Deliveries and a Dead Body Read online

  Deliveries and a Dead Body

  copyright (c) 2022 L. A. Nisula

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to actual places or persons is purely coincidental.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  Ada Shepherd and her wife Kate Ferris were having a perfectly normal day making deliveries for their Mayfair tinkering and haberdashery shop until they reached the Mertons’ house. There, they found an empty house, an unlocked door, and a dead body in the middle of the entryway. To make the day even stranger, by the time Ada returned from looking for assistance with a policeman in tow, the body had disappeared and the house was filled with quite the normal number of people, all while Kate had been waiting on the front step. With no body, the police won’t investigate, leaving Kate and Ada with no choice but to take matters into their own hands if they want to find out what really happened.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 1

  ONE OF THE PROBLEMS with having a shop in Mayfair was that we had the sort of customers who expected personal attention. That meant that Shepherd and Ferris Haberdashery and Tinkering (proprietors K. Ferris and A. Shepherd) could not do the normal thing and hand all our deliveries off to some messenger on the corner with a list of addresses and a few coins and leave it at that. We had to deliver them in person. It was a task neither Kate nor I liked, and one that was difficult to split up as I handled the haberdashery side of things and could answer questions on yarn and thread, while Kate managed the tinkering side and therefore was better with questions on gears and spanners. Splitting up the lists by what people ordered had meant we were both rushing around the same areas of town on different days while our customers constantly asked why so-and-so got their order a day earlier than they got theirs. Fortunately, we eventually managed to hire Julia Abbott as a shop assistant, and as she had grown up around her mother’s dress shop and was taking whatever tinkering classes she was allowed into at the city university and the tinkering academy, she could be trusted to watch over both parts of the shop.

  So on a Wednesday afternoon when Julia was there to watch the shop, Kate and I loaded up baskets with the deliveries for the customers who absolutely needed to have personal attention and prepared to set out for an afternoon of pretending to be glad to see them. It was never our friendly clients who wanted personal deliveries, either. Never the ones we might actually have been pleased to see, like Miss Hillbourne, who was working on a velocycle, or Miss Kenyon, who was trying to knit every lace pattern in The Ladies Journal of Practical Needlework.

  Our shop on a small street in Mayfair was divided roughly in half, with the display area for tinkering on one side, with its sections for gears and tools and a worktable displaying ideas for projects, and the area for displaying haberdashery, with bins of wool and containers of sewing and knitting needles, on the other. Along the back wall were shelves of project books, the more serious tinkering ones covered in pastel paper in case a customer wanted to smuggle one home. Down the center, visible from the door, was a series of tables displaying kits for making various things, mainly overly cute animals that performed small but useful tasks, like the tea-stirring kitten. They served both to attract new customers that might not have realized they had an interest in tinkering, and to make it easier for said customers to get their more patriarchal parents to agree that they really did need a new set of spanners or gears or whatever. They also made up the bulk of our tinkering deliveries.

  Kate did a final check of the lists while I made certain there wasn’t anything odd Julia needed to be aware of. “Ada, do you know where this package of yarn is?”

  I looked at the—fortunately short—list of deliveries to be made that she was holding out. “Is it Mrs. Hopper? She canceled it. At the last second.”

  “Again? We should start charging her for the trouble. And what does this say?”

  Julia leaned over to have a look. “I added that. Mrs. Bexley wants a set of awls for her latest project.”

  “She’s making a false second lock for her jewelry box, why would she need those?”

  Julia shrugged. “She just said to be sure you brought the largest set we carry.”

  “Maybe she’s finally planning on doing in her husband. What do you think, Ada?”

  I considered the question. “Is that a viable way of murdering someone?”

  Kate looked thoughtful for a moment. “I suppose not. Not really sharp enough.”

  “I’ll wipe them down before I wrap them anyway,” Julia said half-seriously. “And I’ll wear gloves while I do it.”

  In spite of all the theories and changes to orders, we did eventually get underway. And managed something resembling good time. As the list of places to visit got shorter, Kate’s mood improved. The Merton house at 24 Sterling Street in Knightsbridge was late on our list of deliveries. We’d already been to five other houses and had been offered tea at only one, Mrs. Bexley’s, which made me wonder just why she wanted a set of awls.

  I was wondering if I should ask Kate to elaborate on her theory when we got back to the shop when she interrupted my thoughts by saying, “The Mertons are next. What are we bringing them?”

  I looked at my list. “One tea-stirring kitten.” Mrs. Merton only tinkered occasionally, and then it was always one of our deliberately overly cute and over-priced pre-made kits. And despite being an avid needleworker, she never purchased her wool or embroidery threads from us.

  “I thought she ordered one of those last week.”

  I didn’t keep as close track of the tinkering side of things as Kate did, so I trusted her memory and shrugged. “Maybe she’s giving them as gifts?”

  “Or she wants to keep making something she already knows how to finish.”

