The Secrets of Gaslight Lane

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  Kill him. You can’t risk it.

  The demon is clever. He uses my voice in my head.

  I change the grip on the knife and stand behind the door as it opens, and Lionel wanders in. He goes to the bed.

  Kill him.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Lionel asks and those two words could have saved his life.

  I rush at him and get there just before the demon. Lionel squeals and falls face down on the bed, and I get hold of the top blanket and pull it over his head to protect him. He wriggles about and squeaks, but he’s a flimsy chap.

  I cut the cord and tie him up. Not too tight. And he calls out something muffled.

  ‘Nutty?’

  Is that what he says?

  22

  ✥

  The World Through Pale Glass

  AS WITH THE other middle rooms, the only daylight to find its way in – and there was precious little of that – came through the door, but unlike the ground-floor rooms there was not even a window above it.

  The room had been stripped – no furniture, bare boards and distempered walls.

  ‘What was it like the day before Lionel died?’ I asked.

  Hesketh stood hesitantly on the threshold. ‘The bed was over there on the right-hand wall. There was a chest of drawers on the wall facing me.’ He scratched his jaw. ‘A washstand to my left. That was all I think. I rarely came in here and never since that morning.’

  ‘He was not related to the Garstangs?’ I clarified.

  ‘Not by blood,’ he concurred. ‘But they gave him a second home after his father died.’ Hesketh fought to contain himself. ‘He came to stay often, as did Nathan, but it was only by chance that he was here that night for he was supposed to go back to his mother, but we had a message that she was unwell and he stayed on.’

  Mr G was attempting to twist the bars. ‘How many other mothers were ill that night?’

  ‘I could not say, sir.’ Hesketh put on his servant’s mask. ‘I only know that mine made a partial recovery, but Master Lionel’s mother had a seizure when she heard the news and died a week later.’

  ‘I believe that he was found under his bed,’ I said softly.

  ‘That is correct, miss.’ Hesketh’s cheeks buckled.

  ‘Did you see Lionel when he was dead?’ Mr G paced the room, stamping on boards and rapping on walls with his cane.

  Hesketh did not appear to have heard the question, but at last he said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  *

  ‘His neck was clawed where he had tried to get his fingers under the rope.’

  I remembered a maid hanging herself once. We had cut her down and the noose out of her flesh. It is not a gentle way to die.

  ‘His eyes were so… they looked like they were ready to burst.’

  I had seen the agony and the black froth of a choking death and so, I realized, had George Pound.

  *

  ‘I identified all the bodies when I came back from seeing my mother,’ Hesketh announced flatly.

  ‘When was that?’ I asked.

  ‘That afternoon,’ he replied like a man in a dream. ‘Mr Garstang had told me to stay on until my mother was well enough, but then a local policeman called.’

  ‘What was his name?’ Sidney Grice challenged, and Hesketh’s eyes went up and to the left as he dredged his memory.

  ‘Frank Hill. I knew him vaguely when we played a sort of cricket as children – just a bit of wood for a bat and a chalked wicket on a wall.’

  ‘Do not trouble to explain the rules.’ My guardian yawned. ‘Show me your young mistress’s boudoir.’

  Hesketh hesitated. ‘Perhaps I should seek Miss Mortlock’s approval first.’

  ‘Now,’ Sidney Grice said firmly.

  *

  Cherry’s bedroom was more prettily furnished with dusky-pink drapes, drooping lilac patterns on the wallpaper and a matching counterpane, and an Aubusson rug in pink and turquoise alongside the bed.

  This room had a good-sized window of stained glass to hide it from the gaze of the rookeries and save the occupant from seeing them. The pattern of the glass was predominantly red and cast an eerie glow across my guardian’s cheek as he went to inspect it.

  I opened one of the four wardrobe doors and eyed Cherry’s clothes enviously. She was better stocked than my favourite dress shop on Regent Street – vibrant colours and impossibly slender waists.

  I could hardly recognize the slim young man in the photograph on her dressing table.

  ‘Mr Nathan in happier times,’ Hesketh confirmed.

