Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

  But two figures loomed in the fog.

  Father inhaled sharply.

  The figures—two men, I saw now—were tall.

  As the fog swirled, they blocked our way.

  “Are you the people I’ve been waiting for?” Father asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ann.”

  “Ann? Who’s Ann?”

  “If you don’t know who Ann is, step aside,” Father ordered.

  When they didn’t, Father shifted to move around them.

  But the men changed their positions and again blocked our way. Their features were haggard, unshaven.

  “Damn you, step aside!” Father demanded.

  The first man’s shapeless clothes resembled those of a street ruffian. The other man had a strange hat. I calculated which way Father and I might need to run.

  “I have no money!” Father told them. “Do what you wish to me, but let my daughter go into the house!”

  “I’m not leaving without you, Father!”

  “Are you the Opium-Eater?” the ruffian demanded.

  “What?”

  “Thomas De Quincey?”

  “What possible business could—”

  “I’m Detective Inspector Ryan. This is Constable Becker.”

  As the fog parted slightly, I saw that the second man’s strangely shaped hat was actually a policeman’s helmet and that he wore a constable’s uniform.

  But the ruffian was in charge. “I need to ask you to come with us to Scotland Yard.”

  4

  “Among Us Are Monsters”

  CHOLERA CAUSES UNCONTROLLED, rice-colored diarrhea that rapidly leads to dehydration and probable death. Three months earlier, in September of 1854, London had suffered its worst epidemic in decades, losing seven hundred people in the frighteningly short time of two weeks. Dr. John Snow had ended the outbreak when he proved that cholera wasn’t caused by breathing foul air but rather by drinking fecal-contaminated water. The center of the outbreak was the Broad Street area of Soho, and after extensive interviews, Snow determined that people who had access to the public water pump in that area were the ones who contracted the disease. Excavation revealed that the well had been dug next to a cesspit from which excrement was leaking. To the surprise of foul-air theorists, Snow ended the epidemic by the simple expedient of arranging for the pump’s handle to be removed.

  Detective Inspector Ryan had helped Dr. Snow conduct his cholera investigation. When Ryan aimed the lantern over the wall and saw Becker covered with blood, lying beside two dead pigs near an excrement-filled ditch, he had no doubt where Becker needed to be taken for immediate medical treatment.

  Ryan ordered a police wagon to hurry Becker to Dr. Snow’s residence at 54 Frith Street in Soho, near where the recent cholera epidemic had occurred.

  The thin-faced, forty-one-year-old physician took a while to light an oil lamp and respond to the urgent pounding on his door.

  “Who the devil?” Wearing a housecoat, he came to attention at the sight of two constables holding Becker.

  “Detective Inspector Ryan says to give you this note, sir,” a policeman said.

  Snow read the note with growing alarm.

  “Take his foul clothes off right there. Throw them in the street. Then bring him into this vestibule. No farther than that. I’ll bring hot water and fresh rags. We need to clean him thoroughly before he comes into the office.”

  Once cleaned, Becker was placed on a sheet on a chair in Snow’s office. Mid-Victorian physicians had desks in their offices rather than examination tables. After all, there wasn’t any need for an examination table. Physicians were gentlemen and almost never laid hands on a patient, except to determine the speed and strength of a pulse. The disagreeable task of actually touching a patient was left to socially inferior surgeons.

  But Snow had once been a surgeon and retained some of his habits even after having been elevated to the higher medical rank. Holding his lamp, he looked closely at the bite marks on Becker’s arms and legs and exclaimed, “If the pigs were diseased, if excrement seeped into those cuts…”

  Snow quickly disinfected the bites with a strong solution of ammonia, a shocking hands-on procedure for a physician to perform.

  Becker grimaced from the sharp sting of the ammonia. The sounds of animals made him look around in confusion. On counters, he saw cages in which mice, birds, and frogs were agitated by the sudden commotion.

