‘Surely he looked to her for support and she did her best to give it.’
‘There was that, of course,’ my guardian said, ‘but there was more and, once I had realized that, almost everything else fell into place. It is obvious now and I am annoyed with myself that I did not see it at once, but William Ashby and Grace Dillinger were in love.’
Tiny wisps of smoke fluttered from the embers.
‘She was his mother-in-law.’
‘As Mr Froume ascertained, she was not, but, even if she were, she was closer to Ashby’s age than his wife was. Despite all the jokes about mothers-in-law it is not uncommon for them to form a platonic affection for their sons-in-law. Sometimes this is based on a mutual affection for the wife. In this case it was based on a shared resentment of her. We have already heard how Mr Dillinger doted on Sarah. In my experience, if a daughter is the apple of her father’s eye it is because his wife is not.’
I took a while to consider this opinion. ‘But how can you prove it?’
Sidney Grice tapped his teeth with his pencil and said, ‘I cannot yet but, once we take the idea as a premise, almost everything else falls neatly into place.’
Molly came in and set some fresh tea on the tray before us, and her employer touched the pot.
‘You have finally delivered a beverage of the requisite temperature,’ he said.
‘Sorry, sir.’
Sidney Grice shook his head in exaggerated despair as she left.
‘Pour it, March. I am getting thirsty and I have quite a problem to unravel yet.’
62
The Nail
‘Imagine the situation.’ My guardian shuddered as I poured a little milk into my cup. ‘William Ashby meets Sarah. She is a pretty girl, as we have seen, and he is, no doubt, besotted. Sarah has a father who adores her and grants her every wish, but for whom she has no affection. She sees William, who is fifteen years older than her, as the man to take her father’s place. The relationship is a disaster. William needs a frugal, hard-working partner and gets an idle spendthrift. They quarrel. Sarah’s mother sides with William. She too has had enough of her daughter’s behaviour.’
Sidney Grice paused to sip his tea. ‘William becomes very fond of Grace. She is, if anything, more beautiful than her daughter. She is only five years older than William and looks young for her age. Her husband is old and unsavoury. William is sturdy and kind-hearted. They have what I believe modern novels describe as an affair. The trouble is that William is a decent man. He knows it is not right to have congress with someone he regards as his wife’s mother. Perhaps Sarah suspects. Either—’
‘But if William was so decent, why did he not marry Sarah?’ I asked.
‘Her father would not allow it,’ my guardian said. ‘He had better things planned for his daughter than a tuppence-halfpenny shopkeeper and, until Sarah reached the age of majority at twenty-one, he could withhold his permission and they could do nothing about it.’
‘So she must have loved William once.’
‘What is love?’ Sidney Grice sniffed. ‘It is nothing more than a feeling.’ He sniffed again. ‘But to continue – William tries to put an end to his relationship with Grace but she refuses to be cast aside. Why should Sarah have everything her own way?’
‘And, as there is no legal relationship between Grace and William, there is nothing in law to stop them from marrying.’ I put two sugars in my tea. ‘Except for William’s decency.’
My guardian nodded. ‘He wants to do the right thing, but suddenly what the right thing is changes dramatically. Grace Dillinger tells William that she is with child and, since she has not lain with her own husband for many years, William must be the father.’
My guardian flicked a speck of soot, smudging it over his shirt. ‘Her husband has died recently – the removal of the only impediment to William marrying Sarah also left him free to marry Grace, who is about to be delivered of their baby. William must do the right thing by her but he is torn.’
Sidney Grice fished two halfpennies out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘Perhaps he agrees to do it – more likely he dithers and fudges – but then events take another turn. Alice Hawkins sees or overhears William and Grace together. I expect Grace wanted her to, for Grace is not a careless woman.’
‘And Alice is Sarah’s best friend.’ The mantle clock struck the half-hour as I spoke. ‘She would tell her everything.’
