The Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Mr Abel Beer?’ Batchelor checked.

  ‘I didn’t ask his name. From the West Country, they were, brother and sister – though I couldn’t see much of a likeness.’

  ‘Could you describe her?’ Batchelor’s notebook was to the fore.

  Mrs Christian looked with a beady eye at it. ‘I haven’t seen a notebook like that before,’ she remarked. ‘Not police issue, is it?’ She reached out a hand to take a closer look.

  ‘Um … no. No, it isn’t,’ Batchelor managed a chuckle. ‘You are a very noticing sort of person, Mrs Christian,’ he said. ‘This is brand-new issue, to go with the new detectives.’

  ‘But you’re more than halfway through it,’ the landlady pointed out.

  Batchelor was sorry that they were not looking for staff at Grand and Batchelor, Confidential Enquiry Agents, No Job Too Big Or Too Small. This woman was a natural. ‘We’ve been busy,’ he said, shortly. ‘Could you describe her?’ He waited, pencil poised, for a minute description from the Walking Microscope.

  ‘Er … well, she claimed to be thirty-three.’

  ‘Claimed?’ Batchelor queried.

  ‘Some women,’ Mrs Christian scoffed, ‘lie about their age. She was forty, if she was a day.’

  ‘And … Mr Cailey?’

  ‘Passed away, she told me. Passed out, if you ask me. There was a smell of drink on her.’

  ‘Indeed?’

  Mary Christian spun round and slid open a bedside drawer. Alongside a Bible, lay a half bottle of gin, most of it gone. ‘I don’t want you to think I am in the habit of rifling my lodger’s things, Sergeant,’ she said, through pursed lips, ‘but with Mr Christian away, I have to look out for myself.’

  ‘Quite. Tell me, Mrs Christian, did Mrs Cailey leave anything else behind?’

  The landlady opened the wardrobe. Two dresses hung there and a pair of lace-up boots stood defiantly in the corner. ‘There’s also a drawer of her unmentionables, but I assure you, you don’t want to see them.’

  The look on Mary Christian’s face said it all and Batchelor thought he had better decline. ‘No, indeed,’ he said. ‘You were describing Mrs Cailey.’

  ‘Was I? Oh, yes. Stout. Tallish – nearly your height.’

  ‘And when did you see her last?’

  ‘Thursday, second of September, if memory serves. She told me she was going to get some things out of pledge and to get money from her solicitor.’

  ‘You don’t remember his name, I suppose?’

  ‘I do,’ she said, folding her arms with the air of a woman who knew something Batchelor didn’t. ‘A Mr Thompson, of Lincoln’s Inn. No need to write it down – he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘He doesn’t?’

  ‘When she’d been gone a few days, with no word, I did a bit of snooping. After all, rent is rent, isn’t it, Sergeant?’

  Batchelor had to agree with that.

  ‘I checked the directories. No such person, in Lincoln’s Inn or anywhere else in the capital. She was lying. She also kept odd hours.’

  ‘How … odd?’ Batchelor asked.

  ‘Very,’ Mrs Christian confirmed. ‘She claimed she was out all day and into the small hours visiting a friend, an old lady in Carlton Square, Chelsea.’

  ‘No such person?’

  ‘No such square. And there’s another thing.’

  Somehow, Batchelor knew there would be. ‘She claimed she was assaulted by four men near Victoria Bridge.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ Batchelor thought he had the measure of the landlady now. At least she wouldn’t be able to claim that there was no such bridge, but there was a definite pattern of general mistrust.

  ‘Well, Sergeant,’ she bridled, ‘in your profession, you must be perfectly aware of how beastly men are. On the other hand, in all my … twenty-four years …’ She fixed Batchelor with a beady eye, challenging him to comment, but he didn’t even flinch and she went on. ‘I can honestly say I have never been assaulted by anyone.’

  Batchelor didn’t doubt that for a moment. Should the dark day dawn when they recruited women to the Metropolitan Police, he was pretty sure that Mary Christian would be the first in line to sign up for her truncheon.

  ‘You know, madam,’ he said, ‘that a number of body parts of a woman have been found in the Thames?’

  The woman shuddered, so perhaps Batchelor’s assessment of her had been wrong. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do know. And if I must, I will visit the mortuary to make the necessary identification.’

