The Curse of the House of Foskett

by Kasasian, M. R. C.

  My guardian took her elbow. ‘Sit down please, Dorna.’

  She obeyed meekly, and suddenly she looked very small and vulnerable. I went over and crouched before her. ‘I have something else to tell you.’

  She looked confused. ‘Have you found him? I do not want to meet him if you have.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Your father died a long time ago but your mother is not dead.’

  Her face twisted into one contorted word, so tangled with hate that I had difficulty understanding it. ‘Liar!’ She leaped up to stand over me.

  I spoke slowly as I rose. ‘A friend of mine, a lady who knew your mother quite well, saw her a few days ago boarding a train at Euston.’

  Dorna looked at me blankly. ‘But I have avenged her.’

  ‘And now she might as well have died for you shall never see her again,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘She has abandoned you, Dorna.’

  And she covered her face and for a while we were silent and, when she took her hands away, her expression was calm again. She unclipped her bag and brought out a scent bottle.

  ‘Was that how you were going to destroy me – getting me to kill the inspector?’ I asked, and she put her head to one side.

  ‘That and this.’ She pulled out the stopper. ‘Though I planned to do it at night when you could not see me.’

  ‘Perfume?’ I said as her hand went back. Sidney Grice was watching her with interest but made no effort to intervene.

  ‘Sulphuric acid.’ Her hand darted forward, dashing it into my face.

  I screamed and clutched my face, curled over, but I was too late. I felt it splash into my eyes with the first throw and over my hands, cheeks and neck with each succeeding cast.

  76

  The Frequency of Unvoiced Wonderment

  Sidney Grice sprang to his feet and pulled my fingers away.

  ‘Take this.’ He pressed something into my palm. ‘It is all right. Open your eyes.’

  I forced myself to do so and found that I could perfectly well see the white handkerchief he had given to me.

  ‘It does not sting.’ I fought down my panic.

  ‘But I filled it myself.’ Dorna sniffed the empty bottle in wonder.

  I dabbed myself dry.

  ‘So you did,’ he said. ‘But last night when we went to the play – and you only took me there to mock me – I hid your glove and when you went to help Emily find another, I looked in your handbag.

  ‘My suspicions were aroused when I saw a bottle of Fougère. I do not know which perfume you wear – for I have yet to study the subject in depth – but March uses Fougère and your scent is very different. I shook the bottle and touched the rim.’ He held up his finger, the tip still raw. ‘If there had not been a carafe of water on your desk to plunge my digit into, I could have lost the end of it. I thought perhaps you carried it for self-defence as you go into some very shady corners, but then I saw the little handgun and I decided that was security enough. So, to play it safe, I poured the acid into your plant pot and rinsed and refilled the bottle from the carafe.’

  ‘I wondered what had happened to that rubber tree,’ I said.

  ‘Unvoiced wonderment is rare in the young,’ he said, ‘but almost always welcome. I also took the bullets out of your rather lovely little revolver while I was at it. I am never happy socializing with anyone who possesses the means of killing me.’

  ‘Oh, Sidney,’ she protested. ‘How could you ever think I truly meant to harm you?’

  He reinserted his eye. ‘Apart from the particularly cruel murders you have committed or your attempts to destroy my reputation, my ward and my police colleague – I cannot imagine what makes me so suspicious of your intentions.’

  ‘But you will not hand me over to the police,’ she said, ‘after everything we have been to each other.’

  ‘Oh, Dorna.’ Sidney Grice ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It was all built on nibs and lies.’

  77

  Clocks and the Atoms of Decency

  There was little to say after that. Mr G rang for Jane and Dorna put her hand up.

  ‘I am still mistress here.’ And when Jane came, Dorna instructed her to fetch the police without saying why.

  ‘Inspector Quigley of Marylebone Police Station,’ my guardian told the young constable who marched in ten minutes later. ‘Mr Sidney Grice requires him at his earliest convenience.’

