A Christmas Case Page 5

  ‘What was it?’ breathed Mrs Fairbanks, on the edge of her chair, receiving a scowl of disapproval behind her back from her husband.

  ‘It was a fire.’

  Posie’s heart skipped a beat.

  Fire…

  There was a flicker of silence in the room.

  ‘It was a house fire. One of those big, beautiful houses…’ Lovelace stared for a moment at the doll’s house under the tree, and nodded sadly in its direction.

  ‘It was a house much like that. I think this beautiful doll’s house from Gamages has brought this all rushing to the forefront of my mind. It was a Nash town house on Hanover Terrace, 98 Hanover Terrace to be exact. It faced right on to Regent’s Park and was one of the best addresses in town. Not that I knew that at the time of course, when we went up there. All we saw were the flames, lighting up the night sky like the Clapham Common bonfire on the fifth of November. It was an inferno.’

  ‘But why was the Yard called in, sir?’ asked Posie.

  ‘Because some sick devil had started it on purpose. As we found out later. It was arson. And we were warned…’

  Everyone gasped, and Inspector Lovelace, as if in a dream, had stood up, and taken to the centre of the room, tugging at his grey hair. Rufus poured a stiff whisky and passed it to him and Lovelace toyed with it, his eyes raking the room, but his thoughts were obviously twenty years ago in the past.

  His silhouette, stocky and certain, was outlined against the red orange of the big hearth, and the effect was somehow eerie, and Posie found herself shivering despite herself. She imagined the young Lovelace silhouetted then, as now, against a fire, a raging inferno, the reason and carnage of it unknown and overwhelming. It was as if the fire had drawn him to stand now, as if he were the performer, not the two famous artists who were sitting, dumb, on Posie’s right.

  Just then, Posie felt a tapping on her shoulder. Turning, surprised, she saw it was Manders. Again.

  ‘What-ho! Busy night for you in here, isn’t it, Manders?’ she whispered. There was a glint of a silver salver proffered her way, for Manders was a Butler who liked to use all the gleamed-up tools of his trade as frequently as possible.

  ‘Quite so, Miss. I don’t like to interrupt. Only please give this to Mr Lovelace as soon as possible. Oh, and tell him “not as yet.”’

  ‘Not as yet?’

  ‘Quite, Miss. Thank you.’

  Posie saw her hands now contained a telegram, and she stole a hurried glance down at it. It was from Sergeant Rainbird at Scotland Yard. She read:

  LAND REGISTRY CONFIRMS - LAST WEEK. ALL FINALISED.

  Bemused, Posie turned the telegram over onto its plain cream back and turned her attention back to the room, and she joined a narrative which was obviously painful in the telling and the hearing. Lovelace paced back and forth. A bad sign.

  ‘We hared up there, me and old Inspector Friday, in one of the Yard’s hansom cabs, as fast as we could. The roads were clear, of course, being past midnight on Christmas Eve, with most people abed already. But the street lamps were already all out, and it was devilishly dark; only the big houses had gaslights still burning in their porticos. And it was very cold, too.’

  He shifted from foot to foot. ‘But as I said, we started to follow the orange-tinted sky, and there were other cabs heading that way too: a few people out for a gape; a few revellers turning home in fly-cabs, and a few other policemen coming up to help. When we got there the fire brigade had arrived from the Marylebone Fire Brigade Station, but there was nothing they could do. Their men stood around uselessly in their shiny-plumed helmets, some trying to drag buckets of water and connect hoses from a pond in Regent’s Park, but it was all in vain: 98 Hanover Terrace was lost. You might as well have tried fixing the great thwacking hole in the side of The Titanic with a mere sticking-plaster. It was on fire at every floor, flames and smoke belching out through the windows and the balconies. I’ll never forget it: the smell of that house burning, the sounds of the screaming.’

  ‘Screaming?’ whispered Mrs Fairbanks.

