpaid) pinioned by a metal spider seemed to be the Captain’s chief legacy to the world, and Captain McTurk, biting his fingers in the shabby room, its plant-tubs quite yellow with neglect and the ‘Head of an Officer’ staring down at him from the wall, felt that he stood in the midst of a parable, whose moral implications it might be injurious to pursue. There was a letter lying on the desk next to the bill-spider, and he picked it up, read a few lines of it – it was a bastardy suit in which Captain Raff had somehow become involved – and then, disgusted, put it down.

  But if Captain Raff, now deceased, was no help to Captain McTurk (they buried him down in Epsom, before a congregation of two persons: Mr Delaney, and a very old lady down from Northumberland, who was thought to be the captain’s aunt) then there were other avenues that were worth the exploring. He had Mr Masterson go down to Leather Lane and interview Mr Solomons, to that gentleman’s profound alarm. He himself routed out Mr File again in Amwell Street. He would have questioned Mr Gresham, but word came from Belgrave Square that the old man was very ill indeed, so ill as to altogether prohibit any interrogation by the police, or indeed anyone else. Still, Captain McTurk procured a search warrant and, together with Mr Masterson, spent an instructive afternoon in Mr Gresham’s study going through his son-in-law’s effects. He had the powder which had been put into Mr Gresham’s milk-and-arrowroot analysed by a man from a chemical laboratory, who demonstrated that it was a powerful sedative that should certainly not have been given to an elderly gentleman in poor health and had probably come near to killing him. He had Mr Masterson go down to Scroop and see what Mr Happerton had left behind him there. But it was remarkable how comfortless all this was to Captain McTurk. He felt like a digger in the vault of some ancient temple, who has assembled a hundred fragments of some shot mosaic, without having the least idea of the originating pattern. And yet Captain McTurk knew that there was a pattern, and that only the guile of its designer kept it from him.

  But all this time Captain McTurk had one trump card up his sleeve, an asset which he thought would enable him to vanquish everything from the caution of the great legal eminence from the Home Office to the evidential desert of Ryder Street. This was Mrs Happerton. A married lady cannot, of course, be compelled to testify against her husband in a court of law. But Captain McTurk fancied that no compulsion would be necessary. At the same time, Captain McTurk had not quite known what to do about Mrs Happerton. He had begun by thinking that he might charge her with old Mr Gresham’s poisoning; expedience had then dictated that she might best be used as a witness to her husband’s overbearing design. On the other hand, a lady in such circumstances cannot really be allowed out into polite society. So Captain McTurk had conspired with the Honourable Major Stebbings and other interested persons, and for the last two weeks he had had her shut up in a house in Marylebone High Street, with a very discreet woman to care for her and instructions that she should be conciliated and indulged in every way, have friends to visit her, be let out into Marylebone High Street for air and recreation if she wished it, only that – she should not be allowed out of the discreet woman’s sigh
t. The discreet woman was called Mrs Martin, and on calling at the house in the week before Midsummer, Captain McTurk made sure that he had a little conversation with that lady in the kitchen. How had Mrs Happerton spent her time? Mrs Martin thought that she had read novels, twenty or thirty novels at least from Mudie’s. Had anyone come to see her? It transpired that the Honourable Major Stebbings had called twice. And how did Mrs Martin think her charge was faring? But to this question Mrs Martin had no answer, and Captain McTurk had proceeded to the drawing room, in which Mrs Happerton was accustomed to spend her afternoons, not quite knowing what he would find.

  She was sitting in a little high-backed chair by the empty grate – the sun, streaming in through the open window burned off her shoulders – and there was something about her manner that made him stop in the doorway and look at her. She was simply dressed, in a print frock, with the neatest pair of slippers on her feet, and as immaculate as a fashion plate, but that a strand or two of her hair had escaped from the chignon behind her head and she was chewing at them like an animal that has nothing better to eat. She looked very sandy and dry, as if the heat of the day had quite shrivelled her up, and Captain McTurk thought that he did not envy Mrs Martin her task.