Peril by Post Read online

  “Oh?” The coroner looked up sharply from his notes. “You knew you were going to find your host’s dead body?”

  “No, of course not! But Death stalked the public room of the Hart and Hound that morning, its horrid image stamped indelibly on the face of every man gathered there. In short, we all knew what we were about to find. The only question that remained was where the Grim Reaper might have deposited his bitter harvest.”

  “Ugh!” Julia murmured into Pickett’s ear. “I hope his poetry doesn’t sound like that.”

  Pickett nodded. “More or less,” he said, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Setting aside the poet’s florid expressions and mixed metaphors, Pickett distinctly recalled his predicting that the missing man would be found in bed with some doxy. Had he been deliberately lying at the time, or had he reworked the events of the previous day in his memory to cast himself in a more favorable light?

  Pickett had not long to consider the matter, for the coroner was asking his next question. “Tell me, if you will, what you found on your search.”

  “I took the path down to the river, and then trekked back upstream some distance. The bank is so narrow in places that I was obliged to walk in the river itself part of the time.” He glared down at his abused boots, and Pickett no longer had to wonder at the poet’s mincing steps; he was surprised Percival Hartsong could squeeze his feet into his boots at all, after their wetting the previous morning. “After some little ways, I saw the body of Ned Hawkins lying on the bank, half in the water and half out.”

  “Which half?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You say the body was half in the water and half out. Which half was in, and which was out?”

  “Oh, I see. The upper half—the head and upper torso—was in the water, and the legs were on the bank, splayed in so ungainly a manner that I knew they must be broken.”

  “Unless you count surgery amongst your talents, Mr. Gape, you may leave any speculations as to the medical condition of the body to the doctor.”

  At this rather mild rebuke, the poet flushed a dull red. “Yes, well, it didn’t take a doctor to see that the fellow was dead. We could hardly leave him there in that condition, so we brought him back up the cliff path.”

  “ ‘We,’ Mr. Gape? Up to now, you have given us the impression that you were alone in your quest.”

  “There were two others,” the poet admitted rather grudgingly. “A farmer—Wilson, I believe his name is—and another guest at the inn, a fellow from London.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gape. I believe we will hear what this ‘fellow from London’ has to say. Mr. John Pickett, will you please take the stand?”

  Pickett gave Julia a nervous glance that was not entirely feigned, and rose from his chair, doing his best to look like a holidaymaker who had never appeared before a coroner’s jury in his life.

  “You are Mr. John Pickett of London?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And how long have you been staying at the Hart and Hound?”

  “Three days.”

  “The nature of your business in Banfell?”

  “I’m on my honeymoon.”

  “I see,” said the coroner, his knowing look shifting from Pickett to Julia and back again. “Not so much business as pleasure.”

  Pickett blushed so vividly at this observation that anyone inclined to question his presence in Cumberland would have been entirely satisfied.

  “And yet you left your bride and took part in a search for a missing stranger.”

  “It seemed like the right thing to do. When we—my wife and I—were at dinner last night, one of the men in the public room promised Mrs. Hawkins that if her husband hadn’t returned by morning, every able-bodied man in the village would go out and search for him. I’m an able-bodied man”—he willed himself not to think of this assertion in the context of his honeymoon or, worse, the Harley Street physician’s examination intended to confirm (or not) his impotence in order to annul the marriage, but Julia’s mischievous smile told him that she, at least, had not missed his unintentional double entendre—“so when dawn came, I went downstairs to inquire, and when I learned there had been no sign of Mr. Hawkins, I joined in the search.”

  “Accompanied by Mr. Wilson and Mr. Gape, as he claims?”

  Pickett nodded. “Yes, sir. Mr. Hetherington”—he glanced about the crowded room, but saw no sign of his magistrate’s friend amongst the rural thrill-seekers—“thought it safest for the older men not to attempt the cliff path, as it was not yet light when we set out.”

  “Describe your findings for the jury, if you will.”

