The Curse of the House of Foskett

by Kasasian, M. R. C.

  Thurston closed the carriage door and laughed. He turned to me. ‘She will kill them all,’ he crowed, ‘and not you nor your half-blind, dirt-digging cripple can do a thing about it.’

  ‘I only pray that you are an accomplice,’ I told him. ‘Mr Grice would so love a double hanging.’

  Thurston pushed his face close to mine and I forced myself not to flinch.

  ‘One day’ – he breathed whisky fumes over me – ‘I will crush you just like that little bird in my bare hands.’ He stepped into a pile of manure and shook his foot angrily.

  ‘Be sure to clean yourself up,’ I advised. ‘You will want to look your best in the dock.’

  Thurston scraped his boot on the kerb, strode past and climbed into the other side of the carriage. The groom cracked his whip and the horses set off much too fast for such ill-lit conditions.

  I dashed back to my cab. ‘Follow that coach.’

  But the driver shook his head. ‘Not likely, miss. That’s Bloodthirsty Gates. I know ’im by reputation and that’s as much as I wants to.’

  He turned his horse and it headed eagerly from the shadows to the light.

  *

  The lights were on when I returned, and I looked into the study to find Mr G sorting through his filing cabinet.

  ‘I have just found a case of murder with an icicle,’ he told me happily.

  ‘I thought you would be with your mother,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that.’ He slipped a newspaper cutting into a folder. ‘Apparently she had a headache. She has never had one before and assumed the worst.’ He printed a number on the cover. ‘So it was all a false alarm…’ he put the folder away, ‘unfortunately.’

  ‘You cannot mean that.’

  ‘I most certainly do.’ He took off his pince-nez. ‘It was in Norway.’

  I told him what had happened.

  ‘And the point of chasing after her was…?’ he enquired politely.

  ‘To see what she was up to.’

  He ripped a page out of a journal. ‘She was hardly likely to be up to anything with you peering over her shoulder. Really, March.’ He tore the page in two, using his rule as a guide. ‘I had four different drivers standing by to follow that woman before you alerted her.’

  ‘Perhaps if you had told me—’

  ‘What?’ He slammed down his rule. ‘You would not have gone charging round like a dragoon on manoeuvres?’

  I was too tired to argue any more. ‘She killed a bird,’ I told him.

  ‘Thank heavens for that.’ He slid the drawer shut. ‘By the look of your cloak I thought you had.’

  57

  Pebbles and the Iceni Hordes

  Charlotte Street was ten minutes’ walk or twenty minutes by cab on most days. We took a hansom.

  ‘It is estimated,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘that the Iceni hordes rampaged through Londinium slaughtering the inhabitants at a rate of eight miles per hour. Today they would be lucky to get across Oxford Circus in an afternoon.’

  We had been sitting for so long that he had drained his flask of tea while we were still within a few hundred yards of home. This seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject.

  ‘Do you think it possible,’ I hardly dared put the idea into words, ‘that Eleanor Quarrel is still alive?’

  I waited for my guardian to dismiss the idea contemptuously, but he only tapped the cork back into his insulated bottle and enquired, ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘My friend Mrs Fitzpatrick, who knew Eleanor Quarrel quite well from the club in Huntley Street, thought she saw her, at Euston Station.’

  A man was juggling three live hens. They flapped and squawked but he passed them hand to hand, high over his head, as easily as if they had been tennis balls.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tuesday last week at about half past four.’

  The man propelled all his hens in the air at once, but one launched itself in a clumsy falling flight and scuttled under a carriage with him scurrying after it.

  ‘Did she speak to her?’

  ‘No. She was alighting from a train as Harriet was boarding another, but she was convinced that Eleanor was looking at her. She thought it might be a ghost.’

  Mr G snorted. ‘If a fraction of sightings were proved true, you would never get a seat on a Metropolitan Line train for the number of shades already occupying them. Yes.’

  ‘Yes, what?’

  A policeman came by on foot, waving his arms and shouting at someone unseen to back up.

