19
‘The Expected Child’
On that day in September 1879, did Severin and Mary Bastendorff have any inkling of the further catastrophe that was about to strike? Possibly it was the case that they had awoken every morning with a sense of dread ever since the discovery of Matilda Hacker’s corpse. With Hannah Dobbs’ acquittal, there had been no sense of catharsis of closure; the murder was still a hideous mystery and it hung heavy over 4, Euston Square; no potential lodgers came calling. The house was shunned.
On top of this, following the searing sexual allegations in court about Severin’s relationship with Hannah Dobbs – which he denied – it is difficult to know how the couple dealt with one another. On the face of it, the marriage held firm; but how united could they continue to stand?
In the meantime, efforts had been made between the Home Office and Scotland Yard to find some way of rekindling the case. There were letters passing back and forth attempting to explain why the trial collapsed, and why a killer was still free. A cash reward of £100 was now offered to anyone who could vouchsafe helpful information; and soon, a hitherto-unheard lady pawnbroker from near Camden Town volunteered herself to Inspector Hagen; she had some clothing that Hannah Dobbs had pawned. The clothing was confirmed as having belonged to Matilda Hacker.
This development had left some Scotland Yard figures wondering whether pursuing Hannah Dobbs on a charge of ‘larceny’ involving the old lady’s property might be the way to bringing all the chief figures in this story back into the witness box, and thus under fresh pressure to finally confess the truth.1
But as the departments quietly corresponded with one another, an even more opportune possibility for bringing the mystery back before the courts was approaching.
It came one morning in September when Severin Bastendorff had been out on business and returned to read his morning newspaper; his eye was transfixed by a headline that promised ‘Hannah Dobbs – Further Revelations’.
This was a news article that had been syndicated by the Central News Agency to every paper. It told of a forthcoming publication – a short autobiography – written by the recently freed maid herself; and it promised that this publication would be filled with the most sensational allegations.
Among these were Hannah Dobbs’ assertion that there had not been just one murder in 4, Euston Square, but two others; and that the complicity in the shocking crimes was shared by the entire household. This work promised readers tales of brutal child murder, and even the torture of a live dog. The home of the Bastendorffs was to be portrayed as a gothic charnel house.
This teasing news story alone was enough to bring the crowds back to Euston Square that morning; and Severin, Mary and the family had to suffer the ‘nuisance’ of people outside the door, staring at the house, talking and pointing. It must have been nerve-stretching.
In the days that followed, with the dark promise of the publication of this special pamphlet (in appearance like a small very closely printed magazine) looming, Bastendorff sought legal advice; he was desperate to take out an injunction that would prevent publication. He even took himself to the Strand office from which the publisher George Purkess operated. And it was here that he was able to obtain an advance copy. He was later to describe the seismic effect of sitting down to read it.
On the cover of this pamphlet was an engraving of Hannah Dobbs. Her name was featured prominently as the title. Beneath was the subtitle: ‘Her life and early career – History of Miss Hacker while in Euston Square – Harrowing details – Story of the Murder.’
Hannah – or more particularly her ghostwriters – had started by relaying the story of her upbringing, her early career in Devon, and indeed the early signs of her own moral failings and weaknesses, when it came both to fashion and sex.
This section was headlined: ‘My Confession.’
She then relayed how she came to work for a Mrs Pearce at Torrington Square as a cook in 1875; and now she wanted to reveal how she really first met Bastendorff.
It was, according to her, on the pavement outside that house. (Bastendorff by that time had been married four years, with four children.) He was walking along, she alleged; and she instantly caught his eye.
‘One morning, when the housemaid and I were cleaning the dining room windows, he passed and the remark that he made was whether we wanted help,’ wrote Hannah (or the journalist who had transcribed and moulded her words). ‘I answered “yes” and we remained talking some little time. He passed again at seven in the evening. I could not go out walking in the evening, as we were not allowed out so late.’2
The sexual subtext of Mrs Pearce’s domestic stricture was quite clear to Hannah; and she intended to find a way around it. ‘I was told servants often went out after eleven o’clock when their families had gone to bed, no-one knowing anything about it.’ And so it was – according to her own account – that Hannah made a promise to Severin Bastendorff that she would be in a position to quietly leave the house at 11.30p.m. for an assignation.
