The Secrets of Gaslight Lane

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  I caught up with him as he stopped at the end stairs.

  ‘Are we going down?’ I asked.

  ‘To an unspeakable place –’ he unlocked the door – ‘where servants rule and their masters fear them.’

  30

  ✥

  Mutton and Mr Marwood

  SIDNEY GRICE TURNED the key with great care not to rattle the lock, and inched the handle anti-clockwise to open the door, so slowly that I had difficulty seeing it move at all and found myself looking about me at nothing. When he had a three-inch gap Mr G brought the dental mirror, clipped it to the end of his cane and inspected the stairwell before flinging the door violently open.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ he bawled down the opening, ‘unless you murdered your master in which case you ought to be terrified.’

  I listened but heard no response.

  The steps were narrow and uncarpeted. They ran directly under the main staircase, into a whitewashed rectangular passage which must have been built directly beneath the hall but was much less wide. At the far end was a small, high-barred window through which I glimpsed a pair of clogs shuffling by.

  The first doorway led into the servants’ dining area with eight wooden chairs round a well-worn pine table. At the head sat a thin woman, verging upon being elderly, wearing a simple black dress and eating a slab of mutton. She looked up as we came in.

  ‘Name?’ Sidney Grice pounced towards her.

  The servant half-rose with great difficulty. She was having trouble using her right arm and I remembered Cherry telling us about the head injury inflicted by Nathan.

  ‘I am Mrs Amelia Emmett, the housekeeper,’ she declared proudly and toppled back into her seat. Her cheeks were grey and cross-hatched as if with a fine quill dipped in red ink.

  A narrow opening led out of the room behind her right shoulder and she faced a closed door on the other side of the room.

  Mr G tapped the quarry-stone floor with his cane. ‘I shall do one thing and you shall do the other.’ He put his ear to the whitewashed wall and rapped with his knuckles. ‘I shall provisionally accept the truth of your statement and you shall stay exactly where you are with both of your unsightly proletarian hands resting on the superior surface of the table.’

  Mrs Emmett clucked indignantly. ‘I am in charge here and you cannot give me orders.’

  My guardian’s lips elevated at the corners.

  ‘And I am the man whose investigations may entrust you to the tender care of Mr William Marwood, the staggeringly incompetent official hangman.’ Mr G ambled behind her.

  ‘I ’aven’t done nothing.’ Mrs Emmett’s haughty manner and sham-refined accent temporarily collapsed into consternation.

  ‘Your flimsy attempts at protestation will not rescue you from his attentions if I decide that you have indeed not done nothing.’ Sidney Grice bowed until his head was alongside hers and whispered. ‘Whilst there is breath in your clumsily constructed and poorly maintained body, you would be well advised to do as you are told.’

  ‘Oh.’ The housekeeper hugged her bosom as if it were a baby.

  ‘What did Mr Mortlock ingest for his last meal?’ Sidney Grice looked under an upturned bowl.

  ‘Hagfish stew.’

  ‘Sounds delicious,’ I muttered.

  ‘And so it was.’ Mrs Emmett bridled. ‘Mr Hesketh had a taste and said how sorry he was to be missing it, and that young police officer ate a whole bowl of it the next morning.’

  ‘Are you the only one down here?’ I asked.

  ‘I was a minute ago.’ Mrs Emmett eyed me coldly. ‘And who might you be?’

  ‘I might be anyone.’ I helped myself to a chunk of meat from the carving board. ‘But, fortunately for me, I am Mr Grice’s assistant, Miss Middleton.’

  I popped the mutton in my mouth. It was dry and not very fresh, but nonetheless a welcome change from the vegetarian fare of Gower Street.

  ‘Oh yes – I’ve read about you – the downy one.’ Mrs Emmett drew the joint away.

  ‘Dowdy,’ my guardian corrected.

  ‘That as well,’ she conceded.

  The meat took a lot more chewing than I had anticipated and if I had been by myself I might have spat it out, but I covered my mouth and said, ‘I think the word you are looking for is doughty.’

  ‘Doubting what?’ Mrs Emmett scratched her scalp with her fork and I began to think she might make a good companion for Molly.

