The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  Just when Dr Gully’s bedside manner began to assume personal overtones is not clear. Florence steadfastly maintained nothing improper had occurred during her marriage to Captain Ricardo. However, early during her widowhood her parents refused to see her because of her relations with Dr Gully and because of her continued drinking. For four years, Florence was cut off from her family and was beyond the possibility of a social circle, but she had Dr Gully, emotional security, and her wine.

  It was during this isolated, if not celibate, widowhood that Mrs Cox entered the scene. Florence was visiting her solicitor, Mr Brooks, and there she met Mrs Jane Cannon Cox. Mrs Cox was the down-at-the-heel widow of a Jamaican engineer with three sons, and through the kind offices and advice of a Mr Joseph Bravo, who had interests in Jamaica, she had bought a small house in Lancaster Road, Notting Hill, as an investment, had placed her sons in a school for destitute gentlefolk, and obtained the post of governess to Mr Brooks’s children. Mrs Cox, with her solid figure inclined to dumpiness, heavy-featured face, glittering spectacles, and skintight hairdo was no beauty, but she made up for it by relentless efficiency, an air of unassailable respectability, and a grim desire to please.

  It wasn’t long before the pretty but lonesome widow appropriated Mrs Cox as her companion. And it was, at the time, an ideal arrangement for sheltered, beautiful Florence and plain, unsheltered Mrs Cox. Mrs Cox ran Florence’s house, controlled the servants, and understood perfectly the comfort and elegance that Florence wished to enjoy, without exerting any effort. And Mrs Cox had it made. She had exchanged the life of uncertainty, drudgery, and poor pay of a governess for the role of “friend of the bosom” to Florence Ricardo. They were on the footing of social equals; it was “Florence” and “Janie”. She received a salary of £100 a year, clothes, and incidental expenses, and her three boys could spend all their school holidays with her.

  In 1872, Dr Gully sold his practice amid testimonials and demonstrations from the citizens of Malvern, and, wherever Mrs Ricardo lived, Dr Gully’s home was sure to be within spitting distance, and their friendship continued. In 1873, the pair made a trip to Kissingen, and the tangible result was a miscarriage. During this illness, Mrs Cox attended Florence, but claimed she did not know the real nature of the trouble.

  In 1874, Mrs Ricardo moved into what was to be her permanent home, the Priory. It was a pale-tinted structure with arched windows and doorways, winding walks, flower beds, melon pits, a greenhouse, and the house was luxurious with a sparkling Venetian glass collection, a lush conservatory with ferns that cost twenty guineas each, and every expensive horror of Victorian decoration. Here Florence Ricardo settled down, with the perpetual Mrs Cox, to enjoy life’s three greatest pleasures—gardening, horses, and drinking. And Dr Gully, whom one is tempted to nickname Johnny-on-the-spot, bought a house just a few minutes from the Priory. There were lunches, dinners, drives, and several nights of illicit bliss when Mrs Cox was away. Dr Gully had a key to the Priory. Then, one day in 1875, Mrs Cox wished to call on her benefactor, Mrs Joseph Bravo, and Mrs Ricardo went with her. There she met Charles Bravo, the spoiled son of the house. The meeting itself was without incident, but its repercussions are now called the Balham Mystery.

  In October 1875, Mrs Ricardo and Mrs Cox went to Brighton and there again met Charles Bravo, a sulky handsome young man with a weak chin. He was a young man her own age and of her social position, and when Florence returned to the Priory she told Dr Gully that she was going to break off their “friendship” and reconcile with her family because of her mother’s health. Actually, Florence was, in all probability, weary of her “back street” existence. She had snapped her garter at the world, and, instead of being told she was cute, was knuckle-rapped by social ostracism. What she did not tell Dr Gully was that she was also going to marry Charles Bravo. Dr Gully was hurt when he found out about the engagement, but later wished Florence happiness. Perhaps the demands of a young capricious mistress had begun to tell on the sixty-seven-year-old doctor, and the prospect of placid days and monastic nights had an attraction.

  But in spite of Florence’s injunction that they must never see each other again, they did. According to British law at that time, every possession and all property of a woman marrying automatically became the property of her husband, unless specifically secured to her by settlement. Florence wanted the Priory and its furnishings secured to her, but Charles sulked and muttered he wanted to sit in his own chairs or he’d call the marriage off. Florence arranged a meeting with Dr Gully to discuss the impasse, and they met at one of the Priory lodges. Dr Gully advised her to give in on the matter and wished her luck. As usual, Florence backed down, and “Charlie” won the moral victory of “sitting in his own chairs”.

