Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

Marx saw that I was about to make a reply to this and glared to me to keep quiet.

‘We had so many plans for our liberation. Utopian ideas maybe, but we both dreamt of a world where we could be free. When we were alone there was no servant and no master but equal souls, true comrades joined together in love. But she!’ he seethed through gritted teeth. ‘She ruined everything!’

‘How?’ asked Marx.

‘That Cardew woman’s designs upon poor young Beckworth were for securing herself a social position. She preyed upon his sensitive nature and his vulnerability. When she discovered where his affections really lay she tried to insist upon my dismissal. She threatened to expose His Lordship to open scandal if he did not honour his promise to elevate her to her long-desired status as Lady Beckworth. On the night of his death she had sent him a hateful letter and a green carnation.’

‘Oh, that,’ Marx interjected. ‘What is the significance of that flower?’

‘It is a symbol of our condemned nature. She wanted him to know that she knew the truth about him. He was utterly distraught, at his very wits’ end. He had so much to lose. We argued, we had drunk much and taken laudanum in an attempt to quell our anxiety. We ended up fighting and in a struggle Beckworth slipped at the top of the stairs and fell to his death.’

Just then came a loud banging on the front door of the squalid den. There was a chorus of groans as the pitiful wrecks roused themselves from their berths. The game-playing Malays stood up and started jabbering at each other. After two or more heavy thuds the door was broken down and a shrill whistle pierced the night air.

‘Police!’ a voice called out as a group of uniformed men, with a plain-clothed man at their head, stormed into the smoke-filled room.

‘Gentlemen,’ the leader hailed us. ‘I thought you might lead us to the quarry.’

It was Inspector Bucket of the Detective.

‘But where…?’ he went on.

We looked to Pasero’s bunk. In the commotion he had slipped out of the den through a back way.

‘I’ve men posted outside,’ said Bucket. ‘He won’t get far.’

We rushed out into the cold air. A figure could be seen making its way to the dockside.

‘There he goes, then. And get on, my lads!’ called Bucket to his men.

But it was myself and Marx that were closest to him as he reached the edge of the slippery quayside. He looked at us for a second, panting like a hunted animal, his breath steaming into the night. He gave a defiant laugh, then dropped out of sight. There was a muffled splash. As we reached the waterside we saw him flounder in the dank waters below. He struggled awhile, his body protesting against its fate, though there seemed a strange tranquillity in his countenance, as if his mind had already given up the ghost. The policemen arrived and made an attempt to drag him out of the dock with a boat-hook. But by the time he had been fished out of the dirty water he was quite cold and dead.

We gave our statement to the affable Inspector Bucket, whose curious forefinger wagged with increasing agitation at our strange testimonies. The ‘Case of the Ten Lords a-Leaping’ was, as they say, closed, and it seemed likely that the inquest into the death of the last Lord Beckworth would record a verdict of accidental death. A perturbing conclusion perhaps, but I must confess that our minds were reeling at the unfolding of events over the last few days. My friend’s great intelligence seemed particularly vexed at all these provocations of meaning; confounded, even.

‘Struggle,’ he murmured to me as we made out way back to his lodgings as the dawn broke. ‘It’s all struggle.’

A week later I was much relieved, when I met with my colleague as he came out of the British Museum, to see that he had been coaxed back to his great work after this strange diversion. A curious-looking young man was with him who bore an intense expression on his countenance, and wore some kind of tweed hunting-cap on his head. After the briefest of formalities the young fellow left us.

‘Who was that?’ I asked Marx.

‘Oh, a student, or, rather, he had just left university with prodigious talents and is unsure of how, exactly, to apply them. Very much like myself when I was his age,’ Marx mused. ‘He has lodgings in Montague Street and is using the Reading Room to develop methods of analysis. He feels sure that a scientific approach to criminology is to be his vocation. I told him of the Beckworth case and he was most interested. I believe he wants to pursue a career as a detective.’

‘As a police officer?’

‘No, as a civilian.’

‘What a peculiar notion,’ I commented.

‘Yes, it’s a pity that such a gifted mind cannot be persuaded to apply itself to our cause but I’m afraid he’s utterly unpoliticised.’

‘The youth of today,’ I sighed.

‘Yes. Though he is a committed materialist. It’s just that he is content to analyse human behaviour and interactions without a desire to change them. Though I must confess that I can now see the fascination in uncovering evidence, interpreting disclosures and clues. One could get lost in the deduction of class and society. He is working on a puzzle presented to him by a high-born friend of his from college, a superstitious observance of an ancient family known as the “Musgrave Ritual”. It is a litany of questions and answers that have no apparent meaning but -’

‘Marx!’ I barked at him.

He stared at me in shock for a second then his face broke into a broad grin.

‘No more of this amateur sleuthing,’ I reproached him. ‘There’s work to be done.’

‘You’re quite right, my dear Engels,’ he assured me, patting the thick sheaf of notes he had been making for the next part of Capital. ‘We’ve the greater crime to solve.’

To the end of his days, Charles Dickens forbade all talk about the slaying of Thaddeus Whiteacre. The macabre features of the tragedy – murder by an invisible hand; the stabbing of a bound man in a room both locked and barred; the vanishing without trace of a beautiful young woman – were meat and drink to any imaginative mind. Wilkie Collins reflected more than once that he might have woven a triple-decker novel of sensation from the events of that dreadful night, but he knew that publication was impossible. Dickens would treat any attempt to fabricate fiction from the crime as a betrayal, an act of treachery he could never forgive.

Dickens said it himself: The case must never be solved.

His logic was impeccable; so was his generosity of heart. Even after Dickens’s death, Collins honoured his friend’s wishes and kept the secret safe. But he also kept notes, and enough time has passed to permit the truth to be revealed. Upon the jottings in Collins’s private records is based this account of the murder at the House of the Red Candle.

A crowded tavern on the corner of a Greenwich alleyway, a stone’s throw from the river. At the bar, voices were raised in argument about a wager on a prizefight and a group of potbellied draymen carolled a bawdy song about a mermaid and a bosun. The air was thick with smoke and the stale stench of beer. Separate from the throng, two men sat at a table in the corner, quenching their thirsts.

The elder, a middle-sized man in his late thirties, rocked back and forth on his stool, his whole being seemingly taut with tension, barely suppressed. His companion, bespectacled and with a bulging forehead, fiddled with his extravagant turquoise shirt pin while stealing glances at his companion. Once or twice he was about to speak, but something in the other’s demeanour caused him to hold his tongue. At length he could contain his curiosity no longer.