Justwhopulled the plug on Mrs Moneybags?

It’s a 150-year-old whodunit even Con an Doyle couldn’ t solve. And, insists the author of this grip ping tale, was hanged... man the wrong

The eccentric and very funny American poet Ogden Nash once wrote this ditty about detective stories: Had she told the private eyes. How she got in that fix I would be much apter To read the last chapter. I thought of this charming little verse as I was reading Sinclair McKay’s interesting book about the real-life Victorian murder of a wealthy old lady. Though the crime took place more than 150 years ago, McKay thinks he has finally worked out who did it – and, according to him, it wasn’t the poor man who was hanged.

But has he fingered the right villain? Only the victim could ever really tell the detectives ‘how she got in that fix’, and she, alas, is beyond words, having been found lying dead in a messy pulp on the top floor of her own home in the hot summer of 1860.

Mary Emsley was by no stretch of the imagination a sympathetic character. Rather like the murder victim in Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment, she was a grasping, mean-spirited moneybags who seemed to take delight in collecting rent from hundreds of poor tenants, and evicting those who were unable to pay, never allowing them any more than a week’s grace.

Twice-widowed, and with no children, she lived by herself in a three-storey house in London’s East End, and seemed to relish her own miserliness. Rumours abounded that she spent her evenings counting out her money.

In August 1860, one of her rentcollectors grew worried that no one had seen her for two or three days. One thing led to another, and soon the police were letting themselves into the house.

The first thing that struck them was the ‘foul and unmistakeable smell’. On the top-floor landing they noticed a bloody footprint and an intensification of the ‘nauseating stench’. Seconds later, they stumbled upon the corpse of Mrs Emsley, her head pulverised, and ‘maggots writhing in and around the lurid crater in her skull’.

As you can see, Sinclair McKay doesn’t hold back. He knows readers prefer murders grisly, and preferably in Technicolor. There was, he adds, a ‘greenish hue’ on her face, and one of her hands was grasping a table leg. Furthermore, there had been an explosion of blood ‘in three directions’.

And now read on… Needless to say, it’s impossible not to. McKay tells a compelling story, and skilfully weaves into it fascinating threads about Victorian London, with illuminating sketches on contemporary themes such as immigration, the workhouses, the coming of gaslight, the temperance movement and terrorism.

Given that Mrs Emsley was a mean-spirited moneybags with more than a hundred hardpressed tenants, there should have been any number of suspects. At first, the police spread their net wide, realising, in their blunt way, that ‘some hundreds… of the most depraved and lowest class… have frequently threatened her’. But they soon convinced themselves that, as there was no sign of forced entry, and very little taken, the murderer must surely have been someone she knew and trusted. A fairly typical murder had suddenly turned into a proper whodunit, with what appeared to be a fairly limited cast of suspects.

Mrs Emsley’s solicitor offered £200 for information leading to a conviction. The British government added £100. In today’s money, this would total almost €40,000 or more, so a considerable fortune – enough to transform a neighbourhood of paupers into fanatical sleuths.

One of those with an eye on the reward money was an oddjob man named James Mullins, helped Mrs Emsley repair her multiple properties. With an eye to the main chance, Mullins led the police to a shed in which he claimed to have spied Mrs Emsley’s chief rent-collector, Walter Emm, depositing a mysterious parcel. The police opened the parcel and found a few sundry objects, among which were four teaspoons owned by the late Mrs Emsley, along with a cheque made out to her.

An open-and-shut case, one might have thought, but at this point the tables were turned on Emm’s accuser, Mullins, when the sharpeyed police inspector noticed the string on the parcel exactly matched the string Mullins used to lace up his boots. Might Mullins have set Emm up? And might Mullins be the murderer?

The police hedged their bets and arrested both men. They then searched their homes and, among Mullins’s possessions, chanced upon a hammer which soon became a key piece of evidence. It was, they said, ‘with just such an instrument that the deceased, Mrs Emsley, was struck’. Furthermore, they thought Mullins’s boots matched the bloodied footprint on Mrs Emsley’s floorboards.

Within a matter of days, there seemed to be a solid case against Mullins, and the public were soon convinced he was the guilty man. It didn’t matter that there was no trace of blood on his hammer or on his boots. One neighbour, Mrs Fuke, remembered the accused telling her that Mrs Emsley deserved everything that was coming to her. ‘It was a great pity,’ she claimed he had told her, ‘that such a miserable old wretch should be allowed to live.’

The Old Bailey trial lasted two days – considered quite lengthy at that time. The judge dismissed as ‘idle dreaming’ the evidence of those who said they had spotted Mullins on the night in question looking crazed and haunted, and made it clear that he thought the blooded footprint, theatrically displayed in the courtroom,

The sharp-eyed police inspector noticed the string on the parcel exactly matched his laces

The judge dismissed as idle dreaming the evidence... nevertheless Mullins was executed

had no relation to the accused’s boots. Nevertheless, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and, after a failed appeal, the unhappy Mullins was executed.

Mullins, it emerges, had lived an extraordinary life before meeting this sorry end. As a young man, he had been recruited into the newly formed police force, and then had served as a spy in Ireland, successfully infiltrating a group of Irish nationalists.

But this cell had got wind of him, and had been about to execute him when he escaped and raised the alarm. Forced to return to Britain, he was demoted, then badly injured in an accident, and driven to petty crime, for which he spent six years in prison.

Once out of prison, he seemed to have fallen on his feet when he got plastering work from Mrs Emsley. But then came her murder, his over-zealous sleuthing and his subsequent arrest. Did he commit the crime that sent him to the scaffold? Writing about the case 40 years later, Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, felt his guilt should be reclassified as ‘unproven’ but McKay is convinced that Mullins was innocent.

However, he waits until the last two chapters to reveal the true identity of the guilty party. My lips are sealed. All I will say is his choice of the real villain is ingenious and artistically satisfying, too, in that it would have pleased Wilkie Collins, or Conan Doyle.

But is it true? Perhaps. But it doesn’t strike me that, based on McKay’s fairly slim evidence, a sensible jury would convict. My own suspicion is that Mrs Emsley might have let a total outsider in – she had advertised a sale of wallpaper, so would have been expecting strangers – which means her murderer might have been anyone. And I suspect McKay is not quite as convinced by his solution as his publishers, who confidently state that he has finally revealed the ‘true murderer’, would have us believe. Being an honest writer, he uses the weasel-word ‘possibly’ twice in announcing whodunit. Still, this is a fascinating book, riveting, unsettling and rich in period detail.