Page 10 of Corpse in the Canal

“I’m here on behalf of Mr. Richard Harvey,” Solomon began, presenting his card. “I understand you have spoken to him already, but I just want to make sure I have all the facts. I take it Mr. Percival has not yet come home?”

“No, sir.”

“You must be worried about him, if he has not been here since Monday,” Solomon said, looking about the tidy sitting room. “Is it like him to stay away like this?”

“Not this long,” Darren said, a faint frown of anxiety disturbing his brow. “He doesn’t always come home every night, though.”

“Do you know where he goes when he doesn’t come home?”

“Not my place to ask, sir,” Darren said woodenly.

“Which doesn’t quite answer the question,” Solomon pointed out. “According to Mr. Harvey, you last saw his son on Monday, when he went out. How was Mr. Percival dressed?”

Darren blinked. “As befits a gentleman,” he said with a hint of condescension.

“In morning attire?”

“Of course.”

“Was he carrying anything with him?”

“Such as what?”

“Such as a walking stick or an umbrella? Perhaps a small portmanteau?”

Darren blinked. “Portmanteau?”

“He attended a formal party on Tuesday evening, at the house of a Mrs. Vennor. I very much doubt that a gentleman would show himself at such a gathering wearing the morning clothes he’d dressed in the day before.”

A dull flush rose into Darren’s face. “He came home Tuesday afternoon, slept, bathed, and changed into evening attire.”

“So why keep this from Mr. Harvey?”

Darren shifted his weight to his other foot, then back again. “Because of the state he was in,” he muttered. “I panicked and just pretended Tuesday never happened.”

Solomon caught and held the man’s gaze, keeping his own severe in the way that had conquered cheeky clerks, predatory merchants, and rebellious workers on three continents. “It’s beyond schoolboy honor, Darren. This could be a matter of life and death. What state was Percy in on Tuesday afternoon?”

Darren slid his gaze free. “Drunk as a wheelbarrow, if you must know. Mud all over his coat and his trousers, as if he’d fallen over more than once. He stank.”

“Of what? Brandy? Tobacco?”

“That was the least of it,” Darren said with a flare of the nostrils. “He was still drunk. I had to put him to bed. Then he wakes up a few hours later, yells for his morning-after cure and a bath, and off he goes out to do it all again.”

“Only in evening dress, this time?”

“Exactly. Leaving me to change his bed.”

“Then when he came home on Tuesday afternoon, he was still in the same clothes as on Monday morning?”

“Apparently, though I had to clean them to be sure.”

So Percy hadn’t been anywhere on Monday night where evening dress was required or expected. He had kept low company, perhaps. “Did he come home on Tuesday night?”

“Yes,” Darren admitted. “Well, early Wednesday morning, I heard him blunder in. He went out again around midday. I couldn’t tell Mr. Harvey that, though, could I? Not when I’d already told him I hadn’t seen Mr. Percy since Monday.”

“He might have worried less if you’d told the truth. So when was the actual last time you saw your master?”

“Midday on Wednesday,” Darren muttered.