Mrs. Jeffries Appeals the Verdict by Emily Brightwell (lightest ebook reader txt) 📕

she hurried

toward the coat tree, “but the traffic was dreadful today. The

omnibus was held up for ages because of a crash between a

hansom cab and a water cart.”

“Not to worry, Mrs. Jeffries.” Mrs. Goodge poured the

housekeeper a cup of tea. “We’ve only just sat down ourselves.”

“Excellent.” She slipped into her chair, took a deep

breath, and then looked around the table at the others. “I’d

like to go first, if I may.” She waited for a moment and then

plunged ahead. “I’ve asked Ruth Cannonberry to give us

some assistance on this case. Perhaps I ought to have spoken to all of you before I took such an action, but I honestly believe she could be a great deal of help to us.”

“Does she know that our inspector doesn’t have this

case?” Betsy asked.

“I told her everything,” she explained. “It didn’t seem

fair not to tell her the whole story.”

“And she’s not alarmed by the prospect of workin’

behind the inspector’s back, so to speak?” Mrs. Goodge

asked.

“Not in the least.” Mrs. Jeffries relaxed a bit. “I know

it was a bit of a risk, my asking her for help, but frankly,

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49

I really didn’t see that we’d any other choice. She has some

very powerful connections and we might very well need

them.”

“If we’re lucky, maybe her connections will keep us

from ’aving to put this on the inspector’s plate,” Smythe

mused. “That’d be right useful.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Mrs. Jeffries replied. “I had another run of good luck by bringing her into it. She actually knew the victim. Caroline Muran occasionally came to her

women’s suffrage meetings. They weren’t close friends

nor did they move in the same social circles, but she was

acquainted with her.”

“Did she like her?” Betsy asked softly. Somehow, one

of their own knowing the victim made it more real, more

personal.

Mrs. Jeffries smiled sadly. “Ruth says she was a very

nice woman—very kind and very intelligent. She was a

strong financial supporter of the society and gave them a

good contribution every year.”

“I expect they’ll miss that,” Mrs. Goodge muttered. She

wasn’t sure how she felt about some of Ruth’s radical

ideas. She used to be dead set against all of them. She’d always believed that the British class system was right and proper and that the lower classes should know their places.

But over the past few years, she’d changed her thinking on

such matters.

“Did Lady Cannonberry know of anyone who had a reason to dislike Mrs. Muran?” Betsy asked. “Was there anyone in the society she’d had a quarrel with or anything like that?”

“No, she was a member, but she wasn’t actively involved enough in the group to have made any enemies.”

“I suppose that would have been too simple,” Betsy

replied glumly. “Finding out who hated Caroline Muran

enough to murder her isn’t going to be easy.”

“Why wasn’t she involved?” Mrs. Goodge reached for

her tea cup. “She ought to have been if she believed in their

cause. She had money and she had time—”

50

Emily Brightwell

“But that’s just it,” Mrs. Jeffries interrupted. “She didn’t

have time. She was actively involved in running the metal

works factory.”

“You mean she was the manager?” Wiggins looked quite

horrified by the idea.

“Why shouldn’t she be the manager?” Mrs. Goodge said

tartly. “She owned the place, she ought to have been able to

run it as she saw fit. Women can manage factories as well

as men.”

“I didn’t say they couldn’t,” Wiggins insisted. “But it

couldn’t have been a very nice place, with all them nasty

chemicals about. I’ll bet the place stank to high heaven.”

“She had a manager,” Mrs. Jeffries interjected quickly.

“But she had to sack him.” That had been the pertinent

point she’d wanted to make. “She sacked him about a week

before she was killed. So we know that she had at least one

person in her life that couldn’t have been too pleased with

her.”

“Why’d she fire ’im?” Smythe asked eagerly.

“Ruth didn’t know any details.” Mrs. Jeffries picked up

her mug. “She heard the information secondhand after she

found out about the murder. But she thought nothing of it,

of course. Like everyone else, because Tommy was arrested

so quickly, she assumed Mrs. Muran’s death was simply a

robbery gone wrong.”

“That’s what everyone seems to think,” Smythe muttered. “We need to find out the name of her factory manager, the one she sacked. I can have a go at that tomorrow.”

Mrs. Jeffries nodded in agreement. “We definitely should

find out the man’s name. But that’s not all I have to tell you.

After I saw Ruth, I went to St. Thomas’s Hospital to have a

quick word with Dr. Bosworth.”

Dr. Bosworth was another friend who’d helped them on

several of their earlier cases. He had some very interesting

ideas about dead bodies, and his theories had often helped

them when they were on the hunt.

He’d spent several years in San Francisco and had seen

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51

a rather large number of homicide victims, virtually all of

whom had been shot. Apparently, there was no shortage of

either guns or bodies in California.

Dr. Bosworth had come to the conclusion that you could

tell a great deal about how a person was murdered simply by

a careful examination of the death wounds. He also believed

that a thorough study of the murder victim could reveal

more than the mechanics of the cause of death; he believed

it could often give clues as to who had been the killer. Like

the household, Dr. Bosworth was quite discreet about his

help with Inspector Witherspoon’s cases.

“Did he do the postmortem?” Mrs. Goodge asked. “That

would make it nice and handy for us.”

“Unfortunately, he didn’t. But he promised he’d take a

look at the attending doctor’s report and get back to us. I

don’t know that it’ll help much,” she warned.

“It might,” Wiggins mused. “Dr. Bosworth knows a lot

about gunshot holes in a body. He might see something

that’d be good for us to know. He might be able to guess

what kind of gun it was. That’d narrow it down just a bit.”

Mrs. Jeffries stared at him for a moment. “Why, Wiggins, you’re absolutely right. We need to have some idea of what kind of weapon was used.”

“I’ll see if I can find out what kind of guns our suspects

own,” he offered eagerly.

“But we don’t even know who our suspects