A Gentleman's Murder by Christopher Huang

Author:Christopher Huang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkshares
Published: 2018-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE VAULT

THE LAST TIME Eric had a look around the Britannia, the cleaning staff was still trying to get rid of all traces of fingerprint powder, and most members had chosen to cross the street to the Golden Lion rather than dine within sight of the evidence of police activity. The powder was all gone now, and a few brave souls had returned to the dining room; but there was something brittle about the atmosphere, as though the attendants were too conscious of their silence, and the light too anxious to chase away the shadows.

Inside, there was a faint but lingering smell in the air of something unpleasant. The fog had crept in overnight and left its taint.

Wolfe had managed to break into the club without leaving a trace; it was the one thing Eric knew for a fact about the night of Benson’s murder. That, then, was where he should start: once he knew how Wolfe had done it, he might begin to see how anyone else could do the same.

Stopping outside on the opposite side of the street, Eric made a critical assessment of the club building.

It had a neoclassical limestone facade, much like the St. James Theatre and most other buildings up and down King Street. Tall windows topped with triangular pediments flanked the entrance. The front doors were very exposed, in spite of the sheltered portico. They were locked after 9 p.m., though an attendant would let one in if one were to ring the bell.

The ground-floor windows were to the dining room on one side of the doors and a public reception room on the other. These windows were locked up tight at this time of the year. In the summer months, a high transom pane in each might be opened for ventilation. Even if those transoms were open now, getting in through them would require a significant amount of agility. The same went for the windows on the first floor above. And farther up on the second floor were windows to the club lodgings. As Eric knew from his experience last week, these had been painted shut.

Below were the basement windows: frosted glass protected by iron grillwork. Eric had no idea what lay beyond them, but it was clear that no one could have got through them without first tearing off the bars, and no such damage was in evidence.

A number of passages and courts bled off from King Street into the recesses behind and between the buildings, and one such passage ran up one side of the club to a narrow utility court. Once upon a time, the carriage house in the back of the property opened into this court, but today the carriage house was the Britannia Club’s gymnasium, and its access to the court had been bricked up. Now, the only entrance to the building from the court was a single door surrounded by dustbins, hidden from the street by a projection of the building. A young sandy-haired attendant, loitering there

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