Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 19, No. 99, February 1952

The Pluperfect Murder by Roy Vickers

The “Holborn murder,” as it was called at the time, deserves its place in the list of perfect crimes. True that Harold Taylor took an insane risk. But he took it with his eyes open, knowing it was a risk — and the risk came off. He made no mistake, tripped himself on no tremendous trifle. It would have been utterly impossible for the most brilliant detective, the most thorough police organization, to catch him.

He was hanged, in the end, through the agency of a charwoman, who, being unable to read the newspapers, had never even heard of him — never knew the grim consequences of her action. She wanted a reward, of approximately eight shillings and sixpence, for finding a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez that had nothing whatever to do with the crime.

Harold Taylor was the son of a schoolteacher in the village of Maenwy in Carnarvonshire. In January 1908, when he was twenty-two, his father died. After all expenses had been paid and the furniture sold Harold found himself possessed of a sum of £85. On the strength of this he threw up his clerkship in a local estate-office and went to London to seek fame and fortune as an author. By May of that year his capital had shrunk to £10 while his prospects remained less than nothing.

It was the year of the opening of the White City, at Shepherds Bush, with the Franco-British Exhibition. The area of the exhibition was so extensive that many persons who were in no sense invalids were glad to hire wheeled chairs in order to see it all without undue fatigue. Taylor, a well set-up young man, quite passably good-looking, was glad to sink his pride and become a chair-man at a wage of £1 per week, plus tips.

One Saturday afternoon a patron in the form of an elderly, richly dressed, and rather obvious maiden lady stepped into Taylor’s chair.

She was Florence Absolom, aged fifty-four, the blamelessly respectable daughter of a deceased Wesleyan minister through whom indirectly she had inherited some £43,000 in gilt-edged securities. Miss Absolom lived by herself in a small flat in Red Lion Square, off Holborn.

It seems that Miss Absolom alone of all with whom he came in contact saw in Taylor a man who was too good for his surroundings. “A gentleman,” as she no doubt would have expressed it. For this reason, perhaps, she gave him no tip but invited him to tea at her flat for the following afternoon.

The conversation turned largely on the subject of speed. Miss Absolom expressed her nervousness of taxicabs, then a comparative novelty. Gradually she worked round to the suggestion that Taylor should hire a car and take her for a ride — at her expense, of course. He agreed. The fact that he had never driven a car was nothing. He had a friend, a lorry man employed at the White City, who would teach him in the earlier part of the mornings of the coming week and he would take Miss Absolom out next Sunday.

As he took his leave she pressed a £5 note into his hand for “expenses.” He repeated his assurance that there would be no expenses and, somewhat stiffly, placed the £5 note on her mantlepiece and departed.

This refusal of the £5 note should be attributed less to his delicacy than to his intelligence. Taylor, even at this early stage, had scented the possibility of big game.

Exactly what was the relation between these two during the months that followed it is difficult to guess. If Miss Absolom was in love with the young scoundrel the love was probably unconscious. It is more credible that he made a strong appeal to her thwarted instinct of motherhood. He himself undoubtedly took this view, for he was able to tell her of his flirtation with a young woman without anticipating jealousy on her part.

During that summer of 1908 they were constantly together. Now and again Miss Absolom would come to the White City and hire his chair. This happened often enough to become the subject of coarse jests among his fellow employees.

During June, July, and part of August, Taylor steadfastly refused to derive the smallest pecuniary benefit from his association with Miss Absolom. She bought the car which they had previously hired. He did everything he could to keep down the running costs, cleaning the car himself and garaging it at a low rent in the Mews over which he lodged in the Grays Inn Road. When they stopped for meals he insisted on paying for both out of his own pocket.

In the third week in August he lost his job through being absent without leave for the purpose of driving Miss Absolom to Reading and back. Thereupon, Miss Absolom firmly demanded the right to assist him in his career. It was absurd, she pointed out, for him to be so squeamish in money matters when every penny of hers would one day be his.

Taylor’s manly pride went down before this remorseless logic.

Miss Absolom, in fact, had her plans all cut-and-dried.

“There is nothing,” she told him, “that you cannot do — with money behind you.” From letters written to a friend it is pathetically clear that at this stage she intended that he should later on adopt a Parliamentary career. In the meantime, as he was now only twenty-two, it would do no harm to enter some profession — for example, the law.

This conversation took place over lunch at her flat. In the afternoon she took him to a ready-made tailor and bought him a dress suit. There are details of masculine attire inseparable from the wearing of a dress suit. She brushed aside his offer to order these himself and have the bill sent to her. She superintended the purchase of each trifle, paying in gold from her chain purse.

