Fatal Inheritance (25 page)

‘So this is also London,’ said Carl, looking about him. ‘Another London. Nothing like the one I have visited with such pleasure so many times. Here is another world altogether.’

We were sitting together in a hansom cab, looking for all the world like a couple, and the ambiguity of the situation worked strangely upon my nerves. Hansom cabs will accommodate two, but only in conditions of the most suggestive intimacy, especially when it is very cold, so that even withdrawn deeply under the sheltering hood and with the wooden slats firmly closed over one’s legs, the warmth of the other occupant forms an irresistible attraction. Carl Correns had been paying the most assiduous attention to me since our first meeting, and the fascinating information he had given to me about the true nature of inheritance, combined with his ardent interest in my detective activities, had led me little by little during the course of a dozen or more pleasant rambles, teas and visits to confide all the difficulties of the case to him, and to discuss, analyse and theorise over them with him at length and in great detail. It was a pleasant change to have so supportive an ear and an arm, without the reserve and even the hint of unspoken disapproval that discouraged me from discussing these things with my husband, however much I knew that I could count on him one hundred per cent in the final pinch. The fact was that although Arthur would always stand by me and had done so significantly more than once, I knew that in his heart of hearts he was repelled by the signs of human cruelty and tragedy that invariably emerged during my investigations, and that he preferred insofar as possible to know nothing about them, taking refuge instead in an abstract world of numbers and equations.

But Carl was a professor of biology, not of mathematics, and the vagaries of the life force had an entirely different meaning for him. Just as the use of a mathematical law to explain the unfathomable mystery of inheritance had fascinated him so that he devoted years of his life to resurrecting and re-proving Mendel’s forgotten theory, so was he fascinated by the application of logic and reasoning to the mystery of human behaviour. Each time I saw him, he asked for news of my progress and my discoveries. His youthful face behind the generous blonde beard was radiant with fervour and excitement as we talked, and although we both kept up a polite pretence that this enthusiasm was purely inspired by the stimulation of detection, it eventually became clear to me that it was my presence quite as much as my work which caused his blue eyes to shine with such intensity.

Absorbed by all that I was discovering, I had pushed this observation to the back of my mind for weeks, cheerfully taking things at their face value, letting myself be warmed by Carl’s ardent interest, so different from Arthur’s quietness, and avoiding asking myself questions. But now something had changed, for I needed more than a willing ear; suddenly, now, I found myself in a situation where I was in need of actual masculine assistance in the plan I had outlined in my mind. A plan whose goal was to surprise the revelation of a truth that I feared might otherwise be entirely and definitively unprovable.

There was Arthur, and there was Carl, and I stood between the alternatives thus presented and contemplated them both. Arthur, stable and loving and dependable, but hating it all; Carl, an unknown quantity, exciting and eager and more than willing.

I chose to ask Carl, not knowing exactly what I was choosing when I did so, not knowing exactly where it was all going to lead. I asked him to help me discover the truth, and within myself I was aware that I was referring not only to the truth about Sebastian’s death, but to another truth as well, which desperately called for clarification from within the depths of ambiguity: a truth about the state of my own heart.

Thus it was that I sat in a hansom cab for the first time in my life with a man who was not my husband, pressed together in a proximity so intimate, in spite of the heavy winter coats and wraps, that I found myself quivering with a mixture of nameless feelings, not least of which was acute embarrassment. Carl reminded me of a medieval knight; they chose and served their fair ladies with strong arms and absolute devotion, quite regardless of whether or not the ladies in question were married. It did not appear to have been a question of any importance in the Middle Ages, and, as far as Carl’s mentality was concerned, it did not seem to have increased in relevance since then. But I myself felt torn a hundred ways, between inclination, desire, interest, and the beginnings of what might be a new love, compared to a deeply established and tender one.

