The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  There might have been an element here of subjectivity on the part of the doctor, possibly with an eye on maintaining the respectability of the Square: to have a murder committed in an empty house, though a bleak prospect, was not as horrible as the alternative. Clearly the murderer was not the elderly sculptor. But the alternative – that the murder had happened in the full and bustling household of Severin Bastendorff – might have been too much for his near neighbour at number 1, Euston Square, even subconsciously, to countenance.

  Meanwhile, Bastendorff was interviewed by the police once more. They were learning a little more of his own background.

  He re-iterated that he was baffled as to the identity of the corpse in his cellar, and the questioning pursued his first theory: was there the chance that the unfortunate woman could have got into the coal cellar without first passing through the house?

  Bastendorff had to concede that this was in essence impossible; there were horizontal railings across the open basement area at the front of the house.

  What, then, of the possibility that the woman had been an ‘unfortunate’ who had committed suicide? A lodger suffering acute depression? Could this have been even a faint possibility?

  No: the Bastendorffs would obviously have missed such a person.

  It emerged however that it wasn’t completely impossible to infiltrate such basement areas; for the horizontal bars were always lifted to admit tradesmen during the day. Bastendorff told the police once more of a scene some two or three years back when he became alerted to a woman who had effected entry into the basement of the house next door.

  She had ‘apparently been drinking’ and she ‘took no notice’ when Bastendorff went down the steps to tell her that she could not stop there.21 Indeed, so impervious was this inebriated woman that he was impelled to ask his maid, Hannah Dobbs, to try speaking to her.

  But this was not the case at number 4, Euston Square; he re-iterated to the police that the bars blocking entrance to the basement were firmly down.

  Then there was the question of time: how was it possible for the corpse to have been in the cellar so long without Mr Bastendorff having had some sense of it?

  What about the smell? Surely someone at some stage must have noticed? Bastendorff recalled that some time back, he and several others had noticed what seemed to be the pungent odour of rotten eggs; he said that it was assumed that this is exactly what it was, and that the eggs had been thrown away.

  And what of the Bastendorffs’ dealings with Hannah Dobbs? Mr Bastendorff recalled that the maid had ‘left his service’ on 17 September 1878.22 And he appeared to be aware that she was now in prison for stealing from other furnished lodgings.

  He concluded by repeating to Inspector Hagen that ‘in his opinion’, ‘he did not think the lime’ that had been thrown around the cellar ‘had been used for the purpose of destroying the body’.23

  In the meantime, public interest in the case had spread right the way across the country and, indeed, across to the United States.

  How was it possible for a well-dressed woman to have been murdered and lain dead in such grotesque circumstances without being missed? There was a sense here not merely of the flinty anonymity of streets and crowds; but also the unsettling and unheimlich transience of boarding houses.

  This growing fashion for sharing furnished lodgings with complete strangers still struck many as being an unnatural and potentially amoral way to live. In some ways, number 4, Euston Square was starting to represent a certain kind of city life.

  6

  Superior Apartments in a Quiet Home

  As the Euston Square mystery was unfolding, readers of The Times were still running their fingers down the closely printed classified advertisements in search of lodgings close to the centre of town very similar to the establishment run by the Bastendorffs. ‘Board and residence (first class) close to Kensington Gardens,’ stated one such advertisement on 16 May 1879. ‘A private sitting room with bedroom adjoining on the first floor is now vacant. Queen’s Road, Bayswater.’

  Meanwhile, in nearby Princes Square, lodgings were described as being two minutes from the Metropolitan Railway; there was also on offer an ‘excellent table’ (or food) and perhaps more valuably, ‘select society’. References were naturally required.

  For those with slightly more modest means, the attractions were framed slightly differently. In Westbourne Park, a mile or so away from Kensington Gardens, there was on offer ‘a most comfortable home’, perhaps suited to ‘one or two ladies’. It boasted a ‘large pleasant front room’ and ‘cheerful society’, as opposed to ‘select’. The terms were ‘moderate’.

