20

‘Oh God! What a Sight Met My Gaze!’

Up until this point, readers of Hannah’s pamphlet would have been brooding not only about her quiet hints concerning what had really happened to the old lady; but also whether they were being told the entire truth. The selling point of the pamphlet was no more and no less ghoulish fascination; and the style in which it was ghostwritten left some fascinating ambiguities about Hannah Dobbs and her own behaviour.

But having set this occasionally seamy domestic scene – Hannah still in a romance with Peter Bastendorff while, readers were to presume, still engaging in sexual relations with her employer – the maid was now ready to turn the account into one of the starkest and most lurid gothic horror.

She – or more especially her ghostwriter – built the suspense stealthily. Hannah recounted her puzzlement at Matilda Hacker’s departure; and Mary Bastendorff’s comment that ‘yes, she has gone into the country for a few days. She fancied she wanted a change and if the room is not let when she comes back, she will take it again.’

And so Hannah, after having put the children to bed, went into Miss Hacker’s former room, puzzling (as she wrote) over her startlingly swift departure. ‘Her heavy trunk was gone,’ she wrote, ‘and the room appeared to be cleared of everything belonging to her.’ As Hannah went to pull down the window blinds, she noticed something curious: one of the panes was broken.

On going downstairs, she told Mrs Bastendorff and asked how it had happened. She was told that it had been an accident caused in the course of lowering those window blinds.

Hannah wrote that Peter Bastendorff came round that evening to see her; that she had wanted to show him the photograph of the children taken on Hampstead Heath, but it was already in the doting possession of Mrs Bastendorff’s mother Mary Pearce. She also wrote about the disposition of the coal cellar at this time; that for the house fires, she fetched coal upstairs by the shovel – and so did Mrs Bastendorff. Hannah was also certain that there were very few coals in the cellar at that time. The implication was that Matilda Hacker – or her remains – had been taken somewhere else first.

The following morning, Mrs Bastendorff called to Hannah from Matilda Hacker’s room. ‘Whatever have you been doing to the carpet?’ she allegedly asked. Hannah asked her what she meant and Mrs Bastendorff pointed to the stain on the carpet, telling the maid that she was a ‘very tiresome girl not to have said anything about it’. And yet, Hannah wrote, this was the first time that she had seen it; she had not noticed it when she had been in the empty room the previous day.

‘Mrs Bastendorff seemed very cross’ and declared that she would rather be without lodgers if things got damaged this way; and that if Miss Hacker came back, ‘she should pay for the damage’. Hannah claimed that she told Mrs Bastendorff that she herself ‘should have looked out for it’ when Miss Hacker ‘went away’. And at this, she wrote, the conversation ended.

Hannah set about remaking the bed in the room after this; and she once more checked the drawers. But now, according to the pamphlet, she did find something: Matilda Hacker’s beloved The Book of Dreams. She took it downstairs to Mrs Bastendorff and ‘remarked’ that Matilda Hacker would be certain to return, if only to retrieve this treasured possession.

That week, a new lodger, Mr Ross – ‘an elderly gentleman of about fifty years’ – took the second-floor room. Hannah’s acquisitive eye had immediately fixed upon his two rings, ‘one a signet, the other a diamond ring’. This tenant only stayed one week. But in the course of that week, there was ‘a most remarkable incident’. ‘Mr Ross called me to his room,’ wrote Hannah, ‘and asked if we had any mad people in the house.’

Why did he ask such a thing? He had apparently just found ‘a revolver’ which had been ‘lying on the small shelf in the water closet on the second floor, the same floor on which Miss Hacker’s room was’. The agitated Mr Ross told Hannah to go and fetch Mr Bastendorff; and presently, the landlord went up the stairs. The two men spoke for about ten minutes; and then Mr Bastendorff came downstairs again, holding the gun, which was apparently not loaded. He asked Hannah if she ‘had put it there’. She denied it. And now, in the pamphlet, she asked why Mr Ross had not been tracked down as a witness.

