Stone's Fall

I still had my scribbled notes on the story, so I read them as the omnibus clattered towards Tottenham Court Road. The witch-woman had not been a particularly successful member of her trade, largely because of personality – I had not managed to get anyone to give an opinion as to the quality of her aura or the respectability of her spiritual intercessors. Although she went under the name of Madame Boninska, this was obviously a fake; all people claiming to be mediums adopted names like that and dropped heavy hints about gypsy blood and exotic lineage. It was expected; no one would ever believe that someone born in Tooting Bec would have much skill in dealing with the far-beyond. Her real name and age remained a mystery; the police doctors guessed she must have been at least in her sixties, although they freely said (off the record) that her bloated and ancient carcass was so raddled by the effects of drink that she could have been ten years younger or ten years older. Nor was her real identity ever discovered; all that was known was that she had arrived in England a few months before her death, and had previously plied her trade in parts of Germany and France, offering her services to the gullible who went to places like Baden-Baden or Vichy. They had little enough to do, were glad of the distraction, and she had made a decent living. There was a slight suspicion that she had also supplied more human intercessors for the comfort of male customers but that was never pinned down. Why she had abandoned the Continent for London was unknown.

But, abandon it she had, and had set up above a shop selling umbrellas, from which vantage point she began to make her living, giving personal appointments to solve problems, or group sessions for reasons which escaped me but seemed to be little more than light entertainment. On rare occasions she made house calls, but preferred to receive her clients in her room, which was decorated in dark colours, with aromatic candles burning all day and night and windows permanently shrouded in heavy curtains. The police investigation revealed why she did not like to perform elsewhere. She would have had to try and convince her customers without the benefit of all the little bits of trickery and stagecraft that were found stacked in the next room. The cupboards with fake doors; the bells with string, so they could tinkle mysteriously, controlled by unseen forces; the source of a mysterious purple light, which looked as though it had been bought from a theatre; the echo chambers so her assistant could make the noises of spiritual beings unseen by the rest.

The woman was a total fraud, in other words, and it was unfortunate that we reporters – who love a good tale of human foolishness – printed all this in cheerful detail before the police managed to interview her clients, as many of them refused to come forward out of simple embarrassment. If she had ever had an appointments book, it had vanished as well, as had the assistant, who, it emerged, had been a prostitute trying to improve herself.

All in all, then, a squalid business, as was her death. For she had been strangled with the velvet tie of the robe she wore when performing. The murderer had acted with force, and thoroughness; making sure of the matter by then crushing her skull with a heavy brass candlestick. There had been little struggle; the room was hardly disarranged at all. And it was unclear when the murder had taken place. There was a suggestion that the assistant, whose name was Mary, might have come back shortly afterwards – someone thought they had seen her in the street – but, if so, she had then fled rather than contact the police. Which was unfortunate, as the police never for a moment considered that she might have been responsible.

With her had gone the most valuable source of information, for she alone of the living might have known who had come that afternoon, at what time Madame Boninska had probably been killed and why. For nobody else had seen anything that day. And without her evidence there was no chance of solving the case. More alarmingly perhaps, I realised I had given Lady Ravenscliff some slightly inaccurate information: Madame Boninska had been found two days after her husband fell from his window, but the police doctors were not at all certain when she had actually been killed. The degree of uncertainty meant it could have been before Ravenscliff had dropped from the window, perhaps after. The police had concentrated their limited efforts on finding Mary, who was the only one who could enlighten them and, when they proved unsuccessful, had more or less given up. Their collective opinion was that she would turn up eventually, and they could reopen the case when she did. Until then, they had other things to worry about.