Читать книгу A Corpse in Shining Armour - Caro Peacock, Caro Peacock - Страница 7

You can buy anything in Bond Street. Anything, that is, except what a person might need in everyday life. Ironmongers, cobblers or grocers have no place on these elegant pavements. But if you want, say, a painting reliably attributed to Fra Lippo Lippi, a marble Aphrodite from Delos, a sacred scarab once owned by an Egyptian pharaoh, you may stroll up and down Bond Street and take your choice from several of each. You could also equip yourself with a full suit of armour, a crested helmet, sword, battle-axe and caparisons for your war horse.

I’d walked past Samuel Pratt’s shop at number 47, on the corner of Maddox Street, almost every day, stopping now and then for a glance when he had some particularly elaborate suit of armour or flamboyant banner in his window.

His customers, I’d assumed, were people who wanted these things to add historical tone to the halls of their newly built gothic castles. The knowledge that he was now supplying them to men who intended to wear and use them gave the place a new interest for everybody. When I walked down Bond Street on a sunny morning to keep my appointment with the younger Mr Brinkburn, there were so many people looking in Pratt’s window that they blocked the pavement, and two carriages were waiting outside. I pushed my way through and went into the shop. The high walls of its salesroom were hung with banners, shields, battle-axes and dozens of swords and daggers arranged in symmetrical patterns. Suits of armour on dummies flanked a door to an inner room. Two gentlemen and a black-coated salesman wearing white gloves were standing at a table gravely examining gauntlets. There was no sign of Miles Brinkburn.

‘Fifteenth-century German,’ the salesman was saying, ‘hardest steel that was ever made, but they’re supple as silk.’

A younger salesman came towards me and asked if he could help. I told him that I had an appointment with Mr Brinkburn.

‘He’s through there in our workshop, ma’am, seeing his armour unpacked. He said you were to be shown through.’

He opened the door between the two guardian suits of armour and stood back to let me pass.

Miles Brinkburn was down on his haunches beside a crate surrounded with wood-shavings, studying what looked like a piece of leg armour. He stood up when he saw me.

‘I’m so glad you could be here, Miss Lane. It arrived just before they closed last night and they haven’t had time to unpack it all yet.’

A well-dressed man in his mid thirties whom I took to be Mr Pratt himself was standing beside the crate, supervising an apprentice who was removing more wood-shavings. It struck me that Pratt looked worried. Miles, on the other hand, was glowing with enthusiasm. He showed me the piece of armour.

‘Just look at the great dent in this greave. Pratt thinks it’s old damage. It might have happened when my ancestor Sir Gilbert was wearing it in a tournament four hundred years ago.’

It struck me that it could have just as well resulted from some domestic accident twenty years ago, but I didn’t say so.

‘The armour’s been standing in our gallery all my life,’ Miles said. ‘I used to dream about it as a boy. I never imagined I’d be wearing it in action one day.’

Pratt looked even more worried. Miles pushed the apprentice aside and delved in the case like a child in a bran tub, bringing out another greave and two or three more pieces I couldn’t identify. Pratt took them and inspected them gravely, nodding his head.

‘Yes, they have every appearance of being authentic fifteenth century.’

‘Of course they’re authentic. They’ve never been out of the family. Now, where’s the main part of it, the what d’you call it?’

‘The cuirass,’ Pratt said. ‘It’s over there by the wall.’

He nodded towards the back and breastplate that would cover the upper part of the body.

‘It will have to be altered to fit me,’ Miles said. ‘Our noble ancestor must have been on the small side. I’ll need it done well before the tournament so that I can practise in it.’

Mr Pratt coughed.

‘When it comes to alterations, I think I should say that your brother may have…’

It sounded like the start of a speech he’d been preparing. Miles broke into it impatiently.

‘It’s nothing to do with my brother. I was the one who had the idea of sending for Sir Gilbert’s armour. He’ll just have to make other arrangements. Where are the spurs? They’ll need new straps.’

Mr Pratt looked anything but reassured, but must have realised he could take the subject no further at present, so signed to one of the apprentices to drag out another crate from where it was standing next to the cuirass. The lid was still nailed down and they had to use a crowbar to lever it off.

While the work was going on, I had a chance to look round. A craftsman was hammering delicately on something at a bench by the window. Wooden dummies stood along the walls, wearing various bits of armour. A full-size wax model of a leg dangled from a peg. Other pegs held leather tunics that were presumably for wearing under the armour. It might have been ancient sweat and blood from those that, in the heat, gave the workshop a pronounced animal smell. I noticed Mr Pratt looking round and wrinkling his nose. Wood splintered. The apprentice wrenched off the lid of the case, disclosing a layer of wood-shavings. Miles Brinkburn stepped forward eagerly, then fell back. The smell was suddenly much worse.

‘What the…? Have they gone and put a dead rat in with it?’

Mr Pratt took his place and scooped out double handfuls of wood-shavings, dumping them on the floor. Something rat-coloured, but not as solid as a rat, appeared among the shavings in the crate. Wispy, like human hair.

I was only a few steps away at the time and my heart gave a thump. I don’t know why, but I think I guessed before anybody else in the room what was happening, even before Pratt turned pale and drew his cupped hands back as if he’d been bitten.

‘No,’ he said, as if the thing could be made to go away.

As the shavings in the crate settled, a yellowish dome appeared as if it were rising by its own will. Pratt staggered back. The apprentice screamed.

‘What is it?’ said Miles. ‘What’s happening?’

His view of the crate was screened by Pratt. He sounded impatient. When nobody answered he pushed past Pratt then came to a sudden halt.

‘Oh God.’