Then there was a further curious twist in the alleged story of Hannah’s sexual arrangements. She claimed that Severin Bastendorff gave her a box, containing a gold watch and chain; the face of the watch was broken. He claimed he had bought it in a sale, and that he would have it fixed for her. The watch came back, repaired and cleaned – the watch, Hannah claimed, that only later in court would be proved to belong to Miss Hacker. Severin Bastendorff attached one condition to this gift, Hannah claimed: that she not say a word about where she got it from. Hannah told him that if anyone asked, she would claim it was from an uncle who had died. The first to hear this lie was her lover Peter Bastendorff.

At around this time, she wrote, Severin Bastendorff was planning a business trip to Paris; and rather than go all alone, he wanted Hannah to go with him too. By her account, Hannah pertly demurred, claiming instead that she had plans to go and visit her family in Bideford.

She also told Peter that she was going home; but he was angry and apparently jealous. He told her directly that he had heard about the proposed Paris trip; and that he believed she was lying and that she was going with his brother. It was not until the following night – after he had spent some time with Severin ‘at the public house’ – that Peter found that Severin had cancelled his journey. Hannah pushed on to Bideford, taking the child Peter with her.

After several days, they returned and she was told that Mr Riggenbach’s room had not been cleaned as he had recently acquired ‘a black dog’ and everyone else in the house was too afraid to go in.

She was also asked by Severin, she claimed, for a loan of some money; Hannah told him she did not have the amount that he wanted. He suggested pawning the gold watch and chain, with the promise that he would soon buy her a new one, which was less ‘old-fashioned’. Thus it was that Hannah Dobbs sought to move the focus on the old lady’s pawned possessions on to a landlord who seemed always to be in some kind of cash-flow difficulty.

But it was the following Sunday that – Hannah wrote – she made the most horrifying discovery. ‘I went out into the back yard to get some shavings (kindling) to make my fire burn up,’ she wrote. ‘In the yard there is a flight of steps leading up to the work-room.’ And under this was a cramped storage area filled with timber and wood shavings. ‘I put my hand in to get these,’ wrote Hannah, ‘when I felt something move.’

In fright, she wrote, she ran back to the house and announced what had happened. ‘They all ran out,’ wrote Hannah, avoiding saying precisely who ‘they’ were. ‘They’ peered into the wood-store darkness and ‘we saw a small boy – very ragged’. The frightened boy tried to wriggle deeper into the wood and had to be poked out ‘with a long bamboo’. ‘The child cried a little,’ wrote Hannah, ‘but at last ran out and endeavoured to make his escape.’ And this is when – by her account – the horror descended.

‘One of the party (how I shudder as I write it!) struck the little fellow on the head two or three crushing blows with a poker. I screamed and was going to run for the doctor but I was stopped and told to wait awhile. I helped undress the little fellow and put him in a bath and then he was wrapped in a blanket and laid under the bench in the workshop. Then, in a little while, they told me he was dead. Would to God they had laid me there too.’

What could be more horrible than the murder of a small and defenceless street child? ‘He was very pale and slim,’ wrote Hannah, ‘his hair was light and his clothes though ragged had evidently been patched at times. I don’t think he could have been more than ten years old. All his clothes were gathered together and burned at the workshop fire.’¹

Again, she was remarkably discreet when it came to naming those in on the conspiracy. Presumably Severin, yes, but Peter? Toon? Mary Bastendorff? And what of any inquisitive neighbours who would surely have been drawn to their back windows to see what all the noise was about in the yard below? But Hannah’s catalogue of horrors was by no means finished. Eliding the question of why she chose to stay in such a nightmarish house, rather than running straight to the police, and then seeking sanctuary at home, she and ‘they’ apparently carried on as though nothing had happened.

There is in fact some wholly unintentional black humour in the continued account, as well as further horrors. ‘On Saturday afternoon, about three weeks after the little child was killed, I was sent to Meeking’s to buy some brown Holland for childrens’ pinafores,’ Hannah wrote, as if it were perfectly natural for her to assent to life carrying on as normal. ‘When I returned, both staircase windows were thrown open; but notwithstanding all this, a fearful smell pervaded the whole house. I asked what was the matter, and was told it was some rubbish in the (furniture work) shop. I tried the workshop doors and found them both fastened.’

