Monday 26th August 1929
Clara poured herself another cup of tea. She ordinarily didn’t like tea without milk, but there wasn’t anything in Uncle Bob’s Electrolux refrigerator, which someone (Mrs Hobson?) had had the good sense to clear out and switch off after his death. She had not intended to stay at the house last night, but by the time she had finished with Ellie Fender and then talking over the case with Alice, it had been quite late. And she still hadn’t tested the samples she’d gathered on Saturday! By the time she’d finished in the laboratory she was too tired to make it back to the hotel. So she had spent the night in Uncle Bob’s bed.
The usual fears of being alone in a strange place were magnified by fevered dreams of Horace Fender’s corpse hanging from the light fitting, while each creak, groan and murmur of the neighbour’s plumbing provided a chilling soundtrack to the terror of the night. Clara wished she still had the gun, tucked under a pillow within easy reach. But the only intruders that night were the uninvited guests from Clara’s imagination. Clara chastised herself; she was not one prone to exaggerated fantasies and had not felt like this since she was a child in her nursery, imagining her rocking horse turning into a fire-breathing dragon. Back then her no-nonsense nanny had told her not to be so silly and that dragons did not really exist. Clara knew that, even as a child of six. And yet, somehow they lived on in the corners of her mind. And now, to her surprise, in the corners of Uncle Bob’s bedroom too.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ she said in the voice of Nanny, and repeated the mantra until, finally, as an oak tree illuminated by a streetlamp cast tortured shadows onto the curtains, she clambered onto a chair and hung a spare bedspread over the window lintel. ‘There now,’ she said to herself, ‘the dragon is at bay.’
She felt more like herself, more in control, as she climbed back into bed and decided that if she was going to move into the house permanently, she would buy some thicker curtains.
Down in the kitchen, after four hours’ sleep, she started on her second cup of tea while contemplating the montage of photographs laid out on the large table. She had sorted the prints into three groups: the office filing cabinet, the hotel window and the picture house trunk. A fourth group consisted of labelled images of prints she could firmly identify. Paper slips were pinned to each one, identifying them as belonging to one of the following: herself, Juju, Jonny, Uncle Bob, Mrs Hobson or Horace Fender. She had not been able to get any item from Alice Whittaker that had Jimmy’s prints on it, in order to eliminate them from the metal trunk in the projection room, nor those of Alfie or Will. But for now she had more than enough to work with.
Her own, Uncle Bob’s and Juju Levine’s prints were all found on the filing cabinet. That was to be expected. There were a further two prints that could not be identified. She moved those aside. Next she turned to the hotel. There were three sets of prints here, all three unidentified. However, with a growing sense of excitement, she realised that one of the unidentified prints from the filing cabinet was also on the window. ‘Bingo!’
She took that print and, using her magnifying glass, angle projector and callipers, compared it to the three sets of prints found on the metal trunk. ‘Bingo!’ she said again. There was a definite match. The evidence was clear: the same person had been in the office, broken into her hotel room and been at the scene of Horace Fender’s death. And that person was not Horace Fender. Horace, it seemed, had not moved the trunk he had used to stand on while he put the noose around his neck. Or at least, he had not used his hands. And had he kicked it over in the throes of death? She remembered that it was lying on its side when she first entered the room. Or had someone else – with their hands – pulled it out from under him? And had the same person forced him into the noose?
As she and Alice had discussed yesterday, it just seemed far too coincidental that Horace would kill himself while they were there without being aware that they were there. Not impossible, of course, but highly improbable, surely. What were the chances? One in a million? No, it was just too fantastical to believe that Alice and Clara had turned up at the very hour Horace decided to top himself in the projection room. And as his wet trousers showed – and the police medic seemed to confirm – he had died within an hour of Alice finding him.