  The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of the city was reflected through these advertisements as well. ‘’Board and residence wanted by a young foreigner,’ declared one notice, ‘with a superior English family, with young and cheerful society.’ Elsewhere, a home was sought ‘for a young French gentleman in a good English family where he can acquire the language’.

  Some residences advertised ‘table d’hote’. Some made a feature of the fact they offered ‘late dinner’. Some made mention of bathrooms; others cheerfully highlighted their pianos. There was a deliberate emphasis upon gentility; not least because across the years, such a way of living had gathered a reputation for racketiness and transgression.

  Boarding houses had been the subjects of one of Charles Dickens’ first satires written for the Monthly Magazine in 1834. ‘Boz’ took a sardonic look at the house run by Mrs Tibbs in Great Coram Street, in the east of Bloomsbury, and the class-conscious manoeuvring of the landlady, her daughters and their gentleman tenants.

  Other writers for weekly journals enjoyed exploring the possibilities of social and sexual awkwardness that these houses offered. A frequently reported anecdote in gossip columns involved the arrival at a boarding house of a young gentleman, seeking lodgings as he established himself in the great city. The landlady of the house, in these stories, was swift to dance attendance and indulgence on such young men, making sure they had excellent food and good drink at the dinner table: the reason being that these landladies were determined to pair their daughters off with these eligible catches. And, indeed, in several such sketches, reported mirthfully in London papers as un-bylined urban news, the gentlemen concerned found themselves entrapped, being told by the landladies that their hands in marriage had been offered, and that if they attempted to withdraw, all sorts of horrid legal consequences would follow.

  Yet sometimes it worked the other way around. In 1874, the young Vincent Van Gogh found a room in a lodging house in Lambeth run by the landlady Ursula Loyer. He was very happy there; working by day in the centre of the town, spending spare hours tending the back garden in Hackford Road. But Van Gogh fell for his landlady’s daughter Eugenie: the young woman was already answered for, and Van Gogh took the news badly, suggesting in letters that he did not like living in houses with ‘secrets’; only some time later was he was able to restore his friendship with his erstwhile landlords.

  Also prevalent in anecdotal accounts of boarding house life was the trope of the predatory widow; the lady of a certain age reduced after the death of a husband to taking furnished lodgings and then keeping a keen eye out for new arrivals such as prosperous and peripatetic salesmen who might serve as new husbands. Male widowers sometimes featured in such stories too.

  And these sketches struck at the very heart of the nature of the boarding house; in the early and mid-Victorian years, with an expanding middle class, there was a concomitant rising sense that the ideal home should be a detached sanctuary: a place where one family dwelled under one roof, in domestic stability, sheltered in every sense from the chaos of the world. Rising middle-class affluence brought a rising taste for privacy. The boarding house, by contrast, introduced a measure of enforced proximity with strangers; total privacy was a practical impossibility.

  This was also a distinctly continental way of living; in Paris, for example, apartments and shared stairwells
were the norm; even by 1879, this still seemed something of a novelty in Britain. There were humorous essays concerning such modern nuisances as living in an apartment with a young family occupying the rooms above, the children stomping ceaselessly throughout the day.

  ‘There is no way in the world,’ wrote William Makepeace Thackery, ‘by which a man … can be placed on family terms and sudden intimacy with those who up to yesterday were perfect strangers.’ He also noted that ‘there is a certain element of romance and history about a boarding house which is attractive in one way but ought to be suspicious in another’.1

  But elsewhere, the author of Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome, found rich inspiration in this particular style of domesticity. As a young man, he had sought to escape a career as a clerk by becoming a success in the theatre; and this necessitated living in a series of north London boarding houses. Because of the irregularity of his hours – and his frequent return home in the small hours – the landladies were required to be quite understanding.