  “Like Mrs. Canford. She’s knitted the exact same sweater twenty-six times by my last count. I don’t know what she does with them.”

  “I suppose if you change the color...”

  “She doesn’t.”

  Kate laughed at that. “Then it is a mystery. We should get Cassie’s views on it when she gets back. I can’t believe Mrs. Albright took her to a place called Upper Slaughter.”

  “They’re only near the Slaughters. I bet if they stayed in one of those villages, nothing would happen.”

  “So we should get some good stories when she gets back. Is that the Mertons’ place?”

  It was indeed the Mertons’ house, one of a row of neat townhouses around a square with a park and gardens. Reasonably sized for Mayfair and bordering on enormous for the rest of London. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Mr. Merton would have preferred we use the delivery entrance, but as we weren’t sending a messenger with their package, we went up the four neatly scrubbed steps to the front door and rang the bell, a boring sort of thing with a pull and nothing more that I was sure Kate was itching to improve upon.

  There was no answer to our ring, and I couldn’t tell if the bell had even rung inside. I looked over at Kate.

  “Even if they’re not in, there have to be some servants around.”

  She was right, of course. I knew the Mertons had several servants. They would ne
ver have left the house completely unattended.

  “Pity the package is too big to shove through the slot,” Kate said, looking wistfully down at the little brass cover of the slot for the post, another feature of the door I was sure she wanted to improve upon.

  “And a bigger pity that Mr. Merton will have a fit if this is late.” He wasn’t particularly supportive of his wife’s tinkering hobby, but he definitely expected his packages, even those he didn’t care about, to be on time.

  Kate reached for the door knocker, a brass sort of hammer thing that didn’t seem as if it would make much sound, and rapped it against the brass plate, attempting to make enough noise to be heard. We were both quite surprised when the door swung open several inches on the first knock.

  “I suppose we should have tried the knob,” Kate said as she pushed the door open the rest of the way. “But who would have thought it would be unlocked?” She poked her head inside. “Mr. Merton? Mrs. Merton? Mr. Siddington? Is anybody here? We have a delivery from Shepherd and Ferris. Oh!”

  That was not the sort of oh that normally accompanied an interesting new gear configuration, or the one that was followed by a scruffy puppy of indeterminate breed doing something perfectly normal, but still ridiculously adorable. In fact, I had not heard that sort of oh from Kate before. As she was still blocking the bit of door she’d opened, I reached around her to push the door open the rest of the way and leaned over her shoulder to look. It was immediately obvious that that oh was how Kate responded to finding a body sprawled out on the entryway floor. “Well.” That was how I responded to the same.

  We both recovered our senses at more or less the same time and went inside. Kate continued down the short hallway, looking in all the nearby rooms and calling out, “Mr. Merton? Mrs. Merton? Anyone home? It’s Miss Ferris from Shepherd and Ferris!” and when that didn’t work, “Is everyone all right?” And finally, “You have a dead body in your entryway!” while I knelt by the body and had a look.

  The first thing I did was check for a pulse. There was none, and the skin was cold and clammy, although not hard underneath. Still, definitely dead. I took a small mirror out of my handbag and held it at an angle to get a better look at his features. Not familiar at all, and no fog on the mirror. I leaned back on my heels and had a better look at him. Male, dressed in the sort of dark suit of decent but not superior quality that doesn’t tell you much about the person wearing it, dark hair, had probably been good-looking when he wasn’t dead. No obvious sign of how he’d died, although he was lying prone on the floor with his head facing the wall, so there could have been some injury to his front that I couldn’t see. His legs were bent at an odd angle, which could have suggested a fall down the stairs, although I would have expected more injuries around the face for that, but then what did I know? The only things I was certain of were that he was definitely dead, and he was definitely not someone we knew.

  The Mertons’ entryway was not the sort of place you’d expect to find a dead body, not that anyplace we visited regularly was. It was a small space, sparsely furnished with a chair for callers to wait in, and a mirror and console table to aid the family as they prepared to go out. The floor was a fashionable black and white tile until it reached the carpeted staircase leading up to the family parts of the house. The walls were papered in a tasteful floral design that didn’t seem to suit the taste of either of the Mertons but made the space look fashionable. There were three doors on the right which I knew from our previous visits led to a little-used receiving room on the left, a coat closet, and a room that seemed slightly smaller than the coat closet which the butler, Siddington, used when he was waiting for guests he expected at the front door. A small hallway led back into the house and eventually to the downstairs sitting room. All in all, not the sort of place I expected to find a body.

  Kate came back and knelt beside me. “I don’t see anyone down here, and if there is someone somewhere else in the house, I would think they would have answered me. They certainly wouldn’t think we were a danger.”

  “So either they’re all in trouble or not at home.”

  “And him?”

  “Dead, not long ago, but long enough for him to be getting cold.”

  “Do we know him?” Kate leaned over to get a look at the face in my mirror but quickly came to the same conclusion I had. “I haven’t seen him around the Mertons’ before either. Have you?”

