The Secrets of Gaslight Lane

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  A breeze ruffled the hem of the white shroud.

  I forced myself to look closer. ‘His nails are broken,’ I said in horror.

  ‘But not in the coffin.’ Sidney Grice pushed past a workman and stood at the feet. ‘That Gothic fantasy so beloved of Mr Poe and the sewage sifters of Fleet Street is just that, a fantasy. Imagine you were to fill this occupied coffin with buckets of water. How many would it take?’

  He spun round like a schoolmaster, but nobody seemed inclined to answer. I was not even convinced they had heard him, mesmerized as they were by that gruesome find, but I was used to him firing questions by then.

  ‘Thirty,’ I guessed wildly, but he accepted my calculation as if I had great experience in flooding caskets. ‘So, sixty gallons.’

  ‘According to Dr Harold Mitre, a man at rest requires two gallons of air per minute. This goes up fifteenfold with exercise and twenty in a panic. That would give him at best two minutes’ air. It took this capable and experienced sexton approximately two minutes and nine seconds to unscrew the lid and the reverse action is similarly time-consuming. So, if this man were to wake in the coffin, it would have to be while the lid was being put down, giving him plenty of time to rap, kick or use whatever means he chose to draw attention to himself.’

  ‘What are you saying, man?’ Sir Grigsby was unmistakeably rattled.

  ‘I do not care to be addressed as man,’ Mr G told him pleasantly. ‘It is only three inches away from my man.’ He raised the wick on his lamp. ‘A term which would be insupportable, even from a parvenu knight of the realm such as yourself.’ He disregarded the poppings of pricked dignity behind him. ‘If you were paying attention, Sir Grigsby, which you were not, I was explaining in quite simple terms that this man was not alive when placed in the coffin unless…’ He directed the question to me.

  I filled the space. ‘Unless the undertakers were deaf or deliberately ignored him.’

  ‘Precisely.’ My godfather viewed me with paternal pride. ‘Inspector Pound shall get his stolid constable to identify the body as being the same one with which he was presented, but in the meantime I would draw your attention to the fact that none of the beautiful and unnecessary silk lining has been plucked or ripped, even though the cadaver’s fingerplates are, as the inelegant but occasionally useful Miss Middleton has already observed –’ he stopped suddenly and clipped on his pince-nez – ‘torn.’

  ‘What is it?’ Pound craned over me.

  Sidney Grice’s hand disappeared and reappeared with his knife, the steel flicking out. With his left hand he took the dead man’s right, and it flashed through my mind that he was about to take a finger for his anatomical collection, perhaps to have it mounted on his desk next to the shrunken ear of Amelia Dyer. But my guardian looked more intent on performing a manicure. He was running the tip of the blade under the edge of the plate of the middle finger.

  ‘What indeed?’ he replied as something fell into his palm. He laid his knife down, took out his notebook and dropped his find on to an open page.

  ‘A bit of dirt,’ Sir Grigsby said dismissively. ‘Interesting though that is, we need to get this resident removed, and his casket temporarily replaced in the grave and covered over. Visitors do not want to discover that we are disturbing their loved ones’ rest.’

  The men took the body and placed it, still twisted, on a sheet of canvas, taking a corner each to carry it up the gravelled path in Sir Grigsby’s wake.

  ‘Resident.’ Sidney Grice closed his knife scornfully. ‘And for that they gave him a knighthood.’

  ‘You’ll get yours one day, Mr Grice,’ Inspector Pound forecast.

  We set off after the sorry group.

  ‘Not after I discovered what one of Her Majesty’s progeny was up to in Whitechapel,’ my guardian replied gloomily.

  ‘Which one?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘What did he do?’ I put in simultaneously.

  But Sidney Grice was hurrying on. ‘Believe me.’ He paused to read an epitaph, the shadow of an angel’s wings sprouting from his back. ‘You would not thank me if I told you.’

  There were lights in the windows of the gatehouse and I saw them dip as the men lowered their charge.