  “Am I seeing things?”

  “I use them for experiments to determine dosage,” Snow explained.

  “Dosage of what?”

  “I need to apply stitches to the worst of these bites. The pain will be extreme. This will help make you comfortable.”

  The “this” Snow referred to was a metal container that had a mask attached to it.

  Snow brought the mask toward Becker’s face.

  “What’s that?”

  “Chloroform.”

  “No.” Becker pressed back in alarm. He knew about chloroform, a newly developed gas anesthetic. The previous year, London’s newspapers had printed stories about how Queen Victoria had made the controversial choice to be given chloroform during the birth of her eighth child. Dr. Snow was the physician she had chosen to administer it.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Snow assured him. “If Her Majesty trusted me, surely you can. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” Becker emphasized. “But I don’t dare go to sleep.”

  “Given the fight I gather you’ve been through, you can use the rest.” Snow again brought the mask toward Becker’s face.

  “No!” Becker raised a hand, keeping Snow at a distance. “I can’t go to sleep! I want to be a detective! If you put me to sleep, the investigation will continue without me! I’ll never have this chance again!”

  MEANWHILE, more constables arrived at the murder scene.

  “Keep knocking on doors. Keep questioning neighbors. Widen the search,” Ryan ordered. “Ask for anything, no matter how slight, that wasn’t normal.”

  Accompanied by two constables holding lanterns, he again climbed the wall behind the shop. Avoiding the two dead pigs, he eased down on the other side and crouched to study the footprints. They remained more perfectly preserved than he had dared to hope.

  Good work, Becker.

  The two constables handed down an empty pail, a pitcher of water, and a sack of plaster of Paris. Then they joined him. Recalling that he’d promised to show Becker how to do this, Ryan put water and the powder into the empty pail and stirred them, adjusting the proportion until the mixture had the consistency of pea soup. He poured the mixture into the footprints.

  “Stay here,” he told the constables with the lanterns. “Don’t let anything touch the plaster as it hardens. I know this is harsh back here. I’ll have someone relieve you in two hours.”

  Ryan made his way to the noisy street outside the shop, where he greeted privy excavators he had sent for. During the cholera epidemic, one of Dr. Snow’s arguments against the theory that miasma caused cholera had been that privy excavators, who constantly breathed foul air, didn’t contract the disease any more than other people did.

  Since privies were normally excavated during the night—hence the term “night soil”—the four-member team, which consisted of two tubmen, a ropeman, and a holeman, hadn’t thought it unusual to be summoned at this hour, although the urgency of the summons had made them curious about what sort of emergency a privy might cause.

  Their interest increased as Ryan explained. “The killer might have dropped something down the hole and used a stick to poke it beneath the surface. Excavate the privy and spread the contents over the courtyard. Don’t come through the shop. Use a ladder to climb over the wall in the alley next to here.”

  As the night-soil men followed orders, Ryan saw a police wagon arriving with a bearded man whom he recognized as a sketch artist for the Illustrated London News.

  “Same arrangem
ent as the last time,” Ryan told him amid the nightmarish zigzag of police lanterns. “I keep the originals. You can make copies, but you can’t use them until I give you permission. That might not happen for several weeks.”

  “What’s all the commotion?”

  “How’s your stomach?”

  “Am I going to wish you hadn’t asked me to come?”

  “Not when your editor sees the illustrations. I want you to draw everything you can until your hand becomes numb.”

  “It’s going to take that long?”

  “I hope your wife isn’t expecting you to be home in time for church.”

  “She moved out a month ago.”

  “Sorry to hear it. But going to church might be something you’ll want to do after you finish this.”

  When Ryan showed him what was in the shop, the illustrator turned pale.

  “God in heaven.”

  Ryan left him in the shop and stepped outside, discovering that Police Commissioner Sir Richard Mayne had arrived. Fifty-eight, with an aristocratic bearing and thick gray sideburns almost to his chin, Mayne listened to Ryan’s report, was shown the crime scene, managed to maintain an impassive, professional reaction, and looked as pale as the sketch artist when he emerged from the shop.

