Part 37 (1/2)

*b.u.t.tercup,' I said. *Her dress was b.u.t.tercup before she dyed it black.'

My guardian looked at me.

*How long have you known that?'

*A few weeks. A lady I met on the train told me. I did not think anything of it.'

*You did not think anything.' His face flushed. *If I had been in possession of that fact...' He pa.s.sed a hand over his forehead. *We shall come back to that later.'

*I am sorry.'

*I do not care if you feel remorseful or not.' He shook his head in despair. *Let us continue. Mrs Dillinger sees that she is in danger of losing William, especially if he finds out she has been lying to him.'

*What lie?'

*Why, she is no more carrying than I am.' He clicked his fingers. *I was never completely happy with her swelling so, when I was pretending to help that fat common woman in the coffee shop with her hat, I took a pin. I penetrated Mrs Dillinger's b.u.mp with it when I goaded her to attack me, the whole length of a four-inch shaft, and she did not even blink.'

*But William would have realized sooner or later.'

My guardian topped up his cup.

*How can I put this delicately?' He put the pot down. *I cannot. Grace Dillinger would not have let William near her whilst she was supposed to be with child a no doubt claiming it was doctor's orders, and she could pretend to miscarry once they were married. There was no legal impediment to their union, just an inconvenient daughter, and I have checked the records using Mr Hartington, the famous birth detective from Bath. Grace Dillinger was definitely Sarah's mother.'

*But why does she still pretend to be with child?'

*In all likelihood she is blackmailing other men with whom she has had relations, and think how much more willing they would be to pay once they knew they could be connected through her to such a major scandal.' He started to flip the coins again. *Where was I?'

*She was in danger of losing William.'

*Ah, yes, and Mrs Dillinger is not a woman who likes to lose. She goes into the shop, selects a knife from the cabinet a one short enough to hide up her sleeve but long enough to do the deed a and goes back into the living room.' The halfpennies were clicking furiously now. *Sarah turns her back on her mother, which suits Grace perfectly. If you stab somebody from behind they cannot see the blow coming, but she is too experienced to stab Sarah in the back where all the problems with hitting the ribs and the spine arise-'

*Experienced?'

*Obviously she had already killed her husband. It is too much of a coincidence that he had been stabbed to death by a third party. Perhaps she had killed others before that, most likely Matilda Ta.s.sel and her two daughters. I do not know yet but I shall.' He rotated his teacup to make the handle parallel with the spoon. *So she slipped the knife into her daughter up and under the ribs. Death would be instantaneous and she would not get splattered with blood, and there would be, as we discovered on the floor and walls, a great deal of blood in the last spasm of that burst heart.'

I twisted a lock of hair around my first finger. *So Grace Dillinger deliberately and calculatingly killed her own daughter?'

*In her mind she was killing the girl who had stolen Mr Dillinger's affection and looked likely to keep William Ashby.'

I picked up my tea, but my hand was shaking and I put it back on the tray, slopping it into the saucer.

*This is not natural.'

The unlit coals s.h.i.+fted in the grate.

*It is uncommon but by no means unknown.' He slipped the coins back in his pocket. *In Greek mythology Medea murdered her own children to punish Jason, and I could give you half a dozen similar modern examples from my files.'

*But surely when William sees what has happened he is horrified.'

*Of course.' He raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. *But this is where Mrs Dillinger shows her true metal. She screams. William rushes in. He has a horror of blood and probably never even touched his wife's dead body. Mrs Dillinger is in an apparent frenzy of grief. Her daughter threatened her with the knife, she tells William, and in her mother's attempts to take it off her Sarah was accidentally stabbed.'

*You know it was an accident,' I quoted.

*Precisely.' His hands rose further apart. *Hence William's seemingly bizarre insistence on sticking to that claim to the very end. He genuinely believed that this was the case. His mother-in-law knows that the police will not be so gullible, however, especially when they find out about her relations.h.i.+p with William, as she knows they will. So she tells William that they must make it look like the frenzied attack of a maniac. They must copy the Slurry Street murders as best they can, thus the multiple stabbings.'

*And the smearing of Rivincita on the wall.'

