The Mystery of Briony Lodge Read online

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  Born in Walsall of Indian and Welsh stock, and educated there and at Oxford, DAVID BAGCHI is an academic now based at the University of Hull. Starting out as a historical theologian he recently became, in what he describes as a shock career move, a theological historian. In 2010 he started pressing the wrong keys on his laptop, and two years later his first novel, a Tudor conspiracy thriller, won the TBS Novel Prize. The Mystery of Briony Lodge is his second work of fiction.

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  First published in Great Britain by Barbican Press in 2016

  © David Bagchi 2016

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

  No reproduction without permission

  All rights reserved

  The right of David Bagchi to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  We blithely acknowledge the living spirit of Jerome K. Jerome & Arthur Conan Doyle, especially as imbued in Three Men in a Boat & ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’

  Barbican Press, Hull and London

  Registered office: 1 Ashenden Road, London E5 0DP

  www.barbicanpress.com

  @barbicanpress1

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-909954-10-6

  Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  Cover by Jason Anscomb of Rawshock Design

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

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  To Fiona

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  ‘This book would not elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatsoever.’

  —JEROME K. JEROME

  ‘“It’s quite exciting,” said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn.’

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

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  ‌Chapter One

  A civilized conversation—On work and idleness—Harris the pedant—The exotic adventures to be met with at home—An interruption

  Wednesday 12 June 1889

  To Montmorency she is always the woman. The effect she had upon him, the day she intruded so bizarrely into our bachelor existence, was both instant and lasting. It happened in this way. Montmorency and I were discussing, in the civilized manner that only old friends can, the advantages to be gained from holidaying at home. Montmorency agreed with my every word. He really is the most intelligent soul I know.

  At least, we were attempting to discuss this theme in a civilized way. There were four of us in the sitting-room, relaxing with our cigarettes after one of our landlady’s better dinners—Montmorency, and George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself. George and Harris kept interrupting with oafish ideas of their own, quite out of keeping with the elevated tone of our conversation.

  ‘What we want is rest,’ said Harris.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ I said.

  ‘Rest and a complete change,’ said George.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said definitively, reaching for another cigarette. ‘We need stimulation. The daily round of labour, the routine of work, has dulled our senses.’

  I spoke charitably, as befits a Christian gentleman, for Harris does no work of any discernible kind and George’s wits were dulled long before he started in that bank of his. Indeed, I believe it is a requirement of his employment. Of the four of us, only Montmorency and I could justly be described as having useful occupations. My work is the writing of superbly-crafted historical novels, which have achieved no small success among a select, discerning readership. I refer of course to The Perils of Hypatia, a rollicking yarn set in fifth-century Alexandria, and The Crucifer of Sidon: A Tale of the Crusades. Montmorency, for his part, has an extensive practice which covers the entire neighbourhood, picking fights with opponents large and small. He more than earns his rations at home by terrorizing the rodent community of Baker Street, W1. Most have already packed their bags and gone. For all I know they have left warnings for any of their ilk who may wish to take their place, and penned furious letters to The Times about the appalling manners of the modern fox terrier.

  ‘The quotidian diet of mere drudgery…’ I continued, warming to my theme.

  ‘Oh, do get on with it, J. You can be such a windbag at times.’

  Ignoring Harris’s ill-natured interruption, born of course of jealousy, I pressed on with my usual remorseless logic.

  ‘Young men such as ourselves, with active minds (naturally I excuse you from this generalization, George) and active bodies (forgive me, Harris, I don’t mean you, of course) do not need rest. Rest for us is the mere counterfeit of death. There will be time enough for rest when the Grim Reaper taps us on the shoulder and asks to see our ticket. No—what we need is stimulus, an opportunity to channel our boundless masculine energy into some new and unfamiliar direction. Just as when, in days of yore, a new-made knight was sent alone, unaided, into the furthest reaches of his liege-lord’s kingdom, there to try his valour against all manner of foe and…’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been alone,’ cut in Harris.

  ‘What?’ I asked, blankly.

  ‘He wouldn’t have been alone. Or unaided. He would have had a page. Someone to go before and announce him. Someone to carry his banner, so that people would say, “Oh look, there goes Sir Whatsisname”.’

  ‘All right,’ I conceded grudgingly. ‘He would have had a page. He would be sent alone, accompanied only by his loyal page, into the furthest…’

  ‘Don’t forget his squire,’ Harris interrupted again. ‘A knight must have a squire.’

  ‘Isn’t that the same thing as a page?’ I inquired, less sure of myself now.

  ‘“The same thing as a page”! Honestly, J., you seem to know remarkably little about history for someone who writes historical novels. Perhaps that’s why no-one buys them. A squire is a knight’s apprentice, a young gentleman who will grow up and be knighted himself. While he’s learning the trade, he looks after the knight’s armour. Gets out the old Brasso and polishes it up at the end of the day. You can’t expect a knight to do that sort of thing for himself.’

