The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  The spirit of the reformed Mr Gradgrind beamed benevolently down on the entire scene. He had after all given his name to the park when he had donated the land some forty years ago, saying that now he knew that the heart was more than simply an organ for pumping blood, he hoped to recompense the citizenry for the hard times he had inflicted on them by providing them with altogether more pleasurable ones. But the statue that the grateful Hands had raised to their newly kind patron was not smiling this morning. Or if it was, Mr Gradgrind’s sad features being preserved for posterity in the finest marble, no one could see it. Mr Grandgrind’s Purbeck head was covered by what the Hands referred to as a “gazunder”, since its normal location was beneath the bed.

  Mr M’Choakumchild’s grandparents, once highly regarded instructors at Mr Grandgrind’s own model school, would have been shocked to the core by the discovery. Just as horses or flowers were once deemed out of place on wallpaper, so such an item was out of place on the head, since it was not designed as headgear.

  Mr M’Choakumchild, however, was inclined to be more amused than shocked, as were the boys and girls who gathered around him on their Monday morning dawdle to school. However, as a responsible young man preparing to go to university, whose destiny would one day summon him as a missionary to a far-off land where monumental statuary was unknown, he felt he should do no less then shoo the recalcitrant youngsters off to their classrooms and draw the offending object to the attention of the park-keepers, Mr Broadbent and Mr Fowler.

  The two gentlemen, resplendent in their civic uniforms and clutching spiked sticks designed for the easier collection of either litter or leaves, stared agog at the statue. Both were old enough to recollect Mr Gradgrind at his most tyrannical, his most dryly factual, and were smitten with a terror that young Mr M’Choakumchild could but dimly apprehend. One was ready to run for the fire brigade, another for a steeple-jack. Both considered the police an absolute necessity. In their panic they did not know which to do first. But the young man recognized that their rhetorical demands –”Who might have done such a wicked deed? And how might he have done the wicked deed?” – were the right questions to ask. A third also posed itself. “And, most of all, how might they retrieve the offending object?”

  Mr M’Choakumchild, being of that persuasion rightly known as muscular Christianity, was at least able to provide the answer to the last question. “If I had a ball,” he mused out loud, “I might kick it at the article and dislodge it that way.”

  Mr Fowler raised a finger. “I had cause to confiscate a football only the other day, when some whippersnapper would try to pot it through the window of the great hot house.” He slipped away to fetch it, still shuddering at the damage the missile might have done to the supply of fresh fruit to the Gradgrind Infirmary.

  Meanwhile Mr M’Choakumchild divested himself of his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and made several passes at an imaginary ball. When Mr Fowler returned, the youth sta tioned him behind the statue, Mr Broadbent before it, and after but one abortive attempt the statue was safely divested of its chamber pot, which fell clamorously to earth when Mr Fowler failed to catch it. Mr Broadbent had better luck with the ball.

  The local constabulary, however, calling at the M’Choakumchild residence, were not so much impressed by Mr M’Choakumchild’s footballing talents as curious to know if he himself placed the article on the benefactor’s head.

  Sergeant Hardman, who wore his embonpoint with the same gravitas as he wore his silver stripes and ginger whiskers, was particularly suspicious. “You’re a fit enough specimen. And you can’t be telling me that you would have known how to get it off if you hadn’t put it there in the first place,” he declared.

  Grandmother M’Choakumchild, seated by the cheerful fire burning in her son’s hearth, clutched helplessly at a fast-ebbing memory of rigorously taught logic. She could do no more than raise a minatory finger, but perhaps that in itself was enough. The sergeant was one of the scores of little pitchers whom she had inexorably filled with knowledge. To his chagrin he flushed, without reason, and put away his notebook and freshly licked pencil.

  Her grandson smiled warmly at the old lady. She had never publicly evinced any grandmaternal feelings, but he had been aware, on the days he had pushed her in her Bath chair around the park, that the experience aroused some emotions in her breast that caused her to smile up and him and reach a gnarled hand for his strong youthful one.