This did not go quite as it should, she wrote; for she and her fellow servants, who all slept in one large bed downstairs, went for a nap at 11p.m. and fell asleep – so Hannah missed her appointment. They were woken by two policemen who had investigated the back door, which had been left open.
After this mishap, the following evening went a little more smoothly for Hannah. She managed to effect a solo exit from Torrington Square, and met Bastendorff at a pre-arranged spot. Hannah did not go back home, she said, ‘until half-past two o’clock’.
Hannah related how she then went on to see Mr Bastendorff ‘several times’ in Torrington Square; and she continued to see him when she decided to leave Mrs Pearce’s service and go to work nearby for a Mrs Cripps in Russell Square, who was offering a little more money. It was while she was adjusting to this new job when Hannah learned that Bastendorff was a married man. She seemed not to have been deterred.
‘I learned that his wife would soon be in want of a servant,’ she wrote, ‘and that the wages were but £11 a year and that the difference might be made up in another way to me.’ According to Hannah, Bastendorff told her that his wife Mary was shortly to advertise the position. ‘I went to 4, Euston Square on 17th June, 1876.’ In fact, there was another servant starting there too: a younger girl called Ellen Peek. She was to stay seven months; Hannah was there, as she recalled with striking precision, ‘two years, two months and three days’.
The house then was a bustling establishment. The most important tenants were a Mr and Mrs Brookes, who retained their own servant. They had ‘the dining and drawing rooms, the small top front room and the back kitchen’. The Brookes servant left just a few days after Hannah arrived; and Mary Bastendorff and Mrs Brookes agreed that Hannah Dobbs should begin working for them, as well as attending to everyone else in the house. Hannah noted of this that her ‘wages were not increased’ accordingly. Indeed, she also alleged that she only received her first wages an extraordinary four months after she started working there; making that summer of 1876 a period of unpaid labour. Hannah did not reveal in this memoir quite why she didn’t leave; she would have had no difficulty finding non-exploitative work elsewhere.
It was also in the first few months that possessions belonging to Mary Bastendorff started finding their way to local pawn shops. ‘Her ear-rings and brooch were pawned,’ wrote Hannah, ‘one in Hampstead-road and the other in Euston-road.’ On top of this, ‘a ring of Mr Bastendorff’s and the family Bible were also pawned, but not by me’. Then by whom? Hannah Dobbs chose not to say, although she then went on to relate how the Brookes’ were being systematically swindled. ‘There were no coals to speak of then in the cellar where THE BODY OF MISS HACKER was found,’ wrote Hannah, teasing her readers with the horror that was yet to come. ‘In fact at this time I used Mr Brookes’s coals for Mr Bastendorff’s fires.’
It was at this stage that Hannah’s account started to darken.
‘Mr and Mrs Bastendorff then slept in the large front bedroom at the top of the house and I slept in the large back one with the children,’ she wrote.
‘He used to come in between twelve and one o’clock when his wife and children were asleep.
‘In January 1877 I was afraid that I was with child,’ she continued. ‘I was told by the father that I need not fear, as I should not be allowed to want for anything. Also that I was to write home, telling my parents I was married, and when the time for my confinement approached, to go home on the pretext that I wished to be taken ill [sic] there, my husband being abroad.
‘It was on the day that the Brookes’ left – in December 1876 – that Peter Bastendorff … first sought to engage himself to me,’ she continued. ‘By an arrangement, Peter was to be imputed the paternity of the expected child and a key of the street door was furnished him so that he could let himself into the house at night to see me. That part worked as desired.
‘I wrote to my mother telling her I was married and she never knew to the contrary until the discovery of the dead body at Euston Square. But I never became a mother. An illness prevented that.’3
In a few short paragraphs, Hannah’s account had depicted a house of shame; of adultery and casual sex, of brothers complicit in sordid transactions, and worse: a house in which such acts took place near where children were sleeping. The publisher George Purkess (later to achieve stratospheric circulation of his torrid Illustrated Police News when Jack the Ripper struck in 1888) knew the laws of libel; but clearly his hard-eyed desire to cause sensation and maximise sales must have over-ridden any cautiousness about the outrageousness of these printed allegations.