  ‘Aye. When we looked up to the first floor balcony, we saw three little girls. They were standing there, silhouetted against the flames. Tiny wee things they were, joined together by holding hands. It became obvious they had got out of the burning room behind them – we found out later it was the main living room where the Christmas tree and all the presents had been set up – and they had no idea what to do next. The trouble was that the floor beneath them, and the garden were also on fire. There was no escape. They must have been looking down into a wall of fire. A ball of orange flames.’

  ‘Heavens,’ whispered Posie.

  ‘I screamed at them not to jump. Shouted that we would get them somehow and I started chivvying one of these fire brigade chappies to bring ladders but he wouldn’t go near. I was faltering for a second and not knowing quite what to do when I realised that old Friday had gone from my side. In the next moment I saw him running like a terrier, head-down, up that little flagged path and into that burning house, and at the same time I saw those three little figures jump, as one, into the flames.’

  The Inspector turned his back to the room for a few seconds, and composed himself. When he turned back there was not a tremor in his voice as he spoke.

  ‘Daft Billy Friday died in there: he only got as far as the hallway before he was engulfed in the smoke. And Jemima, Alexa and Theodora, aged three, five and eight, respectively, probably died as they hit the ground.’

  ‘My God!’ cried Rufus bitterly. ‘How bally dreadful.’

  ‘Quite, your Grace. But it got worse the next morning. During the night a stinging rain had come on, with a sharp north-westerly wind, and the effect was that it fanned the flames considerably on the Hanover Terrace house and the fire went out very suddenly. Quicker than usual, like. The place was burnt well and truly to a cinder, but we could go in and inspect the damage. We’d managed to piece together who exactly lived at the property by that time, and who needed to be accounted for.’

  Inspector Lovelace gave a brief resume of the household in residence at Number 98 Hanover Terrace on Christmas Eve 1903, gleaned mainly from talking to the neighbours.

  There had been a Mrs Muriel Wheeler, head of the household and mother of the three young girls.

  Muriel was the widow of the illustrious coal-mine owner, Alfred Wheeler, who had died unexpectedly and quite naturally two years previously, leaving his wife and family very comfortably off both in terms of residence and income. Muriel Wheeler was a fine upstanding woman of almost forty, and she had married again only fairly recently, in the autumn, to a man some ten years her junior, a Robert Clampton.

  Of Robert Clampton not much was known, except that he was a gentleman of leisure who spent a good deal of time in the old Mews at the back of the house, which was effectively a well-equipped workshop.

  In addition to the three girls, a Governess, a Cook, a Housekeeper, a Butler, a parlour-maid, a house-maid, a kitchen-maid and a small white lap-dog had all resided at Number 98.

  ‘We went through the house from top to bottom. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. We’d already got those poor wee girls and old Billy Friday out in the Mortuary Van and just as the bells were ringing out across the city for Christmas morning I was ticking the dead off a long list.’

  He ticked off his fingers, as if he had that gruesome list still in his hand. ‘We started in the servants’ sleeping quarters, or what was left of them. It was the attic, and very rickety up there, I’ll tell you, and sooty as hades. The Cook and two of the maids were dead in their beds: a small mercy. The girls’ bedroom on the floor below was empty, of course, but the room of the Governess on the same floor was found to be locked from the outside. The poor woman had obviously realised the girls had gone missing and been able to do nothing about it. She’d died trying to hammer that door down, burnt to a crisp.’

  ‘Locked on the outside, you say?’ said Posie softly. This was a crime of truly terrible proportions
if what she understood to be correct was right.

  ‘That’s right. And it was the same story with the mother’s bedroom, Mrs Muriel. Her door was found to be locked, too, but she had died in her bed, probably not knowing what was going on, God rest her soul.’

  ‘And the man, Clampton?’ said Levin Smythe quickly. ‘Where on earth was he?’

  ‘I’ll come to him in a minute. His location was easily explained. The Butler, Housekeeper and the dog had all died in the basement, where their rooms were located.’

  ‘All locked in, too?’ breathed Posie, not wanting the answer but seeking it anyhow.

  ‘That’s right. Tight as you like.’

  ‘And the man, Clampton?’ asked the Major, frowning.

