Eighteenth century London. Controlling crime is in the hands of the Bow Street Runners:
Murder in Silks
by
Lucienne Boyce
Lucienne Boyce
In spring 1798, Bow Street Runner Dan Foster
has been called to his second murder case in a week – one he’s been told to
prioritise because of the victim’s high-society connections. As if that isn’t
irritating enough, the lead officer in the case is Principal Officer John
Townsend – and he and Dan are not exactly on friendly terms.
This extract is taken from the third Dan
Foster Mystery, which Lucienne is currently working on.
Odd,
how dressing up murder in silks and satins instead of cheap cotton prints made
it less acceptable. Inwardly raging as he strode away from Bow Street, Dan swore
defiance of Sir William Addington’s order. He would not drop his case. He would
find out who murdered the nameless woman at the Feathers. And if she had been a
whore, well there was not much to choose between her and a demi-rep dead in a
mansion in Mayfair.
And behind all that lay the nagging
question: why had John Townsend asked for Dan, when he could have picked any
one of the principal officers?
The house stood on the corner of Hill
Street and overlooked Berkeley Square where the young plane trees were
beginning to show signs of regrowth after the winter. The usual morning peace
that enveloped its wealthy inhabitants was disturbed by the babble of the crowd
that had gathered on the pavement. A couple of constables stood outside the
front door to keep them at bay.
“Bow Street Officer!” Dan shouted, pushing his way through. He ran up the stone steps between the spiked railings. One of the sentinels knocked on the door, which was opened by a constable inside after much turning of locks and drawing back of bolts. Dan slipped through while the crowd craned forward for a glimpse into the house.
“Bow Street Officer!” Dan shouted, pushing his way through. He ran up the stone steps between the spiked railings. One of the sentinels knocked on the door, which was opened by a constable inside after much turning of locks and drawing back of bolts. Dan slipped through while the crowd craned forward for a glimpse into the house.
“Mr Townsend is in the library, sir.”
The constable pointed to a half-open door.
Dan crossed a hallway as big as his
parlour and filled with a bewildering array of flowers, vases and mirrors. He
saw Townsend moving about inside the room, stopping to fiddle with an ornament
here, peer at a clock there, prod a cushion or curtain with his cane. Every now
and again he nodded in the direction of the unseen occupant of a chair near the
marble fireplace.
“Mmm, mmm.”
After each slight encouragement, a
woman’s tearful voice continued its disjointed murmur.
Dan stepped into the room, cast his gaze
upon its two occupants. Three if you counted Louise Parmeter, formerly mistress
to the Prince of Wales. Dan’s resentment against the victim evaporated as soon
as he saw her. Even in death she was one of the most beautiful women he had
ever seen. Long eyelashes swept her delicate cheek; shapely eyebrows framed
large, lidded eyes; and her hair was a glory of gold. Her lips were slightly
parted, as if on the verge of a smile that must have been dazzling when life
animated it.
She was seated behind a daintily
fashioned desk, which was littered with papers, books and pens. The upper half
of her body sprawled across the desk, hands and arms outstretched. Her head
was turned to the side, her left cheek resting on her work. Her hair was matted
with blood from a jagged wound at the back of her skull. A heavy silver candlestick
had been thrown onto the table, gouging its brilliant surface, the end sticky
with gore in which were embedded several hairs. The inkstand had been
overturned and dripped down the rosewood to obliterate the pattern of the
opulent rug beneath.
Townsend thrust one hand into the pocket
of the yellow waistcoat straining over his round belly. “There you are at last,
Foster.”
“Mr Townsend.”
Dan looked down to meet the witness’s
pale, red-eyed gaze, her nose rubbed raw from crying. She wore an
unostentatious though well-made dress with a checked apron, a simple muslin
handkerchief, and a plain cap. She was younger than Louise Parmeter by some ten
years: Dan guessed her to be about twenty five. She did not have the attitude
of a servant, would not have been sitting in her mistress’s armchair if she had
been, yet she had clearly not been Louise Parmeter’s equal. A companion
perhaps.
“This is Miss Taylor, Mrs Parmeter’s prottygay,”
Townsend said.
“Her protegée in what, Miss Taylor?” Dan
asked.
“Mrs Parmeter and I are both votaries to
the poetic muse,” Miss Taylor answered. She choked back a sob. “That is, she
was.”
Dan looked at her in surprise. The words
were flowery, but the accents were those of a working woman.
“Miss Taylor found the body,” Townsend
said.
“When?”
“I came looking for her when she did not
come in for luncheon,” Miss Taylor said. “Found her – like that.”
“I’m asking the questions, Foster,”
Townsend said. “You just whip out your notebook and mark down the main points.”
He tapped his cane on the floor as he counted them off. “Miss Louise Parmeter, a literary lady, works
in her library from nine o’clock every morning. At midday she takes a light
luncheon. Today she did not go to the dining room. Miss Taylor came to fetch
her. Knocked. No reply. Entered. Found the lady brutally slain. Murder weapon:
the candlestick on her desk. Have you got that? Obvious how the killer got in
and out.”
 |
| John Townsend |
Dan looked around the room. There was a
day bed in the corner, armchairs by the marble fireplace, paintings on the
walls, busts of Greek or Roman philosophers on top of the glass-fronted
bookshelves. A silver tray on a polished sideboard held gleaming decanters and
glasses. The desk stood in front of a glass door that gave onto the garden, a
formal affair of urns, fountains and statues, looking grey and drab on an
overcast April day. The long curtains were looped back and the door was ajar.
