Death Descends On Saturn Villa (The Gower Street Detective Series)

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  The major fell to his knees, clutching his chest: And now, God damn his soul to hell, he has killed me.

  Gregory fell forwards and it was only the inspector’s quick action that stopped the old man’s face smashing into the tea tray. Pound laid him on his back on the floor and went to tug out Gregory’s right leg, which was trapped under him.

  Pound put an ear to the supine man’s nose: Dead. [He got to his feet.] I shall get his body taken away and then I shall have to write a report. [He rubbed the back of his neck.] It does not look good when a witness dies under questioning.

  I tied up the cardboard folder and put it away before I stood up: Who will complain? His son will not.

  Pound: Quigley will make as much as he can out of it. [He wiped his hands on a handkerchief.] I shall put out a description of Barney Gregory and we can have copies made of that photograph.

  I fastened my satchel: And I must go in search of a drinkable pot of tea.

  Pound gazed at me: But we have work to do.

  I: My work is finished here, Inspector.

  He: We have a maniac to catch.

  I: When I said I wanted you to help me kill Gregory, I meant the major’s son, judicially. [I crossed the room to survey the street and the anonymous masses making their ways towards their graves, and I spoke with my back to him.] But I have failed. You must do what you think fit, Inspector Pound, but neither you with the large but inept manpower at your disposal nor I with my colossal intellect shall ever find Barney James Gregory.

  103

  The Aftermath

  THE POLICE WENT through a simulacrum of the motions of looking for Barney Gregory. Copies of his photograph were sent to police stations around the kingdom and the port authorities were alerted, but I knew from personal experience how easy they are to evade.

  Pound came.

  He: One thing I was wondering. Why did Barnaby or Colwyn, as we knew him, answer your summons to this house? He must have known you might catch him out.

  I: [stirring my tea] It might have looked suspicious if he had refused to answer any questions but, more importantly, Barney James Gregory suffered from something you and I find difficult to understand – that is, arrogance.

  Pound coughed and, not for the first time, I refrained from advising him to quit his tobacco habit: So he thought he could outwit you?

  I: Many have tried but most have ended up being tried.

  [Pound had developed a habit of looking at my teapot like a puppy wanting chocolate, but I had developed a habit of ignoring his habit.]

  He: Why do you think Travers Smyth and Prendergast got embroiled in it all?

  I: [patiently] Few things incite the desire for money more than having had but lost it. [I sampled my tea with mild pleasure.] They probably thought they were merely assisting in a ruse to make Miss Middleton seem incompetent. This would allow them access to the fortunes they believed to be theirs by right. They may even have told themselves that developing the poisonous gas was a patriotic duty.

  He: [swallowing ostentatiously to draw attention to his lack of anything to swallow] And I do not suppose they knew that anyone would die, least of all themselves.

  I: Indeed.

  Pound took me to Mrs Prendergast’s house and I spent five days searching it, but found nothing to contradict the story that her maid, Gloria Shell, and her dog, Albert, had been beaten to death with a claw hammer in the kitchen. The attacker had been a tall, right-handed man with fair hair and wearing clumsily made hobnail boots with one of the iron heels missing, I surmised, but the two witnesses were able to add nothing more. The one who claimed to have heard something was a local wine merchant of good reputation and insisted that the killer had used the exact words: That will keep your mouth shut about March Middleton, you slut.

  I could not find a cab driver who had taken anybody to or from the area of the house around the time of the murder. I spoke to all the local constabulary, neighbours, every tradesman, every street urchin and every crossing sweeper I could find, and nobody gave me any further information.

  Weybridge wrote. He had identified the man whose skull was recovered from the furnace. I did not trouble to read it.

  At the end of three weeks I suffered the heaviest blow I have ever received. Vernon Harcourt, the Home Secretary, had bowed to pressure from Her Majesty’s vile Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, and declared that Miss Middleton was mentally competent to stand trial on the capital crime of murder and must be transferred to a prison immediately.

  Pound came round as soon as he heard.

  I told him: She is lost to me. I swore to protect her and I cannot.

  Publisher’s Note

  At this point Mr Grice ends his account.

  The following extracts are based upon the more coherent of the many notes made by Miss Middleton whilst in detention and discovered hidden in her mattress after she was taken from her cell.

  Part III

  Extracts from March Middleton’s Notes

  The Lost Ones

  MY ROOM IS quite agreeable, as far as any cell can be. It is certainly better than the last condemned cell I visited. I have an iron bed with blankets, which is comfortable enough, though very chilly at night; a wooden table and a chair; and they have provided me with writing materials. I expect my guardian persuaded the governor to grant me that. He has influence in many quarters – either by having helped people or having knowledge of their secrets – and is never shy about calling in favours.

  The guards have been very kind. They bring me books – I hope they do not get into trouble for that – and they are generally courteous and considerate. I am not allowed newspapers, though, and when I ask if there is any petition for my reprieve they pretend not to understand and tell me not to worry about such things.

