Under the guise of spending the day with Alefounder, Mary had, in fact, travelled to the Bluefield lodging house on the Ratcliff Highway, where Sobers had taken a room, and had managed to find Phillip Malvern. Initially Phillip was shocked to discover that he had another daughter; Bertha had never told him that Mary was his, and since he’d disappeared into self-imposed exile after he’d been blinded by Silas, he hadn’t seen her grow up. Old and fragile, it had taken him a few hours to adjust to the news, and it was only when she told him that Bertha wanted him to go back to Jamaica that he finally seemed to believe her. He admitted that Bertha had been the true love of his life. They spent the afternoon and some of the next day together. Phillip was intrigued by Sobers’s claims that Mary was a myalist and begged for her assistance in summoning spirits and ‘vanquishing the demons’ who’d stolen his eyesight. Eventually, he took them down to his underground chamber and showed them his collection of eyeballs. By her own admission, Mary was appalled by what she’d seen and tried to force Phillip to tell her where the eyeballs had come from, and whether he had harmed any of the women. Shaken, he confessed that Elizabeth had procured the bodies for him — he said he didn’t know where they’d come from and only later, when Mary confronted Elizabeth, did she find out the truth.
Mary insisted that Phillip had not been involved in the plot to kill Elizabeth Malvern. From her descriptions of him, Phillip came across as a kind, lonely, deluded old man who was grateful to Elizabeth and didn’t seem to understand the full horrors of what she and Jemmy Crane were doing. Pyke surmised that, out of gratitude, Phillip had told Elizabeth about the sewer access to the bullion vault at the Bank of England. He obeyed, of course, when she swore him to absolute secrecy. Elizabeth, for her part, had no intention of keeping it a secret, and when she told Crane about it, she set in motion a chain of events that inadvertently culminated in Crane’s capture and arrest. Mary swore that she didn’t know what had happened to Phillip and seemed genuinely upset when Pyke told her that he believed Phillip was being held captive by Crane’s accomplices somewhere in the city, and might even be dead.
‘I promised my mother I’d bring him back to her,’ Mary said, facing the prospect that, despite her best efforts, she might fail to make good on this pledge.
Elizabeth Malvern’s fate had effectively been sealed before Mary had even left Jamaica, but the plan — hatched by Harper and Webb — was put into action when Mary went to the Malvern residence to announce that she was going to marry Charles. This drew a predictable response from Silas and she was escorted from the house. Before Mary left, she told Silas that she was not going to change her mind — such were her feelings for Charles — and that she was willing to discuss the matter only with Elizabeth. Mary had left her address at the Bluefield lodging house, with instructions that Elizabeth should meet her there. Like her father, Elizabeth had wanted Mary out of their lives and certainly didn’t want her former servant marrying her beloved brother. For this reason, Elizabeth had asked Crane and his friends to go to the lodging house to try to scare Mary into abandoning her wedding plans, but they had come up against Arthur Sobers. Later, Elizabeth sent word that she would be willing to talk to Mary at her house. Mary had agreed to go because it suited her own ambitions, but only on the condition that no one else was present, not even servants. Together with Arthur Sobers, she crossed the city on a horse and cart that Sobers had acquired the previous day. Convinced that Elizabeth was alone, Mary had excused herself and slipped downstairs to let Sobers into the house via the back entrance. According to Mary, Sobers was the one who’d actually strangled Elizabeth, but she didn’t deny that she’d been a willing participant, pinning her half-sister to the floor.
When Mary described the murder, Pyke tried to gauge whether she felt any guilt or remorse, but her face remained blank.
Afterwards, Mary and Sobers took off Elizabeth’s clothes, removed her jewellery and laid her out on a tarpaulin. They had already decided to cover the body with quicklime — it would dissolve some of the flesh and make a positive identification difficult. The more pressing dilemma had been what to do about Elizabeth’s eyes. They were emerald green and anyone who’d seen Mary and who might be required to identify the body might notice the discrepancy. They’d already decided to try to make Elizabeth’s death — Mary’s death — resemble the murders they’d heard about from Phillip. If these murders were already known to the police, they would likely assume that Mary — or rather Elizabeth — had been killed by the same man. According to Mary, she had been the one who’d cut out her half-sister’s eyes with a scalpel borrowed from Phillip. Once this procedure had been completed, they carried Elizabeth’s corpse to the cart, hid it under a tarpaulin and returned to the Ratcliff Highway. There, at a spot they’d found earlier, they rolled the corpse down a grassy slope and left one of Mary’s dresses — the one she’d been wearing that morning at the Bluefield — nearby, together with a bottle of rum. That, and washing the body with the rum, had been her idea. The scribbled note bearing the name of the Bluefield, which was left in the dress pocket, would lead the police to the landlord, Thrale, who would, in turn, identify the corpse as Mary. The rum and the apparently ritualistic nature of the killing would underline the fact that a black or mulatto woman had been killed. No one would think the corpse belonged to a white woman. The policemen wouldn’t look at the skin colour; all they would see was a body decomposing with quicklime, the missing eyeballs, the rum.
Their hope, Mary explained, was that the corpse would be identified as Mary Edgar’s and any investigation — if there was an investigation — wouldn’t amount to much. They also knew that Silas Malvern, if he ever learned about Mary’s death, wouldn’t want it investigated too much either, because he wouldn’t want his family’s connection to a dead mulatto to become a matter of public record.
The only problem, of course, was Lord William Bedford. A kindly old man who was devoted to his godson, he had been true to his word and, at Mary’s insistence, he’d told no one about her engagement, except for his most trusted servant, the butler. If Mary’s murder was publicised and Bedford, or the butler, read about it, either man might go to the police and tell them what he knew: that Mary had been a guest in his house and that she was engaged to his godson, Charles Malvern. Moreover, if she went to see him after the death, the old man would know that the victim wasn’t, in fact, Mary or the woman the police believed to be Mary.
‘So you had to do something about him, didn’t you? You didn’t have a choice in the matter.’ Pyke tried to push this point.