The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  Stevenson said little of what he had done over the years, but gave Dickens to understand that the bosun was not the only man who had died at his hands. He had learned the technique of strangulation favoured by the murderous Thugs prior to their suppression. Twelve months earlier, he had finally worked his passage back to London. Whatever crimes he had committed, they were too serious for it to be possible for him, even after such a lapse of time, to dare to assert his true identity. When he learned, with much astonishment, of his sister’s celebrity, it made him all the more determined not to bring dishonour upon her by revealing that he was still alive. Although Dickens protested fiercely, the old man was adamant. Elizabeth might have been heartbroken by his supposed demise, but at least she entertained nothing but good thoughts of him. He could not contemplate shattering her faith in his decency.

  The privations of a misspent life meant that he fell sick with increasing frequency. On one occasion he collapsed in Covent Garden and a nurse had assisted him. He gathered from her that his heart was fading. A relapse might occur at any time, with fatal consequences.

  Thus he had decided to make one last journey to the North. Not to see his sister, that was impossible, but someone whose memory he had cherished for more than thirty years. He had always worshipped Clarissa, but had been too shy to make his admiration known to her. Now it became a matter of obsession for him to look upon her one last time before he died.

  After journeying north to Knutsford, he quickly discovered that the woman he had for so long adored was kept virtually as a prisoner in her own home by an avaricious and violent husband. A husband, moreover, of whom he had heard tell during his years in India. Pettigrew had, after a drinking bout, raped a servant girl. Although his superiors did their utmost to hush up the scandal, the story became well-known and Pettigrew was forced not only to leave the sub-continent but also to resign his commission. Stevenson resolved that he would at least do one last good thing in his life. He would free her from the brute.

  It took a little while to pluck up the courage to talk to her. He kept watch on the house and eventually hit upon the idea of asking her to meet him. She had not kept the assignation behind the Lord Eldon on the day he sent her the message, but the next evening, terrified lest her absence be discovered by her husband, she dared to venture out. His faith in her innate bravery had been vindicated. Stevenson said that, once she had recovered from the shock of meeting a man she had believed was long dead, she had begged him not to do anything rash. But his mind was made up.

  He had lured Pettigrew out of Canute Villa the previous evening by the simple expedient of a scrawled note saying I know the truth about your time in India. The stratagem succeeded. Stevenson had confronted his enemy, but on his account the Major lashed out at him. Illness had ravaged Stevenson’s body, but the urge to save Clarissa had given him the strength to overcome Pettigew and slowly squeeze the life out of him.

  “You must come forward,” Dickens insisted. “An innocent man is under arrest for the crime. Besides that, your sister and Clarissa must know the truth!”

  The ailing tramp shook his head. He had lost all his strength now and Dickens had to bend forward to catch what he said.

  “No. You swore you would keep the secret, Mr Dickens. And you must.”

  “But . . .”

  The old man raised a knobbly hand. “No. I shall not leave Knutsford, Mr Dickens, never fear. Soon they will find me here, dead, and in my coat they will discover . . . this.”

  He withdrew from inside his coat a thick, knotted cord.

  “You see that stain? It is Pettigrew’s blood, Mr Dickens, from when I pulled it so tightly around his throat . . .”

  Suddenly he made a strange rasping noise and slumped to the ground, still clutching, at the moment of his death, the means of murder.

  Dickens insisted that Elizabeth accompany him to Canute Villa the next morning. It was his impression that there was a faint touch of colour in the widow’s cheeks. Her voice sounded stronger and her carriage seemed more erect.

  “I hear that Bowden has been released from custody,” she said. “I have already said to Alice that I am willing to take him back in service. I was distraught when my . . . my late husband gave him notice.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Is there any doubt that this tramp whose body was found on the Moor is the murderer?”

  “None.” Dickens held Clarissa’s gaze. “It has been a dreadful business. And yet – perhaps some good has come of it.”