  “It’s the worst I’ve seen,” Mayne concluded.

  Ryan nodded. “And it wasn’t a robbery.”

  “There’ll be considerable pressure from the home secretary to find the madman responsible,” the commissioner predicted. The home secretary controlled all aspects of domestic security, including London’s police department. He was Commissioner Mayne’s powerful superior. “Lord Palmerston will be eager for us to settle this in a hurry. Before there’s a panic.”

  “I think we have both murder weapons. The mallet, and this.” Ryan showed him the ivory-handled razor.

  “Expensive.”

  “Yes. And the footprints don’t have hobnails on the soles, again suggesting a man of means.”

  “Unthinkable,” Mayne told him. “A man of means wouldn’t be capable of this ferocity. The razor must have been stolen.”

  “Possibly. We’ll check burglary reports to see if a razor like this is missing. Also we’ll question shopkeepers who sell expensive razors and see if anyone can identify this one. As for the mallet, the owner might not be difficult to find. There are initials on it.”

  “Initials?”

  “J. P.”

  “No.” Mayne’s face seemed to shrink with distress. “Are you certain?”

  “Why? Is there a problem?” Ryan asked.

  “J. P.? I’m very much afraid there is indeed a problem.”

  “We found him!” a voice shouted. “The murderer! We caught him!”

  Ryan pivoted toward confusion in the fog. The noises grew stronger as lanterns revealed men yanking a figure into view. The figure’s rumpled coat was covered with blood. He struggled.

  “Hiding in an alley!”

  “Wasn’t hiding! I was asleep!”

  “Fought us when we grabbed him!”

  “What was I supposed to do? You attacked me!”

  “Butchered Jonathan and his family is what you did, and that poor servant girl of his!”

  “Jonathan? I never heard of—”

  “That’s his blood on your coat!”

  “I had too much to drink! I fell!”

  “You killed my brother!” A man punched the captive’s face.

  “Hey!” Ryan yelled.

  The man struck again, the captive wailing and lurching back.

  “That’s enough!” Ryan ordered. “Let him explain!”

  “It’ll all be lies! The bugger slit my brother’s throat!” The man struck yet again, blood flying.

  Ryan rushed to intervene. Abruptly the captive fell, people falling with him.

  “I can’t see him! Where is he?” the brother demanded.

  “Here! I have him!”

  “No, that’s me!”

  Bodies tumbled in the fog.

  “There! Over there!”

  The turmoil shifted toward an alley, the crowd chasing a desperate shadow. Someone swung a club and barely missed the fugitive’s head.

  Ryan charged after them. Sensing someone next to him, he glanced that way and reacted with amazement.

  “Becker?”

  WEARING A CLEAN UNIFORM, Becker kept pace with Ryan despite the tightness of the stitches and bandages under his clothes. “I came back as soon as I could.”

  “You should be resting.”

  “And miss the chance for you to teach me?”

  Ahead, the mob surged into the alley.

  “He found a broken bottle!” someone screamed. “My eyes! He slashed my eyes! God help me, I can’t see!”

  More people squeezed into the alley.

  “I can’t breathe!” someone moaned.

  Ryan strained to pull them away.

  Becker did the same. Fifteen years younger than Ryan, taller, with broader shoulders, he yanked men out of the alley, throwing them onto the cobblestones.

  The odor of alcohol was overwhelming.

  “Move!” Ryan ordered.

  But the mob was like a wall.

  To the left, Ryan saw light through an open door, a heavy woman gaping out.

  “There!” he told Becker.

  They rushed past the woman and found themselves in one of the many taverns in the area. Charging past benches and a counter, they entered a corridor and reached a storage room on the right.

  “The window!” Ryan yelled.

