“Oh yes, Miss Mortimer gave her it when she left the manor.”
“Did she?” Constance was aware of her heart beating suddenly faster. “Your mother must have felt the loss of it then. What happened to it?”
Alice shrugged. “We never found out. It must have got knocked into the fire, or into something else that was thrown away.”
“Did she have many visitors around that time?”
Alice’s eyes dropped, then lifted with a shade of defiance. “She don’t have many visitors at all, ma’am.”
Because she was a fallen woman. Like Constance. Only Constance had found a way to thrive in the city, flaunting her sin, and had grown rich, while Mavis Cartwright cleaned the village shop and spent all her free time in church, atoning for what had probably not been her fault in the first place.
“She is a good woman,” Constance said abruptly.
Alice smiled suddenly, like the sun coming out. “She is, ma’am.”
*
Solomon found himself,with some reluctance, at Scotland Yard. Although his instinct had been to personally pursue Captain Blake’s information about the sailor Drayman, to go looking for him among the dockside stews and alehouses, he did not have the luxury of time.
For one thing, the letter about an available house was burning a hole in his pocket. For another, he was uneasy leaving Constance alone for long in a village seething with undercurrents of ill will. As it was, he would struggle to catch a train back to Sutton May this evening.
So he had decided to take a chance on the police doing the work—and not arresting him eitherasthe fugitive or for harboring him. In this particular case, he could not afford to be fobbed off on Constable Napier. It had to be Inspector Omand.
Accordingly, glad of his decent suit and overcoat—which would have been disastrously out of place in the dockside densof vice—he squared his shoulders and walked into the teeming building as though he expected to be served immediately.
And he was. The sergeant on duty sent a minion scurrying for Inspector Omand. To Solomon’s relief, because he didn’t have time for another round with the hostile Napier, the messenger came back to conduct him straight to Omand’s office.
To get there, he had to walk through an open office of desks, from one of which Constable Napier stared at him in open disbelief. The man was about to stand up and no doubt cause a scene, but fortunately Omand appeared in the doorway at the end of the room, coming forward to meet Solomon with hand outstretched.
There was nothing Napier could do in the face of his superior’s obvious welcome.
“Mr. Grey,” the inspector greeted Solomon as they shook hands. “A pleasure to see you again—I hope! Come in and sit down. I’d offer you tea, but it’s pretty nasty by this time of the day.”
Solomon assured him that tea was not required and sat down on the hard visitor’s chair, placing his hat on the desk in front of him. “Perhaps your constable told you I was interested in the case of Herbert Chase?”
Omand blinked. “Actually, he did not.”
Napier, of course, had his own agenda, which seemed to consist largely of outshining his rough old inspector. Omand, a man of amiable demeanor, was both shrewd and experienced, but Napier found him slow and plodding. Which was far from the truth.
“No matter. I have some information that you may not have come across and probably should be made aware of. You know that Chase was a merchant losing money hand over fist?”
“Indeed.”
“And not quite the clean potato.”
Omand inclined his head.
“I understand that Chase was seen in the Crown and Anchor drinking with a sailor who left before him, and then shaking off a second sailor who tried to talk to him and left after Chase.”
Again, Omand nodded, though since some of this information came from David, it might well have been new to the inspector.
“I have a suspicion,” Solomon continued, “that I know who the first sailor was. Unfortunately, I am involved in another case in the country and don’t have time to confirm or deny it, but I want you to know who I think it is. His name is Abel Drayman and he was once a sailor on Chase’s ship, theMary Anne. Back in 1844, theMary Annebrought back a large cargo of stolen spices from China and the East. Chase and Drayman had a very physical disagreement that ended in Drayman’s being hustled onto another ship heading out of Marseilles in order to avoid being charged with Chase’s murder. Chase, of course, was not dead, but it kept the matter from authorities who might then have poked into the cargo’s origins.”
“But Drayman was afraid to go home,” Omand said thoughtfully. “So he bore a grudge.”
“A large one, I imagine, by the time he learned that Chase had never died in the first place. He is not, I understand, a gentle man. When Chase saw him in London, it certainly alarmed him.”
“So Drayman and Chase met in the Crown and Anchor? Would Chase not have known better than to meet such a person there?”
