Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace Read online

  FELICITY CARROL AND THE MURDEROUS MENACE

  A FELICITY CARROL MYSTERY

  Patricia Marcantonio

  To Marguerite and Gabrielle, both strong and beautiful

  All things bright and beautiful,

  All creatures great and small,

  All things wise and wonderful;

  The Lord God made them all.

  —Mrs. C.F. Alexander, 1848

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m most grateful for wonderful online resources, including Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body (U.S. National Library of Medicine), Casebook: Jack the Ripper, The Victorian Web, and Victorian Crime & Punishment, as well as the websites of the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail, BBC, British Library, and Victoria and Albert Museum, not to forget Wikipedia. Thanks to Chris and Heidi Sanders for providing insight into Montana mining. Thanks to my pal Bonnie Dodge for her encouragement. Much gratitude goes to my great agent Elizabeth Kracht, who believed in this story, and to Faith Black Ross for helping it sing on the page. Always thanks to my loving, supportive family, who’ve always believed I had stories in me.

  CHAPTER 1

  London, England

  “Apples, apples,” Felicity Carrol sang out in a whiny voice. She held out the fruit to the woman who passed. “Juicy and sweet, dearie. Only a penny.” Her cockney accent was as perfect as the apple she offered.

  Standing almost a head taller, the woman ignored Felicity with a wave of her right hand and then crossed Warwick Road. The woman had no little finger. Felicity took in the woman’s scent of lavender, vanilla, and murder.

  Bessie Denner was suspected of killing three husbands with arsenic. The Deadly Widow had finally appeared.

  Taking a bite out of the apple, which was as good as she had advertised, Felicity watched the woman walk into Simons Apothecary. The suspect wore an expensive though gaudy blue satin dress and a hat with the largest ostrich feather imaginable, which made her even taller.

  In contrast, Felicity wore a plain dress, apron, and shawl, all topped with an oversized bonnet. She was proud of her disguise, having based it on those of other vendors she had seen on the streets. Her wares lay in a wooden tray hung around her waist with a leather belt. Three days before she had started her apple selling right in front of Simons Apothecary. On that first day, however, owner Alfred Simons had yelled at her to move on, in less than polite terms, and added a little shove for good measure. Slight and short, Simons had eyes that resembled a mole’s, especially when he threw curses at Felicity in her apple vendor disguise. So she had moved directly across the street. The vantage point had proved sufficient. Through the apothecary’s window, Felicity had spotted the woman with the big feathered hat pitch her arms around Alfred Simons and plant an ardent kiss on him.

  “Complice,” Felicity whispered. The French word for accomplice sounded so much better in this case.

  Felicity had smelled Bessie Denner’s lavender and vanilla fragrance before. Like a mist over a cemetery, the scent had lingered on the clothes of Denner’s latest kill. Felicity had examined the newly deceased Michael Spencer in the London coroner’s mortuary. The victim had been dressed as he had appeared in life, a barrister’s clerk natty from his toenails to his tie. Despite the conservative clothing, the face had revealed a kindness even in rigor mortis.

  The coroner reported arsenic poisoning as the cause of death.

  “They did one of those tests to find the stuff,” said Mr. Hobson, a clerk at the coroner’s office.

  “The Marsh test,” Felicity said.

  “That’s the one.”

  Felicity found irony in the fact that arsenic came from nature, existing in minerals and crystal form. But ever since ancient days, arsenic had become the perfect murder weapon because the lethal substance could be slipped undetected into food or drink. Arsenic had been unofficially labeled the poison of the kings on account of its regular use when one noble wanted another dead, presumably to move up the ranks. British chemist James Marsh had devised the first really successful test for the presence of arsenic in bodies in 1836. Using sulfuric acid and zinc, his method effectively detected minute traces of the poison. As a result, the test now bore his name. She had to determine how the poison had been administered.

