He turned down the lamp and left the room. It would be better by far if Dr Willis knew nothing about what he was preparing to do. Henry Carson crept down the staircase of Willis’ house in Rodney Street and let himself out, careful not to disturb the household.
He had questions to ask. And it was usually servants who knew the answers.
Biddy hurried back to Fulwood park. Talking to Michael, walking with him arm in arm, listening to the news of the family – how dad was still drinking, how mam was growing thinner by the day and how Patrick’s cough was no better – had made her lose all track of time.
She began to run but when she reached the park lake she spotted Reginald Politson walking, deep in conversation, with a flamboyantly dressed young man. She slipped behind the trunk of the nearest tree and once Politson and his companion were out of sight she hurried back, her heart thumping, and hurtled down the steps leading down to the servants’ quarters, mouthing a silent prayer that Mr Waggs wouldn’t see her and scold her for her lateness.
When she saw there was nobody about, she paused in the lobby to catch her breath, took off her coat and hat and walked casually through the kitchen where Cook was too preoccupied to notice her. Then she hurried up the back stairs and shot into the sparsely furnished bedroom she shared with Sally the parlour maid, shutting the door softly behind her.
And as she drew the cheap cardboard suitcase from beneath her iron bed, she felt her body was trembling. She knew she was in danger and she was afraid.
“I have just paid another visit to Mrs Politson’s house in Fulwood Park.”
Dr Willis looked up at his assistant who stood on the other side of the huge oak desk like a schoolboy summoned to his headmaster and felt a wave of irritation. “I see,” he said, trying to stay calm. “I should have accompanied you, Dr Carson. It is not your place to . . .”
“I think Flora Politson was murdered.”
Willis stood up, knocking a stack of papers to the floor. “This is outrageous. How dare you intrude on the grief of a family of the Politsons’ standing with unfounded accusations. If you wish to keep your reputation in this town . . .”
“If this matter is not dealt with promptly, doctor, your own reputation might suffer. If it emerged that a crime was ignored . . .”
Willis stroked his mutton chop whiskers, considering the implications. “You have evidence?”
“I have discovered three similar cases.”
Willis raised his eyebrows.
“I have visited all the houses concerned and interviewed the servants. The victims were all wealthy widows and the deaths were identical. The laudanum by the bed tends to deflect suspicion. The blood on the pillow, easily explained away . . .”
He had Willis’s complete attention now. “You have re-examined Mrs Politson’s body?”
Carson nodded. “And my examination confirmed my theory.”
“But the motive? What can your killer gain from these deaths?”
Carson explained patiently and Willis’ eyes widened. “You can prove nothing.”
“I have already sent the maid to fetch Inspector Always.”
Willis swallowed hard, looking like a man who was about to face the gallows. “I fear, doctor, that you are about to make a fool of yourself,” he said weakly.
When Henry Carson arrived at Mortaber Villa in Dr Willis’ brougham, seated opposite Inspector Always, he felt a little apprehensive. But he had considered the facts carefully and he knew that the murderer was clever and had been responsible for the deaths of at least four women. Maybe more.
Carson alighted first and marched straight to the front door. A black crêpe mourning bow was fixed to the brass knocker and the doctor’s pounding on the door was enough to wake the dead. The door was opened by a butler with hostile, suspicious eyes who announced in chilly tones that Mr Politson would be with them presently.
“It’s not Mr Politson we want to see this time,” said Inspector Always. “It’s you, Mr Waggs. We’d like to ask you some questions.” Always had acquired the skill over the years of making even the most innocent statement sound menacing to instil fear into the hearts of Liverpool’s criminal fraternity.
Carson saw panic in the butler’s eyes. The haughty looks had disappeared only to be replaced by fear.
Waggs led them to the butler’s pantry where they spoke in hushed whispers. When the three men emerged, Waggs led Always upstairs and Carson followed, wanting to be in at the end.
But when they reached the room it was empty. Their bird had flown out into the rainy night.
Two years later.
It was a grey, rainy day in New York and Mrs Van Dutton was snoring slightly in her drugged sleep, unaware that her maid, Rosa, was standing by the bed watching her.
As Rosa stared at the unconscious woman, her mind began to wander. She heard again the clank of the anchor being raised, felt the thrill of standing on the deck with her brother watching Liverpool fading into the distance, bound for a new world full of new opportunities. America.
She had used the name Biddy then, of course. But she was accustomed to changing her name. At Mrs Ventnor’s house in Canning Place she had been Sarah, at Mrs Hobson’s establishment in Catherine Street she had been Daisy and at Mrs Tregellis’ she had been Mary. Forging references was a simple matter – Michael had a deft touch with words – and money made lonely old women gullible so it had been easy to steal the wealthy widows’ jewels, little by little. A ring here, a brooch there. Until discovery was imminent and action had to be taken.
She and Michael had thought America would be different – their Promised Land where they could make their fortune. But when the money had started to dwindle, she’d been obliged to fall back on her tried and trusted way of raising the necessary funds.
She took the hat pin from the pocket of her skirts and felt the point with her finger. The pin was an old friend. What policeman would consider that the pin securing her hat could possibly be a murder weapon. Every woman possessed one. But not many considered its murderous possibilities.
