The Frankenstein Murders Read Free Page A

where a body will burn of its own accord.
    The night of Lady Chesterlock’s death, she had attended a musical soiree. Upon her return home, Lady Chesterlock took a small glass of sherry — her nightly custom. She was not seen again until early the next morning, when the housemaid found her mistress’s charred remains in the sitting room. The housemaid went into hysterics at the sight and had to be calmed by the other servants. The butler summoned the police.
    Only Lady Chesterlock’s right ankle and foot encased in a satin slipper remained; the rest had burned, along with the seat, back, and part of the arms of the chair. Nothing else in the room was damaged, save for pieces of broken glass on the flagstone hearth. After careful consideration, the police agreed that Lady Chesterlock’s death was the result of spontaneous combustion; the fire screen was securelyin place, and the matches carefully stowed in a decorative box upon the mantle.
    Lady Chesterlock resided alone in the Grosvenor Square house, after her only daughter married Mr. Charles Lowrey of Bath. The house had been bequeathed to her by her late husband, Sir Humphrey, who had been widowed before they met. Sir Humphrey had a son by his first wife. The London house, although still belonging to Sir Humphrey’s family, had been willed to the use of his second wife for the duration of her life, after which it would return to the exclusive use of his own family, namely his only son, Sir Ian Chesterlock. Lady Chesterlock’s daughter, Mrs. Charles Lowrey of Bath, uneasy because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the strange death of her mother, immediately requested that Holmwood, Gray, Cameron, and Associates investigate the matter further. Mr. Edward Freame was charged with the investigation.
    At first, Mr. Freame examined Lady Chesterlock’s sitting room, in particular the burnt armchair. He noticed a dark oily spot on the wool carpet at a distance quite removed from those stains beneath the chair and was informed by the housekeeper that the stain had certainly not been there before Lady Chesterlock’s death. Mr. Freame took the carpet and tested it by cutting it into pieces and burning both the stained parts and those that were not. He noted that the part of carpet soaked only by the oily substance burned in moments. The rest of the carpet took significantly longer to combust. Mr. Freame then conducted an experiment wherein he took a dead sow, wrapped it in a fabric similar to that of the dress that Lady Chesterlock wore on the night of her death, and placed it in an armchair identical to the ones found in her sitting room. He then doused the sow in lamp oil and lit the oil on fire. The body burnt hotly and quickly, except for the extremities, the bottom halves of the sow’s back legs.
    Mr. Freame additionally salvaged some of the liquid from the shards of glass on the fireplace, which the police had earlier identified as the remains of Lady Chesterlock’s sherry bottle. He fed a small portion of the liquid to a mouse. The mouse immediately went into a deep slumber from which it could not be woken. Through further questioning of the servants, Mr. Freame also discovered that Sir Ian Chesterlock had visited his stepmother earlier that week and had left her a gift of a bottle of her favourite sherry. Mr. Edward Freame also found a London apothecary who remembered Sir Ian Chesterlock, who had complained of insomnia. The apothecary sold Sir Ian Chesterlock a large amount of a potentsedative. Upon inspection of several pairs of Sir Ian Chesterlock’s gloves, Mr. Freame identified that they were soaked in the same oil as that which had been found on the carpet at 112 Grosvenor Place.
    Knowing intimately the habits of his stepmother, Sir Ian Chesterlock waited until all the lights in the house except those in the sitting room had been extinguished. Having in his possession a key to 112 Grosvenor Place, unknown to the