  With a ruler, Felicity opened the mouth of the deceased Michael Spencer. Arsenic carried the smell of almonds, though not fresh ones—rather something reminiscent of stale decay. There was no almond smell in the dead man’s mouth.

  “He didn’t ingest the poison?” she asked Hobson.

  “The coroner found arsenic in his system, but not in his throat or stomach.”

  She proceeded to sniff the rest of the body. This was where she smelled the lavender and vanilla on the deceased’s shirt and coat.

  Hobson stood and watched. Though her first visit to the coroner’s office had been met with resistance and unfriendliness, today the clerk had opened the door with a smile. She and Hobson had become acquainted during her first-ever investigation, which she now referred to as the King Arthur Affair. She’d had to initially bribe him to allow her to inspect one of the victims of the killer, who had been preoccupied with the Arthurian legend. When she’d returned to the mortuary for other investigations, she’d had to pay only a small remuneration to the clerk. Felicity had now come to like Hobson, who knew everything in the world about cats, since he owned two.

  “Hobson, come here, please,” Felicity said. “Take a whiff of the deceased’s hands and tell me what you smell.”

  Hobson took a long sniff. “Beeswax, paraffin, and peppermint?”

  “Excellent, Mr. Hobson. Just what I thought. I suspect the smell came from an ointment because the victim suffered from arthritis. Notice how the knuckles on his fingers are oversized.”

  “Mean anything?” the clerk said.

  “Not at this time, but the investigation is young.”

  Michael Spencer had become the third suspected victim of the Deadly Widow, the title bestowed by the Illustrated Police News. Not necessarily a creative title, but one most accurate. Although sensational and often lurid, the penny newspaper made its living reporting stories about crime, many of them without a resolution. Regularly, Felicity combed its pages, as well as those of the Times, seeking out such cases.

  The unsolved. The baffling. These cases had become her vocation.

  Felicity Margaret Carrol of Surrey was one the wealthiest heiresses in England. She had inherited the magnificent Carrol Manor and thousands of acres of land, not to mention a cotton mill, shipping line, and thousands of pounds from investments. But instead of using the riches to attract a husband, as most young ladies in their early twenties would have done, she had found other ways to spend her money. She had increased wages for those who worked at her family’s businesses and started a foundation to help children in the poverty-laden East End.

  But solving the unsolvable and pursuing justice were her main occupation.

  Felicity had an utter distaste for the usual role young ladies played in their Victorian society and was determined to forge a path in the opposite direction. Tapping her vast financial resources to aid in her investigations, she utilized all her intelligence, scientific talents, and exceptional memory to recall anything she had read to help bring justice to those who might otherwise get none. She had so much in life, and she wanted to give to those who’d had everything taken from them by murder. She gave back by tracking down their killers. This had been her passion for the past year. She received tremendous satisfaction in making sure the people who thought they could get away with homicide ended up with their hands bound by the metal handcuffs of the Metropolitan Police.

&nb
sp; To her dismay, there were many cases where the killer remained free, including Bessie Denner. Felicity had read about Denner in the Illustrated Police News. The story had even earned a spot on the cover. In an obvious ploy to sell more issues, the penny magazine’s drawing depicted an overly beautiful young woman sitting in her chair darning a sock in front of a fire in a quaint parlor. Smiling, she looked over at a nondescript older man sipping tea—tea allegedly containing arsenic. The magazine drawing did show the woman was missing a little finger on her right hand. That detail had been based on testimony from friends of the victims who had seen the woman accompanying her soon-to-be-dead spouses.

  The police reported that the wife had become the chief suspect because she’d departed with the victims’ money and valuables. By the time Felicity read about the case, the Deadly Widow had already dispatched two husbands in such a poisonous fashion. According to the autopsy reports, the men had died from arsenic, but there was no presence of it in the throat or stomach in either case. That left the police wondering how the widow had passed on the toxin.

  The Metropolitan Police hadn’t investigated for several months because their leads had been exhausted. The Deadly Widow had disappeared—until she struck again.