At this stage in her account, Hannah became a form of gothic heroine. ‘I rattled one, and said I wanted to come in,’ she wrote. ‘They told me I could not, and upon my asking what they were doing, I was told they were boiling some grease. Then I went up on the leads and opened one of the wooden slides and looked down into the workroom. I saw a bundle wrapped round with a blue counterpane. The boiler was standing on the stove. I called down and asked what was being done, when the reply was ‘nothing in particular’ and at this moment I was called away by Mrs Bastendorff.

‘Two days after I had seen the bundle in the workroom, I went into the (front) area, and found the outer coal cellar door locked with a padlock,’ Hannah continued. ‘With a woman’s curiosity, I determined to know what was inside, and I tried all the keys about the place until I found one to fit the padlock.

‘I went into the cellar and found there a large bundle wrapped in a blue counterpane and tied round with new rope. I opened the bundle and there found some straw and on removing this – oh God! What a sight met my gaze! There were all that remained of our late lodger, Miss Hacker!

‘How I got upstairs, I don’t know; but I sat on my bed and cried until I thought my heart would break.’

And so what precisely stopped Hannah from running out into the street and summoning the police into this house of slaughter? Her explanation was that ‘they’ – she could only have meant the Bastendorffs – had entrapped her. ‘They said if I spoke about it, I should be implicated too, as I had pawned the old lady’s things,’ she wrote. ‘I was horrified and knew not what to do. I wanted to leave. I wanted to speak, but threats and persuasion overcame me, and I became a partner in the dreadful secret. Other feelings weighed with me. I had been a bad woman, but I had some of a woman’s feelings. Scores of times I thought I would go and drown myself and now I am possessed with the same feeling.’

And so now, according to her account, Hannah was in some senses a prisoner in Euston Square. ‘I grew nervous and frightened after this,’ she wrote. ‘I dared not go into the cellar without a light. I kept candle and matches beside me when in bed and night after night I have lain awake, thinking over all the dreadful things that had come into my knowledge. Once or twice I made up my mind to run away to my home and actually made preparations to do so but then the knowledge of that fearful crime paralysed my actions and I stayed on in the house, enduring the torments of hell.’

We have to imagine Severin Bastendorff reading all this that morning in September 1879, and in a giddy daze, taking it back to Euston Square and to wife Mary. We also have to imagine the many thousands of Londoners who were reading this at the same time; and the increasing murmur, heard from the back kitchen of 4, Euston Square, of people gathering outside the front of the house, discussing these sensational revelations. The Bastendorffs must have been in terror of a mob.

‘One day,’ Hannah’s account continued, ‘it must have been in February 1878, as it was after Mrs Bastendorff’s confinement (which means she would have been heavily pregnant at the time of the horrors Hannah described) and while the nurse girl Lydia Barnett was in the house, I went into the cellar to get some coke.

‘At that time, there had been a lot of coal in, and then some coke, and after, some coal again. I wanted to make an ironing fire and shovelled the coals aside to get round to the coke. I saw something sticking out of the coals. I could not make out what it was, but I felt frightened, and ran into the house.’

Given that she had already taken in the sight of the decaying Matilda Hacker, and yet managed to overcome this to shovel coals, what then was this nightmarish new discovery? ‘They told me it was the body of the little boy who was killed by a blow from a poker after being pulled out from under the workshop,’ she wrote. But there was a further hideous twist she had to impart: ‘The remainder of the body was said to have been given to Mr Riggenbach’s dog to eat,’ she wrote. ‘The cup of horrors never seemed full and I often wished I had been dead rather than keep such dreadful secrets locked up in my breast.’

She addressed the question of how it was that such dreadful secrets might be kept in a house where lodgers and tradesmen were constantly present. ‘The remains were again carefully covered with coals,’ she wrote, ‘but the workmen were continually coming in to get coal for the workroom fire and it was not many weeks after that that one of the workmen in getting some coal came across the human leg the same way I had done. “Whatever is this Hannah? It looks like the leg of an old man.” At this moment Mrs Bastendorff called me to bring some coals and I took the light from his hand and ran into the kitchen. I never saw anything of the body in the cellar after that time.’

