The Curse Of The House Of Foskett (The Gower Street Detective Series) Read online

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  For Robert, with love.

  Introduction

  It is almost a year since I wrote the introduction to my first memoir of my guardian, Sidney Grice – The Mangle Street Murders – and its modest success in these days of paper shortages has encouraged me to give an account of our next major case, the terrible series of events in the autumn of 1882.

  When I last wrote I was sheltering in the cellar of 125 Gower Street with Hitler’s bombs pulverizing London. The Blitz continues, though with less ferocity, and the Nazis have learned the folly of conducting raids in daylight hours. The threat of invasion still hangs over us, though, and the sight of old men and skinny youths training for the Home Guard is a touching reminder of our determination not to be conquered.

  This case of which I now write nearly destroyed my guardian, but it marked an important shift in our relationship. Until then I had been present only under sufferance. When Sidney Grice began these investigations, however, we both acted under the assumption that I should accompany him. This I continued to do whenever possible, apart from our great rift, until the day he died.

  M.M. 3 September 1942

  1

  The Curse of the Fosketts

  Legend had it there was a curse on the House of Foskett. Giles, the first Baron Foskett, it was said, had been present in 1417 at the siege of Bowfield during the long Wars of the Roses and led the second wave of attackers through the breached walls. The defenders had placed their wives and children in the Church of St Oswald for sanctuary but a bloodlust was upon the attackers and they forced their way into the building, slaughtering everybody who sheltered there.

  As if this were not outrage enough, Baron Giles, upon discovering a young nun hiding in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, ravished and slew her upon the side altar. With her dying breath the nun put a curse upon him and his descendants, and the moment Baron Giles left St Oswald’s he was attacked by a pack of rabid dogs and torn to pieces in the street.

  Baron Giles’s son and heir was by all accounts a good man. He gave generously to the poor and paid for St Oswald’s to be refurbished and a memorial built for his father’s victims. His pious life did not save him, however. He had no sooner re-dedicated the chapel than the statue of Mary came crashing down, splitting his skull open so that he died in agony ten days later.

  And so the catalogue continued – hangings, impalements, disembowelments – as various members of the Foskett family met untimely and violent ends. Sometimes the curse skipped generations and was consigned to family history, but sooner or later it reappeared. Nor was the curse confined to the male side of the family. Baroness Agatha drowned in a rain cistern at the age of ninety-five and Lady Matilda, the daughter of Baron Alfred, was decapitated on Brighton beach.

  In 1724, following the incineration of Baron Colin in Mount Vesuvius, the Foskett title fell vacant and so it remained until 1861 when Reginald, tenuously descended from a nephew of Baron Giles, successfully applied for the right to adopt it. Little good did the honour do him. Within six years of being admitted to the peerage he was pierced through the eye, into his brain, by a stair rod. The wound became purulent and he died, raving in torment.

  Shortly after this The Times announced that his heir, Rupert, had predeceased him on a South Sea island, so it was Reginald’s widow, the dowager Baroness, Lady Parthena Foskett, over whose head the curse hung menacingly now.

  2

  The Dust and the Dream

  The dust had still not settled from the Ashby case, the general opinion being that Sidney Grice had sent one of his own clients, an innocent man, to the gallows. This was not good for business, so much so that when the Prince of Wales lost his signet ring in a house of ill-repute, it was Charlemagne Cochran and not Sidney Grice who was called upon to retrieve it. And the fact that he managed to do this quickly and discreetly only served to deepen my guardian’s depression.

  A couple of cases came his way – rescuing a wealthy northern industrialist’s daughter mysteriously afflicted with blue carbuncles and exposing a fraudulent society for men with ginger hair – but my guardian’s workload was light that summer and, as the days shortened and the leaves fell in the windswept London parks, it all but dried up.

  He took to lying in his bath for hours, clambering out in the evenings for a little dry toast and a lot of tea before limping wordlessly upstairs to lock himself in his bedroom. He did not bother to put his glass eye in but wore a black patch all the time. He was usually a voracious reader but now he would not open a book or even pick up any of his five daily newspapers. However, that was probably for the best. My guardian never took well to adverse criticism and there was no shortage of that in the press or the many abusive letters that were delivered several times a day.

  My mother had died giving birth to me and my father had joined her in the summer of ’81, leaving me the Grange, our family estate in Parbold, but not the means to maintain it. I had never heard of my godfather, Sidney Grice, but my lawyers assured me that he was a gentleman of the highest repute and so his offer to take me under his wing had seemed like a gift from heaven six months ago. But now I was beginning to wonder if I should have struggled harder to stay at home.

  Many evenings I dined alone, forking a reheated vegetable stew around my plate and nibbling chalky bread. Afterwards I would go into the tiny courtyard garden to smoke two Turkish cigarettes under the twisted cherry tree and then upstairs to write my journals. And after that I went to my writing box and pressed the button under the inkwell to open the secret compartment and untie the ribbon around my precious bundle.

  Your letters are so few and I know them by heart but your dear hands held them as mine hold them now.

