Page 53 of The Peculiar Incident at Thistlewick House

Dr Appleby’s eyes flitted between the faces of those assembled in the Cleyfords’ front room and was horrified to realise that they did all believe him guilty of the crime.

His challenging words had set off a chain of thought in Edward’s brain: when someone was respectable, they tended to be believed.

Figures of authority, like government ministers, vicars and teachers, would always be trusted over women or uneducated working men…

or troublesome members of travelling communities.

It didn’t necessarily mean these upstanding citizens were always telling the truth though.

Not one person had thought to challenge the doctor’s pronouncement about the time of death and he’d rather relied on that.

Edward was suddenly furious with himself for not properly reading the man’s reactions when they’d first met at Emma’s funeral.

Dr Appleby had been too quick to dismiss his father’s claim to be guilty of bad things as senility, when the old man obviously had dark secrets in his past. His son had also engineered an invitation to the séance – flattering Edward with his interest in spiritualism.

The interest was real, because if the spirit of a young girl linked to the circus was going to appear, he had to be there when it happened.

His shock reaction at the news that Emma was left-handed was genuine, but he’d interpreted it incorrectly, believing the doctor was horrified that there had been foul play, when instead he’d just been annoyed that he’d overlooked this vital detail when he’d administered the morphine.

‘Killing an innocent child is not a very nice thing to be doing,’ Hazibub stressed. ‘Even if you were doing it to protect your father. What did he do, I wonder, that you felt you had to be taking such measures?’

‘What the hell is going on? What are you talking about, Father?’ He looked at the old man and his expression changed as he contemplated the unthinkable.

The man sitting before him was not who he thought.

His hand flew to his forehead as he massaged his temples in his distress.

‘Spirits aren’t real.’ He almost shouted his affirmation.

He turned to Edward. ‘You know this? Your livelihood has been based around this lie. You were good – very good – and almost had me believing you when you pulled that trick about my mother, but the newspapers have confirmed you to be a fraud.’

‘And yet,’ Edward said, ‘you injected poor Mrs Shaw to stop the truth of your father’s role in the murder of the circus troupe forty years ago from coming out.

I suspect he supplied the poison used to kill them all.

Likely strychnine, although I cannot be certain.

’ Now that he’d successfully established the man’s guilt, he had nothing to lose by revealing his hand.

‘But the souls of the people he so cruelly murdered have begun to rise again, in the bodies of those who are passing away in Thistlewick Tye. I saw Noah die up on those cliffs yet seconds later he came back to life. The spirit of Samson Ballard had risen and realised that Silas Garrod – the man who had given them the poisoned wine – was standing before him. I believe the furious circus owner then pushed him from the cliff. Equally, this man—’ he pointed to Hazibub ‘—is not your father, but I think you know that.’

As he had done so many times in the past, when he’d fished for information in his séances, he then stated a thing as fact in an attempt to draw the man before him out.

‘Esfir knows that you injected the body of Mrs Shaw. Despite what the newspapers claim about my abilities, I’ve successfully contacted her spirit and she told us everything. It’s no use pretending poor Barnabas’s wife was responsible for her own demise any longer.’

Dr Appleby pulled at his collar and tiny beads of sweat started to form across his forehead. The man’s predisposition towards the spiritual would be to their advantage.

‘But… but Mrs Shaw was dreadfully unwell and not long for this world. All I did was try to ease her passing…’

‘Mrs Shaw was long dead,’ Katerina said, calmly from her chair. ‘You killed my daughter. She was three years old, frightened and alone. You did an indescribably wicked thing.’ Edward could quite imagine her as the strong, capable woman Mallory had described. Not hot-headed like Samson.

‘You!’ Dr Appleby yelled at Edward, spinning to face him.

‘Everything has gone wrong since you arrived. You’ve got everyone riled up about these spirits.

Charlatan or not, this was not your business to meddle in and you should have left well alone.

I’ve just come from the weekly meeting of the Benevolent Committee and we have become increasingly concerned at your scandalous accusations.

The Reverend Fallow is so worried about the lies you’re peddling that he and Lord Felthorpe are currently heading to the cliffs to examine this so-called grave – which could, frankly, be hundreds of years old. ’

‘I have proof that those bodies are from Samson’s circus.

Possessions found with the bones date the grave and confirm their identity.

Some of the villagers are old enough to remember them visiting that winter, and yet everyone claims they left after two weeks and sailed for foreign shores.

So, I have to ask myself, why they would all lie? ’

‘What you don’t understand, Mr Blackmore, is that the circus folk were bad people – freaks of nature, sexual deviants and thieves.

My father told me about the wicked things they did.

Details of which he only began to talk about in his senile years.

Evil must be eradicated before it spreads like a creeping canker.