  The doctor comes daily. He asks how I am and I tell him I am well, though I am developing a rheum in my chest. It hardly matters to me, but it seems the authorities prefer hanging a healthy woman to a sick one.

  The lost ones have not visited me as often as they used to and I know how to deal with them now. I can get rid of Mrs Prendergast just by hiding behind a screen of my hair. She will cluck and fuss and try to tempt me out with cake but if I ignore her long enough, she will go away. Uncle Tolly is more persistent, though. He will sit in his own armchair for hours, watching me balefully, and I have to go inside myself to hide from him. But Dorna is not so easily avoided. However deep I go she follows, always beautiful, warm and sympathetic; always whispering into my soul.

  I am afraid for you, March… Sidney Grice will destroy you, just as he destroyed me and just as surely as he murdered your mother.

  Silence

  WHY CAN I remember nothing of the trial? I asked the padre if I had given evidence and he said I had not. Was that because I would condemn myself? Sometimes it is better to be quiet. I am quiet most of the time. I lie on my bed, my arms crossed over my breast and block out all the noises of my prison – the shouts and echoing clatters – and then I listen to myself. I slow my breathing and make it so shallow that I can no longer hear it. My heart steadies and the roaring blood dies down, creeping noiselessly through my ears, and even my thoughts begin to murmur, so low that I cannot hear them. I turn the images off, one by one like a series of Chinese lanterns, and then there is not a darkness but a lack of light and, for curled slivers of time, silence, all is silence.

  The Unredeemed

  SIDNEY GRICE CAME this morning. He had his eye patch on and was pale and haggard and physically diminished. He was a small man but his erect posture and dominant manner usually made one forget it. Today he was hunched and the way he had of holding one’s gaze with his was gone.

  I asked if he would be here when they take me out and he told me that he would always support me.

  ‘I am frightened,’ I said and he squeezed my hands. ‘So frightened,’ I whispered.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Grice,’ the warder said, ‘but I have strict orders.’

  My guardian lean
ed forward. I thought he was going to whisper but, to my astonishment, he kissed my cheek. ‘God bless you, March.’

  Dorna laughed when she heard that. ‘You do not believe in God,’ she said.

  My guardian let go of my hands and stood up, his face to the wall. ‘Somebody must be to blame for all this.’ He slipped a coin into the guard’s palm and was gone.

  I listened, but I could not hear his soft footfalls above the clang of the door and the clatter of the lock and the cries of those who are also damned.

  Every Night

  EVERY NIGHT I wonder if this is my last. At first I hope it will be. The reality can be no worse than the fear of it – though I have heard first-hand accounts from Inspector Pound and Mr G of so many botched hangings – but the longer they delay the more I realize something.

  I know I should not be loath to meet my Lord and Saviour but it is growing inside me, undeniable and inescapable, this knowledge of myself. And my prayers for a quick release have been replaced by a new supplication.

  Above all things, I do not want to die.

  A thousand times a day, kneeling by my bed or lying on it, sitting at my desk or standing under the window, I send my petition. It flies to the heavens and is caught and carried by the angels.

  Another sunrise and another sunset; please God, grant me one more day.

  The Carpenters

  THE CARPENTERS ARE here. I hear them hammering and sawing and one of them sings, happy in his work. I know what they are building but I dare not give it a name.

  ‘Is it for me?’ I ask the doctor and he pats my shoulder.

  ‘Not just for you.’ He has gentle grey eyes, but they are heavily underlined by black bags. His work must be a dreadful strain. He has to tend the living and witness their deaths.

  ‘My father was a doctor,’ I tell him. ‘Colonel Geoffrey Middleton.’

  ‘I am afraid I never came across him.’

  ‘After my mother died he rejoined his regiment and, when I was fourteen, he was stationed in India and Afghanistan.’

  My father’s face appears on my sheet like Veronica’s miraculous image of Jesus on the cloth with which she wiped his blood away, but it dissolves in the weak rays struggling through my window.

  Only light and the noise of construction come between those bars and nothing gets out but my prayers.

  ‘You must have missed him.’

  ‘I went with him. We worked together.’

  His brow wrinkles as it rises. ‘But you were a child.’

  I think about his words. ‘Until the day I helped hold a man down as my father sawed his leg off.’ But it was before then. I was a mother to my father at the same time he was a father to me. ‘We looked after each other.’

  His hand goes out to me, but falls away before it has even travelled half of its journey.

  ‘You were like a child to me,’ Uncle Tolly sighs, ‘the daughter I could never have.’

  ‘Do you have a daughter?’ I ask and the doctor nods.

  ‘She is about your age, a little younger.’

  ‘Love her,’ I say and he whispers something, lost before it reaches me.

  He goes and I think about it again.

  I remember playing with Maudy Glass and Barney, running up Parbold Hill and rolling down it, scattering the sheep and spinning until we were dizzy, and afterwards being told off by Mrs Leyland, my father’s housekeeper, for getting grass stains on my dress. I suppose I must have been a child that afternoon. But at the end of that same day, I took the tumbler from my father’s loose grip in his lap and fetched a tartan blanket to cover him as he slumbered fitfully by the dying fire.