  For half an hour or more we sat, listening to the clocks tick and chime. I hardly dared look at my companions but whenever I did Dorna’s eyes were downcast, whilst Sidney Grice was gazing at her with a peculiar intentness. In the end I could stand that and the silence no longer.

  ‘But why did you kill Emily and your cook and pretend to hang yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Did I?’ Her face was a mask.

  ‘Partly because they were witnesses to the charade Dr Berry had planned and partly to cast more victims at Miss McKay’s door,’ my guardian answered. ‘If there is an atom of decency in all of this, she did at least wait until it was Jane’s day off and kill a virtual stranger instead.’

  Dorna Berry shrugged. ‘Perhaps it just happened to be Jane’s day off.’

  ‘Not an atom then.’ He pinched his ear lobe. ‘The murders of the servants and the fake hanging were all designed to put a noose round Primrose McKay’s neck when she came out of hiding to claim her winnings. It would have been your word against hers and she had every motive for all the killings whereas you, apparently, had none.’

  I clicked my fingers to his obvious disapproval. ‘But what about Thurston, her manservant?’

  ‘If you were a man, which you very nearly are in some ways,’ my guardian brought out his Mordan mechanical pencil, ‘who would you rather have as a mistress, the hypochondriac and dangerously sadistic heiress to a failing business…?’

  ‘Failing?’ I queried and he waved the pencil at me.

  ‘I have advised you before to read the business pages. McKay Sausages has taken a tumble with the deteriorating quality of their product since death wrenched Mr McKay’s hand from the tiller eight years ago. Coupled with his daughter’s unwise forays into the equine world – and I am surprised you did not look into that aspect of her affairs, Miss Middleton, eighty-four horses which she would have been better putting into her product – she is on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, even that figurine of a mandarin was a cheap fake. She put the original pair up for auction along with a number of valuable paintings last year. She needed the money. Why else do you think she joined the society? And Thurston could choose between her and an alluring young doctor who was about to acquire one of the oldest titles in the country.’

  ‘What a filthy mind you have,’ Dorna told him bitterly.

  ‘The world I deal with is filthy but I remain pure,’ he responded. ‘In case you are interested, you made three major mistakes this morning.’

  She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. ‘My only mistake was in trusting you. It is that McKay trollop who should be facing these accusations, not me.’

  Sidney Grice turned the pencil between his fingers as if he were rolling a cigarette. ‘First, the noose – luckily, March had to cut it so I could judge the length of the rope to the inch. It was much too short. If you had stood on the stool it would have been above your head. It was only when you climbed into the drawer that you could put it round your neck.’

  ‘He lifted me up.’

  ‘You told us he kicked the stool from under you,’ I reminded her and she breathed out slowly.

  ‘I was confused. I wonder how clearly you would remember things when you have seen your maid horribly killed and almost been murdered yourself.’

  ‘The knot was quite interesting, as knots very often are.’ Sidney Grice lowered the pencil to point it like a rapier towards her. ‘A reverse reef knot.’

  She looked at him coldly. ‘What of it?’

  ‘The same sort of knot was also used to tie up Piggety.’

  ‘And?’ She yawned ostentatiously.
/>
  ‘And is otherwise known as a surgeon’s knot.’

  ‘I am a physician, not a surgeon.’

  ‘Even I know how to tie a suture,’ I said and she eyed me sourly.

  ‘Lastly’ – my guardian lowered the pencil – ‘the gold cross on the snapped chain in the hall. Primrose McKay never wore one.’

  Dorna opened her eyes. ‘But you told me she did.’

  ‘I never lie.’ He looked at her with his pencil at arm’s length, as if about to start a portrait. ‘I merely asked a few days ago if March had mentioned that Miss McKay liked wearing little gold crosses on chains, and then by some strange coincidence one appears in Emily’s dead grasp. It was one clue too many, Dr Berry, and perhaps the final nail in the scaffold.’

  Quigley came at last and Mr G spoke to him in the hall before ushering him into the room.

  ‘At this gentleman’s request I shall not manacle you,’ the inspector told her.