There was no use troubling myself over this knotty problem at present. I put my feelings to one side, and decided to concentrate on my plan, or, to be precise, on its first part, which consisted of a visit to Mrs Munn. Thus we drove through the miserable streets of Bermondsey, a splendid steak-and-ale pie of the most generous dimensions reposing in a large box that Carl held upon his knee. The hour was close to supper time, darkness was falling rapidly, and the poverty and misery of the streets through which we drove seemed diminished by the crystal purity of the frosty air, and by the near-absence of ragged passers-by, all but the most courageous of whom had been driven indoors by the cold.

Mrs Munn and her husband lived in the little curve of Jacob Street, separated from the Thames by the Bermondsey Wall, but quite near enough to suffer from all of the unhealthy vapours emitted by that river, what with the filth from sewage and the waste from the leather tanning factories in the area. Having been there on his bag-returning mission, Ephraim had been able to describe the place to me very precisely. I was rather ashamed of that incident, it must be admitted, and determined, perhaps a tad immorally, to make no mention of it whatsoever (let alone provide a much-deserved apology), but I really preferred Mrs Munn to continue perceiving me as a benevolent and beneficial presence in her life. We came out of the cab, Carl paid the driver, and I led him – sniffing the air and looking about him in all directions as though to absorb to the full this new experience of an unknown London – straight to Mrs Munn’s door, and knocked firmly.

She opened it, as I had been certain that she would. A woman like Mrs Munn, with an invalid husband at home, is not likely to be gadding about at suppertime on a dark winter evening. She was amazed to see me, and even more so Carl who, with his Teutonic elegance and beautiful hat, looked quite incredibly out of place in the dirty street, but she invited us quickly inside, probably as much in order to close the door as soon as possible and keep out the freezing draught as from some rusty and little-used sense of hospitality. Still, though, she did not seem displeased to see me, and it was almost with a smile that she called out to her husband that good gracious me, here was company, here was a visit, she didn’t know why.

The fire burned low and the single room was chilly; only a few lumps of coal remained in the scuttle next to the hearth. The only other light was given by a lamp that stood on the table, shedding a small pool of clarity outside which everything else was in semi-darkness. Half the room was taken up by a tumbled bed in which sat a dishevelled man, peering at us with a mixture of curiosity and hopelessness. The only other pieces of furniture were a few wooden chairs, one of them of a particularly solid construction, with a square backrest and a footrest also.

The sight of the pie, which I took from Carl and presented to Mrs Munn at once, caused a stir of excitement. Placing it in a large dish, she set it to heat in front of the fire while I rather awkwardly introduced Carl, not knowing at all exactly how to describe him or explain what he was doing there with me. But Mrs Munn did not seem unhappy to have a strong, able man in the house, and immediately requested the guest to help her install her husband in his special chair. This job, which must have been quite an effort for Mrs Munn to accomplish by herself, was the work of a moment between the two of them together, her expertise aided by Carl’s strength, and Mr Munn was settled at the table with pillows behind him, a rug around him, and the light upon him. There were more introductions and explanations, and the poor man’s manifest pleasure in the unexpected change to his evening routine warmed the atmosphere.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, shaking hands all around. ‘Betty told me all about the talk she had with you,’ he added to me.

‘I told Bill everything you said,’ she put in, setting some plates and glasses upon the table.

‘It seems you want to know more about why the young man took poison, over there where Betty works,’ went on Bill, speaking alternately with his wife in the kind of seamless duo which denotes endless years of closeness, and smiling up at her as she dished up the four rather tired potatoes and the drop of gravy that she had been preparing for their dinner. She now provided each of us with one of these, handed a knife to her husband, and set the pie in front of him to be cut.

‘I have much more to tell you,’ I said. ‘I have come on purpose to tell you everything I know, and to ask for your help with a plan that I have, if you agree with me.’ And as we ate, I embarked on a complete explanation of the entire story, including all my hypotheses and suppositions, and the details of the tangled and cruel past of the Krieger family.

