‘You are a good-hearted person,’ he said as I wiped the violet tears from his cheek, ‘but I live in hope that time and experience will sour you.’
‘Inspector Pound hopes that it will not.’ I slapped Mr G’s hand away as it went to his socket.
‘I should like to say something important on the subject of you and that adequate officer,’ Sidney Grice spoke softly, ‘but I shall not.’
I was never quite sure exactly what my guardian knew, but I could not imagine George Pound confiding in him. Molly sidled in and deposited the tray so carefully that, had she not caught a saucer with her thumb and toppled a teacup over, I would hardly have heard it being put down.
‘Dannit,’ she swore beneath her breath and slunk away.
‘What will you do about Sergeant Horwich?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Exactly what I promised,’ he said. ‘Sleep on it.’
I knew all too well that when Mr G was determined not to discuss a subject, no amount of probing from me would induce him to change his mind.
‘We know how Nathan Mortlock got in and out of his cell,’ I pondered, ‘but how did he get into or out of the house? It does not sound from the diaries as if he was let in by anybody.’
‘Nor was he,’ my guardian concurred. ‘Or he would not have gone to such lengths. We have considered,’ he pressed on, ‘how the coal-hole lid could have been wedged open after Mr Nig’s horse, Boadicea, stampeded the day before the Garstangs were so unkindly dispatched.’
‘But the door from the cellar to the house would have been bolted,’ I objected.
‘Psalm 118,’ he said simply.
‘So it was a message?’ I realigned the milk jug and considered with a shock how many of Sidney Grice’s traits I was adopting.
‘Who,’ Mr G demanded, ‘except a man with my exceptional powers – and I have yet to meet him – would discover it? No, Miss Middleton,’ he turned the jug five degrees back, ‘the new lock was not fitted in the same position as the old because the original holes had been enlarged.’
‘And the screws were wedged into place with paper so that Nathan could easily push the bolt out from the coal-cellar side,’ I concluded. ‘Then all he had to do was replace the bolt and re-wedge the screws and the door would look unscathed.’ I forced myself not to line up my spoon. ‘But then he could not have got out the same way.’
‘Much as I loathe speculating,’ Mr G put the key into the back of his watch, ‘if I were to kill my last victim near an open window, I might be tempted to avail myself of that egress.’
‘And the windows were self-locking with no padlocks in those days.’
I poured our teas. The handle of the silver strainer was still bent from when Cook had tried to pick the lock for the kitchen door. She had retrieved the swallowed key and I did not want to know how.
‘I am curious,’ Mr G stirred his beverage thoughtfully, ‘as to whether or not Daniel Filbert has been reinterred yet. It would be a nuisance to have to dig him up again.’
*
I had been to the morgue on my first day in London to see the mutilated body of Sarah Ashby. On that occasion I had pretended to be a building inspector to gain admission, but Parker, the attendant, knew me by now and greeted us both mournfully.
‘Daniel Filbert,’ I informed him.
Parker was a small, unsavoury man. He had lost all his hair through ringworm and replaced it with a crusty scabies, through which spiky white hair regrew in tufts reminiscent of Sidney Grice’s shaving brush in miniature.
‘Gone.’ Parker’s breath had never been fresh, but it had worsened over the years until it was almost as putrid as the worst of his charges.
‘Has he been reinterred?’ I enquired.
‘No.’ His left nostril had been packed with so much clot-soaked wadding that his whole nose was distorted and that eye partially closed.
‘Then where is he?’ I asked impatiently.
Parker was not fond of answering questions without at least one coin changing ownership.
‘Not here.’ He pushed a wick back inside with his thumb.
‘Who took him?’ I tried again as he inspected his wet thumb sullenly.
‘I suppose the Garstang estate can spare another shilling.’ Sidney Grice tossed a shiny coin.
Parker fudged the catch as it bounced off his chest. ‘Duffy,’ he said.
‘The anatomist?’ I stepped back, covering my mouth as Parker coughed spasmodically.