  54

  ✥

  The Name of Pathology

  THE DEAD MAN had been laid on boards on a bier in a chapel of rest. He was dressed in a shroud and still tilted disconcertingly upwards, his head a foot or so above the table, his nose flattened at the tip where it had pressed against the underside of the lid and his arms raised like a prizefighter about to attack his opponent. The gaslights had been turned up. They did nothing to alleviate the look of fright on his face, but I could make out several areas where the skin was sloughing away and his left eye had a discoloured half-moon under it.

  ‘Is it possible he had a spinal deformity?’ I suggested.

  ‘That would not explain the position of his arms.’ Sidney Grice dismissed the idea with a toss of his hat on to the altar.

  ‘Have some respect,’ Sir Grigsby protested.

  ‘I sometimes respect that which respects me.’ Mr G threw his overcoat after it. ‘You and your men will leave us now.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ In the light the director did not look quite so impressive. His eyes were small and perfectly round like a cheap doll’s, and his lower jaw receded so far behind his upper that it was difficult to imagine how he ate.

  ‘There is no need to do so,’ Mr G assured him breezily. ‘Go now.’

  ‘We have to examine the body now,’ I told him. ‘I do not imagine the public would like to think of you as an onlooker for such indignities.’

  Sir Grigbsy tussled briefly, balancing the thought of being evicted from his own domain with the bad publicity he might be subjected to.

  ‘Very well. I shall adjourn to my office.’ He mustered his dignity. ‘You men go back and tidy up.’

  The four gravediggers were leaning wearily against the wall.

  ‘Thirsty work, I imagine.’ I gave them a florin each.

  ‘Expecting a gratuity too?’ Sidney Grice asked, as Sir Grigsby loitered, and was answered with a slam of the door.

  ‘His body was found in the cellar, was it not?’ I asked.

  ‘In a disused cesspit, I believe,’ Pound replied, ‘buried in quicklime.’

  ‘I thought quicklime burns bodies,’ I objected.

  ‘I’ve known a few murderers use it to dispose of their victims,’ Pound agreed.

  ‘Dry quicklime does,’ my guardian conceded. ‘Calcium oxide can be gratifyingly corrosive, but wet quicklime becomes calcium hydroxide and an unparalleled alkaline preservative.’

  ‘So the body could have been in it for years,’ I conjectured.

  ‘A very long time.’ Sidney Grice patted the dead man’s chest.

  ‘It sounds hollow,’ I remarked.

  ‘Probably because it is.’ Mr G pulled the neck of the shroud down an inch. ‘The outside has been conserved – cured, one might say – but the slaked quicklime would not penetrate the body more than half an inch or so.’

  ‘So the inside has decomposed,’ Pound concluded, ‘and we are looking at a husk.’

  ‘Where have you seen bodies adopt similar poses, Inspector?’

  ‘Only after a fire,’ Pound replied.

  ‘The pugilistic pose,’ I remembered too late. ‘The muscles contract with the heat.’

  ‘But he has not been in a fire,’ Pound argued. ‘Not a hair has been singed.’

  ‘We are discussing the wrong crime,’ Sidney Grice announced. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Strangulation with a ligature round the neck.’ I pointed to a sunken ring round the dead man’s throat. ‘Probably.’

  ‘Possibly.’ My guardian qualified my diagnosis. ‘We shall pass him presently to those who aggrandize their anatomical desecrations in the name of pathology.’

  He took off his pince-nez.

  ‘His expression.’ Pound shuddered. ‘I shall never get used to r
ictus grins.’

  ‘You will have one yourself soon enough,’ Sidney Grice prophesied.

  ‘Take more than death to make you smile,’ the inspector retorted.

  Sidney Grice tugged his scarred earlobe. ‘Is there more than death, Inspector? It would be pretty to think so.’

  55

  ✥

  The Elgin Marbles and the Size of a Teardrop

  IT WAS AFTER three in the morning when we got home.

  ‘Why do we not take a key?’ I asked as Sidney Grice jangled the bell impatiently.

  ‘Because I have another device for opening doors.’ He rang again.

  ‘Your lockpicks?’ I could not see the point of breaking in to his own house.

  ‘Molly,’ he replied as the door swung open.

  Our maid viewed us through thin slits between her puffy eyelids. She looked all wrong without her hat on. Her hair had expanded into a ginger tumbleweed and had clothes pegs poking out of it.

