The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure (7 page)

Consciousness returned and I twisted, rolled, and rose to my feet, instinctively feeling for the ropes even though I was not in the ring. A painful lump on the side of my head mapped the blow’s location, but there was no cut and no bleeding. A cold compress would help with the pain, but the humiliation would stay with me.

It was a great loss to be robbed just at the hour of my triumph, and yet I was not as downcast as I might have been. Some part of me was more than a little glad to be rid of whatever was in that tin. It might indeed be valuable, but it felt very dangerous, too dangerous for a man like Harry Stubbs to have in his possession.

Round Six: The Irishmen

As I came down to breakfast next morning, the landlady informed me a small boy was waiting to see me in the parlour at my leisure. He was to transmit his message only to me in person, she said, a trifle sniffily.

Going through, I recognised Arthur Renville's eldest, a fine-looking young chap of eleven years, sitting in a hard-backed chair as straight as a guardsman. He stood up and addressed me with the authority of a bonded messenger. “Begging your pardon, Mr Stubbs. If you come with me directly, you will learn something to your advantage.”

“What would that be, then?”

“Can't tell you, sir.”

“Where will you take me?”

“Can't tell that either, sir.”

The boy had been well schooled.

“Just so,” I said. “Young Renville, are you permitted to tell me if you have breakfasted yet?”

“No, sir—I mean yes, sir, I can tell you, and no, sir.”

The fried eggs looked very tempting, and I was loathe to leave them. I requested the landlady make the toast up into a parcel of egg sandwiches. She wrapped them in kitchen paper and passed them to Renville’s boy while I pulled on my boots and buttoned up my coat.

It was a fine morning but sharp. There was no frost on the lawns. Shops were unfastening their shutters preparatory to opening, and clerks, labourers, and shop girls on their way to work filled the streets. The younger Renville led me rapidly up Central Hill, towards Westow Hill. We continued for some minutes.

“Is it far? Hadn't we better get a cab?” I asked.

“No, sir. Cabbies tell tales.”

We turned off down Woodland Road then into a lane that terminated at a stableyard. Arthur Renville the elder stepped out of a stall, flicked a cigarette aside, and saluted us. “You hurry off home now,” he told the boy. “You've done a good job. And remember—not a word to anyone, even Mother.”

I relieved the boy of the parcel of sandwiches, passing him one. The lad dashed off at the double, eating as he went. I supposed he would be late for school, but only a brave teacher would punish Arthur Renville’s boy without his permission.

“Morning, Arthur. What's the S.P.?”

“I think we've got your Irish,” he said without the slightest humour or triumph in his voice. He led me into a straw-covered paddock. I was expecting to find them trussed up like chickens with Arthur’s minions standing guard, but nobody was there. At least, nobody living. As I looked down, I saw with a shock the three of them, half buried in the straw, as lifeless as sacks. When I strode forward for a closer look, I received a second shock.

All three had been cleanly decapitated, the heads lying next to the bodies. The heads had fallen, or more likely been moved, so the faces were visible. I recognised at once three of my assailants from outside the Conquering Hero: the heavyweight Mickey, his associate who had tried to club me with so little success, and the one who had tried to run.

“What happened here? Who did this?”

“I wanted to ask you the same,” said Renville. He looked down at the bodies with distaste. “This is highly irregular, Stubbsy, highly irregular indeed. I expected much better from you, really I did. I thought you was in a respectable trade now, not getting mixed up with murderers.”

“This situation is none of my making,” I protested.

“Isn't it, though? These men appear from thin air, with no purpose but assaulting your person, and then they show up again slaughtered like pigs, right on my patch. I can't see that this is nothing to do with you, however I try, and I did expect better.” He let out a sigh and faced me. “In any case, the pertinent facts are these. Certain informants discovered that these men were camped out here—navvies and the like often use the place as informal accommodation. I approached personally last night with the intention of carrying out an interview and discovered this sorry scene you find here.”

I continued to walk around, scrutinising the bodies from different angles, looking about them in the straw. “Were they beheaded post-mortem?”

