Page 75

‘Sir William waited on the pavement,’ Miss Decima cut in, ‘until he saw Constable Watts on patrol … which is when his plan began properly. He accosted Watts, telling him that he’d just seen someone sneak into the basement of the building opposite: Number 89, Kensington Gore Mansions. These buildings all have servants’ entrances, which open into the main road –’

‘That’s right!’ said Mr Benson from the back of the room. ‘I’ve said enough times, we need a proper system in place so that –’

‘SHUT UP,’ said all the Ivys at the same time.

‘Sir William led Constable Watts to the basement,’ said Miss Decima, drowning him out, ‘where the rest of his gang were waiting for him. They bundled Constable Watts into one of the empty trunk rooms and kept him there for hours. They bound him and gagged him … but, crucially, they did not kill him. Not yet. It was imperative that Watts was kept alive and unharmed until the final, key moment, so that there were no unusual injuries on his body which might turn up later in a post-mortem. And thus one of the more elaborate elements of this already highly elaborate plan came into play.’

She paused for a moment, relishing the drama. I think my apology had put a spring in her step.

‘Keeping a healthy young man still and silent for an indefinite number of hours, without hurting him, is extremely difficult. Thus, it became necessary to sedate Constable Watts: to keep him temporarily paralysed, unable to fight back or run until the key moment had arrived. To that end, Constable Watts was injected in the neck every half-hour with a small, prescribed volume of neurotoxin. Which was how Mr Benson found him when he stumbled into the trunk room later: three men, standing over Watts, who was collapsed on the floor.’

‘Horrible, it was,’ Mr Benson piped up. ‘And wouldn’t you believe it, those fiends had even taken the time to stockpile contraband goods so that –’

‘SHUT UP!’ said all the Ivys at the same time.

I picked up the thread before it got dropped again. ‘Meanwhile, Sir William was outside, preparing the next part of the plan. Perhaps the maddest part of it all, really. You’d never credit it, but then that was the whole point. No sane person would attempt something so complicated and risky and … weird. No sane person would shave off his beard and change from his beggar’s rags into a stolen police uniform. But that’s who we’re dealing with, remember? A man who’s a … what was the Freud thing you keep saying, Miss Decima?’

‘Pathological paranoid narcissist,’ she replied primly.

I nodded. ‘Yeah, that. Sir William didn’t want to be in the shadows any more, relying on men who he considered inferior to him in rank and stature to do his dirty work. He wanted to be right at the centre of it. And that’s why he disguised himself as a police officer and lay in wait for these three to appear on the Gore.’

I nodded to Lavinia, Theodora and Éimhear.

‘He was waiting for them to start covering the statue of Prince Albert with WSPU ribbons. The risk was beyond belief – after all, one of them was his own niece! What if she recognized him? But then, Sir William had always got away with things. He’d got away with hiding tens of thousands of pounds of debt. He’d even got away with faking his own death. And he was able to do that, in part, because of who he was. Rich people don’t get away with everything, and men don’t get away with everything either, but rich men tend to get away with far more than most. Put that kind of licence into the hands of a psychopath … well, is it really any surprise what he did next?’

I let my words settle over the room.

‘Sir Wiliam waited until the three suffragettes had caused their planned firework distraction and the coast was clear,’ I continued, ‘then emerged and chased them away. He knew exactly where they were planning to go – back to Theodora Gussett’s apartment at Number 89. The other three men were already waiting in place. One was with Mr Benson, holding him captive in the basement; the other two were waiting at the end of the road, hidden in the back of a milk-cart.’ I smiled. ‘The milk-cart again. I even saw it earlier that evening, being driven through the crowd. It was crucial for the plan … because hidden in the back of it was the still-paralysed body of Constable Watts, ready and waiting for the three women they were going to frame for his death –’

‘And here came the one and only slip-up in Sir William’s thus-far-meticulous plan,’ said Miss Decima. ‘Caused by a rash, disgusting and – we might as well be honest – depressingly predictable decision which he made on the spur of the moment. He grabbed Lavinia Welford – his niece.’

Lavinia clamped her hands to her mouth. ‘Oh! Oh … the horrid little pervert.’

‘Indeed,’ said Miss Decima drily. ‘Such is the nature of the man we are dealing with: a turgid mess of gambling addictions, hatred of women and nothing to lose. I could write reams about why someone who’d spent years spitting on his nanny and secretly orchestrating the downfall of the women’s suffrage movement might also decide to accost a young woman to whom he was related, but, quite frankly, we have enough on our plate already.’ She steepled her fingers once more. ‘All that matters is that he was not expecting the devastating headbutt you gave him, my dear. The momentary loss of consciousness meant that he never noticed where his victims ran to next. Rather than running to Theodora Gussett’s apartment, as was planned, they instead ran down into the basement. If he’d seen that … well, then, I suspect that the rest of his plan might have gone perfectly. He’d have found a way to alert the police to where they were, and they would have been arrested for the murder of Constable Watts. Instead, he was undone by an unexpected complication. By chance, the women hid themselves in the very same trunk room that had been occupied by Sir William’s men mere minutes before. A trunk room that the police never found because, mere minutes later, Mr Benson inadvertently hid it behind a stack of cases.’

