Death in Bayswater Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE FRANCES DOUGHTY MYSTERY SERIES

  ‘If Jane Austen had lived a few decades longer, and spent her twilight years writing detective stories, they might have read something like this one.’

  Sharon Bolton, bestselling author of the Lacey Flint series

  ‘A gripping and intriguing mystery with an atmosphere Dickens would be proud of.’

  Leigh Russell, bestselling author of the Geraldine Steel novels

  ‘I feel that I am walking down the street in Frances’ company and seeing the people and houses around me with clarity.’

  Jennifer S. Palmer, Mystery Women

  ‘Every novelist needs her USP: Stratmann’s is her intimate knowledge of both pharmacy and true-life Victorian crime.’

  Shots Magazine

  ‘The atmosphere and picture of Victorian London is vivid and beautifully portrayed.’

  www.crimesquad.com

  ‘Vivid details and convincing period dialogue bring to life Victorian England during the early days of the women’s suffrage movement, which increasingly appeals to Frances even as she strives for acceptance from the male-dominated society of the time. Historical mystery fans will be hooked.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘[Frances’] adventures as a detective, and the slowly unravelling evidence of multiple crimes in a murky Victorian setting, make for a gripping read.’

  Historical Novel Review

  ‘The historical background is impeccable.’

  Mystery People

  To

  Tim and MEG

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  On the morning of 14 October 1881 Britain was lashed by severe gales, and there was considerable damage in Bayswater, where shop windows were blown in and trees torn up. At Paddington Green police station some chimneys fell into the cells, which were unoccupied at the time.

  Norfolk Square and its gardens may be visited today, but All Saints church is no longer there. Originally constructed in eleventh-century Gothic style, it was consecrated in 1847, burnt down in 1894 and rebuilt. Closed in 1919 it was later demolished.

  Victoria Place is still there but was renamed Bridstow Place in 1938. Richmond Road has been renamed Chepstow Road.

  The Newgate Prison of Frances’ day was completed in 1782 and public executions were performed outside its walls from 1783 to 1868. It was closed in 1902 and demolished two years later.

  The Cooper’s Arms is fictional, though Bott’s Mews and Celbridge Mews are real, as was the Shakespeare public house at No. 65 Westbourne Grove, whose landlord in 1881 was Mr Charles Bonsall.

  Donald Sutherland Swanson, born in Truro in 1848, was an Inspector with the CID in 1881. He first came to public notice in July of that year when he arrested Percy Lefroy Mapleton, the Brighton Railway murderer. That autumn he was busy with enquiries into the Lefroy case, but in this work of fiction I have allowed him a little time at his disposal to apply his energies to the case of the Bayswater Face-slasher. In 1888, as Chief Inspector of the CID, he was in charge of investigating the Whitechapel murders. For more information see Swanson: The Life and Times of a Victorian Detective by Adam Wood (Mango Books, 2015).

  Ignatius ‘Paddington’ Pollaky was a private detective known for his keen questioning and mastery of many languages. He retired in 1882. For more information see ‘Paddington’ Pollaky, Private Detective: The Mysterious Life and Times of the Real Sherlock Holmes, by Bryan Kesselman (The History Press, 2015).

  Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park were cross-dressers and defendants at a notorious trial in 1871 accused of conspiring to commit an unnatural offence. They were acquitted. For a detailed biography see Fanny and Stella by Neil McKenna (Faber & Faber, 2014).

  Angela Burdett-Coutts was an extremely wealthy philanthropist. In February 1881, at the age of sixty-seven, she married her twenty-nine-year-old secretary who was also very active in trading and philanthropic ventures.

  ‘Men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’ are mythical creatures referred to in Shakespeare’s Othello.

  Mr Barkis, a character in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, indicates with the words ‘Barkis is willin’’ that he wants to marry Clara Peggoty.

