Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  FOR

  Andrew who found me

  Ed who rescued me

  Laura who took me in

  Maddy who nurtures me

  And

  Tiggy who provides the love.

  Introduction

  I WAS APPROACHED BY a man from the London County Council yesterday. They want to put a blue plaque on the front of 125 Gower Street, commemorating Sidney Grice’s many years and countless triumphs here. I can only imagine how my guardian would have revelled in such glorification, especially as his detested rival Sherlock Holmes, being fictional, will never qualify for one.

  I told the official that I understood such luxuries have been suspended for the duration and he agreed, but they were anxious to consult me on the wording while they still could. I asked where they were going but it was obvious from his embarrassment that I was the one not expected to be around for very much longer. I showed him the door.

  I am an old woman now and, whilst I flatter myself that my memories have not faded, they are increasingly all I have got. So many people have gone – Sidney Grice, Inspector Pound and Molly – almost all my friends and those I loved.

  For the best part of an hour, after the man left, I felt very sorry for myself. But a stiff gin soon bucked me up, and the fact that my doctor has strictly forbidden tobacco made the cigarette I smoked with it all the more pleasurable.

  The official had made me feel redundant – I who had assisted in bringing so many wicked people to justice and single-handedly captured the awful Shadow Man of Shanklin, as the press had so fatuously dubbed her. But I would not be consigned to the scrapheap so easily. I can still put my memories to good use, as I hope will be evinced in this account.

  I am coming to accept now that I cannot live long enough to recount all of my guardian’s and my investigations. Some of these are quite well known already and do not need further repetition. I doubt that there are many people not familiar with every detail of The Mountain of Fear and thousands have seen the stage production of The Mystery of the Breathing Horse.

  I catch my reflection in the mantle mirror. Could this slightly sozzled old lady really have been the young woman who battled with malevolence made flesh in that harrowing summer of 1884?

  M.M., 19 February 1944

  125 Gower Street

  1

  The Silver Locket

  February, 1884

  THERE WAS A message engraved in the locket.

  To my darling Siddy with all my heart.

  The glass was cracked, but I did not need to read the flowing Connie to know that the picture was of my mother. And – not for the first time – I wondered that I did not look like either of my parents.

  ‘Give that back.’

  I hardly heard the words but, when I looked up, I saw the curl at the corner of his mouth that I had seen in our twin reflections. ‘Dear God in heaven,’ I cried. ‘Are you my father?’

  ‘Where did you get that locket?’

  ‘It fell on the steps when you were stabbed.’

  ‘You had no right to keep it.’

  ‘I forgot about it with everything else going on.’ I clipped the locket shut. ‘And you had no right to keep it from me.’

  This was the closest that I had ever seen my guardian to panic. He lunged over the table, catching it with his knee and scattering our afternoon tea.

  ‘What?’ I closed my fist around the locket. ‘Will you prise it from my fingers like a clue from a corpse?’ I pulled back just in case. ‘Why did you take me in?’ I struggled to control my voice. ‘By your own admission you are not a kind man.’

  ‘You are my goddaughter.’

  ‘You do not even believe in God and why would my mother be sending you love tokens?’

  Sidney Grice sank back into his chair. He closed his eyes. ‘I am not your father,’ he said quietly. ‘Your father was your father.’

  I had never known Sidney Grice to tell a lie and I could not believe that he was doing so now. ‘What are you hiding from me?’ I looked at him.

  My guardian’s right eyelid was losing its tone and he had trouble closing it properly. His glass eye stared blindly back at me. ‘No more than I am hiding from myself,’ he answered carefully.

  His plate lay in the ashes, broken from when he had dropped it, all those long minutes ago when I thought perhaps I knew him.

  2

  Death among the Dead

  THERE ARE SO MANY threads in the tangled skein of events that I scarce know where to start. Some threads were spun whilst I was away but others stretch even further back to before I came to London, and the longest to before Sidney Grice became a personal detective.