That evening she took him to dinner at the Charing Cross Railway Hotel. Afterwards they went to a leading music hall, but did not stay until the end. Oddly enough, this program was repeated every Monday and Friday evening until the following March. In each case they dined at the Railway Hotel and in each case they went to a music hall, staying only for half an hour or so. The attraction to Miss Absolom, one must assume, was not the show, but the fact of being seen in public with the young man.

That first evening was in the nature of a celebration. On the following day Taylor was taken by Miss Absolom to her solicitor, a Mr. Hellier, who had ground-floor offices in Great James Street, that rather shabby extension of Bedford Row which is the solicitor’s Harley Street. Great James Street, it should be noted, is within one minute’s walk of Red Lion Square.

Taylor, it had been previously arranged, was to be articled to Mr. Hellier who, as he had recently drawn up Miss Absolom’s will in Taylor’s favor, was fully alive to the general situation.

Next came a visit, under Miss Absolom’s tutelage, to a landlady in Doughty Street, in whose house Taylor was to occupy two furnished rooms. To round off this day of preparations for the new life, she took him to her doctor, who was also an oculist. The doctor found the young man sound in wind and limb, but suffering from a slight astigmatism. He wrote out a prescription for glasses that need be worn only when reading, or driving a car.

There was still an hour to spare before the shops closed, so Miss Absolom took the prescription, together with her protégé, to an optician in Holborn.

Here there was a slight difference of opinion, Taylor wanted spectacles, but Miss Absolom decided that spectacles were unsightly. At first gently, and then firmly, she pressed the case for pince-nez. Pince-nez it was — and for pince-nez the optician took measurements. She ordered two pairs, rather elaborate gold-rimmed affairs, at a cost of £4-10-0 each. They were delivered a week later at the rooms in Doughty Street.

According to Taylor’s signed statement, the greater part of which was undoubtedly true, he did not contemplate murdering Miss Absolom until some half an hour before he actually did so. Nevertheless, within a week of his coming to the solicitor’s office, he was holding a very peculiar conversation with his employer.

“Miss Absolom’s great kindness to me puts me in an awkward position,” he asserted, and went on: “Suppose she were to die suddenly with her will in my favor! People would say that I had exerted undue influence.”

“You need not worry about that. There could be no question of undue influence in this case,” replied the solicitor — and afterwards regretted his words. In cross-examination later on he said that the question had startled him; otherwise, he would not have answered.

This conversation is the only item of evidence that Taylor planned the murder a long time beforehand.

Between September and Christmas Miss Absolom consulted Mr. Hellier three times, not as a legal adviser, but as a man of the world. Taylor, it seemed, was not as happy and contented as she had hoped. Mr. Hellier, at each sitting, advised her to give him a little more liberty, but later events proved that she did not take his advice.

Taylor, in fact, was learning something of the troubles of the bird in the gilded cage. More exactly, Miss Absolom treated him almost as if he were a young boy. He lunched every day at her flat, dining at his rooms and returning to the flat nearly every evening from nine until ten when, with a good-night kiss on the cheek, he was packed off to bed. Every material want of his was promptly gratified by Miss Absolom, but invariably Miss Absolom herself made the actual purchases and as invariably compelled him to accompany her to the shop. She allowed him fifteen shillings a week for pocket money and made him account for it — not from motives of parsimony, but in order to keep a motherly eye on him. She insisted on discussing with his landlady the most minute details of his personal health and comfort. To the one servant at her flat she would refer to him not as “Mr. Taylor,” but as “Master Harold.”

At Christmas she obtained three days’ extra leave for him and took him for a week’s holiday to a hotel at Torquay where she spoke of him as her nephew and insisted on his sleeping in the dining room of her suite.

On the night of Boxing Day he had a headache and went to bed soon after dinner. She came to his room to give him aspirin and then, with no more than a mild protest from him, went through his pockets.

In one of them she found an affectionate letter from a young woman, then a Miss Sadler, employed by a drapery firm in Oxford street.

“What is the meaning of this?” she asked and before he could answer: “I am surprised and hurt at your having a flirtation with a girl of that class. This is to go no further.”

“Oh, all right!” he grunted sleepily.

She seems to have accepted this as a solemn pledge. As far as can be ascertained she did not again refer to the girl until the following March, the day of her death.

It was the 22nd of March, 1909, and a Thursday. Every Thursday, lunch in the flat was served at a quarter to one instead of one o’clock, in order that Miss Absolom’s servant might have more time on this, her free afternoon. She was allowed to serve the lunch and go.

Now on the previous night Taylor had been to the Oxford Music Hall with Miss Sadler and this fact had somehow come to Miss Absolom’s knowledge.