  ‘Very brave,’ Batchelor murmured politely.

  Mary Christian half-smiled at the flattery but her attention was suddenly drawn to the window. ‘Oh, really, he’s there again.’

  ‘Who, madam?’ Batchelor asked.

  ‘That wretched fellow who’s been hanging around here for the past week. He had the impudence to knock at my door a couple of days ago, asking if I knew the whereabouts of someone called Amelia. I told him to go away in no uncertain terms … I …’

  But Detective Sergeant Spinster was already clattering down the stairs in search of a ghost.

  ‘No, No, James.’ Matthew Grand was lighting a cigar in the drawing room as dusk descended on the Strand. ‘This whole Mary Cailey thing is a red herring; trust me.’

  ‘I do, Matthew,’ Batchelor said, ‘and I’d go along with that. Were it not for Emilia.’

  ‘It’s not that uncommon a name,’ Grand pointed out.

  ‘Granted.’ Batchelor was pouring the brandies. ‘But it is a coincidence.’

  ‘And you didn’t get a good look at this cuss hanging around the house?’

  ‘Vanished like a will o’ the wisp. So I went back to the redoubtable Mrs Christian and asked her to tell me more about the man.’

  ‘You suspected Selwyn Byng?’

  ‘Of course. It’s not just the name Emilia, but the whole peculiar hanging-about-the-house routine. If it wasn’t for the fact she didn’t call him a lunatic, it could have been Mrs Rackstraw talking.’

  ‘But it wasn’t him?’

  ‘Mrs Christian said he was a down-and-out, scruffy, unwashed. As a charitable soul, she’d given him some money – well, it goes with the surname, I suppose. But he kept rabbiting on about Emilia.’

  ‘Was there an Emilia in Mrs Christian’s household?’

  ‘Not then, not ever, as far as she could remember. Unless of course, Mrs Cailey …’

  ‘… Is really Emilia Byng.’ Grand finished the sentence for his partner. ‘Nothing about this Mary Cailey having a missing finger, I suppose?’

  Batchelor shook his head. ‘But let’s just suppose for a moment it is the same woman, in admittedly quite heavy disguise. She hasn’t been kidnapped but is living under an assumed name in a boarding house in Battersea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘But, according to Mrs Christian, she’s been missing since the second of September, a few days before the body parts began to turn up.’

  ‘And according to Constable Brandon,’ Batchelor was still trying to assemble all the pieces, ‘the dead woman’s brother identified her body in Kempster’s mortuary.’

  ‘Which leaves us …?’

  Batchelor gulped down his brandy in one. ‘Absolutely nowhere,’ he said.

  Daddy Bliss was tired of unidentified bodies. True, he currently only had the two, but for a tidy-minded man such as himself, that was two too many. The identification of the patchwork body was, in his opinion, shaky at best, but it would at least clear the mortuary of the increasingly unbearable smell to let her be buried, even if the stone she was buried under bore the wrong name. But it was the handless, footless body that was nagging at him. His head told him to blame the travellers and failing that, that damned American, with his pistol and his attitude. But his gut told him that he would waste a lot of time that way and time was something that Daddy Bliss preferred to husband, not fritter.

  ‘Brandon,’ he roared. If he tried hard enough, who knew, he might find something the lad was goo
d at. ‘Br … oh, that was quick.’

  The echo of the constable’s size elevens on the ladder had been drowned out in the reverberations of the roar in the low-ceilinged cabin and he had materialized like the genie of the lamp at his boss’s elbow.

  ‘Did you get the pictures taken of our latest visitor?’

  Brandon looked interested, hopeful but, ultimately, completely at a loss.

  ‘The floater. The unidentified …’ Bliss closed his eyes. When would he be first in line for the good one, not behind the door when brains were being given out.

  The light dawned. ‘Yes, sir. All angles. Including …’ he gulped back a little rise of bile, ‘the … stumps.’ Brandon didn’t really like gore.

  ‘Well done. How did they come out? Recognizable?’

  Brandon nodded. Speech wasn’t an option just now.

  ‘Did you send to the papers?’

  Again, a nod.

