Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘But why?’ I asked as my godfather limped back towards us.

  Lucy Booking let go of her needlework, leaving it crumpled in her lap.

  ‘It was a dark night and he ran away.’ There was such bitterness in her voice now. ‘The police traced him through a silver charm shaped like a safety pencil sharpener that he dropped on the scene. It must have been one that Jocinda had stolen. They were so sure they had their man that they did not trouble to search for further clues.’

  Lucy lowered her head.

  ‘The defence were able to demonstrate that at least thirty other people had identical charms,’ Freddy put in.

  ‘Including one Addrum Droffer, a sacked clerk, who had been heard to threaten Clorrence Bocking in St Lawrence’s Church.’ Sidney Grice bobbed to pick up the book, without breaking his stride.

  I shuffled my feet for I had new boots on and they pinched. ‘Do you think Dester Green might have had something to do with the attack upon you?’

  ‘Unlikely.’ Sidney Grice tossed his coat up at the back to avoid crushing it as he regained his seat. ‘He was axed in the vertebral column in yet another brawl and almost paralysed.’

  ‘I believe he tries to communicate by blinking, but nobody in the poorhouse can be troubled to work out what he is saying.’

  I shivered. Wicked though Dester Green undoubtedly was, the idea of being trapped in such a way chilled my blood.

  ‘What did Jocinda steal from your house, Freddy?’

  ‘A yellow dress I had worn to Lucy’s parents’ garden party the summer before the fire.’

  ‘Shall I continue my account of the circumstances of the assault?’ Lucy pressed.

  ‘I have little doubt that you shall,’ the detective assured her. ‘But kindly do not do so before I have quit the premises.’

  He held the book by its spine and shook it vigorously but nothing fell out. I noticed the title, Endymion, in pale lettering.

  Lucy flushed and wriggled under her blanket. ‘If you do not want me to tell you anything else, why have you come?’

  Sidney Grice marked a page with an omnibus ticket, though where he got that from I had no idea, for I never knew him to use that means of transport.

  ‘To learn a little of your early lives.’ He put the book on his lap. ‘Starting with yours, Miss Wilde, since you are usually the one who is cruelly ignored.’

  ‘By you,’ Freddy pointed out.

  ‘To whom else would I be referring?’ he said reasonably. ‘Miss Middleton is almost pathologically kind and Miss Bocking gives the impression of being overly fond of you.’

  ‘Overly?’ they chorused.

  ‘That was nicely listened.’ Sidney Grice brushed and slapped his sleeve vigorously as if it were starting to smoulder. ‘But, to return to you, Miss Freda Josephina Wilde.’ He blew on his left knuckles. ‘Prior to the combustion of your parents’ reputedly splendid home and its several occupants, did you have a jubilant childhood filled with love and laughter?’

  ‘What on earth has that to do with what happened to me?’ Lucy swivelled towards him.

  ‘It might take me days, weeks, months or even years to give that clever enquiry the response which it merits.’ Mr G bared his teeth briefly though not cheerfully. ‘For I shall not know it until this case is solved and your money snuggling down in my overstuffed coffers.’ He took up the book again, as if about to swear an oath. ‘Kindly permit your sometime-irascible companion to answer my question.’

  ‘It was happy enough, I suppose,’ Freddy snapped, thereby at least partially justifying my guardian’s description of her.

  ‘According to Mr Gringham Heartley, assistant clerk to the Registrar General of the General Register Office of England and Wales in the North Wing of Somerset House,’ the detective said, as he replaced Endymion on the oval mahogany table at his side, ‘you had three brothers, two of whom perished before you were born and one before your first birthday.’

  Lucy flared angrily. ‘I did not employ you to pry into our private affairs.’

  Coffers, he wrote, then said, ‘As our ancient foes, the boorish, attenuated and ineffectual French might say, au contraire.’

  ‘But only insofar as they concern the attack upon my person,’ she argued.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Sidney Grice pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Why have so many beautiful women thought they could dictate the course of my investigations?’

  Lucy rounded on my guardian. ‘I will thank you not to make any more comments about my appearance.’

  ‘I shall not give you grounds for gratitude,’ he avowed. ‘And so, Miss Wilde, to all intents and purposes, you were reared as an only child.’

