I touched the gold and untied the black ribbon knotted through it.
Always remember… you wrote.
I watched a man in torment and, in my heart, I actually said a little prayer of thanks. Could you forgive me that? I am not so sure.
I saw the chip that made it less real at first but more real now.
Always remember, you wrote, and I could hardly read the words, that you are beautiful.
I slipped the ring on to my finger and my hands trembled just as yours did those few years so very long ago.
71
Grasping the Nettle
‘I still do not understand,’ I said, the afternoon after the news of the shipwreck, ‘why Grace Dillinger killed Sir Randolph. Surely he was the one man who could help William?’
We were having hot buttered muffins by the fire.
My guardian shook his head. ‘On the contrary, he would do nothing of the sort. Sir Randolph never said he had perjured himself and indeed it was his refusal to do so that sealed his fate. If he would not be her witness, at least she could claim that he was and sow more seeds of doubt.’
‘But why was his body taken to the family tomb?’
‘Whatever his sins,’ Sidney Grice licked his fingers, ‘Father Brewster was still a priest and Sir Randolph was one of his parishioners, albeit an irregular attender. He laid out the body and performed last rites.’
‘The oil on his forehead,’ I said.
‘Precisely.’ My guardian helped himself to another muffin.
I had never seen him in such good spirits and it seemed unlikely that I would ever find him in such a forgiving mood again. So I decided to grasp the nettle and confess.
‘I think I owe you an apology.’ I hoped my voice did not betray my nervousness.
My guardian put down his knife and looked at me.
‘For doubting my judgement?’
He wiped his chin.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I still doubt your judgement but I have to apologize for defrauding you.’
My guardian took off his pince-nez and peered at me as though I were a clue.
‘How so?’
‘Those shares in the Blue Lake Mining Company of British Columbia which I gave you to take on William Ashby’s case…’ I swallowed. ‘I believe I told you they were worth a considerable sum of money.’
‘One hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ he said. ‘Enough to pay Molly’s wages for five years.’
‘Well,’ I took a breath. ‘I feel I ought to inform you that one of the reasons my father became financially embarrassed was that he invested heavily in the Blue Lake Mining Company only for their excavations to fail to find any gold at all.’
My guardian put his pince-nez back on the bridge of his slim nose and looked at me through the sparkling lens.
‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘you really should spend less time on the shockers and more on the financial journals. Why, the Blue Lake Mining Company hit a seam of gold which sent their shares soaring through the ceiling of the stock exchange into the outer firmament. If you thought you were being clever to pretend they were worth half a crown each, you were very strangely deluded indeed. They were worth over four shillings at the time and have more than tripled in value since. Those thousand shares which you so kindly gave me are now worth at least six hundred pounds on the open market.’
‘And when was this strike?’ I asked.
‘As I recall, it was late February.’
‘Would this be just before you wrote to me?’
My guardian stretched lazily and selected another muffin from the tiered plate between us.
‘Do you know? I believe it was.’ The butter trickled down his fingers.
I put my teacup down carefully.
‘Is that why you offered to take me in?’
Sidney Grice’s mouth opened and shut. His hands rose and fell.
‘March,’ he said, ‘I am wounded.’
‘You will be,’ I said, and I thought, Thank heavens I still have forty thousand shares left.
‘Have another muffin.’ Sidney Grice held out the plate.
‘Why not?’ I said, and the fire crackled and a long flame shot up and disappeared, and in our dull distorted reflections on the silver teapot I could almost believe that we were smiling.
Postscript
Less than a month after the Framlingham Castle went down there was another twist in the sad story of Sarah Ashby. Jeremiah Dillinger’s sister Gertrude, eaten by consumption, made a deathbed confession. She had been present – though she swore she had not assisted – when Sarah’s real mother was stabbed to death by the woman we knew as Grace Dillinger. Sarah was three years old at the time and grew up believing that woman to be her mother. The impostor’s real name was Eleanor Quarrel.
Eleanor Quarrel was four years older than the woman she impersonated for the rest of her life and she had good reason to change her identity. She told Gertrude that she had killed her own father after he forced himself upon her when she was thirteen, but some sympathy for her might evaporate when it becomes known that she had already killed her younger sister for being their father’s favourite. At the age of fifteen she served a prison sentence for stabbing a policeman in the face, her account of his advances to her being dismissed by the court out of hand.
Upon release Eleanor left her native Birmingham and moved around the country. Her journey was uncharted but may well have been marked by a number of unsolved murders, always of men for money and always with a knife. In 1862, when Eleanor Quarrel was twenty-two, she was caught in the act of murdering a wealthy widower in Portsmouth but, the day before she was to be brought to trial, escaped through a privy window, possibly with a warder’s help.
It was then that she went to London, struck up a relationship with Jeremiah, and disposed of the unfortunate Grace on the very day that the Dillingers moved into Crystal Court. Matilda Tassel and her two daughters, who lived on Mangle Street, had also lived near the Dillingers at a previous address and would have known Grace, and so they were slaughtered too.