  Charles Bravo was not a wealthy man in his own right and was mostly dependent on his father’s spasmodic handouts, since his law practice only netted him £200 in the last year of his life. However, his future was bright. He was his stepfather’s heir, and his prospects for becoming a member of Parliament were good, and here was a young, infatuated, wealthy widow, with a belated yearning for respectability and security, palpitating on his doorstep.

  Charles and Florence told each other “all”. He had had a purple passage with a young and willing woman in Maidenhead but had made a final settlement with her before breaking off. Florence told him about her idyll with the autumnal Dr Gully, and Charles seems to have accepted it with equanimity. Charles was what might be called “rotten spoiled”. He was charming when things went his way, extremely conscious of money, probably because he had been around it so much, yet had so little of his own. And the prospect of marrying a wealthy widow—even one with a sexual slip-up in her past—was attractive. Certainly he was not consumed with jealousy. When he went to see Florence’s attorney about the settlement, he received the lawyer’s congratulations with the remark, “to hell with the congratulations, it’s the money I’m interested in!”

  Mr Bravo, Sr, settled £20,000 on Charles as a wedding present, but Mrs Bravo refused to attend the wedding. She didn’t like Florence. For that matter, she probably wouldn’t have liked any girl her son married. And so Florence and Charles Bravo were married and settled down at the Priory, and they might have lived happily ever after if Charles Bravo hadn’t been so stingy.

  They seemed like an average, happy couple. Charles brought his business associates to dinner and heartily endorsed the institution of marriage. The servants all thought the Bravos a happy, devoted couple, but Mrs Cox was worried. Charles was cutting down on the overhead. He wanted Florence to give up her horses and her personal maid which she did, and he wanted her to dispense with Mrs Cox. He had put together a pound here and a pound there and figured out that the genteel companionship of the widow was costing £400 a year—enough to keep a pair of horses. And Florence, who operated on an anything-for-the-sake-of-peace basis and who was charmed by her young attractive husband, decided to give up her horses and maid, and Mrs Cox could see the handwriting on the wall. Her relatives in Jamaica had been pressing her to return, and now Mr Joseph Bravo and his son were urging the same thing.

  During this period of surface serenity, several curious events occurred. Mrs Cox had several meetings with Dr Gully; whether they were planned or accidental, they have all the aspects of Mrs Cox trying to stir something up. Mrs Bravo had had a miscarriage, and Mrs Cox, at one encounter, asked Dr Gully, who knew Florence couldn’t take regular opiates, to send something to her house on Lancaster Road. The doctor sent some laurel water and thus laid himself open to later insinuations that he was supplying Mrs Bravo with abortive medicines, a rather empty charge in view of the fact that a child would have been just what Florence Bravo needed to cement her newly established respectability and reconcile Charles’s mother to the marriage. And then, just after Charles Bravo figured out the cost of Mrs Cox’s companionship, he was taken suddenly and mysteriously ill one morning on his way to his chambers in Essex Court. So ill, in fact, that he reported to his father he was
afraid people might think he was drunk from the night before, and Charles Bravo had the digestion of an ox.

  That was the situation at the Priory Easter weekend, 1876. Charles Bravo had his attractive wife and her equally attractive fortune. Florence was recovering from her miscarriage and appeared devoted to her husband, and Mrs Cox was brooding about the imminence of a trip to Jamaica. Charles Bravo laid out a tennis court, played with Mrs Cox’s boys, who were down for the Easter vacation, and wrote to his mother that he had “loafed vigorously and thoroughly enjoyed the weekend”.

  Tuesday, 18 April, Mrs Cox set out to look at houses in Worthing where the Bravos were planning to go for Florence to recuperate from her miscarriage and with her she took a flask of sherry to fortify herself. Mr and Mrs Bravo drove into town, and he went to his club at St James Hall for lunch, while Florence returned to the Priory, after doing some shopping, for lunch, which she polished off with a bottle of champagne. Mrs Bravo understandably spent the afternoon resting. Late in the afternoon Mr Bravo returned home and went riding. The horse threw him, and he returned home with his dignity and himself rather badly bruised. Mrs Bravo suggested a warm bath before dinner, and then went upstairs herself to change. Mrs Cox returned from her house hunting with a photograph of the house, and, it is presumed, an empty sherry flask. She did not have time to change for dinner, she did go upstairs to clean up a bit.

