The Supernatural Murders

by Jonathan Goodman

  The soubriquet which stole into existence – it dared not proclaim itself – is a self-explanatory historical lesson. The poudre de succession1 marks an epoch which, for sheer, regardless, remorseless, profligate wickedness is almost without peer in history (and this is said without forgetting the time of the Borgias). Not even natural affection or family life or individual relationship or friendliness was afforded any consideration. This phase of crime, which was almost confined to the upper and wealthier classes, depended on wealth and laws of heredity and entail. Those who benefited by it salved what remnants of conscience still remained to them with the thought that they were simply helping the natural process of waste and recuperation. The old and feeble were removed, with as little fuss as might be necessary, in order that the young and lusty might benefit. As the change was a form of plunder, which had to be paid for in a degree in some way approximate to results, prices ran high. Poisoning on a successful scale requires skilful and daring agents, whose after-secrecy as well as whose present aid has to be secured. Exili and Glasser – one of the Italians and the German – did a thriving trade. As usual in such illicit traffic, the possibility of purchase under effective conditions made a market. There is every reason to believe from after-results that La Voisin was one such agent. The cause of La Brinvilliers entering the market was the purely personal one of an affair of sensual passion.

  1. Poudre here means ‘poison’; and the whole phrase can be read colloquially – ‘the too general use of poison as a safe means of getting superfluous people permanently out of the way’.

  Death is an informative circumstance. Suspicion began to leak out that the polyglot firm of needy foreigners had dark dealings. Two of them – the Italians – were arrested and sent to the Bastille, where one of them died. By unhappy chance, the other was given as a cell-companion Captain Sainte-Croix, who was a lover of the Marquise de Brinvilliers. Sainte-Croix, as a Captain in the regiment of the Marquis, had become intimate in his house. Brinvilliers was a fatuous person and of imperfect moral vision. The Captain was handsome, and Madame la Marquise amorous. Behold, then, the usual personnel of a tragedy of three. After a while, the intrigue became a matter of family concern. The lady’s father, the Civil Lieutenant d’Aulroy, procured a lettre de cachet (Royal warrant), and had the erring lover immured in the Bastille as the easiest and least public way out of the difficulty. ‘Evil communications corrupt good manners,’ says the proverb. The proverbial philosopher understated the danger of such juxtaposition. Evil manners add corruption even to their kind. In the Bastille, the exasperated lover listened to the wiles of Exili; and another stage of misdoing began. The Marquise determined on revenge, and be sure that in such a period even the massive walls of the Bastille could not prevent the secret whisper of a means of effecting it. D’Aulroy, his two sons, and another sister perished. Brinvilliers himself was spared through some bizarre freak of his wife’s conscience. Then the secret began to be whispered – first, it was said, through the confessional – and the Chambre Ardente (analogous to the Star Chamber), instituted for such purposes, took the case in hand. The result might have been doubtful, for great social forces were at work to hush up such a scandal, but for the fact that, with a truly seventeenth-century candour, the Marquise had written an elaborate confession of her guilt, which if it did not directly assure condemnation, at least put justice on the right track.

  The trial was a celebrated one, and involved incidentally many illustrious persons as well as others of lesser note. In the end, in 1676, Madame la Marquise de Brinvilliers was burned – that is, what was left of her was burned after her head had been cut off: a matter of grace in consideration of her rank. It was soothing to the feelings of many relatives and friends – not to mention those of the principal – in such a case, when ‘great command o’erswayed the order’ of purgation by fire.

  Before the eddy of the Brinvilliers’ criminal scandal reached to the lower level of Madame Voisin, a good many scandals were aired; though again ‘great command’ seems to have been operative, so far as human power availed, in minimising both scandals and punishments. Amongst those cited to the Chambre Ardente were two nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, the Duchesse de Bouillon, the Comtesse de Soissons, and Marshal de Luxembourg. In some of these cases, that which in theatrical parlance is called ‘comic relief’ was not wanting. It was a witty if impertinent answer of the Duchesse de Bouillon to one of her judges, La Reyne, an ill-favoured man, who asked, apropos of a statement made at the trial that she had taken part in an alleged invocation of Beelzebub, ‘and did you ever see the Devil?’ – ‘Yes, I am looking at him now. He is ugly, and is disguised as a Councillor of State!’