  ‘All right,’ I said testily. ‘The knight was sent alone, accompanied only by his loyal page and his trusty squire, into the…’

  ‘You’re forgetting the groom,’ cut in Harris yet again. ‘You can’t have three horses and no-one to look after them.’

  For a full half-minute, I did not speak. I could not trust myself to do so. Luckily for Harris, I possess a more-than-ordinary power over my base animal instincts. It was what saved his life that day. When at length I broke my silence, it was with a finely-judged admixture of dignity, ratiocination, and compassion for those who dwell on a lower intellectual plane than myself.

  ‘The point I was making, Harris, was the general one that the young male of the species requires to be challenged. I was not discoursing upon the travelling habits of the medieval knight. Only a pedant of the most literal-minded stripe could possibly think I was.’

  It was gratifying to see Montmorency announce his loyal support of my position by jumping up onto the window sill and barking at the street and wagging his tail in agreement. He goes th
rough just the same ritual whenever a cab pulls up at the street door, but I suppose a fox terrier, lacking the power of speech (or so he says) has only a limited repertoire of signals with which to express his feelings. I thought it best to proceed to my conclusion as swiftly as possible, given that Harris was in a disputatious mood.

  ‘But whereas many, including ourselves on past occasions, have sought adventure by travelling abroad, I maintain that in this great, brooding metropolis we call our home, there is to be found as much mystery, excitement, and romance as in the darkest souks of Maroc or the furthest pavilions of the Chinee.’

  ‘Look, old man, if you’re short of a bob or two for a trip abroad, you only have to ask: I’m sure George would lend you whatever you need.’

  ‘No, Harris, I speak in earnest; yea, and never in greater earnest. Depend upon it: that our great mother-city of London longs to open up her treasure-chest of adventure to all her children. All she asks is that we agree to seize the very next opportunity that presents itself to us, without questioning or prevarication, without hesitation or procrastination. We must cast no backward glance, as did tragic Orpheus, nor turn again from the plough having once laid hand upon it. Provided one is open to all possibilities, adventure—blessed adventure—awaits.’

  ‘What, in a dingy Second Floor Front in Baker Street?’ asked George, who had been woken by Montmorency’s barking. ‘What adventure could possibly happen upon us here?’

  At that precise moment, the Boots opened the door to my sitting room.

  ‘Miss Briony Lodge,’ he announced.

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  ‌Chapter Two

  Of the power of female beauty upon the male brain—A decorated ceiling—On the supernatural abilities of dogs—The railway guide a threat to public morality—On the glorious freedom of God’s special creature, the locomotive—Harris has an idea—The moral degeneracy of the downstream man

  As our fair visitor entered, we rose as one man. Or, rather, as two men, for George had in the meantime fallen asleep again and had to be roused from his slumbers by a well-aimed cricket boot.

  ‘Do come in, miss,’ I said, hastily retrieving the boot, which had bounced off George’s forehead. No harm had been done. The leather was quite undamaged, and the spikes had not been bent. George’s head, thankfully, had taken the brunt of the impact.

  ‘And, pray, take a seat.’ I indicated the chair that George had so recently, and hurriedly, vacated. ‘Harris, if you would be so good as to ring for tea.’ He did so, but with such a bad grace that he broke the rope and had to go down and find Mrs Hudson himself.

  ‘Thank you, sir. And thank you, gentlemen, for permitting me to disturb you. I know that your time is precious, Mr Holmes, so let me come straight to the point. My name is Briony Lodge, and I am at present engaged as the acting-headmistress of a private girls’ school in St John’s Wood. Until three months ago I was the second mistress in a similar establishment in Walsall, run by Miss Violet Hunter.’

  At this point I break from Miss Lodge’s interesting narrative, not out of any disrespect to our visitor but in order to clarify a point for my readers which might otherwise be puzzling them. It must be remembered that, when a male of the red-blooded variety is involved, the proximity of a very pretty young woman—as Miss Lodge certainly was—is inversely proportional to his grasp of reality. Questions of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, even veracity and mendacity, become wholly subordinated to more material questions about the colour of her eyes (they were a deep, intense blue, verging on indigo), the shape of her nose (it had a noble, almost aquiline, sweep to it), and the curve of her lips (like a scarlet bow whose darts could pierce the hardest soul, if you must know). So when our beauteous visitor informed me that my name was ‘Mr Holmes’, it simply did not occur to me that she might be mistaken. After all, did not the ancient Greeks, who generally knew what they were on about, equate truth to beauty? In that case, how could any beautiful woman ever be wrong? (I know the answer to that one now. It is when you marry ’em. But at that stage of my life I was still ignorant of such deep matters.) Besides, I or she might have misheard, as the names ‘Holmes’ and ‘Jerome’ do very nearly rhyme. But let her resume her narrative.

  ‘Miss Hunter recommended you to me as the only man in England who could shed light on my predicament. She told me that you had once helped her when she faced a not dissimilar dilemma. If you did not remember her name, she said, she felt sure you would remember her case, the affair of the Copper Beeches.’