‘From across the road to number 125,’ Sidney Grice grumbled. ‘A good job I told the cab to wait.’
But our cab must have been washed away in the sudden downpour that greeted us when we went outside again, for it was nowhere to be seen.
80
✥
The Mary Murders
PROFESSOR DUFFY WAS already in the dissecting room. His cloak had been draped over the shoulders of a skeleton on a stand. I had met him a few times before and always thought that, if he were wanted by the police, he would be a very difficult man for them to describe. He was of average height and build with the normal light complexion of an inhabitant of London who rarely sees anything resembling the sun. His nose was not overly large or small and his chin not protrusive or regressive, as far as I could see, for his face was heavily bewhiskered as was common in those days. I could see no distinguishing moles or scars. Apart from being completely bald there was nothing to note, and a hat would have disguised that feature. If I were called upon to assist, I would tell them to look for a man who was extraordinarily ordinary.
‘Had him brought here.’ He extracted his hand with a squelch from an old woman’s abdomen to shake ours, but we determinedly ignored it. ‘Much more convenient, better light, more equipment and that man Parker worries me. I autopsy healthier corpses than him every day.’
Mr G was happily pottering about, looking at a heart in a jar and a bottle of pickled toes.
‘You have Daniel Filbert’s body?’ I looked about but all the bodies were lying flat under their formalin-soaked sheets.
‘Most unusual.’ Professor Duffy went in again up to his elbow. ‘The state of preservation is remarkable.’ He delved about. ‘And I have never seen such a splendid pugilistic posture. I may keep him to put in my museum.’
Sidney Grice ambled over to a long crate in the corner, slipped his cane under the cotton cover and lifted it aside. Daniel Filbert lay in his coffin, still trying to claw his way out, his face still frozen in a silent howl.
My guardian sorted through a tray of surgical instruments and selected a broad serrated-edged retractor to slip under the upper lip. It took some effort, for the tissues were stiff, and there was a distinct ripping noise as he hauled the lip up.
‘I thought I glimpsed it at Highgate,’ he said in satisfaction and I had a look.
The upper-left central incisor was the best part of a quarter inch longer than its companion tooth.
‘On to something?’ There were more sounds like a boot being pulled out of a bog and Duffy joined us. ‘Oh, a sticking-out tooth, how exciting.’
‘But is that not very unusual?’ I reasoned. ‘A longer tooth that is not proclined or over-erupted? It is actually longer.’
‘I suppose so,’ Professor Duffy granted me. ‘Anyway –’ he grinned broadly revealing a picket fence of enamel – ‘that’s nothing. Look what I found.’ He opened his hand. ‘Tucked away behind her ascending colon.’
At first I thought it was a bullet but as the professor rinsed it under the tap I saw that it was a porcelain statuette, no more than an inch long, a lady in a long blue gown with her hands together in supplication.
‘The Mary Murderer,’ Sidney Grice exclaimed delightedly. A wistfulness fell over him. ‘I wish he or she would kill a Mary with family rich enough to employ me.’
*
I read my Bible as always, but I did not look at Edward’s letters in the secret compartment of the writing box I had bought him, and I did not slip his ring upon my finger. I lay in bed with the drapes
open and waited for my eyes to capture the illuminations of London, for the city is never truly dark. A million lights cannot be extinguished.
I wished I could talk to George Pound about it. He was a good man and wise; kind, but with a strong sense of justice.
I reached out and cradled the image of his face, my fingers clutching the night air and my body aching so much that I thought it would break.
81
✥
Walking in the Sky, Black Snow
I HARDLY SLEPT that night and rose early but, as almost always, Sidney Grice was at the table before me. Unusually, he was not reading the stack of papers at his side but wagging a finger at Spirit, who sat in unrequited hope of a titbit.
‘Roll over.’ He twirled his hand to demonstrate but Spirit merely dabbed his shirt cuff.
‘She will not do it,’ I predicted, helping myself to two boiled eggs from the bowl on the sideboard.
