The Formula for Murder

by Carol McCleary

  “I don’t recall murder being part of the scientific method for beauty treatments or anything else.”

  “I haven’t murdered anyone.”

  “Splitting hairs,” I interrupt him. “Maybe you didn’t do the deed, but you condoned it.”

  “You have no notion at all of the nature of my research. You are wrong if you believe I am trying to make women look prettier. The spa is just a place to provide the money to finance serious research.”

  “You may fool Hailey, but I saw a poor woman in Bath crying for her child and a nice old gentleman in the moors—”

  “Your small mind will never comprehend my work,” he snaps. “Take her upstairs. And keep an eye on her. We don’t want her wandering around. The dogs will attack strangers.”

  As I follow Hailey up the stairs to the second level, she tells me they are staying in the servants’ quarters so Lacroix can be closer to his work. I am only half listening because my concentration is on one thing only—escape.

  “He works day and night, barely taking time off to eat. He sleeps very little, a few hours here and there, never a full night.”

  “He’s a murderer and you’re an accomplice to his crimes.”

  She stops on the stairs and spins around to me. “Stop it.”

  Her voice is quiet, but with desperation.

  “He’s not any of those things.” She starts to say something else, but looks back down the stairs.

  Hare, the other ice pick thug, is at the bottom of the steps, looking up at us.

  We go up to the landing and move away from the stairway, into a sitting room with a hallway to the right were I assume bedrooms for servants are located. Closed French doors lead out onto a small balcony and I wander over to get a look through the windows. There’s enough moonlight for me to identify a pasture behind the carriage house.

  “Anthony isn’t a murderer,” she tells me in a low voice.

  “Why don’t you ask the artist in the moors who got an ice pick in his back or another man who got one in his brain?”

  She shakes her head, frantic, and puts her hands over her ears. “They’re not things Anthony would do.”

  “See no evil, hear no evil. Tell that to the police when they come for you and to the hangman when he puts the rope around your neck.”

  She stares at me, swaying, ready to collapse, and sits down on the couch. I take a seat on a chair facing her.

  She really doesn’t understand.

  I find it incomprehensible.

  She’s a grown woman. Yet this is not the first time she did something bizarre. Because of Hailey’s own traumatic background I found reasons to justify why she aided a woman in New York who killed her abusive husband. But I can’t comprehend how she can close her eyes to these atrocious crimes against innocent people.

  Is she completely devoid of reason and common sense?

  “Hailey … tell me what you think is going on here.” I gesture toward the stairway. “What is being done down there? Why have people been killed? And please, don’t tell me they haven’t. I witnessed the murder of two people and there’s three more I know of, beginning with Lady Winsworth and a child.” I actually hadn’t seen Archer being killed, but looking at his still warm-blooded body was close enough.

  For a moment we sit in silence.

  Hailey finally meets my eye. “We’re prisoners. Anthony is doing research on rejuvenation, on defeating the aging process of our bodies. You call it beauty treatments and it’s true that women like the countess want to stay beautiful longer or get back their youthful appearances, but that is not the true purpose of his research. He does that work because wealthy women are willing to finance his research if they think they will get what they want.”

  “Who do the thugs downstairs with cowboy boots and ice picks work for?”

  “They work for Dr. Radic and the countess. She put up most of the money that Radic used to build the spa in Bath. She controls everything.”

  “How many of these hired killers are here?”

  “Only the two you’ve seen.”

  “That’s two too many. So your Dr. Lacroix just shuts his eyes to what’s going on around him and you shut yours, too. Why?”

  She avoids my eyes.

  “Because … because you love him.”

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  “Hailey, listen to me. It’s not adding up. You say you and he are being held prisoner. Those two brutes were away from here, kidnapping me. So was the countess. Why didn’t you just leave?”

  “We are not prisoners like that. Anthony’s research can’t continue unless the countess keeps financing it. And keeps the police from bothering him. She has powerful friends. He didn’t hurt Lady Winsworth deliberately. When blood transfusions are done, sometimes people die.”

  Sometimes people die.

  She said it as if she is speaking about nameless people in a textbook, not a woman and child of flesh and blood, real people with loved ones saddened by their loss. Good lord—she is so mesmerized by Lacroix, so infatuated, that she simply takes whatever he says as the gospel, no matter how strange it may be.

  “Was she getting blood? From a child? A little girl?”

  Hailey nods. “Yes. But the woman had a bad reaction.”

  “So did the child.” I shake my head, trying to get the pieces rattling inside to fall into place. “What a … a horror story. You simply fell for this man and tolerate this insanity?”

  “It’s not just that.” Her eyes are that of a wounded doe. “Anthony needs my blood.”

  63

  Inspector Mulcher, the highest-ranking police officer in the Okehampton district, is not happy about getting the local manager of the telegraph office out of bed to open the wire station. Nor is he pleased about planning a widespread search for a foreign woman in the middle of the night, waking neighbors and sending them down the streets to wake others and have them gather into groups to spread out and hunt for the woman.

