Page 76

Silence settled across the room. Miss Decima sighed.

‘Fucking idiot thought he was the only man on earth who read Greek mythology,’ she muttered. ‘Lavinia: who was Cadmus?’

She blinked. ‘Oh! He’s in The Bacchae. The father of King Pentheus, who built Thebes. It’s all very exciting, really. He sows these dragon’s teeth, and they grow into these big, strong men called the Spartoi who –’

‘A character creating an army of strong men by sowing teeth,’ Miss Decima said. ‘Honestly, he couldn’t have made it clearer. Who else would know exactly what Lavinia, Theodora and Éimhear were planning to do? Who else had their own reason for wanting to get rid of them … Or, at least, get rid of one of them?’

She let her gaze fall on Flora; on Cath; on Cartwright; on Mrs Ripley. Then, at the last moment, she turned.

‘Why don’t you tell us, Mr Gussett?’

It took a moment for people to realize what she had said. Then, one by one, all eyes turned to Clarence, still kneeling beside his aunt. He was gazing back at Miss Decima with a face so calm, so gentle, that it chilled my blood more than any amount of hatred ever could.

53

Thursday, 22 June, 4.03 p.m.

No one spoke. All the while, Clarence Gussett stayed right where he was, looking back at Miss Decima with that same calm, eerie smile.

‘Property, not people,’ sighed Miss Decima. ‘Was that not always the adage of militant suffragism? I should have remembered that. If I made one key mistake in this investigation, it was assuming that it was a case about people. Someone choosing to target Constable Watts because of their own beliefs in suffrage or socialism or Home Rule, for example. All red herrings. The basis for this tawdry murder was, fittingly, far more tawdry than that. Property. More specifically, Miss Gussett, your lavish Kensington Gore apartment, which I believe Clarence is in line to inherit.’

Theodora was aghast. ‘How dare you! Clarence would never –’

‘On the contrary,’ said Miss Decima, ‘he’s already done it twice. How was it he inherited the money needed to start his dentistry practice? It was the untimely deaths of both your parents in quick succession, was it not, Mr Gussett?’

Clarence stayed stock-still on the floor, like a man posing for a photograph. Miss Decima held up a document in her lap.

‘It was Crace’s police file that gave me the evidence I needed,’ she said. ‘Crace’s body was so badly burned, he could only be identified by his dental records. Which meant faking Sir William’s death would work only if the corpse’s teeth were identical to the records provided to the coroner. I had a feeling about who had supplied those very records and, sure enough, when I sent one of the Ivys to the address provided in the file, it showed that they came from the office of Sir William’s dentist: Mr Clarence Gussett of West End Lane in Hampstead, who changed all of Sir William’s documents to match the teeth of the homeless man they had kidnapped –’

‘Utterly preposterous!’ Theodora cried. ‘Clarence, tell them!’

She waited for her nephew to deny it all, but of course he didn’t. He remained silent, frozen.

‘I am afraid you have been living with an expert in fakery, Miss Gussett,’ said Miss Decima. ‘He faked a nervous illness in order to drop out of medical school, preferring instead to kill his own parents and live off the inheritance. He faked a passion for political suffrage in order to get closer to you and ensure his name would feature prominently in your will. He’s been successfully hiding his debilitating addiction to the cocaine injection for years now. Quite an immoderate monkey to have on your back, Mr Gussett – no wonder you need so much money!’ She smiled. ‘To lose one parent is a tragedy; to lose two smacks of carelessness; to lose both of them, and then an aunt just a few years later, is frankly incriminating. Thus, your only answer was to have your aunt killed by someone else – namely, the state. Hanged at the gallows for murder, ensuring that her inheritance passed down without anyone ever suspecting you of the crime. All you had to do was find someone willing to do your dirty work for you!’ She leant back with a smile. ‘I imagine you started making secret enquiries with the men you saw sabotaging female suffrage meetings – men who, you imagined, would leap at the chance of framing a suffragette – and they led you right to Sir William. A perfect partnership! Am I on the right lines, Mr Gussett?’

Clarence Gussett stayed silent. Theodora was no longer arguing, instead gazing at him, open-mouthed with horror.

‘Getting an alibi for the night of the murder was simple enough,’ said Miss Decima. ‘You just had to make sure you were waylaid at work. You booked that fake appointment, didn’t you, Mr Gussett? You went out for lunch and telephoned your secretary. I imagine it was you, too, who sent the letter to Chief Constable Cartwright with Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh’s real address; you who made the telephone call to the police yesterday, telling them they’d been searching the wrong bedroom. You must have been around the corner in Myring’s Place, watching from the shadows: a fitting place for a skulking, treacherous fraud with evil intentions, no?’

Clarence’s eyes were racing around the room, taking in the police officers, the locked door, the crowd blocking his escape. I could tell that he was calculating his next move, working out whether to speak or stay silent, how much to say, how much to leave out.

Then – all of sudden – he started talking.

‘Part of the deal that I made with Sir William,’ he said cheerfully, ‘was that I was always kept out of any discussions. His men had no idea who I was – my involvement was not to be mentioned anywhere. If I’d known the idiot was keeping a record of it all, I probably would never have taken part. Ah, well!’

He let go of his aunt’s hand and stood up, dusting her off his palms. It was like he was finally getting rid of her, once and for all. The mask was off now: the timid, eccentric Clarence Gussett act was finished. We were dealing with the real thing.

‘It’s a relief to be done with it all,’ he said. ‘Pretending to suffer from a nervous illness is exhausting; there were times when it took so much out of me that I almost believed it to be true. Pretending that I thought there were Detectiphones in my apartment and a policeman watching me in the sewers … though of course, I was looking for something down there. Care to take a guess, Miss Decima, with that inestimable brain of yours? After all – you’ve worked everything else out admirably, haven’t you?’

‘You may direct your question to my assistant, Stephen,’ she replied. ‘He’s the one who worked it out.’

I felt myself turn scarlet. She could have given me a brand-new suit and a golden crown and it wouldn’t matter as much as what she’d just said about me, to a roomful of people.

‘You were looking for a scorpion,’ I said. ‘The one you secretly bought and kept in your bedroom, so you could extract its poison. The one that managed to escape and has been killing pigeons for the last week.’

Mr Gussett smiled. ‘Leiurus quinquestriatus, otherwise known by the splendid moniker of the deathstalker scorpion. Fascinating species. Their poison causes paralysis – death, too, in a large-enough quantity. But I correctly deduced that a small amount, administered with regular injections, might ensure that a grown man could be kept lightly sedated over several hours –’

‘Enough to mean that Constable Watts wasn’t going to run or fight back,’ I said. ‘Your knack for knowing how much cocaine to use on your patients – and to sate your own addiction – gave you a good idea of how much would be needed to work properly. And you always wanted to be an explorer, didn’t you? Rare animals, strange plants, exotic countries – that must be where you first heard about them.’