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  A LOSS OF ANGELS

  Tales of the Last Edwardian

  by John Linwood Grant

  Published by John Linwood Grant

  Copyright John Linwood Grant 2015

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  A Loss of Angels

  The bodies of Edward Tallboys and his infant daughters, Eliza and Lucia, were discovered on a damp September morning. They lay together in the kitchen of their respectable Manchester home, both children with one small hand outstretched towards their father. It might have been entreaty, or a final gesture of love.

  There was a considerable amount of blood. The first police constable on the scene lost his footing and fell against Lucia's corpse, which was still warm. The event haunted him until his own death in Flanders, a decade later.

  In each case the throat had been sliced open with a single stroke. The father showed signs of resistance, according to the doctor called to the house; the children were otherwise unmarked. The doctor was, however, preoccupied in treating the constable and then sedating the family cook. An elderly woman, she had gone out to complain about the shin beef delivered the previous evening. She had returned to a house of the dead.

  Reporters descended on the area within the half hour, and the evening editions were thick with fact and speculation. Little distinction was made between the two.

  At which point, Michael Albert Reade was apprehended in the city of Leeds. Drunken affray, with menacing behaviour. Common enough, but Reade turned out to possess, upon being placed in charge, a number of interesting items. The desk sergeant was most particular in recording everything.

  An amount of loose change and a pound note. A ticket from Manchester Victoria Station for that same day. Two cheap cigars. A straight-bladed razor, its blade and ivory handle none too clean – in a dried, red-brown way, that is. A broken pocket-watch...

  And an unposted letter, clearly intended for Mrs Tallboys, who was staying with an aunt in Salford at the time of the murders. The letter declared, amongst other things, that his passion for her had never died.

  Reade was quickly discovered to be a former suitor of Mrs Tallboys, nee Laura Clerkensmith. Two days before he had been dismissed from his position as a foreman at a Lancashire mill, due to “An increasingly inebriated disposition which he would not correct.” He was interviewed, and his full confession, though rambling and angry at times, was on record by the following evening. He had murdered Edward, Eliza and Lucia Tallboys.

  The Crown Court, with due and solemn process, committed Reade to Armley Gaol to await the hangman. The hangman, meanwhile, prepared to calculate the drop.

  Alice Urquhart stretched in her chair, wincing at the discomfort where she had sprained her left ankle a few days before. The moors were an infuriating tumble of hidden rabbit holes, ditches and sudden drops, best left to the sheep in her opinion.

  “Dr Urquhart?”

  The attendant from the open ward, the one with the warts on his left hand. Oh God, what was his name?

  “Yes, Hotchkiss.” she said, inspired.

  “Hotchkins, doctor, beg your pardon.” He gave her an awkward smile. “Dr McLeod has done his rounds, and he wants a word, like. If you don't mind. He's in the day room.”

  She nodded, and levered herself to her feet. The ankle wasn't quite so bad today, after all. Hotchkins slipped away, due his morning cocoa, and she hobbled down the corridor to the day room, a large and pleasant space on the south side of the main building.

  Dr Sholto McLeod, FRCP, MRCS and Medical Director of High Helmsley Asylum, beamed his pleasure at her arrival. Around him, the less stricken and less agitated private patients lounged in comfortable chairs, muttering, picking their noses or staring out across the gardens. Martha Jenkins, although harmless, was surreptitiously trying to reach inside her double layer of undergarments and interfere with herself again. The sedatives would have to be increased slightly, thought Alice, disappointed.

  “I wondered, lass,” he said in his usual Scots boom, “If we might review your progress? It's a wee while since we talked.”

  “In here?”

  McLeod looked around him as if surprised to find the room occupied by so many odd looking people.

  “The gardens, then, aye?”

  High Helmsley was a broken horseshoe of a place. A substantial Georgian house formed the main curving bulk, while a converted stables block and a large laundry stood separate to make up the sides. The heavily-wooded gardens of the asylum were extensive and well-kept, mostly by the patients, or inmates, as the attendants would call them.

  Under a late autumn sun, the leaves glowed in reds and auburns, butter-yellows and all shades of brown. Alice and McLeod paced the main gravel path, his normally vigorous stride slowed to meet her more careful pace.

  “Ye'll no be walking out with anyone for a day or two.” he said, still beaming.

  She bit back an acid comment, and waited.

  “Well,” he said after a minute or two, “D'ye have an opinion on our boy with the razor, then?”

  “An opinion, Dr McLeod?” She turned to face him, a tall lime shading them. “I think that Michael Reade should have been hanged two weeks ago. As for a psychiatric diagnosis...”

  “Moral insanity, lass.” He laughed. “That'd satisfy the lawyers, would it not?”

  “Or impulsive insanity, over-exertion of the brain tissue – do they really care?” Alice kicked at a stone. “His delusions about Laura Tallboys, for example, calling her a divine spirit, entrapped by her husband. Bound to the earth against her will. He never mentioned these when taken in Leeds.”