In the meantime, the murky financial business conducted under that roof continued, according to Hannah’s account. ‘In March 1878, I pawned, by request, Mrs Bastendorff’s necklet,’ she wrote, ‘but a few days afterwards I was asked to redeem this pledge, as it was found Mrs Bastendorff would miss it.’ Hannah’s silence over who precisely has asked her to carry out this theft none the less shifted the focus on to Severin Bastendorff. ‘The pawnbroker lent £8 on the necklet,’ she continued, ‘and I was told that I might buy myself a small watch out of the money. This I did at the same place where the necklet was pawned, Mr Gill’s in the Hampstead-Road, giving £2 10 shillings for it. To redeem the necklet I was only given £5 10 shillings and I was asked to pawn my watch to make up the amount required for taking it out of pledge. I was obliged, however, to put my own locket and chain with the watch to raise the requisite sum. I was promised that my things which I had pawned should be taken out soon.’

First murder; now the financial exploitation of the poor maid. The unnamed Severin Bastendorff’s villainy seemed to know no limits. Yet the readers of this sensational work were to discover yet one more dimension of depravity to which he was apparently able to sink.

‘So far as I have spoken in this book, I have been obliged to suppress the name of the principal actors in this awful tragedy,’ wrote Hannah and her amanuensis who must surely have been aware that this omission would scarcely help them in a libel case. ‘But there is one scene that occurred in my presence and which was witnessed by so many people that I can detail all the facts and, if necessary, bring forward witnesses to prove them. Joseph Bastendorff is the foreman in his brother Severin’s workshop, and has been for some considerable time. Joseph had a little dog given to him.

‘He took it home, and after that he brought it to the workshop with him and here it was fed on Mr Riggenbach’s dog’s biscuits. It was a pretty little creature, very affectionate, and always seemed so pleased to be noticed. One day about a fortnight after Joseph had the dog I was standing on the step leading down into the workroom, holding Mrs Bastendorff’s baby in my arms, when I saw them tying the little dog up with cord.’ Again, the ‘them’ went nameless.

‘I asked what they were going to do and they said laughingly they were going to kill the dog,’ she wrote. ‘He was tied to the workman’s bench and then someone fired at the poor little thing. It howled piteously and looked so plaintively up to its murderers that I cried out and begged them to desist, but they only laughed, and again and again the pistol was fired at the poor little creature.’

And one of these ‘murderers’? Hannah named the dog’s owner, Joseph. ‘At last Joseph struck it over the head,’ she wrote, ‘and then carried the carcass into the gilder’s gallery over the shop. They had only been there a few minutes when the most pitiful moaning and then fearful howling filled the whole place. They had commenced skinning the animal before it was dead!

‘The horrible scene,’ she added with wholly unintentional bathos, ‘filled me with a tenfold longing to leave the dreadful place. The thought of the other dreadful secrets completely unnerved me and yielding to solicitations I still remained in the house.’ But the barbarity did not end there. ‘The cruel murder of this little inoffensive animal met with a fitting sequel in the disposal of its remains. Joseph took it home and had it cooked and some of the members of the family ate it! Amongst those who witnessed this horrible cruelty were Anthony Bastendorff, Bullisch, Wm Hanwell, Severin Bastendorff, a boy named Frank and Joseph’s little boy Charlie and three of these I have named ate a portion of the dog. This occurred in July 1878.’

And yet for all of this darkness, Hannah Dobbs did still manage to take trips home, where she somehow managed to maintain her silence. ‘In August 1878, I went to … north Devon for a fortnight, and took Christina Bastendorff with me, and also little Freddy Pearce (a nephew of Mary Bastendorff).’ Yet even on this innocent holiday, she managed to fall foul of malignant fate. ‘I lost my purse and railway tickets on the journey,’ she wrote (doubtless the story given to the station master) ‘and wrote to Peter Bastendorff to lend me £3, which he duly sent. He sent me a letter a few days afterwards stating that Mr Riggenbach had come home and found some of his clothes gone.’ (Riggenbach, as a sugar merchant, would have made frequent trips overseas to the continent.) ‘When I went back to London I spoke to Mrs Bastendorff the first evening about the missing things.