  Sergeant Hardman coughed. “So if it wasn’t you, my lad, who might it be?”

  It was a question on everyone’s lips, as the Hands scurried into work, or exchanged illicit snatches of conversation at the mills owned by other than the Gradgrind family, where moderate social intercourse was now positively encouraged. Was it one extraordinarily tall and agile man? Or was there a sinister collaboration, one man holding a ladder for another to climb? In the butcher’s shop, one young mother, more imaginative than most, wondered aloud if God Himself had reached down from Heaven with the head-covering, but she was swiftly hushed. Despite the changes in the town, fancy was still not popular amongst the older generation.

  For a while, people looked with accusing eyes at each other and especially at strangers to the town, the consensus being that no one who knew the debt owed to the Gradgrinds would have committed such a frivolous crime. Alderman Bitzer, however, declared publicly that the fate was one the canting old hypocrite deserved, but his words caused little more than offence. What further surprised the townspeople was that this son of a man who had risen particularly high in Bounderby’s Bank was vocal in his defence of all these stray incomers seeking work.

  A veritable image of his father, if cut Mr Bitzer would have been expected to bleed white. His hair – like the rest of him – had progressed from the blond of youth to the white of late middle-age without anyone noticing. In fact his stance on the immigrants made perfect sense. An influx of workers had the capacity to lower wages, a fact that would clearly benefit his bank’s clients and thus himself. Moreover, many moved into Bitzer houses, paying Bitzer rents.

  Others, more fortunate, lived in the better-built and well-equipped Gradgrind model village, paying more moderate rents and able to supplement their wages by nurturing Gradgrind pigs (though many were referred to by older people as Bounderbys) in sties on their Gradgrind allotments. Amongst these families a great many of the daughters were called either Louisa or Cissie, even Cecilia, but very few sons called Tom, despite the later kindness of Thomas Senior.

  But by all, whether they came from Bitzer or Gradgrind families, the chamber pot incident was soon forgotten. They had after all livings to make, and gardens to tend, for recreation looking forward to the humbly named horse riding which was back in town. Though Mr Sleary and his asth matic lisp had now joined the great sawdust ring in the sky, along with most of the men and women who had helped Thomas Gradgrind come to his senses, the circus folk regularly returned to their quarters at the Pegasus’s Arms. Here they would break horses, practise new acts and refurbish their bright costumes, all too often a matter of making do and mending.

  Recently the men, walking with legs stiff and bowed from all the time spent on horseback, and the women, vividly dressed if negligent in the matter of leg-covering, had been joined by tumblers and jugglers from overseas. Was it a matter of surprise that the mighty tiger had to be controlled by a real Indian fakir? Or that the lions were in the care of a gentleman who did not need the coal-black make-up that ran in streaks and could be removed only by ale?

  Indeed, the circus had become distinctly international, a genius who could throw and make a simple piece of wood return to him alongside a squat man who could make sinuous creatures called sea lions balance balls on their noses. As in Mr Sleary’s time, however, everyone had at least one other party piece. The Indian’s other talents included walking on live embers and sleeping on nails, the Australian’s shinning up the central tent pole to attach the tightrope. None of the circus folk had much to do with Coketown inhabitants except by
way of their profession, preferring a sequestered existence with sequinned Indian elephants to the mundanity of a mill town with its melancholy mad ones.

  Then another outrage occurred. The drinking fountains with which Gradgrind had so generously equipped the park ran with blood, or so it appeared to the man who discovered it, the clergyman in charge of the New Church, who was regularly in the habit of imbibing too freely of the communion wine and whose testimony was promptly rejected. But red they did indeed run, as the more sober Hands soon averred, and with dye presumably stolen from one of their own manufactories. Once again the town was in uproar, not because the jewel-like colour offended them, ruby enlivening the grey stone chalices of the fountains, but because the insult seemed to be directed at the Gradgrinds once more, and in particular dear Miss Louisa, who made a point of wearing crimson and other brightly coloured ribbons and of carrying enough about her person to give to any child too poor to buy one for herself. The dye, moreover, left a stinking residue it was hard to shift from the stone.