“That would not seem to be the case.” Arthur squatted beside me. “As near as I can tell it, Stubbsy, decapitation occurred coincident with and at the same time as actual death. But really! What kind of savages are you dealing with—Hottentots? Borneo head-hunters?”

He went on, and I lost track of his words. This was very strange indeed. I’ve done my time behind a butcher’s counter, and I’ve seen meat cut, chopped, and sawed with a dozen instruments. I’ve seen it cut with sharp blades and blunt ones, by real masters and by raw apprentices. But no instrument I could recognise had cut those severed heads. The meat had been cut very cleanly, and the ends had an odd finish to them—pickled pork would be the closest comparison I could make, or perhaps seared. The meat had not been cooked but treated in some way.

“Stubbsy, what are you doing there?”

I twisted some straws together and poked at the vertebrae sticking out of Mickey’s neck then inspected the matching end. I did the same with a second body. A cord of muscle and skin remained on one side as though the killer had not quite caught that one squarely. “Were they killed from in front or behind?” I asked.

“I don’t know—why’s it matter?”

“I don’t know, either. The cut is perfectly even. You can’t tell if it’s left to right or front to back or what. If you were to have the sharpest blade in the world, you couldn’t cut so cleanly. And it didn’t cut the bone, neither, but it cut through the spinal cord inside the neck bone… how can that happen? Have you ever seen anything like this?”

“Don’t look at me, Stubbsy.”

“Maybe it was some sort of electrical saw, or surgical instrument,” I said aloud.

“Or shrapnel.”

I shook my head. I had spent the war lugging sixty-pound bursting shells, and we had suffered the effect of counter-battery fire by German fifteen-centimetre guns. One man might be decapitated, but not three, and the mess was far greater.

“Not much blood,” Arthur added. He had calmed down now and was looking at it more rationally. “The straw soaked up what there was, but there wasn’t much to begin with.”

Something stirred in the straw, and I had the horrible impression that one of the heads was moving, working its jaws to speak something except it had no breath.

“Garn!” shouted Arthur, and a rat scuttled away through the straw. It had been chewing at the soft meat of the severed neck. “Vermin everywhere.”

Then I saw the biscuit tin. It was open and lying empty a few feet away from one of the bodies. Next to it was a white object that proved to be a piece of crumpled tissue paper. There was, of course, no sign of what it had wrapped. I took both the tin and the tissue.

“This is only three of the men,” I said. “What about the other?”

“He doesn’t signify right now. What bothers me is these three dead ’uns here. Now, I’m going to make them disappear somewhere they won’t easily be found. The last thing I want is police and murder investigations stirring things up—especially when it leads back to Harry Stubbs, known to be an acquaintance of mine.”

“The police might think you’d arranged it. A sort of revenge for the attack outside the Hero.”

“They might well suspect that,” he said patiently. “And they might stumble over a few other things in their size nines while they were about it. So what I’m saying is, are you going to give me any more grief?”

“I hadn’t the foggiest that this could happen. There’s money at stake—perhaps thousands of pounds—but Mr Rowe never hinted there might be criminal gangs in it.”

“I trust you.” Arthur looked over the dismal scene. “But I think you should have a word with your Mr Rowe. I don’t think he’s playing straight with you. If the other one shows up, and I’m sure he will, you’ll be the first to know.”

“You’re a pal, Arthur.”

“Keep looking over your shoulder, Stubbsy. This ain’t over yet.”

Round Seven: The Mastermind

Once more I squared up to write a report on my investigation and struggled with what to leave out and what to include. The failure of my attempts to retrieve Shackleton’s treasure-box was one thing; the dead Irishmen were another matter entirely. In the end, I eschewed any attempt at picking and choosing and laid the whole thing before Mr Rowe to use his superior understanding and judgement, neglecting only mention of Arthur. The greatest danger, I surmised, was that I would omit a vital piece of evidence. If Mr Rowe wanted to go to the police, so be it.