  ‘This is an outrage,’ Dorna protested, but followed him to the door without resisting.

  ‘Take a good look, Dr Berry,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘You shall never know these comforts again.’

  She forced a tense smile. ‘Oh, I shall be back,’ she vowed, but Sidney Grice demurred.

  ‘Dear Doctor’ – he crunched on his last piece of carrot – ‘the last person you shall see is the man who is about to choke you to death for a fee of two guineas.’

  She spun away and let Inspector Quigley lead her out and into a Black Maria.

  ‘You see,’ my guardian told me, ‘I said you must allow Dorna to be the murderer.’ He clambered aboard the van. ‘I shall send you a cab.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said, turning back to the house. ‘Somebody has to talk to Jane.’

  *

  It was almost midnight before Sidney Grice returned, grey with exhaustion.

  ‘I shall not talk about it tonight.’ He took two sniffs of snuff and threw back his head with his eyes closed. At last he bowed his head and I watched him for a while, staring into the open snuffbox as if waiting for something to happen. ‘You should go to bed.’

  ‘We both should.’

  My guardian patted my shoulder awkwardly and I thought he shivered.

  And, as I lay in bed that night looking out into the starless sky, I thought about that shadow on my guardian’s face. The sadness had been there since the day I met Sidney Grice and it was never to go away.

  *

  When I returned to the hospital the next day, the screens were pulled round Inspector Pound’s bed and my first thought was that something dreadful had happened, but the nurse told me that he had visitors and was playing cards, and they did not want Matron to see.

  ‘He must be feeling better,’ I said and, as I neared the end of the ward, I heard a stranger chuckle and say, ‘Got you that time, Baker.’

  Somebody else grunted and said, ‘No sign of your fiancée today, Pound?’

  ‘Miss Middleton isn’t actually my fiancée.’ The inspector’s voice was weak. ‘It was just something she told Matron so she could visit me.’

  And someone else laughed but this time with a hard edge. ‘Give him some credit, pal. He’s not that desperate.’ And the men roared in mirth and one of them leaned back, and the screen parted and I saw Inspector Pound propped up in bed. He was not laughing but he was not speaking, and at that moment he glanced up and our eyes met.

  I spun round as if he had struck me and I almost wished he had.

  ‘That was quick,’ the nurse said.

  ‘I just remembered something,’ I said.

  I lifted my skirt – how my guardian would have fussed about that – and ran.

  78

  The Trial

  The trial of Dr Dorna Berry was not a prolonged affair. There were so few witnesses left. Sidney Grice and I told the court what we knew and Inspector Quigley turned up to pick what scratchings of glory he could from the case. My guardian had briefed the prosecuting counsel well. Valiantly though the defence tried to shift all the blame on to Baron Rupert Foskett, they could not make a convincing account of it.

  Dorna was demure and her replies were quick and seductive, but they were crushed under the weight of evidence against her.

  The only time she seemed about to break down was when it was revealed that Rupert’s cousin, the Earl of Bocking, had recently died childless, leaving him all his estate via the baroness. Had Dorna been content with merely seducing and marrying Rupert, she would have come into two titles and a considerable fortune.

  The jury deliberated for a long time, doubtless desperate in their attempts to believe her. As Dorna Berry had said, nobody wanted to sentence a beautiful woman to death. The judge, however, showed no such reluctance.

  *

  There was none of the crowing triumphalism that I had witnessed in Sidney Grice when he had seen William Ashby condemned. He sat throughout, rattling his halfpennies and ignoring the attentions of the press. I had thought Waterloo Trumpington might be there but apparently he had been sent to report on a gasworks explosion in Derbyshire.

  ‘I have an appointment with the patent office,’ Sidney Grice told me in a strange monotone. ‘A fraudulent American is claiming to have invented the Grice-ophone before me – some stupid device with wax cylinders.’