  The British Bull Dog introduced by Philip Webley & Son of Birmingham, England, in 1872, was a small, double-action five-shot revolver, suitable for carrying in a coat pocket.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for the Frances Doughty Mystery Series

  Title

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  In the Frances Doughty Mystery Series

  In the Mina Scarletti Mystery Series

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Guilty!’ said the foreman of the jury. The word thundered in the packed and shadowy court like a blast from the trumpet of doom. It echoed from the throats of eager spectators, and as the doors were pushed open to release the scampering jostling crowds, the word preceded them, and flowed unrestrained through the corridors. Out it went, into the open air of the walled bail-dock, where prisoners waiting to be tried that day shivered as they reflected gloomily on their chances of meeting a similar fate. It sprang into the thoroughfare of the Old Bailey, where those unable to gain entry to the court had clustered in the autumnal drizzle, kept warm by expectation. ‘Guilty!’ they exalted, and hurried away to drink to the death of the prisoner, for there could be no doubt even before the judge had donned his black cap that Jim Price was going to swing for the cruel murder of his sweetheart Martha Miller.

  ‘Guilty!’ said the newsmen to the chattering telegraph, ‘Guilty!’ exclaimed the presses as they inked the good news into the morning papers, ‘Guilty!’ wrote the sketch artists for the illustrated editions under pencilled likenesses of the condemned man and his victim. Only one person was silent, and that was the unfortunate prisoner’s mother, who, her initial cry of anguish muffled by the loud approval of the onlookers had sunk into a dead faint, from which it appeared she might never recover.

  Cool rain was rattling the windows, but in his comfortable parlour, Inspector Bill Sharrock of the Paddington police was cosy and content. He had just eaten a good dinner and was sitting in his favourite armchair, warming his toes by the fireside, enjoying a pipe and a bottle of beer. The children had all been put to bed, the house was quiet and his wife Bessie was knitting him a new muffler.

  Earlier that day Jim Price had been rightfully condemned for a murder that had shocked all of Bayswater. Sharrock had seen the body of his victim, a pretty young thing, who had trustingly and innocently loved the man who had killed her. Martha Miller had been stabbed in the chest and stomach more than twenty times in a frenzy of jealous rage following a rumour that she had been seen in the company of another man, a rumour that had since been proved false. Sharrock found it hard
to understand how anyone could expend such savagery on a defenceless girl, and mused that had any man dared to show more than a polite interest in Mrs Sharrock, it was the man he would have sorted out, and enjoyed doing it, too.

  Murder, he reflected, was thankfully rare in Bayswater, although that prying detective woman Miss Doughty had an annoying habit of uncovering old murders that no one had ever thought were murders in the first place. There was only one unsolved case at present, a nasty one, where the victim, a shop girl called Annie Faydon, had been killed while walking home from her work in the dim of the evening, her throat cut right back to the spine, and great disfiguring gashes made on her face. Sharrock felt sure, however, that the culprit would not kill again. Marios Agathedes was a young confectioner who, having come to England entrusted with the investment of his family’s fortune, had recklessly lost every penny. He had recently been committed to the public asylum after being found wandering the streets in a state of hysteria. Agathedes, who had had some slight acquaintance with the murdered girl, was not fit to be interviewed, but the police, convinced that the perpetrator of such a gruesome crime had to be either mad or a foreigner, and preferably both, had decided not to look any further.

  Other than that Sharrock had the usual assaults and burglaries and forged cheques to deal with, and a recent spate of window breaking, but the cold and damp were keeping most of the idlers indoors, and that suited him very well.

  An urgent tapping at the front door disturbed the peaceful scene, and Bessie started anxiously, lest the children should hear. Once one of them was awake the other five would join in the unrest and then it would take time and careful soothing to get them to settle again. She knew better than to ask who might be calling at that time of night. As a policeman’s wife, she already knew the answer.

  Sharrock grunted and went to open the door. He was unsurprised to see young Constable Mayberry on his front step, the lad’s pale face blanched by the shine of the gas lamps, rain spotting his pimpled cheeks like teardrops. Mayberry was often a close shadow to the Inspector in his work, and despite his inexperience, could show commendable reserves of courage and common sense. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Mayberry, but there was a strange wild look in his eyes that needed no further explanation.

