All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred thirty-five)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred thirty-five)

“…and did, I find it safe to say, pick up the brochures from a hotel, and introduce them to his wife. The sight of them may well have inspired the crime. He lies, because the lie is easy to tell, and because it obscures the premeditation.”

“Is it altogether impossible,” said Ebrach, “that Mrs. Demrose could have taken herself to the stairs, perhaps after suffering an extraordinary dream? The ointment, yes…but if she had crawled?”

Monaghan looked at Phelan. “They will ask.”

Phelan returned a prim smile.

“No, sir. A thousand things are possible, but only those that are evidenced concern the police. Now as to Cornish House, it has three apartments above the ground floor, the lowest apartment holding all the rooms in which the routines of Mrs. Demrose played out, the between portion occupied by Mr. Demrose, the top part given to Miss Buckley. Servants’ quarters in the basement, with the exception of the coachman. Miss Zucker’s room is among those belonging to Mrs. Demrose. Crank-elevator installed, from ground floor to second, the means of Mrs. Demrose getting up and down.”

“Who cranked it?” asked Weem.

“Coachman and Demrose. Both together, that was the strength needed.”

“And still,” Élucide’s father said, “they hardly found the chance to get her alone. Shipboard.” He went on, for putting himself in the shoes of a killer, speaking in a dissatisfied way, “Why not, then, leave her? Why move her from the bed? Why…”

“For one, begging your pardon, because the nose was sealed with thumb and forefinger, palm over mouth. Bruises either side the nasal bone. These might have been otherwise accounted for…”

“But the room was dark.” Élucide did not beg pardon for interrupting. “So he didn’t know.”

“Well.”

And in this word weighed a balance of information Monaghan had, that she did not.

Phelan spoke: “Demrose is thirty-five years of age. Miss Buckley is twenty-nine. The birth of Mrs. Demrose, information the coroner’s office had need of pursuing, is not recorded. Her parents belonged to no church. It was in 1845 that she married Cloughman, her age given as nineteen. The wedding was in May, Miss Buckley tells us her mother celebrated her birthday in December. We derive an age for Mrs. Demrose, at the time of death, of sixty-four.”

Élucide sat up.

“She married Buckley in 1853, aged twenty-four, by the record. She married Manfred Burgess Ryan-Neville in 1881, aged forty-eight. By the record.”

An unwinding of time to the tune of seven years, by a table’s worth of quiet calculations, only Weem doing the sum on paper.

247

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred thirty-six)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)