His left heel drummed the floor arrhythmically. ‘On the Sunday night Sarah confronts her mother in William’s presence. The women have a bitter and violent argument. William, ever the weak one, says he cannot desert Sarah and goes off into the kitchen. He cannot bear it.’
‘For all Sarah’s faults he still loved her too.’ I stirred my tea. ‘I could see it in his eyes.’
‘Absurd as your ocular observations are, yes, he did.’ He flipped the coins over each other in his left hand. ‘The row gets worse. Sarah takes off her meaningless wedding ring and flings it in the fire, or possibly Grace rips it from her finger. In the tussle Sarah kicks her mother, bruising her toe – and rips her dress – hence the yellow thread caught in her fingernail, though I have yet to prove that Mrs Dillinger ever had a yellow dress.’
‘Buttercup,’ I said. ‘Her dress was buttercup before she dyed it black.’
My guardian looked at me.
‘How long have you known that?’
‘A few weeks. A lady I met on the train told me. I did not think anything of it.’
‘You did not think anything.’ His face flushed. ‘If I had been in possession of that fact…’ He passed a hand over his forehead. ‘We shall come back to that later.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘I do not care if you feel remorseful or not.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘Let us continue. Mrs Dillinger sees that she is in danger of losing William, especially if he finds out she has been lying to him.’
‘What lie?’
‘Why, she is no more carrying than I am.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘I was never completely happy with her swelling so, when I was pretending to help that fat common woman in the coffee shop with her hat, I took a pin. I penetrated Mrs Dillinger’s bump with it when I goaded her to attack me, the whole length of a four-inch shaft, and she did not even blink.’
‘But William would have realized sooner or later.’
My guardian topped up his cup.
‘How can I put this delicately?’ He put the pot down. ‘I cannot. Grace Dillinger would not have let William near her whilst she was supposed to be with child – no doubt claiming it was doctor’s orders, and she could pretend to miscarry once they were married. There was no legal impediment to their union, just an inconvenient daughter, and I have checked the records using Mr Hartington, the famous birth detective from Bath. Grace Dillinger was definitely Sarah’s mother.’
‘But why does she still pretend to be with child?’
‘In all likelihood she is blackmailing other men with whom she has had relations, and think how much more willing they would be to pay once they knew they could be connected through her to such a major scandal.’ He started to flip the coins again. ‘Where was I?’
‘She was in danger of losing William.’
‘Ah, yes, and Mrs Dillinger is not a woman who likes to lose. She goes into the shop, selects a knife from the cabinet – one short enough to hide up her sleeve but long enough to do the deed – and goes back into the living room.’ The halfpennies were clicking furiously now. ‘Sarah turns her back on her mother, which suits Grace perfectly. If you stab somebody from behind they cannot see the blow coming, but she is too experienced to stab Sarah in the back where all the problems with hitting the ribs and the spine arise—’
‘Experienced?’
‘Obviously she had already killed her husband. It is too much of a coincidence that he had been stabbed to death by a third party. Perhaps she had killed others before that, most likely Matilda Tassel and her two daughters. I do not know yet but I shall.’ He rotated hi
s teacup to make the handle parallel with the spoon. ‘So she slipped the knife into her daughter up and under the ribs. Death would be instantaneous and she would not get splattered with blood, and there would be, as we discovered on the floor and walls, a great deal of blood in the last spasm of that burst heart.’
I twisted a lock of hair around my first finger. ‘So Grace Dillinger deliberately and calculatingly killed her own daughter?’
‘In her mind she was killing the girl who had stolen Mr Dillinger’s affection and looked likely to keep William Ashby.’
I picked up my tea, but my hand was shaking and I put it back on the tray, slopping it into the saucer.
‘This is not natural.’
The unlit coals shifted in the grate.
‘It is uncommon but by no means unknown.’ He slipped the coins back in his pocket. ‘In Greek mythology Medea murdered her own children to punish Jason, and I could give you half a dozen similar modern examples from my files.’
‘But surely when William sees what has happened he is horrified.’