  He saw me to a cab and wandered away, deep in thought. I got the driver to drop me off at Tavistock Square and sat watching Silas Braithwaite’s empty house. Once I thought I saw a woman in the waiting-room window and an insane thought shot through me that Dorna might have been telling the truth, and that she had seen somebody in there. But the figure moved and I saw that it was just the reflection of a dray driver.

  I walked slowly back to 125 Gower Street, paying little attention to my surroundings or the masses of people bustling by.

  Molly admitted me and took one look at my face. ‘Oh, miss,’ she said in dismay as she took my cloak and hat. She touched my arm.

  ‘Thank you, Molly,’ I said and trudged upstairs to my bottle of oblivion.

  Not an hour goes by without me thinking of him repeatedly. Edward, so young and brave and caring and foolish. Dear God, how we loved.

  He did not put me on a pedestal; he put me in his eyes and – for all my plainness – I saw myself in them as more lovely than is humanly possible.

  But Edward was not handsome. He was beautiful. He blushed when I told him that but it was true. He was so very beautiful.

  He was a subaltern in India. There had been some trouble in the area and he went on patrol, him and eleven others. I thought he was safe, miles away, but we had had that argument and he wanted to see me. So he persuaded his commanding officer to let him join the group that was coming to our camp… They were ambushed. Four of them died on the spot and four were seriously wounded, but their comrades managed to fight their way through and get them home.

  The normal practice was for the officers to be dealt with before the men but I had persuaded my father, who was the camp surgeon, to allow me to triage casualties so that those who would benefit the most received treatment first.

  His face had been blown off by a musket shot at close range. I thought he was a hopeless case and that we would be better treating his juniors. I left him for the padre, so disfigured that I did not know him. He was unrecognizable, my father said, but it was always with me, the thought – if I had truly loved, I would have known him through a mountain. And a voice in the night whispered to me, ‘You knew it was him all along and did not want him when he was no longer pretty.’

  ‘Liar!’ I screamed. ‘You damnable, sick, perverted liar.’ And I woke up drenched with my father shaking my shoulder. He hugged me for the first time and I sobbed until I thought I could sob no more. How very wrong I was. But then I was born wrong.

  79

  The Corridors of Perdition

  Dorna Berry was simply attired in a black dress with a white lace trim. Her hair was neatly tied back and at first sight she looked so cheerful and relaxed that we might have been me
eting for afternoon tea in Hyde Park, but there was nothing elegant about her surroundings: a stone sepulchre, dripping condensation, and lit only by a high, barred window and the traces of day seeping past the silhouette of the warder standing in the open doorway.

  ‘March’ – her voice was acrid with irony – ‘how lovely.’ She gestured to the bed and we sat side by side a foot or two apart and, as we turned to each other, I saw that her complexion was grey and her eyes darkly ringed.

  I hesitated. ‘I was not sure you would want to see me.’

  ‘I have nothing else to occupy my time.’ Her left fingers tremored in her lap. ‘And I am curious as to why you wanted to come.’

  ‘To see if there is anything you need.’

  She twitched in grisly amusement. ‘A ticket to America might be nice.’

  I watched her fingers. ‘Is there anything you need that I can get you?’

  ‘No. Is that all?’

  There was a tic in her right cheek. It crawled under her skin like one of Rupert’s maggots. I shuddered and burst out with, ‘Oh, Dorna, why did you have to do it?’

  She inhaled sharply. ‘I came from nothing, March, and I was no one. The Marlowes dragged me round the fleapits and louse-riddled hostelries of every decaying principality in Europe. Before I could even speak they had me on the stage. I hated it and I hated them. My earliest memories are of being exhibited like a prize pig, being laughed at when I tripped and hit my head, being booed when I forgot my lines or derided when the Marlowes made me sing.’

  Her arm shook. ‘I lost count of the times we sneaked out of inns before dawn because we could not pay bills, or were put into prison for debts. I was reared in a morass but I scrambled my way out of it by my own determination. I fought tooth and nail for my professional qualifications and even then I was spurned. Only one hospital would employ me occasionally and then only because I worked for free.’