Murder as a Fine Art

5

The Sublimity of Murder



DURING THE 1300S, Paternoster Row acquired its name because monks could be heard chanting the Pater Noster, or Our Father, in nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral. In that century, stores there sold religious texts and rosaries. But by 1854, the street was the center of London’s publishing world. At 6 A.M. (according to the bells at the cathedral, telling the faithful to waken and prepare for church services), Ryan and Becker descended from a police wagon.

In early light, a breeze chased the fog and allowed them to study the multitude of bookshops on each side of the street. Many were owned by publishers who, during business hours, placed stalls on the street to promote their various offerings. But 6 A.M. on a Sunday morning was hardly the start of business hours, so Ryan and Becker pounded on various doors in the hope that someone lived on the premises.

An elderly man raised an upper window and leaned out sleepily. “What’s all the noise?”

“Do you work here?” Ryan yelled up.

“Yes. Go away.” The old man started to close the window.

“Police. We need to talk to you.”

“Police?” Although the old man seemed impressed, it took a while before he managed to come downstairs and open the door. He wore nightclothes, including a cap. His white beard curved into his sunken cheeks.

“Those bells are loud enough without you hammering,” he complained. Fumbling to put on his spectacles, he clearly wondered what a uniformed policeman was doing with a ruffian whose red hair wasn’t quite concealed by a newspaperboy’s cap.

“The Opium-Eater,” Ryan said.

“Thomas De Quincey?” Ignoring Ryan and his shabby clothes, the clerk spoke to Constable Becker. “Yes, what about him? You won’t find him here. Saturday was the time to talk to him.”

“We’re looking for books that he wrote,” Ryan said.

The clerk kept directing his attention toward Becker and his uniform. “They’ve been selling briskly. I have only a few left.”

“We need to read them,” Ryan said.

The clerk continued to ignore him, telling Becker, “We’re not open on Sunday. But come back after church. I’ll make an exception for a constable.”

“We need to read them now.”

Ryan passed him, entering the shop.


THE LEATHER-BOUND VOLUME had pages that needed to be cut. Becker hid his surprise when Ryan raised a trouser cuff, pulled a knife from a scabbard strapped to his leg, and slit the book’s pages.

“Be careful how you do that,” the clerk objected. “Customers are particular about how their book pages are cut. Constable, since when do you let prisoners carry knives?”

“He’s not a prisoner. He’s Detective Inspector Ryan.”

“Irish.” The old man nodded as if his suspicions were confirmed.

“Tell us about ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ ” Ryan said.

“Seems like you’d know more about that subject than I would.”

Ryan stared at him so directly that the old man raised his hands in surrender.

“If you mean De Quincey’s essays…”

“Plural? De Quincey wrote more than one essay about murder?” Ryan asked.

“Three. All in that book you’re trying to destroy. De Quincey does enjoy his murders.”

“Murders?”

“After he wrote Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he promised his next book would be called Confessions of a Murderer.”

The two police officers gaped.

“But instead of a book about killing, he wrote three essays about it,” the clerk said, opening the book to show them.

Astonished, Ryan and Becker read about a men’s club where lectures were delivered about the great murders of history. The lectures were called the Williams Lectures, after John Williams, the man accused of the Ratcliffe Highway multiple killings.

“My God, look at how De Quincey praises the murders,” Ryan said. “ ‘The sublimest that ever were committed. The blaze of his genius absolutely dazzled.’ ”

“And here.” Becker quoted in amazement: “ ‘The most superb of the century. Neither ever was, or will be surpassed. Genius. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his.’ ”

“De Quincey sounds insane.”

Ryan and Becker discovered that De Quincey’s latest essay about murder had been published only a month previously. In it, the Opium-Eater described Williams’s two killing sprees for fifty astoundingly blood-filled pages—murders that by 1854 had occurred forty-three years earlier and yet were presented with a vividness that gave the impression the killings had happened the previous night.