  ‘Yes, I do think it possible that Eleanor Quarrel is still alive. The thought occurred to me the moment I read that the Framlingham Castle had gone down with all hands and passengers.’ He put his flask back into his satchel. ‘But I dismissed the idea as too optimistic.’

  I shot him a glance. ‘But you hated her. Why would you not want her to die?’

  ‘Oh, I wanted her die but not like a bather who had got into difficulties.’ Our cab jerked forwards. ‘She should have choked and struggled on the end of a rope and I should have been there to watch. She should have been given to the anatomists to dissect. After Corder was hanged for the Red Barn Murder the surgeon tanned his skin for a book binding. Imagine having Mrs Quarrel’s hide covering your written account of the case.’

  ‘What a disgusting idea,’ I said and he shrugged.

  ‘What she did to the living was worse than anything that could be done to her dead.’ He fastened his satchel straps.

  ‘There are four reasonable explanations of what happened to Eleanor Quarrel. First, that she went down with the ship. Second, that she got off the ship, most likely with the pilot, before it went into the open sea. That is easily checked. Third, that she survived the shipwreck and was picked up by a passing vessel when the storm subsided, though this would probably have been widely reported.’ We came to a standstill again. ‘Fourth, that she was not on the ship when it sailed. Numbers one and four are the most credible events and, when you have a number of options, dismissing the likely ones does not make the unlikely ones any more likely. When this case is settled I shall devote some time to investigating further, but at present we have murderers to apprehend who are all too definitely alive. Let us deal with that first.’

  A scrawny boy scrambled under our horse pursued by a skinny girl calling, ‘Stop, thief.’ They were both almost naked.

  ‘What could she have had that would be worth stealing?’ I wondered.

  ‘Everyone has something,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘a coin or a cup of water, even an idea. Desperate men will fight over pebbles.’

  Charlotte Street had developed in an ad hoc fashion but what it lacked in the uniform stylishness of Gower Street, it made up with dozens of different buildings ranging from the quirky to the imposing. The Prince of Wales Theatre stood on the corner, its once-grand facade more than a little tattered now.

  ‘Clear off,’ my guardian said to a respectably dressed lady rattling an orphans’ charity box. Even by his own standards he was especially ratty that afternoon. ‘You might as well throw your money down the drain,’ he grunted as I gave her sixpence.

  We passed the Sass Academy of Art as a wan young woman came out wrapped in a brown woollen coat, not long enough to hide her bare calves, and Sidney Grice turned away in a horror which I had never seen him display for a slaughtered body.

  A police van went by with an old woman standing peering out. She had a clay pipe clenched between her gums and was gripping a bar with one hand and waving merrily to all and sundry with the other.

  Gallop’s Snuff Emporium had a small bow window crammed with glass jars and coloured pots piled so high that hardly any light filtered through or between them into the shop.

  A small bent man stood side-on behind the counter, his head twisted at an odd angle towards us and his back hunched. He had a grey goatee dangling down his chest. ‘Good morning, sir, miss.’

  ‘Mr Gallop?’ my guardian asked.

  ‘Warrington Tusker Gallop it is, sir,’ Mr Gallop confirmed che
erily. ‘How may I be of—’

  ‘Who is in the back room?’ my guardian demanded.

  ‘Why, nobody.’

  ‘Get down!’ Sidney Grice shouted.

  ‘I am not standing on—’ Mr Gallop jerked his head away. ‘Ouch.’ His hand went to his neck.

  There was a scuffling noise and I looked across just in time to see a thin tube being withdrawn from a knothole in a cream-painted door behind him. There were running footsteps and another door banged.

  ‘Blowpipe,’ my guardian said and scrambled over the counter, ignoring the pyramid of snuffboxes and row of ornamented humidors he scattered in his progress. ‘Deal with him.’ He jumped down, wrenched open the door and disappeared through it.

  Mr Gallop put his hand to his neck. ‘Oh dear,’ he said and, before I could stop him, pulled out what looked like a bamboo meat skewer. His hand was covered in blood. ‘Goodness, that stings.’