She turned the drugged woman over gently and lifted the hair until the nape of the scrawny neck was exposed. That young doctor in Liverpool – Carson his name was – had noticed a spot of blood on the pillow so now she was careful to place a handkerchief beneath the head to prevent any telltale mark being left. Then she arranged the scene carefully. The half-empty bottle of laudanum by the bed and the remains of a night-time drink which also contained the drug – Mrs Van Dutton had taken it to help her sleep and taken a double dose accidentally. Her maid, of course, would confirm that she was in the habit of using it to prevent disturbed nights. No questions must be asked. And no doctor would dream of examining the area beneath the hairline at the back of the dead woman’s neck.
The maid gritted her teeth and thrust the hat pin upwards into the unconscious woman’s brain. So neat. Now the charade would begin. She would discover that the old lady had died in her sleep and call the doctor after helping herself to any jewels and cash that might not be missed by the victims’ neglectful relatives.
It was a full hour before the doctor came that day – plenty of time to arrange things. It had all gone smoothly. Mrs Van Dutton’s usual physician was otherwise engaged but a new doctor was coming in his place so that was better still. She felt rather pleased with herself and, as she waited for the doctor to arrive, she gazed out of the window, avoiding the sight of the wizened corpse on the bed. It was raining again. Funeral weather.
The doctor arranged his features into a solemn expression as Mrs Van Dutton’s footman answered the door.
“I was expecting Dr Brown,” the servant said as he led the way upstairs.
“He’s been unavoidably detained.”
The footman turned. “You sound English, sir.”
“I am. I only arrived in New York three weeks ago. Carson’s the name. Dr Henry Carson.”
A YEAR TO REMEMBER
Robert Barnard
“MY, HOW TIME flies!” wrot
e Annette Bigsby, as she sat down on December 13 to compose the round-robin that, immaculately word-processed, would accompany her Christmas cards to friends and relations all around the world.
“This last year has been one of all sorts. Some of the usual, which my correspondents will recognize: holidays in Majorca and Las Vegas, visits to Brighton, London and Morocco, and then some of the unusual to balance them.
One high spot of the unusual occurred in May. What could be nicer and more heartwarming than opening the door to a relative unseen for more than fifteen years? And how lovely that we could immediately strike up a rapport! That’s what happened with my second cousin Malcolm Watts – only a teenager, but wise and generous beyond his years.”
Annette put down her pen. She would have to say more of Malcolm, but she wanted to strike the right note from the beginning. On reading it through she thought she already had struck a nice balance (as she would have put it) between the true and the misleading.
When she opened the front door on that memorable day in May 2007 her main emotion was not the surprise which her letter, quite cleverly, led her readers to assume she felt. She had already had contact with Malcolm through the Families United website. She had responded unwillingly to his appeal, and in fact had only done so because it had been made clear that if he did not get the facts of his birth from the website he would get them from his adoptive mother, who was obviously as weak and indiscreet as Annette had always feared.
“More than fifteen” was also true but misleading. It was over seventeen years since mother and baby had been allowed home from hospital, three days after Malcolm’s birth. After overnighting at cousin Caroline’s home she had kissed the boy goodbye (cousin Caroline seemed to insist on it) and gone back to her own home in Peterborough.
“Am I what you expected?” asked Malcolm in his eager-puppy way.
“I’m not sure . . . I don’t think I expected anything.”
“I thought I might remind you of my father.”
“Oh dear – that’s so long ago. He was dead before you were born.” And in truth Annette could hardly remember anything about him.
“Dead? He must have been very young. How did he die?”
“It was a car crash. Tragic. Absolutely tragic.”
“But you’ve married since?”
“Been married. At the moment I’m in a relationship. We’re planning to marry, but we’ve just not got around to it yet.”
“And you’d rather he and I didn’t meet.”
Annette flounced a little.
“I don’t know why you say that.”
“Because you specified times when I could come so exactly. They were obviously when he was at work.”
“Well . . . well yes. I didn’t think Grant was quite ready yet.”
“Ready?”
“Ready to be told.”
Annette licked the tip of her Uniball pen and continued writing.
“Professionally – on the job front, I mean – everything has gone like a dream. I am now well entrenched as head buyer at the Peterborough M and S, and enjoying enormously the work and the challenge. So much has been done in the last year or two to improve and brighten the store’s women’s clothing, and I am happy and proud to have been part of this. Grant, in his challenging and demanding job in securities, goes from strength to strength, and both of us seem to be on a steep upward curve.”
“Who was round here today?” Grant asked, when he got in in the early hours.
“Round here?”
“There were two cups and saucers on the draining board.”
“Oh, that. That was Peggy Hartley from marketing. She’s been on to me to see the house, because she’d love to move to this area.”
“What’s so fucking special about these houses?” Grant asked. He had never so much as nodded to any of the neighbours, or shown any consciousness that they lived in a desirable neighbourhood. “It’s just a fucking house.”
“Well, it’s two or three steps up from anything Peggy Hartley can afford. We do very nicely, Grant.”
Grant grunted, and got down to what he did very nicely.
