Shades of Murder (9 page)

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Damaris grimly. ‘Or something will have to be done.’

The case against William Price Oakley, accused of the murder of his wife, Cora, last year, opened today amid scenes of great excitement. The public benches were crowded, those hopeful of attending queuing outside since daybreak. The press box was also well filled, some of the gentlemen of that calling having travelled from London. One even represented the international news agency founded by Baron von Reuter and sat ready with pen and paper to set down the details and send them around the world. Such is the morbid interest aroused by murder trials in all parts of the globe
.

Stanley Huxtable, a red-haired, stocky young man and the
Bamford Gazette’s
regular court reporter, was rather pleased with this piece of copy. Stanley sat through trials of all sorts on behalf of his employer. Usually it was smalltime stuff and the miscreant was up before the magistrates. Bamford wasn’t a hotbed of crime, not unless you counted petty theft and the usual drunk and disorderly on a pay-day. It wasn’t often he got anything as good as a murder and the chance to attend the assizes in Oxford in his professional capacity. A journalist could let himself go on a murder. To the citizens of Bamford, Oakley was a local boy. They wanted to know every detail and it was up to Stanley to supply it, hurrying back at the end of the day with material for the special late editions being put out to cover the trial.

The nation shared their curiosity. You only had to look at this, admittedly rather small, press box, filled to overflowing with sweating hacks. Seated next to Stanley, the Reuter’s man was mopping his brow and the nape of his neck with a spotted handkerchief.

Stanley settled his bowler hat on his knees and licked the tip of his pencil. When he’d been a cub reporter he’d been taught to write everything down. ‘You think you’ll remember, my boy, but believe me, you won’t!’ his mentor had intoned. So Stanley had already written,
Court very warm
.

It was likely to get warmer. The room was not large. The press box was a narrow single bench shielded by a low wooden wall, fixed to the side of the room at right angles to the rest of the benches which ran across the room side to side. It faced the jury benches across the room in a similar situation against the far wall. The witness box was to Stanley’s left. In front and to the right of him, on the benches set across the room, facing the judge, sat counsel. Behind them was an empty row, half of which was partitioned off to form the dock. Behind this rose the grey-painted public benches in ascending ranks. They were rapidly being filled by said public, which was jostling its way through the entrance at the top of the room.
Packed like sardines
, jotted Stanley,
and nearly as smelly
.

The public was at last seated, waiting, holding its breath in anticipation for the moment of drama. It came. Like the devil in a stage play popping up through a trapdoor, the defendant, William Oakley and his escort appeared, first their heads, then their bodies, up the narrow stair that gave access to the subterranean tunnel running between the prison and the courtroom. Oakley was led to his place in the dock, the heads of those seated above craning to look down on him. This was the man they’d come to see. This was the murderer! The escort took its seat on the remaining half of the row, forming a stiffly uncomfortable red-faced mass of heavy wool uniforms.

Preliminaries were briskly completed, the defendant entering a plea of Not Guilty in ringing tones. There was undisguised satisfaction on the public benches. A plea of Guilty would have seen the whole proceedings despatched in minutes and everyone sent home, other than the condemned man and those who would escort him back through the tunnel to prison, and ultimately to his appointment with the hangman.

Counsel for the prosecution, Mr Taylor, tall, thin, with an elongated neck, rose to his feet and clasped the front edges of his robes in either hand.

‘We’re off!’ murmured the Reuter’s man.

The courtroom held its collective breath.

‘Gentlemen of the jury,’ Taylor began, ‘we are here in the presence of a dreadful crime, dreadful in its concept and execution, and rendered more dreadful by the hand of Fate.’

Good start, thought Stanley, scribbling. The old boy’s got a nice turn of phrase.

‘The accused, William Oakley,’ Taylor was saying, ‘married a rich wife and during their marriage administered her money and kept an eye on her business interests. This was convenient for him, because he’s a
man who needs money, a gambler, a follower of the turf and a womaniser. Mrs Oakley had been very young, only eighteen, at the time of the marriage and was accustomed to defer to her husband’s judgement. However, as the years went by, Mrs Oakley became aware of her husband’s incessant philandering and, being now a mature lady in her thirties and not a girl of twenty, was resolved to do something about it. The final straw which broke the proverbial camel’s back was an affair begun between the accused and the nursemaid, Daisy Joss.