‘All an accident,’ said Mr Benson quickly. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide, and, even if I did have something to hide, no one can –’

‘SHUT UP!’ said the entire room at once, including Cartwright.

‘Back outside,’ I continued, ‘the last part of the plan was coming together. It had to be done fast – that was why Sir William didn’t have time to double-check that the women had gone where he expected. His men dragged the paralysed body of Watts from the back of the milk-cart and held him upright. By now, most of the neurotoxin he’d been injected with had worn off: they had timed it perfectly. But he was still a big man, and he weighed a ton. That’s why the milk-cart was so important: it enabled Sir William to climb into the back, lean over Watts from above while two men held his arms, and slit his throat from ear to ear.’ I coughed. ‘It was important, that cut. It had to be wide, so that it would hide the telltale needlepoints in his neck. Sir William flung the double hollow-ground reed blade away – it wasn’t hard for him to arrange for that be stolen from your room, Lavinia – and, with a final flourish, he stuffed a WSPU ribbon down Watts’s throat to incriminate the movement. Then he shoved Watts’s body away from the cart, where it landed on top of the blade, and the milk-cart drove away with Sir William hidden in the back, out of the side road and away from the Gore. Which is when I arrived just a few moments later, to find Watts bleeding out in a completely empty road, leaving nothing but a small trail of bloodspots on the cobbles.’

I shook my head.

‘It bothered me, that trail. I knew something was off. If it had been left by someone running away, you’d think the spots would have gone on to the pavement at least once … but they never did, did they? Because they were coming from the back of a cart and landing in the middle of the road – from the blood Sir William had left on his hand, after he’d stuffed that ribbon down Watts’s throat, dripping through the slats and on to the cobbles.’

‘All of which left Sir William free to carry out the final part of his diabolical scheme,’ announced Miss Decima, always keen to take the best bits for herself. ‘A bomb detonated during the coronation ceremony. A milk-cart filled with hatpins and WSPU leaflets. There was no chance that the cart would ever get near the King before the cavalry stopped it, but it didn’t need to. All Sir William had to do was light the fuse, send the horse galloping towards the procession and leave before the explosion. It would be seen as an attack by the suffragettes on the monarchy itself, made in view of the whole world. It would cement the decision that the government had already made to abolish the WSPU, and further draw attention to the three fugitive suffragettes. This was why Sir William posted a large package of hatpins to his niece in the days leading up to the attack; why he had more of them planted in Theodora Gussett’s bedroom; why he filled Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh’s boarding room with them in the days following Watts’s death, along with the dynamite and falsified documents that linked the two crimes together.’ She sighed. ‘But of course even masterminds slip up. They cannot help themselves. The boundless egoism – the same insane self-belief that drives them to commit these unprecedented acts in the first place – is always what undoes them in the end. Sir William had already fumbled his plan with a moment of rank stupidity, grabbing his niece … Now, he undid himself with another. Go on, Stephen, you tell them.’

I blushed with gratitude. ‘He nearly ran me over with that milk-cart on Sunday. I saw him driving it down our road on Tuesday morning, too. He couldn’t help himself: he returned to the scene of the crime, twice. If he hadn’t, I would never have recognized him, and I wouldn’t have connected it to the milk-cart that Theodora mentioned seeing on the day of the murder. He’d have blown up those bombs, fled the country with what little money he had left and spent the rest of his life sunning himself in the colonies under a false identity. In short, he’d have got away with it.’

‘Oh!’ said Flora, her face flushing. ‘I say, that’s terribly clever of you, Stephen.’

No one else complimented me. They were too busy shuffling with discontent. You could feel it in the air: people weren’t happy. Something was off.

‘Beggars belief, doesn’t it?’ said Miss Decima. ‘It is a plan that only a truly demented soul could have concocted. One that relied on a thousand separate elements coming together in perfect harmony. One that relied on Sir William’s police contact knowing that Chief Constable Cartwright would be out that evening; one that relied on the neurotoxin that they used working exactly as planned; one that relied on an entire society falling exactly in line with his own drab expectations.’ She smiled. ‘But I can tell that you have noticed the gaping hole in this explanation. The missing part of the puzzle, so to speak. Sir William’s plan, however elaborate, could surely not rely on so many separate coincidences happening all at once. How, for example, did he manage to fake his own death so convincingly? How was he able to procure a neurotoxin so rare that it wouldn’t even show up in a post-mortem examination? Most importantly: how did he know that Lavinia Welford, Theodora Gussett and Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh were planning to target the statue in the first place? How did he know about the firework distraction, the plan to run back to 89a Kensington Gore Mansions?’

She smiled.

‘You are right to doubt. There is no way that Sir William could have pulled off this murder without an accomplice. Someone who could provide him with all the missing elements that he needed. The evidence is all right there, in his notebook – he had a secret partner with whom he planned the entire murder from the beginning. Someone whom he met in the dark, murky world of the anti-suffrage movement. Someone he referred to throughout by a secret codename, in order to protect their identity: Cadmus.’