  And so I shall begin with what became known as The Case of the General Surgeon, for that is where the threads began to weave together.

  In the early evening of Saturday 2 July 1881 – the same day that President James A. Garfield was shot in Washington DC – Mr David Anthony Lamb, a retired surgeon, was visiting his family plot in Brompton Cemetery. He had had the reputation of being a kind man – devoting two days a week to tending those unable to pay for medical treatment – with a sympathetic manner and great skill. He had been unable, however, to save his wife and six children during an epidemic of typhoid and, in the end, he was unable to save himself.

  Two other mourners, twelve-year-old brothers at their mother’s grave, some fifty yards away, heard what they took to be the sobs of a bereaved man and chose not to intrude. It was only when they heard thumping and sounds of a scuffle that they became concerned.

  A man’s voice was raised above the cries, repeating hoarsely Lies, they were lies, with something unintelligible in between. There was a final crash and the sounds of running. Both boys glimpsed the back of a man’s dark coat as he rushed away, becoming lost from sight between the towering monuments and behind a mock Greek temple.

  Anthony Lamb had been attacked with a marble funerary vase. His face had been pulverized. And, when he managed to turn away, the blows had fractured his skull so severely that his brains exuded from his bald pate.

  Inspector Quigley was asked to advise on the investigation a fortnight later, but could give no real assistance. There had been unseasonably heavy rain for several days after the murder and the first police on the scene, then hordes of sensation seekers, had trampled all around the area. To frustrate him further, the cemetery board had decreed that the site be tidied as soon as possible. Quigley had instructed that the vase be sent to his office at Marylebone but, due to a misunderstanding, it had been thoroughly cleaned before it reached him. He was also frustrated by his application to have the body exhumed being successfully opposed by John Box’s sister and last remaining relative. The boys, having repeatedly embellished their story for the benefit of their friends, no longer knew exactly what they had seen or heard. And a man reported covered in blood, running away down nearby Hortensia Road, turned out to be the victim of a violent robbery.

  For a while there were calls for extra watchmen in the graveyard but, as the trail grew cold, memories faded. There is never a shortage of fresh horrors to thrill the public in London.

  Quigley dropped the case and promptly forgot about it.

  Sidney Grice was not called upon to investigate the murder but, ever the assiduous archivist, he filed all his newspaper clippings of the case in his study at 125 Gower Street under L for Lamb, B for Brompton and cross-indexed under twelve other categories, including S for Still to be Solved.

  3

  The Hockaday Legacy

  ON THE NIGHT of Monday 4 February 1884, whilst British officers were being slaughtered in far-away Soudan, Geraldine Hockaday was raped. Geraldine was the daughter of Sir Granville, a high-ranking official in the War O
ffice, and the case was hushed up as much to protect his own reputation as hers. For not only was the offence itself a stain on the family reputation, but it had taken place in a notorious location, an alleyway behind the Waldringham Hotel in the East End of London, where she had gone with friends in search of adventure.

  Sir Granville intended to marry his daughter off to a respectable but impoverished gentleman from Braintree, who – for a generous dowry and the prospect of a parliamentary seat – was prepared to overlook the fact that she had been despoiled. Geraldine, however, had lost nothing of her independent spirit and neither her father’s threats nor her mother’s pleas could persuade her to enter into the marriage or stop her from reporting the matter to the police.

  The police had no difficulty in finding a suspect. Two night watchmen and a member of the public had come across and overpowered a man who was half-carrying and half-dragging Geraldine down the alley. But Granville Hockaday was more than a match for his daughter when it came to being stubborn and she had reckoned without his ruthlessness. He made it clear that if Geraldine tried to testify in court against her attacker, as her father he could have her certified as a moral delinquent and put into an asylum. The case was dropped.