  Then Felicity read about the death of Michael Spencer in the Times and had the opportunity to examine what could be a fresh kill of the Deadly Widow.

  Friends and neighbors called Spencer a man of good character. Childless and not physically attractive, he made wooden toys for children at a nearby orphanage and helped unfortunates at his church. Though only a clerk, he had recently inherited money from his father’s clothing store. Being a frugal man, he had placed the seven-hundred-pound legacy away until he could realize his vision of becoming a clergyman in the country. Above all, he longed for the love of a good woman and his own children.

  He got neither.

  Instead, Michael Spencer met Bessie Denner. The Illustrated Police News drawing had greatly embellished her looks. In reality, Bessie Denner was one of those broad-of-shoulder women with the glowing cheeks of a milkmaid who could wrestle a cow to the ground.

  Ten years younger than Spencer, the woman did possess provocative curves, deep round eyes, cherub cheeks, and full lips. Not so much a beauty, though she projected herself as one.

  After examining Michael Spencer’s body, Felicity had then set off to talk with his neighbors. One of them was an old woman with wiry white hair.

  “You some kind of detective?” the neighbor asked in a creaky voice when she answered the door.

  “Just a citizen interested in justice for Mr. Spencer,” Felicity replied earnestly. Whereas she had often turned to subterfuge in previous investigations, Felicity didn’t lie this time.

  The neighbor thought about that, grinned with brown teeth, and asked Felicity to follow her into an insignificant parlor. The woman sat back in a worn chair and proceeded to tell Felicity all she could about Bessie Denner.

  “I knew she was up to no good. Courting Michael that way, like a lioness after prey. Putting on airs like a lady. She used his loneliness against him.”

  “She does sound despicable,” Felicity said.

  “I had a better term come to mind,” the old woman replied, and huffed a bit of snuff from a worn tin.

  “Did you notice that she had only nine fingers?”

  “She always wore gloves when I saw her.”

  Felicity smiled. “That’s a good detail. Did she smell of lavender and vanilla?”

  “Stank of the stuff, really.” The neighbor pinched more snuff and sneezed mightily into a threadbare handkerchief.

  “Did Mr. Spencer ever talk to you about Bessie?”

  The neighbor spit into a tin she kept next to her chair. “Only that he loved her and wanted to take care of her and about how sweet she treated him. He bought her anything she wanted. But I heard her yelling at him like a banshee.”

  “About what?”

  “Money. When was he going to go to the bank for his inheritance? When was he going to buy her more pretty things? When were they going traveling in style? I swear that Bessie woman looked at Michael like he was the Bank of England.”

  Not exactly information Felicity could use to track down the killer. But the woman’s other observations about Bessie Denner’s character were useful. She was not only greedy but mean.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” the older woman said, as if reading Felicity’s thoughts.

  “Oh, but you have been most helpful.”

  The woman gave a tired smile and began rubbing her hands, which were gnarled as dying tree roots. The smile became a grimace.

  “In much pain?” Felicity, who had a medical degree from the University of London, recognized an acute case of arthritis.

  “Agony. Poor Michael suffered from the same ailment in his hands. All that holding a pen at the barrister’s office.”

  Spencer’s hands had showed signs of arthritis when Felicity examined the body. They had also smelled of beeswax, paraffin, and peppermint.

  A rush of excitement came to Felicity at a possible connection.

  “Did Mr. Spencer say whether Bessie gave him anything to help him with his pain?”

  The neighbor gathered her shawl tighter. “Matter of fact, she did. An ointment he rubbed on his hands all the time. I wanted to use some, but Michael said it didn’t help him much and not to bother. Bessie insisted he keep using the stuff, so he did just to please her. He’d do anything for that woman.”

  “Ever see the ointment pot?” Felicity said.

  “Kept it in his pocket, he did.”

  “Anything written on it?”

  The old woman’s eyes lightened at the memory. “Why, it said ‘Simons Ointment.’”

  Felicity smiled at the discovery and bid the neighbor goodbye.