Hannah wrote of some of the lodgers who came and went at number 4, and their sometimes equally immoral arrangements. There was the arrival in January 1877 of a Miss Griffith. She took ‘the drawing room second floor and three rooms at the top of the house as well as the back kitchen and outside coal cellar’. And moving in with her, it seemed, was the strange salesman, Mr Findlay. Implicit was the suggestion that Mr and Mrs Bastendorff were fully aware of all the liaisons of their lodgers. Rather than being the guarantors of genteel behaviour, as most live-in landlords were presumed to be, they were, by Hannah Dobb’s account, encouraging licentiousness.
After several months, wrote Hannah, ‘Miss Griffiths’ left and for a time, Mr Findlay went with her. But then he came back. ‘Mr Findlay seemed to be a very mysterious personage,’ she wrote. ‘He had lots of money, got I know not how, but where he and his money have gone to, I am only permitted to suspect.
‘The police have been too stupid to guess,’ she added, ‘their officers too imbecile even to accept a broad and STARTLING CLUE. Dogberry and Noodledum – no matter, that is public business now.’ But what did she mean by this (apart from taking the opportunity to hit out at Inspector Hagen?) ‘One day,’ she wrote, ‘I found a loaded revolver in Mr Findlay’s bed. At my request, Mr Bastendorff went up and took it downstairs. Before I had finished the room, Mr Findlay came back for it, saying he had forgotten to put it in his pocket. Mr Findlay went away at length to Liverpool.’
After this cryptic passage, Hannah outlined a period of calm at 4, Euston Square, before the salesman’s return. She described the arrival of the respectable sugar merchant Mr Riggenbach, who brought his own furniture with him. Then came a Mr and Mrs Loeffler who ‘took the two rooms on the second floor.’ When Mr Findlay came back, he ‘took the large top front room’.
According to Hannah, Findlay and Severin Bastendorff became close during this period; and ‘went out together’. She took a period of leave from the house in August 1877 ‘as the letters prove’; and when she came back ‘I was told he (Findlay) had gone.’ Added to this, soon afterwards, ‘I had a gold watch and chain given me’ (she declined to say by whom). ‘It was a large keyless watch with a white dial, the chain was of gold with large links and now,’ she added, ‘when I recall the facts, it strikes me they were just like the watch and chain that Mr Findlay used to wear. Mr P. Bastendorff corroborates this. I returned the watch and chain before I received Miss Hacker’s watch. What has become of Mr Findlay? That was the question which was asked at the trial but never answered.’
The woman who stood in for Hannah during her absence, Mrs Hobson, told the maid that she had not seen Mr Findlay leave; and more, ‘that more than ordinarily liberal man had only left a shilling on the mantel-shelf for her.’
Yet Hannah Dobbs seemed to be throwing out ambiguities of her own; the suggestion here was that Mr Findlay had somehow fallen victim to Severin Bastendorff; and had been murdered. The next section of the pamphlet was intended to pull Bastendorff deeper into this mire, while also suggesting that the younger brother Peter was being dragged down too.
This curious side-plot started with Peter Bastendorff and Hannah Dobbs at Waterloo railway station in August 1877; he was under the impression that she was going home to Bideford for extended leave. But in fact, according to her own account, she was not. She took a train ‘to Box Hill only’, about an hour’s journey away; then took the next train back. She met Severin Bastendorff at Victoria station and, she wrote, ‘we went to Redhill together’.
It seems there was an illicit tryst at a Redhill inn. They returned to London the following day; and their aim, implied in the text, was to avoid being seen either by Mary Bastendorff or by brother Peter. ‘Next night, a room was taken in the Edgware Road,’ she wrote, ‘and there I passed the night alone.’ Hannah moved from rented room to rented room all over; from Kew to King’s Cross. But then she alleged that she became a secret nocturnal visitor to Euston Square.