“How did he get into the garden?” Dan
asked. “It’s a high wall. He couldn’t have climbed it in broad daylight without
drawing attention to himself.”
Townsend tut-tutted. “I have already
established the facts. There is a gate at the end of the garden which leads
into the mews. It was closed but unlocked when I checked it. It is usually kept
locked.”
“Have you – ”
“Looked for footprints? Thank heavens
you are here to think of it...Of course I have. There are none.”
Dan moved towards the desk for a closer
view of the body. One earlobe was torn and bloodied. He addressed Miss Taylor.
“Her jewellery has been taken?”
“Yes,” Miss Taylor answered. “Diamond
earrings and a matching necklace. They were a gift from the Prince of Wales.”
She dabbed at her eyes.
“She wore diamonds to work at her desk?”
“She often wears – wore – them. She didn’t
believe in hoarding.”
“The question is,” Townsend said, “who did
the thief have on the inside? The servants are gathered in the hall downstairs
under the guard of two constables, and all are accounted for. So whoever let
him in is still on the premises. Go down and start taking their statements,
Foster. Find out where they say they were this morning, and make a note of anyone
who doesn’t have an alibi.
Dan thought of telling Townsend what to
do with his orders, then remembered Sir William Addington’s threat to demote
him. There was no point giving Townsend cause to make a bad report of him
within an hour of starting the case. Besides, there were several things
puzzling him.
“That clock on the mantelpiece is worth
a bit,” he said. “Not to mention the silver snuff box on that table over there.
The candle snuffers. Any one of the ornaments.”
“Obviously he came expressly for the
diamonds,” Townsend said. “They alone are enough to make his fortune – his and
his accomplice’s.”
“But why come for them while she’s
wearing them? And why in the day time?”
“They were kept overnight in a Bramah
safe in the butler’s pantry. The lock is impossible to pick. It’s apparent,
Foster, that you are not used to high-class crimes of this nature. There’s a
bit more going on here than the pilfering of a few bits of lace from a
haberdasher’s or the lifting of a purse. It takes a bit of nerve to pull off
something like this, and it wants someone with connections to sell the gems.
They’ll need taking out of their settings, possibly getting over to Amsterdam.
This is a professional job.”
“Then why did he miss one?” Dan used his
pencil to push a lock of the dead woman’s hair aside, revealing the glittering
diamonds on the drop still hanging from her left ear.
“Because he was interrupted before he
got everything he wanted,” Townsend said. “Probably when Miss Taylor knocked on
the door.”
Miss Taylor’s hands flew up to her
throat. “Oh! Do you mean he was still in the room when I was standing in the
hall?”
“Very likely,” Townsend answered.
Dan scratched his head with his pencil.
“But even with someone knocking on the door, it would have been the work of
seconds to snatch the earring. He’d made no ceremony of
taking the first. And it’s strange, isn’t it, that she sat calmly at her desk
while someone let themselves in at the door just behind her. She must have
known he was there. If she didn’t hear his footsteps, he would have blocked out
the light.”
Townsend rolled
his eyes. “Do you have a point, Foster?”
“I think the
killer must have been someone she knew.”
Miss Taylor let
out a scream and collapsed back in the chair in a dead faint.
© Lucienne Boyce 2017
About the author
Lucienne
Boyce is an award-winning historical novelist and local historian. Her
historical novels are To The Fair Land
(2012) and the Dan Foster Mysteries comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The
Fatal Coin (2017), and The Butcher’s
Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a
winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and was also a semi
finalist in the M M Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction 2016. Lucienne
published The Bristol Suffragettes in
2013 and The Road to Representation:
Essays on the Women’s Suffrage Campaign in 2017. She is a steering
committee member of the West of England and South Wales Women’s History
Network, and is currently working on the next Dan Foster Mystery, and a
biography of suffragette Millicent Browne.
Social Media Links
Twitter: @LucienneWrite
Buying
Links
 |
| Read our Review |
Bloodie
Bones
 |
| Read our Review |
The
Butcher’s Block
 |
| Read our Review |
The
Fatal Coin
(e-book novella)
Follow the Tales…and Discover some Diamonds
3rd December Richard Tearle Diamonds
4th December Helen Hollick When ex-lovers have their uses
5th December Antoine Vanner Britannia’s Diamonds
6th December Nicky Galliers Diamond Windows
7th December Denise Barnes The Lost Diamond
8th December Elizabeth Jane Corbett A Soul Above Diamonds
9th December Lucienne Boyce Murder In Silks
10th December Julia Brannan The Curious Case of the Disappearing Diamond
11th December Pauline Barclay Sometimes It Happens
12th December Annie Whitehead Hearts, Home and a Precious Stone
13th December Inge H. Borg Edward, Con Extraordinaire
14th December J.G. Harlond The Empress Emerald
15th December Charlene Newcomb Diamonds in the Desert
16th December Susan Grossey A Suitable Gift
17th December Alison Morton Three Thousand Years to Saturnalia
18th December Nancy Jardine Illicit Familial Diamonds
19th December Elizabeth St John The Stolen Diamonds
20th December Barbara Gaskell Denvil Discovering the Diamond
21st December Anna Belfrage Diamonds in the Mud