  I lifted the flap and rushed round. There was a chair behind him and I guided him into it. I reached for my handkerchief to staunch the steady flow down his collar, but when I turned back Warrington Tusker Gallop was dead.

  58

  Hunting Monkeys

  ‘Do not touch it.’ Sidney Grice came back into the room. ‘It will have been poisoned.’ The skewer was still in the dead man’s hand.

  ‘But who?’

  ‘He was out of the rear exit before I got into the room and he locked it from the outside. He could be halfway across the city by now.’ My guardian put on his pince-nez and bent over. ‘This dart has been hollowed out.’ He clicked his tongue thoughtfully. ‘I have seen blowpipes being used by tribesmen in the Amazon Basin to hunt monkeys and I have heard of them being used in tribal wars, but this is the first case I have ever come across in this country.’

  ‘What a trophy for you,’ I said acidly.

  ‘Indeed.’ His glass eye glowed red in the light through a jar as he went by the window, bolted the front door and pulled the blind down. I saw the mirror-image closed in black through the blue cloth. ‘Come here.’ I followed him to the doorway behind the counter and he held out an arm to halt me. ‘Luckily, Mr Gallop was too mean to employ a cleaner.’ The floor was thick with dust. ‘What do you make of those?’

  ‘Footprints and scuffmarks.’

  ‘The footprints to the right near the wall are mine, but what do the scuffmarks tell you?’ He pointed with his cane.

  I looked at the long imprints. ‘Something was dragged along the floor.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ His cane moved over the outlines. ‘The curved front edge is a knee and the trail behind it is a trouser leg.’

  ‘So we know we are dealing with a man.’

  ‘Or a woman dressed as a man – but probably a man. See those?’

  ‘A toe print in front of the knee and to the right of it, and another less distinct one behind the trouser mark.’

  ‘I knew your eyes would be of some use to you one day.’ He took hold of the jamb and leaned low into the room over the marks. ‘The tip of my little finger to that of my thumb when I stretch my hand is exactly eight inches, so we are looking for a tall man with small feet.’

  ‘Like the print at Piggety’s in the crushed glass.’

  ‘Possibly, though the heel shape is different over there, so if it is the same person he has changed his boots.’ He looked up and round and pulled himself straight. ‘I think we can disturb these now. Lift your skirts as much as is commensurate with decency and go in first.’ He ushered me into a low-ceilinged storeroom, with sparsely used shelves on either side – a few old bottles, some rolls of cloth, some curling account books, all covered in grime and clothed in cobwebs. ‘First impressions?’

  ‘There is a strong smell in here – a sort of perfume.’

  He breathed in through his nose. ‘I can just about smell something. A scented snuff?’

  ‘No. It is more like a toiletry but it is difficult to tell with the room being so musty – a sort of cologne, I think. Perhaps it was a woman after all.’

  ‘Or a foreigner,’ Mr G muttered. ‘Now, let us see the room as the murderer must have.’ He pulled the door to. ‘Wait a moment for our eyes to adjust. What can you hear outside?’

  I listened. ‘Very little.’ And waited for a sarcastic remark but he only said, ‘That is because there is very little to hear – except the two dogs barking and the cries of a ragman above the traffic.’

  ‘I think I can hear the dogs and the man but I cannot hear the traffic.’ Four circular cores and two slits of light came through the planks from the shop.

  ‘That is because it is distant so the exit opens into a back alley.’ He genuflected to position his knee over the imprint. ‘See how much further back the toe is than mine.’

  ‘A good two or three inches.’

  ‘Also, if I were using a blowpipe, I would put it through this lower hole and look through the one above, but the killer used the two top holes. He must be at least five foot ten or eleven. I have a very good view of the shop from here but the side where Gallop stood is slightly obscured. The murderer could much more easily have fired at me or you, so he was clearly intent upon his victim.’

  He brought a miniature safety lamp out of his satchel and lit it, the yellow glare momentarily blinding me. I shaded my eyes and turned to see an old packing crate.

  ‘He must have sat on this.’

  Sidney Grice came over to inspect it. ‘And for quite a while, judging by the amount of shuffling about on the case and floor… and what do you make of those footprints?’