‘The rest of the time I was ostensibly away in the country,’ she wrote, ‘I slept at 4, Euston Square every night, being let secretly into the house at night and slipping away unobserved in the morning, spending the day walking in Hyde Park and elsewhere.’
Here, Hannah seemed to become tangled in her own narrative web: she related that while she was supposedly away, she sent Peter a letter telling him that she would soon be returning from Devon, catching the train from Exeter to Waterloo, and asking him to meet her on the date she gave.
Yet Peter was apparently no fool; he noticed that the post-mark on the letter bore a ‘London’ stamp. He knew that Hannah had not been in Bideford at all. He declined to go and meet her as she supposedly ‘arrived’ at Waterloo; his brother Anthony Bastendorff – known to the family as ‘Toon’ – was sent to fetch her instead. Peter and Anthony, as Hannah related, had formerly worked with their brother Severin but had lately started up their own breakaway furniture concern in Francis Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road.
Hannah told the jealous Peter she was staying at her former place of employ at 42 Torrington Square; and when Peter returned from a business trip in the country and caught up with her, she maintained a charade of allowing him to walk her to the gates of Torrington Square (many Bloomsbury squares were gated at that time). When away from Peter’s gaze, and under the cover of darkness, Hannah – by her own account – would steal back to 4, Euston Square.
Her claim to have slept there every night throughout that period stretches credulity; surely Mrs Bastendorff would have had some sort of inkling? And yet the idea evokes the image of the unlit house at night, and the stealthy movements on the stairs of one who is familiar with every creak and groan. A midnight interloper: the confessions of extra-marital sex were one thing, but Hannah Dobbs was maximising this outrage by portraying herself as a sexual intruder, the husband’s betrayal of his wife taking place under his very own roof as his family slept oblivious.
One day in the midst of this sinister arrangement, Hannah Dobbs – she claimed – chose an afternoon to go and see Mary Bastendorff; Hannah pretended that she had just returned from Devon. It was at this point that Hannah’s stand-in, Mrs Hobson, was working there; but it seemed she was unsatisfactory. Mrs Bastendorff asked Hannah if she wished to return ‘to her employ’; Hannah told her she would ‘think about it.’ But as well as her night-time visits, Hannah often went back during the daylight hours, by her own account, sometimes to take the children out to the Square gardens or ‘for a walk’.
But it seemed Peter Bastendorff was getting more jealous, and suspicious. He ‘charged’ her with ‘secretly meeting Severin’ which she ‘denied’. ‘One evening, Peter, after saying ‘good night’ to me at the Torrington gates, went around the square,’ wrote Hannah, ‘and as I passed round on my way to Euston Square we met face to face and then he knew that I did not go into the house at 42, Torrington Square.’ But Hannah was ready with a riposte to him: ‘I told him I had come around just because I knew he remained to watch where I went to.’ Peter apparently accepted this; the two of them walked a little further, towards his furniture workshop in Francis Street; the two of them bade farewell again; and Hannah by her own account ‘then went out and met one of his brothers’. That brother being Severin.
There was one weekend when Mrs Bastendorff, seeing Hannah in the daylight, told her that she and Severin and the children were going to the country for several days; would she care to stay at Euston Square with the (inadequate) Mrs Hobson to help run the establishment in their absence? Hannah assented. Mrs Hobson was very shortly to leave; and Hannah moved back into Euston Square openly, now once more employed full-time.
It was a little after this that Matilda Hacker came asking about rooms. ‘I showed her the rooms we had to spare on the second-floor front and the rooms at the top,’ wrote Dobbs. ‘She did not want to give 12 shillings a week for the second floor – that was the price asked. I then went and asked Mrs Bastendorff about letting Miss Hacker have the second-floor back, while Mrs Bastendorff took the second-floor front for her bedroom. Miss Hacker waited while I went to ask. Mrs Bastendorff said she was willing to change rooms but Miss Hacker, on seeing the back room, did not like it, because it had such a dull view, overlooking the mews. She then agreed to take the front room at 12 shillings a week and said she would come in the afternoon the next day.’
