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‘How the whole murder was planned!’ said Miss Decima, merrily cutting him off. ‘Such is the nature of the man we find ourselves dealing with. A psychopath of the highest order: a man who believed himself untouchable. A man who was prepared to chance unimaginable risk in order to frame three women for a crime they did not commit!’

Lavinia, Theodora and Éimhear all sat gobsmacked on the settee.

‘But … why?’ exclaimed Theodora. ‘I’ve never met Sir William Crace in my life!’

‘That was far from his concern, my dear,’ explained Miss Decima. ‘All that ultimately mattered to Sir William was that the three of you were members of the WSPU. I’ll take it from here if I may, Chief Constable.’

She leant back in her chair while Cartwright opened and closed his mouth uselessly.

‘Something complicated, masquerading as something simple,’ said Miss Decima grandly. ‘That is always how I imagined this murder was accomplished. I was even more correct than I realized. People believe that suffragettes are wild and uncontrollable, that if given free rein, they will tear men apart limb from limb. This murder relied on such a bias, and on many more. There is no more effective way to get what you want than by playing on people’s pre-existing fears.’

She steepled her fingers again.

‘You may remember,’ she continued, ‘that Sir William lost his seat as a Liberal MP in the last election. It was a loss that many attributed to the government’s handling of the suffragette movement: a ludicrous claim, believed only by those whose established disregard for women clouded what little judgement they might otherwise have possessed. Sadly, Sir William was one of them. He blamed the WSPU entirely for his change in fortunes, for the desperate situation he found himself in.’

She held up a handwritten letter.

‘Behold – a letter sent last year to my nephew, Lord Conrad Stockingham-Welt, which I found in his personal effects several days ago. In the letter, Sir William explains to his old childhood friend that he’s run into a series of financial difficulties and is in need of a loan. Begging, really. He makes it quite clear, in rambling and occasionally desperate prose, that he blames the suffragettes for his predicament … rather than his notorious gambling addiction. Your once-wealthy uncle was up to his neck in debt, my dear.’

Lavinia squeaked with surprise. ‘Oh! But Egg was always so generous –’

‘Quite,’ said Miss Decima. ‘That generosity allowed him to appear wealthy, and to live on credit for a short while, but not for long – and certainly not after losing the power and influence afforded to his seat. He had long fought against female suffrage while he was in office: it’s right there in his voting record, clear as day. But it seems that his actions against the WSPU extended far beyond that … Care to do the honours, Chief Constable?’

Cartwright wearily consulted the leather notebook. ‘It appears that Sir William had been secretly financing attacks on WSPU meetings for almost three years – paying hired goons to commit disruptions and so on. This, it seems, brought him into contact with a number of men who held similar views on the female suffrage movement, which –’

‘Which is where he found the other three men involved in this crime!’ said Miss Decima, under no impression that she was repeatedly interrupting. ‘For a while, Crace was content to terrorize individual campaigners, but after the loss of his seat he became obsessed with the idea of bringing down the WSPU permanently: of hobbling the female suffrage movement for a whole generation. And it seems that, on this occasion, Sir William was determined to do the dirty work himself.’

She laughed.

‘And why not? It was only a matter of time before his debts overtook him: in his eyes, he had nothing left to lose. Add to that a towering self-regard, a misjudged confidence in his own abilities, a sneering contempt for anyone of the fairer sex or working class, and the assumed infallibility and chronic risk-taking of your common-or-garden psychopath … and you have all the makings of a murder so byzantine in its workings, so ambitious in its aims, so monstrous in its true nature, that no one in their right mind would have seen it coming. A murder that relied on the principle of Occam’s Razor: that everyone would draw the simplest conclusion available, including a chief of police, because the truth was so outlandish that it would have been impossible to believe.’ She turned to me. ‘Stephen! Why don’t you carry on from here?’

It took me a moment to collect myself, largely because I’d just learnt that I’d been saying Occam’s Razor wrong for the last four days and no one had bothered to tell me.

‘Sir William’s plan was certainly complex,’ I said. ‘Even I doubted it was possible at times. Maybe that’s what’s been muddling my head these last few days. Making me feel like the killer was everywhere, watching me, following me. Wicked things can do that to you … and this plan was as wicked as they come. Diabolic, in truth.’ I paused. ‘You might even say it was Mephistophelian.’