Williams forced his way through the crowded streets, bound on business. To say was to do. And this night he had said to himself that he would execute a design which he had already sketched and which, when finished, was destined on the following day to strike consternation into the mighty heart of London. He quitted his lodgings on this dark errand about eleven o’clock P.M., not that he meant to begin so soon, but he needed to reconnoiter. He carried his tools closely buttoned up under his loose roomy coat.


Ryan pointed at the next page. “Marr kept his shop open until midnight. Williams hid in the shadows across the street. The female servant left on an errand. The watchman came by and helped Marr put up the window shutters. Then…”


Williams waited for the sound of the watchman’s retreating steps; waited perhaps for thirty seconds; but when that danger was past, the next danger was that Marr would lock the door. One turn of the key, and he would have been locked out. In therefore, he bolted, and by a dexterous movement of his left hand turned the key, without letting Marr perceive this fatal stratagem.


“His left hand. How does De Quincey know Williams used his left hand?” Becker wondered.


Having reached the counter, he asked Marr for a pair of unbleached cotton socks.


“Unbleached socks? How does he know that? Only the victim and the killer were in the room.”


The arrangement had become familiar to the murderer. In order to reach down the particular parcel, Marr would find it requisite to face round to the rear and at the same moment to raise his eyes and his hands to a level eighteen inches above his head.


“Eighteen inches? How can De Quincey be that precise?” Ryan exclaimed.


This movement placed him in the most disadvantageous possible position with regard to the murderer who now, at the instant that the back of Marr’s head was exposed, suddenly from below his large coat, unslung the heavy ship-carpenter’s mallet and with one solitary blow so thoroughly stunned his victim as to leave him incapable of resistance.


“It’s the same as what happened last night, complete with the unbleached socks we found on the floor. The shopkeeper must have been reaching for them,” Becker said. “Look at this about the baby.”


He found himself doubly frustrated—first, by the arched hood at the head of the cradle, which he beat into a ruin with his mallet; and secondly, by the gathering of the blankets and the pillows about the baby’s head. The free play of his blows had thus been baffled, and he therefore finished the scene by applying his razor to the throat of the little innocent, after which, as though he had become confused by the spectacle of his own atrocities, he busied himself by piling the clothes elaborately over the child’s corpse.


“It’s the same as what we found.”

“Two,” Ryan suddenly said.

“What?”

“Williams committed two sets of killings.” Ryan turned a page to find more horrors: the slaughter of the tavernkeeper, his wife, and the servant twelve days later.

“The tavernkeeper’s name,” Becker said.

“What about it?”

Becker pointed at a line in the book. “John Williamson.”

“So?” Ryan asked.

“The killer’s name was John Williams. In the second set of murders, the victim’s name was John Williamson.”

Ryan looked at him in confusion.

“John Williams. John Williamson. As if they were in the same family,” Becker said, “like a father killing his son.”

“That has to be a coincidence,” Ryan told him. “The commissioner would have mentioned if the killer was related to the victim. Besides, the parallel doesn’t work. Williams was young enough to be the tavernkeeper’s son, not his father. Thinking that way doesn’t make sense. The point is, look at the detail with which the Opium-Eater describes the murders.”


The housemaid was caught on her knees before the fire-grate, which she had been polishing. That part of her task was finished, and she passed on to filling the grate with wood and coals at the very moment when the murderer entered. Mrs. Williamson had not seen him, from the accident of standing with her back to the door. Before he was observed, he had stunned and prostrated her with a shattering blow on the back of her head. This blow, inflicted by a crow-bar, smashed in the hinder part of her skull. She fell, and by the noise of her fall, roused the attention of the servant, who uttered a cry, but before she could repeat it, the murderer descended on her with his uplifted instrument upon her head, crushing the skull inwards upon the brain. Both women were irrecoverably destroyed, so that further outrages were needless, and yet the murderer proceeded instantly to cut the throats of each. The servant, from her kneeling posture, had presented her head passively to blows, after which the miscreant had but to bend her head backward so as to expose her throat.


“It’s as if I’m in the room,” Becker murmured. “Forty-three years after the murders, and the Opium-Eater writes about them as if they happened yesterday.”