  And such homes clearly made a deep impression on him, for they became recurring leitmotifs in his fiction. In his turn-of-the-century novel Paul Kelver, Jerome’s young protagonist recalled the delicate economics of these arrangements. ‘My first lodging was an attic in a square the other side of Blackfriars Bridge. The rent of the room, if I remember rightly, was three shillings a week with cooking, half a crown without. I purchased a methylated spirit stove with kettle and frying pan, and took it without.’2

  And it was in the nature of such houses that unexpected intimacy could be sparked; occasionally with the darkest consequences. In one house in fashionable Bayswater, in 1858, Dr Thomas Smethurst lodged with his wife. Dr Smethurst, 54, was a feted pioneer of hydrotherapy; he administered what became known as the water cure to various well-to-do patients in the Chilterns. Back in Bayswater, he enjoyed the sociability of this elegant and tasteful boarding house; the easy evening conversations with other residents in that drawing room before the landlady had the dinner served.

  Into this house arrived a single woman called Isabella Banks, 43, who joined the other residents in that drawing room each evening. Isabella and Dr Smethurst fell for one another very swiftly. It is not difficult to envisage the furtive nights that followed; Mrs Smethurst perhaps feigning sleep as her husband crept from their rooms.

  But the relationship was too intense to be sustained and the landlady of the house soon became aware of the affair. The landlady demanded that Isabella Banks leave; she did so and Dr Smethurst left with her. They set up home in Richmond upon Thames and might never have been heard of again were it not for Isabella Banks dying suddenly and Dr Smethurst standing accused of her murder.

  He was accused of poisoning her to get rid of a baby; as it transpired, the evidence was tainted. His lover had died of an infection. But what gave the story extra resonance, on top of the tragedy of Isabella’s death, was the way that it had begun in the better sort of boarding house; adultery and promiscuity were more usually associated with the lower sorts of establishments to be found in the poorer districts.

  In George Gissing’s The Nether World, published in 1889, but set ten years previously, there is a vivid account of a boarding house in Clerkenwell (not very far away from the more handsome houses of Euston Square). Here, the house is dilapidated; the landlady and her daughter confining themselves to the downstairs and their lodgers upstairs. At the start of the novel, we are led to believe that there is one female lodger in the first-floor front room; but finally, as we are led up the stairs, the door opens to reveal a harassed young mother with three young children, a teenaged daughter and a father who is out of work.

  Food is taken in that one room; upon his return from job-hunting, the father is offered a piece of cold steak, some bread, and tea using the tea leaves from that morning.3

  In the grander houses of Bloomsbury, the catering was daintier: at the same time, there was obviously no obligation to dine with one’s fellow residents. You could arrange to have your supper brought to your room. In many houses, the residents would sometimes purchase their own ingredients – pies, chops, wine – and arrange for the maid-of-all-work to heat the food in the kitchen before bringing it all upstairs on a tray.

  The other attraction of boarding houses – both to younger aspirant people, and also to those older residents who had known more affluent days – was that the better properties were furnished to give every impression of a fine middle-class home.

  Even by the 1870s, the fashion for darker wallpaper was still prevalent: deep rich greens, lustrous dark reds. The reason was not just aesthetic. Gaslight and oil-light were, over time, injurious to such paper; their fumes would gradually stain any lighter shades. The greens and the reds masked the depredations.

  The heavy furnishing and the heavy curtains and carpets also had the effect of insulation, both physical and psychological; a shield against the cold and the commotion from the outside world. In the centre of London, the horse-drawn traffic was now so dense that the streets seemed alive even into the depths of the night. But there was not only the sense in these houses of swaddling oneself from noise; there was also an element of feeling safe. The fullness of the furnished rooms – the padded leather of the seats, the deep velvets, the ironed linen of the sheets, the polished wood, the china ornaments, the glass of the gas lamps – conveyed a sense that its occupants were cosily hidden and protected from the world by many layers. But this idea of protection could be an illusion.