‘Of course.’ He raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. ‘But this is where Mrs Dillinger shows her true metal. She screams. William rushes in. He has a horror of blood and probably never even touched his wife’s dead body. Mrs Dillinger is in an apparent frenzy of grief. Her daughter threatened her with the knife, she tells William, and in her mother’s attempts to take it off her Sarah was accidentally stabbed.’
‘You know it was an accident,’ I quoted.
‘Precisely.’ His hands rose further apart. ‘Hence William’s seemingly bizarre insistence on sticking to that claim to the very end. He genuinely believed that this was the case. His mother-in-law knows that the police will not be so gullible, however, especially when they find out about her relationship with William, as she knows they will. So she tells William that they must make it look like the frenzied attack of a maniac. They must copy the Slurry Street murders as best they can, thus the multiple stabbings.’
‘And the smearing of Rivincita on the wall.’
‘Quite so.’ My guardian touched the scar on his ear. ‘Remember I asked Parker if the body had been washed, and he promised me that it had not. The small amounts of blood around the other wounds and the lack of sprayed droplets around them showed that the cuts were made shortly after and not before she died.’
I struggled with my thoughts. ‘But when you inserted the probe into the wound you told us that the killer was left-handed, and Grace Dillinger is right-handed.’
‘I had not considered the possibility of an initial attack from behind,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘as all the other wounds were clearly inflicted from the front.’
‘So then she leaves and William cries out Murder,’ I said, but Sidney Grice shook his head.
‘If only it were that simple. Grace Dillinger is all too aware that Alice Hawkins knows enough to hang one or both of them, and she cannot be sure that William will not tell the truth and be believed. You met him and he was such a patently genuine man that it was difficult to imagine he might be lying. She kills two birds with one stone. Alice has to go and William has to do it. He is in a state of shock and a man in shock becomes as a sleepwalker.’
‘I have seen it after battle,’ I said. ‘Men wandering about in a daze. Some of them did not even notice they had been severely injured.’
‘I have heard it was so after Waterloo.’ My guardian got to his feet. ‘Everything is unreal and William knows that, whatever he does, he will awaken and find that it was just a dream. Grace Dillinger is a very persuasive woman. He does not want to see her hanged for a dreadful mishap.’
‘Especially as she is carrying his child,’ I said, ‘and he knew that he could be convicted as an accessory. So he would go to the gallows first because they would wait until she gave birth before they executed her.’ I found myself winding my hair so tight that it hurt. ‘Then their baby would be imprisoned in an orphanage and treated as the child of monsters and therefore a monster itself.’
‘Exactly.’ He paced the room again. ‘It is all or nothing now and Ashby has to continue the deception to its nightmarish conclusion. Grace is but a weak woman and cannot do the job. William must do it for them both and their baby. He cannot bring himself to touch the knife that killed his wife, so he takes the other knife of the same design and goes out of the house through the yard and along the alleyway on to Chandler Street, slipping in through the back entrance and down into Alice Hawkins’ room. But where to hide?’
‘In the old meat safe that she used to hang her things,’ I said. ‘Dear God, I cannot imagine what went through his mind while he waited. Every creak of the house must have terrified him.’
‘But nonetheless there he stands.’ Sidney Grice picked the ebony rule from his desk. ‘For an hour, or maybe more, until at last he hears the door open and Alice return to her room after having taken her dog for a walk. It is dark by then. She goes to the shelf to light a candle and Ashby springs out.’ My guardian clutched his rule like a dagger, hacking the air wildly as he spoke. ‘It is a botched job. He swings the knife around in a blind panic, hardly bearing to look at what he is doing to this innocent girl who had befriended them, only wanting to silence her screams.’
‘She fought back.’ I closed my eyes. ‘Poor Alice tried to defend herself… all those wounds to her arms and hands…’
‘And that is why the wounds bleed so much. She is still alive until she finally succumbs to that one last desperate lunge that snapped the blade off inside her lacerated body.’
‘Her little dog,’ I remembered. ‘It must have tried to protect her.’
