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

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  He leaned on the cupboard, watching me twist about.

  ‘Why was Uncle Tolly so afraid of being murdered?’ The knot was burrowing into a tendon in my right wrist, making my thumb hook into my palm.

  ‘The only thing Tolly was frightened of was being poor,’ Barney snorted. ‘He told you he would be murdered to make you more receptive to the idea when you found him.’

  ‘I was inconsolable when I thought you were dead,’ I told him.

  Barney came up to me. ‘Then rejoice that I am not.’

  I ran back and swung my boots at him with all my might but he stepped easily aside, watching me cry out as my arms were nearly wrenched from my body and I struggled to get back on my feet.

  Barney chuckled. ‘Still the fighter, Marchy. Still the little girl who gave that boy from the mill a bloody nose. I was going to torture you,’ he informed me matter-of-factly, ‘but you seem to have done that very well yourself. In about twenty minutes you will lose both your hands. See, they are already going blue.’ His eyes glinted steel. ‘What is the combination number, Marchy?’

  ‘You do not imagine the formula is still in there?’

  ‘Yes.’ He came up close, tongue out a little, like Spirit when she was sleeping. ‘And, if my fool of a father had told me about it, I should not have troubled with all this charade but gone straight to hurting you. Still, it has all been a great deal of fun and I have been able to hurt you anyway.’

  ‘Fun?’

  He giggled again. ‘I would not have missed it for all the steam treatments, straitjackets and bromide in Switzerland.’ Barney stood against me and lapped the blood from my temple, but I refused to react. ‘The number, Marchy?’ He ran his tongue from my chin to the bridge of my nose.

  ‘Six-two-three-four-four-three-nine.’ I lost my footing and yelped, and I almost wished that Sidney Grice or George Pound could have been there. They would have slain him where he stood, leering and slathering like a filthy mongrel.

  ‘Tell me again – and it had better be the same.’

  ‘Six-two-three-four-four-three-nine.’

  He strolled towards the inner room. ‘If you are lying, March, I shall do things to you which you cannot have imagined in your most terrible nightmare. You would not credit how long it took the lovely Gloria to die. She was all over the room by then.’

  ‘Five-one-one-one-eight-six-two.’ I struggled to keep upright.

  Barney depressed the corners of his mouth. ‘I might have guessed.’

  He went down the steps into the laboratory and slid aside the panel that concealed the safe, and I thought, If I die today I shall never be able to put things right. I took a deep breath. Let me live for the living.

  ‘Now!’ I screamed. ‘For the love of God, now!’

  The cupboard flew open and there was a rush of body and red, and Barney whirled just in time to see the door crash and hear the bolt slam, and there was the flash of a long steel blade hurtling towards me.

  ‘I thought you would never call,’ Harriet gasped.

  109

  The Sunset

  HARRIET FITZPATRICK SAWED at the rope.

  ‘I wondered where that knife had gone,’ I said shakily.

  She glanced at me grimly. ‘You would not have been the only one seeking revenge,’ she loosened the last knot, ‘if I had not got to the door in time.’ She broke the last strand. ‘I would have run him through.’

  I forced my fingers to bend and the blood scorched back into them as they straightened stiffly. ‘What is he doing?’

  We went to the barred window and saw Barney turning the dial to and fro. He wrenched at the lever.

  ‘Bitch!’ he shrieked. ‘You didn’t even give me the right number.’ His voice came through the one open porthole high over his head.

  I cleared my throat. ‘That is because I do not know it, but it makes little difference. My father destroyed the contents years ago.’

  ‘You are lying.’

  ‘He did not want to risk a falling out with your father,’ I rubbed my wrists, ‘and so he never told him, but he was not going to risk that safe being broken into.’

  ‘But there was an account in the Bloomsbury Times.’ Even as Barney spoke, his voice betrayed his growing doubt. ‘A man was coming from Berlin to open the safe and retrieve important documents.’