  ‘Yes, of course, the copper beaches. I remember them well,’ I replied. (For an explanation of this temporary insanity, the reader is kindly referred back the space of two paragraphs. That will teach you to skip bits just because they look too long.)

  ‘You must mean you remember it well—“The Copper Beeches” was a country house five miles from Winchester.’

  ‘Of course—I remarked at the time that it was a singular name for a house lying so far from the sea.’

  ‘Er, yes. Mr Holmes, perhaps I should proceed to the strange occurrences which have brought me here?’

  Closing my hands together into an attitude of prayer, with my fingertips just touching my upper lip, in a gesture designed to convey both intense interest and wisdom beyond my years, I nodded sagely. That was a mistake. The combined effect of these two actions was that both index fingers became lodged in my nostrils. Luckily, our visitor was at that moment busy extracting a packet of letters from her bag, and did not notice my temporary predicament.

  ‘You will see,’ she explained as she untied the packet and passed it to me, ‘that the first was dated a week ago and is postmarked from Oxford. The second, a day later, from Abingdon. The third, two days after that, is postmarked Wallingford. The fourth, dated the following day, is postmarked Goring and Streatly. The final one was sent the day after that, from Pangbourne.’

  ‘That is really most interesting,’ I said, managing to stifle a huge yawn so successfully that my pretty interlocutor could not have noticed it. ‘But you seem to have neglected to bring the enclosures with you.’

  ‘That is just it: there were no letters, no enclosures of any sort. Just empty envelopes. Oh!’ she interrupted herself. ‘Unless of course you count orange pips as an enclosure?’

  ‘Orange pips? That is indeed most singular! Now, what fruit do we know of that has orange-coloured pips? A melon, perhaps.’

  ‘No, Mr Holmes, you quite misunderstand me. The pips themselves are grey. They are from the fruit of an orange.’

  ‘An orange. I see. No, Miss Lodge, there is no significance in that whatever. I conclude only that your correspondent is of a peculiarly tidy frame of mind and, being devoted to the eating of oranges, is constantly seeking receptacles in which to dispose of the pips. The envelopes he was writing to you merely served that purpose. I experience the same difficulty myself when eating olives: one never knows where to put the stones. But do go on with your interesting narrative. Do these envelopes yield any other clues?’

  ‘No. As you can see, there is only the address, formed the same way on each envelope: “The Woman Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St John’s Wood”. It is a strange form of address.’

  ‘It is,’ I observed. ‘They should of course have added “London” for the avoidance of any confusion.’

  ‘I mean it seems strange to address me as “The Woman Briony Lodge”. At first I thought it a deliberate discourtesy. But then it occurred to me that it might have been written by a foreigner, unfamiliar with our ways. But why would a foreigner write to me? Oh, Mr Holmes, what does this all mean? Is it merely a practical joke—perpetrated by one of my pupils, perhaps? Or should I worry that it is something more sinister? Whoever it is, for whatever purpose, they seem to be getting nearer to London by the day. I am at a loss to know what to do, which is why I applied immediately to my friend and mentor Miss Hunter, and why she suggested I come at once to 221b Baker Street.’

  As she spoke, and as for the first time lines of worry sprang
unbidden across her fair brow in the prettiest way imaginable, I realized that there was one point above all others I needed to settle at once.

  ‘I can assure you, Miss Lodge, that you are in no danger. Nonetheless, it is an invariable principle with me to be prepared for any eventuality, no matter how remote. Tell me, do you have a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a fiancé, someone with whom there is an understanding of any sort, who might be able to offer you the manly arm of protection in case of need?’

  ‘No, Mr Holmes. All my relatives live in Staffordshire. I have no-one in town. As for a fiancé, or male friends of any description—I scorn the very idea, for I am entirely devoted to my profession and to the young ladies in my care.’

  Although I did my best to disguise it, I fear that Miss Lodge may have noticed that at this most welcome revelation I punched the air in the manner of a victorious gladiator. Fortunately, by the gift of quick-thinking, with which I have always been unfairly blessed, I was able to pretend that I was merely indicating a more than usually interesting patch of plasterwork above our heads. Miss Lodge followed my gaze, and uttered a gasp of shock.

  ‘Goodness me—what on earth are they?’ she cried.

  For a moment I had no idea to what she might have been referring. And then I realized that she must have noticed the many bullet holes with which my ceiling was peppered. To the uninitiated, it must indeed have presented an alarming sight, but it was one to which I was now long inured.

  ‘Oh, those. That is my downstairs neighbour, the First Floor Front. He occasionally takes pot-shots at his own ceiling with a revolver. He evidently does not realize that they pass through into my room, and hit my ceiling.’

  ‘My goodness! He does this without warning? Is that not a cause for the greatest alarm!’

  ‘Not at all. In fact, it works to my advantage. Mrs Hudson—my landlady, you know—is good enough to offer an appreciable reduction in my rent because of it.’