“I love London!”Fiona exclaimed as she pranced ahead of Fletcher and myself and pirouetted on her stiletto-heeled, snaky red shoes. She faced us and waited with her arms akimbo until we reached her. Then she did a half-turn, squeezed between us, hooked her arms into ours, and created a chorus line of three. “Just think of all the scandals and intrigues being cooked up behind these staid Victorian facades. It’s so wicked and stately all at the same time — pomp and phony-baloney. And the Brits know it. They don’t take themselves too seriously.”
I knew the prices of the real estate we were walking by. “These Brits are pretty good at making money, too. Just one of these Manchester Square homes costs what everyone in Inverness makes in a year.”
Fletcher opined, “I think they’re worth it. Everything that sophisticated life can offer is in London. It’s the Koh-I-Noor diamond of cities.”
We had just come from the theater in the West End. Got off the Underground at the Oxford and Bond Street station, and had closed a pub after several rounds of beer for me and Fiona, and stout for Fletcher. It was about midnight and the October air was tinged with wood smoke. Decaying autumn leaves skittered over the pavement and gathered in little piles. We turned onto Manchester Square on our way to Durrants, our favorite hotel on George Street. This is where Fiona had leaped with glee just now.
Manchester Square has at its center a small gated park where the privileged with keys can sit on the benches amidst the gracious trees and shrubbery and contemplate how lovely life is when one is very rich. Tall brick town houses frame the park, most with high stoops and grand white entrance doors, sporting brass knobs and kickplates shined to mirror quality. Looking up from the street, occasionally one can get a glimpse of the high-ceilinged great rooms inside. As the square is not on a through street, it is serenely quiet, a welcome juxtaposition to the loud and frenzied shopping Mecca of Oxford Street only a few blocks back. Black wrought iron lampposts with weak incandescent bulbs cast a genteel and unobtrusive light on this dignified scene, which as Fiona rightly pointed out, could mask very foul acts.
Indeed, Fletcher had been engaged by the Manchester Square Association (MSA) to solve what Scotland Yard had failed to do: the sniper murders over the last year and a half, of five women, all single and living alone on the square, shot dead with an arsenic dart on their outside door steps. The tabloid press, in its alliterative passion, had dubbed them the “Manchester Maiden Murders.” Not only were the inhabitants of the square terribly rattled, the real estate value was now threatened, and the local Wakefield Museum had seen a catastrophic drop in attendance. The victims were in their early twenties to late forties, and they all had lived on the square for at least three years, some for almost twenty. Some professional, some not. They all had succumbed to immediate death by a lethal dose of cyanide delivered by a dart gun, literally felling them in their tracks in front of their homes. The police had assigned sharpshooters to the area after the first three deaths, but two more killings occurred. Lady Wakefield, the matriarch and main benefactor of the MSA, and the museum, which was formerly her ancestral home and above which she now lives in a private apartment, recommended that Fletcher be hired. She had been an ardent admirer of Fletcher’s for many years.