  I tucked the mutton into my cheek pouch and went to the door. ‘Did this used to be the room of your predecessor, Amelia Seagrove?’

  ‘What if it was?’ Her jaw jutted indignantly. ‘It’s mine now.’

  ‘Then it must also be the room she died in.’

  Nancy Seagrove, the housekeeper, was killed with a single blow of a broad long-bladed knife, probably the same carver that was used on the other victims, George Pound told us. It went through her neck from right to left and ripped into her pillow, so she must have been lying on her left side. There was no sign of a struggle or even movement. She would have died instantly in her sleep. She was the lucky one.

  31

  ✥

  The First Demon

  IF MRS SEAGROVE were to open her eyes she would see the shadow falling across her. But she is fast asleep, her hair undone, white and draped over her blanket like a mare’s tail. And it’s not until the knife rises in both hands high, like Abraham about to sacrifice his son, that I realize what is going to happen.

  ‘No!’ But I can’t scream and the knife is swooping down, and the only sound is the blade passing through her flesh like a spade being plunged into soil, then a thud.

  Mrs Seagrove coughs and her eyelids flutter like the wings of a moth, and her mouth fills with life become death.

  I pull the knife and her head lifts up with it. I put my hand on her head. It feels warm, like a living thing. And I pull again. I have to wiggle it a bit and the blood squirts into my eyes. It comes out suddenly and her head flops down.

  I fall to my knees and bury my face in her sheet. It has the scent of soap. I never knew you could smell things in dreams. And, when I pull away, the image is preserved on the linen like that miraculous face of Jesus on St Veronica’s cloth. But this is the face of Satan, not mine. MY face is in the water that I pour from the jug into the bowl, but it dives beneath the ripples as the murderer’s fingers dip in and I hold my breath until he goes.

  She could be alive now if not for that curtain.

  32

  ✥

  The Psalms and the Bamboo Rat

  I PUSHED THE door open and, uncomfortable at my own intrusion, tried but failed to swallow.

  It was a small room with a bed, dressing table and chair, and a small armchair, but no natural light. ‘Do you know how that drawing got under your bed?’

  I closed the door, struggling not to choke.

  ‘No.’ Her face was lopsided. ‘But if I had my way that filth would have gone in the fire.’

  ‘Enough.’ Sidney Grice slammed his cane on the table. ‘Hands on top – now. Come, Miss Middleton.’

  And both of us obeyed.

  Directly off this area came the kitchen, the pans all polished, hanging from a row of hooks on a rack suspended from the ceiling, and a butcher’s block at the end of a preparation table with nothing being prepared on it. The range was hot and it struck me as strange that Amelia Emmett did not sit beside it where she would be warm.

  ‘It is beneath her menial dignity to eat in here.’ My guardian must have added mindreading to his curriculum vitae. ‘Upper below-stairs servants dine at table even when they are alone.’ He took the lid off a red-enamelled caddy and sniffed. ‘This tea is not fit to clean a carpet.’ He pulled away. ‘Small wonder somebody cut his throat.’

  From the kitchen came the scullery, remarkably compact for such a good-sized house, with its wooden draining boards and a barred and padlocked plain plank door. I managed to swallow the meat.

  ‘I shall inspect the exits another time,’ Mr
G said, ‘but let us build our premise for the time being on the possibly erroneous assumption that the doors and windows are all solid. What conclusions can we draw from that?’

  ‘Perhaps the murderer was a servant,’ I said, ‘and did not have to force an entry. Or perhaps somebody managed to sneak into the house, hide, kill Nathan Garstang and hide again until he could sneak out.’

  The meat was stuck halfway down my gullet.

  ‘If somebody hid here I will find traces,’ Mr G vowed. ‘Where do you suppose that door leads?’

  I ran a toe along the threshold. ‘From the dust coming under it, I would say the coal cellar, which is why this room is so small. Our cellar goes under the pavement with the door in the moat, but there is no moat at the front here so the cellar has to extend into the house.’

  I tried to punch my own back.

  Sidney Grice produced a pair of dividers. ‘But why secure the cellar so strongly if the only ingress from the street is through an iron lid which – or so we have been informed – is also locked?’

  I had an uneasy suspicion that the mutton was trying to find its way back up.