  Clarissa gave the slightest nod. There was a distant look in her eyes and Dickens was sure that she was thinking about the man who had loved her without acknowledgment, let alone hope, for so many years, and how he given her the most precious gift of all. Her freedom.

  “How sad,” Elizabeth said, “that a man should become so depraved that he should commit a mortal crime for no rational cause.”

  “Who knows what his reasons may have been, my dear Scheherezade?” Dickens said. “Clarissa has given him her forgiveness and so must we.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Poor man. To die, unloved.”

  Dickens cast a glance at Clarissa and said, so softly that only she could hear, “Perhaps not unloved at the very end.”

  Watchful Unto Death

  Hilary Bonner

  And so we come to Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, released in monthly parts from May 1864. It is one of the gloomiest and bleakest of all of his books, making the squalor, stench and pollution of London almost tangible. In common with others of his recent novels it also explored the influence and corruption of money. Although it has another labyrinthine plot, the basic storyline is simple. John Harmon is the son of a wealthy “dust contractor”. Harmon is to inherit his money but only if he marries Bella Wilfer whom, at that time, Harmon had never met, so Harmon decides to conceal his identity at first in order to learn more about her. However, as he is arriving by boat in London, Harmon is attacked by a sailor in whom he confided. In the struggle the sailor is killed. His body is found in the river and, because he is wearing Harmon’s coat, is mistaken for him. With Harmon believed dead his father’s fortune passes to a former employee, Nicodemus (or Noddy) Boffin. Harmon takes on the identity of John Rokesmith and becomes employed by Boffin, who has also adopted Bella Wilfer. However Boffin is being blackmailed by the street-vendor Silas Wegg, whom Boffin had employed to read to him. Wegg had discovered that Harmon’s will had been altered in Boffin’s favour and believed this had been Boffin’s doing. Boffin is actually a kind and friendly man who has not only taken in Bella, but the orphan Sloppy, and a disabled girl who makes dresses for dolls, Jenny Wren. It is thanks to Sloppy that Silas Wegg’s blackmail is discovered and Wegg dealt with. At length, alongside a myriad other plots, Rokesmith learns that Bella truly loves him and so reveals his identity and inherits his fortune. Despite being disinherited Boffin remains on good terms with Harmon and they all live happily together. Or do they? There is at least one thread that remains unresolved and Hilary Bonner takes that to its conclusion.

  Hilary Bonner was a former showbusiness editor for the Mail on Sunday and Daily Mirror before she turned to full-time writing in 1994, though she continues to work as a columnist. Most of her novels, starting with The Cruelty of Morning (1994), are psychological thrillers. No Reason to Die (2004) is a novel based upon the tragedy at the Deepcut army barracks where four soldiers died of gunshot wounds. That book, as with the following story, seeks justice and closure.

  Yet again she heard the tapping behind her. Yet again when she turned around there was nothing. Neither man nor beast.

  She peered into the murky night. There was virtually no lighting in the dark lanes leading east by Blackfriars Bridge. They darted off like the legs of a spider, their angles awkward and winding, leading, it seemed, only into black nothingness.

  The salty mist from the river merged there with the smoky fog of the city. The air was thick like treacle, only icy damp. It chilled to the bone, and she could see onl
y a foot or two ahead. This was a particularly bad night.

  She was shivering. She did not know whether it was from cold or from fear. Certainly she could no longer deny that she was afraid.

  The cobbles beneath her feet were wet and treacherous, but she hurried along, thinking only of her mission and the disgrace of discovery. Then she lost her footing and would have fallen had she not managed to grab hold of a post set into the wall by her side. The tapping grew louder, closer. There was an opening in the wall, right before her. A gateway. The gates stood ajar. Without further thought she slipped through them.

  At once the smell of death overwhelmed her. An acrid stench of stale dried blood. She guessed she might be in a tanner’s yard, or at the back of a butcher’s shop. She stumbled against a pile of unsavoury waste of some kind. Once more she nearly lost her footing. But this time she slipped, not on a wet cobble, but some slimy remnant of something that had been discarded in this unpleasant place. She was desperate to leave, but dared not. Instead she cowered there, gazing into the wall of fog, ears pricked, listening, all her senses alert.