  A police officer for thirty-two years, most of his police duties had centered around stolen livestock and an occasional domestic dispute. The only serious case he had ever investigated had been that of a woman who split her husband’s head with an ax, and he had been a young officer when that occurred.

  Like the telegraph office manager, he had been awakened by banging on his door and shouts from strangers outside. Then he listened with some astonishment about a woman being kidnapped—not any woman he was told, but a famous American newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly, and that the kidnappers drove the most expensive brand of carriage in the kingdom.

  The amazing situation doesn’t end with the victim and the kidnappers.

  The men at his door, it turns out, include a well-known writer and a high-society wit from London.

  He keeps his temper stowed because he has heard of the author’s stories about a detective named Sherlock Holmes, and his wife has read in the newspaper about the rather large and unusually attired individual from London, whom the inspector’s wife says is a London society nob.

  However, he cares less about the social butterfly than the author who is also a respected medical man.

  The third man, a teacher, also appears respectable, though not one he or his wife has heard of. And none have been imbibing, another point in their favor, though he himself could use a stiff shot right at the moment to settle his own nerves.

  He’s never handled a significant police investigation and has no idea as to what steps to take, although it did occur to him that kidnappers want ransom money.

  Told that the motives of the people who seized the young woman were not monetary and were in fact not even known, left him with no clue as to how to proceed to get her back.

  The inspector made it clear to the men from out of town from the moment he agreed to take action that he was fully in charge, but being prudent, he had listened carefully and took notes as the excited men tossed about ideas about rescuing the young American woman.

  Now as he awaits news from a
volunteer search party, he stands with the doctor and the socialite and watches the young teacher, Herbert Wells, who is pacing nervously, as if he is struggling with a demon.

  Wells finally approaches him and his companions.

  “Does anyone in the area have a black coach? Not an ordinary one, but an expensive rig, the finest, a town coach with four-in-hand.”

  “None that reside down here except in the summer. A handful of nobles and wealthy squires have good coaches, one or two may be black, though I don’t recall for certain.”

  “There was a noble crest on the door,” Wells says.

  “You saw the carriage?” Dr. Doyle is surprised to hear this.

  “No, I saw a similar one in Bath.”

  “A similar one in Bath?” howls the inspector. “What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”

  “I think there’s a connection. Both Nellie and I saw the town coach in Bath, though she saw it from a different angle and watched a woman wearing widows’ black get out of it. She also saw that the coat-of-arms crest on the door had been covered. When we arrived in Exeter at the train station, she saw a duplicate carriage, also with a coat of arms, but this time it was uncovered.”

  “Whose crest was it?” the inspector asks.

  “She wasn’t close enough to make it out.”

  “Was it the same woman in Bath and Exeter?” asks Dr. Doyle.

  “We don’t know who was picked up or dropped off, for that matter. Not only was the coach an expensive one, it had unique markings that tells me it belongs to the same nobleman, though I can’t explain why the crest would be covered in Bath and not in Exeter.”

  “It may be that the woman had her noble crest covered to hide her identity as she patronized the spa.” Conan Doyle paces back and forth as he speaks.

  “Or the coach is owned by a nobleman who doesn’t want to make it obvious that the woman is using it,” Oscar says. “If it doesn’t belong to the woman in black, the man may not want to feed rumors about himself and the woman because it would become drawing room talk in London.”

  “Quite.” Conan Doyle stops pacing and rubs his chin. “But he couldn’t care less if the situation generated talk out in Exeter.”

  “I’m sure the coaches are duplicates,” Wells says. “It’s not uncommon for rich people to order the same custom-made coaches for their city and country places.”

  “But you didn’t see the one she was carried away in,” the inspector says, “so it may not be the same one.”

  “True, but it’s worth checking out,” Conan Doyle says. “Black coaches in Bath, Exeter, and in the moors; three are too much of a coincidence. And there is an obvious connection to Bath, it’s where all this started.”

  “There can’t be that many luxurious black town carriages in the area,” Oscar says. “We should be able to find out with some inquiries.”

  “Let’s wire the police in Exeter,” Wells says.

  The inspector started to object but an excited Conan Doyle cut him off.

  “An excellent idea! It would also show them that our esteemed police inspector here is on top of the matter and is where credit should go. What do you think, inspector? Will you wire Exeter and other police facilities in the region specifically about black town coaches?”

  “I was just about to do that very thing when the subject was raised.”

  “The chief inspector in Bath, too,” Wells interjects. “Ask him about the coach and the woman in black. Nellie spoke to him. He might know something about the wealthy women at the spa.”

  64

  “Anthony is a hemophiliac,” Hailey quietly says.

  The statement throws me for a loop. I have to think about what a hemophiliac is. “He bleeds more than other people? Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes. He has to be very careful because he can bleed to death from a small cut. His blood doesn’t clot like others, and he can also bleed inside without even knowing it.”

  I nod, chewing on the situation. Now I know why Archer joked about vampires. It isn’t just the countess. “Anthony needs blood. And yours works for him?”