  ‘To stop anyone stealing?’ I guessed, but my guardian tsked and remarked, ‘The meat safe in the kitchen is not locked and servants are far more likely to help themselves to a joint of beef than a nugget of fossilized vegetation.’ He made a quick series of measurements. ‘This has been set four inches above the site of the original bolt.’ He clicked his tongue like a disapproving schoolmistress. ‘Yet Pound assured me that the old one was not damaged at the time of the massacre.’

  ‘Perhaps it did not have a hasp to hold a padlock,’ I suggested. ‘But even without a padlock you would have had to break the door down to get in, for the weakest part is usually the fixing plate, but this goes straight into a slot in the brick wall.’

  Sidney Grice made some more measurements. ‘That is of little relevance to my puzzlement.’ He reached into his inside coat pocket for his gold cigarette case and flipped it open. Where some kept Virginians, he had an array of keys and, instead of Turkish, lockpicks. He slipped out one resembling a darning needle, with a hooked point, and genuflected to insert it into one of the old screw holes. ‘An empty hole.’ He tutted and tried another. ‘Ha.’ He twisted his pick as if tackling a particularly complicated mechanism and slowly withdrew it. ‘What do you make of that?’

  Mr G passed me a tiny tube and I unrolled it, a torn-out scrap of paper.

  ‘In the name of the Lord I cut them down,’ I read in what feeble light seeped through the opening from the dining room. ‘It is a psalm. Number 119, I believe.’

  ‘Number 118,’ Sidney Grice corrected me.

  ‘Do you think it is a message?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably,’ Mr G dropped the paper into a test tube where it promptly curled up again, ‘not.’ He opened the padlock with its key, slid the bolt back and pulled open the door. ‘I do not feel tempted to enter in this remarkably fine attire,’ he declared after a glance inside. ‘Perhaps you would care to root about.’

  ‘I would not.’

  I just wished the food bolus would make its mind up one way or the other.

  ‘When we return to 125 Gower Street –’ Sidney Grice brought his oil safety lamp out of its asbestos pouch – ‘consult a dictionary, preferably Johnson’s. Webster’s is American and therefore unreliable.’ He lit the wick. ‘I am convinced you will find that it defines an assistant as one who assists.’

  ‘I wonder how it defines a guardian.’

  It was a good-sized cellar, about twelve-foot square and brick-lined. A pile of coal lay on the floor about three feet high beneath the closed circular lid. Mr G extended his telescopic cane to almost twice its original length, hooked the lamp over the handle and held the light into the room at arm’s length, illuminating even the furthest corners.

  ‘The lid looks solid enough.’ He raised the lamp to shine beneath it; the spring-loaded bolt was slotted into place. ‘And even I, with my remarkable skills, could not have come through that hole on or after the fourth of January.’ Sidney Grice raised the lantern to illuminate his point. ‘That moss around the lid has not been disturbed in at least six weeks.’

  ‘So not a means of entry for the murderer?’ I raised my skirts but they were already dirty.

  ‘Not unless he hid in the house for several weeks undetected – unlikely, but not impossible. Remember Sally Massie?’

  ‘I will not forget her in a hurry.’ I bobbed to pick up a stray chunk of coal and tossed it into the middle of the room. Several pieces rattled down. ‘The whole pile would have collapsed if anyone had trodden on it.’

  A few more lumps of coal clinked to the floor. I had started a mini avalanche, or was somebody trying to get out? A mangled hand broke through the surface on the nearest slope. For an instant I thought of a drowning man waving, and the priest who had been lost during a storm in the Bay of Biscay.

  ‘Hurry.’ I rushed into the cellar.

  ‘I feel no compulsion to do so.’ Mr G held back.

  But I was scrabbling up the side – the pile collapsing around me – falling on to my knees to claw through the coal as once I had helped drag a worker from under the shale in Parbold Quarry. The hand came loose and I overcame my revulsion to whisk it up before it was buried again.

  Sidney Grice lowered his lantern and, under its illumination, I saw that I was clutching the mummified corpse of a rat. I yelped and threw it back.

  ‘Oh, I hate them.’ I shuddered, remembering the night I had woken up in India with one running over my face.