  ‘Happier for whom?’ Sidney Grice was peering out through a small piece of clearer pale-yellow glass and he stepped aside to let me see.

  I had seen the poor many times in England and India, but the square below was a different country. Children hobbled with swollen stomachs on bandy legs, clambering over what looked like a dung heap, women nearly naked, men clad in old sacking, oddly angular elbows hinging concave arms, all drifting across a muddy court or squatting unspeaking against bulging walls propped with bent timber.

  ‘The barbarians are amongst us,’ Sidney Grice declared in revulsion. ‘Come, Miss Middleton. Hesketh shall lead us up.’

  23

  ✥

  The Tyrant and the Mirror

  THE SERVANTS’ STAIRCASE was constructed from plain pine.

  ‘Men on this floor, women on the top,’ Hesketh recounted as we made our way up, my dresses brushing the whitewashed walls on either side.

  This third level was much smaller than the first and second, and had only two doors facing each other.

  ‘We are in the front of the tower now, miss,’ Hesketh puffed. ‘The rest has been closed off and is empty.’

  ‘So much house going to waste.’ I was slightly short of breath myself.

  ‘Mr Nathan wanted the house as secure and easily searched as possible,’ the valet explained. ‘It was one of my duties to check the entire house every night.’

  ‘Why do the women have to climb the furthest?’ I objected.

  ‘So that the male staff have no excuse to go past their chambers,’ Hesketh replied. ‘In the old days the men were accommodated at the other end of the house.’

  ‘Brian Watts, the footman, put up a fight,’ Inspector Pound said softly. ‘He was a powerfully built man with a neck like a prize bull. It was hacked about and he had a gash on his cheek and on both hands.’

  ‘And a struggle was indicated how else?’ Mr G clacked his halfpennies together.

  ‘The room was all but destroyed. The washstand had been knocked over and the bowl thrown across the room and smashed.’ The inspector took a pinch of the Murray’s Mix from his left hand and deposited it into the bulb of his meerschaum. ‘The leg of a wooden stool was hanging loose and there was blood on all the walls.’

  ‘All?’ Sidney Grice tossed the coins from hand to hand.

  ‘Every one plus the window.’ Pound lightly tamped the tobacco. ‘And in several places on the floor.’

  ‘How many is several?’ My guardian caught one coin in each hand.

  Pound grimaced in irritation. ‘I do not remember exactly. About twenty with a large pool where he fell.’

  ‘Astonishing.’ Mr G made two fists. ‘Because several is generally taken as being a number greater than three but less than eight.’ And when he opened his fists the halfpennies had vanished.

  ‘I found a broken penknife blade in the cellar.’ Inspector Pound put his pipe away. ‘Much too small to be used as a weapon, though.’

  ‘Some might say including eight,’ Sidney Grice ploughed on with his theme.

  I beat some of the whitewash off my dress. ‘The Garstangs must have been very proper.’

  ‘Indeed they were, miss,’ Hesketh concurred, ‘as Mr Mortlock increasingly became, though he was less rigorous in his approach to alcohol. Mr and Mrs Garstang would not have it in the house.’

  ‘No wonder the brewer’s horse did not like it here,’ I remarked and Hesketh raised his eyebrows.


  ‘I would not pay too much attention to that story, miss.’ Hesketh opened the door and stood aside.

  The valet’s room was comfortably appointed, with a narrow window too high for me to see out of, an immaculately made bed and a small pine wardrobe. On his chest of drawers stood a patchily silvered mirror, a varnished button box, a splayed hairbrush, a wooden wedge and a sepia photograph of an elderly lady resting on a garden seat with a studio backdrop of Venice behind her.

  ‘My mother.’ Hesketh smiled fondly.

  ‘What a striking woman,’ I said. Even the fixed pose that photography requires could not hide the way she sparkled. ‘She must have been pretty in her youth.’

  ‘Hah!’ Mr G snorted and pounced upon it.

  ‘My father swore she was the belle of the village.’ Hesketh hovered anxiously. ‘I only wish we were not so far apart.’

  Sidney Grice had his pince-nez on and was scrutinizing the back of the frame.