  I dreamed of you that night. We were drifting in a rowing boat down a holly green river, the sun blazing in the indigo sky and the herons scudding raggedly over us. We had a picnic basket at our feet and a bottle of Champagne hanging into the water and we lay back just holding hands and happy. It was all so lovely until the end. I can never change that.

  I destroyed the last letter you wrote.

  On the first Tuesday of September, however, my guardian came down for breakfast and graced me with a grunt. We sat at opposite ends of the table, me looking at him with his unopened copy of Simpkin’s Diseases of the Human Foot.

  ‘I need a big case,’ he said suddenly, ‘or my brain shall become as stagnant as yours.’

  ‘Something will turn up,’ I said, but he shook his head.

  ‘Who will employ my services now? I cannot even show my face without being ridiculed and abused.’

  I cracked open my egg and pushed it hastily aside. The smell of sulphur was nauseating. ‘Perhaps you need to get away for a bit.’

  ‘A bit of what?’ He picked up a slice of toast, crustless and charcoaled just as he liked it.

  ‘Why don’t we take a holiday?’

  ‘What an absurd idea. Can you imagine me in a striped blazer ambling along gaudy promenades and eating cockles from a paper cone?’

  I had to admit that I could not, but I was delighted to see him so suddenly animated. He leaned over and stretched across to slide my eggcup towards him with his Grice Patent Extendable Fly Swat, and smelled it appreciatively, though he was still very snuffly from a cold.

  ‘Why not visit a friend,’ I suggested.

  ‘A friend?’ He recoile
d in disgust. ‘I have no friend and what on earth would I want one for?’ He shuddered. ‘Really, March, it is quite bad enough suffering your shrill gibberish day and night, week after week, without taking on a friend.’ Sidney Grice tucked into the egg with relish.

  I threw down my napkin. ‘I have lived among what most Englishmen would describe as ignorant savages and met with more courtesy than you are capable of.’

  ‘What is courtesy?’ My guardian dabbed his lips. ‘It is deceit bursting with lies. If I were courteous I should have to tell you that you look nice when to the best of my knowledge you never have and I do not suppose that you ever will.’

  ‘You are the rudest man I have ever met.’

  ‘I hope so for your sake,’ he retorted. ‘A ruder man might express his opinions on your low intelligence or ungainly deportment.’

  ‘Most girls glide about like statues on casters,’ you told me, ‘but you sway and move like a woman. You have blood in your veins, not weak tea.’

  I toyed with the idea of throwing my plate at him, but I was hungry and there was little enough to eat in his house as it was.

  ‘I think I preferred it when you were silent.’

  ‘So did I.’ Sidney Grice ground his burnt toast into a powder and sprinkled it into his bowl of prune juice.

  Far away and below us the doorbell rang.

  ‘Molly has forgotten something.’ He scrunched his napkin on to the tablecloth.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I do what I am unable to persuade you to do – use my ears. She is answering the door in her heavy outdoor boots. Therefore she must be planning on going out for an essential supply.’

  I listened but I could hear nothing until our maid began to mount the stairs to the first-floor dining room.

  ‘You have a caller, sir, a gent.’ Her ginger hair was escaping either side of her white starched cap. ‘He said he must see you on…’ she screwed up her face in an effort to remember ‘…a matter of the outmost importance.’

  ‘Did he give you a card?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ And, as my guardian had deduced, Molly had her outside boots on.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In my pocket.’

  ‘Why not on a tray? Never mind. Just give it to me.’

  Molly held out the card and her employer snatched it away.

  ‘Mr Horatio Green.’ He shivered. ‘What a revoltingly bucolic surname. Where is he now?’

  ‘Outside, sir. You told me to admit no one without your premission.’

  Sidney Grice stood up. ‘Then show him to my study at once.’ He untied his patch. ‘Idiotic girl. You never obey my instructions when I want you to.’ He took a steely-blue glass eye from the velvet pouch in his waistcoat pocket, pulled his lids apart and pressed it into his right socket, checked his cravat in the mantel mirror and pushed back his thick black hair with his hand. ‘You had better come too, March. All this moping about has made you even more irritable and irritating than usual.’

  3

  The Visitor and Party Tricks

  I followed him down the stairs into his study, his shoulder dipping jerkily with his left leg. A plump, middle-aged man in a navy-blue coat and charcoal trousers was already seated to the right of the fireplace, his hand to his cheek. This was my usual chair but Molly would never have dared allow him to sit in her employer’s. The moment we appeared our visitor jumped up and grasped my guardian’s hand.

  ‘Mr Grice. It is such a thrill to meet you. I have read so much about you in the newspapers.’

  ‘You will have been hard pressed to find an accurate fact then,’ Sidney Grice told him.

  ‘And you must be Miss Middleton.’ Mr Green compressed my hand in his. ‘I believe you helped Mr Grice solve the Ashby stabbing case.’

  My guardian adjusted his eye. ‘She may have accompanied me on that case,’ he said, ‘but I can assure you she was nothing but a hindrance. Ring for tea, Miss Middleton.’

  ‘I shall try my idiotic best.’ I pulled the bell rope twice as the two of them sat facing each other, then got myself an upright chair from the round central table.