  ‘One day I shall tell you about the Case of the Large Bamboo Rat of Indonesia,’ my guardian promised.

  ‘Did it kill somebody?’ I wiped my hand on my skirt.

  ‘If only it had.’ Sidney Grice was lost in thought. He dusted his hands with a white cloth.

  The rat was rolling back down the incline towards me. I tried to boot it away and the pile collapsed around my ankles, throwing up another cloud of coal dust.

  ‘Control yourself,’ my godfather castigated me as I doubled up, catching his cane with my shoulder.

  ‘I am trying.’

  ‘Succeed.’

  He was still in the doorway, his lamp swinging wildly to and fro, the face lit then hidden under a drape of dark which was just as quickly whisked away again. I put up my hand to steady it.

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Oil lamps get hot,’ my guardian advised absently as I struggled but failed to fight down another coughing fit.

  ‘Most likely.’ Sidney Grice banged my back, more in irritation than sympathy and, at long last, the meat slithered down.

  Mr G turned out his lamp. ‘Congratulations on your find, Miss Middleton. Do you wish to take it home?’

  ‘Do you think it is a clue?’

  ‘Do you?’ My guardian went back into the hall.

  I took an old sack from a hook on the wall and found a short-handled shovel. ‘I think we should let Inspector Quigley decide that,’ I said and was rewarded with a snort.

  33

  ✥

  The Eyes of Death

  MRS EMMETT WAS still at the table, though, in defiance of my guardian’s instructions, her left hand was no longer resting upon it. She was trying to harpoon the last pickled onion floating in a jar.

  Sidney Grice rushed towards the housekeeper so violently that she yelped and slopped the vinegar.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Emmett, Mrs Emmett.’ He pushed his face almost into hers. ‘When was the last coal delivery, Mrs Emmett?’ He leaned forward and she tilted backwards and away. ‘And do not attempt to distract me with your feminine wiles.’

  ‘I couldn’t say exactly, sir.’

  ‘Then be silent, woman,’ he snarled.

  ‘Roughly,’ I urged and Mr G snorted.

  ‘At what juncture did we conclude that we would be satisfied with approximate evidence?’

  ‘It is better than none,’ I reasoned and, before he could respond, the housekeeper said, ‘J
ust before Christmas.’

  Sidney Grice shot up. ‘You have an original, if somewhat bizarre, notion of what constitutes silence. I hope your concept is not universally adopted.’

  Mrs Emmett stabbed her fork in again – she was holding it very oddly now – and the onion bobbed away. ‘He was supposed to come the day Mr Mortlock died,’ she recollected. ‘Only his horse got spooked.’

  ‘And now you are telling me when he did not come.’ Sidney Grice snatched the fork from her hand.

  ‘The coalman’s horse?’ I clarified. ‘Not the drayman?’

  ‘You’re getting confushed,’ the housekeeper told me, her voice hollow and nasal. ‘That wash when the Garshtangs were killed.’ She cocked her head. ‘Whash that ringing?’

  ‘You are imagining it,’ Sidney Grice said confidently for, if he could not hear a sound, there was none to be heard.

  ‘And banging.’ She covered her right ear with her left hand. ‘Sho loud.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, concerned at her sudden deterioration in speech.

  ‘Of course she is not.’ Sidney Grice leaned over the housekeeper. ‘This is highly interesting.’ He clipped on his pince-nez. ‘If I troubled to get out my mirror, I could show you that your right pupil is dilating whilst the left is not.’

  ‘What?’ I pushed in front of him.

  ‘And, unlike mine, it is not vitreous,’ he continued chattily.

  ‘Whash?’ Mrs Emmett slurred, the left side of her face collapsing.

  ‘Can you lift your hands?’ I asked her.

  ‘Of cosh I can.’ Her left arm rose but the right came up a few inches and flopped, and the housekeeper tried to rise.

  ‘Sit back.’ I pushed her firmly down. ‘You are having a minor seizure but it is nothing to worry about.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ my guardian contradicted me, ‘it is a great deal to worry about. From the speed of onset and severity of your symptoms I would wager – if I were a gambling man, which I am not – that your chances of making a recovery are exceedingly low as is your life expectancy.’