‘She said I was a fool to have taken any notice of (Peter’s) interfering letter and that I could not make things better by returning before the time. I asked her what was lost, but she would not say, and although she endeavoured to dissuade me, I went upstairs and asked Mr Riggenbach about the robbery.

‘He replied, “I don’t know anything about it, no more than when I came home and found my things gone.”’ But clearly he had taken action. ‘The same evening, the police officers came, but Mrs Bastendorff saw them. I asked her again about the things and she replied “what have I to say about them? You ought to know how you left the rooms and his things.” I said, “So I do know. I left everything all right.”

‘There was a deal more said on both sides and it ended by my declaring I would leave, and next day I gave a month’s notice and then she gave me the balance of my wages and said I might go as soon as I liked. I, however, stopped out my month, and then took a lodging at Mr Wright’s, 67 George Street.’

Again, here was unintentional bathos: the idea that after having witnessed murder and depravity, Hannah Dobbs would have her domestic situation ended because of an accusation of pilfering from a man whose dog feasted upon the body of a murdered boy; and none the less saw out her month’s notice. Yet Hannah was steering her story back to sexual scandal. ‘When I left 4, Euston Square, Mr Bastendorff was in Luxembourg,’ she wrote. ‘But after he came back he called in at 67 George Street and asked to see me. Mr Wright allowed me on that occasion to take him into the drawing room.

‘I frequently met Mr Bastendorff after this,’ she continued, ‘but he never called again at 67 George Street while I was there. I was led at this time to believe that I should be set up in a public house and by direction I called at Mr—, house broker, in the Euston-road, to get a list of public houses in the market. The broker told me I could not purchase a house myself, and on giving this message, it was suggested that I should take Peter Bastendorff with me. I did so, also being promised money, but beyond one pound, which I paid Mr Wright for lodgings, and a few shillings at a time, I had no means of living except by pawning my things.’

And it was here perhaps that another sort of story began to emerge with greater clarity: the economic dependence of a young working-class woman on men of property. This was a world where an unmarried woman was forbidden to embark upon any business transactions involving large loans; and Hannah was suggesting that the only remaining options were either finding another domestic situation; or becoming a paid mistress.

‘I was asked if I would like to go to Paris,’ she wrote, not saying which brother – Severin or Peter – had made the offer. ‘But I replied I would not but that I would try for another situation.’

And she was now in financial difficulties. ‘I had no money to pay (landlord) Mr Wright, and I was told to go and live with Mrs Crigger in Melton Street. She was a friend of Mr Bastendorff’s. I only stayed there a week when I wrote home, asking my mother to send money, so that I might come to Devonshire.’

Again, if this was the case, then the perpetrators of the atrocities in Euston Square seemed strikingly relaxed about her movements. But in the pamphlet, Hannah was attempting to sketch out motivation. ‘I was fearfully miserable at this time,’ she wrote. ‘The sight of what I had seen in the coal cellar at 4, Euston Square, the threats that if I spoke I should be implicated with the rest quite unnerved me and this, coupled with the desertion of those who should have been so true to me, almost drove me mad.

‘I went home to Bideford, and said my husband was coming down to see me,’ (indeed, keeping track of Hannah Dobbs’ multiple narratives – the stories she told her readers and the stories she told her family – is occasionally dizzying). ‘But I had a letter afterwards which suggested that I should telegraph (Peter), asking him to come down, and he did so, staying two nights.’ So while Peter posed as her husband, had the original intention been to pass Severin off in this role? ‘We then returned to London together and I took a lodging in Hunter Street. A whole week passed and I saw no-one. I was short of money – absolutely in want.

‘I was tempted, and I took a dress and jacket which did not belong to me and carried then to the pawnshop. It was very wrong – that I well know. But at this time, I was fairly beside myself with trouble.’ And here, she vouchsafed an insight that would have struck a nerve with suspicious householders everywhere. ‘My apprenticeship as a lodging house servant,’ she wrote, ‘had not tended to develop any careful distinctions as to what belonged to myself and what was the property of the people.’