We do not know how the conversation started. Taylor’s signed statement begins, as it were, at the end, with the facts accepted by both sides.

(“Miss Absolom did not say anything at first, but she was angry. Then she said: ‘You’re much too young to think like that about women and when the time comes for you to marry you must marry a lady.’ And I said: ‘Rose is quite lady enough for me or anybody else.’ And then Miss Absolom said I must give up Rose and as she had been paying for me all this time I said I would. Then Miss Absolom was quiet and before I went back to the office she kissed me like she often did and said I was a good boy, which was only her way of speaking, and that she wanted to see Mr. Hellier but not about me and Rose, but about something quite different which she did not mention to me.”)

The latter part of that last rambling sentence does not ring true. Why this labored explanation that though she wished to consult her solicitor it was “not about me and Rose.” It is fairly safe to assume that Miss Absolom wished to discuss precisely that matter and that she told Taylor as much.

On his way back to the office we may guess that Taylor was contemplating the fact that the material benefits he had so far received were an inadequate return for all that he had endured at the hands of Miss Absolom. There was the question of the future to be considered — with special reference to the coming interview between Miss Absolom and her solicitor.

Mr. Hellier’s offices were on the ground floor of a house that had once been a dwelling house. On your left, as you entered the open front door, was a small room, the window of which opened over a basement. Behind this was Mr. Hellier’s room. On your right was the waiting room and behind that was the clerks’ room.

Taylor had the little room all to himself. His early struggles as an author had at least made him a fairly good typist, so that a good deal of copying work fell to him.

At twenty minutes past two Mr. Hellier came back from lunch with a client named Dacosta. Mr. Hellier looked into the waiting room and asked Taylor whether he had finished the Dacosta agreement.

Taylor had completed the work before leaving for lunch. It was lying on the table beside his typewriter. Here he took his first risk — albeit a very small one: that Mr. Hellier would not notice the agreement.

“No, sir,” he answered. “I am sorry but I haven’t started on it.”

Mr. Hellier expressed his annoyance and then inquired how long the work would take.

“I will bring it into your room at a quarter to three, sir, if I am not interrupted in the meantime,” answered Taylor.

“Who is going to interrupt you?” grunted Mr. Hellier.

One imagines a “deprecatory smile” on the face of the young clerk as he answered: “As it’s so important, sir, I’ll make sure, if you don’t mind, by locking the door.”

Taylor locked the door and waited until his employer was in his own room with Mr. Dacosta. Then he put on his bowler hat, his overcoat, and his gloves. Next, he opened the window and dropped six feet into the basement.

Within a minute he was at the corner of Red Lion Street, and some one hundred yards from the Square. He went into a public house which displayed a telephone sign. Here he gave the number of the block of flats and in due course this call was answered by the porter. Altering his voice just enough to make it unrecognizable, he told the porter that he wanted to speak to Mrs. Eagle on an urgent matter. He gave a mumbled name and urged the porter to hurry.

Now Mrs. Eagle was tenant of a flat on the fifth floor. Miss Absolom’s flat was on the second floor. Further, there were only two telephones in the building at that time — Miss Absolom’s and the one in the porter’s office.

As soon as the porter laid down the receiver, Taylor cut off. He hurried to the block of flats, reaching Miss Absolom’s door, of which he had a latchkey, just as the porter, an elderly, corpulent fellow, arrived on the fifth floor.

He knew that she was resting in her bedroom. Without disturbing her he went to the kitchen whence, after some consideration, he emerged with a flatiron and a blind-cord.

The details become gruesome. It will be sufficient to record that at a quarter past eleven that night Miss Absolom’s maid, entering the bedroom with hot cocoa, found her mistress battered to death.

To leave a gap of five minutes or so we again find Taylor at the telephone — this time in the hall of Miss Absolom’s flat. He is handling the instrument somewhat awkwardly because he has his gloves on. In a pocket case are five gemmed rings, subsequently valued at £70, just torn from the dead fingers of Miss Absolom.

He again rang the porter and apologized for the stupidity of the exchange in cutting him off before he could speak to Mrs. Eagle. There was no need, he protested in his slightly altered voice, to trouble her a second time if the porter would be good enough to tell her that her cousin was in London and would like to meet her at her club at four o’clock.

Taylor listened for the porter’s footsteps and then, leaving Miss Absolom’s flat by the front door, took his big risk. He had disposed of the porter who was at that moment on the floor above, making his second journey to Mrs. Eagle’s flat. But he could not similarly dispose of the other tenants, most of whom knew him by sight. If one of them were to see him leaving the block, detection would be certain.

