Frances agreed to take the case, but she thought how useless it would be to have either husband or wife followed to discover which one was being truthful as both would be on their guard. The hearing was due to come to court in three weeks, so there was very little time to achieve anything.
At the offices of the Chronicle, Frances read the report of the inquest on Edwin Antrobus’ maternal uncle, thirty-seven-year-old Mr Charles Henderson, which had taken place in Paddington on 14 September 1863. The principal witness was his nephew, then aged twenty-six, who had found the body. Although the young man had borne himself well in court, the Chronicle’s report stated that from time to time he could not refrain from shedding tears and attracted considerable sympathy.
Charles Henderson had died three days earlier at a family gathering at his home on Craven Hill. It had been an informal dinner, attended by a Mr Pearce, who was accompanied by his wife and two daughters and Mr Henderson’s elderly aunts. During the course of the evening the party had removed to the drawing room, and there had been some conversation on the subject of ornamental snuffboxes, since Mr Henderson collected them, and he offered to show the company a new acquisition that was in a glass case in his study. The study was locked, and he said he would fetch the key and return shortly. Several minutes passed before one of the aunts commented that her nephew was taking a long time and she thought he must have mislaid the key.
About a minute or two later there was a gunshot that appeared to come from within the house. Edwin Antrobus, telling the rest of the party to remain where they were, went out into the hallway and called up the stairs to his uncle, but there was no reply. He ran up to the study and found the door open, his uncle slumped across the desk and a recently discharged pistol and its polishing cloth on the floor beside him. He had been shot through the temple.
There was a pause in the testimony during which the witness was overcome with grief, and the coroner asked for a glass of water to be brought.
When Antrobus was able to continue he said that as soon as he saw his uncle he knew that the case was hopeless. He had left the study and closed the door behind him, returned to the parlour, quickly ordered that everyone should remain there and sent a servant to fetch a doctor. He then stayed with the other guests until the doctor arrived.
Shown a pistol he agreed that it was the property of his uncle, who usually kept it unloaded and locked in a cabinet in his study, together with a supply of ammunition. His uncle kept it as a sporting item although he rarely used it. He himself had never handled the pistol, in fact he was sure that neither he nor anyone else in the house would have had the slightest idea of how to load and fire it. He had given the matter careful thought and as far as he was aware his uncle must have been alone in the study when the shot was fired as every other person in the house was accounted for.
The question of Mr Henderson’s state of mind was of paramount importance. He was an unmarried man of independent means and generally of a cheerful disposition and good health. There had been allegations that he was prone to melancholy but this his nephew firmly refuted. Henderson had sometimes suffered from the migraine, which had required him to retreat to a darkened room – there was a chaise longue in the rear parlour where he liked to recline – but after he had rested he was as well as any other man.
The coroner reviewed the evidence. He saw no reason why Mr Henderson should have taken his own life. It appeared that he had himself unlocked the study door, taken the gun out of its case and polished it, perhaps in order to show it to his guests as it was of unusual design. Although he usually stored the gun unloaded it was possible that he might have mistakenly put it away previously with a bullet still in it, and while being polished, it had accidentally discharged, killing him. The presence of the cloth supported that theory, as did the fact that the study door was found open. In his experience men who retired to their rooms with the intention of ending their lives always did so behind a firmly closed door.
The jury had no difficulty in returning a verdict that Charles Henderson’s death had been an accident.
Frances concurred, but she could see why Edwin Antrobus felt that his inheritance had been tainted by blood. Whether the incident and his grief had had anything to do with his disappearance fourteen years later seemed unlikely.
It was always a pleasure for Frances to entertain her uncle Cornelius Martin to tea. The elder brother of her absent mother, Rosetta, his kindness to Frances when she was a child was the best and truest paternal guidance she had ever known. Frances had grown up under the cold and unappreciative eye of her father William, whose energies were largely devoted to the upbringing and education of her brother Frederick, and the firm, practical hand of William’s sister, Maude. Valued only for her work in the home and the shop, and given no more schooling than was necessary for those duties, her enquiring mind had sought out further knowledge in her brother’s books and her father’s library, and it had been fed with stimulating experiences when Cornelius had taken Frederick and herself on outings.
Her uncle was a lonely man, still missing his wife after twelve years of widowerhood. On the death of her father Frances had found that unwise investments had left her almost penniless, and the business had been sold to pay debts. Cornelius had generously offered her a home and a simple but secure life, but the celebrity that had descended upon her when she solved her first murder case had brought unexpected commissions, and she had taken the adventurous step of becoming a private detective. Cornelius had not been offended, simply concerned, and he often called on her to reassure himself that she had not been murdered or, worse still, become a depraved woman.
Frances had long forgiven her uncle for keeping secret the fact that her mother had not, as she had always been told, died when she was three but had deserted her father for another man. She had never been able to discover the identity of that man, or whether her mother still lived, mainly because she had made no determined attempt to do so, from fear that knowing the answers might be worse than ignorance. Sometimes it required a very conscious and deliberate effort on her part not to look for her mother. Such was her extreme restraint in this area that she had done no more than painstakingly scour the registers held in Somerset House for any record of her mother’s death or even a bigamous marriage, but she had found nothing. Although she tried to put it from her mind, the mystery still gnawed at her, all the more so because she had discovered that she had a younger brother living, the son of her mother and her unknown lover, the lover who might well be her own natural father. The only clue she held was a letter of her mother’s referring to the man as ‘V’.
Recently, Frances had re-examined her parents’ marriage certificate and seen that while one of the witnesses was her aunt Maude, the other was called Louise Salter, a name with which she was unfamiliar. The Bayswater Directory had no record of any householder of that surname. Frances had no wish either to call upon her aunt Maude or invite her to her home, which would have resulted in a fierce lecture on her inappropriate way of life and an unwanted revival of memories of childhood neglect. A far pleasanter prospect was to speak to her uncle.