  ‘Did you never marry?’ I picked up the wedge as the least personal item I could find. It did not feel right to pry with him at my side.

  ‘A live-in servant can only marry another.’ He gazed out of the window. It was too high for me to see anything through it. ‘And a valet cannot consort with a scullery maid.’ He straightened his neckerchief. ‘The opportunities are few and far between.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  Hesketh turned towards me.

  ‘Perhaps Miss Middleton could start a marriage agency.’ Sidney Grice replaced the picture exactly where he had found it. ‘She appears to have nothing better to talk about.’

  ‘Whose is the next room?’ I turned the wedge in the pretence of examining it, but it was just a wedge – no telltale stains or dents.

  ‘Easterly’s, miss.’

  Mr G grasped the window grille, hauling himself up to peer out while I looked at the back of the door.

  ‘Is this where the police found the curtain rope?’ I touched the hook.

  ‘So I believe, miss.’ Hesketh tore his eyes away from my guardian’s antics. ‘I was not present while my room was searched.’

  ‘Why is there no lock?’ I asked, and Sidney Grice let go and landed on his feet with a crash that rattled the cheval mirror in the corner.

  ‘That was to be my next question, though more intelligently structured,’ he complained.

  Hesketh scratched his neck. ‘Mr Garstang was of the opinion that a servant had no business excluding him from any part of the house.’

  Sidney Grice dropped on his haunches.

  ‘He sounds like a tyrant.’ I put the wedge back, though not with my guardian’s precision.

  ‘Which tyrant?’ Mr G quizzed me. ‘Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus perhaps? Or that unusually resourceful Frenchman, the self-appointed Emperor Napoleone di Buonaparte?’

  ‘I never knew him to enter our quarters.’ Hesketh eyed my guardian as Mr G pulled open the bottom drawer of the dresser and checked around it with an outsized dental mirror. ‘Though Mrs Garstang was known to enter the maids’ chambers unexpectedly.’

  ‘I have heard of many mistresses doing that.’ I picked up a coiled iron holder with the stub of a candle in its base.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Garstang were very strict in their religious views,’ the valet conceded. ‘There was a terrible fuss when they saw that drawing. Master Nathan was thrown out of the house and only allowed back when he swore he had destroyed it. But they were good people at heart. They were fair employers and kind to their poorer relatives, and when Masters Nathan and Lionel came to stay, Gethsemane rang out with laughter.’

  Mr G put his mirror away.

  ‘It is difficult to imagine merriment here.’ I picked a waxen dribble off the stand.

  ‘There has not been much in recent years,’ the valet agreed sadly.

  Sidney Grice rooted through the neatly folded clothes.

  ‘According to Bartwell’s Guide to Occult Objects, sixty per centum of things hidden in a triple-compartmented chest are to be found in the lower drawer, twenty-eight per centum in the middle and the remaining twelve in the upper.’ He ran his long fingers through the pockets of a pair of trousers before lifting the garment to one side. ‘And this,’ he held up a small bunch of envelopes, ‘would appear to fall into the first category.’

  Mr G remained on his haunches as he opened the letters on the thin rectangular rug.

  ‘Those are from my mother and brother, and a very old one from my father.’ For the first time Hesketh flared. ‘And, if I may say so, sir, they are personal.’

  ‘In a murder investigation,’ Sidney Grice flicked though the correspondence, ‘the only thing personal is the detective.’ He perused the handwriting. ‘These, however,’ he reassembled the pile, ‘have depressed dullness into a tedium deeper than I had realized was possible.’ He replaced the letters and the clothes, smoothing a shirt before sliding the drawer regretfully back into place.

  24

  ✥

  Brian

  ‘I TAUGHT YOU’ ow to blow smoke rings,’ Brian says. ‘I covered up for you when Saint Augusta found your bottle of brandy inside the piano. I said it must ’ave been the tuner ’cause I ’ad smelled it on ’is breaf.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I tell him,‘and I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘Sorry? You don’t know what sorry means.’

  Now Brian is a big man and he still looks it, lying on his back with the moonlight through his open window as I creep across the room. My clothes rustle but my tread is as quiet as a kitten’s. Even I can’t hear my bare feet fall on the bare boards.