  7

  ‘A Mass of Light-Coloured Ringlets’

  Suicide was still a distantly possible solution to the Bastendorff affair; a few weeks earlier, a woman called Emily Collett, who lived in Drummond Street, close to Euston Square, had been arrested and prosecuted for attempting to ‘destroy’ herself. It was a criminal offence. She had what would today be termed alcohol dependency and mental health problems. The authorities saw only moral weakness.

  Such melancholic stories were increasingly prevalent in the ever-growing city. For all those who found the pace of life exhilarating, there were others who were overwhelmed, terrified of their insecure future.

  Yet in this instance the idea of suicide still left too many questions unanswered and Inspector Hagen and his team were proceeding with another possibility. Perhaps it was something to do with his background in cases of fraud; but what Hagen was bringing to this case was a keen eye for its more material elements. To start with: a well-dressed woman such as this would have had jewellery and valuables; so what, he wondered, had become of them?

  In addition, this elderly woman must surely have wanted to attend to her health; so, he wondered, what appointments might have been made with local practitioners that had not been kept? Ingeniously, Hagen also wondered if this woman had had dentures made to fit around her existing teeth: who would have attended to this?

  Dentistry was a highly competitive trade in London at the time, jostling with innovations to make life easier, especially for the elderly. Having one’s teeth removed and replaced with dentures was now a commonplace, if still deeply unpleasant, procedure. In 1879, ‘surgeon dentists’ such as ‘Mr Eskell’, based in the City, proclaimed in advertisements that he had ‘introduced the only perfectly PAINLESS system of DENTISTRY. Artificial teeth secured to the mouth entirely by suction without fastenings of any kind. They defy detection, and are perfect for eating and speaking.’ Another Mr Eskell (possibly this was a family business) in Mayfair wished it to be known that his false teeth ‘are of such density as to admit of masticating the hardest substance without the least liability to fracture’.

  Near Regent Street, Mr B.L. Moseley was advertising his use of nitrous oxide gas guaranteeing ‘entire immunity from pain’ and ‘successful painless adaptation of artificial teeth’.

  Hagen’s dental inquiries were focused around St Pancras, Bloomsbury, Somers Town and Kentish Town. And remarkably, after a few days, they did yield an affirmative response; a local practitioner near Euston Square told the police tha
t around two years ago, a female client had come in with the aim of being fitted for new dentures; and to this end the dentist had taken a cast of her mouth and remaining teeth. She had never returned. But he had held on to the cast.

  This was relatively simple to check against the body in the St Pancras morgue. The dental match was exact.

  At about the same time, Edward Hacker, an elderly gentleman, aged 67, presented himself at the offices of Scotland Yard.

  Mr Hacker had been following the Euston Square mystery in the newspapers; and some instinct had made him fearful that the corpse was that of his sister, Matilda, from whom he had not heard for some two years.

  There had been no estrangement, no cross words between them; simply the puzzling blankness of sibling neglect. It might seem extraordinary now to conceive of a brother having no curiosity about even the whereabouts of his sister; this might have been one of the atomising effects of city life. It transpired that Edward Hacker lived in Rochester Row, in Kentish Town, barely a mile north of Euston Square.

  Inspector Hagen would have known and been familiar with families forced into silence by emigration, by voyages around the world; but a brother and sister living in the same city? How could there be so little care or heed?

  It was immediately obvious that there was something abstracted about Hacker; and it was soon to become clear that his eccentricities were reflected many times over in his missing sister.

  As Hagen’s other enquiries around the pawn shops of the area – checking and rechecking valuables that might have belonged to the corpse – continued, Hacker was taken to the St Pancras morgue. It is not known with what degree of curiosity the detectives observed this old gentleman as he was required to make the most hideous of identifications; whether there was any flicker in his reaction that could not quite be read. But Hagen must have been watching him very closely.