  ‘Mr Trumpington wrote that article in exchange for being able to describe how he helped to capture a murderer,’ I explained.

  Barney tried to stand on a rusty wastepaper bin but it buckled under him and he nearly toppled over.

  ‘He would probably be snooping around here now if I had not given him a sensational story about an incident in Rugby.’ Harriet put the knife down. ‘And told him we were coming here tomorrow.’

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ He kicked the bin across the room.

  ‘It is not I who is the devil,’ she retorted.

  Barney charged up to an outer window and hammered on it with his fists.

  ‘The glass is six inches thick for safety,’ I told him.

  ‘You think it will hold me?’

  ‘I should imagine so,’ Harriet told him, and I said quietly, ‘You had better leave us, Harriet.’

  She squeezed my hand. ‘You will be all right?’

  ‘I am safe now, thanks to you.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Gregory.’ Harriet put on her gloves and gave Barney a wave. ‘By the way, I love your cravat.’ She went reluctantly.

  ‘What?’ Barney ripped his collar open in a frenzy, but Harriet had already gone.

  ‘Did you really think I was so helpless?’ I addressed Barney. ‘I who rescued that calf from the bog; I who climbed down that cliff to help you? ’

  Barney paced the room, rifling through a filing cabinet for something to aid his escape but it had been emptied long ago.

  ‘I was not waiting for Mr Grice and Inspector Pound to rescue me,’ I told him. ‘I was hoping they would not arrive in time to save you.’

  He wrenched a wooden drawer out and hurled it in a windmilling motion to bounce uselessly off a skylight and fall shattering on the floor. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Revenge,’ I replied. ‘You thought you were hunting me but I was hunting you.’

  ‘You are talking rubbish.’

  ‘I knew you would come,’ I continued, ‘with the bait of the formulae and knowing I was here without a man to protect me.’

  Barney unclenched his fist. ‘Things got a little out of hand, that’s all.’ He forced a travesty of a smile. ‘You know I have always cared for you, Marchy.’

  ‘Pay close attention, Barney,’ I instructed. ‘There are two bottles on the ceiling right above your head. One is filled with the chemicals that make yellow smoke. Remember that evening on Southport Pier? The other is filled with the last sample of liquid for the gas. Let us call them left and right for identification purposes. Look carefully and you will see the little hammers, which are activated by two levers in here. If I pull a lever it will smash a bottle. You must choose which.’

  Barney sneered. ‘You are not a killer, Marchy.’

  ‘The little girl you knew was not,’ I agreed. ‘But then you murdered her father, the one man she had left to love.’

  It took every fibre of willpower not to pull both levers there and then.

  ‘He slipped on the wet grass,’ Barney insisted desperately. ‘I risked my life getting down that waterfall and I did everything I could for the colonel, but his head had hit a rock and he died instantly. I knew I would be blamed and sent back to that hospital, and I could not bear the thought of being imprisoned again. So I took the only course left to me and ran.’

  ‘Stop it! I cannot listen to any more lies.’ I clutched at my head. ‘All those other people, were they accidents too?’ Barney exhaled dumbly. ‘And for what?’ I demanded. ‘For that vile poison?’ I gripped my hair in wretched frustration. ‘Is that what I saved you for? Dear God, Barney, if you had only heard those poor animals squealing and seen t
hem burn and blister and how they frothed in agony, even as you have become, you might have thought better of your plans.’

  Barney hung his head. ‘I did not know what it did,’ he protested with an innocent lift of his shoulders. ‘I thought they would just fall asleep.’ His shoulders dropped. ‘That is what I was led to believe.’

  I had trusted those words the first time I had heard them on Southport Pier, and I ached in my desire to believe that Barney had not understood the consequences of his actions. But a tiny twitch at the corners of his mouth betrayed Barney’s soul and I knew then, beyond doubt, that there was no redemption for my childhood friend.