  And so the detained man, His Illustrious Highness, Prince Ulrich Albrecht Sigismund Schlangezahn, second cousin to the German Kaiser and one of the wealthiest landowners in Prussia, was released without charge. And Geraldine Hockaday’s attacker was free to prowl the streets of London and strike again without fear of the consequences of his actions – that is, until Geraldine’s brother, Peter, back from fighting Egyptian rebels at Kassassin and outraged at his younger sister’s treatment, took her to share his lodgings in Gosling Lane and sought the help of London’s most famous and expensive personal detective, Mr Sidney Grice.

  With his help, Geraldine identified the man who had lured her down the alley, a mean and petty criminal with multiple aliases but known throughout the area of Limehouse as Johnny ‘the Walrus’ Wallace.

  4

  The Girl on the Bridge

  SIDNEY GRICE WAS humming contentedly as he arranged several rows of clear glass wide-mouthed corked bottles on his desk.

  ‘What is it today?’ I asked and he crooked his left eyebrow.

  ‘What is what?’ he enquired amiably enough.

  ‘Your experiment.’

  ‘It is what it was yesterday and the day before,’ he replied and went back to humming again, under the impression that he had satisfied my curiosity.

  ‘Yes, but what is it?’

  I wended my way over the scattered newspapers and between the piles of books, some opened face down on the oak-planked floor, many bookmarked with scraps of paper, pencils, twigs, parts of a rabbit’s skeleton – whatever came to hand. A braid of black hair had been inserted into Mr Edward Wilson’s A Brief History of Doorstep Whitening in Preston. That marker came from a victim of Frances Forrester, the Featherstone Flayer.

  ‘I am making a comparison of the rates of dissolution of human tissues in various concentrations of Oil of Vitriol, Aqua Fortis and Acidum Salis.’

  ‘Sulphuric, nitric and hydrochloric acids,’ I translated for the benefit of Spirit, my cat, but mainly to prove to Mr G that he had not baffled me – yet.

  Spirit was stretched over the back of my armchair, watching the proceedings with interest. Perhaps she thought the bottles contained snacks, but even Mr G would never think of feeding her with these specimens – nineteen of them bobbing about in various stages of corrosion, as my godfather stirred the liquids with a long, clear glass rod.

  ‘Where on earth did you get all those?’

  I had seen Mr G’s extensive collections of fingers and bones and various other body parts – he was especially proud of his pickled hand of Charlotte Corday, the one with which she had stabbed Jean-Paul Marat during the French Revolution. But I had not known that he had amassed so many human ears.

  ‘Oh, I came across a notice for them in The Anatomists Monthly,’ he said airily. ‘They came with all the internal organs of a noble bachelor but I have given those to my mother.’

  He struck a pair of eight-inch tweezers like a tuning fork against the side of a bottle, listening intently to something only he could hear.

  ‘But why would she want them?’

  ‘Exactly what she asked me.’ He held a bottle up to the light. ‘This is the nineteenth time since we met that I have reflected that you bear more similarity to my mother than your own.’ He shook the bottle. ‘I am often struck by how complex is the construction of our auditory organs and how negligently most people use them.’

  He fished out an almost intact ear and placed it to drain on a sheet of blotting paper, where it fizzed lazily. And I gave my attention to a copy of the Daily Telegraph which had so far escaped Mr G’s habitual ripping out of anything that interested him and shredding of the many articles that aroused his righteous anger.

  There were the usual advertisements on the front page – Mr Clapper, a barrister-at-law who had not slept for sixteen months until he tried Du Barry’s Food to decongest his brain; a Great Firework Display at Crystal Palace, one shilling, to include a re-creation of the great device of the bombardment of Dover; a woman who learned to play the pianoforte in three days having never attempted such a feat previously. I cast a quick eye over a report about a delegation from the Berlin Conference visiting London to decide how to divide Africa between the European powers.

  And then an article entitled Tragedy on Westminster Bridge:

  An unhappy and sordid event which is becoming all too common in our modern age occurred on Westminster Bridge in the early hours of Sunday morning.