  The King, Louis XIV, took much interest in the trial and even tried now and again to smooth matters. He went so far as to advise the Comtesse de Soissons, who was treated rather as a foolish than as a guilty woman, to keep out of the way if she were really guilty. In answer, she said with the haughtiness of her time that, though she was innocent, she did not care to appear in a Law Court. She withdrew to Brussels, where she died some twenty years later. Marshal de Luxembourg – François Henri de Montmorenci-Boutteville, duke, peer, Marshal of France, to give his full titles – was shown to have engaged in an attempt to recover lost property by occult means. On that basis, and because he had once asked Madame Voisin to produce His Satanic Majesty, he was alleged to have sold himself to the Devil. But his occult adventures did not stand in the way of his promotion as a soldier, though he had to stand a trial of over a year long: he was made Captain of the Guard and finally given command of the Army.

  La Voisin and her accomplices – a woman named Vigoureux, and Le Sage, a priest – were with a couple of score of others arrested in 1679, and, after a spell of imprisonment in the Bastille, tried. As a result, Voisin, Vigoureux and her brother, and Le Sage were burned early in 1680. In Voisin’s case, the mercy of previous decapitation, which had been accorded to her guilty sister Brinvilliers, was not granted. Perhaps this was partly because of the attitude she had taken with regard to religious matters. Amongst other unforgivable acts, she had repelled the Crucifix – a terrible thing to do, according to the ideas of that superstitious age.

  The Well and the Dream

  RICHARD WHITTINGTON-EGAN

  Between the acting of a dreadful thing

  And the first motion, all the interim is

  Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.

  Wordsworth: In Memoriam

  HURRICANE-LAMPS FLICKERED like Will-o’-the-wisps among the tall, rank grasses and clutching tangles of weeds on the deserted farm. Their thin yellow beams chased shadows through the overhanging branches, and shone on the bared arms of the searchers, that September midnight.

  Shortly before sundown, they had slipped like a marauding band of body-snatchers through the five-barred gate in Hayes Lane, at Kenley, near Croydon, on the south-eastern outskirts of London, to begin their grim and secret hunt at The Welcomes Farm.

  For nearly six hours they had been picking and shovelling the rubble of tight-packed earth, crumbling bricks and concrete from two of the farm’s five wells.

  Now they were working on the third….

  It was a strange story which had brought Superintendent Francis Carlin, one of the ‘Big Four’ of Scotland Yard, and his men to the lonely farm that night. A story which Carlin was afterwards to describe as the most extraordinary in all his thirty-five years’ experience.

  It had really begun years before – in 1919. The Great War, which had scythed through ‘the flower of England’s youth’, had ended. The survivors were taking up – or trying to – the threads of peacetime life. Among them were two demobilised Army officers, twenty-five-year-old Eric Gordon-Tombe and twenty-seven-year-old Ernest Dyer.

  They had been lucky. In the ‘land fit for heroes to live in’ other young ex-officers were selling boot-laces, but these two had landed respectable jobs at the Air Ministry in London.

  Lucky? Their chance-ordained meeting was to spell
disaster for both of them.

  Someone who knew them at this time was a young ex-gunner officer now helping in his father’s wine business in the Haymarket. His name was Dennis Wheatley. Still fourteen years away from publishing the first of the novels that were to make him the widely acknowledged ‘Prince of Storytellers’, he could not have guessed that these two young men were to act out a real-life mystery as bizarre as any tale ever to come from his imaginative pen.

  He told me: ‘I met young Tombe in a camp for convalescent officers in the spring of 1917. We shared a hut together for several months. I resumed my friendship with him after I was invalided back from France. Dyer I met only a few times, but there was something about him I didn’t like.’

  Dyer had big schemes. Motoring and horse-racing, he said, signposted the road to great fortunes. Tombe had £3000 in the bank. They decided to go into partnership.

  Two motor businesses were started – at Harlesden, north London, and in Westminster Bridge Road. Both failed. The partners then purchased a race-horse training stable and stud farm – The Welcomes – Tombe putting up the greater part of the money. That was in 1920.