  ‘Perhaps you will find out for yourself in a moment,’ I said. ‘I shall count to five and, if you have not chosen, I shall pull both levers. One.’ I held up my fingers to count off the numbers.

  ‘I know you too well, Marchy. You are bluffing.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Look at me, Marchy. This is Barney. I would never really have hurt you. All that stuff with the axe – it was just a trick.’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘They let me go too soon. Let me live and I shall go back and be cured, and then we shall be married just like we always planned.’

  ‘Four.’ I put my hands on the brass levers.

  ‘Left!’ he shrieked. ‘Left! God rot you, you stinking bitch!’

  I slammed the porthole and pulled the lever and a wire twitched on the laboratory ceiling but nothing else happened. Had I connected it wrongly? I could not go in to fix it.

  ‘Help me,’ I whispered to the man who could not be there.

  Barney looked up at it and then over to me. ‘I knew you were bluffing,’ he crowed.

  ‘Do not be afraid.’ It was a voice I thought never to hear again, inside and all around me, and I could almost feel my father’s strong hand wrap round mine as I pulled again.

  The wire straightened and tensed so hard I thought it might part. The hammer went up and dropped back a fraction. It stuck but, as we watched, the hammer fell and the bottle exploded into a cloud of yellow. And even through the wall I heard Barney, or the monster that he became, scream, one cry of agony and despair amidst the countless he had wished for.

  I hurried from the room to the lobby, where Harriet waited for me, and we went out into the chill wind, shutting the door behind us. But still I heard him – whether it was through the thick walls, or across the many years, I could not tell.

  ‘Don’t leave me, Marchy. Don’t let me die.’

  But this time I could not take his hand, nor swear, I won’t.

  ‘Which one did he choose?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Left.’

  ‘Oh, March,’ Harriet whispered, and we clung to each other, and afterwards we walked along the path to the top of Parbold Hill. A family of pigs snuffled in the ploughed remains of a turnip crop.

  ‘If you had not answered my telegram…’

  ‘How could I not?’

  I pointed. ‘That is Maudy’s cottage where the smoke rises. I sent her away.’

  ‘She will understand.’ Harriet slipped her arm through mine.

  ‘I sent somebody else away.’ I fought back the tears.

  ‘You will not find it that easy to be rid of him.’ Such suffering broke her voice that it startled me.

  We went over and stood at the tumbled fence by the edge of the quarry, each staring over her own chasm.

  Harriet grasped the splintered rail and shivered. I kissed her cheek and went to the flat rock where so often I had waited for my father. I looked down the road. Past the church and graveyard came George Carpenter, urging Onion at a pace I had not thought possible, and on his cart sat two figures, shadows in the sunset, but unmistakeably those of the two men I loved.

  Postscript

  SIXTY YEARS HAVE passed and, as I look back on those events, we are embroiled in the most terrible war in history. But at last we have some grounds for optimism. The seemingly invincible German forces have been dealt a crushing blow with the surrender of their 6th army at Stalingrad, and one can only hope and pray that the tide is turning in our favour.

  *

  Shortly after we returned to London, it became apparent that I was not so completely recovered from my ordeal as I had imagined. The poisons which had upset the balance of my mind took a long time to be flushed from my nervous system and I was not able to work effectively with Sidney Grice for several months. Those wishing to know more of his work in that time, his handling of the notorious Mystery of the Creeping Women, for example, will have to look for sources other than my journals.

  That summer I was sent on a long holiday and Harriet Fitzpatrick came with me, more than a little dispirited by the ease with which she managed to convince her husband that he could manage just as well if his sister came to look after the house.

  We had a pleasant tour of Britain, the August sunsets being especially gorgeous because of the eruption of a volcano at Krakatoa. The sunrises, we were given to believe, were equally dramatic but we never managed to see any of those.