  “Ye think he's faking?”

  “I think he's a murderer, driven by possessive jealousy and coached after the fact by his lawyers, friends, maybe even a two-a-penny doctor from a public asylum.”

  “Can ye prove it, though?”

  Alice thought a moment, gazing around her. She had not yet made her mind up as to McLeod's true nature. He called everyone lass or laddie, and employed a Scots accent which varied from mood to mood. Still, he had hired her. Most British asylums would have baulked at taking on a female alienist.

  She looked across to the long two storey block where high-spirited horses must have once held sway. The Secure House, where the dangerous and unknown were kept from the bulk of the distressed but harmless. The line was blurred, and madness had many hats.

  The hats in the Secure House were torn and bloody, urine-soaked, or pulled down so far that their wearers might never emerge again.

  “Another three days.” she said. “Dr Jenkins has discounted the supposed cranial abnormalities which the defense counsel raised. Give me three more days.”

  “That'll be it, though, lass. We'll need an opinion one way or the other. The papers are baying for blood again – they want the lad hanged and gone – and the lawyers are on my back.”

  “You could have taken the case yourself.”

  “Aye, that I could have. But I didn't. It took a bit of coin to steal ye from Vienna. Dinna buy a doggie and bark yoursel', eh lass?

  He lashed his cane at a thistle top, missed by the gardeners.

  “Ye'll get there. How's the rest of the wee buggers?”

  “Progress in the main. Compton's improving. Martha Jenkins seems to be relapsing. We'll have to put her back on the women's ward.”

  He nodded. “And how's Walton coming along?”

  Augustus Walton. The secretary who thought he was being stalked by Mr Dry, the so-called Deptford Assassin. A classic case of paranoia, as the Europeans n
ow dubbed his condition. The newspapers had a lot to answer for, drumming up such hysteria in every quarter.

  “At least his case might yield to modern techniques. Given time”

  McLeod raised a whimsical eyebrow. “Aye, lass, maybe so. But Reade will yield a muckle for our pocket-books, so mind ye keep him first on your list.”

  Between committal and the intended noose, doubts had been raised as to Michael Reade's fitness to stand trial in the first place. Raised, of course, by his lawyers and his moderately wealthy family. Their appeal for stay of execution had provoked another flurry of public interest, and the defense had need for an independent assessment

  They had sought to hire Sholto McLeod, a competent alienist of sound reputation. They had been given Alice Urquhart, late of Zurich and Vienna, only four months in post at High Helmsley. She herself might have refused, but the lead defence barrister, a snappy little terrier of a man, had annoyed her.

  “I question,” he had said with a sneer, “If a woman is equipped for this task, given the appalling acts involved. How can one of the fairer sex be expected to deal with the gory nature of such a crime?”

  “Difficult to say, Mr Thetford.” she had answered. “Do you believe that your mother was equipped to deal with the 'gory' nature of your birth? I assume, of course, that she too was a woman?”

  Mr Thetford, whatever his skills in open court, was not a popular man. His junior had sniggered, whilst Reade's family solicitor had guffawed openly. Alice was retained.

  Reade had been placed in the Secure House. Alice tried to see her patients analytically, without judgement, yet she disliked him. She disliked him because beneath the delusional claims and the lapses into nonsense, she sensed a lie.

  It was a mere moment's walk to the Secure House, hairpins and any jewelery removed beforehand. There were patients inside who would use anything to injure themselves and others.

  “Afternoon, doctor. 'Ow's tha keepin'”

  Armitage, both attendant and gatekeeper most afternoons. A big man with tattoed arms, a Hull fisherman until he lost part of his left leg in a trawler accident. He was intimidating enough to halt all but the most deranged.

  “Well enough, thank you, Daniel.” Armitage had accepted a female doctor more readily than some of the medical staff. She had no idea why.

  She stepped into the porter's office and signed the book. “Mr Reade again.”

  Armitage nodded to a burly attendant. “Arliss'll be wi' thee, doctor.”

  The porter's office and examination rooms occupied the small central section of the Secure House. The North Ward held those most dangerous to others; the South Ward those whose worst deeds were reserved for themselves.

  Alice followed the attendant up the short flight of stairs to her right, leading to the north landing. Grey steel doors with shuttered slots at head and foot height. If things were bad, you spoke at one, pushed food through the other.

  Cells. There was no real point in pretending that these were anything else. If a patient was physically threatening, they received either a hypodermic or the straight-jacket. Sometimes both.

  Morphine, chloral hydrate and paraldehdye; numbers on grey doors. If she could see past those numbers, find dreams, lost memories, childhood triggers which had brought adult insanity, then it would be worth it…

  The door to Number Four opened, and she followed the attendant in. He looked around the small room keenly, approved the state of it, and stood back to let her work.

