The Curse of the House of Foskett

by Kasasian, M. R. C.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Molly froze mid-bob and left the room.

  He looked at the tray. ‘Give me two half-good reasons why you stopped me sacking that lumpen sluggard?’

  ‘Molly may be scatter brained—’

  ‘There is no may be about it.’

  ‘But she is hard-working and loyal. She would die for you.’

  He grunted. ‘I wish she would get a move on.’

  ‘And besides, nobody else would tolerate your behaviour.’

  He tugged at his scarred earlobe. ‘That is true. I once got through six servants in a week.’

  I righted a tipped teacup and put it on the table. ‘So what do you think happened at Mr Piggety’s?’

  ‘I can only make preternaturally intelligent guesses at present,’ he said as I poured. ‘Most probably,’ he inspected his tea despondently, ‘the murderer or murderers—’

  ‘Why the plural?’ I had an itch in the sole of my right foot.

  ‘I will come to that, but I will stick to the masculine singular for now.’ He sampled his tea. ‘Actually, this is not too bad… The murderer comes to Piggety’s Cat Factory. He gains entry without any force, so either Mr Piggety knew or was expecting him or the killer managed to talk his way in. They go through the cattery and into the boiling room.’

  I tried to wriggle my toes around but the itch was getting worse.

  ‘Could he have gone in through the skinning room?’ I shuddered at the very idea of such a place.

  Mr G crossed his legs. ‘I looked around after you had gone. It has no means of access other than the door into the killing room.’

  I pressed the sole of my boot on to the edge of the hearth and eased my foot up and down. ‘So they go through to the boiling room. What then?’

  ‘Mr Piggety undresses himself.’ He curled his lips at the unpleasantness of the image. ‘The clothes were not ripped off him – they have not been damaged. Indeed, they were neatly folded and his jacket was hung on a peg. So how do you make a man undress himself?’

  ‘By seduction,’ I suggested and he coloured.

  ‘What a filthy idea, but one we must consider’ – Mr G uncrossed his legs – ‘and, I believe, dismiss. A man in what I must call a state of excitement does not lay out his attire as if it is on display in a draper’s shop.’

  The itch was driving me to distraction. ‘At gunpoint.’ I stamped my foot.

  ‘Temper,’ he said absently. ‘Possibly, but then he would be even less concerned about sartorial matters.’

  ‘I do not think he was overly concerned about them at the best of times.’ I remembered Mr Piggety’s shiny-elbowed coat, stained shirt and crumpled trousers.

  ‘Besides which,’ Sidney Grice took a sudden interest in the palm of his left hand, running a finger over the creases, ‘you would have to put the gun down to tie him up, at which point he is going to struggle.’

  ‘How do you know he did not?’ I tickled my palm in the hope that creating another itch would get rid of the first, but my hand did not itch and my foot felt as though I were standing in an ants’ nest.

  ‘Because the knots were tied neatly and methodically, which is why we must consider the possibility of a second murderer – one to hold the gun and the other to truss their victim up. Which leads me to the rather alarming thought that these murders may involve at least three different felons – one poisoner for Horatio Green, for poisoners rarely resort to violent means, and two killers for Slab, Jackaman and Piggety.’

  The silhouette of an omnibus crossed the room, its top passengers moving in a shadow-puppet display over his bookcase. ‘And Braithwaite,’ I suggested.

  ‘Not my case.’ He folded his arms.

  I put the strainer back over my cup, but there was more tea in the tray than in the pot now. ‘At this rate the murderers will outnumber the victims.’ I got up to fetch a wooden rule from his desk.

  ‘That is not unknown. Most of this peculiar nation murdered Charles I.’

  ‘What if he were knocked out?’ I suggested, and Sidney Grice smoothed his hair back.

  ‘He could have been, but I doubt it. If you render a man unconscious with a blow to the head, you run the risk that he will not regain consciousness. He may even die and whoever killed Mr Piggety did not want him to die peacefully, otherwise he would have been tipped straight into the vat – whereas Mr Piggety knew exactly what was happening to him and probably for a number of hours. That is why he expelled his gastric contents.’