  “Yes. You can’t just go around taking blood from one person and giving it to another. No one knows why, but sometimes a person’s blood is poisonous to another person.23 People have died getting transfusions. Some doctors have even killed people giving them animal blood. Anthony developed a way to test a person’s tolerance for another’s blood by giving just a tiny bit of blood. If they tolerate that, he slowly increases the amount until the need is filled.”

  “Is that what happened to Lady Winsworth? Was she a bleeder?”

  “No. As part of his blood work, he’s developed a rejuvenating blood elixir for use at the spa, but he wasn’t ready to give it to just anyone. Lady Winsworth insisted that he let her try it. It—it didn’t work. Anthony thinks she took more than she was supposed to at one time.”

  “Ah, I see, it seems he can’t resist rich women, can he?”

  She pouts. “Anthony is a genius, a savior of mankind.”

  “A regular saint. What about the countess? She told me she wanted my blood. Is she another bleeder? Or another aging woman looking for the Fountain of Youth?”

  Hailey looks away, refusing again to meet my eye.

  “It’s her face, isn’t it? She thinks his treatments can erase her age with … with my blood.”

  I get a lump in my throat. There is a reason they call it life’s blood. I really don’t think I have any to spare.

  “I’m so sorry you were brought into this. You weren’t surprised to see me. Did the countess tell you I was here?”

  “The only thing the countess told me was that she needed my blood. I more or less knew you were alive when I found out about your luggage in Bath. I just didn’t want to face it. I trusted you as if you were a sister.” My voice breaks and I turn my head, struggling not to cry.

  “What about the luggage?”

  “The luggage had been directed to a train going toward the moors instead of back to London. I assumed something had happened to you and Lacroix was getting his hands on the luggage to search for evidence against him and get rid of it. But you were supposed to have gone back to London. It would have been stupid of Lacroix to send the luggage in the direction he was fleeing. And I’m sure he’s not a stupid man.

  “It also made no sense that you stayed over in Bath and permitted the spa to pay for your room. That was unprofessional. It just wasn’t adding up.”

  She nods. “The luggage was my fault. Radic went into a rage when he found out I didn’t have my luggage sent to the London train. Anthony didn’t want me to go back to the hotel and pick up my things, but I needed my stuff, so I sent a message to have it delivered to the southbound track, not knowing they wanted to create a pretense it was sent to London.”

  “The young woman in the morgue in London—another blood donor with a bad reaction to the procedure?”

  “No, Anthony bought the body from an undertaker. She was a prostitute who died and would have ended up in a pauper’s grave. He told me he needed me to drop out of sight. Once I had established a connection with the spa, he didn’t want anyone—like you—looking for me and finding him.”

  I suspect that is a lie from Lacroix, but I let it pass. There are more than enough dead bodies to go around. Then I had another revelation. “I was lured here from New York.”

  “No, Nellie—”

  “Don’t lie to me. You knew I would come if something happened to you. And that I would be suspicious of the body at the morgue because no matter what I was told, I would sense it wasn’t you. But the real clue was the diary, wasn’t it? The diary was left behind so I would find it. When I read it, I would suspect you were killed and follow the leads, but Archer stole it from me. It cost him his life.”

  “Anthony never hurt him.”

  “For someone who treats everyone with kid gloves, your Anthony leaves a lot of dead bodies in his wake.”

  “He is on the brink of h
istory with a discovery that will change the world. Someday—”

  “I’m not sure I have any days left.” There is still a big question left unanswered and I almost hate to ask it. “Why was I lured here all the way from New York? What does your mad scientist and his ‘change the world invention’ need me for?”

  “Listen up.”

  I nearly jump out of my shoes. Burke has come to the top of the stairs without us noticing.

  He speaks to Hailey. “The doctor will need you in a few minutes. He said to bring her with you.”

  He turns and heads back down the stairs. I ask Hailey, “Time for his blood?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And time for the countess to get her blood.”

  “Nellie, please, you have to understand—”

  “What’s to understand? I’m in the hands of murderers.” I rub my head, this is all too bizarre. “Hailey, I have a terrible headache. Do you have powders?”

  “They’re in the bathroom. I’ll get them.”

  She goes down the hallway. As soon as I see her disappear through another door I run to the balcony doors, pull them open, and slip out onto the small balcony.

  The fenced pasture below that spreads out behind the carriage house is for the carriage horses. I am on the second floor, but it’s not too far down. Directly below the balcony are the roofs of the horse stalls.

  I lift my skirt and get one leg over the railing, then the other, and carefully get a footing between the rails. Trying to control my panic because I’ll probably break a leg, I drop down. It is about a ten-foot drop and I hit with both feet but fall backward, tumbling onto my backside, smacking the roof hard with my back, knocking the wind from me.

  Rolling over, I get to my feet and scramble to the edge of the stall roof and drop again, this time into dirt softer than the stall roofing, only going down onto my backside.

  I rush for a gate on the side opposite the direction of the manor house. As I run, the thought of getting on a carriage horse and riding bareback flashes through my mind, but without reins I wouldn’t be able to stay on, even if I managed to get on in the first place.