  Michael Reade was over six foot tall. A large face veined from drink, cheeks coarse with dark brown hairs. He still hadn't allowed himself to be shaved. Muddy eyes peered out under brows which almost tangled into his hair. Alice sat on the one chair in the room, and regarded Reade as he rocked slightly on the edge of the bed, watching her.

  “Mr Reade, do you recognise me? Your solicitor requested that I talk to you.”

  He paused in his rocking motion, looking at her tweed jacket and skirt. “Are you another bloody nurse?”

  “You know who I am, Mr Reade. I'm Dr Urquhart.” She sighed. “Are you in good health today?”

  “I need to see her, see my angel.” A wild look from under those brows.

  “You know we can't do that.” She glanced into his file, thick with police records and depositions from relatives. “But we did talk, yesterday. About your belief that Mrs Tallboys --”

  “Laura.” he snapped, and the attendant took a step forward. Alice waved him back. Reade was intemperate by nature. He had never called Edward Tallboy's wife by other than her first name, even during his confession and his few utterances at the trial.

  “Yes. You said...” Alice picked up threads from the day before in her mind, re-creating her last session with Reade. “That Mrs Tallboys was 'a genuine angel, sent to bring me into grace'. You said that God had told you this.”

  “He sent her to be at my side, to be my help-meet.” The large man squinted at the attendant. “Men are sinful, and Laura is pure.”

  “But before your trial, you said that she had once been your fiancee, that Edward Tallboys had stolen her from you. How could an ironmonger steal an angel?”

  Laura Tallboys was in isolation, mourning with her family, not only for her husband but for her two children. Despite her training, Alice could not imagine how the woman felt.

  “God determines all.” muttered Reade, darkening. “And Laura will come here, for me, will free me as I freed her. She will come to embrace me, and thank me.”

  She spent two hours with him, growing increasingly irritated with rambling, almost Biblical statements. They did not ring true. He did not ring true. She tried to go through his childhood with him. He came from good enough family. By their own account, he had been a bully as a youth and had taken to drink early, yet there were no obvious traumas which might account for his action in Manchester. Only jealousy, which affected the sane as much as anyone.

  She left in a poor temper, and returned to her office. Her head began to throb as she read through the depositions from both families.

  Michael Reade had pressed his suit on Laura Clerkensmith, and been rejected numerous times over the five year period leading up to her marriage. Had he not begun to spout such nonsense in Armley Gaol, he would have been put down as an angry former flame, utterly culpable. If he had not killed the children, the press would have had limited interest in the trial. And why had he killed Eliza and Lucia, if his fury was towards the husband. Because they could not be Laura's children, he said. Laura was pure...

  She closed the files. There was Augustus Walton yet to see, a man whose delusions might be analysed, explored, even alleviated.

  She made her way down to the interview room. It was six o'clock. Hotchkiss – no, Hotchkins – was at hand, a cup of sweet tea ready for her.

  “Should I stay here, doctor?” He glanced at the man sat by the window.

  “We'll be fine, I'm sure. I have the bell.”

  A button by the door. Of limited value, but it symbolised a connection with the rest of the asylum. That was enough for most situations. Hotchkins closed the door behind him, and Alice eased herself into the unoccupied chair, an over-comfortable monstrosity with a lace throw on the back.

  “Good afternoon.” she said.

  Walton looked up, a momentary panic on his face, but relaxed when he saw who it was. Alice had been working with him since the start of the week, the day of his admittal.

  “Is there news?” His eyes darted to the door, then back to her.

  “You're in no danger here, Augustus”

  He sighed. “Mr Dry will find me. You do know that, doctor. He never fails.”

  Total conviction in his voice. It fascinated her. Here was a man who had been brought to High Helmsley by his sister Felicia. He was co-operative, free from aggressive behaviour. His presence was voluntary. According to his younger sister, who lived with him in their rented villa, he was a secretary in a minor shipping house, given to no more vice than two bottles of stout on
a Friday night and the occasional pipe.

  She nodded. “I do understand. But Mr Dry is not your usual killer. If we believe what we read…” She emphasised the word 'believe'. Her first act had been to take away the thick book of newspaper clippings which Walton was clutching, a veritable encyclopedia of Mr Dry's supposed crimes. Most were sheer invention by the press.

  “I believe what they say.”

  She looked pointedly at Walton. He squinted back through half-moon spectacles, his rounded face complemented by a fringe of sparse whiskers.

  “Well, they say he has killed a Member of Parliament, two City brokers, and the son of Lord Rothergyre, amongst others. We agreed last session that it would be, at the very least, peculiar for him to turn to you after such fine fare

  “I suppose that I may not seem such an important person.” He tried to smile, failed. “But I have enemies, doctor. My superior in the firm, I'm sure he believes I might supplant him. And one of the partners, I did tell you. He has taken a dislike to me since I pointed out some irregularities...”