  ‘But who would hate Mr Piggety so much as to kill him so cruelly?’ I eased the rule down the side of my boot but could not get it to where it might have helped.

  ‘Every man has his enemies. Possibly a cat-lover who knew what he was intending to do and thought to give him a taste of his own medicine. More likely, they did not hate him at all. I am increasingly convinced that the person the murderer really hates is’ – he doodled with his forefinger in a puddle of tea – ‘me.’

  ‘Why are you taking it personally? The next victim might easily have been me.’

  ‘I only take things personally when they are.’ He eased his head back as if he had a stiff neck. ‘And every step that has been taken seems calculated to wreck my career and therefore me, for no man is more than what he does and most people are a great deal less. What on earth are you doing?’

  I pulled out the rule. ‘I have an itch.’

  My guardian looked revolted. ‘Ladies,’ he declared, ‘never itch.’

  ‘How lucky we are.’ I put the rule down with exaggerated care. ‘So you think that somebody killed four men so brutally just to harm you?’

  He took up the rule. ‘It is a possibility that I must bear in mind.’

  ‘But that is inhuman,’ I said as my guardian measured his hand at several points.

  ‘Unfortunately, it is all too human. I know of no beast whose savagery can even approach that of mankind, and Mr Piggety’s death was one of the most ghastly it has ever been my privilege to witness.’

  ‘You regard it as a cachet?’

  ‘Death is a secretive fellow. It is always an honour to watch him at work.’

  I closed my eyes. ‘Then I have been privileged a great many times… if only I had realized.’ I opened my eyes to see my guardian standing at my side and holding out his hand, and I reached up and he took mine awkwardly, like a bachelor uncle being given a baby and unsure what to do with it.

  ‘The loss of loved ones is never a privilege,’ he said, ‘but to be with them when they are lost, is.’

  ‘Not always,’ I said.

  ‘I know you had loved ones you would rather had not died, but would you want them to have died alone?’ His voice was soft and his hand closed on mine, but I pulled away.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I whispered as I stood up to leave.

  Sidney Grice winced and stepped aside, and I ran up the stairs, threw myself on to my bed and buried my face in my pillow to let the scream escape. But a scream is like an ocean; you can only drain it by creating another, and pain does not end just because you are weary of it.

  What passed through your mind as I cradled your head that last time? Did your love turn all at once to a sense of betrayal? ‘God bless you,’ I said and I thought you nodded. You mouthed my name in flecks of your own blood.

  My father stood beside me. ‘Dear God in heaven, March.’

  ‘Dead.’ I mouthed the word as if not hearing it could make it less true. ‘I have killed you.’ My lips could not frame that sentence any more than my mind could reject it. I kept it, nurtured it and let it grow, four words which were my birth and became my life.

  53

  Rabbits and the Marquis de Sade

  I washed my face in cold water with a rose-scented soap, smoked a cigarette out of the window, drank a large gin, sucked on a parma violet and was making my way down the stairs as my guardian came up them for dinner. He did not speak and neither did I.

  We sat at opposite ends of the table, listening to the dumb waiter creak up from the k
itchen. Mr G got up and brought out two plates, and put a dreary khaki slush in front of me.

  ‘I fear you are too distressed to continue.’ He returned to his seat. ‘It cannot be easy being a member of the weaker sex.’

  ‘I would not know,’ I retorted, ‘being a woman.’ He looked puzzled. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘your concern is misplaced. Please go on with your reconstruction.’

  And without the slightest pause he did so. ‘Prometheus Piggety is trussed naked in silk cords and fastened to the first hook on the chain track. The killing tub is filled with boiling water and the engine started. This, I suspect, is when the drinking water in the cattery was turned off and the heating turned on.’

  ‘The murderer would not have known how all the valves worked, so perhaps the cats’ suffering was accidental,’ I suggested with more hope than conviction.

  ‘How did you know which tap turned on their water?’ Sidney Grice polished his pince-nez.

