PRAISE FOR THE FRANCES DOUGHTY MYSTERY SERIES
‘If Jane Austen had lived a few decades longer, and spent her twilight years writing detective stories, they might have read something like this one’
Sharon Bolton, author of the best-selling Lacey Flint series
‘A gripping and intriguing mystery with an atmosphere Dickens would be proud of’
Leigh Russell, author of the best-selling Geraldine Steel novels
‘I feel that I am walking down the street in Frances’ company and seeing the people and houses around me with clarity’
Jennifer S. Palmer, Mystery Women
‘Every novelist needs her USP: Stratmann’s is her intimate knowledge of both pharmacy and true-life Victorian crime’
Shots Magazine
‘The atmosphere and picture of Victorian London is vivid and beautifully portrayed’
www.crimesquad.com
‘Vivid details and convincing period dialogue bring to life Victorian England during the early days of the women’s suffrage movement, which increasingly appeals to Frances even as she strives for acceptance from the male-dominated society of the time. Historical mystery fans will be hooked’
Publishers Weekly
‘[Frances’] adventures as a detective, and the slowly unraveling evidence of multiple crimes in a murky Victorian setting, make for a gripping read’
Historical Novel Review
‘The historical background is impeccable’
Mystery People
This book is dedicated to all who suffer from hyperacusis and those who are working to make their lives better.
CONTENTS
Praise for the Frances Doughty Mystery Series
Title
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by the Author
In the Frances Doughty Mystery Series
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
All through the long hot summer of 1880 the thick, dark, greasy waters of the Paddington Canal Basin bubbled with noxious gases. The warehouses and inns that flanked the wharf side were so closely crowded and decayed that each building seemed to be standing only because it could lean on the one beside it. Porters like swollen crows toiled back and forth unloading the barges that brought bricks, coal, timber and cattle to this busy terminus of the Grand Junction Canal. Towering dust hills, hot with decay, were constantly fed by carts piled with rubbish culled from the ashbins of the metropolis, and ragged women crawled over the smoking debris, sifting the rotting material for anything of value. The worst of the stench was by the cattle pens, where animals waiting to be transported to market were crowded into stalls hoof-deep in dung, and the semi-fluid waste swept from the streets of Paddington by scavengers accumulated in overflowing slop pools. Liquid filth drained freely into the stagnant waters of the basin, which also served as a common convenience to the numerous inhabitants of the barges. When warm summer breezes passed over the canal, they carried poison into the homes of Bayswater and flowed like a cloud of infection into the wards of nearby St Mary’s Hospital.
Concerned residents had addressed increasingly urgent complaints about the nuisance to the Paddington Vestry, that body of well-meaning gentlemen responsible for the highways and health of the parish, and a report had concluded that widespread sickness and early deaths amongst those employed in the area of the Paddington Basin was due not so much to trade in offensive material but bad air from the miasmic slurry that filled the canal. The Grand Junction Company that managed the waterway had often expressed itself willing to deal with the hazard, but words were cheap and easy, and the task of cleansing the four-hundred-yard-long basin and the canal approach was a monumental and daunting prospect. Admittedly, the waters were only five feet in depth, but at the bottom was a thick layer of clinging foetid mud into which all manner of revolting material had sunk and which when disturbed emitted the suffocating odour of bad eggs.
The protest came to a head in August when a deputation of influential citizens confronted the vestry with a petition signed by over six hundred ratepayers, deploring the filthy and unwholesome state of the Paddington Basin, whose water, according to a professor of hygiene, was ‘nothing better than sewage’. Faced with the horrible prospect of a withholding of rates, the vestrymen finally took action and secured an agreement that the basin would be cleansed. The eye-watering stench that hovered over the canal and its environs meant that nothing could be achieved in safety during the heat of summer, but early in November teams of labourers arrived to carry out the unpleasant task.
As the work commenced, thousands of people poured into the area and assembled for the free spectacle of the great canal laid bare. From St Mary’s Hospital all the way to Westbourne Park, the murky sulphurous waters were pumped away, and shapeless globs of detritus were slowly revealed. The labourers set to with shovels, and as they worked a grim atmosphere settled over the scene as the men, their clothes, bodies and faces smeared with mud, toiled without speaking. In places the deposits they dug into were two or three feet thick, and from the layers of semi-solid sludge a few recognisable forms began to emerge: bricks, broken and rusted fragments of chain, the metal portions of carts and barrels with some splinters of darkened wood. There were bones, too, of animals fallen or thrown into the canal, or the gnawed remains of meals. Had any of the fragments been human, which was not impossible, they were many years old, long disarticulated and beyond any prospect of knowing to whom they had once belonged and how those lost individuals had died.
There was only one moment when the labourers recoiled and the crowds gasped. Work stopped, and a pail of clean water was brought to better reveal the horror and consider what ought to be done. Protruding from the upper layers of mud was something more recent, a ribcage, and clinging to it some tattered fragments of clothing rotted to a black pulp. It was attached to something grey and glistening, smelling fouler than the mire from which it had emerged. A spine and a cranium, its jawbone fallen away but still with some flesh congealed into a glutinous mass, its shape a perverse travesty of what it had once been: a face.
Seven months later, with the canal imperfectly cleansed and refilled, and the water rather less dangerous than before, the identity of the person – a man, judging from the shape of the skull – whose remains had been found and removed, examined and argued over, was still a mystery.
Frances Doughty, Bayswater’s youngest and only lady detective, had not imagined that she would be employed in the case, which seemed to be more appropriate to the mortuary table than the consulting room, but unexpectedly, she was about to receive a visitor who wished to engage her. Many Bayswater ladies came to Frances about matters that concerned their husbands, and she had often observed that the difficulties associated with a deceased husband were as nothing compared to those that attended one who was living. Mrs Harriett Antrobus, however, had a more complicated problem. Some three years ago her husband Edwin had journeyed to Bristol on business and failed to return or communicate with his family and friends. Mrs Antrobus was convinced that he had met with an accident and died, but in law he was alive and could not be declared dead until either a body was found and identified or a total of seven years had elapsed. The situation was compounded by the fact that Edwin Antrobus’ will, which could not be proved but existed in a legal limbo, had been drawn up under a misapprehension which had plunged her into grave financial difficulty.