  The tapping seemed to have ceased. Or had it? She could not be sure. The fog so muffled the sound.

  After a few minutes she could stay in that stinking yard no longer. She made her way cautiously into the narrow cobbled lane again and, looking around her all the time, staring wide-eyed into the cold treacle though she could see nothing, began to continue her journey, still walking at a brisk pace, though more mindful now of the treacherous nature of the ground.

  Then she heard it again. Tap. Tap. No mistake this time. Behind her. To her right. Or was it to her left? The fog was all powerful. It distorted everything. She could not even work out the direction of the tapping. But there it was. Tap. Tap. Tap. And this time so close she could not believe that she couldn’t see the cause of it. Scared beyond measure, she swung round on her laced leather boots, right round in a circle, flailing at the dense air with her arms, her little fists tightly clenched.

  Still she could neither see nor feel the source of the danger she felt sure was right there with her. Such was her terror that she even thought she felt the breath of another upon her face.

  She took off then, at a run, her feet slipping and sliding in all directions. Once she took a wrong turning and had to quickly double back. But the will to reach her secret destination safely and to leave behind that lurking danger, in whatever form it took, propelled her onwards.

  Bella and John Harmon still lived in the beautiful house that the Boffins had bought when they’d thought that they’d inherited John’s father’s fortune, believing, as all London did, that the young man had been murdered.

  Mr and Mrs Boffin still lived there too, a tribute to both their good honest nature and that of John Harmon and his young wife. For the Boffins had gladly handed over the fortune to which they felt they had no right, and welcomed back wholeheartedly the man whom they’d cherished as a boy, while he had embraced them as the family he’d never really had.

  Also there lived with the Harmons and the Boffins two young people whom they not only felt it was their duty to care for, because of their loyalty and steadfastness, but had also grown to love. One was Sloppy, a strange but stout fellow with a heart of pure gold, Mrs Boffin said, and the other was Jenny Wren, a young woman with a bent body but the straightest and sharpest of brains, who made dresses for dolls. To the delight of the Boffins and the Harmons, these two, with whose pasts they were so entangled, had recently married.

  Sloppy was coachman and Jack of all Trades in the Boffin-Harmon household, and Jenny Wren, while still a doll’s dressmaker, officially acted as a kind of lady’s maid to Bella. But in reality, she was just what she had always been. Bella Harmon’s best and closest friend.

  It was a fine and happy household. There was also a cook and a parlour maid. And it was this parlour maid, whose name was Polly Martin, who was giving Mrs Bella Harmon such cause for concern that day.

  Bella had never ceased to wonder at her own good fortune. Brought up in extreme, though genteel, poverty by a half-broken but still delightful father, whom she had adored, and a pompous overblown mother she had never quite managed to love as she knew she should, Bella had married for great love alone and then found herself rich beyond her dreams. She was a content and fulfilled woman, wife to a kind, fair, and generous man, mother to a toddler, little Bella, and to a babe of just a few weeks, little John. Her life was almost too good to be true. Certainly so much better, Bella felt, than she had ever deserved.

  All of this could, as she had once so feared, have turned her into a selfish grasping person. In fact the effect had been quite the opposite on Bella. She wanted all around her to be as happy and as well provided for as she was.

  It irked her that life was so cruel. That good men and women died on the streets from cold and hunger rather than risk the dubious mercies of the Poor House. That children were turned into beggars and thieves by the harshness that was all around them, and that they grew up without any real hope of improving the accident of their birth, the vast majority never even beginning to learn to read or write.

  But Bella was a young woman brought up within the strict confines of Victorian England and it did not occur to her, even in her dreams, to attempt in any way to change the world she lived in. Nor did it occur to her that she, nor indeed anyone else, could change the way things were. All she was able to do was to ensure, to the best of her ability, the well-being of those around her, her family, her family employees, and her small circle of dear friends.

