The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White)

by Lynn Shepherd

  I shall expect a report of your progress within the week.

  F. H. C.

  “I’ve told you already, I don’t know, and even if I did, I couldn’t tell you.”

  We are now at the desk of the police-station in Bow Street, in front of a hefty constable Charles doesn’t know, and who clearly doesn’t know who he is either.

  “Look, sir,” he says with a practised theatrical sigh, “you say you know Inspector Field, and that may very well be so, but he’s not my Inspector, and my Inspector would take a pretty dim view of me divulging anything in our files without the proper authority. So until you can show me such authority, then I’m afraid the answer is going to remain the same: No.”

  Charles stands there, drumming his fingers on the desk, but he’s beaten and he knows it. The constable now makes a great show of ignoring Charles and carrying on with what he’s doing, and summons a pink-faced young man from the back of the office to collect a stack of paperwork. Charles turns away, only to find himself face-to-face with the sergeant he met at the graveyard. It seems weeks ago, but it’s actually barely two.

  “Maddox isn’t it?” says the man. “What can we be doing for you?” He’s eyeing Charles’s bandaged hand with some interest, but he conforms exactly to our previous experience of him by pointedly refusing to ask.

  “He was enquiring about the Cass case, sir,” interjects the constable. “You remember—about a year ago. That woman we found up at Church Street—had been cut up good and proper.”

  The sergeant nods. “I remember,” he says slowly. “You seem to take rather an unhealthy interest in that part of town, Mr Maddox, if you don’t mind me saying so. What’s got you poking around in that old case?”

  “I was wondering which of your officers was first on the scene.”

  “And why should that concern you?”

  Charles wonders for a moment if what he’s about to do is all that well-advised, but decides he has little real alternative. He takes a deep breath. “I believe the man who killed Abigail Cass may have struck again. But I cannot be certain of that until I know more about the first attack.”

  “Struck again, you say?” This with a frown. “And where was this, precisely?”

  “Near Golden Square, on Sunday night. Young woman by the name of Lizzie Miller.”

  “Can’t say it rings any bells. Whore, was she? Must be, in that neighbourhood. Street robberies like that—ten a penny.”

  “But this one wasn’t a street robbery. She was killed in her own room. I think she knew the man who killed her, and I think Abigail Cass may have known him too.”

  The sergeant manages a thin smile. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that these two crimes have very little in common. What makes you think there’s a connexion?”

  “The newspaper report of the Cass death mentioned a ‘frenzied attack’. It sounded unduly brutal for what you appear to be dismissing as a petty alley-way assault.”

  If he was hoping that would draw the sergeant out, then he’s misjudged his man; he’s far too wily for that.

  “This other girl—Lizzie Miller—was practically eviscerated. Breasts cut off, heart cut out, face removed. Does any of that sound like Abigail Cass? I can’t believe you wouldn’t remember something like that, if it happened on your patch.”

  Is it Charles’s imagination or was there just the merest flicker—the merest trace of a flicker—in the sergeant’s eyes? But it’s not enough—not on its own.

  “Can you look at the file for me? Or better still, let me look at it? It would only take a minute.”

  The sergeant is no longer meeting the eye. “That’s not possible, I’m afraid, as the constable here has no doubt already informed you. Police files are confidential—you should know that better than anyone. Was that all?”