‘A stout kick would be enough to finish that off.’ I had never seen Sidney Grice so animated. He threw himself into miming every movement. ‘Ashby staggers out of the room, fighting for air. He runs off and is nearly out of the gate when he realizes he has forgotten something, but what? He leaves the weapon anyway.’
‘Rivincita,’ I said, and he snapped his fingers.
‘Of course. Ashby remembers and walks back. The devil alone knows what demons he summons to help him re-enter that room and be confronted by what he has done, and to dip his finger into the freshly flowing blood that so horrifies him and daub on the wall before he runs away. The alley is always flooding and has flooded again whilst Ashby is out. He hurries through the sewage and into his own back yard.’
‘Which was how the blood got on to the gate handle.’
My guardian placed the rule carefully on the mantle shelf and took a breath. ‘Ashby takes off his shoes, rinses the mud down the sink and goes back in to the house. Meanwhile Grace has thought of a refinement to the plan. The Slurry Street Murders were supposed to have been committed by an Italian. So why not provide such a suspect?’
‘James Hoggart.’
‘The very man.’ He pointed his forefinger at me. ‘Grace is familiar with him through her husband’s gambling den and knows he is an actor who plays the part of an Italian and that he is down on his luck. For a hundred pounds he can be persuaded to put on his costume, go to the police station making himself as conspicuous as possible, give in a letter addressed to Inspector Pound, confessing to the murders and giving proof of a knowledge that only the murderer could have known. Then all he has to do is walk away, collect his payment from Mrs Dillinger, and disappear.’
‘But Hoggart was illiterate,’ I said. ‘That was why he insisted on having his scripts read to him.’
‘And could not write so much as an IOU at Mr Dillinger’s poker school.’ Out came the halfpennies, clicking rapidly in his hand. ‘Grace cannot write the letter because her hand is obviously feminine, but William can. He can then write a note to me, the only object of which is to convince me that he has an ill-educated hand.’
‘The fire,’ I remembered. ‘They burnt every scrap of paper they could find with William’s handwriting on it. So it was not what was written but how it was written that they were hiding.’
My guardian pinched the bri
dge of his nose while he collected his thoughts.
‘Mrs Dillinger leaves, and on the way out she takes a box of matches from Tilly’s tray. Perhaps it is from mischievousness. More likely she has the foresight to give William that extra detail to write in his letter. Either way she goes to church as usual, and William is no doubt about to write the Caligula letter when the shop door goes.’
‘Little Tilly putting her cup back.’
‘We know that, but Ashby panics and runs into the shop shouting Murder before he has had a chance to write the letter. All is not lost, however. He writes it in his cell on paper thoughtfully provided by the police, with the letter to me on top of it, slipping both letters into the same envelope when Grace Dillinger creates a diversion by pretending to faint.’
‘That would explain why Caligula was misspelled,’ I said. ‘William had probably never even heard of him.’
‘Precisely, and he misspelled his own name as a red herring.’
The image of Grace Dillinger sprang up in my mind and her unfeigned despair as dawn rose after the vigil. ‘But how could she make him commit a murder if she loved him?’
‘Whatever made you think she did?’
‘But you said that they were in love.’
‘And so they were.’ My guardian clicked his tongue. ‘He with her and she with his money. Grace Dillinger never loved anyone except perhaps herself and that is what makes her such a dangerous woman.’
‘But to do all that for a rundown shop and a hundred pounds insurance…’
‘Which doubtless she suggested he took out.’ Sidney Grice shook his finger at me. ‘But Mrs Dillinger had her sights set on bigger game than that. You remember William Ashby told us he was to inherit the rest of his uncle’s estate after five years. That time would have elapsed in little over a year from now. Well, I have done a little research into Edwin Silas Ashby’s affairs and the shop was by no means his largest asset. He had properties in Bristol and Birmingham to a conservative value of over eight thousand pounds – a tidy sum by any reckoning.’
The Mangle Street Murders Page 23