‘Of course she will.’ My guardian clucked. ‘I could train you or Cook to do it, and even Molly with a little cruelty, and this is far and away the most intelligent female in my house. So why can she not learn to do it?’
‘She does not want to.’ I buttered a slice of toast.
‘We shall see about that,’ he mumbled, returning to his prune juice and snapping a London Times open wide.
I lowered my fingers with a morsel of egg white and Spirit sauntered over to investigate it.
‘Have you come to a decision about Sergeant Horwich?’ I asked.
He evaded my question. ‘What would you do?’
Spirit rejected my offering and maundered off under the table.
‘I would let him go.’
Sidney Grice peeped over his paper. ‘Present me with a logical catalogue of reasoned arguments to support your proposal, and please do not say that he is a nice man. You have an unfortunate addiction to being affectionate to criminals.’
‘He is a nice man,’ I declared. ‘He was tricked into an action, not having any idea where it would lead, and has regretted it ever since. He will never do anything like that again and he has suffered considerably for all this time with his terrible burden of guilt.’
Sidney Grice tore a column out of his paper and weighed it down with a fork.
‘So – to take the last of your impassioned pleas – if a guilty man feels guilty he should be exonerated?’
‘Perhaps he should be treated more leniently,’ I suggested.
‘To the extent that he suffers no consequences whatsoever for his crime? Seven people died in Gethsemane because of his dereliction of duty and at least two more as a result of his concealing his misdemeanour, not to mention the young woman condemned to be incarcerated in a mad prison, subject to the whims of that maniac Whelkhorn.’
‘He did not know.’
Mr G ripped up his Times.
‘He knew the next morning and he has known every waking minute since, and still he flouted the law he is sworn and gainfully employed to uphold.’ He crumpled the paper into three tight balls. ‘Damn it all, March.’
My godfather clawed around his eye.
‘If you felt like that, why have you played cat and mouse with him?’ I flared up. ‘He was resigned to being arrested and you gave him false hope.’
‘Felt?’ he echoed in disgust. ‘It is not a question of how I felt. I was considering the best interests of my client.’ He hurled a ball on to the floor and Spirit leaped joyously upon it. ‘How am I to tell her that her father was a murderer? It was bad enough when I was told that my father was.’
It was bad enough, I reflected, when I was told that my guardian was one too.
It was still only eight o’clock and so I went out. The fog was swirling like the first drops of milk in a stirred tea. My childhood friend Barney once told me that fog was fallen clouds and so, when we broke through them and into the sunlight, at the top of Parbold Hill, we were walking in the sky. In London it felt more like Dante’s Inferno, with its sulphurous fumes of a million coal fires and the soot in flakes of black snow.
The crossing sweeper made a great display of brushing a path across the road for two young ladies who made a greater display of ignoring him. A shaven-headed child raked through the gutter with a short stick, hoping for dropped coins or the holy grail of his trade, a lost ring. He was one of the Gower Street regulars.
‘You missed this one, Nippy.’ I pretended to stoop and threw him a penny.
‘I fink I prob’ly missed sixpence,’ Nippy said cheekily and I tossed him a thrupenny bit.
I lit a cigarette – ignoring the scandalized glare of a cigar-smoking top-hatted gentleman – and walked the length of Gower Street, long, straight and grey, then crossed over and walked back. On the corner of Torrington Place, in her regular spot, a little girl was selling dried lavender. Her name, I knew from previous questioning, was Betty and she had the most iridescent green eyes I have ever seen. Her legs were badly bowed from lack of calcium, too weak to support her bird-like frame. I bought a sprig and pressed it in my notebook, and remembered pressing another flower in another world.
You risked your life for it, scaling the old fort wall, with rusty rows of spikes in the dry moat forty feet below you, to pluck a wild rose. I was furious. How could a flower be worth one moment of my anxiety for you? But I took it from your mouth when you triumphantly descended and replaced it with a kiss. And now it lies, crushed and dried in my journal. How foolish, I upbraided you, to risk death for a flower. But you only kissed me again and said no, love was worth more than life. I hope you were right.