  ‘Go on then.’ Mr Green flushed with excitement and Sidney Grice blinked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Make a series of ingenious observations about me.’

  My guardian stretched languidly. ‘I do not perform party tricks.’

  But our visitor leaned forward and urged, ‘Oh, come on. Tell me something about myself.’

  Sidney Grice waved a bored hand. ‘Apart from the fact that you are a pharmacist…’

  Mr Green touched his cheek. ‘How the blazes..? It is almost supernatural. Do I have faint stains of chemicals on my hands?’ He scrutinized his fingers. ‘I cannot see any.’

  ‘It is written on your calling card,’ my guardian said.

  ‘Well, that is not much of a trick then, is it?’ Mr Green said. ‘Do another one.’

  ‘You are suffering with an earache,’ Sidney Grice told him, ‘though not as much as I might wish.’

  Mr Green stroked his left ear in confirmation. ‘I have been a martyr to it since my eardrum was burst by an earwig when I was fourteen.’

  I laughed. ‘But surely the belief that earwigs burrow into one’s ear is an old wives’ tale?’

  Mr Green became sorrowful. ‘I am living proof that it is not.’ He put his fingertips to his left temple. ‘But a child could have worked that out from the cotton wool in it. Say something cleverer.’

  Sidney Grice scratched his head in exasperation. ‘How am I supposed to know what is or is not obvious to a man of your mean acumen when everything about you is obvious to me? For instance, you are clearly a bachelor.’

  Mr Green thought about this and said at last, ‘Very well. I give up. How did you work that one out?’

  ‘Three reasons,’ my guardian explained. ‘First, the button stitching on your waistcoat is at least four years out of style – five, if you live in one of the better squares, which you do not – and no wife would allow her husband to be abroad so unfashionably attired. Second—’

  ‘Yes, but what if I choose to ignore sartorial trends and my wife is too meek to prevent me?’

  Sidney Grice gave a clipped laugh. ‘Yet more proof that you are unmarried. You must have been reading the small-brained scribblings of Mr Dickens if you believe that such a thing as a meek wife exists outside the bindings of one of his tawdry novels. To proceed, you do not wear a wedding band – which many men do not – but since you are a Roman Catholic—’

  ‘Can you smell incense on me?’

  ‘I can smell something,’ I said, but both men ignored me.

  ‘Your rosary is hanging out of your coat pocket,’ Sidney Grice observed. ‘Third, and most conclusively, you are such an insufferable man that no sane woman would ever consent to be your wife and an insane woman is barred by law from entering into the marriage contract.’

  Mr Green clenched his jaw and half stood. His mouth worked itself into forming a reply but then he beamed and fell back, laughing heartily. ‘Capital. Capital. Your rudeness is as famous as you are, Mr Grice, and now I shall be able to tell all my customers that I have been a recipient of it.’

  ‘I can give you much more than that to report,’ my guardian said. ‘I could discourse at length upon your imbecilic grin, for example.’

  Mr Green blushed. ‘I can take a joke as well as any man but—’

  ‘So how was your trip to the dentist?’ I asked, and my guardian glanced at me.

  ‘But—’ Mr Green said again.

  ‘I can smell it on you,’ I explained, ‘and you keep touching your right cheek.’

  Mr Green clapped his hands. ‘Why, you will be putting your guardian out of work. I—’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me why you are taking up my time,’ Sidney Grice broke in, and our visitor’s smile vanished.

  ‘It is a bad business, Mr Grice,’ he said as Molly came coughing in with the tea.

  4


  The Society of Fools

  ‘A very bad business,’ Mr Green said when Molly had gone. ‘Have you ever heard of final death societies, Mr Grice?’

  ‘I have three such societies in my files,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘and in all of them some of the members were murdered or died in extremely dubious circumstances, but, as I was not called upon to assist in any of the cases, they remain unsolved.’

  I poured three cups of tea and asked, ‘What exactly is a final death society?’

  ‘It is an association of fools,’ my guardian said, ‘with large estates and microscopic traces of common sense.’

  Our caller straightened indignantly. ‘Let me describe it in less emotional terms,’ he began.

  But it was Sidney Grice’s turn to bridle. ‘The whole world knows I have no emotions,’ he said, ‘other than my twin loves – of possessions and the truth.’

  ‘Milk and sugar?’ I offered and Mr Green nodded.

  ‘The societies are groups of men,’ he explained, ‘though in our case we have two lady members – who either have no heirs or have heirs that they do not care for. They make wills for a sum of money usually based upon the total assets of the poorest member, all of them being independently audited. These testaments are put into the hands of a mutually employed solicitor who will collect and manage their estates as they die and release the total funds to the final surviving member. For his services he takes a twenty per cent share of any increase in the value of the fund. The—’

  ‘In other words,’ Sidney Grice interrupted, ‘all the members have a vested interest in ensuring the prior demise of their fellows.’

  ‘Which is why I am approaching you.’ Horatio Green raised his teacup carefully with both hands. ‘You see, seven of us formed the club and we lodged a promise of eleven thousand pounds each into the fund, the surviving member to receive the grand sum of seventy thousand pounds plus any interest that has accrued in the meantime.’