Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

Kate hesitated and said she had to deliver the bag to a friend at Barnes, and would her companions wait in the bar for her. She was back without the bag in twenty minutes, an incredibly short time for her to go and come back from Barnes, but she gave Porter and his son no time to remark upon this but caught their attention with a case of rings and some photographs she had. They all had a drink, and then Mr. Porter left them at the station.

When Kate and the boy reached the villa in Park Road, Kate unlocked the door and made her companion go in ahead and light up.

“A drop o’ rum will do you no harm,” she said, “and I could do with it myself, for we have a little job to do, Bob. I want you to help me carry a box to Richmond Bridge, where I am to meet a gentleman.”

The Body in the Box

The box was upstairs, a hat box about a foot square, hinged and padlocked and tied about with a cord, and the pair brought it down. They had another drink, and Kate ran her fingers over the piano keys as though used to playing, and asked Robert to notice the “foine tone.”

They left the house, carrying the box between them. It was a good weight, and several times they changed hands. One of the handles was missing, and Robert had to carry his end by the rope and grazed his knuckles. That graze was later to make him remember the absence of a handle.

Half way over Richmond Bridge, Kate asked Robert to set the box down on a bench in a recess, and then to go back the way he had come and wait a bit while she handed over the box to the gentleman who was to meet her.

Robert obeyed her, but did not go far. It was very dark and the spot was lonely, so he slipped into another recess and waited.

All at once he heard a splash and a gentleman passing looked over the parapet.

In a moment or two Kate came hurrying back and said she had seen her friend and everything was all right. She took the boy to the Richmond Station, but the last train was gone. There was nothing else to do but to go back to the villa and stay all night.

Hogarth alone could do justice to the scene. On one side of a round table Kate with her gleaming eyes and rat trap mouth, on the other an open-eyed boy growing dizzier and dizzier as he swallowed down the rum with which his glass was kept continually filled. Overhead a spluttering gas jet. Beyond, in the kitchen, an atmosphere from which the horror had not entirely been filtered.

When the boy’s head slid to the table, Kate put out the light and went upstairs to the comfort of her mistress’s soft bed.

The morning came. Kate stole downstairs, glanced into the kitchen, then into the dining room, and smiled with satisfaction as she saw her guest had not stirred all night. She shook him awake and fed him. She sent him on ahead of her to his mother’s, with whom she spent the evening and stayed the night.

In the morning the newspaper boys were shouting:

“ ’Orrible Discovery at Barnes! Mysterious body in box!”

“Wot’s that?” asked Mrs. Porter.

“Just a catch penny, mother,” said Kate calmly. “You can’t believe a word they say in the papers.”

A number of people in London and all over the country were, however, deeply interested in the story.

The Doctor’s Decision

Shortly before seven o’clock on the morning of March 5, Henry Wheatley, a coal porter, was driving a cart along the banks of the Thames. On arriving opposite Barnes Terrace, some thirty yards from Barnes Bridge, he saw an object half in half out of the water, and, going closer, saw it was a wooden box.

With the aid of the man with him he drew it ashore, a corded box. Wheatley cut the cord and gave the box a kick, when it fell apart, disclosing a mass of flesh. His friend thought it was butcher meat, but Wheatley thought different and set off to the police station. A surgeon summoned pronounced the flesh to be human.

Pieced together, it constituted almost the entire body of a woman, and from the parchmentlike look and absence of decomposition Dr. Adams concluded it had been boiled. The head, one foot and several minor parts were missing. There was nothing to identify the murdered woman.

Kate returned to the villa, but this time with William, the elder of the Porter boys. She said she had forgotten her keys and had him climb in through a window. There was evidently some underlying purpose in her use of the boys.

No one seeing Mr. Church, proprietor of the public house known to the residents of Hammersmith as The Rising Sun, could have mistaken his calling in life. He oozed prosperity as he walked down the street in his light tweeds, field glasses over his shoulder as he went his way to the races.

Kate’s Late Husband!

Behind his bar, in shirt sleeves, a heavy gold chain across his vest, and a twinkle in his eye he made a genial host. An ex-cavalry man, he now wore a sandy beard and mustache, and had his hair brushed up into a curl over his bold forehead.