The Price of Murder Page 16

  Downstairs in the lobby the standing clock in the corner said that it was near half past five. Had I taken so long to wash and dress?

  “Can I get a cup of coffee in the tap-room?” I asked the fellow behind the desk.

  At that he barked a laugh. “At this hour? Not the least chance, I fear. The tap-room opens at seven.”

  I nodded and headed for the door. There I paused and turned back to him.

  “Has Mr. Deuteronomy Plummer left yet?”

  “You mean the small fellow? Oh, you may be sure of it. ’Twas near an hour ago, I should say.”

  Again I nodded as I threw open the door and left.

  It was cold out there. I pulled up the collar of my coat and thrust my hands deep into my pockets. Starting off along the same route I had walked the day before, I thanked God for all the threats and pleas that Clarissa had used to force me to bring along the waistcoat that now kept my chest properly warm. Then did she press her entreaties on the matter of the wager, as she repeated to me her formula—“favorable odds and the right attitude”—as a sort of incantation.

  Yesterday evening, as Constable Patley and I ate dinner in the tap-room, I described to him in general terms (not mentioning Clarissa) the nature of my problem. He listened, nodding, rubbing his unshaven chin, as I explained all as best I could, even repeating to him her magic formula.

  “‘Favorable odds and the right attitude,’ is it?” said he. “And what might the right attitude be?”

  “Prayerful,” said I.

  He laughed at that, but then said that it was as good as many he had heard of.

  “Do you mean I should do just as this person has asked?”

  “Well now I didn’t say that, did I?” He paused, taking a moment to consider the matter. Then: “Here’s how an experienced bettor would handle the problem. First of all, if the person you describe entrusted you with money and those instructions, I’d say you had an obligation to do it just that way—with that person’s money.”

  “But Mr. Patley!”

  “No, hear me out, Jeremy. What an experienced bettor would do is use his own money to hedge the bet he’d made for the other person.”

  “Hedge the bet?” said I. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you put the money on the safest bet you can make—a sure win, if there is such a thing. That way you’ve more or less insured the loss of the money bet at favorable odds. Of course, the safe bet you make to hedge the other one won’t pay near as well because everybody else will be betting him, too. But it’ll probably pay off just enough. You’ll be covered against the loss, you see?”

  Indeed I did see. “It sounds to me like the only sensible way to bet.”

  Patley let that stand for a moment or two, though it was clear that he was made a bit uncomfortable by it. But then did he come out with this. “Sensible it may be, but if a body was sensible, he wouldn’t be betting in the first place. Betting is, well, it’s having an inspiration. It’s having a thunderbolt hit you so that you know this is the one! You don’t look at the odds. You don’t worry about how the horse has done in past races. You just know this is the horse that’s going to win today!” It sounded almost like poetry the way he said it then—and perhaps it was a kind of poetry to him. But he did add: “Most of the time it’s just money thrown away when you bet like that. Ah, but once in a while it happens just the way your vision said it would—and what you’ve won is not just a bet, it’s letting you believe your life’s going to get better, that maybe you’ll win all in the end.”

  I knew not quite how to take that, and so I did no more than nod and say rather timidly, “Thank you for telling me about hedging bets. That should solve the problem nicely.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  We parted shortly afterward—I to our room, where I read myself to sleep, and he to join the group at the bar, men who, like us, had come up from London. I marveled at his endurance, yet then reminded myself that he had slept the distance from just outside London all the way to Cambridge—and I, of course, had not.

  It was still quite gray by the time I reached the race course. Indeed, I wondered, from the look of the sky, if it might not rain that day. (It did not.) There was one man alone who stood hunched over the rail. Even from behind—perhaps specially so—I could tell that the on-looker was not Lord Lamford. It was not, however, till he turned round and I saw his face that I recognized him from Shepherd’s Bush on Easter Sunday, one of those who tended Pegasus following the race. I gave him a greeting and received one in return; then did I settle myself relatively near the fellow but made no attempt to question him nor start a conversation with him. We simply watched at some distance, one from the other.

  What we saw surprised me somewhat, for, though at a considerable remove, Mr. Deuteronomy and Pegasus were nevertheless visible in the still-dim light. Yet the surprise was that, though the horse was saddled, the jockey led him by the reins at a slow pace that was comfortable to them both. I watched, fascinated, for he seemed to be communicating as they walked. Were his lips moving? They seemed to be; if so, he was communicating directly with Pegasus, for there was no one about at his end of the track to whom he might be speaking. Here and there he took the trouble to point things out along the way. I cannot say that the horse understood, but he certainly gave Mr. Deuteronomy his full attention. I watched them so for some minutes; then, unable to contain myself further, I put to my companion at the rail a question.