  Pickett relaxed somewhat, realizing the question he dreaded the most—what he did in London for a living—was not going to be asked; apparently the coroner had mistaken him for a gentleman. Pickett silently blessed Julia for tricking him out in fashionable clothing, however uncomfortable he had been with the gesture at the time. He breathed a sigh of relief and launched into the narrative he had rehearsed the night before. “We found the body—Mr. Hawkins, that is—very much as Mr. Gape said, lying face down at the edge of the river. His legs were bent at an awkward angle and his face was bruised, but there was no sign of an animal having disturbed him.”

  He directed this last toward the innkeeper’s widow in a reassuring tone, and was not at all surprised when the coroner said somewhat condescendingly, “I know you mean well, Mr. Pickett, but perhaps such speculations are best left to the doctor.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Pickett said meekly.

  Having confirmed the poet’s observations, Pickett was soon dismissed and Ben Wilson was summoned. The yeoman farmer proved to be just as reticent in the witness stand as he had on the cliff path, and the coroner soon dismissed him, realizing that he would get nothing from this third witness that he had not already heard in greater detail from the previous two. For his next witness, the coroner called for the doctor, and there was a stirring of interest from the spectators as a short, stout fellow with thinning gray hair and wire-rimmed spectacles answered the summons.

  “You have examined the body of Ned Hawkins?” the coroner asked him.

  “I have,” said the medical man, inclining his head.

  “And what is your professional opinion?”

  The doctor pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “First of all, Mr. Gape is quite correct when he supposes the man’s legs were broken.”

  “Did the man drown, then, being unable to lift himself out of the water due to his injuries?”

  “Good heavens, no!” the doctor exclaimed in some surprise. “You seem to be laboring under the mistaken belief that Ned Hawkins had gone down the cliff path and somehow fallen into the water from the riverbank. It is my opinion, however, that the kind of injuries he sustained could only be the result of landing abruptly after descending from a great height. It is my professional opinion that he fell, or else leapt, from the cliff above.”

  At the suggestion of suicide, the room erupted in a babble of voices, the most prominent of which was that of Mrs. Hawkins.

  “He never jumped!” she declared. “My Ned was a good man! He wouldn’t do such a wicked thing!”

  It appeared that every resident of the village had something to say on this subject, and everyone seemed to determine to air his views at the same time. Eventually, the coroner found it necessary to call the crowd to order before continuing with his questioning.

  “Yes, Mrs. Hawkins,” he addressed the widow, not unkindly, “you will be allowed to speak in a moment, but first let me finish with the doctor. You suggest the deceased might have leapt to his death, Doctor. Have you any reason to believe he may have done so?”

  “I meant no slur against poor Ned’s character,” the physician quickly demurred. “I only meant to make a point of his injuries being consistent with his having descended, by whatever means, from the cliff above, rather than the bank alongside the river.”

  “And yet you have been his physician for some time, have you not?
”

  “Aye, these last twenty years and more.”

  “I believe men and women sometimes confide in their doctor issues that have little to do with their health, in much the same way they might confide in a clergyman. Did Ned Hawkins ever tell you anything that might, in retrospect, have suggested that he was considering taking his own life?”

  Mrs. Hawkins sobbed her objections to this line of questioning, leading Lizzie to put her arm around her stepmother and glare at the coroner. Whatever their differences over the character and intentions of Percival Hartsong, it seemed they were united in protecting the reputation of Ned Hawkins.

  “Certainly he had no medical problems that might lead him to consider so irrevocable a solution, for his health was good for a man in his forties, with nothing beyond the usual aches and pains to be expected at that age. As for anything beyond medical issues, I could not say. Although Ned was a friendly and convivial man, his was not a confiding nature.”

  “I see. Let us return for a moment to this drop from the cliff which, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, at least for the nonce, we shall refer to as a fall. Would you say that death would have been instantaneous?”