I tossed my cigarette into an overflowing drain and went home to find Sidney Grice contentedly engaged in filing a series of reports about fresh sightings of Springheel Jack. He had stolen a magistrate’s wife’s petticoats in Kensington by jumping over her garden wall, and sprang from the top of the abbey tower in Barking to kiss three girls until their lips were sore. To me, most of his acts were no worse than those of the medical students I had seen tumbling out of the Duke of Wellington into University Street at all hours of the day.
It was nine thirty.
I tried to read Immaturity by George Bernard Shaw, but I could not get interested and did not think he was likely to be heard of again.
The mantel clock chimed the third quarter.
‘Nathan Mortlock and Holford Garstang had at least one trait in common – a tendency to make mysterious payments.’ My guardian held up Mr Garstang’s pocket book. ‘In 1855, Holford paid five hundred pounds in cash to an undisclosed recipient.’
‘I wonder why.’ But I was not really in the frame of mind to pay attention.
‘I anticipated that you would.’ He made a note.
I went restlessly to the window.
‘This might interest even you.’ He opened Fortitude Garstang’s household records at a page he had marked with a frayed bootlace, the one used by George Gurney, the Grimsby Garrotter. ‘On the seventh of September 1872, two weeks to the day before the Garstangs were murdered and the sixtieth anniversary of the battle of Borodino…’
A man was pacing the pavement. Hunched and bowed, he looked very different from the man I knew.
‘Just get on with it,’ I snapped.
‘Mrs Garstang paid for a new livery for her coachman.’
I had never seen him out of uniform before and he cut a much less impressive figure, with his slightly baggy grey trousers showing beneath a buttoned-up grey oil-cotton overcoat.
‘She describes it as being for our dearest coz, Easterly.’
‘Sergeant Horwich is outside.’
‘He is early.’
‘Yes, but it is cruel to keep him waiting.’
‘Not quite as cruel as the acts that he permitted Nathan Mortlock to commit.’
‘Shall I invite him in then?’
‘If you must.’ My guardian shut his scrapbook.
Molly was coming up the hallway with Spirit’s tail poking out of her apron pocket.
‘We’ve been playing Bind Men’s Boff,
’ she announced, ‘but she keeps cheatering by taking her bindfold off.’
‘Cats do not like to have their eyes covered,’ I told her.
‘Well, she shouldn’t play then.’
Spirit struggled out and climbed down Molly’s dress.
‘There is a man walking up and down outside,’ I told her and Molly guffawed.
‘Not there aintn’t not, miss. There’s thousands of them.’
‘This one is just outside the front door.’ I buttoned her collar. ‘Please call him in.’
I returned to the study.
‘Oy, you… yes, you, pacey man with the big nustache. Bring your coat in with you inside it,’ Molly roared.
‘She gets worse,’ Sidney Grice groaned.
He still had his patch on but made no attempt to remove it or insert his eye.
‘That man what was walking up and down outside and Miss Middleton made me bring in,’ Molly announced disapprovingly before something lit up in her brain. ‘Oh, it’s you Sergeant Porridge.’ She beamed. ‘I didntn’t not recognize you without your clothes on.’ She clamped her mouth. ‘Your uninform, I mean.’
‘Go away.’ Her employer shooed her off with his rule.
‘Have a seat, Sergeant.’ I offered my chair but Horwich stood to attention, hands clasped behind him.
‘I would rather stand, thank you, miss.’
And so we all stood, two of us dwarfed by our caller. Sergeant Horwich nibbled his lips.
‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’ Mr G walked round the back of him.
‘I have no excuses, if that’s what you mean, sir.’ The sergeant fixed his gaze straight ahead. ‘All these years I have tried to tell myself it was not my fault, but I always knew that it was, and then you told me about the other murders… I knew full well what kind of man he was and I left him free to commit more crimes.’ Horwich swallowed. ‘I appreciate your kindness in giving me one more night with my family but I know now that I have to face the music.’
The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 36