In spite of the heat of the day, I was shivering. I told myself: You’ve seen worse than this. It was true, but that didn’t make it any better. I wanted to look away, but there was a terrible fascination about that head. The shavings had settled now, just at the arch of the eyebrows. The skin of the forehead was shiny and tight-stretched, with a small liver-coloured birthmark shaped like a map of Ireland on what would have been the hairline when the person was younger. A man, certainly. A man going bald but not grey yet. A middle-aged man who did not go to expensive barbers. I wished my mind would stop working like that, coolly forming conclusions while the rest of me shivered. It registered too that there had been a peculiar tone about Miles’s ‘Oh God’. It sounded like recognition as well as shock.

To his credit, Pratt must have been cool enough to notice that too.

‘Do you know him, sir?’

Miles retched out a ‘yes’. Then added, ‘I think so.’

‘We’d better get him out.’

When it was clear that he’d get no practical help from Miles, Pratt reached into the packing case. The head flopped forward. The hair at the back of it was black and clotted.

I thought: Head wounds bleed a lot. There’s no blood on the shavings, so he was dead before they nailed him up in the crate. It seemed a relief to know he hadn’t been shut up in there alive and suffocated. I don’t think I said anything out loud, but I must have made some movement that reminded Pratt I was there.

‘Get the lady out of here,’ he said to the apprentice.

In fact, the apprentice needed help far more than I did. He looked near to fainting and I had to guide him towards the door to the shop. Just before we got there, he leaned over and vomited. I jumped aside in time or it would have been all over my shoes. When I glanced back, the body was out of the case and Pratt had laid it on the floor, surrounded by pieces of Sir Gilbert’s armour. It was a man in black trousers and jacket and what looked like a coarse, yellowish shirt. He seemed rather shorter than average and younger than I’d guessed, perhaps in his mid thirties. Above the retchings and gaspings of the lad, I heard Pratt repeat his question:

‘Do you know him, sir?’

And Miles Brinkburn’s answer, as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying:

‘It’s Handy. My father’s servant, Handy.’

I’d have liked to hear more, but had the apprentice to look after. Several well-dressed gentlemen took backward steps as I propelled him through the door into the shop. I sat him down in a chair meant for customers and told the gauntlet salesman to bring him a glass of water. The man looked so horrified at this breach of protocol that I thought it was just as well he didn’t know what was happening in the workshop. He was still dithering when the door from the workshop opened and Pratt told him to go and find a policeman.

‘A policeman, sir? Has something been stolen?’

‘Just go and do it,’ Pratt said.

The man gulped and left the shop at a run. Pratt went back into the workshop. Before he closed the door after him, I heard a snatch of Miles’s voice, saying shouldn’t they wait before calling the police? Wait for what? I wondered. The customers were asking each other and me what was happening. I had no idea, I said. One of the gentlemen said his armour was out in the workshop and he hoped to goodness it wasn’t one of the things stolen. He showed signs of wanting to go through for a look, but luckily the shop assistant was back within minutes with a police constable in tow. There are always plenty of police in Bond Street. The assistant opened the door and let him through to the workroom. The customer worrying about his armour tried to follow, but Pratt barred the way.

‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. A situation has arisen and we are having to close for the afternoon. Our apologies. We shall be open tomorrow morning as usual. No, sir, I assure you that there’s been no robbery. Nothing is missing, nothing at all. An accident, that’s all.’

They filed out, slowly and reluctantly. I was lingering with the last of them when the door to the workroom opened again and Pratt came out.

‘Miss…Miss Lane, is it? I do apologise most sincerely, but for some reason the constable wishes to speak to you. If I may send him out to you…’

‘I’ll come in,’ I said and walked past him, through the door and into the workroom. Partly it was an act of bravado to prove to myself that my nerves were under control, partly that I was curious about the reaction of Miles Brinkburn. He was sitting on a chair at one of the work benches by the wall, head bent, arms hanging between his legs. He stood up and looked at me with the expression of a dog in a rainstorm, hungry for pity, and started apologising for bringing me into this. The constable cut across him, polite but authoritative. If he was surprised that I’d come into the room instead of waiting outside, he didn’t show it.

‘I am sorry to cause you any further distress, Miss Lane, but the coroner will need to know who was present when the body was discovered.’

He seemed well spoken and intelligent for a mere constable. His grey eyes looked me in the face and I was sure he’d recognise me if we met again. The body was on the floor behind him, covered with a caparison ornamented in black and silver chevrons that must have been meant for the back of a warhorse.

I gave him my name and address and he wrote them down in his notebook.

‘I understand you were here at the invitation of Mr Brinkburn, Miss Lane?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask if you are a friend of the Brinkburn family?’

‘I met Mr Brinkburn for the first time yesterday.’

A flicker of surprise in the grey eyes.

‘And other members of the family?’

‘I have met no other members of the family.’

He was trying to place me, I could tell that. I was unmarried, with an address in Mayfair (he might not know that it was on the unfashionable side) and I accepted invitations from gentlemen I’d only just met. The conclusion might seem obvious.

‘Had you met Mr Handy?’

‘The man in the crate? No, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen him before.’

That seemed to be all. He thanked me.

‘I’ll see Miss Lane to a cab,’ Miles said.

The constable shook his head.

‘I’d be grateful if you’d wait, sir. There are formalities. I’m sure Mr Pratt will take care of Miss Lane.’

Miles seemed about to protest. Pratt took my arm and I let him guide me towards the door. Miles called after him.

‘Pratt, will you get somebody to send for Lomax. Oliver Lomax of Lincoln’s Inn. He’ll know what to do.’

Pratt nodded and we went through to the shop. I told him I didn’t need a cab and walked into the sunlight of Bond Street, wondering why Miles Brinkburn’s first coherent thought had been to summon a lawyer.