  The doctor frowned thoughtfully. “I should think it would be very unlikely for a man to survive such a fall, especially in the light of the injuries he sustained.”

  Pickett let out the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. At least if anyone—the murderer, for instance—had had any knowledge of the letter in Ned’s pocket, and any suspicion that this letter had been removed by a third person before the killer had been able to take possession of it himself, he would have no reason to believe that Ned had lived long enough to communicate anything to anyone before he died. Not that he had communicated much, in any case; still, if Ned was not of a “confiding nature,” then the fact that he tried to tell Pickett something—never mind the fact that he had written to Bow Street in the first place—became all the more significant.

  The coroner thanked the doctor and dismissed him, then summoned Mrs. Hawkins to describe for the jury her husband’s state of mind the last time she had seen him. Pickett was not surprised to hear her hotly deny any suggestion that her husband might have had the slightest care in the world. His opinion of the coroner rose exponentially as that canny practitioner of the legal arts skillfully extracted the information that Ned had been a bit worried about his daughter of late, she having recently attracted the attention of the Wrong Sort of man, which was hardly surprising, for the girl was as pretty as a morning in May (thus mollifying Lizzie, who appeared ready to take exception to this disparagement of her beloved), and one couldn’t be too careful these days, could one?

  “And,” she continued, “I’ll admit my Ned has been a bit worried about money of late, too, what with that Jedidiah Tyson who never had two shillings to rub together suddenly setting himself up as a fashionable establishment right across the street, with dancing and cards and who knows what-all going on under his roof, in the hopes that these gentle-born holiday-makers will pack their bags and move across the street from our place to his. But that don’t mean he was ready to do away with himself over it, for if he were to do away with anyone, it would be Jedidiah Tyson.”

  Pickett had been listening with only half an ear to this testimony, as he knew quite well that Ned Hawkins had not committed suicide, but at this assertion, his ears pricked up, and he sat a bit straighter in his chair.

  There followed a number of utterly tedious testimonies from various persons who gave it as their opinion that Ned Hawkins had had no thought of suicide, from his daughter Lizzie (“It’s true that Papa did not much like Mr. Hartsong, but only because he didn’t understand about poetry”) to his son Jem (“Oh, we didn’t always see eye to eye—what father and son do?—but to think he’d do away with himself over such a thing don’t even make sense—it would be like he was giving in to me, wouldn’t it?”) to the vicar (“I’m sure no parishioner of mine could consider, much less commit, such a sin against his own body”).

  At last the coroner invited the last of these to step down, then issued instructions to the jury, whose task, he reminded them, was to determine whether Ned Hawkins’ death was the result of natural causes, suicide, accident or misadventure, or unlawful killing. It took them only a few minutes of deliberation before they returned, and a tall, thin man with a receding chin delivered a verdict that, while incorrect, was hardly surprising: “The men of the jury are convinced Ned Hawkins died when he accidentally fell from the cliff. Our verdict is death by misadventure.”

  7

  In Which John Pickett Displays

  a Hitherto Unsuspected Talent, albeit under Duress

  I’M GLAD THAT’S OVER,” Pickett said, shutting the door and leaning against it. After the jury had announced its decision, most of the crowd had adjourned to the Golden Feather across the street to discuss the proceedings, a rudimentary sense of decency preventing them from doing so while still under the roof of the deceased. Pickett and Julia, on the other hand, had escaped up the stairs to the privacy of their own room for essentially the same purpose.

  “I thought you did rather well,” she assured him. “It can’t have been easy for you, deliberately misleading a jury—”

  “I didn’t lie to them,” he put in defensively, moving away from the door. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I just—didn’t tell them everything I knew. More to the point, I kept you well out of it. Make no mistake, Julia, I intend to seek justice for Ned Hawkins, but I’ll do it without putting you in further danger. What Mrs. Hawkins said about Mr. Tyson, though—could he be our man?”

