The Murder Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

Dupayne welcome that?”
    â€œIn theory, I suppose. If the heirs keep it on they may go down that path, but they haven’t got a lot to offer here, have they? The Dupayne is hardly the V and A or the British Museum. If you’re interested in the inter-war years—and I am—the Dupayne offers practically all you need. But the 1920s and ’30s have limited attraction for the general public. Spend a day and you’ve seen it all. I think the old man always resented the fact that the most popular room was the Murder Room. Now a museum devoted entirely to murder would do well. I’m surprised someone hasn’t set it up. There’s the Black Museum at New Scotland Yard and that interesting little collection the River Police have at Wapping, but I can’t see either of them being opened to the general public. Admissions strictly by application.”
    The Murder Room was large, at least thirty feet long and well lit by three pendant lights, but for Dalgliesh the immediate impression was darkly claustrophobic despite the two easterly and the single south-facing windows. To the right of the ornate fireplace was a second and plain door, obviously permanently shut since it was without either doorknob or handle.
    There were glass-fronted display cases along each wall with, below them, shelves for books, presumably dealing with each case, and drawers for relevant papers and reports. Above the cabinets were rows of sepia and black-and-white photographs, many enlarged, some obviously original and starkly explicit. The impression was of a collage of blood and blank dead faces, of murderers and victims united now in death, staring into nothingness.
    Together Dalgliesh and Ackroyd made a tour of the room. Here displayed, illustrated and examined, were the most notorious murder cases of the inter-war years. Names, faces and facts swam into Dalgliesh’s memory. William Herbert Wallace, younger, surely, than at the time of the trial, an unmemorable but not unappealing head rising from the high stiff collar with its tie knotted like a noose, the mouth a little loose under the moustache, the eyes mild behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Beside it was a press photograph of him shaking hands with his counsel after the appeal, his brother at his side, both rather taller than anyone in the group, Wallace a little stooped. He had dressed carefully for the most appalling ordeal of his life, in a dark suit and the same high collar and narrow tie. The sparse hair, carefully parted, gleamed with brushing. It was a face somehow typical of the meticulous over-conscientious bureaucrat, not perhaps a man whom housewives, paying over their weekly pittance, would invite into the back room for a chat and a cup of tea.
    Ackroyd said, “And here’s the beautiful Marie-Marguerite Fahmy, who shot her Egyptian playboy husband, in the Savoy Hotel of all places, in 1923. It’s remarkable for Edward Marshall Hall’s defence. He brought it to a crashing conclusion by pointing the actual gun at the jury, then letting it fall with a clatter while he demanded a not guilty verdict. She did it, of course, but thanks to him she got away with it. He also delivered an objectionably racist speech suggesting that women who marry what he called ‘the Oriental’ could expect the kind of treatment she received. Nowadays he’d be in trouble with the judge, the Lord Chancellor and the press. Again, you see, dear boy, we have a crime typical of its age.”
    Dalgliesh said, “I thought you were depending on the commission of the crime for your thesis, not the workings of the then criminal justice system.”
    â€œI’m relying on all the circumstances. And here’s another example of a successful defence, the Brighton Trunk Murder in 1934. This, my dear Adam, is supposed to be the actual trunk in which Tony Mancini, a twenty-six-year-old waiter and convicted thief, stuffed the body of his prostitute mistress,