  The constabulary drafted in extra officers to inquire into the affair, but once again they had to admit defeat. No other dye was inappropriately inserted into the water supply, and life once again resumed its even tenor – but not for one young man.

  Now the cricket season was beginning, William M’Choakumchild was like a child expecting Christmas. In every moment of his spare time, he was to be found in the nets at the edge of the field, offering to bowl to any of the gentlemen or professionals needing his services and overwhelmed with gratitude when at the end of a long session he was offered the chance to wield the willow himself. He even helped the club steward clean the spectators’ benches and whitewash the pavilion. There must be nothing to disgust the great WG, or make him feel that this ground was in any way unworthy of hosting an important match. At last he took himself down to the Grand Imperial Hotel to ensure that sufficient rooms had been allocated to the visitors. Only then did he join other young men of the town at the railway station to welcome their most distinguished visitor and such of his team as were travelling with him.

  And there he was – in the flesh! In point of fact, there was a good deal of flesh on WG’s superhuman frame: had not most of it been muscle, in his cricket whites he must have looked like an overgrown snowman. There was a good deal of beard, too. Already two greying streaks ran from the source near the firm mouth to the delta at the very tip. Above the beard two bright eyes twinkled, and although today they were benign, affable even, William could see why some critics called them cunning: they said they befitted a man who had all the rules of cricket in his head, but did not always practise them in his heart. But William dismissed the rumours with an idealistic scoff. How could such a magnificent being do anything as human as cheat? How could a man of such generous proportions suffer accusations of being mean with his money?

  Today the godlike side of WG was in evidence. To the amazement and delight of the young men like William who surrounded the great man’s carriage, WG suggested that while his team-mates might wish to refresh themselves at the Grand Imperial, he himself would like to see the ground where he was to play on the morrow. William truly believed that if the great man had asked them to unhitch the horses and drag his carriage to the park, none would have baulked. However, his progress, though god-like, was a good deal more sedate.

  There they were at the ground at last! To their horror they found their passage impeded by a distraught groundsman, who almost prostrated himself before Dr Grace.

  “Sir – Your Honour – please, it wasn’t my doing! Not any of it!” He wrung his hands, tears flowing down his manly cheeks.

  As well they might.

  The sacred square, protected, nurtured and guarded like a tender infant, had been violated. Divots of earth had been taken up apparently at random, with blue and red dye staining the wounds.

  WG spread his hands – they were all to stand back. Towering almost head and shoulders above most of the Coketown denizens, he could see what they could not. The dye filling the missing clods enabled a keen eye to pick out letters – this was no chance assault on the turf, but the spelling out of a message.

  REVENGE!

  But even WG was unable to distinguish the scrawl after that. Some thought it might be the letter T, others G. Some said it was a combination, the two entwined, as on a gentleman’s signet ring.

  But surely no gentleman – no, nor any professional cricketer either – had committed the vile deed.

  WG pressed a finger to his lips; he was deep in thought. At last he straightened. “It is clear to me,” he said, “that you have a dangerous man loose in the town! A man who would commit such a vile act as this would not hesitate, in my opinion, to commit murder.”

  William stepped boldly forward. “If you please, Dr Grace, this is not the first offence to be committed in Coketown. To be sure, the others were less serious, but occurrences there were.”

  “And have the police been informed?”

  “They have indeed, sir. But they have apprehended no suspect.”

  “And how hard did they try?”

  William could not vouchsafe an answer – he spread his hands in despair. But his anguish turned to pure gold.