  Thus it was that Bella had begun to fret so over the well-being of Polly Martin.

  Polly was probably a pretty girl, certainly she had lovely dark curls and black eyes which looked as if they should be dancing, but most of the time her eyes were dull and her features drawn. She had been with the Boffins and the Harmons for nearly six months now, hired by Bella and Mrs Boffin as much out of compassion as anything else after a recommendation from the Reverend Milvey, to whom Polly had come for help upon the recommendation of someone the reverend could not quite recall. She had been presented to them as a young woman alone in the world following the death of her father, eager to maintain her respectability and independence, and looking for a place in service.

  The Harmons and the Boffins had spotted an injured soul and found themselves incapable of not doing their best to allow that soul to mend. Although at first wary, certainly cautious, Polly had quite quickly come to be at ease with those fine people and had shown herself to be both hard working and fundamentally good-natured. She had even learned to smile again, just occasionally.

  But over the last few weeks Polly had smiled less and less. It seemed that she had lost her appetite. Certainly she had lost weight. Indeed she was thin to the point of being emaciated. Her face was pinched and there were dark circles beneath those lifeless black eyes. And, as she went about her work in the drawing room early one morning, she looked as if she hadn’t slept for at least a week, nor eaten.

  “Are you sure you are quite well, Polly dear?” asked Bella, for the umpteenth time.

  Polly was shining the brass fender which stood on the stone hearth of the big fireplace, rubbing it with a polishing cloth so vigorously it was as if her life depended upon it. She did not pause.

  “Polly, do you hear me, dear?” Bella persisted.

  Polly turned her head towards her mistress then, but still did not for a moment cease her polishing.

  “I am quite well Mrs Harmon, thanking you,” she replied.

  Not for the first time Bella was struck by how well spoken Polly was, for a girl of her apparent station.

  “You do not have to work if you are ill, Polly,” she remonstrated. “Not in this house. You should know that. Why don’t you rest and let me call out the doctor for you. Mrs Boffin and I can always turn our hand to a little housework. Indeed, I sometimes think Mrs Boffin would be happier doing more in the house. I’m not at all sure how at ease she is with being waited upon and having s
ervants about the place, really I’m not.”

  The girl finally stopped her polishing then, and turned full round to face her mistress.

  “I really am quite well,” she repeated, this time managing a wan smile.

  But Bella noticed that Polly’s face that day was paler and more drawn than ever and the circles around her tired eyes were deeply etched.

  “Then something is severely troubling you, Polly,” she said. “Please, dear, won’t you tell me what it is?”

  The girl stared at her for a moment, and it was as if Bella could almost reach out and feel the pain in those dull black eyes. For a moment she thought that Polly might be going to confide in her, share a secret perhaps. But no.

  “There is nothing troubling me, Mrs Harmon,” said the girl flatly, and she returned at once to her polishing.

  Bella stood anxiously watching her for a moment or two more. Then she heard her baby boy’s cries from the nursery. He had woken hungry as usual, and was calling for his mother. With one last anxious glance over her shoulder at her parlour maid, Bella left the room.

  That night when she had finished her duties Polly set off again on the secret journey that took her to Blackfriars and then through a series of dark and unsavoury lanes, beneath the tall shadow of the Tower of London, and on to a small and not particularly welcoming house close by the river.

  The blend of rank city fog and salty river mist was even thicker and denser than the night before. Polly could see less than ever as she made her weary way. She coughed wretchedly. She was bone tired, and her lungs could barely cope with the lethal mixture, yet once again she forced herself to walk as fast as she possibly could. She was in an even greater hurry than the previous night to reach her destination, because she was, as Bella Harmon had suspected, severely troubled – consumed by the greatest anxiety she had known. Greater by far than anything inflicted on her by the drunken father of whom the Boffins and the Harmons knew nothing, and greater even than when she’d had to face life alone after the loss of her darling man.