Every person in the room was silent, hanging on my every word, except for Miss Decima, who was sighing quietly.

‘Perhaps the best place to start,’ I said, ‘is the bomb in Sir William’s mansion. That had to happen first, in order for everything else to work. Sir William had to fake his own death because you can’t suspect someone of murder when they’ve been dead for nearly three months, can you? Luckily, one of his gang knew all about building bombs. They made it appear like it was a furnace fire – they even made it so that the study would be the worst hit, which handily provided a reason for every document that Sir William kept to be destroyed. Letters from debt collectors, unpaid bills and so on. A broom to his footsteps.’ I cleared my throat. ‘What was more difficult was making it look like Sir William had been killed in the fire, too. They needed a body. Sadly, there’s no easier place to find bodies than the streets of London.’

I folded my hands. I thought back to Maggie, the homeless woman looking for her Joe – she’d been right all along.

‘They searched the streets for days,’ I said, ‘until they found a homeless man that fit the bill. Someone of a similar age to Sir William, with a similar height and weight. They plied him with booze until he passed out, kidnapped him, then dressed him in Sir William’s clothes and left him to die in the blaze. The heat of the fire was so bad, his body was more or less beyond identification.’

I moved along quickly, hoping no one would ask the obvious question before the right moment.

‘Their plan worked perfectly … that is, until Constable Watts came along. He was the one who started asking tricky questions about the case – realizing that it was a bomb rather than a faulty furnace. It turns out one of Sir William’s gang had connections to the Metropolitan Police Force – that was how they first got wind of it. Sir William realized quickly that they had to get rid of Watts … and, as luck would have it, the next part of his plan involved the murder of a police officer. So why not kill two birds with one stone? Thanks to their police connections, they were able to ensure that on the day of the demonstration, Constable Watts was placed on duty around the Hall. Not hard, given how many officers were being shipped in to help control it.’ I shook my head. ‘A more cautious killer would never have dreamt of making such a reckless decision – but remember who it is we’re dealing with. Sir William thought himself indestructible. He made decisions that were, not to mince words, demented. Which is exactly what led to the next part of his plan. To spend the morning of Saturday, 17 June, right across the road from the planned murder site … in disguise.’

I let the detail settle over the room.

‘You never pay beggars much mind, do you? You block them out. You avoid looking at them. Especially nowadays, when there are so many. And that was exactly what Sir William was relying on. All Sir William had to do was grow out his beard, cover up his bald head with a hat, and wear some dirty clothes … No one was ever going to think he was that MP who had died three months ago. He planted himself over the road from the Hall, where he’d have a view of everything that he needed, thinking that not so much as a glance would come his way.’ I smiled. ‘Which is when I stopped to talk to him. He tried to fob me off at first. But then I suppose he realized he could use me as part of his plan. The veiled suffragette: a sinister woman seen sneaking around the Gore in the hours before a brutal murder.’ I shook my head. ‘I’ve spent days trying to work out who that woman was. Trying to piece together where she hid, where she went. No wonder I couldn’t find her – she never existed. It was all nonsense that Sir William invented on the spot, to sow doubt and discord.’ I smiled again. ‘A mysterious and ghostly woman in black, sneaking down the road to commit vengeful murder … It was just as Miss Decima said. This was a crime that fitted what people already wanted to believe. That was precisely what would allow the next part of his plan – however impossible – to work.’

I paused. There was something I’d been thinking about a lot in those last tense hours, waiting in the parlour in silence. Something that had to be said.

‘Something complicated disguised as something simple. We had that wrong, in a way. At the heart of this case is something incredibly simple, but that everyone makes complicated. People find every reason under the sun to say why women shouldn’t have the vote. They say it’ll ruin families and punish working-class men and upset the colonies and cause more problems than it solves. Even in the suffrage societies, no one agrees on what needs to be done. But the simple truth, however you slice it, is that women not having the vote is just wrong. No amount of arguing can ever change that. And if working-class men not having a vote is wrong, too, then … well, two things being wrong doesn’t make one of them more right, does it?’

I didn’t dare look at Miss Decima because then she’d know that I was apologizing to her, and she’d never let me forget it.

‘I’m sorry,’ Chief Constable Cartwright suddenly snapped. ‘Shouldn’t I be the one explaining all this? It’s a police matter and –’