  ‘He was alive.’ Lovelace nodded. ‘The poor blighter. He was down in that Mews workshop at the end of the garden making Christmas sleds or some such thing and he said that around about eleven-thirty he suddenly heard a key being turned in the lock and realised he’d been locked in. With no way out. He watched the fire in the big house with no way of helping or knowing what was happening, or even if the fire would come down the garden and reach him – to all extents and purposes he was a sitting duck.’

  ‘And you believed him?’ asked Andromeda Keene, in slight mocking disbelief.

  ‘We did, Miss Keene. He was in a bad old way that Christmas morning. Shaking, stammering: a human blancmange. He was taken to a local private hospital and given some mind-numbing drugs. I visited him several times over the next two weeks and he was always the same: polite, distant, in pieces. Often crying.’

  Posie crossed her arms. ‘You said there were three maids employed in that house, but only two bodies were discovered. Where was the missing girl?’

  ‘Clever girl.’ Lovelace nodded approvingly. ‘Where was she? It was the house-maid who’d disappeared, so it seemed. Rumpelstiltskin-like. But I found her again, much later on.’

  ‘And was she involved in the fire?’ Posie leaned forward.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Lovelace. ‘She was pivotal to the whole thing. But she was a fool, too: for she had a heart, and felt sorry about her part in the whole wretched affair. I believe it was the maid who walked to a call-box in the foyer of a fancy hotel near Hanover Terrace and put through a dashed expensive call to the Yard. She wanted out. She’d done enough. The little fool.’

  ‘But she was a murderess anyhow, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of that there is no doubt.’

  ****

  Five

  ‘You can imagine,’ continued the Inspector slowly, ‘that my investigation was tough going. The rain and sleet continued the next day, and the front of the house, which had effectively been burnt away, became a damp, sodden mass of ashes. Our Forensics boys – such as they were at the time – had a quick check over the place, and then they deemed it best to take what they could away, to inspect it back at their laboratories, where it was at least dry. Before the evidence perished.’

  ‘What did your Forensics team take?’ asked the Major, leaning forward in his chair.

  ‘Oh, lots. The stockings on the hearth, all laid out for Father Christmas, the charred remains of presents – there was even a doll’s house, would you believe? They took the gas lamps from around the house, and even the cremated Christmas dinner which had been prepared down in the kitchen by that poor Cook. But it was mainly things from the first-floor living room, where the little girls had met their doom. There was an idea running around that maybe the candles from the Christmas tree had been left burning all night and that the place had gone up because of it. But it sounded odd to me: it didn’t explain the presence of the little girls in that room at so late an hour. I watched and supervised as the men brought things down box by box, and there wasn’t one who wasn’t crying.’

  ‘How awful,’ said the Major, gruffly. ‘Did you get to the bottom of it all?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Richard Lovelace said, his mouth a grim line. ‘But not until much later. I was hampered from the start. Firstly by the weather, secondly by the press. Do you know, none of the major newspapers would run the story? It was deemed bad form at Christmas to run such a depressing tale, especially one involving children – it was thought it would lower people’s spirits in the country as a whole. I convinced my Acting Chief Superintendent to hurry along the Inquest, and he did so, with the Coroner announcing his verdict just after New Year: and that was at least reported in the press, but the fact that the whole thing was pre-meditated murder never really bubbled over. I think most people who eventually read about it thought it was just some unfortunate accident.’

  ‘So you were unlucky, but the murderess was lucky, wasn’t she?’ mused Levin Smythe thoughtfully, his hands restless on his knee, still tapping out a melody.

  The Inspector pursed his lips. ‘That’s absolutely right; you’ve hit the nail on the head there, sir. What also didn’t help was that it was that dreadful in-between Christmas period, and everything was closed.’

  Posie nodded, understanding. She knew that wretched time all too well: when all of London shuts down, offices and businesses remaining closed until the New Year, with no-one answering anything until they are ‘back from the country’.