  ‘Because it was labelled,’ I said.

  ‘I rest my case.’ He uncrossed his legs. ‘We are not dealing with nice people, March. The suffering of creatures would have given them nothing but pleasure. I shall not soil my lips with the name of the French rascal whose practices they have adopted.’

  ‘I am quite familiar with the story of the Marquis de Sade,’ I said and my guardian drew back.

  ‘How have the minds of the young become so polluted?’

  ‘Why do men confuse innocence with ignorance?’ I demanded and he wrinkled his brow.

  ‘Because someone who is ignorant of a vice is not tempted to indulge in it.’

  ‘But may be more easily lured into it,’ I said.

  ‘In my experience it is more often the women who do the luring,’ he retorted. ‘But, as always, your inanities are distracting me from the matter in hand.’ He rubbed his left cheekbone. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Turning the heating on,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Ah yes. Let me see.’ Sidney Grice scribbled a few numbers on the tablecloth. ‘There were twenty hooks on each chain. According to Bridlington’s Statistics, the average fully grown cat weighs three pounds and two ounces, which would make a total load of somewhere in the region of one thousand ounces. Piggety must have weighed something like nine stone or two thousand, two hundred and forty ounces, which is more than twenty times the load that the system was designed to carry. Now, one of the many reasons that the electric motor will never replace steam is that it has a poor torque. For every ten per cent you increase the load, the motor will slow by twenty per cent. With the relatively large weight of Piggety, the progress would have been marvellously slow, but how do you calculate how slow it is?’

  ‘You time it over a measured distance,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Piggety may have been an unpleasant man but he was no more asinine than average. He would have known what was happening to him. So what does he do?’

  ‘He struggles and kicks out and knocks the watch that his murderer is timing him with on to the floor.’

  ‘Or more likely he catches his persecutor on the nose – hence the blood droplets. The killer then drops the watch and accidentally steps on the glass.’

  ‘So the murderer calculates when Mr Piggety will reach the tub, leaves him to his fate, locks up and sends you a telegram and the key,’ I said. ‘But why not send the telegram and key together by the same messenger?’

  ‘He sends the telegram early to make sure I get it, and the key later so that I cannot enter the factory too soon and so that I have to stay here waiting for it.’ Mr G tucked into his dinner.

  ‘Is it not time we visited the last member of the club?’ I proposed, and wondered what he had on his plate that warranted chewing.

  ‘Ah yes, Mr Warrington Tusker Gallop.’ He took a sip of water. ‘We shall call upon Mr Gallop soon and unexpectedly, in order to catch him unawares at his place of business which is conveniently close by…’ He winced.

  ‘In Charlotte Street,’ I put in as his fingers went to claw the air an inch from his face.

  ‘Blast this thing.’ He squeezed out his eye and cupped a hand over his socket.

  ‘Perhaps if you left it out for a few days it might become less inflamed,’ I said. ‘Then I could help you make a fresh impression.’

  My guardian put out his right hand. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘I can tolerate the pain but I could not bear it if I thought you cared.’

  I did not know what to say. I wanted to reach out but Sidney Grice was, as always, unreachable.

  Harry Baddington was devastated by your death. He was very supportive, but then he never knew that I had brought it about.

  All of your things went into a packing case but Harry saved the writing box for me. Your father’s letter was still in it and also one sheet of paper, a reply. I am sorry, Edward, it was wrong of me to read it but I had to know. There was no preamble. In an angry hand you had scrawled,

  Dear Father

  I have never understood why you and Mama pretend to think that I have any kind of ‘understanding’ with Hester Sandler. Though she and I were childhood friends, we were never sweethearts and I have never given her any reason to think otherwise. If I danced with her at the last ball, it was because she was a friend and because you asked me not to leave her unattended at an event where she knew so few other people.

  There was more in the same vein, but you never finished that letter. I tore it into little pieces along with your father’s and put them in a kidney dish and set them alight, his disapproval and your last written words lost – like me – for ever.