“He describes the blood with glee.” Ryan grabbed the book and quickly stood. “We need to talk with him.”

A voice asked, “Who? De Quincey?” Footsteps rumbled down the stairs, preceding the elderly clerk, who held a hymnbook and was dressed to go to church.

“He was here on Saturday, you told us?” Becker asked.

“In that chair over there. Wasn’t comfortable. His forehead gleamed with sweat. Even sitting, he kept moving his feet up and down. Probably needed laudanum. But his daughter brought him cups of tea, and he answered questions from customers, and I must say I sold plenty of books. Are you planning to buy the one you mutilated, by the way?”

“A discount for police business.”

“Who said anything about a discount?”

Ryan put half the price on the desk. “Do you know where he went?”

“Well, I know he lives in Edinburgh.”

“All the way to Scotland? No!”

“But I got the impression that for the next week he and his daughter were remaining here in London.”

“Where?” Ryan demanded.

“I have no idea. Unlike the police”—the old man gave Ryan’s shabby appearance a disparaging look—“I don’t ask people their personal business. Perhaps his publisher would know.”

“Where do we find his publisher?”

“The address is in the book for which you demanded a discount. But if you need to talk to the Opium-Eater anytime soon, I don’t think the address will help you.”

“Why?”

“The publisher’s in Edinburgh, also.”


RYAN AND BECKER hurried from the bookstore and climbed onto the police wagon.

“Waterloo Bridge train station,” Ryan told the driver.

As they sped away, people walking toward St. Paul’s Cathedral looked with disapproval toward Ryan’s rough clothes, seeming convinced that he’d been arrested.

“De Quincey wrote about two sets of murders,” Becker said.

Ryan reacted as if Becker had stated the obvious. “Yes, there were two sets of Ratcliffe Highway killings. What’s your point?”

“Do you suppose there’ll be another set of murders?”

As the wagon came to Waterloo Bridge, buildings gave way to the open expanse of the river with its steamboats, barges, and skiffs adding wakes to the surging waves.

Becker noticed that Ryan looked down at the wagon’s floor rather than at the wide, powerful water. The detective’s grip was tight on the side of the wagon. Only when the wagon arrived on the other side and the river was behind them did Ryan relax his grip and look up from the floor of the wagon.

“Are you all right?” Becker asked.

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“Crossing the river seemed to bother you.”

“Murders are what bother me.”

They reached the arches that supported the Waterloo Bridge train station and ran into its massive structure.

Ryan could remember when railroads hadn’t existed. The first one—from Liverpool to Manchester—had been built in 1830, when he was sixteen. Before then, most transportation had been via horse-driven coach, which—as Commissioner Mayne had noted—could proceed as fast as ten miles per hour, although only the mail coaches, with their system of horse relays, could maintain that pace. Now, with railroads crisscrossing the nation, it was possible to travel at a once-inconceivable sixty miles per hour.

For the system to function, however, arriving and departing trains needed to maintain a strict schedule. The result was a profound change in the way communities thought of time and distance. Prior to the railroad, a village in northwestern England might have had its clocks set at ten minutes after seven while a village a hundred miles away might have had its clocks set for twenty minutes later. The discrepancy couldn’t be noticed when someone traveling via a horse-driven coach required more than ten hours to go from one village to the other.

But now, with trains speeding across that hundred miles in one hour and forty minutes, the difference between the clocks in those two villages was significant. If similar differences existed in every community, a coordinated schedule would have been impossible. Using the measurement of time as determined by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, every railroad clock (and soon every other timepiece throughout England) was set for the same hour and minute, in what became known as Railroad Time.

Amazingly, information could travel even faster than passengers on a train, crossing hundreds of miles not only in a few hours but in an astounding few seconds, because as the railroads spread, telegraph lines were erected next to them. The click-click-click of operators’ keys relayed messages with what had once been impossible speed.

In the train station’s telegraph office, Ryan told the operator to send a message to James Hogg Publisher at 4 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, Scotland, the address inside the book.