  Becker ran around beer kegs and tugged up the window. Outside, the noise of shouts and curses was overwhelming. Ryan brought a lantern to the window, piercing the outside gloom enough to reveal the fugitive swinging a broken bottle at the mob. Faces were bleeding. In fright, the pursuers now strained desperately to retreat from the broken bottle, colliding with those behind them.

  Becker’s long arms stretched through the window and seized the fugitive’s shoulders, pulling him inside. Out there, two men grabbed the fugitive’s legs.

  The fugitive screamed as if he were being torn apart.

  Ryan set the lantern on a table and grabbed a broom from a corner. With the pointed end, he thrust out the window toward the men clutching the fugitive’s legs. He aimed toward their chins, jabbing, striking so hard that a man cried out and grabbed his face. Ryan lunged the broom at the other face, and with a wail, the men out there released the fugitive’s legs.

  Suddenly freed from resistance, Becker lurched backward, pulling the fugitive into the room, the two men falling onto the floor.

  “Get away!” the captive shouted, swinging the broken bottle.

  Ryan grabbed his arm and twisted until, with a scream, the man dropped the bottle, its jagged points shattering. Becker pulled handcuffs from his equipment belt, their new spring-loaded design holding the clasps in place as he used a key to lock them.

  “I didn’t do anything!” the man screamed.

  “We’ll find the truth of that soon enough,” Ryan said, trying to catch his breath. “How did blood get on your coat?”

  “They damned near killed me. That’s how it got on my coat.” The man’s lips were swollen and mangled.

  “If you passed out from alcohol and you weren’t hiding,” Becker said, “they did you a favor.”

  “How the hell do you figure that?”

  “The night’s so cold you might have froze to death.”

  “Some favor. Freezing to death or getting beat to death.”

  “You can thank us for stopping that from happening.”

  “Where were you drinking?” Ryan asked, impressed by Becker’s effort to make the prisoner trust him.

  “A lot of places.”

  “What’s the name of the last one? When did you leave?”

  “I don’t remember.” The man reeked of gin.

  “Keep him here until he’s sober enough for us to question him,” Ryan told the patrolmen who’d joined them.

  Stil
l breathing hard, he and Becker went to the front room, where Commissioner Mayne waited in the tavern, looking much older than his fifty-eight years. His skin seemed to recede behind the sideburns that hemmed his jaw.

  Outside, the loud noises of a scuffle filled the street, constables shouting, striking with their truncheons to disperse the mob.

  “This is only starting,” Mayne said gravely.

  “We can hope the gin will put them to sleep,” Ryan offered.

  “No, this will become worse. I know from experience. The mallet and the initials on it. I—”

  The commissioner suddenly stopped as he looked at the heavyset woman who helped to manage the tavern. A red-faced man who seemed to be her husband came in and stood next to her.

  “I need to speak with you,” Mayne told Ryan, pointedly ignoring Becker’s presence. “In private.”

  The tavernkeepers obviously thought it strange that the commissioner paid attention to a red-haired Irish ruffian instead of a uniformed patrolman.

  “Constable Becker is my assistant,” Ryan said. “He needs to know everything.”

  Although Becker couldn’t have expected that, he hid his surprise.

  “A constable as an assistant?” The commissioner still didn’t look at Becker. “Isn’t that a bit irregular?”

  “Well, as you indicated, there’ll be pressure from Lord Palmerston to solve this in a hurry and avoid a panic. We want to assure people I had access to every resource. If you can tolerate going back to the shop, no one will overhear us there.”

  “Except the dead,” the commissioner murmured.

  THE MAN FROM THE Illustrated London News was drinking from a flask when they came in. He showed no embarrassment at having been discovered.

  “I don’t believe this is a job for me. When I couldn’t tolerate being in here any longer, I went outside and tried to sketch the riot, but—”

  “For God’s sake, don’t put anything in the newspaper about a riot,” the commissioner pleaded.