  “Get that murderous slut.” The old woman raised her eyebrows and took in more snuff.

  Back at her London house, Felicity had reread the police and postmortem reports on the first two murdered husbands. Although she easily recalled anything she read, she still reviewed the information for absolute certainty. She also turned to the dependable solicitor firm of Morton & Morton, which had proved of value again and again—for a fee, of course—in her past investigations. She requested from them a narrative on each of the dead spouses.

  Denner’s victims had all been lonely older men without children but with money. Each had had medical problems. One man complained of a bad left knee obtained while serving in the army. The other dealt with gout in both legs. And Michael Spencer suffered from arthritis in his hands. After learning this, Felicity sat back and visualized how Bessie Denner had committed the crimes. The woman must have given her husbands the tainted ointment to use on their aching legs, knee, and hands. Over time, the poison killed them. Denner took all their money and promptly vanished. She preyed on men who only wanted love, which infuriated Felicity. Her determination to track down Bessie Denner intensified.

  Next Felicity talked with hospital nurses and doctors, although none had ever heard about a Simons Ointment. One nurse did mention a Simons Apothecary on Warwick Road. And that was what had finally led Felicity to start her reconnaissance. In her disguise as an apple vendor, she had waited for the Deadly Widow to appear. And appear she did.

  From Felicity’s observations over the next few days, Denner and Alfred Simons lived upstairs from the shop. From time to time, he locked the door and put up a GONE TO TEA sign, and they both retired upstairs for what Felicity surmised was a romantic interlude. Either that or plotting another murder. Bessie Denner’s association with the apothecary made the most perfect sense—criminally speaking. No doubt he had worked up the ointment Denner had used to deliver the fatal arsenic. At the crime scenes, police probably thought nothing of seeing an ointment pot in the home of an older man, nor would they have considered testing the ingredients for poison.

  One day, Denner left by herself, wearing a girlish white outfit bedecked with ribbons. Felicity
set aside her apple vendor tray in a nearby alley and followed. Denner moved her hips and sashayed as if she were the only person in the world who mattered. At a café, she fluffed her hair and entered. Felicity hurried to the other side of the street and located a good place from which to see without being seen. She used a telescope to aid her surveillance.

  At a table, Denner sat with a man who resembled her other victims. Older, well dressed, and a little too starved for attention from females. The last was readily apparent in how the man threw his head back to laugh and how his cheeks reddened when Denner reached over and touched his hand. Here, potentially, was dead husband number four.

  Felicity had to hurry.

  Abandoning her apple vendor disguise, Felicity rented a second-story room in a boarding house across the street from the apothecary. The site provided a good view. She realized she needed to make Scotland Yard aware of the murderous widow’s whereabouts. First, she wanted to confirm that Bessie Denner and her associate had whipped up the lethal ointment in the apothecary. That meant she had to see the mixture for herself. But rarely did the couple leave together during the day. Either one or the other left on errands and returned with food or supplies. Denner also went out by herself in various new dresses, no doubt to woo the older man Felicity had seen in the café.

  Sharing the watch in the rented room was Helen Wilkins. Felicity’s friend and maid had insisted on helping catch the probable killer of three men.

  “She’s a shame to all women,” Helen had said. “Besides, I can’t have you staying in a room by yourself.”

  “Then we shall do this together, Hellie,” Felicity replied.

  Helen had previously told Felicity she had gotten used to her young mistress’s sometimes peculiar activities during her investigations, although Helen still tried her best to make sure Felicity wasn’t harmed. For her part, Felicity didn’t like to get Helen involved as she pursued killers. Helen had raised Felicity ever since her mother died when she was six months old. Her father, Samuel Reuter Carrol, had abandoned Felicity to Helen, servants, nannies, and governesses at Carrol Manor. So Felicity considered Helen family, and therefore was protective of her. At the same time, Felicity greatly appreciated Helen’s love and respected her strength, which had made Felicity feel less lonely growing up.