  ‘Do not let this happen to her,’ I said, forgetting my visitor had gone.

  ‘A child, yes, a child,’ Uncle Tolly moans.

  When will the blood stop pumping – pumping from his ripped-open chest?

  Repentance

  I HEARD SCREAMS this morning – not unusual here, but these screams went on and there were sounds of a struggle and a man saying:

  ‘You will only make it worse for yourself.’

  It comes from the cell next to mine and I have heard her before, praying loudly or sometimes shouting obscenities.

  She howls. ‘No I’m not ready. You should have warned me.’

  And the chaplain – I know his voice – says, ‘Come on, Maggie. You will only get hurt.’

  There is a dull crash and a clattering, and I know her table must have gone over with her tin wash jug on it. My jug has not come yet. I suppose she is more urgent. They don’t want to hang a woman with a grubby face.

  They are coming past. I hear scraping and feet drumming, and so they must be dragging her.

  ‘You should have told me.’ She is crying. ‘I had no time to prepare myself.’

  ‘They’re never ready,’ a warder says. I know his voice too and I do not like him.

  Dorna opens the door so suddenly that I jump. I have no chance to shut her out.

  ‘This is what you did to me,’ she says sadly.

  She comes in, dragging her right leg, and then I remember that it was snapped when she died.

  ‘All those people,’ I try to explain.

  I wonder why her neck is not broken, but then I realize that it is and that her head is lolling loosely as she tells me, ‘They were nothing – nothing to you – but I loved you, March… and him.’

  The chaplain tries to reason with Maggie. ‘You knew it was coming.’

  ‘But not today.’

  Maggie starts to sob and cannot speak. The chaplain murmurs something. He is probably quoting scripture – a verse about repentance, I imagine.

  I imagine so many things as the gate slams. And the sounds fade in my ears, but they are trapped inside my head by the hands which must be mine crushing my ears. Round and round they go, bouncing off the walls of my skull until I am quite dizzy. They would drive me mad if I were not mad already.

  The Remains of a Life

  I HEAR THEM later, clearing out her cell. One of them says something. I cannot hear what, but the tone is mocking and the others laugh.

  ‘You wouldn’t’ve credited as she could fight so ’ard,’ a whining voice said. I know him, a sniffy little Cockney barrow boy made important by the uniform he cannot fill. ‘Gawd but she didn’t want to go. Gave Eustace a real shiner she did. ’E won’t see out of that eye this side o’ Christmas.’

  They laugh again and I decide there and then I will really give them something to laugh about – no demurely climbing the scaffold steps and tipping the executioner for me. I shall fight tooth and nail for every extra beat of my racing heart.

  ‘What shall I do with that?’

  A slight pause while they examine it. ‘Frow it away.’

  In a land where people live by collecting scraps of bones from gutters what could have remained of a woman called Maggie that was so completely worthless?

  The Dark

  THE LIGHTS WENT out last night. There are none in the cells.

  The corridors are lit by gas mantles and the beam they project through the spy hole in my door casts a yellow disc on to the wall by my head. I can reach out from my bed and see my hand illuminated, alive. I wriggle my fingers and watch the shadows dance on the whitewash. I make birds and an elephant, just as my father taught me with his magic lantern, when I was a child in The Grange. For the first time in my life I am glad he is dead. I cannot bear to think what the shame and shock would have done to him.

  Last night I touched the disc and it vanished as if I had snuffed it out, and my whole world became black. It was then that the screaming started. I think it was the Irish major’s wife three cells away who started it, but screaming is more contagious than scarlet fever. Few have any natural resistance. I do. Screaming annoys me as a rule. It is almost always done to gain attention. But these were cries of fear, and fear is more contagious than screaming.

  I never understood how a crowd could panic so quickly until I was in a single-storey theatre in Bombay. In
the interval a chai wallah knocked his charcoal burner over and the curtain burst into flames. There was a stampede to the exit at the front, people pushing, elbowing and clawing at each other in their desperation to escape the spreading conflagration, trampling wild-eyed and high-pitched over their fallen fellows. The British press printed accounts of white men trying to calm hysterical natives, but I saw Europeans fighting their way through the scrimmage and a military policeman using his truncheon, not to restore order but to effect his own escape. I watched from the back in horror. The exit was blocked with a terrified writhing mass and I was just about to cry out when Edward took my arm.

  ‘I shall not let you die in this place,’ he vowed and I believed him. There was a planked door at the back, hardly discernible in the poor light, and it was locked. He drew out his revolver and shot off the padlock, kicked the door and it flew open.

  Edward ushered me out and told me to stand back and then, as the smoke poured out of our escape route, he kissed me. There was blood on his face, but it could not mask the fear as he went back in. The screams were awful. I stood in the street and put my hands over my ears. An age later he reappeared with a bawling Indian girl under his arm and leading her mother by the hand. He was shouting: ‘This way. This way.’ And people began to follow. The mother kneeled and kissed his hand, but he pulled away in embarrassment and told her to get up.