  Outside, the sky is clear and bright and the street is heaving with traffic, both on foot and on wheel; Covent Garden is creating its usual gridlock. There are greengrocers’ vans, coster-mongers’ carts, and row upon row of donkey-barrows backed up all the way down Bow Street to the Strand, while their owners wait their turn to unload. The men are catching a last coffee from nearby stalls and groups of women in rough shawls are sitting on the kerbs, smoking pipes. The smell of cheap tobacco is layered with the earthy aroma of fresh-dug vegetables, and the stronger wafts of scent from wagons laden with oranges. Some of the coster-mongers’ carts are bright with new brass, but most are drawn by cowed and miserable animals, the barrows patched together with pieces of sacking and bits of old rope. On both sides of the road the pavements are stacked with sacks of produce—cauliflowers, carrots, swede, turnips—and shreds of cabbage are being trodden slippery underfoot in the mud. Women have baskets of apples balanced on their heads, and some of the men are managing whole stacks of them, so that from a distance a squadron of wicker giants seem to be lurching and swaying up the street. Charles’s eye is caught suddenly by the sight of a girl in a thin print frock weaving her way through the crowd, a basket of violets over her arm and auburn curls under her velveteen bonnet. He’s sure it’s Sarah—how many girls have hair that shade—but when she turns in his direction he realises his mistake at once. This girl must be at least fifteen and the hair, now he sees it against her face, is far too garish to be natural. He looks away, anxious not to catch her eye and have her misinterpret his interest, and finds himself feeling a vague sense of disappointment. Which is, of course, ridiculous. He has no interest in Sarah—no desire whatsoever to see the girl again. He’s so absorbed in reminding himself of this fact that he starts like a gazelle when someone touches him on the arm.

  “Mr Maddox, is it?”

  It’s the thin little constable who was loitering at the back of the police office. He looks painfully young, his skin blotched with pimples. His collar is at least one size too tight and is chafing his neck, much as his presence there appears to be chafing his conscience. He looks round furtively before speaking again. “Percy Walsh, sir. Constable Percy Walsh. Look, I probably shouldn’t be talking to you. The sergeant would have me strung up.”

  “Is it about Abigail Cass?”

  The lad’s eyes are flicking from Charles to the crowd to the door, and back again. “You were asking which officer found the body? Well, it were me. I can tell you what you want to know.”

  Charles tries to disguise his sudden rise of excitement. “Can you spare me ten minutes? It won’t take long.”

  Walsh nods. “Wait for me by St Paul’s, in the piazza—I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  In the piazza business is already brisk and the air is thick with costers’ cries, “Three a penny, two shillin’s the lot,” “Best-quality leeks, just look at the shine on these beauties,” “Fine apples, mister—’apenny each—you won’t get no gawfs ’ere.”

  Some of the market lads are washing themselves at the pump and others are gathered round the birdcatcher’s pitch, poking fingers in the cages and whistling at the merchandise.

  Charles buys a coffee from a stall under the colonnade, and after a moment’s reflection buys another for Walsh. It seems the least he can do, and he even goes as far as to buy a piece of seedcake from an old woman with a face as brown as a walnut. He eventually spots the young constable weaving his way through the crowd, and smiles to himself at the combination of aversion and abuse his starched uniform provokes. Walsh narrowly escapes being pelted with overripe fruit, and when he makes it to Charles’s side the constable suggests they go into the churchyard, where they will be out of sight—and out of shot.

  “So,” says Charles, once they’ve found a bench, “you were the one who found Abigail Cass.”

  The constable takes a gulp of coffee, and nods. “It weren’t my usual patrol—I were covering for another lad who’d got his leg broke following a thief through Rats’ Castle. Fell into one of them traps they lay for us and ended up half drowned in a vat of sewage.”

  “So what happened—what did you see?”

  The lad’s face veers
from red to pale. “I ain’t never seen nothing like it, I can tell you. First up, I thought it was something off a Smithfield cart—some sort of animal carcase with all the guts spilling over the road. But straightaway I knew I was wrong—there’s no butcher as would take his wagon up that route. And the closer I got, I could see it was a woman, despite the wreck he’d made of her. There was blood everywhere.”

  “He?—who?—did you see him?”

  Walsh shakes his head. “Not me. All I saw was what he’d done.”

  “Go on.”

  Walsh takes another noisy swallow of coffee. “I tell you one thing, I ain’t never seen the inside of a human body like that before. He’d cut her wide open and thrown her innards across her face. What there was left of ’em. Doctor told me afterwards that half her organs were gone and we never did find ’em. He said the man must ’ave known what he was doing, because it’d have taken him at least an hour to take a body apart like that.”

  “What was missing, exactly, do you know?”