  “Do my eyes deceive me,” said I, “or is Mr. Deuteronomy actually talking to Pegasus?

  “Yes, that’s what he’s doing, pointing things to watch out for along the way, and where they might speed up, and so on.”

  “And does the horse . . .”

  “Does he understand? Yes, I’d say he does. Deuteronomy, he’s got a special talent with them animals. I never seen nothin’ like it in my life before.”

  Nor had I. The question that came to me, however, was whether the “special talent” was Mr. Deuteronomy’s or the horse’s. It would be difficult to say.

  “Pegasus won’t let nobody but him on his back,” said my companion. “He’ll let me lead him, saddle him, rub him down to dry him off, all of that, but I dare not sit on his back.”

  “That is indeed interesting,” said I, “Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”

  “Bennett. And you’d be young Mr. Proctor, I s’pose. Deuteronomy said you’d be coming by early.”

  So this was the Bennett who had brought the pistol to the gunsmith Joseph Griffin. I would know what Deuteronomy had asked him. Later.

  He pulled from his pocket a collapsed spy-glass and offered it to me.

  “Here,” said he. “It’s getting lighter. You might want to take a look through this.”

  I accepted it with thanks, opened it up, and peered through it. It only tended to confirm what my unaided eyes had suggested. Mr. Deuteronomy kept up a fairly constant chatter with Pegasus at his side. Indeed, through the spy-glass, the image of the jockey came through so plain that, were I a lip-reader, I am sure that I could have caught every word he spoke, all at a distance of a furlong or more. I wondered what he spoke. Which is to say, did Pegasus understand the King’s English, or did the two have a separate language between them? I entertained that thought, and others no less fanciful, whilst I studied the horse and the man approaching. I returned the spy-glass to Mr. Bennett just as the two arrived at our vantage point. He ducked under the rail and gave Mr. Deuteronomy a leg up that he might mount Pegasus. The jockey spoke his thanks politely to Bennett; to me, he gave only a nod. Then did the two, horse and man, start off on a tour of the course.

  The first time round, and the second, they did no more than go at a trot. Then, at a signal from Mr. Deuteronomy, Pegasus sped up to a canter. It was twice round so—and then a walk, a trot, and a walk round again, this time Pegasus led round by his rider. Never once did they take the course, or any part of it, at a full gallop. But by this time, too, other horses, and their riders and trainers, had arrived. Deut
eronomy signaled Bennett that it was time to go. Halfway up the hill there seemed so many horses marching down to the track that I was certain there would be a repetition of yesterday’s mob-scene in that part we had just left.

  I fell in beside Mr. Deuteronomy, eager to talk, yet I saw that he was occupied by thoughts of the race, which was by then but two days hence. He signed his readiness to talk by opening the discussion himself.

  “You see from this crowd of horseflesh why we got down here so early,” said he to me.

  “Oh, I do indeed. Yesterday there were so many horses on the course, there was scarce any room for those entered in the race. That was in the late morning or early afternoon—sometime in there.”

  “Oh, I know how it can be. I hope it clears out a bit this evening, for Pegasus needs a light workout. If it’s as bad as you say, I’ll take him out on the country roads. We have to bring him up to a peak in a couple of days, though. Not easy.”

  “Still think you’ll win?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen any yet who could likely take him.”

  We trudged along in silence for a fair distance, but then did I recall one of the reasons that had brought me down to the track so early in the morning. I had news for him.

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

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

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

  “But you’re sure it was her?”

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

  “I’d like to meet him.”

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

  “That so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s correct, Mr. Plummer, sir.”

  “And she claimed that Maggie had been stolen?”

  “True, sir.”

  “Why do you suppose she did that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And you accept that, do you?”

  “Oh yes.”

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

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

  “And what is that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I recall remarking on this to Mr. Patley in the midst of our searches, and he responded, “Well, it ain’t bad as London for stealing a poor man’s coppers, but you put a lot of money into any town in England, and this is what you’re likely to get.”

  “I think if we were to make this tour at nightfall,” said I, “we would find that the residents of the makeshift dwellings are holding their own insofar as separating a poor man from his coppers.”

  “P’rhaps so,” said he. “Are you truly proposing that we make such a tour?”

  “No, not really. I believe we can spend our time better in another manner. Mr. Deuteronomy said to me earlier that he would be taking Pegasus out for a run in the early evening if the course is not too crowded. I thought you might like to see him put through his paces.”