Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.
may be a simple case. If he muddles it completely, which wouldn’t surprise either of us, then of course we’ll have to help him out.”
She paused, and then she added thoughtfully, “A deliberately disfigured corpse is rare in Britain. This wasn’t done in a frenzy of lust or blood lust like the Jack-the-Ripper murders. This murderer had a purpose, however deranged and perverted, and the mutilation was done for coldly calculated effect. The murderer has left his own distinctive signature on the corpse. I wonder whether his purpose was fully achieved with one murder, or whether he will require more.”
We made our turn onto St. George Street, and the unusually warm September night had suddenly began to feel chill and threatening.
CHAPTER 2
It rained during the night—a rain such as London rarely experiences, with savage thrusts of lightning tearing apart the darkness while thunder rolled like the artillery of a besieging army. Water fell in cascading floods. Sleep was impossible, so I lay awake thinking about the search for a ferocious animal among London’s wharves and docks and wondering how Lady Sara could be so certain there was none.
I had no doubt she was right. She always knew; she always saw what no one else saw, or she had information everyone else had overlooked or hadn’t bothered to acquire. Chief Inspector Mewer never seemed able to grasp that fact. With every case she interested herself in, he had to grapple with it anew as though there were something unnatural about a woman from a titled family becoming a criminal investigator.
I tried to think what she could have seen in her scrutiny of the mutilated corpse. Of course I had seen it, also, but it meant nothing to me. Too frequently I lacked the essential bits of knowledge that made deduction possible. Such detective talent as I possessed could be exercised only with intense effort. Lady Sara seemed to use hers with ease though she claimed to have worked as hard as I did in the beginning.
She was often asked how she happened to acquire an interest in crime, and she answered that she came by it honestly—she inherited it. Her mother, Lady Ranisford, the Dowager Countess, was, like so many titled ladies, a great enthusiast of murders and murder trials. It was a life-long interest. One of Lady Sara’s earliest memories was of her mother sending a maid or a footman to buy copies of broadsheets—penny plain or tuppence coloured, the Countess of course bought the tuppence version—or the latest newspaper from street hawkers who shouted an account of a murder. The Countess also was an avid frequenter of murder trials at Old Bailey, one of a number of stylishly dressed, bejewelled ladies of family, position, and wealth who never missed a session of a sensational trial.
Lady Sara vividly recalled her mother’s jubilant return home at a late hour in 1877 with news of a conviction in the sordid Penge murder trial. A man named Louis Staunton had married a feeble-minded girl for her money. Once he gained this, he, his brother, and two females of irregular status had maltreated and starved the poor girl to death.
Lady Ranisford’s delight over the verdict changed to absolute fury at Charles Reade, the author, when he wrote a series of letters for the Daily Telegraph claiming that Staunton was innocent because the wife already had a fatal disease, tubercular meningitis. “As if it were perfectly all right to starve an ill person to death!” the Countess exclaimed indignantly. She banished all of Reade’s books from the house forthwith, a severe hardship on her because she was fond of them, especially The Cloister and the Hearth.
When the Earl of Ranisford was looking for a London town house, it was understandable that his wife would direct his attention to Connaught Place. For one thing, the architect ingeniously placed the entrances in the rear, leaving the splendid terraces with unobstructed views of Hyde Park and allowing access to them from a lightly travelled side street rather than busy Bayswater Road. For another, the address was eminently respectable. Caroline, Princess of Wales, had lived there in the early years of the nineteenth century. Finally, the location—at the convergence of Oxford Street and Park Lane, which earlier had been called Tyburn Street or Tyburn Lane—was the site where the notorious Tyburn Tree once stood. The “tree” had been replaced at an early date by a gallows, and the gallows was repeatedly enlarged until as many as twenty-four criminals could be hanged there simultaneously. The place had been the nemesis of London’s convicted malefactors from the twelfth century until 1783 when the gallows was moved to Newgate Prison. It was estimated that as many as sixty thousand people were executed at Tyburn over the centuries.
If this weren’t titillation enough for a murder enthusiast, during the excavation for the Connaught Place terraces, quantities of human bones were uncovered, relics of those same malefactors. At least a cartload was hauled away to be buried in a pit in Connaught Mews. When Lady Ranisford discovered this, the Connaught Place address became irresistible to her.
But Lady Ranisford’s interest in sensational crimes could not begin to account for Lady Sara’s amazing talent for serious criminal investigation. Lord Anstee, a long-time friend of the Earl of Ranisford and Lady Sara’s confidant after her father died, once told me this about her: “The first thing you must understand is that she is brilliant. She has blazing intelligence—one of the best minds in England. I would go book with her against the best. And because she was born a woman, she grew up with nothing for that wonderful mind to do. Women doctors are a rarity; they were almost unheard of when she was young. Nursing was becoming a recognized profession, thanks to Florence Nightingale, but it was still battling for respectability, and it was no career for a noblewoman. Other than that, there was nothing. It wasn’t even possible for women to obtain a good education without extraordinary effort. Oxford and Cambridge grudgingly allowed them to attend lectures and take university examinations, but even today, at the beginning of the twentieth century, women aren’t eligible for degrees at either place, no matter how much higher their scores are than those of the men competing with them. What was she to do?
“People who know very little about her work say she has made a hobby of crime. They could not be more mistaken. She has made a profession of it, and the profession is one she invented herself. She applies research, along with analysis and synthesis, to criminal investigations—not the ordinary kind of research done in libraries nor the analysis and synthesis practised in laboratories, but an intense mental application that brings the full spectrum of human knowledge to bear on criminological problems, even including such a newfangled thing as psychological medicine. She had one enormous advantage—her social position and wealth opened doors that otherwise would have remained tightly shut, and it also enabled her to call upon the many professional men and scholars of her acquaintance for assistance. Scotland Yard can’t begin to match her resources. She is the only investigator in the world who works like this, but she will never receive credit for it because she is a woman.”
Most of her titled friends thought she had an eccentric quirk for solving mysteries—certainly an odd pastime for a person in her position but a harmless one. They condescendingly came to her for assistance with their own petty domestic and business puzzles. Few of them had any conception of the enormous scope of Lady Sara’s activity, or they would have considered it far more disreputable than acting.
Her greatest difficulty was and always had been gaining professional respect from the men she had to work with. It was a challenge she faced anew each time she encountered another pompous ass in a position of authority. Lord Anstee described a confrontation he had witnessed between Lady Sara and two of Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioners: “She encouraged them to talk until they had made resounding fools of themselves. Then she began to ask questions neither of them could answer. When she had them sufficiently embarrassed, she answered the questions herself, and from that point they had to listen to her.”
That may have been her method with politicians and bureaucrats; where artists, or scientists, or professional men were concerned, she encouraged them to talk because she wanted to know what they knew. Her memory was astonishing, and that, coupled with her wonderful intelligence, enabled her to analyze and compare things no one else noticed. She delighted in assembling a panel of experts, hearing everything they had to say on a subject, and then watching with amusement while they argued themselves into a conclusion she had already arrived at.
Lady Sara’s headquarters were in nearby Connaught Mews, where a block of stables had been remodelled to meet her requirements.