“By the way, I have something to show you when you have time,” Doyle told Ian as the three men stepped into the icy December air, leaving Bacchus alone in the empty flat, with only the steady ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall to keep him company.
CHAPTER FIVE
When Ian arrived at police chambers, he was startled to see Aunt Lillian pacing in front of his desk. She looked agitated. At first he thought she had come to continue their conversation from the night before, but one look at her face told him otherwise.
“What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“You remember my friend Elizabeth Staley? From the séance?” she added, seeing his blank look.
“Of course—the schoolteacher. What’s happened?”
“We were to breakfast together this morning, as we often do after a session with Madame, but when I turned up, she was—” Lillian turned away, her jaw working, like a fish gasping for air. “I found her in her flat . . .”
“Perhaps you should sit down.”
Lillian shook him off, taking a deep breath. “She was at the bottom of the basement stairs, as if she had fallen. But,” she said, looking him in the eye, “something’s not right.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come with me and I’ll show you. It’s not far from here.”
“I just have to check with—” Ian began, but as he spoke, the door to DCI Crawford’s office opened, and his massive head poked out.
“Go with your aunt,” Crawford said. “If there’s a murderer on the loose, best we find out earlier rather than later.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Ian. “Where does she live?” he asked Lillian.
“Albany Street, near the corner of Dublin Street.”
They took a cab to a well-maintained building on Albany Street, whereupon Lillian produced a key from her handbag.
“You have her latchkey?” Ian said as they mounted the steps to the front door.
“Sometimes I feed her cat,” she replied, unlocking the door.
She led him through the tidy ground-floor flat, with its slightly tattered armchairs and white crocheted antimacassars, past a table in the parlor set for tea, with a blue-flowered plate of raisin scones and cherry jam. The room was silent save for the ticking of a ship’s clock on the mantel. Ian shivered at the eerie stillness so familiar to him from other crime scenes, the heavy emptiness where a violent death had occurred, the ineffable feeling of loss. There was a sense of absence, as if life had been sucked from the air itself; the atmosphere felt thinner and more fragile.
“This way,” Lillian said, showing him to an open door leading down a sturdy set of basement stairs. At the bottom was the prostrate body of a woman.
“You touched nothing?”
“Of course not!” she scoffed, as if the question itself was an insult.
He crept gingerly down the stairs, taking note of everything he observed. Her body lay on the staircase, head on the last step, her torso and legs on the higher steps, as if she had tumbled forward while descending the stairs. The wall of the staircase was splattered with blood, and upon examining her body, Ian concluded it came from the sizable wound on the side of her head.
At the bottom of the stairs was an upturned laundry basket, the contents spilled out onto the hard-packed dirt floor. Lifting the basket carefully, he examined the ground beneath it. The cellar smelled damp, of earth and apples and aromatic plants. Looking around the low-ceilinged space, Ian spied a bushel basket of apples in the corner, a wooden washing tub with attached wringer, and bunches of herbs hanging upside down from an improvised clothesline. An empty coal scuttle sat waiting to be filled. The cellar was as neat and organized as the flat upstairs, everything in its place, no sign of a struggle. The only evidence of violence was the blood on the walls and the gash in Miss Staley’s head. He took some time examining the railing and each step before climbing back up to where his aunt stood, watching anxiously.
“You are entirely correct,” he told her. “This was no accident.”
“How can you tell?”
“There are numerous clues. For one thing, she appears to have hit her head on something, yet there is no concentrated area of blood on the railing or any of the steps. The blood on the wall suggests a violent blow of some kind. It is spread out over a large area, and you can tell from the shape of the droplets that it hit at considerable velocity.”
Lillian frowned. “The shape of the droplets?”
“Yes. Observe how they are long and narrow.”
“So they are,” she said, peering at them through her spectacles.
“I have been studying the properties of blood evidence. The shapes made upon impact vary according to velocity, distance, and angle.”
“And how are you coming by all this blood for your . . . study?”
“Conan Doyle has been very helpful in that regard. At any rate, this blood was traveling quite fast, which accounts for the long, narrow droplets.”
“I see.”
“Furthermore, there is the matter of her skirts.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Did you not remark how they are modestly draped over her legs?”
“Yes.”
“Does that not strike you as odd?”
“You mean if she had fallen down the stairs—”
“Gravity would likely have resulted in a less ladylike position.”
“Possibly, but that’s hardly conclusive.”
“There is one more thing. Come,” he said, beckoning her to follow him down the steps. “Mind how you tread.”
They descended together, careful not to touch poor Miss Staley, into the cellar with its faint odor of mildew and dried aromatic herbs. “Do you see any blood on the laundry or the basket?” he asked.
Stooping to look, Lillian examined it carefully. “No.”
“Yet look at this,” he said, lifting the basket. On the floor beneath it was the same scattered pattern of blood as on the staircase.
“That’s odd,” she said. “What do you make of it?”
“She did not have the laundry basket when she was attacked. It was placed there by her killer.”
“But why?”
“To make it look like she fell while going down to do the laundry.”
“So she was actually attacked—”
“She was assaulted on the stairs, most certainly, but whoever killed her felt compelled to place the overturned laundry basket there to make the accident narrative more plausible, as if she dropped it when she fell. However, they neglected to realize that this little flourish would betray them in the end. Sometimes it is best to leave well enough alone.”
“I knew it,” Lillian said softly. “Elizabeth Staley is not the sort of woman to trip over herself doing housework.”
“Can you think of anyone who might wish her harm?”
“I didn’t know her that well, but I’m not aware of any enemies. She never mentioned anything of the kind.”
“Is there a back entrance to the flat?”
“No, just the front. And the cellar doors.”
“I examined them—bolted shut from the inside. And neither the front door nor the entry to her flat showed signs of damage. They were both closed when you arrived?”