“Lookin’ for me, were you?” said he. “I s’pose His Majesty has summoned me for another talk. He said he’d not done with me.”
“I thought you might be open for customers,” said I, avoiding a more serious lie.
“Not today, but tomorrow. I shall have a job of washing up to do. Then I must buy my meat and fix delivery. It takes a day to start up again. But in truth, Jeremy, I’m glad I ran into you.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“I’m afraid I was a bit short with you last night. Short? I gave you no greeting at all! I was put out of sorts by the magistrate. Put plain, he seems not to believe me. Why, I don’t know — unless it be something personal.”
“Oh, I think not,” said I. “It is just that having captured one killer, he came to discover there was another.”
“He told me of that, said you were quite the hero in the matter — given a reward and all.”
“Half a reward, for there is still one to be caught, and Sir John feels great urgency that he be apprehended before he kill again.”
“Well, you can tell him for me that, beggin’ his pardon, but I ain’t his man.”
He growled that out so loudly in his deep voice that the rude woman in the next stall turned to look.
“I believe you, Mr. Tolliver,” said I stoutly. “I would not, could not, think ill of you. Nor could Lady Fielding. We have both spoken oft in your behalf.”
He grunted a rumbling bass grunt. “I must say she treated my wife well. You may tell Kate for me that I’ll not forget that, nor will Maude.”
“Maude?” I asked a bit dully. My mind, reader, was at that moment on a much weightier matter. I was laboring to make a decision.
“My wife,” said he, explaining the obvious. “Maude Whetsel she was, and Maude Tolliver she is now. I tell you, Jeremy, it’s a sad thing to bring a woman you’ve just married back to a terrible muddle like this.”
Then did he shake his great head as one would in a state of awful perplexity. What was to be done? What could be done? In that moment I felt that only I could help him.
“Mr. Tolliver,” I burst out, at last giving in to the impulse with which I had been grappling these last moments, “is there any way that you can prove that you were on that night coach to Bristol? That you did not wait till the morrow to travel there?”
He looked at me queerly, as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes and he saw now clearly what he had before only dimly perceived.
“So,” said he, “it all comes down to that, does it?”
“Tell me what you told Sir John, if you would, please. What did you do after you left us there on Henrietta Street?”
“Why, I went home.”
“Back to your rooms in Long Acre. Continue — all the details, please.”
“Well, coming in to my place, I found a lettered been slipped under my door. It was from — ”
“Stay a moment,” said I, interrupting. “Do you know how the letter came to be there?”
“Not for certain, no, but Fve an idea. Fve a neighbor, Mr. Salter, who manages the backstage at the Theatre Royal. A man in a position like that, he gets a fair share of post from all over, so he stops by the letter office two or three times a week to pick up his packet. It’s known that I live at the same address, and so the odd letter comes now and then for me they give to him for to pass on. He tucks them under my door.”
“Good,” said I. “Will you find out from Mr. Salter that he did in fact deliver that letter from Bristol so?”
“I can do that, yes, if he remembers. It was more than a month ago.”
“Well and good, you found the letter, you opened and read it. Why did you decide so immediate to go off to Bristol to meet the woman who was to become your wife?”
“Sir John asked me that, too, and I told him polite that it was a personal matter, and Fd keep my own counsel on that. And we argued a bit, but since it’s you askin’, Fll tell you. Fve had terrible luck tryin’ to marry again. I came close once” — he gave me a look I would term significant — “yet that went for naught. Mostly it is that women who are respectable want nothing to do with a butcher. I don’t know why, for they’ll eat a good cut of meat ready enough. Yet I courted a few, and it all come down to that — bein’ a butcher was somehow disgusting to them. So Fd put this advert in the Shipping News in Bristol where it was I grew up, and I made it plain in it butchering was my trade, and I swear to you, Jeremy, hers was the only letter I got back. And it was a grand letter, so it was. I saw her as an intelligent woman who’d had terrible misfortune visited upon her, lost her husband and two children, yet managed to support herself and keep her self-respect. And so she is and so she has — she’s a grand woman is my Maude. And… well. ” He came to a full stop and looked away.
“And what? Tell me what you were about to say, Mr. Tolliver, please.”
“It was what I just came from, finding that girl dead in the passage, that decided me to leave immediate. As I believe I said at the time, Td seen the girl about — she’d bought from me on an occasion or two — and to see her so, a mere child she was, all crumpled up and murdered, people pawing over her to find her wound — well, it just made me heartsick. This is such a hard city, Jeremy, so little in it of hope and decency, especially for those of her kind. Well, I just wanted to get away from here as quick as ever I could. P’rhaps I should have given thought to Sir John’s request that I be here for the inquest, but I’d told all I knew two times over. I just wanted to get away.”
He had grown tense in the telling. His hands, both of them, were rolled into big fists; his head was bowed. I remembered his objections when Mr. Bailey had sought the death wound the Raker had inflicted just below her sternum. Indeed Lady Fielding was no bad judge of character, nor was I: Mr. Tolliver could not have murdered Libby Tribble and Poll Tarkin.
“You told Sir John none of this, I suppose?”
“No — just a bit about Maude, that I was eager to meet her.”
“When he questions you again, as no doubt he will, you must tell him all of this exactly as you’ve told me.” I saw resistance written in his face, and so I repeated: “Exactly so. But now, please continue. You packed your portmanteau in a great hurry and made ready to leave. Do you know the time you left your rooms to catch the night coach?”
“Well, as near as I can remember, I had a little less than an hour to get there. I’ve a clock I wind daily, so I can be right certain about that.”
Something here was wrong. “But if you had near an hour to get to the coach house,” I said, “why were you in such a great hurry? You could walk it easily in a quarter of an hour.”
“But I had to get back to my stall here in the Garden. I’d meat inside, and it was all locked up. With no idea when I’d return, I knew the meat would rot. Couldn’t have that.”
“How did you dispose of it?”
“Why, I just hung it up on the hooks in front. I knew it would be gone by morning. A good two guineas’ worth it was, over the counter. That’s how eager I was to be away from London. Oh but, Jeremy, you must know that a butcher would never let his meat rot in the stall. God, the stink of it! I’d never be able to sell a piece of meat here in Covent Garden again. But with coming back here, hanging out what was left and all, it was getting on towards ten, though I didn’t know the time exact, for I have no pocket timepiece. So I crossed the Garden, which is a risky thing to do at night, and caught a hackney at the Theatre Royal.”
“Again,” said I, “did you tell Sir John of this? All the details you’ve given me?”
“I may have told him I caught a hackney. But so far as the rest of it, no. We were mostly arguing about my responsibility to be at the inquest and so on. He rubbed me the wrong way, he did.”
“That’s as may be,” I said, “but when next he interrogates you, you must tell him about your trip back here and how you hung out the meat. Those are very important details.”