  “Young man, you seem to have more sense than most,” WG declared. “Let us adjourn to that pretty pavilion there and you can tell me what you know. Meanwhile, I believe that our friend the groundsman here will do his best to repair the damage. I cannot think the pitch will be playable this week, but with careful rolling and filling it may recover for the end of the season.”

  “But the match, sir—”

  “I believe that there is another ground, not far from here, on the Trafford Road. We will use that.” Clearly the great man was in no doubt that should any other fixtures have been scheduled for the ground they would be summarily postponed.

  A boy having been despatched to the nearest outdoor to obtain jugs of the finest ale, Grace and William walked into the little wooden building as if, William felt, into the very halls of Valhalla.

  “So Mr Bitzer might well have a grudge against the Gradgrind family, for its ideological violation of all he holds dear?” WG asked, seating himself in the chair reserved for the club president and motioning with an enormous hand for William to sit beside him.

  “Mr Bitzer is a very grand man in the county,” William was obliged to object. “He owns a good third of the town, and eats good dinners as a consequence. I cannot in all honesty see a man of his status or size sneaking into the cricket ground with a spade and cans of dye.”

  “But he would have had access to both?”

  “What householder in this town would not have been able to lay his hands on a spade? But Mr Bitzer is not a manufactory owner, who would have much readier access to the dye,” he said regretfully.

  WG raised an eyebrow. “You would have liked Mr Bitzer to be responsible, I fancy?”

  Even in such a sturdy young man as William the latter verb still caused a frisson he chose to ignore. “I fear he is not a kind man, sir, and there are many who would like to see him get his come-uppance. He will have nothing to do with any of the improvements to Coketown that Miss Louisa has steadily instituted. Indeed, the kinder she becomes, the harsher his regime at the bank and the more swiftly he forecloses on those unfortunate enough to owe him money. That’s the Bounderby Bank, sir. You’ll hear the name of Bounderby a great deal about this place, but the originator of the name himself is dead. He lives on in the form of twenty-five pensioners who took his name and take his meat. But they are all old men, and I cannot think that they would have the strength required to deface the pitch.”

  “And are there any other disaffected folk in the town?”

  The young man frowned in his efforts to please his idol. “There is talk of an aristocrat, one Mr Harthouse, having suffered a setback in an affair of the heart, many years ago. It is said – but very quietly, sir, because we all revere and respect the lady in question – that he tried to make love to dear Mis
s Louisa, then Mrs Bounderby, who sent him to the rightabout. But the day he left town, they say, she returned to the protection of her father, leaving her husband for ever.”

  “That would be the original Mr Bounderby?” Grace clarified with a smile. “Ah, thank you – you are very kind!” He counted out the money due to the boy who ran in with the ale. As an afterthought he reached into his pocket book and scribbled something on a page which he tore out and presented to the lad. “There, that will gain you free admission into the ground when we play Lancashire.”

  The boy, who William deduced had been hoping for a silver sixpence for his pains, looked downcast. Recalling with horror those allegations about the tightness of WG’s fists, William fished in his own pocket, and the youngster left speedily, clutching the coin.

  Puzzled and possibly ashamed, the great man scrutinized William from under his huge eyebrows. “Admission to the ground costs twice as much when I am known to be playing.” The implication was that the slip of paper would have been worth far more than sixpence.

  William swallowed hard. “Did you not see his shoes, sir? He could not have walked as far as the Trafford Road without them falling to bits. His father works for Mr Bitzer,” he added, by way of meaningful explanation.

  Brightening, WG asked, “The revenge promised on the pitch could not have been directed at Mr Bitzer?”

  William shook his head decisively. “He has no involvement with any of the other incidents.”

  “Pray, explain,” WG demanded, as if he were back in his surgery asking for details of an ache or pain.

  “The statue or the drinking fountains, sir – the other occurrences I mentioned earlier, sir. The first I discovered myself.” When he told Grace how he had removed Mr Gradgrind’s unorthodox headgear the great man threw back his head and laughed.

  “I shall have the pleasure of playing against you, I hope.”