*Quite so.' My guardian touched the scar on his ear. *Remember I asked Parker if the body had been washed, and he promised me that it had not. The small amounts of blood around the other wounds and the lack of sprayed droplets around them showed that the cuts were made shortly after and not before she died.'

I struggled with my thoughts. *But when you inserted the probe into the wound you told us that the killer was left-handed, and Grace Dillinger is right-handed.'

*I had not considered the possibility of an initial attack from behind,' Sidney Grice said, *as all the other wounds were clearly inflicted from the front.'

*So then she leaves and William cries out Murder,' I said, but Sidney Grice shook his head.

*If only it were that simple. Grace Dillinger is all too aware that Alice Hawkins knows enough to hang one or both of them, and she cannot be sure that William will not tell the truth and be believed. You met him and he was such a patently genuine man that it was difficult to imagine he might be lying. She kills two birds with one stone. Alice has to go and William has to do it. He is in a state of shock and a man in shock becomes as a sleepwalker.'

*I have seen it after battle,' I said. *Men wandering about in a daze. Some of them did not even notice they had been severely injured.'

*I have heard it was so after Waterloo.' My guardian got to his feet. *Everything is unreal and William knows that, whatever he does, he will awaken and find that it was just a dream. Grace Dillinger is a very persuasive woman. He does not want to see her hanged for a dreadful mishap.'

*Especially as she is carrying his child,' I said, *and he knew that he could be convicted as an accessory. So he would go to the gallows first because they would wait until she gave birth before they executed her.' I found myself winding my hair so tight that it hurt. *Then their baby would be imprisoned in an orphanage and treated as the child of monsters and therefore a monster itself.'

*Exactly.' He paced the room again. *It is all or nothing now and Ashby has to continue the deception to its nightmarish conclusion. Grace is but a weak woman and cannot do the job. William must do it for them both and their baby. He cannot bring himself to touch the knife that killed his wife, so he takes the other knife of the same design and goes out of the house through the yard and along the alleyway on to Chandler Street, slipping in through the back entrance and down into Alice Hawkins' room. But where to hide?'

*In the old meat safe that she used to hang her things,' I said. *Dear G.o.d, I cannot imagine what went through his mind while he waited. Every creak of the house must have terrified him.'

*But nonetheless there he stands.' Sidney Grice picked the ebony rule from his desk. *For an hour, or maybe more, until at last he hears the door open and Alice return to her room after having taken her dog for a walk. It is dark by then. She goes to the shelf to light a candle and Ashby springs out.' My guardian clutched his rule like a dagger, hacking the air wildly as he spoke. *It is a botched job. He swings the knife around in a blind panic, hardly bearing to look at what he is doing to this innocent girl who had befriended them, only wanting to silence her screams.'

*She fought back.' I closed my eyes. *Poor Alice tried to defend herself... all those wounds to her arms and hands...'

*And that is why the wounds bleed so much. She is still alive until she finally succ.u.mbs to that one last desperate lunge that snapped the blade off inside her lacerated body.'

*Her little dog,' I remembered. *It must have tried to protect her.'

*A stout kick would be enough to finish that off.' I had never seen Sidney Grice so animated. He threw himself into miming every movement. *Ashby staggers out of the room, fighting for air. He runs off and is nearly out of the gate when he realizes he has forgotten something, but what? He leaves the weapon anyway.'

*Rivincita,' I said, and he snapped his fingers.

*Of course. Ashby remembers and walks back. The devil alone knows what demons he summons to help him re-enter that room and be confronted by what he has done, and to dip his finger into the freshly flowing blood that so horrifies him and daub on the wall before he runs away. The alley is always flooding and has flooded again whilst Ashby is out. He hurries through the sewage and into his own back yard.'

*Which was how the blood got on to the gate handle.'

My guardian placed the rule carefully on the mantle shelf and took a breath. *Ashby takes off his shoes, rinses the mud down the sink and goes back in to the house. Meanwhile Grace has thought of a refinement to the plan. The Slurry Street Murders were supposed to have been committed by an Italian. So why not provide such a suspect?'

*James Hoggart.'