People at risk. Send London address for Thomas De Quincey at once.


“You make it sound as if De Quincey’s in danger,” Becker said.

“It might get us a quicker response.”

As they spoke, the message would arrive at the Edinburgh telegraph station. In minutes, a messenger would set out to deliver a sealed envelope to Hogg’s business address, where if the publisher wasn’t available (as he wasn’t likely to be on a Sunday morning), the messenger would ask every neighbor he could find until Hogg’s home address was located.

Ryan sent a separate telegram to the Edinburgh police department.


Murder investigation. Urgent you find James Hogg at this address. Need London location of Thomas De Quincey.


“Now you make it seem as if De Quincey’s a suspect,” Becker noted.

“Well, isn’t he? Edinburgh’s small compared to London. One of these messages ought to get results this afternoon. Twenty years ago, when I was a constable like you, there wasn’t even a train to Edinburgh, let alone a telegraph line. This could have taken weeks.”

“What if Hogg traveled somewhere?” Becker asked. “He might even be in London.”

“Then I’ll order patrolmen to ask at all the hotels in London. One way or another, I intend to find out where the blazes De Quincey is.”


THE MURDER SCENE remained a welter of activity.

As Ryan and Becker jumped down from the police wagon, a constable reported, “The neighbors I spoke to didn’t notice anything, Inspector.”

“Same here,” another said. “The fog and the cold kept everybody inside.”

“I found a dollymop who claims she saw a stranger,” a third added.

“Working the streets last night, she must have been desperate,” Ryan told the policeman.

“That’s one reason she noticed him. Nobody else was in sight.”

“One reason?” Ryan asked.

“She says when she started to approach the stranger, he gave her a look that warned it would go nasty for her if she came any closer. Hardest eyes she ever saw, she tells me.”

“Did she describe him?”

“Tall. Big shoulders. A sailor’s coat and cap. A yellow beard.”

“Yellow? There aren’t many men with that color of beard. We’ll go through the catalogue system and look for a match.” If the man had been arrested in the past ten years, Ryan knew, his aliases, age, height, weight, tattoos, birthmarks, scars, and other identifying characteristics would have been recorded as part of the arrest procedure. “Did she notice where he went?”

“She says she was smart enough to go one way when he went the other.”

“Keep questioning the neighbors. Extend your search even wider.”

Ryan and Becker entered the tavern and went to the back room, where two patrolmen watched the handcuffed prisoner.

Still claiming to have been drunk, the prisoner didn’t remember where he’d been the previous night or who could vouch for his presence at the time of the murders.

“His boots have hobnails,” Becker pointed out to Ryan. “The prints we found didn’t.”

“ ’Course my boots’ve hobnails. Can’t afford to keep resoling ’em,” the prisoner muttered.

“There’s always a chance he changed his boots,” Ryan said. “But he can’t change their size.”

“Let’s find out.” Becker tugged a boot from the complaining prisoner and went outside to compare it to the prints, the casts of which were now dry.

“Too small,” he reported when he came back.

Ryan rubbed the back of his neck. “Almost out of possibilities.”

“Detective Inspector Ryan?”

Ryan turned toward a constable in the doorway.

“There’s a boy here looking for you. He has a telegram.”

When Ryan opened it, he smiled. “De Quincey’s London address.”


Continuing the Journal of Emily De Quincey

In all my adventures with Father, I can now add one more: being arrested. Constable Becker and the ruffian who said his name was Detective Inspector Ryan insisted that was not the case, but the somberness of their expressions and the haste with which they wanted to place us in a police wagon belied their assurances.

“Go with you to Scotland Yard? Why?” Father demanded as the fog swirled around us.

“We have questions,” the ruffian said.

“About what?”

“The Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

“Everything I have to say about them is in my latest book. Why do you care about something that happened forty-three years ago?”

“Not forty-three years ago,” the ruffian said. I have difficulty referring to him as a detective inspector.

“Of course it was forty-three years ago,” Father replied. “Do detectives not have schooling? Subtract eighteen hundred and eleven from—”

“Last night,” Ryan said.