Apart from the minutiae of boarding house life, Dobbs might also have been slyly commenting on the state of the Bastendorff marriage; earlier she had stated that Severin and Mary slept at the top of the house; she now seemed to be suggesting that they were occupying separate rooms. She also emphasised the fact that she – and not Mrs Bastendorff – was running the establishment: that Mrs Bastendorff, sitting in the kitchen, had not even glimpsed this new lodger, and that it was left to Hannah to describe her as a ‘grand old lady’ who wore ‘a blue silk dress, a black dichu, and white hat with a lot of white feathers’. The one concession Mrs Bastendorff made for her new guest was to go out that day and buy a new lamp for the room.
The next day, Miss Hacker ‘came to the door in a cab with all her luggage, which consisted of a large trunk covered with American oilcloth, over which was a coarse wrapping, one or two small parasols, and an umbrella. She had on a black bonnet with blue feathers, the same blue silk dress, and a small black lace cape … The cabman helped me up with the luggage to her room, while Miss Hacker waited in the hall until the cabman came down, when she paid him. The trunk was very heavy … I did not see what Miss Hacker paid him but I think he wanted two-pence more for carrying the trunk upstairs and I think he did not get it.’
Hannah Dobbs was fascinating on the eccentricity of this new lodger. On that first day, the old lady went out to buy herself some food. She returned with ‘a mutton chop, a loaf, and some butter’. Hannah ‘cooked the chop for her and took it up to her with a kettle of boiling water with which she made tea’. Hannah showed Miss Hacker to a cupboard on the landing in which she could store ‘eatables’ as well as clothes.
Hannah went upstairs to clear away the plate for the mutton and the tea things; a little later, as the evening drew on, she went up again to ‘tidy up’ the room. She asked Miss Hacker what she would like for her supper; the lady explained that she did not ‘take anything more than a glass of ale’. She did a little later give Hannah six pence to go out to the pub and fetch for her ‘half a pint of stout’. As the day drew to a close at midnight, Hannah knocked and asked her if there was anything else that she required. Miss Hacker told her no, and Hannah noted that she ‘was not in bed at that time’. She also noted that Mrs Bastendorff had still not introduced herself – or had even seen – her new lodger.
Matilda Hacker was not an early riser; she rang the maid’s bell for her breakfast at 9a.m. ‘She asked me to go out and get her a rasher of bacon,’ wrote Hannah. The maid was reluctant to trouble the butcher for such a singular purchase; and Mrs Bastendorff authorised her instead to by ‘half a pound’ which she would use herself. Miss Hacker’s rasher was cooked in the kitchen; Hannah took it up to her second-floor room. ‘She was not pleased with the bacon,’ wrote Hannah, ‘saying she was glad she did not send for more than a single rasher as no-one could please her.’4
And so the rhythms of Matilda Hacker’s remaining days – those days at Euston Square – were established. After breakfast, and at some point in the mid-morning, she would go out (Hannah knew not where) and she would take her lunch at other premises. Miss Hacker returned for tea; and at around 6p.m., Hannah would take a kettle of boiling water up to that room looking out over the gardens and the square. At 9p.m., Miss Hacker rang down with her request from the local public house; she had not been pleased with the stout so this time she requested that Hannah fetch her a ‘half-pint of “four-ale”’. And this again satisfied all of the old lady’s needs for that day; Hannah checking with her about midnight that she had everything required.
And the maid got a clearer sense of this new lodger; not merely her quirks but also the secluded nature of her life. The old lady always took her lunch elsewhere; but in the afternoon, she was back and either she would be writing a number of letters, or she would be consulting what Hannah called her ‘dream-book’. There was an image of Matilda Hacker sitting at the table near the window, either thoroughly absorbed in the pages of this astrological almanack; or dealing Tarot cards to herself.
Hannah also caught a note of vulnerability; there was one day when Matilda Hacker had to turn aside from The Book of Dreams, with her head held back. The maid asked if she was quite well, and the old lady told her that she had a headache; that it was possibly a cold. Hannah asked her if there was anything she could fetch that would help: the answer was ‘gruel with a little rum in it’. Hannah accordingly went out to buy some oatmeal; she then mixed it with half a pint of milk and a ‘quartern of rum’. She heated it all up and took it to the old lady who drank it gratefully, declaring that it was ‘very nice’. A little later that evening, Hannah looked in on her again and asked if perhaps she might like some of her habitual ‘supper beer’; the old lady declined this but did said that if Hannah brought some boiling water upstairs, she would instead happily have hot rum. This she did.