‘Mrs Oakley made it clear she was prepared to indulge her husband no longer. Not only would she cease to make money available to pay his debts, she might even have come to consider a legal separation. It was then that William Oakley hatched a scheme to rid himself of his wife. It probably came to him during a routine visit to London Chemicals, a factory in which his wife had interests. Arsenic, that well-known and readily available poison, was used at the factory in the manufacture of rat poisons. Secretly to procure a small amount would be easy. But to poison his wife by the usual method, that is introducing it into her food, presented difficulties. He had no reason to visit the kitchen where the food was prepared. They shared the same meals, served by one of the maids. But at London Chemicals he was able to observe the way in which arsenic crystals are obtained from the ore, and was told that in the process, a highly toxic gas is produced. William Oakley, gentlemen, had found his means.

‘Having abstracted a small amount of arsenic ore from the factory, William Oakley now had to await his opportunity. It came soon enough. Following a painful dental extraction, his wife had asked him to bring laudanum from the pharmacy in Bamford. She would be taking it that night and under its influence first become drowsy and then sleep heavily. Oakley’s plan was that his wife should die in that sleep and that the death would be attributed to another cause – namely, over-indulgence in the laudanum. Oakley’s plan was as follows: once he was satisfied that his wife was in a drug-induced slumber, he would creep into her room and construct a primitive but working apparatus, using the heat from the bedside lamp to vaporise the arsenic. He would then leave the room, making sure windows and door were shut. His intention was to return later, his nose and mouth well muffled, throw open the windows to let out the smell of garlic caused by the vapour, remove the evidence, pour away much of the laudanum and then return to his own room and await the morning. By then, the tell-tale garlic odour would have disappeared, Mrs Oakley would be dead in her bed and the large amount of laudanum
missing from a full bottle, purchased only that day, would indicate she had overdosed herself with the drag.’

Taylor paused at this point.
Checking the jury’s reactions!
thought Stanley. Taylor need not have worried. The whole courtroom hung on his every word.

‘Things didn’t go to plan. Mrs Oakley had not taken so much laudanum that she was unaware of the odour of garlic filling the room. Or possibly, her husband, on closing the door as he left after setting up his dastardly apparatus, had disturbed her. She awoke, saw that something very strange was happening, and attempted to get out of bed. Alas, she was overcome by the vapour and fell, bringing down the lamp. That set alight her nightgown and, dying as she was from the effects of the toxic vapour, she could do nothing to save herself.

‘At this point, another thing unforeseen by William Oakley happened. The housekeeper Mrs Button arrived on the scene. She was unable to save her mistress but she did notice the smell of garlic, so typical of the process, and threw open a window to let it out. Had she not opened that window, gentlemen of the jury, it is possible the housekeeper might also have died from inhaling the dreadful vapour. You will also hear that she noticed foreign items amid the wreckage of the shattered lamp, although she had no way of knowing what their presence meant. We shall show that what Mrs Button saw was the remains of the apparatus set up by Oakley, also brought down in Mrs Oakley’s fall.

‘The inquest on the death concluded that Cora Oakley had fallen while drugged and brought down the lamp, dying of burns and shock. Defence will doubtless seek to make much of the fact that Mrs Button said nothing to contradict this at the time, only later when she had been dismissed from Mr Oakley’s service. Mr Oakley must indeed have disliked seeing daily a woman who had witnessed incriminating evidence of his crime. He may have suspected the housekeeper had noticed the smell and seen the remains of his devilish device and was puzzling over them. Mrs Button had indeed been worried; once dismissed, and feeling herself released from any obligation to her former employer, she went to Mrs Oakley’s parents. They had never been satisfied with the manner of their daughter’s death and set in train the events which brought William Oakley to be in the dock today.’

Neat!
scribbled Stanley.
But you’ve got to prove it, old son!