In response to this confession, the floor of the old stables was lifted and the skeleton of a young woman discovered, with the rusty blade of a knife still embedded in the neck. When Sidney Grice was told this, his only comment was, ‘I said the floor tiles were broken.’
And so it was apparent that Grace Dillinger was no more than an innocent victim of a multiple murderer and that it was Eleanor Quarrel who was responsible for the chain of deaths which became notorious as the Mangle Street Murders.
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When their new client, a member of a Final Death Society, dies in front of them, Sidney Grice and March Middleton set out to investigate.
Introduction
It is almost a year since I wrote the introduction to my first memoir of my guardian, Sidney Grice – The Mangle Street Murders – and its modest success in these days of paper shortages has encouraged me to give an account of our next major case.
When I last wrote I was sheltering in the cellar of 125 Gower Street with Hitler’s bombs pulverising the city. The blitz continues, though with less ferocity and the Nazis have learnt the folly of conducting raids in daylight hours. The threat of invasion still hangs over us, though, and the sight of old men and skinny youths training for the Home Guard is a touching reminder of our determination not to be conquered.
This case nearly destroyed my guardian but it marked an important shift our relationship. Until then I had been present only under sufferance. When Sidney Grice began these investigations, however, we both acted under the assumption that I should accompany him. This I continued to do whenever possible, apart from our great rift, until the day he died.
&n
bsp; M.M. 3rd September 1942.
1
The Curse of the Fosketts
Legend had it there was a curse on the House of Foskett. Giles the first Baron Foskett, it was said, had been present in 1417 at the siege of Bowfield during the long Wars of the Roses and led the second wave of attackers through the breeched walls. The defenders had placed their wives and children in the Church of Saint Oswald for sanctuary, but a bloodlust was upon the attackers and they forced their way into the building, slaughtering everybody who sheltered there.
As if this were not outrage enough, Baron Giles, upon discovering a young nun hiding in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary ravished and slew her upon the side altar. With her dying breath the nun put a curse upon him and his descendants and the moment Baron Giles left Saint Oswald’s he was attacked by a pack of rabid dogs and torn to pieces in the street.
Baron Giles’s son and heir was by all accounts a good man. He gave generously to the poor and paid for Saint Oswald’s to be refurbished and a memorial built for his father’s victims. His pious life did not save him however. He had no sooner rededicated the chapel than the statue of Mary came crashing down, splitting his skull open so that he died in agony ten days later.
And so the catalogue continues – hangings, impalements, disembowelments – various members of the Foskett family met untimely and violent ends. Sometimes the curse skipped generations and was consigned to family history but sooner or later it reappeared. Nor was the curse confined to the male side of the family. Baroness Agatha drowned in a rain butt at the age of ninety-five and Lady Matilda, the daughter of Baron Giles, was decapitated on Brighton beach.
In 1724, following the incineration of Baron Colin in Mount Vesuvius, the Foskett title fell vacant and so it remained until 1861 when Reginald, tenuously descended from a nephew of Baron Giles, successfully applied for the right to adopt it. Little good did the honour do him. Within six years of being admitted to the peerage he was pierced through the eye, into his brain by a stair rod. The wound became purulent and he died, raving in torment three weeks later.
Shortly after this The Times announced that his heir, Rupert had predeceased him on a South Sea island but it was Reginald’s widow, the dowager Baroness, Lady Parthena Foskett who met the most horrible end of all.
2
The Dust and the Dream
The dust had still not settled from the Ashby case, the general opinion being that Sidney Grice had sent one of his own clients, an innocent man, to the gallows. This was not good for business, so much so that, when the Prince of Wales lost his signet ring in a house of ill-repute, it was Charlemagne Cochran and not Sidney Grice who was called upon to retrieve it and the fact that he managed to do this quickly and discretely only served to deepen my guardian’s depression.
A couple of cases came his way – rescuing a wealthy northern industrialist’s daughter mysteriously afflicted with blue carbuncles and exposing a fraudulent society for men with ginger hair - but my guardian’s workload was light that summer and, as the days shortened and the leaves fell in the windswept London parks, it all but dried up.
He took to lying in his bath for hours and clambering out in the evenings for a little dry toast and a lot of tea before limping wordlessly back to lock himself in his bedroom. He did not bother to put his glass eye in but wore a black patch all the time. He was usually a voracious reader but now he would not open a book or even pick up any of his five daily newspapers but that was probably for the best. My guardian never took well to adverse criticism and there was no shortage of that in the press or the many abusive letters that were delivered several times a day.
Many evenings I dined alone, forking a reheated vegetable stew around my plate and nibbling chalky bread. Afterwards I would go into the tiny courtyard garden to smoke two Turkish cigarettes under the twisted cherry tree and then upstairs to write my journal and untie the ribbon around my precious bundle.
Your letters are so few and I know them by heart, but your dear hands held them as mine hold them now. I dreamed of you that night. We were drifting in a rowing boat down a holly green river, the sun blazing in the indigo sky and the herons scudding raggedly over us. We had a picnic basket at our feet and a bottle of Champagne hanging into the water and we lay back just holding hands and happy. It was all so lovely until the end. I can never change that.
