‘I’m not sure that I follow you, Mr Burns.’
‘He worked for Mr Quayle. A dead man can’t give you the sack.’
Colbeck’s mind was racing. He thought about two young men who excelled at cricket and had been drawn together. He remembered thinking how the pair of them would bond easily and spend free time together whenever they could.
‘You’re talking about the coachman, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right, sir — John Cleary.’
Harriet Quayle’s death was slow, gentle and uneventful. She just passed away before their eyes. They had been ready for it for so long that there was no outpouring of grief. Each of them contained his or her own sorrow and watched as the doctor examined their mother. He confirmed her death with a faint nod. Lydia shed the first tears. Unable to mourn a murdered father, she was moved by the loss of her mother.
Within minutes, the news reached the servants below stairs and they expressed themselves with less restraint. A beloved mistress had been taken from them. Their weeping and moaning soon bordered on hysteria. John Cleary stayed long enough to comfort some of the women. When the wailing eventually gave way to maudlin reminiscences, he took his leave and went off to his room above the stables. The coachman had his own reasons for mourning the loss of a woman he liked and respected. Kneeling beside a wooden chest, he took out a key and used it to open the chest. Cleary then reached in and took out a tall, cylindrical hat. He then placed it gently on his head as if crowning himself.
It was rare that Victor Leeming was able to gather such comprehensive evidence in so short a period. When he caught the train, he was still congratulating himself on his success. The sense of triumph lasted all the way to Derby and made the journey seem ridiculously short. Alighting from his compartment, he expected to take a cab to the hotel so that he could pass on the fruits of his research. But he got no further than a dozen yards along the platform before Colbeck stepped out to greet him.
‘Welcome back, Victor!’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Was your visit a profitable one?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Leeming. ‘I’ve so much to tell you, sir.’
‘Get back onto the train and I’ll be happy to listen to it.’
Leeming was taken aback. ‘Where are we going?’
‘We’re off to Nottingham to make an arrest.’
They found an empty compartment and jumped into it. Saving his own news, Colbeck asked for details of the evidence that Leeming had managed to gather.
‘It was as you suspected, sir,’ explained the sergeant. ‘I found a number of occasions when Mr Quayle and Mrs Peet visited Christie’s together. Each of them not only bought items at the same auctions, they had them delivered to the same hotel.’
‘Which one?’
‘It was Brown’s Hotel in Albemarle Street. The manager wouldn’t let me see the booking register at first but he changed his mind when I told him that we’d discuss the matter at Scotland Yard.’
‘What did you discover?’
‘The two names cropped up time and again, sir. Mr Quayle and Mrs Peet stayed there — in separate rooms — when no auctions were being held at Christie’s. It was obviously their meeting place.’
‘You’ve done very well, Victor.’
‘It was your idea to look more closely at Mrs Peet.’
‘But it was Mr Haygarth who supplied the information about her obsession with oriental porcelain. He’d seen her collection at the house and had heard her praise the auction house which she patronised. Haygarth also told me what a handsome woman she’d been.’
‘She was a handsome woman with a much older husband.’
‘Significantly, Mr Peet had no interest at all in her collection. He once told Haygarth that china was something that ought to be used and not put on display in glass-fronted cabinets. But he loved his wife,’ Colbeck went on, ‘so he indulged her. At some point, Mrs Peet met a man with the same love of porcelain as herself. That friendship developed to the point where they had clandestine trysts.’
‘Now we know what he was doing in Spondon that night.’
‘He wanted to see the plot where her body was to be laid. If he’d turned up at the funeral, his presence would have been noted. The visit had to be surreptitious.’
‘How did he actually get to the village, sir?’
‘Thanks to Gerard Burns, I finally worked that out.’
‘Has he given himself away?’
‘No, Victor — without realising it, he’s just handed his friend a death sentence.’
Leeming was bemused. ‘So who are we going to arrest?’
‘It’s Mr Quayle’s coachman — John Cleary.’
Everything he needed was stuffed into the saddlebags. After several happy years there, Cleary was about to leave. As long as Harriet Quayle had been alive, he felt that he had to stay. She was the lonely, ailing, neglected wife of a wealthy man. The one pleasure in her life was to be taken on extended drives in the country. Over the years, she and Cleary had become more than mistress and servant. He offered a sympathy that she didn’t get from anyone in the family. Long before the detectives had found a link between Vivian Quayle and Cicely Peet, the coachman knew that his master was betraying his wife. When he returned from visits to London, Quayle was always in a mood of uncharacteristic bonhomie. Harriet, too, was keenly aware of it.
Reaching into the wooden chest, Cleary took out the last object in there. It was the appointments diary he’d stolen from Quayle on the night of the murder. A casual glance would suggest that it was merely a list of endless meetings about the Midland Railway. To the coachman’s eye, it was also a record of adultery. The dates of auctions at Christie’s had a tick beside them as did other occasions when Quayle had stayed at Brown’s Hotel. Each rendezvous with Mrs Peet was there.
Cleary had not needed to search through the ledger at the auction house or inspect the booking register. Harriet Quayle had insisted on ocular proof. She trusted her coachman enough to engage his services, sending him off to follow her husband to London. Cleary soon got conclusive proof for her. He saw the couple entering Christie’s together and he watched them getting out of the same cab at the hotel. While Harriet was in no position to fight back at her husband, the coachman was. All that Cleary had to do was to choose his moment to strike.
In a fit of anger, he tore the diary to shreds and tossed it away. Then he stood the top hat in the middle of the room and stamped on it several times until it was virtually flat. It was his final act of rebellion against a master he’d come to hate.
‘Why didn’t Burns tell you all this before?’ asked Leeming.
‘He’d given his word to his friend.’
‘He’s not the sort of friend that I’d want, sir.’
‘You’ve never played cricket,’ said Colbeck. ‘I have. It’s a game that breeds camaraderie. Burns and Cleary were the solid foundation of the team. It must have irked them to see Stanley Quayle receiving the plaudits as captain when the players who actually won games were them, the gardener and the coachman — with some help from Lucas Quayle, I fancy.’
‘Cricket’s not for people like me,’ Leeming said. ‘It’s too difficult. I could never hold a bat properly because I’m all fingers and thumbs. The only sport I ever liked was the tug of war. This case has been a bit like that,’ he added, reflectively. ‘First of all we were tugged in one direction and now we’re pulling in the opposite one.’
‘That’s a good metaphor, Victor.’
‘I loved the feeling of the rope in my hands.’
‘Cleary is going to feel it around his neck fairly soon,’ said Colbeck, wryly.
They were in a cab that had just passed between the main gates of the Quayle estate. Overawed as a rule when he visited mansions, Leeming felt no queasiness now. They were on their way to arrest a killer and that concentrated the mind. When the house rose up before them, he ignored it altogether. Like Colbeck, he turned his attention to the stables. As their cab got closer, they saw a lone horseman emerge and kick his mount into a canter. Colbeck recognised him at once. It was John Cleary.