Annette nearly swallowed her Uniball before she got down to the first crux in her account of 2007. This needed careful handling.
“So those are the main outlines of my year. One of the joys has been the way the two strands have meshed. No sooner did Malcolm and Grant meet than they seemed to form a partnership – both taking enormous pleasure in each other’s company. Grant has no family to speak of, unlike most Londoners. He has lost them through emigration, death and spending long periods away.” (She thought, then crossed out the last six words and inserted an “or” before “death”). “So it was a particular joy to see how one of my few remaining relatives got on with the man who will be my husband. Goodness! We must make arrangements for the wedding soon!”
When Annette got back from work at twenty past five one July evening, Grant and Malcolm were eyeing each other up like two dogs meeting each other for the first time in a park. This time what she noticed about Malcolm was not his puppyishness but his incipient manhood. The moment she came in Grant started getting together his gear for work: the tightly-buttoned suit jacket over the padded waistcoat and the swagger stick. There was no sign of any refreshment having been offered to Malcolm.
“You’ve got a visitor,” said Grant, pausing bulkily by the door, an expression of disgust on his face. “I’ll leave you to it.”
“We can manage,” said Malcolm.
“Yes, I’ll give Malcolm a cup of coffee and then I have a lot of work on my plate for tomorrow. Be careful, darling.”
“Oh, I’ll be careful. Ain’t I always? If I wasn’t I’d be on Disability, and I wouldn’t be able to keep you in the manner to which you are accustomed.” He leered. “Have fun.”
Annette busied herself in the kitchen to get her thoughts together, then brought coffee into the lounge.
“You arranged this, didn’t you?” she said accusingly. “Coming here at a time when you knew I would be at work and Grant would be at home.”
“How would I know that? You never told me he was a night worker.” Seeing her thoughts Malcolm changed his tactics. “All right, all right. You told me when not to come. And I kept watch on the house.”
“What did you do that for?”
“To be able to come and see Grant in his natural habitat.”
“I would have asked you to meet him eventually.”
“You’d have given him directions how to behave, covered over all his rough edges.”
“Does Grant look like somebody I could tell how to behave?”
“He might have made an effort. I wanted to meet the real him.”
“Well, now you have.” She didn’t ask what he thought of him, but he told her just the same.
“Mum—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“We’re alone, Mum. And I didn’t tell him. I’m your cousin Caroline’s son as far as he’s concerned. He’s a violent man, Mum. There’s aggression bubbling away under the surface the whole time. Does he hit you?”
“No, he doesn’t! The idea!” lied Annette.
“Well, I wonder at you. You’ve got loads of class, and he’s just a common nightclub bouncer.”
“Casino. That’s quite different. He’s in charge of security at a very well thought of casino, part of a chain.”
“Well, swipe me. Actually, Mum, I don’t give a damn what he does for a living. What I care about is the atmosphere of violence he carries around with him. He’s an eruption waiting to happen. And then he spouts a lot of nonsense about keeping you in the lap of luxury.”
“He earns a very good wage. It’s a dangerous job. And the house takes a lot of upkeep. It’s the age when the plumbing and the electricity start going wrong, and the Council Tax is horrendous.”
Light dawned.
“It’s yours, isn’t it, Mum? Your house.”
“Yes. What of it? I got it with my divorce settlement �
�� with a mortgage to match. If it hadn’t been for Grant I’d have had to sell it.”
“How did you meet him?”
“At the casino. It’s a nice place to go. You don’t have to be a big gambler. There’s a really good restaurant, and it’s the same to them if you bet high or if you’re cautious, like me. I like it there.”
Malcolm came over and took her in his arms.
“Mum, you were lonely, weren’t you? After your divorce. You were just a well-off widow waiting for some lounge lizard to get his claws into you.”
“Grant is not a lounge lizard,” Annette said weakly.
“A lounge Rottweiler then.” Malcolm pushed her away so that he could look into her eyes. “Mum, I worry about you. I don’t care how violent he is towards the other punters—”
“Don’t be silly. You’re ignorant. How could he be violent towards the casino’s best customers? He’d be out on his ear in no time.”
“All I’m saying, Mum, is: you need someone to protect you. I’m glad I came along in time.”
Annette smiled satirically.
“Malcolm dear, you’re seventeen. I’m sure one day you’ll be a very capable man, but at the moment you’re not—”
“I’m not taking him on at all-in-wrestling, Mum. He’s got all the muscle. What I’ve got is brain.”
Annette said nothing. She really didn’t know about his brain one way or the other. Malcolm drew her closer to him.
“Mum, you’ve got me to rely on.”
“One sadness was Malcolm’s inability to come on our holiday with us. He was just too busy looking for a job. I know he’s going to find one where he will do well, and he’s quite right to be choosy, because he’s a very personable young man. We went back to Vegas – as I call it now – where we were so happy last year. It’s not the gambling that attracts us: Grant gets enough of that in his job. It’s the whole atmosphere, the feeling of something exciting going on all the time. So we don’t lose much money – in fact, Grant made a very nice ‘killing’ this year. But that’s not something we’d rely on doing another year – we’re not so daft.”
The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7 Page 45