Clara had spent around an hour collecting samples from the curtain and screen and then measuring and photographing the scene. So that meant he had likely arrived sometime within that hour. If that was true, then Horace – or his murderer, if that proved to be the case – had timed his death so that the women would find him. The question was begging, how did he – or the murderer – know they were there? Had they followed them? From Gill’s Ironmongers? Or from the Salvation Army? Perhaps, and this caused a shudder down Clara’s spine, perhaps they had been following them all day. All the way from Newcastle.
The next question was how had Horace got into the Paradise? The Whitley Bay police had searched the place and found no sign of any break-in – not even a jimmied window like in Tynemouth – so the most likely explanation was that he had come through the front door after Alice had opened it. She admitted to the police that she had not locked it after herself.
So, Horace, possibly tailed by another fellow, had followed them in. Why? To talk to them? To find out what they did or didn’t know? But before he could speak to them, he was hanged. How had that happened without them hearing? If he had chosen to die, he might have done it quietly, but if he was forced to do it, as Inspector Davidson had already pointed out, why had he not called out? Clara recalled the sweet chemical whiff she’d discerned on the corpse and finally remembered what it was: chloroform. She’d used it as a solvent in the laboratory during experiments. However, she was aware that apart from the scientific use of dissolving alkaloids, it could be used as an anaesthetic. It was utilised in dentistry and some surgical procedures. And, if movies and detective fiction were to be believed, for incapacitating victims for abduction. In fact she remembered a Bulldog Drummond film where that very thing had happened.
Surely this was something that would be picked up at the post-mortem. If so, then Inspector Davidson should be open to the possibility that Horace was murdered. The question, of course, was why. Was someone trying to silence him? To prevent him from talking to Alice and Clara?
Also, if he was murdered, what happened to the assailant? Did he go into hiding and escape before the police got there? Was he watching while first Alice then Clara stumbled upon the corpse? Did he want them to find Horace’s body? Was it a warning? A threat? She had evidence here that the same person who broke into her office, knocked Juju Levine off her feet, then broke into her hotel room, also touched the metal trunk Horace Fender had stood on when he was hanged. Was this man a murderer? Was he a danger to her too? Clara looked up to check that the kitchen door was locked and remembered that she had made a point of bolting the front door before she went to bed last night. However, there were always the windows … Clara’s heart started racing, and for the second time in a few hours she wished she still had her gun.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she told herself again in the voice of Nanny, and repeated it until she felt calmer. She then picked up her pen and started compiling a summary of all the evidence she had gathered so far, including the conclusion she had come to last night in the laboratory that there was indeed kerosene on the samples she had taken from the remains of the curtain and the screen. And Uncle Bob, according to his notes, had identified kerosene at the Tynemouth picture house, which Clara confirmed when she double-checked the samples. Add to that Mr Gill’s testimony from the ironmonger’s shop that Horace had purchased some kerosene in the days before the fire, then, as far as Clara could tell, the evidence pointed very clearly towards Horace being the person who had started the fire at the Paradise Picture House, and possibly the Carousel Picture House too.
Horace could have slipped into the Paradise through the open rear door, splashed around some kerosene then tampered with the lamp that ignited the flames, and then slipped back out the rear door, locking it behind him. Clara’s heart was racing. It all made perfect sense! If not conclusively proven, then surely there was enough here for a strong hypothesis. Enough to cast more than a shadow of doubt on Horace’s damning testimony that he’d seen Will locking the door – particularly as they also had Ellie’s testimony that Horace was remorseful about something. She wasn’t sure what to do now. Should she suggest Alice get a lawyer? Or should she speak to the police first? She could ask Mr Jennings about that. She had already planned to speak to him today anyway, with regards to her own legal standing as an investigator.
Clara had a busy day ahead of her. The first thing she needed to do was make some telephone calls. There was no telephone in the house – something else she would need to correct if she moved in – so she would have to go to the office. She looked out of the kitchen window to see it was bucketing down with rain. Drat, she didn’t have a raincoat. She would have to borrow one of Uncle Bob’s.