  ‘Yes,’ Freddy agreed. ‘And I believe I nearly died from whooping cough when I was three. I fear that, as a result, my parents spoiled me.’

  ‘I wondered who had,’ my godfather murmured. ‘You are five months and one day younger than Miss Bocking.’

  ‘Yes, and we have lived almost all of our lives close to each other,’ Freddy volunteered.

  ‘That was not a question, but thank you for that unsolicited information,’ Mr G said, and she bristled before realizing that he was not being sarcastic. ‘Let me direct my attention,’ he mimed the washing of his hands, ‘to the current employer of some of my unequalled abilities. You lived – did you not? – until shortly after your parents’ slaughter, in the unimaginatively and now inappropriately named New House on Abbey Road, adjacent to Steep House, the residence of the menacingly named Wilde family. Mr Gringham Heartley and Miss Freda Wilde separately gave me cause to suspect that you had a brother.’

  ‘Eric.’ Lucy pulled her lower lip tightly up. ‘He was five years older than me.’ Her upper lip forced her lower down. ‘Eric died in the fire.’

  ‘Poor Eric.’ Freddy took her friend’s hand. ‘He was a lovely, gentle boy.’

  ELTNEG Mr G wrote. ‘Oblige me for once by defining lovely.’

  ‘Sweet-natured.’ Freddy poured milk into three cups.

  ‘And handsome?’ I asked, not sure why that was relevant but pleased to hear my godfather humph approvingly.

  ‘Very,’ Lucy said without hesitation.

  ‘You have a photograph of him, Lucy,’ Freddy reminded her.

  And Lucy shifted. ‘I am not sure where it is.’

  Freddy treated us to a rare brief laugh. ‘Lucy is always losing things.’

  ‘That is not possible.’ The spring knife appeared in my godfather’s grasp but disappeared so quickly that I almost thought I had imagined it. ‘Even the most careless person – a title for which Miss Middleton could intermittently compete – must spare the time to perform other tasks.’

  All three women groaned.

  ‘And Eric died in the fire,’ I recapitulated, shocked at how hard my softly spoken words came out.

  Freddy puffed out her lips. ‘He broke in to try to save us but was trapped in the front cellar before he managed to rescue anyone.’

  ‘What would have induced him to go down there?’ Mr G was trying to balance a gunmetal pen vertically on the tip of his middle finger.

  ‘To escape the flames, I suppose,’ Lucy replied. ‘And, once he was down there, the only way out was by the stairs into the hall.’

  ‘It was a courageous act,’ I mused. ‘Was he very attached to your parents, Freddy?’

  Freddy avoided her friend’s gaze. ‘They did not really get on,’ she admitted reluctantly.

  ‘Eric’s main concern would have been Freddy.’ Lucy spoke in a monotone. ‘He had a bit of a soft spot for her.’

  Sidney Grice caught the pen as it fell.

  ‘It was just a schoolboy thing,’ Freddy protested bashfully, ‘and I would hate to think that Eric was lost because of it.’

  A tear trickled down Freddy Wilde’s cheek and Lucy patted the hand that enclosed her own.

  ‘I like to think that he was.’ Lucy dabbed her own eyes. ‘I like to think that Eric died for love.’

  Mr G tried again, the pen teetering on
his oscillating finger.

  I struggled to ignore his antics. ‘How did you get out, Freddy?’

  ‘I do not remember anything between going to bed and waking up in pain.’ Her hand hovered over the biscuits. ‘Fairbank, the butler, found me unconscious and carried me out.’

  She pulled back without selecting anything.

  ‘How. . .’ Sidney Grice glimpsed my expression and put the pen back into his pocket. ‘How did brother Eric break in?’

  ‘Through a ground-floor window, I believe,’ Lucy said. ‘I knew nothing of what happened until I was awakened by the sound of the fire brigade arriving. They said the glass had been smashed from the outside.’

  ‘We shall talk more of this.’ My godfather eyed me sulkily for interrupting his game. ‘Who has possession of the site now?’

  ‘That is a moot point,’ Freddy said wryly. ‘My father’s affairs were in a terrible state when he died. Apparently he had borrowed money from all sorts of creditors, not all of them reputable, and used our home as security on more than one occasion and so, until the courts make a ruling on who actually owns the property, the insurance company will not pay out.’ She plucked at her dress. ‘And so Steep House still stands in ruins.’