The risk came off. No one who knew him saw him leave the block — no passerby in the Square noticed him. Before Mrs. Eagle had finished explaining to the porter that she possessed neither a cousin nor a club Taylor was back in his little room in Mr. Hellier’s office with the better part of ten minutes to spare.

He unlocked the door and Waited. Then he took the typed agreement to Mr. Hellier, at the same time asking and obtaining permission to leave the office an hour early.

Shortly after five o’clock he was in the Burlington Arcade, the tip of a leather pocket case protruding from his coat pocket. He took a couple of turns, shop-gazing in the manner of a country cousin. Then he made the inevitable discovery that the protruding leather case had caught the attention of a pickpocket and had duly disappeared.

There was now nothing more to be done. He spent a pleasant evening in the company of Miss Sadler. We may assume that he slept well and that he even looked forward to the morning’s papers with a certain confidence.

But when the time came for him to read them, he discovered that he had lost one of his two pairs of gold-rimmed pince-nez. In the light of after events we may safely say that this discovery shattered his complacency and filled him with something approaching panic.

A pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez, however, was not among the clues to the crime. There was, indeed, a singular lack of clues. That the porter had been decoyed from his point of observation was less a clue than a mere fact. The theft of the rings obviously was either the motive for the crime or a “blind.”

As to the “blind” theory, there was only one person known to have a motive for killing Miss Absolom and that was her heir and protege, Harold Taylor. But medical evidence supported the common-sense view that the crime was committed in the time between the two telephone messages received by the porter — that is between 2:25 and 2:35. During that period, as Mr. Hellier testified, Taylor was in his little room copying an agreement on his typewriter.

When they interviewed him, the police found Taylor calm and even helpful. He was able to give a minute description of the missing rings and to help his words with rough but serviceable drawings. This information was sent out and on March 26th, four days after the murder, a pawnbroker of Marylebone Road, accompanied by an assistant, called at Scotland Yard and produced the five rings.

They had been pawned just before closing time on March 22nd, the day of the murder, by a man and a woman together, both probably under thirty years of age.

Sergeant Wilmott (who later gained a V. C. in the great war) then carefully contrived a meeting between the pawnbroker and his assistant on the one hand, and Taylor and Miss Sadler on the other. Both men were instantly positive that they had never seen either the man or the woman before.

In the eyes of the police this definitely removed suspicion from Taylor. Armed only with the pawnbroker’s rather hazy description, they began to look for the thieves, one of whom was almost certainly the murderer. They never found them — possibly because they were not looking for pickpockets.

In short, the crime, as a crime, was perfect. Nothing could now betray Taylor but blind chance. And the blind chance happened.

Taylor’s prolonged search for his missing pince-nez yielded nothing. He seems to have dismissed the matter, to have put every detail of his successful crime out of his mind. The picture of him during the next few weeks is of a young man in a hurry.

After a day or two of decorous mourning for his benefactress he resigned his position and borrowed £1oo from Mr. Hellier on account of the £43,000 which, minus death duties, would be his as soon as the tedious formality of probate was complete.

He had in the meantime persuaded Miss Sadler to leave her employment without notice, in order to devote her whole time to preparations for their wedding.

The preparations were no doubt as thorough as could be desired, but Taylor seems to have been unable to spare time for the ceremony itself. The young couple set up housekeeping together in a maisonette in Addison Road. Assisted by Mr. Hellier, Taylor borrowed again on his prospects — the amount of the loan this time being £7000.

The murder of Miss Absolom became one of London’s unsolved mysteries.

The first link in the chain of blind chance that dragged Taylor to the gallows was the failure of a well-known architect, who occupied rooms on the first floor of the house in Great James Street, which had once been the scene of Taylor’s labors. Mr. Hellier seized his opportunity of acquiring a much better suite and proceeded to transfer himself upstairs. Naturally he wished to leave his old office properly clean and for this purpose he employed for a week an extra charwoman. By a supreme flourish on the part of the goddess of chance this extra charwoman happened to be a Mrs. Taylor.

Mrs. Taylor’s first task was to clean the basement which Mr. Hellier had used for the storage of office lumber. In the basement well, partly concealed by a piece of guttering, Mrs. Taylor found a small case containing a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Mrs. Taylor took them to Mr. Hellier who looked at them and said he thought they must belong to his late clerk, Mr. Harold Taylor, who would doubtless reward her if she were to take them to his address, which Mr. Hellier would write down for her.

On the following morning Mrs. Taylor again stopped Mr. Hellier on his way out to lunch. She had seen Mr. Harold Taylor who had said that the glasses were not his. So, far from obtaining any reward, Mrs. Taylor had not even received her bus fare.