“Excuse me?”

“The murders happened last night.”

The statement made the air feel colder. Even in the fog, I could see Father straighten.

“Murders last night?” he whispered.

“Can anyone account for your activities between ten and midnight?” Becker asked. From Ryan, the question would have been challenging, but the constable made it sound respectful.

“No.”

“Please tell us where you were.” Again, the constable’s tone was assuring.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Ryan interrupted rudely. “Does your laudanum habit weaken your memory?”

“My memory is excellent.”

“Then perhaps you were too affected by the drug to know what you were doing last night.”

“I know what I was doing. I just don’t know where.”

Ryan shook his head. “What opium does to people.”

Constable Becker stepped forward, kindly asking me, “May I have your name, miss?”

“Emily De Quincey. I’m his daughter.”

“Can you help us understand what your father is trying to say?”

“I meant what I said. It’s perfectly clear,” Father told them. “If you’d asked me what I was doing instead of where I was, I could have told you I was walking.”

“Walking? That late?” Ryan interrupted again as the fog continued to engulf us.

I began to sense a stratagem that they had calculated before we arrived, the ruffian trying to make us feel threatened while the constable was solicitous, in the hopes that the contrast between them would confuse us into making careless statements.

“My father walks a great deal,” I explained. “Especially if he is making an effort to reduce his laudanum intake, he spends much of his time walking.”

“One summer in the Lake District,” Father said proudly, “I walked two thousand miles.”

“Two thousand miles?” Ryan looked puzzled.

“It’s cold out here,” Father said. “Instead of pursuing this conversation for the neighbors to hear, may we go inside?”

“Where we need to go is Scotland Yard,” Ryan insisted.

“And is there a necessary on your wagon, or will you stop on the way so that we can use one?” Father added with a turn to me, “Excuse the reference, my dear.”

Now Father was the one employing a stratagem. He has never used a genteel synonym for a privy.

“I forgive you, Father.”

“The necessary in the house is remarkable,” Father told Ryan and Constable Becker. “Our housekeeper tells me it is modeled after a water device introduced at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park three years ago. ‘A flush with every push,’ I believe the motto is. She says that the inventor charged a penny a flush. Almost six million visitors to the Great Exhibition. Imagine, a penny from each of them.”

Ryan sighed. “Very well. Let’s go into the house.”

Mrs. Warden hovered as the four of us entered the parlor. Her look suggested that she expected nothing less than that the Opium-Eater would be questioned by the police.

“I’ll light a fire,” she said, obviously wanting to overhear.

“Don’t bother,” Ryan told her. “We won’t stay long enough for the room to get warm.”

“Father hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast. Please, bring tea and biscuits,” I told Mrs. Warden.

But she didn’t move.

“Please,” I emphasized.

Mrs. Warden reluctantly went to do her duty, her hooped dress brushing against the doorway. I assumed she would do her best to eavesdrop from the kitchen.

There was a lot of activity after that, with everyone—thanks to the cold outside—using what Father kept calling the necessary. It is on the main floor. Although this well-to-do section of London is serviced by a company that pumps water into homes, the pressure of the water is not dependable. A necessary on the upper floor would not receive enough water to function.

During the confusion of the coming and going, I noticed that Father went upstairs, however. Soon afterward, he returned to the parlor. Despite the cold temperature of the room, his brow had a film of moisture. This morning the moisture—caused by exertion—had been shiny, but now it was dull, and from experience, I knew that could mean only one thing.

“Oh, Father,” I said with disappointment.

He shrugged. The left side of his overcoat had a bulge, no doubt caused by a flask of laudanum. I might have expected it, given the pain he feels when relating to strangers.

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, Father’? Is something the matter?” Constable Becker asked, glancing from my face to my father’s. The lamp in the parlor showed that the constable has a scar on his chin. Despite it, he is not difficult to look at.

“My daughter is merely indicating that she is fatigued.”

“Quite the contrary, Father.”

“Last night,” Ryan said. “You went walking?”