  Walsh fishes in his pocket and gets out a small black leather notebook. “Uterus and its appendages, upper portion of the vagina, posterior two-thirds of the bladder. But that weren’t what killed her. She’d had her throat cut. Ear-to-ear.”

  He mimics the action, left to right. Charles notes it and wonders if it was deliberate.

  “And what pose was the body in?”

  Walsh frowns and looks again at his notes. “I’m not sure I follow?”

  “On her back, on her face—what? Did it look as if he’d arranged the body in a certain way?”

  “Oh, I see,” he says, his face brightening. “Well, now you come to mention it, it did look a bit odd. A bit artificial, if you take my meaning. She was on her back, like you said, but her knees were up, almost as if—”

  He blushes suddenly; he is, after all, very young.

  Charles saves him further embarrassment. “As if she was having sexual relations?”

  “Exactly, sir. That was what struck me. That and the blood. Like I said.”

  Charles nods grimly. The constable’s experience is a mirror image of his own. “Were there no reports of people hearing her cry out?”

  The constable shakes his head. He starts on the seedcake with what is—in the circumstances—commendable enthusiasm.

  “No-one heard nothing,” he says, his mouth full of cake. “But the doctor thought she’d been gagged, which might account for it—her tongue was twice its normal size. Seems he probably killed her quick, then took ’is time with the rest of it.”

  “So no witnesses at all,” says Charles with a sigh.

  “I didn’t say that. Though I’m not sure witness quite covers it neither—”

  He starts coughing and specks of cake splutter down his uniform.

  Charles can barely contain his impatience; he seizes the lad by the shoulders and pounds his back. He’s so thin Charles can feel his shoulder-blades, even through the thick layers of cloth.

  “When I arrived at the scene,” Walsh says eventually, his voice still strained, “first thing I saw was this young lad running away down the alley. Shabby little urchin he was. Anyway, it was pretty dark down there, but as far as I could see this lad’d been bending over the body—we found out after there were at least two rings missing on her left hand. Anyways, I tried to catch ’im but the lad was too quick for me, and I thought I’d seen the last of ’im, but as luck would have it I came upon ’im again a few days later, when I was on me way home. Turns out he’s a crossing-sweeper on one of those streets off Holborn. Newton Street, if I remember rightly. I saw a man talking to the sweep from a distance, and naturally I thought the boy might be importuning the gentleman, so I approached ’em both, and that was when I recognised it was the same lad I’d seen in the alley-way.”

  “And what did he tell you—the boy?”

  “Not much. Claimed he ‘never saw nothink’ and ‘never done nothink’ and he was going to ’hook it, just like ’e was told to.’ ”

  “What do you mean—like he was told to?”

  “That’s what I wondered. Sounded to me like someone had put the frighteners on ’im, but whoever it was, he weren’t telling. I tried to press ’im but the man stepped in and told me not to be harrassing the lad, who had to battle all day to clear the mud and got but a pittance by way of exchange.”

  “You don’t know who the man was?”

  “Refused to give me ’is name. Said he was ‘nobody.’ And he certainly looked no better—scrawny hair, matted beard, filthy coat. Though I do recollect thinking there was something in ’is manner that suggested ’e’d ’ad a fall in life.”

  “Have you seen either of them since?”

  “The man, no. But I did see the lad again, only yesterday as it ’appens. It reminded me that I ’adn’t heard anything for a good long while about the Cass case, so I went and ’ad a look at the files. Just out of interest, you know ’ow it is. But there was nothing there.”

  “The file was missing?”

  “No, the file was there all right. It’s just that all the details—the doctor’s report, all of that—it were all gone. There was nothing to say it wasn’t just the usual sort of street robbery the sergeant told you it was. No different from the rest of ’em. And that’s not all,” he continues, leaning forward and lowering his voice. Charles realises suddenly that the lad’s not unnerved by what he saw after all, he’s positively revelling in it. As a more celebrated novelist than I once said, we can sometimes recognise the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come. And this lad—had Charles but known it—is the very model of a modern teenage geek.