  Dyer, his wife Annie, and their three children lived in the farmhouse. Tombe stayed either at his flat in the Haymarket or, less often, at a hotel in Dorking, ten miles or so south-west of Kenley.

  Shortly before nine o’clock each morning, he would arrive at Kenley Railway Station, where he would be met by a pony and trap, and driven to The Welcomes. He would spend the day there, and be driven back to the station at about six o’clock.

  Then, one night in April 1921, the farmhouse burnt down. Dyer, with his wife and children, moved in over the stables – and he also moved in with a swift claim against the insurance company.

  The place had cost £5000. Dyer had insured it for £12,000. Suspicious after a sharp-eyed insurance inspector had spotted a number of petrol tins, the company declined to settle. And Dyer was shrewd enough not to press his claim.

  After the fire, no more business was conducted at the farm, and Dyer was beginning to cast around for ready cash. His tanglings with fast women and slow horses were proving expensive. He needed money. At first he obtained it by borrowing from Tombe. Then he forged his partner’s name on several cheques. Discovery, accusations and a bitter quarrel followed.

  The new year – 1922 – started badly. Three months went by without much improvement. Then Tombe simply vanished from the face of the earth. The last trace that anyone had of him was a letter. Addressed to his parents, it was dated Tuesday, 17 April. ‘I shall be coming to see you on Saturday,’ it said.

  Eric Tombe never arrived.

  In their little house in Wells Road, Sydenham (seven miles north of Kenley), the Reverend George Gordon-Tombe and his wife watched for the postman, listened for the doorbell, waited for some word of their son. The weeks lengthened into months. Puzzled, plagued with anxiety, the frail, sixty-year-old, retired clergyman turned detective. He began putting advertisements in the personal columns of the papers. No reply. He spent three months scouring the West End for clues. Drew blank after blank. Just as he was starting to despair of ever finding out anything, his luck changed.

  ‘I went to see a barber, Mr Richards of the Haymarket, to ask if he had seen my son lately. He told me no, not for a long time. But as I was leaving the shop, a thought struck me to ask if Eric had ever brought any friends there. The barber kept a little book in which he recorded any introductions by his customers. In it was written: ‘Ernest Dyer, The Welcomes, Kenley. Introduced by Mr Eric Tombe.’

  The name Dyer meant nothing to the retired clergyman, but he lost no time in paying a visit to The Welcomes. Dyer was not there, but his wife was. She could tell him nothing definite, but was able to give him an address in Yorkshire where, she said, a close friend of his son’s lived. Mr Tombe left at once for Yorkshire.

  There he heard a tale that seemed to confirm his worst fears. The daughter of the house said that she had last seen Eric in March 1922. He had arranged to meet her and another young woman, to whom he was engaged, at Euston Station on 25 April. Dyer was to meet them there, too, and the four of them were to take a brief trip to Paris. When they arrived at Euston, however, Dyer was on his own. He showed them a telegram which he said had come from Eric – ‘SORRY TO DISAPPOINT. HAVE BEEN CALLED OVERSEAS.’

  That word ‘overseas’ had aroused one of the girls’ suspicions. ‘It wasn’t one of Eric’s expressions,’ she said. ‘He never used it. But Dyer did.’ And she told Dyer point-blank, I don’t believe that telegram is genuine. I think you’ve made away with Eric, and I shall go straight to Scotland Yard.’ Dyer became very agitated. ‘Don’t do that,’ he pleaded. ‘If you do, I shall blow my brains out.’

  The Paris trip was called off.

  Thoroughly alarmed now, Mr Tombe caught the next train back to London, where he went to see the manager of his son’s bank. ‘I don’t think you need to worry,’ the manager told him. ‘We have a letter here which was written by your son only last month.’

  The letter was dated 22 July 1922. Mr Tombe scrutinised it closely.

  ‘That is not my son’s signature,’ he said. ‘This letter is a forgery.’

  The manager’s turn to look worried. Rapidly he leafed through Eric Tombe’s file.

  April 1922 Credit balance £2570. Letter from Tombe requesting transfer of £1350 to the Paris branch, and asking that his partner, Ernest Dyer, be allowed to draw on it.