  ‘And …?’ Bliss was used to playing twenty questions with his family around the Christmas table, but at work it really was too much. His colour began to darken worryingly. Any constable but Brandon would have beaten a hasty retreat at this point, but his eyes were closed, so he missed the signs and portents.

  The constable opened his eyes a crack and pointed in the general direction of the corner of the inspector’s desk, where a tightly folded newspaper awaited tea-break time. Opening his lips as little as possible, he said, ‘Page three,’ then bolted for the ladder to fresh air and the edge of the boat.

  Bliss flicked open the paper and there, sure enough, was a small, one-column piece but headed by a sketch of the dead woman, not at all a bad likeness, as these things went. The copy was fairly terse, not at all over-blown and Bliss was pleased to see that there was none of the usual English rose cut down in her prime nonsense, nor even veiled hints as to her possible occupation. In fact, to his amazement, it only had what the police had told the papers to print. He jotted a note on his blotter; this was something for his diary, that was for sure.

  He went to the bottom of the ladder and called up, in rather less hectoring tones. ‘Brandon?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  It wasn’t much but at least he sounded a bit brighter.

  ‘Is this in all the papers?’

  ‘London and South Coast.’ George Crossland’s face swam into view. ‘Brandon’s not feeling too chipper, I’ve sat him in the stern for a bit. Do you want me to get it out further? North? Essex?’

  ‘No, no,’ Bliss flapped a hand. At least he had one man on the strength who knew what he was doing. ‘Let’s see what the next few days bring. If no one gets in touch, we’ll go further afield.’ He stepped back into the cabin and sat behind his desk. A thought struck him. ‘Crossland?’

  Crossland’s head appeared again in the opening to the upper deck. ‘Guv?’

  ‘Any chance of a cuppa?’

  ‘Biscuits?’

  Bliss gave a happy sigh. Yes, indeed, it was good to have at least one on the strength who knew what was important in life. ‘No currants. But otherwise, whatever you’ve got.’ He settled back with his paper, in the happy knowledge that he was not a hard man to please, not really.

  Mrs Rackstraw was not an ungrateful woman, taken all in all and by and large. She lived in a nice house, in a nice street and if sometimes the men she house-kept for drove her to the brink of insanity, they were out most of the day and apart from some of the laundry, an issue on which she tried not to dwell, they were no trouble. Especially Mr James, who put her in mind of a boy she had known back before there was a Mr Rackstraw or even a thought of him. The crazy little between-maid was polishing something pointless up in the spare bedroom under the eaves, the charwoman had gone home having scrubbed every inch of the kitchen floor and sanded all the saucepans until their pips squeaked. The smell of baking wafted through the house and Mrs Rackstraw, all thoughts of lunatics tucked away in the part of her mind marked ‘last week’, put on her afternoon dress and settled down in her sitting room over the hall and sat back and closed her eyes. Peace at last.

  In another mood, Mrs Rackstraw would have interpreted the knock on the door as just a normal person using the knocker. But as she had just dropped off to sleep and had delivered herself of her first stertorous snore, she heard it as if all the hounds of hell were yammering at the threshold. She got to the bottom of the stairs, wide-eyed and with her hair slightly awry, as Maisie, smelling faintly of paraffin and beeswax and wafting a grubby cloth, opened the door.

  On the step stood, not Lucifer and his infernal crew, but a little old lady, dressed in a somewhat passé day dress under a serge cloak, attended by another woman, rather younger, a little taller but clearly, for all she was smartly dressed, a maid.

  Maisie was getting better at the door opening task, but still had a way to go. ‘Whaddya want?’ she said, then, remembering, ‘Ma’am.’

  Mrs Rackstraw hung back in the shadow of the hall. There was something about these two which made her suspect that her afternoon was going to spiral down even from its current low point.

  The little old lady, who looked quite sweet at first glance, tapped Maisie sharply on the chest with the handle of her umbrella. ‘I am here, you rude, uncouth girl,’ she turned to the maid standing behind her, who had disapproval written all over her face. ‘Whatever is the next generation coming to, Enid? I despair, I really do.’

  Enid pursed her lips even tighter and looked at the unfortunate Maisie through narrowed eyes.

  The old lady looked confused. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘I am here,’ Maisie offered, anxious to please.