Hannah and her ghostwriter were also well aware that for this narrative to be truly satisfactory, justice had to be seen closing in. ‘I had at this time made up my mind to have nothing more to do with the Bastendorffs,’ she wrote. ‘I removed lodgings to Burton Street and then applied for and obtained a situation which I was going to on the Friday evening when I was apprehended by the police for the theft I had committed. I told them the truth, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to eight month’s imprisonment, which I richly deserved.’

The brief homilies on prison and religion that were to follow will have been greeted by many readers with cackles of cynicism; by the late 1870s, in many parts of London, church-going was chiefly a matter for fervent evangelists. Agnostics had other uses for their Sundays. None the less, Hannah’s bid for redemption was an important element in any sensationalist story.

‘My life in prison differed, I suppose, in no respect from that of other prisoners,’ she wrote. ‘I behaved well, and was treated with some kindness and consideration. I saw the chaplain on the morning following that on which I was admitted. I dare not tell him all I should have liked, but I felt very very wretched and confessed to him what a miserable evil-doer I had been. I had not been confined there many days before I made my mind up to lead quite a new life and never see prison again.

‘I was not sorry I was placed in prison,’ she added, ‘as I felt it was all for my own good. After I had been there six weeks I was set to work and then the time passed very much quicker but still I had such a load of guilt on my mind that I often longed to relieve myself of the whole burden. Then the old threats would recur to me and I was frightened to speak … I felt as though I must change my life. I prayed as I have never prayed since I was a child and I afterwards told the chaplain I should like to prepare for confirmation.

‘[The chaplain] spoke so kindly to me and I joined the preparation class and was afterwards confirmed on April 29th. That day was not to me as it should have been, for my heart was sick with the secrets of others which I had kept locked up in my breast.’

Hannah Dobbs and her co-writer were now venturing on to slightly trickier ground. ‘Inspector Hagen came to the prison in the beginning of May,’ she wrote. ‘I answered all his questions but still I volunteered no additional information which I might have given. I had made a solemn promise to keep what I had seen and heard a secret and I tried to conceal certain matters which would have thrown suspicion on the guilty parties. From what he told me I concluded the remains were of Miss Hacker and I was exceedingly surprised to hear where they were found as I was told the body had been interred in the Square.’

This was a fresh detail almost bordering on the whimsical: Euston Square was constantly busy with the traffic to and from the railway station. Even in the depths of the night, the digging of a grave under the gaslight – and the dumping of a body therein – would have attracted some curiosity. None the less, she said, she told the inspector that the remains were certainly those of Miss Hacker.

‘On the second occasion when Inspector Hagen came,’ she wrote, ‘I was taken to the mortuary. He asked me several questions, all of which I answered truthfully, but I volunteered no information farther than what was being asked …’

And then came what Hannah claimed was an unexpectedly cruel twist. ‘A few days after I went to the mortuary, I was surprised to find that I was to be confined to my cell,’ she wrote. ‘My clothes were taken from me each night, and a warder stationed at the door. I could not understand when I was taken in a cab to Bow Street but until I was placed in the dock I had not the slightest idea that I was going to be charged with the murder of Miss Hacker.

‘I was dumbfounded, and knew not what to say,’ Hannah continued. ‘But the thought of my own innocence, so far as the commission of this crime was concerned, enabled me to bear up; in fact all through my examination and trial I was confident I could not be made to suffer for a crime which I never committed.’ This composure, she said, endured even as she was committed for trial at the Old Bailey. ‘I had such confidence in those whose vile actions had placed me in that position that I felt sure that they would not let me suffer for their crimes.’

Not, she said, that she felt desperate to save herself from execution: ‘I had been a wicked wretch and death had no great terrors for me at that moment,’ she wrote. As her trial was adjourned, and she was taken to the prisoners’ area below, Hannah wrote that she met Kate Webster, even then better known as The Richmond Murderer; she too was awaiting her verdict and, she told Hannah, had no idea what the result would be. ‘She seemed cheerful’ though; and after she was called up to hear of her fate – a guilty verdict and a date for execution – Hannah wrote that she never saw her again.

She also related that her composure remained as the jury returned in her trial; the verdict of ‘not guilty’ was pronounced. Yet she looked around the court and ‘no friendly eyes’ met her gaze.