Ron Gladstone stood in front of the dilapidated stone building, sucking his front teeth. His whole attitude was one of deep disapproval.

‘Shocking,’ he said aloud. ‘And I dare say worse inside.’

The building in question had been put up more years ago than anyone could remember. It stood in the far corner of the grounds, away from the house, and was hidden by a tangle of shrubbery. When Ron had started working in Fourways gardens, he’d been there a week before he’d realised this place even existed. Ramshackle and overgrown as it was, he’d seen no reason to do anything about it right away. He’d put it low on his list of priorities for the garden and it was only today that he’d made up his mind to tackle it.

The building’s solid stone block walls had withstood the ravages of time fairly well, but its corrugated iron roof had rusted, warped and collapsed entirely in the centre, leaving a hole through which years of rain must have entered. Not surprisingly he discovered, as he checked methodically, that all the woodwork was rotten. Ron’s screwdriver sank in like cheese, as he muttered and prodded at window and doorframes. ‘Blimey! Rough bit of workmanship, this,’ he observed of the door itself. ‘And dropped.’

By this Ron meant that the door no longer sat square within its frame. Though held in place by rusted hinges on the one side, it had been dragged askew over the years by its own weight and the bottom corner on the handle side rested on the ground. It was locked by means of a hasp and padlock and it was to tackle this obstacle that Ron had brought along the screwdriver. He set to work on the aged fixtures. The screws resisted surprisingly but he got them loosened in the end and was able to wrench off the whole locking device. With the padlock circumvented in this way, he put it, the hasp and the screwdriver on the ground. His next task was to oil the hinges. He then seized the door handle in both hands and hauled on it. It took him several minutes and he risked splinters in his fingers before the oil worked into the metal joints and they groaningly
obliged. At last he was able to drag it open sufficiently to allow him to squeeze through.

‘Phew!’ he muttered, taking out a handkerchief to mop his brow. ‘Wonder when that was last opened!’

He edged through the gap. It took a few moments for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. The air was stale and damp, smelling of earth and decay. There were windows all along one wall. They were hung with cobwebs so thick and huge they might have been heavy lace curtains. The cracked and broken panes were encrusted with dirt. The shrubs outside had grown up hard against them, poking twig fingers through gaps and invading the shed with greenery. As a result, next to no daylight seeped through by this route. The main source of light was the hole in the roof. It revealed to Ron’s bemused gaze a time capsule of long-ago gardening activities and all of it covered with a layer of thick dust and more strings of cobweb. The floor was of beaten earth, muddy in the centre beneath the gap in the roof. Utensils were propped against the walls or were stacked in corners. Beneath the windows ran a long bench covered with broken earthenware flowerpots, seedtrays, yellowed seedpackets, dried out scraps of vegetable matter. A collection of what looked at first glance like pebbles turned out, on inspection, to be the dried speckled remains of runner bean seeds. Ron picked up one of the flowerpots and a trickle of earth, dried to the consistency of finest dust, ran out. He felt as though he’d broken open a tomb. Unlike Howard Carter, however, he wasn’t faced with ‘wonderful things’ but only junk.

‘Been a potting shed,’ he observed again aloud to himself.

He turned round. Against the back wall stood an extraordinary-looking mechanical contraption, rusted into immobility, a cross between a dogcart and a lawnroller and he realised that was exactly what it was – a roller designed to be drawn by a pony.

‘A museum would like that,’ said Ron.

He transferred his attention to the shelves around the walls, stacked with tins, jars, packets, all rusted, grimy, discoloured. Most of the labels were illegible. Ron scratched his chin. Getting rid of that sort of stuff, if you didn’t know for sure what it was, could be tricky. You couldn’t just abandon a pile of old fertilizers and weed-killers on the local dump and leave the whole lot to leach into the soil. The council were fussy about that sort of thing these days. The council, in fact, might have to be contacted about the disposal of all this. He would have a word with Miss Oakley.

In a way Jane Austen would have recognised, Ron always referred to
Damaris as Miss Oakley and to her younger sister as Miss Florence.