“I have been restless lately,” Father said. “I do not feel shame by admitting that my debts are considerable. At one time, I had obligations to pay rent on six lodgings.”

“If not for all your books, Father, you wouldn’t have needed most of them.” I turned to tell Constable Becker, “He fills one house with books and then rents another and another.”

“That is family business, Emily. No need to share the details. Some landlords were so pitiless that they pursued me into court and even into jail.”

“Jail?” Ryan asked, straightening.

“In jail, how was I to work and pay my debts and support my dear now-departed wife and what were then eight children? Thanks to friends who paid my bond, I was released, but then of course I owed my friends as well as the landlords, the butcher, and the baker, and you can see how everything mounted. Sometimes, to avoid the bailiff, I was forced to sleep in haystacks, but that was nothing compared to when I lived on the cold streets of London when I was seventeen.”

Becker frowned. “Miss De Quincey, does your father always talk this way?”

“What way?” Father wanted to know, puzzled.

“So many words so quickly.”

“Not quickly,” Father rejoined. “It’s everyone else who talks slowly. I hang on to their words, wishing they would proceed with their thoughts. Constable Becker, I don’t wish to be forward, but blood is seeping through the left knee of your uniform.”

“Blood?” Becker looked down. “Oh. I must have torn one of my stitches.”

“Stitches?”

“Last night, I was attacked by two pigs.”

Now it was Father’s turn to look baffled.

Mrs. Warden squeezed her hooped dress through the doorway, carrying a tray of tea and biscuits that she set on a table. She poured the tea but then stood in the background.

“Thank you,” Ryan said with a tone of finality.

Disappointed, Mrs. Warden returned to the kitchen, where she no doubt continued to eavesdrop.

“The murders,” Father said.

“Yes,” Ryan said. “Last night near Ratcliffe Highway.”

Father’s blue eyes contracted. “How many victims?”

“Five. Three adults and two children.”

“Oh, my,” Father said. With a look of defeat, he reached into the left side of his coat, pulled out a flask, and poured a ruby liquid into his teacup.

“What are you doing?” Ryan asked.

“Taking my medicine.”

“Medicine? What kind of medicine comes in a flask? Is that alcohol?”

“No. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. But no.”

“Don’t tell me that’s laudanum.”

“As I said, I’m taking my medicine. I’m subject to severe facial pains. Laudanum is the only way to relieve them.”

“Facial pains?”

“And a stomach disorder.” Father took a deep swallow from his teacup. “It dates back to when I was a young man.”

Constable Becker pointed. “But you poured at least an ounce.”

Father took another swallow.

“Stop.” The constable reached for the teacup. “Good heavens, man, are you trying to kill yourself?”

Father pulled the teacup close to him, preventing Constable Becker from grabbing it. “Kill myself?” The film of sweat on Father’s brow became more noticeable and yet duller. “What a strange idea.” He pointed toward an object that Ryan held. “I see you have my latest book.”

“ ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,’ ” Ryan said.

Father swallowed more liquid from his cup. “Yes, that is an essay in the book.”

Becker looked at me and said, “Miss De Quincey, perhaps you’d like to join your housekeeper in the kitchen or else go to your room.”

“Why on earth would I wish to do that?”

“I’m afraid our conversation might disturb you.”

“I’ve read Father’s work. I know what it contains.”

“Even so, what we need to talk about might shock you.”

“In that event, if I find it shocking, I shall leave,” I pronounced.

No one said anything for a moment. Ryan and Constable Becker glanced at one another, as if determining how to continue.

“Very well, if you insist on remaining,” Ryan said. “In eighteen eleven, on Ratcliffe Highway, John Williams entered a linen shop that was about to close. He used a mallet with the initials J. P. to shatter the heads of the shopkeeper, his assistant, his wife, and his infant. Then he slit the baby’s throat.”

It was my impression that Ryan was needlessly graphic in an effort to persuade me to leave the room, but I steeled myself and showed no reaction.

“That is correct,” Father said.

“The same thing happened last night in the Ratcliffe Highway area,” Ryan told him. “Except that two children were killed, not one.”