  ‘I wasntn’t not sleeping,’ she defended herself against the anticipated attack, for her employer would never accept that she needed any rest at all.

  ‘I think you were, Molly,’ I said gently. ‘But did you fall asleep in your uniform?’

  ‘It saves time in the morning.’ She yawned without covering her mouth and, if there had been a tonsil-growing competition, I felt sure she would have walked away with the cup. They sat like two lobular apricots either side of her throat, so close together I was amazed that she could swallow.

  ‘I told you she slept in her clothes.’ My guardian waited for Molly to take his hat.

  I put my hat on the table. ‘I thought you were joking.’

  Mr G greeted that remark bleakly. ‘Then you have seen a side of me I do not have.’

  ‘The skittish playful side?’ I hung my cloak on its hook.

  ‘The very same,’ he concurred, rearranging his sticks. ‘How many times have I told you not to polish my canes, wretched skivvy? Do not answer that. It is four hundred and sixteen.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ Molly rubbed the handle of one absently with her sleeve. ‘But I aintn’t not skinny,’ she mumbled, adding all too audibly, ‘not like somebodyone I could mention.’

  ‘What are you doing to your hair?’ I asked.

  The more I looked, the more tangled it seemed.

  ‘I always wanted straight hair.’ Molly patted it underneath with the ball of her thumb. ‘Not like yours, miss, but nice.’

  A tress dangled lackadaisically.

  ‘But wrapping it round pegs will only make it wavier.’ My boots were muddy and I genuflected to untie the laces.

  ‘That’s the clever bit.’ She twisted the tress round and pegged it up again. ‘Cook tolded me hair dontn’t not never do what you tell it to – just like yours dontn’t not, miss – so if I tell mine to curl…’ Molly opened her arms to allow me to conclude her irrefutable logic.

  ‘Tea.’ Her employer pushed past her into his study and the peg fell out.

  Sidney Grice had lit an oil lamp on his desk. Its base was moulded from the head of the sledgehammer which Prince Albert had used to smash the Elgin Marbles, necessitating their replacement with the clumsy forgeries that decorate the British Museum to this day.

  He was bent over a sheet of white paper and appeared to be slicing his fingertip with a scalpel, but as I drew closer I saw that he was trying to cut into a dark flake, the shape of the wing of a housefly but about half the size.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Failing to separate the layers,’ he mumbled. ‘Hold my magnifying glass.’

  ‘This brass-handled one that you never let me touch?’ I picked it up.

  ‘I have allowed you to touch it twice,’ he argued, ‘and you have used it nine times without my permission when I am not in the room.’

  I did not tell him that Molly had used it once as well.

  ‘Not counting the time you let Molly use it to insert a thorn into her finger,’ he grunted. ‘Hold it steady… and ten-elevenths of an inch higher. That is only nine-elevenths.’ He picked at the flake again. ‘Hold it steady.’

  ‘What about holding your finger steady?’ I suggested.

  ‘It is not I who tremors.’ He was probably right but I was disadvantaged by having to lean over the desk. ‘This is hopeless.’

  I walked round it to join him. ‘Is that what you dug out from under that man’s fingerplate?’

  ‘If I were to trouble to answer that enquiry, it would be in the affirmative.’

  He took a glass slide from his microscope box.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Possibly his calling card.’ Mr G put a blob of glue, the size of a teardrop, into the shallow concave well on the top of his slide. ‘What shall we talk about while we wait for that to get tacky? I do so hate these awkward conversational gaps and the more one thinks about them, the more difficult they become. My mother once sat with the Grand Admiral of Lichtenstein for twenty-nine minutes trying to exchange pleasantries with him, only to realize that he had died the day before. She had noticed that he was lying on a table, but then one expects eccentric behaviour from foreigners.’

  ‘But not from Grices,’ I put in.

  ‘Quite so.’ He prodded the glue with a needle. ‘Ah, that is tacky now.’

  With the tiny droplet on the end of his needle, Mr G lifted the flake and very carefully deposited it against the blob on the slide.

  Molly plodded in.

  ‘Deposit the tray and leave instantly,’ her employer commanded, manoeuvring the flake minutely.