  ‘I was waiting. Endlessly waiting, kicking my heels. The Forensics laboratory was closed, and most of Scotland Yard was empty: just a skeleton staff were working in shifts. I was the only man assigned to the Hanover Terrace job, following the death of old Friday, and the Chief Super didn’t want to assign anyone else to the case: said it would be a waste of time and public money. I was cheap, as I was on trial you see. And as I saw it, the trial wasn’t going particularly well. So I did what I could while I waited, and I set out on my own little investigations…’

  The Inspector detailed how he had gone painstakingly from door-to-door at Hanover Terrace and in the other streets bordering onto Regent’s Park, trying to get information about the family who had perished, trying to find out what had happened.

  He came across the same tale from many he spoke to: the Wheelers had been a private family with real money, who kept to themselves, with Mrs Muriel only just out of wearing black mourning clothes for her late husband. The sweet girls, usually rigged out in pinks and whites, had been seen nearly every day tripping through the park with their rather beak-nosed Governess. Nothing untoward.

  But then Lovelace had stumbled across a stable lad, Joe Ellis, in one of the houses off Hanover Square who was ‘in the know’.

  ‘It was my lucky break. Joe had been sweet on Tilly, the kitchen-maid who had perished in the fire at Number 98. He was very shaken by what had happened, but he was willing to talk to me. Tilly had even given Joe a photographic print of the whole Wheeler household, including the servants; it being the only photograph of herself which she had to give him. It had been taken the previous Christmas.’

  Lovelace explained to the room that he had inspected the photograph, noting the obvious absence of Mr Clampton, and he had asked about the missing house-maid.

  ‘That’s ’er, sir,’ said the stable lad, pointing. ‘Her name was Meggie McColl, and I fink she came from Liverpool. Slip of a girl with a sharp tongue: you wouldn’t have caught me courting her, which is not to say many others didn’t try their luck. Why? You still not got ’er? No body to bury, is that the trouble?’

  The then-Sergeant Lovelace had shaken his head and studied the girl in question: it was true, she was a mere slip of a thing, this Meggie McColl, or what you could see of her under the white and black of her servant’s livery. Very young, perhaps only eighteen, and dark haired with a long plait down one shoulder. Meggie was a girl with an unremarkable face, except for some mysterious flicker of amusement which seemed to light it up from within. A cruel face, his gut instinct had told him immediately.

  ‘Would you mind if I borrow this here photograph, Joe?’ he had asked, giving the boy some loose change, and promising its safe return.

  The Inspector continued now:

  ‘So I got a pal of mine at o
ne of the papers, it was The Times, I think, to enlarge that section of the photograph featuring Miss McColl, and to run it in miniature on the front page of his rag, every day for one week, asking for anyone with information about the girl to send it care of the newspaper offices. We mentioned a hefty reward, and there was no mention of the police, or Scotland Yard, as that might have scared people off. And then I waited…’

  ‘What did you find?’ asked Andromeda Keene, curiously.

  ‘Lots.’ Richard Lovelace smiled.

  ‘Some information coming in was obviously not right; just people chancing the cost of a postal stamp for a stab at the reward, which was complete rot, anyhow. But what I did piece together was that this Meggie McColl – which wasn’t her real name, by the way – had blagged and lied her way about all over the place, from Liverpool to Blackpool to Birmingham and then eventually down to London. There wasn’t a good word to be said for her, either. The story was always the same: a letter full of indignation from some eminent householder who had employed Meggie in full confidence as a maid, and had later been robbed or exposed to some sort of armed attack by local ne’er-do-wells, which Meggie could confidently be found to be at the bottom of. There was always confusion about her real name, and her origins, and some said she was from Liverpool, and some said she was from Scotland, or further afield. Whatever the case, Meggie seemed to last about a year in a position, maximum, and then she always disappeared like a puff of smoke. Much like at Number 98 Hanover Terrace, although there the crime was obviously much more serious. A hanging offence, of course.’

  ‘She’d stayed more than a year at Number 98 though, hadn’t she?’ said Posie softly. ‘If she was in a photograph from the previous Christmas? So something kept her there.’