The woman, thought Mr. Hellier, was becoming a nuisance in her anxiety to be rewarded for her find.

“I can only suggest that you should take them to the lost property office at Scotland Yard. If the owner is found you will receive a part of their value as reward,” said Mr. Hellier and hurried on his way to lunch.

Mrs. Taylor took his advice during her own dinner hour. Doubtless in the belief that Scotland Yard might at least do something about the wasted bus fare, she gave the clerk the whole story of her pilgrimage to Addison Road.

For no other reason than that her name was Taylor she was sent first to Tarrant of the Department of Dead Ends. He was disappointed when he learned that she had come in order to talk about a pair of pince-nez that did not belong to Harold Taylor. But he hung on from force of habit.

He opened the case, read the name of the Holborn opticians who had made it, and sent the pince-nez by messenger to the firm with a request for information.

The answer he received was that the glasses had been made for a Mr. Harold Taylor, that they had been ordered in duplicate and the frame fitted on August 25th, paid for in cash by an elderly lady, and delivered to Mr. Taylor in Doughty Street on September 2nd, 1908.

Now it must not be imagined that Superintendent Tarrant thereupon slapped his thigh and “in a flash saw the whole dastardly crime down to its smallest detail.” He had probably done all that within a second or two of first going through the premises in Great James Street. Flashes have their uses, but they cannot be reproduced in court for the enlightenment of a jury. The difficulty is always proof. And no one knew better than Tarrant that the glasses by themselves would prove nothing.

He sent Sergeant Wilmott to Addison Road, convinced that he was wasting his time, to ask Harold Taylor if the glasses were his.

“No, they are not mine,” said Taylor. “They look to me very like the ones an old woman brought here yesterday. Nothing to do with me. I can buy myself a pair if I want them.”

“Are you sure? Why not try them on and see if they fit you?”

“Of course I’m sure!” replied Taylor with an emphasis that struck the sergeant as superfluous. “If they were mine, why on earth shouldn’t I say so and have done with all this hanky-panky?”

That question remains unanswerable to this day. Why did Taylor deny ownership of the glasses? Even if they had been found on Miss Absolom’s dead body they would not have endangered him, as he was known to be almost an inmate of the flat. In the circumstances it was impossible that the glasses could ever have proved anything against him.

Sergeant Wilmott apologized for the trouble he had given and departed — for the firm of opticians, to ask if they could give incontrovertible proof of the ownership of the glasses.

They replied that while it was very improbable that they should have made glasses of exactly the same prescription, in a frame of exactly the same measurements, for someone else, they could only be certain if they were to look through their files — which would take about a week.

That week was one of strange activity for Harold Taylor. First, again with the help of Mr. Hellier, he married Miss Sadler by special license, there being certain reasons of a domestic nature which removed most of the normal obstacles to this form of marriage. Then he applied for a passport for himself and his wife for Brazil.

Next, he went to the store where he had bought (and paid for) his furniture and now resold it at a fraction of its cost. The furniture was to be moved and the cash paid at once — a queer transaction in view of the fact that he had nearly £2500 in his current account.

He had still five days to wait before he could sail. As his furniture had been removed, he was forced to take his wife to a hotel. Of all the hotels in London he chose the Charing Cross Railway Hotel — where he used to dine with Miss Absolom.

On Tuesday, April 23rd, the day before he was to sail, he transferred £4000 to Messrs. Cook, the well-known tourist agents, and drew £320 in cash for immediate use. As he came out of Cook’s office in Ludgate Circus he was met by Sergeant Wilmott, who had been instructed to find out why Taylor had given Miss Sadler’s age as twenty-two when it was really nineteen, and why he had stated that her parents were dead when in fact they were both alive.

Sergeant Wilmott explained the nature of his errand as tactfully as possible and requested Taylor to accompany him to the Yard.

There followed one of those fragments of dialogue that always look so disconnected and unnatural when they are reported in the newspapers.

Taylor said: “You don’t expect me to swallow that. I only told them the tale to save a lot of fuss, and you know it isn’t that as well as I do.”

To which Wilmott replied: “Well, I expect that’s a matter of opinion!” This startling epigram seems to have infuriated Taylor, for we are assured that he then shouted:

“You won’t get anything out of me unless I know where those glasses came from!”

“From the basement area in Great James Street, if you really want to know.”

“Ah! That’s the game, is it? Well, you won’t get promotion out of this, because I’m going to spoil the game. I’ve had enough of your games. You can tell the bobby over there that it’s all right. I did the old girl in.”

That afternoon he signed his confession.