Here, perhaps artfully, is a portrayal of the ideal boarding house relationship; the paying guest being looked after by a genuinely concerned servant. One of the contemporary concerns about such houses was their atomised quality; the absence of family leading to a soulless home filled with random souls who could form no connection. Instead, here, Hannah Dobbs was suggesting that there was not only a connection but also warmth. Even a wilful eccentric such as Matilda Hacker would not be left completely isolated.
Yet Hannah also seemed alive to the less attractive traits of this unusual lady. Her fussiness over the type of beer fetched from the public house seemed soon to become something of a nightly nuisance; so much so that the teenaged lad Frank who worked in the furniture workshop at the back was deputed to go for it instead. Hannah was also intrigued as the old lady gradually divulged something of the nature of her own property interests.
‘When I took her tea up at six o’clock,’ wrote Hannah, ‘she asked if the house did not run to a very high rent. I said it did. She said, ‘Yes, I know they do because I have houses of my own. They cost a great deal of money to keep in repair.’ She also said, ‘I used to keep a pretty little house for myself when my sister was living but when she died I gave it up, as I preferred to travel about.’
‘People may ask,’ wrote Hannah in an aside, ‘why do I remember all these small details, but the fearful trial in which my life was placed in such jeopardy constrained me to rack my memory to recall every incident connected with the unfortunate Miss Hacker and my experience at the Bastendorff’s, so that my counsel could give me the truest, ablest and best defence.’ She wrote that since then, she had frequently lain awake at night thinking through those experiences. She was saving the darkest allegations until last.
The old lady continued to settle into the house; but no-one apparently had any more concrete idea of who she was or where she had come from. ‘On Saturday, Miss Hacker had her breakfast as usual,’ wrote Hannah. At the time when Mary Bastendorff was climbing the stairs to go to her own room, she apparently met her new lodger for the first time, and they talked.
On the following day, ‘Miss Hacker went to church’. She asked Hannah to ask Mrs Bastendorff if she might borrow the copy of the church service book that she had seen in the house. Hannah fetched it; and on Matilda Hacker’s return, it was time to cook the Sunday lunch that the old lady had bought for herself: a mutton chop. Matilda Hacker asked Hannah if she might have it with a few of Mrs Bastendorff’s potatoes; she indicated that she would pay for these. Hannah procured them, cooked the old lady’s dinner, and gave it to her.
What then followed was a fascinating – and again – artful outbreak of ambiguity. Hannah’s narrative leaped forward two days. On the Tuesday, she wrote, ‘Mrs Bastendorff made out Miss Hacker’s bill, and I took it up’. ‘It amounted to 12 shillings, 4 and a half d (pence). Miss Hacker looked at the bill and asked what the 4 and a half d was for.’ It was for the potatoes. ‘I never had more than one and a half d or 2d worth altogether,’ the old lady apparently told Hannah. Hannah looked at the bill, turned to get it corrected – but then realised what was causing the misunderstanding.
‘In a minute more, I said, “it is all right. There is one and a half d for the potatoes and 3d for the cruet, for pepper, salt, mustard and vinegar.” The old lady asked if she would be expected to pay this every time for the cruet; she was told no, not unless she used it all. And with this, Hannah wrote, ‘she gave me a £5 note and I think I went and got it changed’.
She wrote that she obtained the change and got the rent bill ‘receipted’ by Mrs Bastendorff; but she took it back upstairs to the old lady because it had not been possible to put a name on it. She said that the old lady had not given a name. And it was at this point, according to Hannah, that the old lady first told her that her real name was Matilda Hacker. ‘She never was called Miss Uish,’ wrote Hannah. This, she said, had been a name given by the Bastendorffs.