Hannah had to complete her term for theft; and she related that two days after the murder trial, a frustrated Inspector Hagen came to visit her once more. He asked ‘to know if I could throw any light upon the affair’. Hannah wrote that she ‘at once complied and commenced to tell’ all she knew. But Hagen ‘sneeringly stopped’ her by ‘throwing doubt on (her) truthfulness’. She went on, she wrote, to tell more, until ‘he remarked harshly: “we don’t want any of your lies.” ‘Why should he call me a liar then?’ Hannah wrote. ‘I was ready at that moment to have spoken fully and freely to anyone who would have listened to my story, but though Inspector Hagen said he would come again in three or four days time, I saw no more of him.’

She was released from jail ‘on the 8th of August’ and upon leaving, someone handed her a copy of a book called The Great White Thorn. ‘I was much touched that anyone should have thought it worthwhile to remember such an abandoned wretch as me,’ she wrote. ‘The consolation I have derived from (its) perusal is more than I can tell.’ The book – a reprint of a popular eighteenth-century work concerning Joseph of Arimathea coming to England and preaching about Jesus by the great thorn at Glastonbury – was ‘a comfort when all else seemed to have forsaken me’. And, wrote Hannah, may it ‘long continue to be a source of comfort to me and may Heaven guide my steps aright for the future!’

Again, this was almost demanded by the convention of popular literature and drama; the wicked woman who finds redemption. Yet some sort of concluding note was needed: after all, both Hannah and the Bastendorff family had somehow to continue their lives. She also had to say something about the possible impact of this pamphlet.

‘And now one word as to the dreadful secret which was imparted to me,’ wrote Hannah. ‘Inspector Hagen has expressed a theory, so I am told, as to this case.’ (This was extremely improbable, at least in the form Hannah was about to outline.)

‘That the old lady had missed her property. That she made a noise about it. That she threatened to go for the police and then the murder was committed. His theory is correct. And the one who suggested it to him was the one that committed the deed. Let the authorities ask the men in the workshop if they remember the bell being violently rung on the day I was at Hampstead with the children.

‘The men remember the day, as they joked me when I came back about donkey riding. Let the police ask if they remember the bell being rung a second time and then one of their number being asked to go upstairs. And also let them be asked whether they heard pistol shots, screams for police, and the smash of glass.

‘Have the police tried to find the glazier who mended that window? If he can speak to the date, he will declare it was before Sunday October 14th. Have they tried to find Mr Ross, the lodger, who took Miss Hacker’s room the day after I went to Hampstead and was living in that room on October 14th (the day on which it was alleged I had committed the murder)? The lodger, it will be remembered, discovered a pistol in the water closet on the day following his arrival in the house.’

There was also an explanation for the rope around the neck of the corpse of Miss Hacker. Once she had been murdered, Hannah averred, her body had first been dragged by this rope through an opening into the garret of the house; and there it remained until it was transferred to the coal cellar.

‘In my statement, which has been forwarded to the Home Office,’ she wrote in conclusion, ‘I have mentioned other matters and given such definite information that if the police act on the suggestions thrown out, and work on the facts of the case instead of their own theories, the murder of Miss Hacker will no longer be known as the Euston Square Mystery.’

There was a reproduction of a handwritten addendum: ‘I have read this through and declare it to be my own story and correct in every particular.’ And there was her signature, dated 18 September 1879. Below was an advertisement for other ‘books’ that readers might enjoy: among them were the mystic, fortune-telling works that Matilda Hacker loved: The Egyptian Dream Book, Napoleon’s Oraculum: or the Book of Fate, The Egyptian Circle; or Ancient Wheel of Fortune and Raphael’s Chart of Destiny.²

Ever since he had first heard of the forthcoming publication of this pamphlet, Severin Bastendorff had been seeking legal means to have it stopped. But publisher George Purkess seemed happy to risk any court case; he knew that he could make a vast amount of money very swiftly from getting this pamphlet out on to the newsstands. It had a kind of terrible gravity; and in his frantic efforts to have all his denials heard, Bastendorff was going to find that he was dancing on the edge of absolute ruin. Rather than bring a sense of closure over the murder of Matilda Hacker, a further moral chasm was opened.