  He bent over and held the lamp close, and I peered over his shoulder.

  ‘The right foot is turned in a bit.’

  ‘Good… and it has a less sharp outline, showing that it drags slightly. So he has a limp but not a bad one, more likely a sprained ankle than a game knee or hip.’ He strode across to the back door. Hardly any light came in from the outside but a rectangle of day seeped underneath through a gap. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘The murderer entered through the back door.’ He opened his mouth as I added hastily, ‘Or else he was known to Mr Gallop and came in through the shop.’

  ‘You must get out of the habit of saying things because you think I want you to say them. I could bring along Cook for that,’ he said. ‘Just look at the pattern of the prints.’

  I followed them carefully with my eye. ‘It was the back door.’

  ‘But how did he gain access?’

  ‘Perhaps it was not locked.’

  He tutted. ‘Who leaves an entrance unlocked in this metropolis? Use your eyes, girl.’

  There were more marks on the floor in front of the back door, four of them with long straight edges overlapping. ‘Newspaper,’ I said. ‘I have done it myself as a child. You slide the paper under the door, push the key out with a small length of wire so that it falls on the paper, and pull the paper back.’

  Sidney Grice rubbed his hands. ‘At this rate I shall be able to leave the business to you and retire to my estate in Dorset by the end of the year. What next?’

  ‘He went and sat on that box and then crept—’

  ‘How do you know he crept?’ He stroked a stain on the wall.

  ‘Prints close together and very well delineated – small careful steps.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He kneeled there, looking into the shop through a knothole, pushed his blowpipe through the other hole and fired at Mr Gallop. Either it was just Mr Gallop he intended to kill, or you alerted him and he panicked and ran.’

  My guardian blew out his lamp and we went back into the shop where Warrington Tusker Gallop sat in his chair, his head still to one side. Sidney Grice went to him, tried to twist his head and pushed on his shoulders, and Mr Gallop tipped back. ‘The spinal curvatures were certainly not feigned,’ he said. ‘So he could not have carried out the other murders himself or have been of much assistance in them.’ He slid his lantern into an asbestos pouch to save his satchel from being scorched and took
the dart with his tweezers from the dead man’s loose grip. ‘This is not from the Amazon. It has been sharpened with a cut-throat razor and the fletch is made from the feathers of a male Turdus philomelos, the song thrush. How did he die?’

  The eyes were still open and fixed on me. ‘Almost instantly, with no pain except from the actual wounding, and no fighting for breath or convulsions.’

  He clicked his tongue. ‘The tribesmen I came across use curare, which suffocates their prey. He would have died in a similar manner to Horatio Green if that had been used.’ He dropped into a crouch and prodded the floors with his finger. ‘Blood,’ he remarked.

  ‘Mr Gallop did bleed quite heavily when he pulled the dart out,’ I informed him.

  ‘Describe the bleeding.’ He scrutinized the bare boards through his pince-nez.

  ‘There was a gush and then a steady flow. So it did not hit an artery,’ I told him.

  ‘This blood is in droplets.’ He jumped up and looked from side to side. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘Well, surely, Mr Gallop,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense.’ He wiped his finger on a cloth. ‘I have told you before to look for patterns, whether it be fingermarks or pavements. The droplets form a flattened cone, the base being near Gallop’s feet and the apex near the door into the storeroom.’

  ‘So the murderer blew blood through the pipe,’ I said and he looked at me questioningly. ‘Perhaps he had a wound in his mouth or a severe chest condition such as consumption.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ my guardian conceded. He picked up a pot which had been smashed as he vaulted the counter, and sniffed the contents. ‘Come,’ Mr G said. ‘I shall send a message to the inimitable Inspector Quigley from home.’ He stopped on the threshold. ‘I have had an important thought.’

  ‘About the murderer?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. But it occurs to me,’ he pinched the dimple on his chin, ‘that a little snuff, possibly a menthol mix, might help clear my nasal passages and restore my olfactory organs to their full and remarkable sensitivities.’ He stepped outside. ‘Though I shall have to seek another supplier now, of course.’