  Dinner, consisting of whiting, roast lamb, a dish of eggs, and anchovy bloater was not a sparkling meal. Mr Bravo was still smarting, both literally and figuratively, from his fall. Mrs Bravo had dry pipes from the champagne and was trying to put out the fire with sherry, and Mrs Cox had things to think about. Mr Bravo drank his three customary glasses of burgundy, but the ladies put him to shame. Between them, Mrs Bravo and Mrs Cox polished off two bottles of sherry, and the butler later testified that he had decanted the usual amount of wine that evening.

  After dinner, they retired to the morning room where again conversations languished. In about a half hour, Florence announced she was going to bed and asked Mrs Cox to bring her a glass of wine. Since her miscarriage Mrs Cox had been sleeping with her, and Mr Bravo had been relegated to a guest room. Mrs Bravo went upstairs and was followed by the obliging Mrs Cox with a glass of wine. Mary Anne Keeber, a maid, came in to help Mrs Bravo undress and was asked by Mrs Bravo to bring her some wine. Mary Anne brought a tumbler of marsala and was still in Mrs Bravo’s room when Mr Bravo entered to make the understatement of the Balham Mystery. He accused his wife of drinking too much wine and stormed off to bed. Mary Anne withdrew and saw as she left the room that three-bottle Florence had taken the count and was asleep, while Mrs Cox sat by her bed fully dressed. As Mary Anne started downstairs, the door to Mr Bravo’s room flew open and he cried, “Florence, Florence. Water!”

  And Mrs Cox, who sat fully dressed and wide awake by Mrs Bravo’s bedside, heard nothing until Mary Anne called her. From the time of Mr Bravo’s cries for water, there began a procession of doctors and a progression of statements by Mrs Cox. Mary Anne and Mrs Cox rushed into Mr Bravo’s bedroom, where they found him standing by the window vomiting. Mrs Cox ordered Mary Anne to rush for an emetic and Dr Harrison. When Dr Harrison arrived Mrs Cox told him Mr Bravo had taken chloroform to ease a toothache, but the doctor said there was no smell of chloroform.

  Mrs Bravo was by this time aroused and sent for Dr Moore and Royes Bell, a Harley Street surgeon and friend of the Bravo family. Mrs Bravo threw herself down by her husband, spoke to him fondly, and promptly fell asleep and finally had to be carried to her own room. Obviously, she hadn’t had time to sleep it off.

  Dr George Johnson arrived with Royes Bell, and they are told by Mr Bravo that he has rubbed his gums with laudanum for his toothache.

  “But laudanum,” Dr Johnson tells him “will not account for your symptoms.” But Mr Bravo stubbornly insisted that he had taken nothing else, no other drug.

  At this point, Mrs Cox takes Mr Bell aside and confides to him that, while “Charlie” was vomiting at the window, he told her, “I have taken poison. Don’t tell Florence.”

  Mr Bravo’s reply to this is “I don’t remember having spoken of taking poison,” and again insisted he had only rubbed his gums with laudanum. Dr Harrison was annoyed with Mrs Cox for not telling him about the poison. “You told me,” he said petulantly, “that he had taken chloroform.”

  Mr Bravo by now was in a bad way. He was frequently sick and had intense stomach pains, but he kept his wife by him, drew up a will leaving everything to her, and sent word to his mother to “be kind to Florence”. Again he swears to the growing assembly of doctors that he had taken nothing but laudanum and with a trace of his old money consciousness says: “Why the devil should I send for you, if I knew what was the matter with me?”

  Mr and Mrs Joseph Bravo arrived, and the elder Mrs Bravo took charge of the sick room. However, when the doctors had declared the case hopeless, Florence roused herself from her despair and her hangover to take action. “They have had their way, and I as his wife will have mine.” And proceeded to try water treatments and small doses of arsenicum, both approved of by the doctors, as harmless.

  Then Florence calls in Sir William Gull, a physician who wore as a crown the credit for having cured the Prince of Wales of typhoid fever.

  “This is not a disease,” Sir William tells Bravo. “You have been poisoned. Pray tell me how you came by it.”