  Molly opened her mouth.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to go to bed, Molly,’ I suggested.

  ‘Aintn’t no p’raps about it,’ she said. ‘Only—’

  ‘Now would be a good time,’ I said. And her mouth clamped shut and she was gone faster than the magician I had seen once at the Pier Pavilion in Southport, but without the alarming puff of yellow smoke.

  Mr G straightened his back and I saw that he had fixed the flake so that it stood on its edge, glued at its base on one side. He placed the slide on his microscope platform and peered through the eyepiece.

  ‘Push the lamp cautiously closer… three-eighths of an imperial inch more… stop.’

  He rotated the slide about ten degrees and fiddled with the focus.

  ‘Wunderbar,’ he breathed and made a final fine adjustment. Sidney Grice was transfigured. He had seen the light and now he almost radiated it. ‘Ausgezeichnet.’

  ‘Was is est?’ I stretched my German vocabulary to its outer limit.

  ‘Have a look for yourself,’ he invited me, in English, I was happy to hear.

  My father told me that you should keep both eyes open while looking down a microscope so that you could draw your specimen at the same time, but I could never manage, and now I screwed my left eye shut.

  ‘You should keep one eye open so that you can make an accurate—’

  ‘I know,’ I snapped. ‘All I can see is a thick black line.’

  ‘You are very good at not doing what you are supposed to do,’ my guardian complained.

  ‘But not as good as I am at doing what I am not supposed to,’ I responded, rubbing my eye. ‘Oh, I can see three lines now.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Mr G clapped his hands like a sultan summoning his favourite wife. ‘And what colours are they?’

  ‘From left to right,’ I squinted hard, ‘brown, blue, green.’

  Sidney Grice was virtually skipping by now. ‘And what do those colours mean to you?’

  ‘If they are the colours of another country’s flag, I am hopeless at those,’ I said, but did not add that my childhood friend Barney had known a hundred of them.

  ‘Think,’ my godfather urged.

  ‘I am trying.’

  My G started pacing behind me. ‘There is no point in trying. Molly tries to think and Cook may well make an attempt herself one day. Just think.’

  He slapped the desktop and the lamp wobbled.

  ‘Ho
w can I think when you are behaving like Wackford Squeers?’ I jumped up and nearly butted him under the chin, but Mr G whipped away.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He was a cruel schoolmaster in Nicholas Nickleby.’

  Mr G threw up his hands. ‘Perhaps having pupils like you drove him to it. Perhaps he used to be a mild-mannered man, as I was before you entered my life.’

  ‘The last time you were mild-mannered was one year and one day before your first birthday,’ I retorted. ‘And until you learn to moderate your behaviour, I am going to follow poor Molly’s example and go to bed.’

  ‘Perhaps you could shout up and ask her to look at this fleck of—’ he began scornfully.

  ‘Paint?’ I interrupted his eloquence. ‘You did not tell me it was paint.’

  ‘Of course it is paint.’ He checked his tongue, perhaps a tad guiltily.

  ‘The cells at Marylebone Police Station,’ I realized.

  ‘Hoera,’ he breathed sarcastically.

  ‘And stop speaking German.’

  ‘That was Dutch.’

  ‘Why are you speaking Dutch?’

  ‘There is little else that one can do with it. Dutch is not a language worth writing or reading.’

  I retraced my thoughts. ‘So the dead man was held in a police cell some time before I was.’

  ‘A long time before.’ Sidney Grice went to the window and looked out between the drapes. ‘Tonight, Miss Middleton, you had the privilege of meeting the long-lost friend and drinking partner of the late Mr Nathan Roptine Mortlock, Daniel Filbert.’ His arms rose and parted as if to acknowledge the applause of an audience, but there was only the dustman’s cart creaking past the gas lamp. ‘I have that tiger in my sights now, March.’ Sidney Grice revolved a hundred and eighty degrees, arms still high as if to embrace me, his face aglow with the fire of his zealotry. ‘See how steady my hand is. It shall not be long before I pull the trigger.’

  ‘We could do with a new hearthrug,’ I observed.

  56

  ✥

  The Pendulum and the Pit