  She sighed. “I knew you were going to ask me that. I don’t think it was he. I think I must have noticed his being so gaunt, but I can’t be certain.” She pressed her hands to her face. “If only I could remember exactly what happened! It was over so quickly, and since then I’ve tried so hard to recall it that I’m no longer sure what I actually saw, and what my imagination has colored in after the fact.”

  “All the more reason for you not to have testified,” Pickett said. “The coroner would have made mincemeat of you, and in the meantime whoever pushed Hawkins off the cliff would know exactly who had seen him.”

  “You think he was there at the inquest, then? The murderer, I mean.”

  “I think he would want to know exactly what had been seen, or deduced, about Hawkins’s death. Then again, I expect the news will be all over Banfell within the hour, so he’ll hear about it in any case.”

  “Yes, for the inquest probably offered the villagers the most excitement they’ve seen in years.” She gave him a mischievous smile. “And a very good show they will have found it! I thought Mr. Hartsong—or should I call him Mr. Gape?—in any case, I thought he was a surprisingly good witness, if a bit florid. Still, my favorite part was when you assured the coroner that you were an able-bodied man.”

  Pickett blushed anew at the memory. “I didn’t mean it that way!”

  “I know you didn’t, which is what made it so funny. And now”—she put a hand to the small of his back and gave him a nudge in the direction of the washstand—“you’d best see about getting that able body of yours dressed. We’re promised to the Hetheringtons tonight, you know.”

  The subject of the murder was dropped, at least for a time, as they prepared for dinner. Pickett’s cravats had acquired significantly more starch in the few months since his marriage, and consequently required more time (and often more than one neckcloth) before he achieved a respectable result. Then, too, their room boasted only a single mirror over the washstand, meaning that he and Julia, in the absence of her dressing table, were obliged to take it in turns.

  “You can’t know how pleasant it is to wear colors again.” Having arrayed herself for the occasion in lilac silk, she stood before the small square mirror and affixed pearl and amethyst teardrops to her earlobes. “When I think of all those months I spent in unrelieved black, I wonder you ever gave me a second look.
”

  “I wonder you ever gave me a first,” he said, marveling anew at how far they had come in the fourteen months since they had met quite literally over her husband’s dead body. He had hardly appeared to advantage on that occasion, as he’d been so stunned by the lady’s beauty that he could barely form a coherent sentence.

  “John?” Her eyes met his in the mirror, and it soon became evident that her thoughts were running along similar lines. “What would you have done if you’d discovered proof positive that I had killed Fieldhurst?”

  He shook his head. “I knew you hadn’t. I knew you couldn’t have.”

  “For which I am eternally grateful, as your confidence in me was very likely the only thing that kept me from the gallows! But just for the sake of argument, what would you have done if you’d discovered you were wrong?”

  He gave her a long, considering look. “I think,” he said at last, “that poor Lord Fieldhurst’s murder would have remained unsolved.”

  “Hmm.” She subjected his reflection to a long, appraising look. “I wonder if you could have.”

  Coming up behind her, he wrapped his arms around her and buried his nose in her violet-scented hair. “You think I could have let you go to the gallows, if I might have done something to stop it?”

  “I don’t think your conscience would have let you do anything else, no matter how much you might have wished to,” she said, leaning back into his embrace. “You have more personal integrity than anyone I know—when you’re not withholding information and misleading juries, that is.”

  ROBERT HETHERINGTON’S carriage called for them promptly at half past seven. Pickett handed Julia inside, then climbed in after her. The distance to the Hetherington residence was not great, and he might easily have walked it himself, but among the many small facets of Lady Fieldhurst’s life which he had glimpsed during his investigation of her first husband’s murder was the fact that ladies’ evening slippers were not crafted to withstand walking long distances. Nor, he supposed, were gentlemen’s; he had worn boots on his first visit to Mr. Hetherington, but tonight he sported soft leather pumps that might have done very well for dancing (had he known how), but would very likely have fallen to pieces had he attempted to trudge there and back on foot.