7

‘A Mass of Light-Coloured Ringlets’

Suicide was still a distantly possible solution to the Bastendorff affair; a few weeks earlier, a woman called Emily Collett, who lived in Drummond Street, close to Euston Square, had been arrested and prosecuted for attempting to ‘destroy’ herself. It was a criminal offence. She had what would today be termed alcohol dependency and mental health problems. The authorities saw only moral weakness.

Such melancholic stories were increasingly prevalent in the ever-growing city. For all those who found the pace of life exhilarating, there were others who were overwhelmed, terrified of their insecure future.

Yet in this instance the idea of suicide still left too many questions unanswered and Inspector Hagen and his team were proceeding with another possibility. Perhaps it was something to do with his background in cases of fraud; but what Hagen was bringing to this case was a keen eye for its more material elements. To start with: a well-dressed woman such as this would have had jewellery and valuables; so what, he wondered, had become of them?

In addition, this elderly woman must surely have wanted to attend to her health; so, he wondered, what appointments might have been made with local practitioners that had not been kept? Ingeniously, Hagen also wondered if this woman had had dentures made to fit around her existing teeth: who would have attended to this?

Dentistry was a highly competitive trade in London at the time, jostling with innovations to make life easier, especially for the elderly. Having one’s teeth removed and replaced with dentures was now a commonplace, if still deeply unpleasant, procedure. In 1879, ‘surgeon dentists’ such as ‘Mr Eskell’, based in the City, proclaimed in advertisements that he had ‘introduced the only perfectly PAINLESS system of DENTISTRY. Artificial teeth secured to the mouth entirely by suction without fastenings of any kind. They defy detection, and are perfect for eating and speaking.’ Another Mr Eskell (possibly this was a family business) in Mayfair wished it to be known that his false teeth ‘are of such density as to admit of masticating the hardest substance without the least liability to fracture’.

Near Regent Street, Mr B.L. Moseley was advertising his use of nitrous oxide gas guaranteeing ‘entire immunity from pain’ and ‘successful painless adaptation of artificial teeth’.

Hagen’s dental inquiries were focused around St Pancras, Bloomsbury, Somers Town and Kentish Town. And remarkably, after a few days, they did yield an affirmative response; a local practitioner near Euston Square told the police that around two years ago, a female client had come in with the aim of being fitted for new dentures; and to this end the dentist had taken a cast of her mouth and remaining teeth. She had never returned. But he had held on to the cast.

This was relatively simple to check against the body in the St Pancras morgue. The dental match was exact.

At about the same time, Edward Hacker, an elderly gentleman, aged 67, presented himself at the offices of Scotland Yard.

Mr Hacker had been following the Euston Square mystery in the newspapers; and some instinct had made him fearful that the corpse was that of his sister, Matilda, from whom he had not heard for some two years.

There had been no estrangement, no cross words between them; simply the puzzling blankness of sibling neglect. It might seem extraordinary now to conceive of a brother having no curiosity about even the whereabouts of his sister; this might have been one of the atomising effects of city life. It transpired that Edward Hacker lived in Rochester Row, in Kentish Town, barely a mile north of Euston Square.

Inspector Hagen would have known and been familiar with families forced into silence by emigration, by voyages around the world; but a brother and sister living in the same city? How could there be so little care or heed?

It was immediately obvious that there was something abstracted about Hacker; and it was soon to become clear that his eccentricities were reflected many times over in his missing sister.

As Hagen’s other enquiries around the pawn shops of the area – checking and rechecking valuables that might have belonged to the corpse – continued, Hacker was taken to the St Pancras morgue. It is not known with what degree of curiosity the detectives observed this old gentleman as he was required to make the most hideous of identifications; whether there was any flicker in his reaction that could not quite be read. But Hagen must have been watching him very closely.

First, Hacker was called upon to look at the clothing that had remained on the corpse; was this his sister’s mode of dress? It was. Inspector Hagen then asked him if there might be any other distinguishing features with which they might be able to identify her.

There was the matter of her hair; despite her advancing years, the deceased was in the habit of wearing it in striking auburn ringlets. Hacker was adamant about the colour. The hair that remained on the skull was indeed dyed that shade.

Were there, he was asked, any items of valuable clothing or jewellery that would be particularly distinctive and recognisable? There was a gold watch; one that had come from the family’s old home in Canterbury.

Edward Hacker was allowed to return home. There was, for a few hours more, some caution on the part of Inspector Hagen and his team; the newspapers were clamouring but the police did not want to make prematurely public the name of the woman. Hagen would also have been acutely conscious that identification of the body was merely one step; discovering how that body had come to have been found in the coal cellar was another.

None the less, some journalists had got hold of a name; and they were swift to arrive on the doorstep of 4, Euston Square. They wanted to put it directly to Severin Bastendorff that the murdered woman had been one of his lodgers.

Constables from the local station had just managed to reach Mr Bastendorff in time, however, and the journalists were thwarted, left merely to note that Bastendorff ‘refuses to say’ if the victim had lived under his roof ‘or indeed to answer any inquiries on the subject, stating that he has been counselled by the police to withhold all information’ pending the resumption of the inquest.¹

The strain upon Bastendorff, his wife Mary, his young children and his brothers, was increasing by the hour. The publicity would surely only lead to any further possible tenants shunning the house. There were also crowds gathered at all hours of the day (and into the evening) just outside; gothically fascinated sightseers who wanted to take a long look at this landmark of murder.

‘Euston Square continues to be of great interest to the public,’ reported the Morning Post blithely, perhaps only half aware that its own detailed reporting of the grisly horror was half the reason. ‘Two policemen are stationed at the corner of the thoroughfare for the purpose of restraining the exuberance of the sightseers.’²

The positive identification of a gold watch was the next step towards giving a definitive identity to the murdered woman. It had materialised in a pawn shop in St Pancras. On the back of it was the address of its maker – a Mr Warren, of Canterbury, Kent. Inspector Hagen, in the meantime, had been contacted by his colleagues in that town; there was indeed local talk of an eccentric lady who was known to have moved to London and subsequently vanished.

To be certain, Hagen took a train from London to Canterbury, bearing the gold watch and some of those ringlets of auburn hair. He presented himself to Superintendent Davies of the Canterbury police and laid the items before him. Davies had had some rueful dealings with the lady in question several years ago.

And now, as he looked at the items and affirmed that they were absolutely hers, Inspector Hagen knew for certain that the murdered woman was Matilda Hacker, described as an ‘elderly maiden’.³

She was a renowned eccentric, in her mid-60s, who had been a colourful, aggravating and often madly impetuous figure. She was wealthy too. But in terms of finances, debts and obligations, she was curiously irresponsible and prone to quarrelsome chaos. Although a blithe spirit herself, Matilda Hacker, it seemed, had led a formidable dance of infuriated figures across the years.

But what sort of dance could have led to this ghastly end?