  But Bravo persists that he has taken nothing but laudanum and on Friday morning, April twenty-first, the much harassed, much questioned Charles Bravo mercifully died.

  The inquest had more of the air of a family tea than anything else. Mr Carter, the coroner for East Surrey was informed in a note written for Mrs Bravo by Mrs Cox that “refreshments will be prepared for the jury”, and the inquest was held in the dining room of the Priory. Mr Carter, an experienced official, had the idea that there was something amiss and out of deference to two respectable families did not even send notices of the inquest to the papers. Test of specimens and organs revealed that Mr Bravo had died from a large, economy-sized dose of antimony administered in the form of tartar emetic, which is easily soluble in water and tasteless. Mr Joseph Bravo went to Scotland Yard and Inspector Clark, an expert on poisoning cases, was instructed to make inquiries to see if antimony could be traced to the Priory, because the senior Bravo suspected the story of death by accident. Both Mrs Bravo and Mrs Cox had medicine chests and the house contained innumerable bottles of medicine, but nothing lethal. But Mr Joseph Bravo refused to believe Mrs Cox’s story that his son had committed suicide.

  The coroner felt it was an embarrasing case of suicide, however, and closed the hearing without allowing Drs Johnson or Moore to testify and without calling Mrs Bravo, who was suffering from shock. Mr Bravo even admitted to the coroner’s direct question, he did not suspect foul play, but there were a lot of drugs in the house. The verdict was “that the deceased died from the effects of the poison antimony, but there was no evidence as to the circumstances in which it had come into his body.”

  Mr Bravo was buried on 29 April, and Mrs Bravo and Mrs Cox, probably fortified by several flasks of sherry, departed for Brighton. But the end was not in sight. Charles Bravo had been popular in his circle of friends and colleagues, and they were dissatisfied with the summary verdict from the coroner’s inquest. A week later, The World ran a provocative paragraph titled “A Tragedy?” It was done in the gossip-column style of today with no names mentioned but easily identifiable. Charles Bravo was referred to as “a rising young barrister recently married”.

  The following day, 11 May, the gathering storm continued, in which the Daily Telegraph became more explicit, naming names and premiering the sobriquet, “The Balham Mystery”. The Telegraph also commented on the secret and unsatisfactory inquest and called for a reopening of the investigation. The case aroused great interest, and journals and newspapers were deluged with suggestions as to how Mr Bravo clashed head on with the antimony. Two schools of
thought emerged. Either the fatal dose had been administered in his burgundy at dinner or in the water bottle which sat on his night stand and from which he was in the habit of drinking before he went to bed. Because of the time element the water jug was a 2-to-l favorite. The doctors in the case were bitten by the literary bug. Drs Moore and Harrison wrote for the Daily Telegraph, and Dr Johnson gave a medical history in Lancet.

  Mrs Bravo was aware of the drift of public sentiment. She was receiving anonymous letters, and, on the advice of her father, offered a reward of £500 to anyone who could prove the sale of antimony or tartar emetic “in such a matter as would throw a satisfactory light on the mode by which Mr Bravo came to his death”.

  The Home Secretary (afterwards Lord Cross) issued a statement that his office was “entirely dissatisfied with the way the inquiry had been conducted”. Mrs Bravo’s consent was obtained for a thorough search of the Priory. The investigation lasted two days and every medicine in the house was tested. Nothing was discovered that Charles Bravo could have taken, but five weeks between Bravo’s death and the investigation were ample time to get anything incriminating out of the way.

  On 27 May a private inquiry was called, and, although Mrs Bravo and Mrs Cox were not asked to give evidence, they both asked to make statements. Mrs Cox’s statement, made after consultation with Mr Brooks, her former employer and Mrs Bravo’s solicitor, dropped a bombshell. She deposed that through a misguided effort to shield Mrs Bravo’s character, she had not given full particulars at the inquest. What Mr Bravo had actually said was, “I have taken poison for Gully—don’t tell Florence.” However, Mrs Cox had to admit that Mrs Bravo had had no contact with Dr Gully since her marriage and characterized Dr Gully’s relations as “very imprudent” but of an innocent character. Mr Bravo had a hasty and violent temper and four days before his death had had a violent quarrel with his wife in which he called her a selfish pig, wished he were dead, and said “let her go back to Gully”. He constantly stated he hated Gully.