On the first Tuesday of September, however, my guardian came down for breakfast and graced me with a grunt. We sat at opposite ends of the table, me looking at him with his unopened copy of Simpkin’s Diseases of the Human Foot.
‘I need a big case,’ He said suddenly. ‘Or my brain shall become as stagnant as yours.’
‘Something will turn up,’ I said but he shook his head.
‘Who will employ my services now? I cannot even show my face without being ridiculed and abused.’
I cracked open my egg and pushed it hastily aside. The smell of sulphur was nauseating. ‘Perhaps you need to get away for a bit.’
‘A bit of what?’ He picked up a slice of toast, crustless and charcoaled just as he liked it.
‘Why don’t we take a holiday?’
‘What an absurd idea. Can you imagine me in a striped blazer ambling along gaudy promenades eating cockles from a paper cone?’
I had to admit that I could not but I was delighted to see him so suddenly animated. He stood up and stretched across to slide my eggcup towards him with his Grice Patent Extendable Fly Swat and smelt it appreciatively though he was still very snuffly from a cold.
‘Why not visit a friend,’ I suggested.
‘A friend?’ He recoiled in disgust. ‘I have no friend and what on earth would I want one for?’ He shuddered. ‘Really, March, it is quite bad enough suffering your shrill gibberish day and night, week after week without taking on a friend. ’ Sidney Grice tucked into the egg with relish.
I threw down my napkin. ‘I have lived among what most Englishmen would describe as ignorant savages and met with more courtesy than you are capable of.’
‘What is courtesy?’ My guardian dabbed his lips. ‘It is deceit bursting with lies. If I were courteous I should have to tell you that you look nice when to the best of my knowledge you never have and I do not suppose that you ever will.’
‘You are the rudest man I have ever met.’
‘I hope so for your sake,’ he retorted. ‘A ruder man might express his opinions on your low intelligence or ungainly deportment.’
‘Most girls glide about like statues on casters,’ you told me, ‘but you sway and move like a woman. You have blood in your veins, not weak tea.’
I toyed with the idea of throwing my plate at him but I was hungry and there was little enough to eat in his house as it was.
‘I think I preferred it when you were silent.’
‘So did I.’ Sidney Grice ground his burnt toast into a powder and sprinkled it into his bowl of prune juice.
Far away and below us the doorbell rang.
‘Molly has forgotten something.’ He tossed his napkin onto the tablecloth.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I do what I am unable to persuade you to do – use my ears. She is answering the door in her heavy outdoor boots. Therefore she must be planning on going out for an essential supply.’
I listened but I could hear nothing until our maid began to mount the stairs to the first floor dining room.
‘You have a caller, Sir, a gent.’ Her red hair was escaping either side of her white starched cap. ‘He said he must see you on...’ – She screwed up her face in an effort to remember – ‘a matter of the outmost importance.’
‘Did he give you a card?’
‘Yes Sir.’ And, as my guardian had deduced, Molly had her outside boots on.
‘Where is it?’
‘In my pocket.’
‘Why not on a tray? Never mind. Just give it to me.’
Molly held out the card and her employer snatched it away.
‘Mr Horatio G
reen.’ He shivered. ‘What a revoltingly bucolic surname. Where is he now?’
‘Outside, Sir. You told me to admit no one without your permission.’
Sidney Grice stood up. ‘Then show him to my study at once.’ He untied his patch. ‘Idiotic girl. You never obey my instructions when I want you to.’ He stood up, took a steely-blue glass eye from the velvet pouch in his waistcoat pocket, pulled his lids apart and pressed it into his right socket, checked his tie in the mantle mirror and pushed back his thick black hair with his hand. ‘You had better come too, March. All this moping about has made you even more irritable and irritating than usual.’
3
The Visitor and Party Tricks
I followed him down the stairs, his shoulder dipping jerkily with his left leg, and into his study. A plump middle-aged man in a navy blue coat and charcoal trousers was already seated to the right of the fireplace, his hand to his cheek. This was my usual chair but Molly would have never have dared allow him to sit in her employer’s. The moment we appeared our visitor jumped up and grasped my guardian’s hand.
‘Mr Grice. It is such a thrill to meet you. I have read so much about you in the newspapers.’
‘You will have been hard pressed to have found an accurate fact then,’ Sidney Grice told him.
‘And you must be Miss Middleton,’ Mr Green compressed my hand in his. ‘I believe you helped Mr Grice solve the Ashby stabbing case.’
My guardian adjusted his eye.‘ She may have accompanied me on that case,’ he said, ‘but I can assure you she was nothing but a hindrance. Ring for tea Miss Middleton.’
‘I shall try my idiotic best.’ I pulled the bell rope twice as the two of them sat facing each other and got myself an upright chair from the round central table.
‘Go on then.’ Mr Green flushed with excitement and Sidney Grice blinked.
The Mangle Street Murders Page 26