And so she came to Matilda Hacker’s increasing integration into the house; a sense that the old lady was starting to feel at home. And her account seemed to overturn the chronology that had been heard in court. On one Saturday night, at twelve, Hannah went upstairs and saw a light under Matilda Hacker’s door. She knocked, and went in, and asked if there was anything further that she should like. The old lady was on the sofa ‘between the two windows’ and had the table drawn up close to her. Upon the table ‘lay her blue silk dress, white petticoat, lace cap and her bonnet.’ She explained to the maid that she was preparing her things for church the next morning – and this included her gold watch in chain which she said she only ever wore for church as she ‘did not trust’ flaunting them in London otherwise.
She needed nothing more; and she said: ‘Good night, Hannah.’ Across the landing, Mary Bastendorff was also preparing for bed, with her door slightly ajar; there was a short exchange between her and Hannah and then ‘Mr Bastendorff came in’ and Hannah went up to her own bed. On the Sunday morning, Matilda Hacker went to church and when she came back, she asked Hannah if she might have the key to the gate that led to the gardens in the centre of Euston Square. It was her intention – if Mrs Bastendorff was agreeable – to take the little children Christina and Peter out to play there.
And indeed out they went, with the children seeming to have a jolly time with this youthful seeming old lady. When they eventually came back in, Matilda Hacker went upstairs to change; Hannah noted that whenever she did so, the old lady would fold up her things and either lock them in her trunk or lock them in the landing cupboard; the chests of drawers in her room remained empty. Via Hannah, Miss Hacker sent down a request that little Christina and Peter join her upstairs in her room. She had a treat for them: a selection of nuts and ginger nuts that she had bought earlier.
So the children went up for their little tea party; and Matilda Hacker beguiled the time, possibly by means of The Book of Dreams and the extraordinary stories around it; and Hannah went up at seven to tell Christina and Peter that it was now time for bed. She also carried a request from an apparently grateful Mrs Bastendorff: would she care to go down that evening to the dining room to while away some hours with the lady of the house?
Miss Hacker was reluctant; she declared that she had nothing suitable to wear. But Mrs Bastendorff sent Hannah with word that they were not expecting any visitors that evening; and so the arrangement would be perfectly informal. And at this, according to Hannah, Matilda Hacker relented. The maid was sent out to secure several bottles of lemonade. Mary Bastendorff’s favoured refreshment for herself and her guests was lemonade and brandy.
It seemed the evening was a success, according to Hannah (and this was a direct contradiction of Mary Bastendorff’s evidence at the trial in which she swore she had no dealings with the old lady); at one stage, Matilda Hacker withdrew briefly to go and fetch her ‘photographic album’; she then showed her hostess ‘her sister’s and others’ likenesses’. Indeed, she also handed over a likeness of herself for Mrs Bastendorff to appraise. In this account, the ladies remained in that dining room until 11p.m.
The photograph of Matilda Hacker remained on the property, according to Hannah. First, the children apparently had it; then it made its way to the Bastendorff furniture workshop out at the back of the house, when little Peter took it to show his uncle Anthony (‘Toon’). ‘Toon stuck the likeness on the wall beside the bench where he was working, where it remained for some time,’ wrote Hannah. Indeed, one day, in a spirit of high jocularity, Toon called her ‘to come and see his sweetheart’s likeness’. ‘I went,’ she wrote, ‘and the moment I saw it, I said, “Why that was our old lodger.” I said it was a shame to put it there and I went and pulled it down. Peter and Toon Bastendorff then tried to get it from me; there was a struggle for it that ended with the likeness being torn up.’
This was some time after Matilda Hacker’s disappearance; Hannah at this point almost off-handedly mentioned that she was ‘given’ (with no hint by whom) a gold bracelet that had been found in the second-floor cupboard that had been used by the old lady. The idea was that she was to pawn it; and she took it to a nearby shop in the Hampstead Road – ‘and as far as I know, the bracelet is lying in that shop still,’ she wrote. ‘It was a rather large bracelet of plain plaited gold.’