“Two children?” Father slowly set down his cup. “Oh.”

“We have numerous questions,” Ryan continued. “Why do you know so many precise details about murders that occurred forty-three years ago? Why, in all that time, did you persist in praising those murders? Why did you feel compelled to write about them in extremely graphic detail as recently as last month? Finally, I’ll ask you again, where were you at ten o’clock last night?”

“And I’ll answer again, I was walking the streets.”

“Which streets?”

“I have no idea. I was lost in my thoughts.”

“You expect us to believe that you paid no attention to your surroundings?”

“In the fog? Even if I hadn’t been preoccupied, there weren’t any surroundings to notice.”

“Preoccupied about what?”

“A personal matter.”

“When it comes to murder, no topic is too personal for us to ask about.”

I couldn’t keep silent any longer. “This is outrageous. Surely, you are not suggesting that my father had something to do with the murders?”

“He’s an expert in them. He’s obsessed about them.”

“Murders forty-three years ago!” Embarrassed that I’d raised my voice, I moderated it, but my tone was nonetheless stern. “My father is a professional magazine writer. On occasion, he writes about sensational topics so that he can help publishers sell their magazines. Murder is a popular topic.”

“Last night it certainly was,” Ryan said. He looked at Constable Becker, as if giving him a cue to take over.

“Miss De Quincey,” Becker said, obviously trying to win me over, “do you have any idea when your father might have returned from walking the streets?”

“No.”

“Do you know when he went out?”

“I heard his footsteps on the stairs about nine o’clock.”

“An hour to reach the shop at ten,” Ryan said to himself. “It’s do-able for a man accustomed to walking a great deal.”

“Did you hear him return?” Constable Becker asked me.

“No.”

“Three o’clock!” Mrs. Warden called from the kitchen.

“That is true,” Father said. “I returned at three o’clock.”

“Plenty of time for you to have walked back from the shop,” Ryan murmured to himself.

I no longer cared that I raised my voice. “Look at this man! He’s sixty-nine! He’s short! He’s frail!”

“Thin,” Father said. “But please, Emily, not frail. This month alone, and it’s only the eleventh, I walked one hundred and fifty miles.”

“Do you honestly believe my father has the strength to bludgeon three adults with a… what did you say was used?”

“A ship carpenter’s mallet,” Becker answered.

“It sounds heavy.”

“A sturdy tool.”

“Look at my father’s arms.”

They turned in Father’s direction, and perhaps it was the effect of the laudanum, but he seemed smaller in the chair, his shoes barely touching the floor.

“What you describe would have been impossible for him,” I emphasized.

“Alone,” Ryan said. “But two people could have done it, one with the knowledge and one with the strength.”

“You are making me impatient,” I said. “The next thing, you’ll suggest that I’m the one who helped Father kill all those people. Would you like to know where I was at ten o’clock last night?”

“Honestly, Miss De Quincey, I don’t think—”

“In bed. But I’m afraid I don’t have a witness.”

Color rose to both men’s beard-stubbled cheeks.

“A ship carpenter’s mallet?” Father asked.

“Yes,” Ryan answered. “You understand the significance?”

“The parallel was that exact?”

“More than can be imagined. The mallet had initials stamped into it by a nail. Would you care to guess what the initials are?”

“J. P.? It’s not possible.”

“But it is. The initials are indeed J. P., the same initials that were on the mallet used in the murders forty-three years ago, the same initials that you wrote about in your essay on how murder is such a wonderful art. Now I must insist”—Ryan stood—“that you come with us to Scotland Yard, where you can answer our questions in a more appropriate setting.”

“No,” Father said. “I won’t come with you to Scotland Yard.”

Ryan stepped closer. “You’re mistaken. Believe me, sir, you will come with us to Scotland Yard. Whether under your own power or under duress, that is your choice.”

“No,” Father repeated. He drank the last of the laudanum in his cup. “Not Scotland Yard. I’m afraid there is only one place to discuss this.”

“Oh? And where might that be?”

“Where the murders occurred.”