‘Madame Eugénie, you see,’ continued Lady Hardcastle, ‘is more properly known as Queenie Huggins from Birmingham. I had a most marvellously illuminating conversation this morning with a stage magician I’ve been introduced to by a mutual friend. You all remember Colonel Dawlish from the circus? He knows all manner of fascinating people, including my new conjurer friend.
‘As well as letting me in on a few tricks of the trade, he was also able to tell me a little more about Queenie Huggins. It seems she worked for a few years as a magician’s assistant on the music hall circuit where she picked up a few of the magician’s secrets and realized that she could make a much better living for herself gulling the lonely and vulnerable by pretending to put them in touch with their departed loved ones. She recruited an assistant, Miss Lizzie Bean – whom you see before you in her ghostly garb – and together they travel the land, rooking the desperate and bereft with their thoroughly convincing spiritualist show.
‘But she spoke to my uncle John,’ said Mrs Spratt. ‘No one here knew I had an uncle John ’cept our Daisy.’
‘Did she?’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Do you remember what she said? She said she had someone with her called John, and John is the most common man’s name in England. It was Daisy who suggested that it was your uncle.’
‘But what about Dr Fitzsimmons’s wife,’ said Mrs Spratt, defensively. ‘She said his June wanted to speak to him.’
‘She did indeed,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘In the end. Did you notice how many names she tried before she hit upon June? There was Jane, Jennifer and Juliet before June appeared.’
‘But the spirits is sometimes hard to hear,’ said Mrs Spratt, with somewhat less conviction. ‘All she could make out was the J.’
‘The J, yes,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Have you ever glanced at the signet ring that Dr Fitzsimmons wears on his wedding finger, Mrs Spratt?’
‘Can’t say as I have, no.’
‘It’s a rather beautiful thing. I asked him about it a few days ago. It’s rather unusual for a man to wear a wedding ring, but he wears his as a reminder of his lost love. If you look carefully you can see the letters C and J entwined on the face. Charles and June. A good charlatan pays attention to such things. A man she had been told was a widower, the initial J on his ring… it wasn’t too much effort for her to work out that J was probably his late wife, and then all she had to do was to try a few names and see which one worked. We all wanted to believe, so we all forgot the three wrong guesses and only noticed when she got it uncannily correct.’
There were frowns and scowls around the table.
‘How did you get your hands free?’ I asked when it seemed that no one else was going to bother.
‘When the lightning struck and we broke the circle in shock,’ said Lady Hardcastle. We simply rejoined our hands in the manner you saw, leaving us free to rap on the table and for Queenie here to manipulate her fishing rod.’
‘But there weren’t no lightning last time,’ said Mrs Spratt, still desperate to cling to the possibility that it might be true, despite the props on the table and the embarrassed accomplice standing before her.
‘That’s true, Mrs Spratt. That was a lucky opportunity for me, I must say. I’d planned to slip off my chair, but the thunder gave me much more convincing cover. No, last time, if you remember, Queenie sneezed and blew her nose extravagantly once the lamp was out. That was her chance.’
‘That’s all very well and good,’ said Mr Holman, the baker. ‘But what’s all that got to do with Mr Snelson here?’
‘Ah, now that’s altogether more convoluted,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘And potentially a great deal more lucrative for our Queenie. Perhaps Mr Arnold would be good enough to pour us all a drink while I tell you the tale.’
While Joe poured fresh drinks for everyone, Constable Hancock led the ghost to a chair and sat her down. Madame Eugénie still hadn’t said anything, but she had made no move to flee and so Sergeant Hancock seemed content to leave her be. If anything, she seemed resigned to her fate, as though this sort of thing were an occupational hazard.
Once we were all settled and had taken a sip or two of our tipples, Lady Hardcastle motioned for silence.
‘Thank you,’ she said once we were all paying attention. ‘I can’t take credit for all the information I’m about to share, much of the hard work was done by my solicitors who scoured company records, birth records, and probate records.
‘Now, the more attentive of you might have noticed that the young lady so ably playing the part of the ghost here, shares a surname with the ghost she has been portraying. It’s not a spooky coincidence, though, she’s his daughter. Mrs Bean left her husband twenty years ago, taking young Lizzie with her, and neither of them ever saw him again. Lizzie is Emmanuel Bean’s “estranged daughter” as the press so melodramatically say.
‘When Mrs Bean knew him, Emmanuel was a rather lacklustre businessman, with a string of failed ventures behind him and she brought her daughter up to believe that he was an abject failure. It was with some surprise, then, I should imagine, that when she heard of her father’s unfortunate death, she learned that he was a partner in a successful timber business in Gloucester. She would have learned, also, that the beneficiary of the considerable insurance policies on the business, the premises which were destroyed in the fire, and the life of her father himself, was his business partner, Mr Nelson Snelson. There wasn’t a penny in the late Mr Bean’s will for his former wife, nor for the daughter he hadn’t seen in all those years. He left his considerable personal fortune to Mr Snelson as well.
‘Now the next part is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that events proceeded thusly. Miss Bean approached her employer, Mrs Huggins, with news that she had missed out on a substantial inheritance, and between them they hatched a plan to try to get the money for themselves. They reasoned that if they could implicate Mr Snelson in the torching of the factory and the manslaughter of Mr Bean, that he would no longer be entitled to the insurance money and that, once Bean’s rightful heir had come forward, the rest of Mr Bean’s estate would be theirs.