  ‘Which company?’ Mr G walked his fingers through the air.

  ‘If we could actually talk about why I employed you,’ Lucy tried.

  ‘Of course you can.’ Sidney Grice jumped to his feet. ‘You and Miss Wilde may talk about it until your tongues cleave to the roofs of your mouths.’ Mr G slouched back, as if about to take a nap, but all at once tipped forward and on to his feet in one smooth movement. ‘Come, Miss Middleton, you have given enough offence for one day.’ He grasped his startled client’s hand. ‘How chill your dear little fingers have become. Goodbye, Miss Bocking. I hope we meet again.’

  ‘But I thought. . .’ Freddy pressed the bell in confusion.

  ‘There you go again,’ my guardian told her. ‘Imagining that I care what you think.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I apologized to them both.

  ‘They are polite ladies,’ Sidney Grice told me, ‘and if they cannot forgive you they will at least pretend to do so.’

  ‘I was apologizing for—’

  ‘Best not to remind them,’ my guardian advised and, shouldering his satchel, made a stiff bow of the head. ‘I bid you brace of spinsters farewell.’

  Mr G trotted backwards to the open door and, spinning half a circle in mid-air, jumped with both feet, like a child over a puddle, into the hall.

  Freddy came racing after us.

  ‘You cannot keep treating my friend like this.’ She clenched her fists furiously.

  ‘Oh, Miss Wilde, I can only apologize,’ Sidney Grice bowed his head, ‘if I have given you grounds to believe that.’

  Aellen handed me my cloak. ‘If you give me warning in future I can have a cab waiting for you, sir.’

  ‘That is a kind thought,’ Sidney Grice remarked, ‘and so I decline it.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked as we stepped into the square and three hansoms edged past, all occupied.

  ‘The day we accept kindness from our servants we become beholden to them.’ Mr G stuck out his cane, but we were beaten to it by an elderly gentleman in a towering beaver-skin topper. ‘And that is an egg’s eyelash from equality. The moment you bridge the gulf between ourselves and the lower orders they will swarm across it and storm the citadels of our privileges.’

  ‘No need ter totter with a good boot on yer trotter,’ came from across the square, competing with a girl’s ‘Buy my lovely fresh flowers’.

  She waved a wilted fistful under a frock-coated gentleman’s nose but he batted it away, the head flying off in a faded shower.

  A gentleman in a green paisley waistcoat and pinstriped grey trousers was stamping his black, side-buttoned boot. ‘Now see here, my good fellow.’

  An empty hansom came along the opposite side and seemed about to go ten yards on to a young man in a short sand-coloured coat, jumping up and down and waving frenetically.

  ‘Oyah!’ I bellowed and the driver hauled on his reins and wheeled his cab across the traffic to pull up alongside us.

  ‘Why, March,’ my guardian said, ‘when it comes to social bridge-building, you are a veritable Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel.’

  19

  The Style Street Slaying

  THERE WERE TWENTY-FOUR cadavers laid out on trolleys under formalin-soaked sheets in the dissection room of the anatomy building opposite number 125 Gower Street, but all the living occupants were congregated at the far end of the room when we entered. Professor Duffy was bent, a hooked Pirogov retractor in hand, over a long marble-topped table behind a tin bathtub. And half a dozen students, their long laboratory coats encrusted in dried body fluids, stood round the table, sorting through a selection of human fingers in two kidney dishes.

  He glanced up. ‘Mr Grice and Miss...’ His voice and interest in me trailed away. ‘Meet my human jigsaw puzzle.’

  There was a man’s head on the slab, badly gouged, as were his limbs. The rest of him was still in the tub, a mess of torn bloodied flesh with projecting bones still waiting to be reassembled.

  ‘Style Street?’ Sidney Grice picked up a thumb with some tweezers.

  He put it under his nose and, for a horrible moment, I thought he was going to pop it in his mouth but he sniffed appreciatively and put it back in the bowl.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked, hoping I did not look as queasy as I felt in the midst of such masculine company.

  ‘He was passed through a rag shredder.’