  July 1922 Letter from Tombe notifying that he had given power of attorney to Ernest Dyer.

  August 1922 Tombe’s account substantially overdrawn.

  When Mr Tombe left the bank, he was absolutely convinced that Ernest Dyer was not only a forger and a thief – but also a murderer.

  But where was Ernest Dyer? His wife didn’t know. He had not been seen at The Welcomes for months. He had vanished as totally and mysteriously as Eric Tombe.

  The time Three months later. 16 November 1922.

  The place The Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough.

  Mr James Fitzsimmons is just finishing his lunch in the dining-room of the Old Bar Hotel when he receives a message that there is a gentleman asking to see him.

  The gentleman is Detective Inspector Abbott of the Scarborough CID, and he is anxious to ask Mr Fitzsimmons a few questions regarding a number of dud cheques which he has been passing. He is also requiring an explanation concerning an advertisement which Mr Fitzsimmons has inserted in the local papers, inviting men ‘of the highest integrity’ to contact him with a view to obtaining employment with exceptionally good prospects. All they had to do was to produce a substantial cash deposit to establish their probity. It was one of the oldest tricks in the confidence business.

  Mr Fitzsimmons is all charm and plausibility. ‘Of course, of course, Inspector. Now, if you will just step upstairs to my room, I’m sure we can clear this matter up to your entire satisfaction.’

  It was as they reached the landing that Abbott saw Fitzsimmons make a suspicious movement towards his pocket. Thinking that he was about to destroy some incriminating evidence, Abbott seized hold of him.

  There was a struggle. The two men crashed to the ground. A flash … an ear-splitting explosion. Fitzsimmons went limp. The bullet from the revolver he had pulled from his pocket had killed him instantly.

  Later, when the police searched Fitzsimmons’s room, they discovered a suitcase bearing the initials ‘E.T.’. They found, too, a passport in the name of Eric Gordon-Tombe – and 180 cheque forms, on each of which was pencilled Tombe’s forged signature.

  James Fitzsimmons was Ernest Dyer.

  But where was Eric Tombe?

  Dyer had been dead and buried ten months on the day that the Reverend George Gordon-Tombe called at Scotland Yard.

  Superintendent Carlin sat at his big desk and listened politely to the incredible story that the clergyman was telling him of his wife’s recurrent nightmare. Night after night, he said, Mrs Tombe had had the same terrifying dream. In i
t, she saw her son’s dead body lying at the foot of a well.

  Carlin was sympathetic – but dubious. Dreams are not evidence in the matter-of-fact world of crime detection. Yet somehow, as Mr Tombe talked on, telling the detective of his own investigations, the dream seemed to take on a significance.

  At length, Carlin leaned back in his chair. ‘Very well, Mr Tombe,’ he said. ‘We’ll look into the matter.’ A day or two later, when Carlin and his men went down to The Welcomes, he discovered something that sent a shiver down his spine. There were five disused wells in the grounds of the farm.

  Carlin remembered Mrs Tombe’s dream. Perhaps a mother’s intuition had probed beyond the veil. Ridiculous? Well, let’s see. He gave the order – ‘Dig.’

  The autumn moon hung low over the stark, fire-blackened rafters of the gutted farmhouse. Somewhere away in the distance, a dog was howling. Otherwise, only the scraping of the spades on stones and the heavy breathing of the diggers broke the stillness.

  Suddenly one of the men called out: ‘We’ve come to water here, sir.’ Then, as the glow of the lowered lantern tinctured the oily black surface twelve feet down, they saw, sticking out of the mud, a human foot.

  Hours later, at Bandon Hill mortuary, near Wallington, Tombe’s father looked at the body – at the stained clothes, the gold wrist-watch, the tie-pin, the cuff-links. Tears were running down his face as he whispered: ‘Yes – yes. That is my dear boy.’

  A pathologist discovered a gun-shot wound, about 1¼ inches in diameter, at the back of the head. He thought that it was probably caused by a shotgun, fired at close range.

  What actually happened at The Welcomes must remain for ever a mystery. Not even the date of the murder is known. The coroner’s jury put it as on or about 21 April 1922, but that was mere guesswork.