  ‘I can see that. I asked where I … oh, yes, I see. I am here to see either Mr …’ she glanced at a card in her hand, ‘Mr Grand or Mr Batchelor. I don’t mind which, but I would very much prefer both, if that is at all possible.’

  Maisie was caught on the back foot. It wasn’t her place to know where the young gentlemen were, though she had been known to track Grand for miles, on her afternoon off. She glanced over her shoulder at Mrs Rackstraw. Though the woman hadn’t made a sound, Maisie could tell from the pricking of her thumbs that she was standing behind her.

  The housekeeper slid forward, as though on wheels. ‘May I help you?’ she asked. ‘I am the housekeeper.’

  The old lady looked her up and down with ill-disguised contempt. The woman who had trained the little guttersnipe was clearly not much of a housekeeper, but she looked more likely to know what was going on, so she decided to be polite. ‘Ah, good. I wish to speak to your employers.’

  Mrs Rackstraw pinned what she hoped was an ingratiating smile on her face, but having had little practice, couldn’t know whether it had worked or not. ‘I’m afraid neither Mr Grand nor Mr Batchelor is in,’ she said.

  ‘Then I insist that you find them at once,’ the old lady snapped and as she spoke, she stepped firmly in through the open doorway. ‘While you look, Enid and I will wait.’

  Mrs Rackstraw didn’t often lose a stand-off, but she knew this was doomed from the start. Little old ladies smelling faintly of lavender and wearing clothes almost a generation out of date always had the whip hand over a housekeeper who looked as if she could overpower a docker, on the right day. She threw open the door to the sitting room and ushered her in. ‘May I have a name?’ she enquired, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Miss Moriarty,’ the little old lady said. ‘They’ll know why I am here.’

  Mrs Rackstraw closed the door with care. Slamming came more naturally to her, but there was a time and a place. Maisie was still waiting, irresolute, in the hall.

  ‘Stop gawping, girl,’ Mrs Rackstraw spat. ‘Get your coat on and run round to the office. Tell whoever’s there that there’s a Miss Moriarty here, wants a word. And be quick about it. No mooning about.’

  Maisie didn’t need second bidding. Although she wouldn’t be long, she would be out in the fresh air and who knew, perhaps He would be in the office by himself. She would be in the room alone with the object of her affect
ions and it might be that when he saw her, outlined in a beam of sunlight, the golden rays touching her hair, bringing radiance to her cheek … She sighed as she crossed the hall, buttoning her threadbare coat. Mrs Rackstraw fetched her a firm one upside the head.

  ‘No mooning, I said. Tell them it’s urgent.’

  ‘What’s it about, Mrs Rackstraw?’ Maisie felt she should have all the information.

  ‘I have no idea,’ the housekeeper snapped. ‘But tell them it’s urgent, all the same. Then they might come round straight away, instead of when they feel like it. Now, off you go – sooner you’re gone, sooner you’re back. Those knobs won’t polish themselves, you know.’

  And Maisie, with love to give her wings, flew down the steps to the pavement and was past the lunatic before she even noticed he was there.

  TWELVE

  Grand and Batchelor met Maisie just as she turned into the Strand.

  Grand advanced on her kindly. He worried about the poor little soul; she didn’t look fit to be out on her own and he wondered for a moment if she was running away from what she presumably thought of as home. ‘Is everything okay, Maisie?’ he asked, and her heart lurched.

  ‘Oh, yes, Mr Grand, sir,’ she breathed. ‘Mrs Rackstraw says to come home straight away, and you, Mr Batchelor, because there’s a woman.’

  They both waited politely for more detail, for example, what the woman might be doing but it was clear that that was it; there was no more.

  ‘Is the woman threatening Mrs Rackstraw?’ Batchelor ventured, knowing even as he spoke how unlikely that was.

  Maisie shook her head so that the loose bun at the nape of her neck swung madly back and forth.

  ‘Is the woman … in trouble?’ Grand had a go.

  Again, Maisie shook her head. The little old lady was certainly self-possessed and well able to look after herself; Maisie knew that when she undressed tonight, she would have a bruise where the carved bill of the duck which made up the handle of the umbrella she had wielded had tapped her on the chest. Even in her own head, she dropped her voice at ‘chest’. Her mother had always made that kind of thing very clear, usually with a clip round the ear.