  “No, but then this isn’t a place we spend much time, is it?” There was nothing else to be done for him, so I got to my feet.

  Kate got up as well. “Did you see a constable as we were coming?”

  I thought back to the short walk down Sterling Street. “No, but in this neighborhood, there has to be one nearby.” One who would find the thought of a dead body troubling because of the number of residents who would be complaining to the commissioner the next time they had him to dinner or their Member of Parliament at the next fundraiser they threw for him.

  Kate looked at the entryway. “Well, we shouldn’t leave him alone either. I’ll stay.”

  I felt guilty that I was relieved she’d offered, but not guilty enough to turn down the offer. “If you don’t mind. I’ll try to be quick.”

  “Some of these parcels are heavy enough to make a good cosh. I’ll be fine. Although it’s probably best if I wait outside so I don’t disturb any evidence.”

  I had the feeling the fact that she didn’t want to be left alone with a body carried more weight than the state of the evidence, but both were perfectly sound reasons to stand on the front step. “I’ll keep going down the street. If I don’t see a constable, I might see someone who knows his beat and where he’ll be.”

  Kate followed me out. “If I see anyone pass by, I’ll try to send them for help.” She paused to look at the doorknob and see if the door would remain unlocked when it was closed, only the knob wouldn’t turn. She knelt by the door and took a closer look. “There’s a bit of metal here, over the plate. It’s stopping the latch from catching. That has to be deliberate, although I don’t know what it means.” She got back to her feet. “I’ll leave that for the police to examine. They might have some ideas.”

  I wanted to ask once more if she was going to be all right, but I had the feeling that would just make her worry more, which would annoy her and delay me finding the constable. “I’ll go as far as the corner then try up the next street. If I don’t see anyone there, I’ll come back.”

  “Right. And I’ll keep an eye out.” Just as she spoke, the wind picked up, startling us both and blowing dust and dead leaves into the Mertons’ entryway. “That’s got to be disturbing evidence,” Kate said.

  “Confusing it, at least,” I agreed.

  Kate reached behind her and pulled the door closed. “At least I can still hear if anyone starts moving around in there.”

  As I doubted the body would be moving any time soon, it would be the killer she’d be hearing. “I’ll hurry back,” I promised yet again then started off down the street before I could find another reason to assure her I’d be back quickly.

  The Mertons lived in the sort of neighborhood where there is always a constable around somewhere. Halfway down the block, I stopped a maid who was going out on an errand, and she was able to tell me more or less where a certain Constable Redding would be patrolling. That made it easy enough to find him the next block over. He stopped when he saw I was approaching and tipped his helmet. “Morning, Miss. Are you lost?”

  That was probably the main problem he ran into around here. Lost visitors and pickpockets, I would think. This would be quite a shock for him, so I tried to approach it gently. “More serious, I’m afraid. There’s a dead body at 24 Sterling Street.”

  Constable Redding actually blinked at that. “I’m sure it’s...”

  “No pulse, cold but not stiff, and no fog on my mirror.”

  I watched his expression as he tried to convince himself that someone who knew about pulses and rigor mortis could still be completely mista
ken about a dead body. I’m sure one hadn’t been in his plans for the day. Still, he managed to rally. “Let’s have a look, shall we?” I could tell he was hoping it wouldn’t be there when we arrived.

  While I led Constable Redding to the Merton house, I told him everything Kate and I had done since we’d first climbed the steps to the Mertons’ front door. Constable Redding half listened, still hoping I was wrong. When we were in sight of the Mertons’ house, I waved to Kate. She was still waiting where I’d left her, on the front step, leaning against the railing, watching the street. She waved back when she saw me and came down to meet us.

  “I haven’t heard anything from inside. No one’s been in or out through here. I wasn’t able to see the back of the house though. And the street’s been quiet, not even a nanny or a delivery boy.”

  “So everything should be undisturbed,” I told Constable Redding.

  “Right. Well, let’s see if we can get in.” It was quite clear Constable Redding was hoping we wouldn’t be able to, but he went up the stairs and rang the bell.

  “Something going on at the Mertons’, Constable Redding?” Kate and I both turned to see a blonde maid coming out of the house next door, the one belonging to Mr. Atley (not a customer of ours but the servants were friendly with those at the Mertons’, so we sometimes heard bits of gossip about the goings-on there).

  “Nothing you need to worry about, Miss Gladys. These ladies just had a bit of confusion while making some deliveries.”

  Kate glared at him while I tried to convince myself he was merely trying to stop there from being a panic on the block. I wasn’t succeeding very well, which was possibly why I got more annoyed with him than his second attempt at the bell warranted. “When we arrived, the lock had been rigged so the door opened when we knocked,” I reminded him.

  Constable Redding looked back at me then gave the door a slight push. It swung open easily. “A bit of metal jammed in the lock, it seems.”