  ‘Was he still conscious?’

  ‘Not when he came out of the other end.’ A tousle-haired pimply student guffawed and his companions chortled, partly at his joke but mainly at me.

  ‘It is impossible to tell,’ the learned professor explained for the benefit of the simple girl who had asked the question.

  ‘Have you considered the possibility that Miss Middleton was merely curious as to whether you had calculated the answer for yourselves?’ my guardian enquired with touching, though unjustified, loyalty.

  Professor Duffy unsuccessfully suppressed a snigger. ‘Indeed?’

  ‘Perhaps you would like to explain your methods for the benefit of these gentlemen,’ Mr G invited me, mouthing the last word like a bad taste.

  No, I damned well would not, I thought, but I forced what I hoped was a confident smile and murmured, ‘Surely they have already worked it out for themselves.’

  ‘Not yet,’ a reedy, red-eyed youth sneered.

  ‘Well, the patterns of bleeding...’ I floundered, and felt my godfather’s cane press into my boot. ‘Are irrelevant,’ I added hastily.

  The students folded their arms to watch me make a fool of myself and I obligingly walked slowly round the table whilst I played for time. Sidney Grice wandered away behind the group, leaving me alone.

  ‘I fear your master overestimated your powers.’ Duffy smiled patronizingly as Mr G popped up behind him, miming an orchestral conductor, rather unhelpfully, I thought.

  ‘I have no master,’ I retorted.

  Mr G rolled his eye and repeated the manoeuvre, nodding and shaking his head, arms waving and twirling, and then I realized – he was tying an imaginary rope.

  ‘He was dead or at the very least unconscious,’ I declared.

  The professor eyed me suspiciously. ‘Explain,’ he commanded, as if I had joined his unsavoury band.

  My mind raced. The arms and legs are severely lacerated but there is enough skin visible to be confident that there are no rope marks, and you could not make a conscious man lie still on the conveyor belt to be fed into a shredder without tying him up.’

  ‘Hmmmm’ The professor considered my proposal dubiously and my guardian, still behind him, threw back his head in despair and tried again, this time very slowly. He held out his right hand like a claw and drew it down in a wavy motion, shaking his head. He repeated the process in a straight downward line, nodd
ing vigorously. And then it clicked.

  ‘Let me make it simpler,’ I continued, to my guardian’s approval. The striated wounds, caused by the shredding teeth, run in straight parallel lines. No matter how well you restrained your victim you could not stop a sentient man from writhing in his agonies.’

  And, from the back of the room, Sidney Grice applauded silently.

  ‘I was going to let my fledgling colleagues work that out,’ Duffy declared unconvincingly. ‘What is the purpose of your visit, Mr Grice?’

  ‘Mr Jonathon, alias the Walrus, Wallace,’ my godfather announced.

  ‘Oh yes.’ The professor indicated a covered mound to his left. ‘Haven’t had a chance to look at him yet. I had forgotten he was one of yours.’

  ‘I do not and never have possessed Mr Wallace, nor have I constructed a scheme to do so,’ Mr G assured him, and we went over and, walking down each side, peeled the saturated sheet back.

  Johnny looked smaller than when I had last seen him. It was not just that he was lying down or that he was naked, but there is something about death that diminishes a person – as if the flight of the soul physically shrinks a body. Sidney Grice huffed noisily.

  ‘Some cack-handed fool has already interfered with him,’ he snarled, and I looked to see that the dome of the skull had been sawn clumsily so that the neat bullet wound was now a jagged hole some four or five inches in diameter. ‘And, from the determinedly innocent look on that pallid Habsburgian boy’s face, it is clearly his doing.’ Everybody looked at the pale student, who had a projecting lower jaw, though I thought it unkind of my guardian to remark upon it. ‘I would advise any gamblers amongst you to wager that it was he.’

  The pale youth paled further. ‘I was just looking for the bullet.’

  Sidney Grice held out his hand and the student reluctantly reached into his laboratory coat and surrendered a grey lump.

  ‘I wanted it as a souvenir,’ he mumbled.

  Mr G turned the bullet over, a shapeless, squashed lump of lead now.

  ‘With what did you remove it?’ he demanded. ‘The truth, boy.’