  ‘All right, I’ll get my coat,’ growled Sharrock, and turned to see that Bessie had already brought it, his stout warm wool that repelled the rain if it was not beating down too hard. There was a touching little domestic scene as she buttoned the coat and saw to it that his old worn muffler was properly wound about his neck.

  ‘Young woman dead, sir,’ said Mayberry, as they trudged along the damp street, its paving stones slick with mud. ‘Norfolk Square. Not sure who she is, yet, but looks like a respectable type, servant class. Clothes all wet, so she’s been lying there an hour or more.’

  ‘Drunk or killed?’ asked Sharrock. Public drunkenness was not unknown in Paddington, and sometimes people staggered out of beerhouses, lay down in the street to sleep it off and were found dead next morning. Norfolk Square, however, was another matter, quiet and select. When its residents were mentioned in the newspapers it was usually in the births, marriages and deaths columns of the quality publications and not in the doings of the coroner’s or police courts.

  ‘Killed sir. No doubt about it. I whistled up Constable Cross and sent for Dr Neill. They won’t move her until you say so.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It was a horrible sight, sir. I’ve never seen anything as bad.’

  ‘Early days yet, lad, early days,’ said Sharrock, reflecting that Mayberry would not have said what he did had he seen what Marios Agathedes had done to Annie Faydon.

  That thought provoked a question that started eating busily away at Sharrock’s brain, but he said nothing to Mayberry. It was a worry and he pushed it aside. No need to jump in too quickly and make the wrong assumptions. One murderer about to hang, another one locked away where he could do no more harm, that was nice and neat, just the way he liked it, but a third one, and in a fashionable square, that was bad. Most murders were simple; man strangles wife, wife poisons husband, man gets drunk and stabs his best friend; you didn’t need to look far for the culprit. If a servant was dead in Norfolk Square, then, Sharrock reassured himself, most likely her killer was another of her class, and someone she knew well – probably rather too well. The guilty man would be in the cells before the week was out.

  They turned on to Edgware Road, a broad busy thoroughfare that never truly slept. Nothing seemed out of place; carts and cabs rattled by, candles glowed from apartment windows, and if the people who clustered in shop doorways were up to no good then they did not, as the two policemen passed by with a searching glance, have the guilty look of murderers. The more peaceful residential streets they traversed on their way to the boundary of Norfolk Square appeared similarly untroubled by serious crime.

  Norfolk Square was oddly named because it was not a square at all, but an elongated rectangle, where two rows of town houses faced each other, roughly north and south, across some pleasant enclosed gardens. To the west was London Road, leading directly up to Paddington railway and Praed Street underground stations, while the east was dominated by the Gothic spires of All Saints church.

  ‘She’s lying in the gardens under some bushes,’ said Mayberry. ‘They lock it after dark, so I had to climb over the railings. I only saw her because the lantern light shone off her – her lower limbs, sir.’

  Sharrock did not know how much experience Mayberry had of female lower limbs, although from the young policeman’s hesitation, he suspected not a great deal.

  ‘There wasn’t any – I mean her skirts weren’t pushed up far, not as if there’d been any interference. It was just the way she fell, like she’d been struggling.’

  Sharrock nodded. That was useful information. There was too much business with well-meaning people messing about with a body so the police never found it as the killer had left it and what were they to make of it then?

  As they entered the square they saw a disgruntled-looking man, evidently the keeper of the keys, shivering in a doorway clad in a heavy greatcoat he had thrown quickly over his nightclothes. The gate was open and through it they saw the light of Constable Cross’s bullseye lantern shining on something that lay huddled on the ground, while the figure of Dr Neill crouched beside it. The glow polished the dark leaves of evergreen shrubs that grew hard against the railings giving privacy and shelter to the gardens, and a fine mist of raindrops sparkled in the air. Neill stood up and stretched his back as they approached. ‘Ah Sharrock, you’ll want to see this one before we take her to the mortuary. Nasty business. Dead about one to three hours I’d say, can’t make it any closer than that. Her throat’s been cut, so it was quick, which is more than you can say about what followed.’