All I had to show for my expedition was a piece of tissue paper and empty biscuit tin. The tin, from Huntley and Palmer, yielded no information, but the paper was more informative. The contents had perforce imprinted the wrapping. It was ordinary tissue paper, a type commonly used to wrap delicate clothing and other items, of double thickness, white in colour, of ordinary manufacture and not especially old. Judging from the creases, it had been folded up inside the box. I looked for crumbs or fibres and found nothing. I sniffed the paper, a faint residue of wood and dry earth.

I tried folding and refolding the paper, and concluded it had wrapped a flat object perhaps five inches across with five equal projections. A medallion or ornament in the shape of a star. Perhaps a piece of jewellery—or a fossil.

By the end of the morning, I had completed my report. I submitted it to Mr Rowe, with the tissue paper as an enclosure duly noted, via Mrs Crawford. Fortunately, another matter relating to the repossession of a motorcar called me away, and my mind was distracted.

The murder—and it must have been murder—of the three Irishmen was a puzzle too deep for me. Obviously, one of them had coshed me and taken the box, and a third party had then taken it off them. But I could not even speculate whom they were working for, never mind who else may be involved.

The next day the office seemed livelier than usual, and I soon apprehended that Mrs Crawford was not at her desk. In her absence, the outer office took on the air of a schoolroom without a teacher. I found two messages waiting for me, one an office memorandum about the excessive use of vellum paper for unimportant documents. The other was from Mr Rowe and was most mysterious. It instructed me to make my way to the Upper Norwood recreation ground to a certain bench, where I would receive further instruction. I was on no account to let anyone else know where I was going.

It was a clear, bright morning, and the sun made a pretty show on the frost, but the wind was too sharp unless you were walking briskly. I passed housewives with baskets on their way to the shops, delivery boys on foot and on bicycle, a postman finishing his morning rounds, a group of children from the Blind School led in a crocodile by a teacher. The world was going about its regular business.

The Recreation ground was a large rectangular area consisting of playing fields at one end and a landscaped section at the other. Consulting my instructions, I located the bench directed. Nobody was in sight except a pair of municipal gardeners digging up flowerbeds in anticipation of spring. The ground was hard frozen, and that was an optimistic task.

“Good morning, Mr Stubbs,” Mrs Crawford greeted me cordially and indicated I should remain seated. “A chilly morning, I'm afraid, but we need a secluded spot away from other ears.” She was wearing a long coat trimmed with fur, patent leather shoes, a black hat, and carried a large handbag and a black umbrella. She remained standing as she spoke. Outside the office, she seemed different from her usual self. I had never seen her without her reading glasses. “This will be a morning of revelations. Firstly and most importantly, you are about to become a wealthy man—if you're able to follow my instructions.”

“
Your
instructions?”

“Yes, mine. In fact, you've been following them for some time. That is one of the things about which I must undeceive you. I'm afraid the world is not as kind and generous a place as you have been led to believe,” she said sadly. “Solicitors’ firms are not apt to give golden opportunities to boxers with no qualifications and a taste for adventure stories. Mr Rowe has not been taking a personal interest in your career.”

“Yes, he is,” I protested automatically. “I have had many words of encouragement from him and some very flattering reports on my performance.”

“I'm afraid not. You may have received messages in his name, but he wrote not one of them. Your employment as Latham and Rowe was entirely on my initiative. The partners believe you are kept on to help with debt collection duties and the like. They have no idea of the terms of your engagement. In effect, you have been working entirely for me.”

This shocking news took some time to digest.

“My interest,” Mrs Crawford went on, “is in the Shackleton case. Again, Mr Rowe has no idea the firm is still pursuing it. As far as he's concerned, it's a dead letter. Only you and I know otherwise.”

“But Mrs Crawford, why?”

“Mr Stubbs, have you met a single person in your investigations who genuinely believed that Shackleton had anything of value? I think not. The world is persuaded that he was nothing but a wild adventurer, a treasure-hunter who never found treasure. But we know different. We know he found Aladdin's cave.”

“How do we know that? And what did he find? What was in that biscuit tin?”

“That is the answer to the mystery and the gold at the end of the rainbow. I will explain more at the proper time. The only question now is whether you are willing to walk the final mile with me and claim the reward for your labours.”