  I’m about a yard away now. And then I trip. The stupid ass has left his boots in the middle of the room. Who in their right mind does that?

  ‘A man who ain’t expecting to be murdered by ’is friend,’ Brian says.

  I go flying and it’s all I can do not to land on top of him and, on a good night, I wake up, but there are so few good nights now.

  I stop myself on the edge of the bed and the knife gets dropped, and of course Brian wakes and sits up and sees me, and says, ‘’Ello, Nutty. ’Ad a foo, ’ave we? You’re in the wrong room, friend.’

  ‘Remember that, do you?’ Brian asks indignantly.‘I called you “friend”.’

  ‘I saw the curtain move,’ I try to explain, but what’s the use?

  ‘Just looking for something,’ I say, and pat the boards, feeling around.

  Brian’s eyes must be getting used to the dark. He says, ‘Been in a fight, friend? You’re covered in blood.’

  That’s when I find it, the sticky blade and then the handle, and Brian says, ‘What you got there, Nutty?’

  ‘A knife.’ It must be the way I say it because he’s swinging his legs over, and his knees are very hairy.

  ‘What you been up to, Nutty?’

  I can’t move. I don’t know why, but I’m crouching and watching Brian scratching a Lucifer and seeing it flare painfully bright, and he’s lighting a candle and saying, ‘That’s not your blood, is it, Nutty?’

  ‘No, it isn’t my blood,’ I admit because I don’t like to lie.

  And then Brian is angry. ‘’Ave you ’urt Angelina, you dirty ——’

  He uses a rude word and I HATE rude words.

  ‘’Course Hi haven’t. Not yet,’ I say, and, before I know it, Brian is on his feet and I get to mine.

  ‘So it’s like that?’ he says. ‘Come on then.’

  I stick the knife at him but he’s swung his fist into the side of my head. I kick him, forgetting I haven’t got any boots on, and stub my toes on his shin and he sees that and grins and says, ‘Want anovva one?’ And he gets me on the arm as I put it up to defend myself.

  Somehow I get the knife in his stomach but it doesn’t seem to have much effect. I pull it out and he grabs me by the collar. I fall backwards and he falls on top of me, but when I wriggle out I see my knife is sticking in his chest this time. He pulls it out and throws it aside and knees me on my jaw. That really rattles my teeth but, for s
ome reason, it never wakes me up. I scramble away and get to my feet by his old chair. Brian may be big but he’s slow. I break it over his back and he grunts, and the language he uses is just unrepeatable, and he goes down on all fours and somehow I’ve got the knife in my hand and I’m on his back, and I get his chin and pull it back. He tries to bite me and he rears up, but it only bares his throat more and the blade goes through it like a wire through cheese, and he’s splattering on the floor and coughing and putting his hand to his neck as if it will do any good. Nothing he can do will do any good now. He’s down. Big Brian is down and out, and I feel sorry about that but also triumphant, and he shouldn’t have called me those things.

  ‘Manners maketh man,’ Mrs Garstang says.

  ‘You disgust me,’ Brian says, and I think he means me.

  It seems so real I could almost believe I was there.

  25

  ✥

  The Lamp and the Lions

  EASTERLY NUTTER’S ROOM opposite Hesketh’s was just as I expected. I had gained the impression that he was a very particular person with his precise, if misguided, attempts to speak correctly, his neat uniform, his well-groomed hair and the careful way he carried himself – and all of these traits were reflected in his own domain. The few items on display were lined up with a precision that matched my guardian’s, and his bedmaking would have satisfied a sergeant of the guards.

  There was a wedge on the floor, a bit grubbier than the first, but I did not trouble to pick it up.

  ‘Is that where the bloodstained shirt was found?’ Sidney Grice opened the wardrobe. It had been emptied.

  ‘The police took all the other clothes to check them for bloodstains,’ Hesketh told us. ‘Luckily, he has a spare uniform.’

  Mr G pressed on one end of a plank in the floor of the wardrobe and it tipped up to reveal a secret compartment about nine inches deep. He glanced inside and wandered away. In the base of the cavity stood an oil lamp.