  Sharrock took it all in; the victim’s youth, no more than twenty-five, the costume of a servant from a good household, the skirts rippled up to the calves, legs flexed in a last effort to escape before she died, boot heels pushing into the damp earth, hands resting on her breast, fingers clenched. The throat was laid open in a single wide wound, and bloody rain had pooled about the neck and shoulders, but it was the face that it was impossible to forget. One cut had not been enough; the killer had wanted not just to kill the woman but blot her out. He had carved at her, and what was most alarming, he had done so in a way that both Sharrock and Neill had seen before and very recently.

  ‘Judging by this I’d say your Mr Agathedes is innocent,’ said Dr Neill, ‘and somewhere out there is a homicidal maniac on the loose who has done this twice and will probably try and do it again.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Frances Doughty, Bayswater’s youngest and only lady detective, her morning newspaper unread, letters unopened, tea untasted, a breakfast egg congealing on its plate, was studying a marriage certificate. Her burly assistant Sarah Smith, not liking to say anything to interrupt such earnest thought, gave her a worried look, added a piece of brea
d and butter to the egg and pushed it closer. Frances ate them absent-mindedly.

  It was only recently that Frances had learned that her mother Rosetta had not, as she had always been told, died in 1863, when Frances was three years old and her brother Frederick eight, but had, to the family’s great shame, run away with a man. In the following January her mother had been living with that man in a Chelsea lodging house where she gave birth to twins, a girl who had died in infancy and a son who still lived. Frances had confronted her mother’s brother, Cornelius Martin, with this discovery, and he had, after much soul-searching, revealed his suspicion that it was Rosetta’s mysterious paramour, and not her husband William Doughty, who was Frances’ natural father. Frances had long ago forgiven her uncle for hiding the unpalatable truth, something she knew he had done out of kindness, but her lost family were often in her thoughts, and sometimes she ached to find them. She did not even know if the younger brother she had never met, named Cornelius after her uncle, knew she existed. He had once been seen boarding a train at Paddington Station, and she could only hope that his destination was some good school where he was even now distinguishing himself.

  It should have seemed obvious for Frances to use the skill and persistence that she brought to her detective work to try and locate her mother, but she had hesitated for a long time, afraid of what she might find. Every so often, overwhelmed by curiosity, she had dug a little further into the mystery, but had applied no concerted dedication to it. For most of the years of her mother’s absence, Rosetta Doughty had known exactly where Frances was to be found, helping William at his chemists shop on Westbourne Grove, and yet she had not so much as sent a message. If she had ever entered the shop to glimpse her daughter she had done so under a veil of anonymity. William had passed away in 1880 in circumstances that would have engaged the attention of anyone who perused the newspapers, and had his presence in the shop been the only factor that had kept Rosetta from visiting her daughter she would surely have contacted Frances after his death, yet she did not. The business was now under new management, and had been advertised as such in the newspapers, but had her mother truly wanted to find her, she would easily have been able to do so. The new proprietor, Mr Jacobs, knew where Frances lived, and often directed potential clients to her address. The only conclusion Frances could draw was that her mother did not wish to see her, the prospect of a meeting being more painful than not seeing her daughter at all. Perhaps she thought that Frances would reject her as a dishonest woman, and revile her for abandoning both her and Frederick at such tender years. The inevitable distress Frances had felt on learning that she had been deserted had, however, been tempered by later thought. She had seen a letter written by her mother after the desertion in which Rosetta had begged her husband to be allowed to see her children one last time before their lives were finally severed. It was obvious that she loved them dearly, and perhaps she was more to be pitied than censured. Frederick had died in 1879 and Frances often wondered if her mother had ever visited his grave.