  “This boy,” he whispers, “the crossing-sweeper—he’s mixed up somehow in whatever it is that Inspector Bucket’s investigating. I can’t tell you what it is, ’cause none of us at Bow Street know anything about it, ’e keeps it so close to his chest. But there’s one thing I do know. I saw a messenger come for ’im last night, and I recognised ’is face. His name’s Knox, Jeremiah Knox, and he’s—”

  “—chief clerk to Edward Tulkinghorn.”

  “Oh,” says Walsh, evidently disappointed, “so you already know ’im then?”

  “I know him,” says Charles.

  His voice is firm, but for the first time in months—and certainly for the first time since he started this case—he’s beginning to feel afraid. Afraid enough to be glad he can now fire a gun with reasonable accuracy, and that he has it about him, even now. Afraid enough to go straight back to Buckingham Street and issue Stornaway strict new instructions on bolting the doors front and back, even during the day. But not afraid enough—yet—to think again about the wisdom of what he’s doing.

  Or change his mind.

  An hour later he’s been to Newton Street and found the crossing-place occupied not by a lad, but by a thin, faded girl. Everything about her from her straw bonnet to her coarse wool cloak to her wan skin seems bleached and colourless. She’s sweeping the street rather erratically with a series of odd juddering movements and cannot be persuaded to leave off, though she is—eventually—coaxed into revealing that ‘Toughy’ did indeed once sweep here, but she has only the vaguest notion of the passing of time and cannot say for sure how long it was since he left or where he might be now. Thankfully Abigail Cass proves rather easier quarry. Constable Walsh has furnished him with an address, and within the hour Charles finds himself at the entrance to a narrow cul-de-sac near the Foundling Hospital. It’s so narrow, in fact, that a coster’s cart can only just negotiate it and the inhabitants on opposite sides of the road can talk comfortably to each other by looking out their windows. One house has a heap of mussel shells by the kerb, another a soggy pile of yellowing vegetables. There are strawberry baskets hanging by some doors, and grocers’ sieves and barrels of herrings at others. Long poles stretch above his head and lines of old patched sheets hang drying in the damp air. Four old men are sitting on the ground near the junction playing cards, seemingly oblivious to the v
ehement row taking place a few yards farther down, where a woman with slicked black curls is leaning out of her first-floor window and screeching abuse at a chimney sweep in the road below.

  “That villain dragged her in ’ere by the hair,” she cries at the crowd gathered round him, “and then ’e kicked her till she was black an’ blue! You should see ’er face! Make ’im show you ’is boots—I’ll wager there’s blood on ’em still!”

  A woman in the crowd shouts at her that she’s a “vicious old cat” and shakes her fist at her, while people in the windows all around the court applaud and whistle.

  Charles skirts past the crowd to a house at the far end of the yard. There the door is opened by an old Irishwoman with a black eye and a nightcap tied tight around her head. She looks at Charles with some suspicion at first, but a shilling soon gains him entry. The room she shows him into has a sloping roof, with little black-framed pictures round the walls. Most are too fogged to make a guess at their subjects, but there’s one of a sailor smoking a pipe, next to Jesus with a bright red bleeding heart. There’s a flypaper hanging from the ceiling and in one corner of the room a recess with a bed pushed flush against the wall. A stout lad is asleep on top of the bed, still clad in his outdoor clothes. The blue-striped shirt is missing one sleeve and the black trousers look as greasy as tarpaulin.

  “What happened to your eye?” says Charles, not much to the point.

  The old woman puts a hand to her face. She’s wearing grey fingerless mittens and there are pulls and snags in the filthy wool.

  “T’at blackgeyard t’ere gave it me, shame on him. It’s t’e liquor I blame—he’s not such a bad lad when he’s sober. And I canna turn him out. I need t’e money.” Her fingers close more tightly round the coin Charles gave her, as if apprehensive he might demand it back.

  “I’m here about Abigail Cass,” he says. “I think she lodged here. About a year ago?”