This is an exemplary village and has a reputation that generations of us have striven to uphold.

I will not allow the Devil to invade it again.

My father may have supplied the poison, but he was doing God’s work. ’

The truth suddenly dawned on Edward. In this village, religion, which although not for him and something he generally understood to be a force for good, had been twisted to legitimise controlling behaviour.

This man – like his father before him – was a hypocrite of the highest order, and an extremely dangerous one, to boot.

Had he also shot at him in the woods, and poisoned Carl too?

But before Edward could challenge him, Dr Appleby lunged forward and grabbed his collar, twisting at it in a forceful and violent attempt to strangle him.

The pair tussled for a few moments, before his attacker realised that Edward, although pale and quiet, was stronger than he looked.

In his frustration, Dr Appleby pulled back his right arm and swung at his head.

He caught Edward across the cheek, at the same moment as the door flew open and Sarah returned with the constable.

Mallory let out a little cry and rushed to his side. His face felt sore and he knew his eye would come up in a nasty bruise.

‘What in the blazes is going on?’ Constable Lovett exclaimed.

The doctor had sunk to his knees and was staring at his hand, as though he couldn’t believe what he’d just done, so Edward supplied the explanation.

‘As I’m sure you are aware, there have been dark things going on at Thistlewick Tye.

I wasn’t certain at the time, but I can tell you now that Silas Garrod was responsible for the deaths of a travelling circus troupe forty years ago; my manservant was deliberately poisoned, I was shot…

’ He pointed to his bandage. ‘And the good doctor here administered the fatal dose of morphine to Mrs Shaw. Go back and check the coroner’s report.

She was a left-handed woman who wouldn’t have injected herself in the left arm.

Appleby admitted it to his own father this morning. ’

‘Sorry, my son, but this man is speaking truths and justice must be being served.’ Hazibub looked at the doctor and nodded slowly, as everyone else in the room mumbled their agreement, and the constable scratched his head.

‘There’s definitely something peculiar in the air, ’cause I ain’t seen nothing like it in all my twenty years in the job.

’ Edward stopped short of volunteering that the deceased souls of a whole circus troupe might be the peculiar thing in the air he was referring to.

‘Always thought I’d landed on my feet, policing this village: there was barely an apple stolen from the market.

And yet, if what you say is true, in the last couple of weeks, along with Jacob’s strange behaviour last night, there’ve been murders and attempted murders left, right and centre. It beggars belief.’

‘All lies!’ Dr Appleby shouted. His eyes were wild and he was almost shaking, as he spat out the words and flailed his arms around.

‘Who do you believe, Lovett? The respectable village doctor? Or two desperately ill, elderly people, a known drunkard and a man who has been exposed in the newspapers as a liar?’

‘But, my son, you were admitting your crime to everyone in this room moments before the constable arrived.’ Hazibub continued to play his part.

‘This man is not even my father,’ Dr Appleby shouted in his frustration. ‘He’s the spirit of a long-dead circus freak.’

‘Right you are, sir.’ The constable frowned at the doctor, now clearly convinced the man was either drunk or mad.

‘However, in the meantime, you’ll be paying a little visit to the cell to calm down whilst I sort through all this muddle because, whatever else you may or mayn’t have done, you have just assaulted Mr Blackmore. ’

‘Never was I thinking a son of mine would be attacking another man, completely unprovoked, with his bare hands.’

Appleby looked defeated, or maybe he was just glad the whole sorry mess was out in the open. Constable Lovett produced a pair of iron handcuffs and led him from the room, turning as he stepped through the door. ‘But I want to speak to you all down at the station before the day is out.’

‘Of course, Constable,’ Edward said. He wanted to feel that he’d secured justice for Emma, but the truth was she had never been murdered; she’d passed away in the night from influenza, and an innocent little girl had been killed by a desperate man.

‘So, the doctor killed Esfir to protect his father?’ Mallory said.

‘I don’t understand. Was old Dr Appleby behind it all?

I realise the constable will get answers from him soon enough but why did his father want us dead?

I don’t even remember him having much to do with us back then.

The allegation concerning his niece came out after the massacre. ’

She looked over to Katerina who, Edward remembered, had been about to make a dramatic pronouncement just as the doctor had burst in on their gathering.

In all the drama, he’d momentarily forgotten that Mrs Ballard, the common-law wife of the owner of Samson’s Circus of Astonishing Spectacles, had claimed she was responsible for the deaths.

‘It’s all rather more complicated than that,’ Katerina said, pulling herself up from the chair, all traces of her influenza gone. ‘The doctor said the Reverend Fallow is with Lord Felthorpe examining the grave?’ She looked at Sarah, who nodded. ‘Then that’s where we must go.’