  We are reliably informed that Father Roger Seaton, a curate at nearby St Mathew’s Roman Catholic Church, was taking his habitual constitutional bicycle ride along Westminster Bridge when he spotted the figure of a woman standing precariously upon the parapet on the downstream side of the bridge.

  When Fr Seaton stopped to ask if the stranger needed any assistance, she wailed, ‘I am beyond any earthly help now.’

  Fr Seaton dragged his Rover safety bicycle on to the pavement and hurried towards the woman. She was young, not much more than a girl, he noticed in the dawn light, and he was of the opinion that she might have been handsome had her features not shown the signs of violent acts upon her person, not least of which was a laceration on her brow. He implored the unfortunate lady to take care and not to do anything rash, but his pleas were futile.

  It was too late, the stranger insisted. She gave him to believe that she had been outraged against her will and spent the night running through the streets of London in blind terror of being abused similarly again.

  Fr Seaton cautiously approached the young lady, trying to reassure her that another’s sins would not be heaped upon her on the Day of Judgement.

  ‘I shall find out soon enough,’ she vowed as her would-be saviour drew close to the barrier between them and, at that point, the wronged girl let out a piteous cry and plummeted from her precarious perch.

  Fr Seaton expressed his hope that the young woman had slipped as she edged away, for suicide, he explained to our correspondent, is a mortal sin in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, condemning the offender to eternal damnation. On questioning, however, he was forced to admit he thought it more likely that she had jumped.

  As the inhabitants of and visitors to our great capital city cannot help but be aware, there had been heavy unseasonable rainfall for three days before the tragedy and the River Thames was swollen. A lighterman and his mate heard a cry and saw the troubled girl enter the water near their barge but despite their efforts to rescue her with their boat hooks, the torrents swept her quickly beyond their reach and she was lost from sight and must be presumed to have succumbed to the rushing waters.

  The identity of the girl remains a mystery, though Fr Seaton has given a detailed description of her to the Thames River Police. It is believed that she had long dark hair, was aged between sixtee
n and twenty years and wore an expensive dark blue dress but no hat.

  It would appear that she was yet another victim of the violent, licentious and lewd behaviour which bedevils our society and makes the streets unsafe for any lady of good standing to travel unaccompanied without fear of violence upon her person.

  We cannot help but question what the Metropolitan authorities are doing to ameliorate the situation.

  ‘How sad,’ I commented.

  ‘Indeed,’ Sidney Grice agreed. ‘It makes one ponder why most people are given two ears to begin with. Oh, that.’ He glanced at what I was reading. ‘If you would care to use one of the eyes which fate has thus far permitted you to retain, it refers to events on the morning of the third of this month.’

  ‘Why is it still out then?’

  He placed the ear in the left-hand dish of his scales. ‘There is an announcement on page five, at the top of column two, which I thought might be of interest to you.’ He balanced scales with a series of weights decreasing in size until they were pentangles of foil. ‘I have encircled it in a noose of my secret formula Startling Sapphire Ink.’

  I leafed through the Telegraph until I found it. ‘Hints for a Lady on keeping her coiffure fresh and hygienic,’ I read out indignantly.

  ‘Unless of course you do not wish to do so.’

  Sidney Grice hummed again as he replaced the ear in a bottle labelled Vitriol, seven per cent solution.

  5

  The Wages of Sin

  I HAD HEARD TALK of Hagop Hanratty. He ran an empire. Its boundaries were mainly, but not exclusively, within the East End of London, from the Limehouse Basin along the Thames through the docklands to Pennyfields, where it existed in an orderly alliance with neighbouring Chinatown.

  Born of an Armenian mother, Alidz née Sarafian, Hagop never knew his father, Joseph, who was killed in a brawl in Crumlin Road Prison, halfway through an eighteen-year sentence for extortion.