  Our tour was not entirely hedonistic, however, and one day I hope to be able to give an account of our visit to Scarfield Manor where we helped to investigate a particularly loathsome crime.

  Saturn Villa still stands, I believe, though I shall never visit it again except in my dreams.

  I did not go back to see what had happened to Barney Gregory that fateful night in Parbold but left him to Sidney Grice and Inspector Pound, for I knew that, whichever bottle had been chosen, the result would have been the same.

  M.M., 19 February 1943

  125 Gower Street

  ~

  We hope you enjoyed this book

  The next Gower Street Detective book is coming in summer 2016

  About M.R.C. Kasasian

  About The Gower Street Detective series

  An invitation from the publisher

  About Death Descends on Saturn Villa

  LONDON, 1883

  125 Gower Street was once a house of justice, truth and perspicacity. Now madness, murder and scandal lurk in its empty halls. It is rumoured that its owner Sidney Grice – London’s foremost personal detective – has been driven to the brink of despair.

  But, as with all good stories, we must begin at the beginning. With Sidney Grice journeying to Yorkshire to solve a mysterious death. And with March Middleton, his ward, left to her own devices in a London swarming with danger and vice.

  Curiosity, as we know, has a dark edge. So when an intriguing letter leads March to the gates of the palatial Saturn Villa, and into the nightmarish world of her long-lost uncle, it could be the beginning of an end, for all...

  Reviews

  ‘One of the most delightful and original new novels of the year. Painted with great verve and sparky dialogue, Grice and Middleton promise to become a positive treat. Catch them now.’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Kasasian’s sparkling debut introduces a memorable new detective duo.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Full of twists, turns, skulduggery, danger and double-dealing.’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Funny, fresh and sharply plotted... starring a detective duo to rival Holmes and Watson.’

  Goodreads

  About M. R. C. Kasasian

  M.R.C. KASASIAN was raised in Lancashire. He has had careers as varied as a factory hand, wine waiter, veterinary assistant, fairground worker and dentist. He lives with his wife, in Suffolk in the summer and in Malta in the winter.

  Contact him via Twitter: @MRCKASASIAN

  About the Gower Street Detective series

  LONDON, 1882

  Sidney Grice, London’s most famous personal detective, has an encyclopaedic mind and – according to him – no emotions save his twin love of possessions and the truth.

  March Middleton is Sidney Grice’s ward and she is new to London. With her sharp tongue and even sharper mind, March is sure she could help her guardian solve his cases – if only he di
d not think women too feeble for detective work.

  But even Grice must admit some puzzles are too great for even him to solve alone…

  Set between the refined buildings of Victorian Bloomsbury and the stinking streets of London’s East End, The Gower Street Detective is for those who like their crime original, atmospheric, and very, very funny.

  1 – The Mangle Street Murders

  Queen Victoria may sit on the throne and Robert Peel’s bobbies walk the streets but this is a London still haunted by the spectre of Spring-heeled Jack. The demons of vice and poverty rule the capital: ruffian gangs, forgers, pickpockets, counterfeiters, fences, prostitutes, card-sharps and vagrants clog the city with their iniquity…

  But in one particular Gower Street residence –the parlour of the famous personal investigator Sidney Grice – order presides. Until, that is, the arrival of March Middleton and of course, the vicious Whitechapel murder that follows hard on her heels…

  The Mangle Street Murders is available here.

  2 – The Curse of the House of Foskett

  Sidney Grice, of 125 Gower Street, is London’s premier personal detective. But since his last case led an innocent man to the gallows, business has been light. Listless and depressed, Grice has taken to lying in the bath for hours. Once a voracious reader, he will pick up neither book nor newspaper. His ward, March Middleton, has been left to dine alone.

  Then an eccentric member of a Final Death Society has the temerity to die on his study floor. Finally Sidney Grice and March Middleton have an investigation to mount – an investigation that will draw them to an eerie house in Kew, and the mysterious Baroness Foskett…