Hannah returned to the old lady’s period of residency, and some curious circumstances. One night, the maid ‘heard something go smash’. At the time, Hannah was in her own room, changing her dress; by her own account, she ran downstairs and into Matilda Hacker’s room. The old lady had had a mishap while trying to light the lamp; and its glass globe had shattered on the hearth. ‘I picked the pieces up,’ wrote Hannah, ‘and in picking them up I ran a piece of glass into my finger.’
At that moment, Peter Bastendorff had knocked at the front door; Hannah went downstairs, wrapping a handkerchief around her finger. Peter was most attentive towards her injury; the landlady, on the other hand, when learning of the accident, seemed more concerned about the cost of the lamp. Miss Hacker was aware that she owed an extra two shillings for the breakage.
The ordinariness of life, the perfectly undramatic details, served to give a sense of gathering and motiveless menace; what was happening in that house that would then lead to such murderous violence? Yet there were unsettlingly odd undercurrents, at least according to Hannah. One day, she was approached by Mary Bastendorff who told the maid that her sister and mother were coming to visit, and she wanted the girl to go to the pawn shop to pawn a ring for her. Hannah wrote that she offered her employer a loan of a few shillings; but Mrs Bastendorff refused. If she pawned the ring, Mrs Bastendorff could get her sister to buy it later.
Her account came to the mysterious final hours of Matilda Hacker. She had been fully settled for a few weeks in her second-floor room. One morning, Severin Bastendorff interrupted Hannah as she was cleaning windows (an echo of the alleged first encounter three years previously) and told her to fetch the rent from the old lady. While it was certainly due that day, Hannah wondered at the peremptoriness of demanding it so briskly, and not even in person. The maid found Miss Hacker at her table, writing; she apologised for ‘troubling her’ and the lodger told the girl that at that moment, she didn’t have any change.
This was the most crucial part of Hannah’s defence; the encounter that she and no-one else could testify to. The old lady told her that she would be going out after she had finished writing her letters, and then she could ‘obtain change’. Hannah offered to go and fetch it instead: and at this, she said, Matilda Hacker said ‘very well then’.
According to Hannah, Miss Hacker got up, ‘and turning towards the sofa lifted her skirt and took a five-pound note from her flannel petticoat’. Indeed, she apparently took out several notes, also concealed within a flannel arrangement which was fastened with ribbon.
‘She smiled, and told me to look and see what a good plan she had got, and how nice it was to keep money for anyone who was travelling for no-one would think of looking in such a place as that for money,’ wrote Hannah. ‘This was the first occasion on which Miss Hacker showed that she had a considerable sum of money in her possession.’
Hannah related how she took the five-pound note downstairs and as well as telling Severin Bastendorff that she would obtain the change for it, she claimed that she also remarked to him that Miss Hacker ‘had a roll’ of such notes. ‘A remark was made that it was desirable that she should drop her petticoat and let someone pick it up.’5
And now the outlines of motive for murder, so carefully seeded by Hannah and her ghostwriter, were beginning to become apparent. Crucially, there was also a studied vagueness about the days; in court, it was held that the murder had taken place at the weekend and that the house had been empty. Hannah Dobbs’ pamphlet muddied this certainty.
Matilda Hacker, in this account, went out to post her letters; and returned at lunchtime. By this stage, according to Hannah, the maid was preparing to take the children up to Hampstead. They set out, she and Christina and Peter and the small baby, taking the horse-drawn omnibus that ran up the Hampstead Road, through Camden and up towards the heights of the Heath. There, she said, she had the children photographed (this, like donkey rides at Whitestone Pond, was one of the side attractions). The photographer, she averred, was ‘a very fair man with a little moustache’. Then, she wrote, the weather turned. Hannah wrote that she took the children home and ‘we got out of the ‘bus at the top of Drummond Street and I sent the two children into the house through the (furniture work) shop’. She herself walked round the front with the baby, as the rain fell on Euston Square.
Mrs Bastendorff was in the front dining room, drinking tea. Hannah put the Hampstead photograph in the toddler’s hand and told the child to take it to ‘mama’. Mrs Bastendorff first told Hannah: ‘The very idea of you having this taken. But don’t the baby look pretty?’
And, Hannah added, ‘it was that night that I was told that the old lady had gone away’.