‘That poor young girl, with such a father, and dying like that,’ said Mrs Munn, when I had completed the tale. Her tone held all the simplicity of a background which recognises suffering as an intrinsic part of human life, and does not turn its face away and utter sanctimonious nothings from behind its fan when it encounters it face-to-face, as so many of the ladies I frequent would feel the need to do; not necessarily from a feeling of superiority, although it often appears that way, but from a sense of shame at the very existence of certain phenomena that will not allow them to look them directly in the eye.

‘Yes, the first and worst victim of the whole story was the eldest daughter, Xanthe,’ I said. ‘I do not see how there can be any forgiveness in this world or the next for that kind of sin. I should like to discover her grave, and visit it someday.’

‘One girl died, one girl locked away, and now a young man dead,’ said Mr Munn thoughtfully. ‘It doesn’t stop, does it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t stop. It cannot be a question of chance. It is all related; it must be.’

‘He was a handsome, lively lad, Master Cavendish,’ said Mrs Munn. ‘Not one to poison himself. That’s what I thought.’

‘But you think he didn’t poison himself at all, don’t you?’ said Mr Munn, looking at me astutely. ‘You think he was poisoned because he found all this out and someone didn’t want it known. Isn’t that it?’

‘I don’t know what I actually believe,’ I quickly qualified my thoughts. ‘Let me say that I suspect it. I think that it might be the case, and I am determined to find out. If Sebastian’s death was murder, I do not want it to remain hidden and secret forever as the other crimes did.’

‘But who would have done such a terrible thing?’ said Mrs Munn, looking as though she knew exactly what I was about to say.

‘The obvious candidate is Mrs Cavendish,’ I replied firmly. ‘She is the one who had most to lose from the facts becoming known to her future husband or to society in general, and she may very well have still been in the house when Sebastian returned home. If he left Holloway after the end of visiting hours there, he might have arrived home as early as six or seven o’clock. She says that she had already left for Lord Warburton’s, and she certainly did arrive there, but their paths still could have crossed, perhaps even for just a few minutes.’

‘But her own son!’ cried Mrs Munn.

‘He wasn’t really, you know. Her sister was really his mother, and on that day they both knew it.’

‘Still, though, it was she who raised him.’

‘But you told me yourself that their relations with each other were pleasant but never close.’

‘It’s not so much whether it’s likely she did it,’ intervened Mr Munn, ‘but whether it’s more likely that she did it or that he did it. Someone did it. The poison was given. That’s certain. And there doesn’t seem to have been any reason for him to do it himself. You were surprised enough about it when it happened, Betty, weren’t you? So if it’s between him and her, then why not her?’

‘Or someone else, a third person who came to the flat that evening,’ I said. ‘The fact is, we don’t know, and it will be virtually impossible to prove anything at all unless we take some kind of radical step.’

The firelight flickered over the miserable room with its bed in the corner in which the invalid spent his days, the shaky wardrobe and the table that now looked rather dismal with the plates containing nothing but a few crumbs. But the two faces before me, wrinkled, gnarled with the thousand strains and stresses of a life of illness, hard work and poverty, were nevertheless alight with human feeling and the effort of imagination. Carl hovered over us all without speaking, but listening intently to every word.

‘Go on,’ said Mr Munn, ‘tell us what you think happened. And what you want to do.’

‘This is my idea,’ I said. ‘I believe that Sebastian returned from Holloway very angry, found that his mother was still in the flat, and confronted her with what he had discovered. He couldn’t blame her for the dreadfulness of all that had happened in the past, of course, nor even for having kept it all from him. But I think he could not bear to discover that his real mother had been imprisoned in a madhouse all these years; especially not now that he had seen her, and knew that she was really not mad at all. Holloway is a luxurious and superior place, but it is nevertheless an asylum for insane people, and for the patients it is not much more than a prison. Sebastian must have seen in Lydia what anyone would see: a beautiful, gentle, sweet person, a victim who might arouse anyone’s chivalrous sympathy – and on top of that he found a mother, and realised that twenty-five years of life had been stolen from her, and twenty-five years of a true mother’s love from him. Anyone can understand that he must have been livid.’