  54

  Beef Tea and the Hospital Ghost

  Inspector Pound was propped up on three pillows and listlessly sipping a mug of beef tea when I visited him the next morning, but his expression brightened when he noticed me and even more when I showed him the pies and bottles of ale I had brought along.

  ‘My desk sergeant came this morning with a bag of tea. What on earth am I supposed to do with that here?’ He coughed and clutched at his stomach. ‘My constables clubbed together for a bag of apples. I hate apples at the best of times and these are crawling with worms. Which is’ – he broke off with another fit of coughing – ‘the closest you can get to fresh meat here.’

  ‘Has your sister brought you nothing?’

  From under his pillows he brought out a battered leather-bound copy of the King James Bible. ‘It belonged to my father.’

  ‘Do you read it?’

  He covered his mouth in an attempt to smother another cough. ‘Don’t tell my men or I would never live it down, but I try to read a passage every day.’

  The man in the next bed was winking at me. I tried to ignore him. ‘I am not sure that Mr Grice believes in God.’

  ‘I have come across so much evil in my profession that I cannot help but believe in the devil and, if he exists, how can there not be a God?’ The inspector drained his mug. ‘Mr Grice would find more answers in the Bible if he opened it occasionally.’

  ‘I shall tell him you said that.’ I put his mug on the side table.

  ‘I would rather you did not.’

  Matron came along. ‘Mr Sweeney is much impressed by your fiancé’s progress.’ Inspector Pound hid his surprise at being so described with another cough. ‘You must not tire him.’

  ‘I shall only stay a moment,’ I assured her, but when we looked back he had already fallen asleep. I stroked the hair off his forehead and bent to kiss his cheek. ‘Goodbye, my dear.’

  The matron ushered me away, but on the way out she added, ‘He has recently been in correspondence with another surgeon in Edinburgh who has had great success with carbolic acid and is very much in favour of its use. My nurses may not thank you for drawing it to our attention for it stings their eyes abominably, but’ – the sternness briefly vanished – ‘I believe we have saved three lives this week.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for saving his.’

  She touched my arm. ‘Do not thank me too soon. That cough of his may be co
nsumptive and we cannot bathe his lungs in antiseptic.’

  ‘I know you will do your best for him.’

  I made my way back down the long white corridors and had just reached the stairwell when I saw her, a spectral figure walking through the night air towards me.

  ‘March?’

  I spun round.

  ‘I thought that was you.’

  ‘Oh, Dr Berry.’

  She came close. ‘Why, March, you look like you have seen a ghost.’

  For one moment I thought I had. ‘I am sorry. I was daydreaming.’ And then I added clumsily, ‘What are you doing here?’

  She laughed as I struggled to collect myself. ‘That is like me asking why you are at the scene of a crime. I work here – well, two sessions a week anyway. Not content with outraging all decent people by educating Jews, University College has taken to employing the occasional woman and I am one of the lucky few, albeit on a voluntary basis.’

  I felt like hugging her but I took her hand. ‘I have been visiting a friend of mine, Inspector Pound.’ I told her about the attack on him and how I had brought it upon him.

  ‘The blood transfusion,’ she said. ‘I heard about that. That was brave of you.’

  ‘It was my fault he needed it.’

  Dr Berry squeezed my hand. ‘You must not blame yourself. I will take a look at him later – if I can sneak past Matron.’

  ‘She is not such a dragon as she appears,’ I said.

  ‘In that case I shall go now.’ She hesitated. ‘May I visit you tomorrow evening?’

  ‘Oh yes. I am sure Mr Grice will be pleased to see you – and I will too, of course.’

  I felt a little happier as I went on my way.

  *

  Sidney Grice was pasting a cutting into a navy-blue scrapbook.

  ‘An unusual case in the East End.’ He squashed the air bubbles with a cylinder rule. ‘A man with no arms was fished out of the Thames and his legs were shackled.’

  ‘Chas.’ I gripped my handbag and tried to stop shaking. ‘Charles Sawyer.’