The Price of Murder

by Bruce Alexander

  I had spoken in such a quiet tone that I was reasonably certain that Mr. Tolliver had heard nothing. Indeed, I was certain of it when we stepped up before him.

  He greeted me with a great smile and a wink. “Well, Jeremy,” said he to me, “what shall I do for you today?” And then, before I could respond, he quietened me with this: “And who, pray tell, is that fine-looking young lady seekin’ to hide herself behind you?”

  With that, I introduced Clarissa to him, and told him that she would be coming round from time to time, doing the buying, when Molly or I were otherwise employed.

  “And do you cook?” said he to her.

  “I’m learning,” said she.

  “Well, that bein’ the case, you’ll wish to start with something simple. What about a nice stew—beef or mutton, either one.”

  “I’ve done both on a number of occasions, and it turned out well enough. So I thought, perhaps something a bit more demanding . . .”

  “Something like a pot roast, you mean?”

  “Something like that, yes. Have you the right meat for pot roast?”

  “I do indeed,” said he. “Here, let me show you.”

  And show her he did, hacking off a long corner of red from the side of beef that hung behind him. He then brought it over to show us.

  “Now, what you want to do,” he said, “is take this long piece here, roll it round and tie it so. Give it the better part of the afternoon in the oven with potatoes and carrots, and you’ll have a fine pot roast for dinner.”

  “How will I tell when it’s done?”

  “I take it you’ll be cooking this all by yourself? Molly won’t be round to tell you how?”

  She shook her head in the negative. “No,” said she, “I’ll be on my own this whole week or longer.”

  “Ah well, there’s no problem that I can see. Just keep the heat up in the oven and sink a fork into it from time to time. When it goes in easy and comes up clean, you’ll know it’s right.” Then he looked at her right sharp. “Now, what about tomorrow?” he asked.

  “That’s a question I can’t now answer. I’ll be back tomorrow, after I’ve given the matter some consideration.”

  “Fair enough,” said he, “but just remember, the day after is a holiday, and you’ll need to get here early—earlier than this.”

  She nodded solemnly and accepted the package he had wrapped for her.

  To me, he said, “Shall I add it to your bill, or . . .”

  “Put it on the bill,” said I. Then did I take her arm and lead her away.

  “Can we trust him?” Clarissa whispered to me. “I’ve heard tales of butchers adding half to a bill just for spite.”

  “You’ve naught to worry with Mr. Tolliver.”

  “Truly? He gave us no figure, after all. He could as well say that he sold us a pound’s worth as a penny’s.”

  “There’s not a more honest man in Westminster.”

  Thus it was that we returned to Number 4 Bow Street. Entering by the door that led to that part behind Sir John’s magistrate’s court, we made our way to the stairs and were about to mount them when I heard Mr. Marsden’s hoarse voice call my name. I urged Clarissa up the stairs and went to hear what he had to tell me. It was simply, as I supposed, that Sir John wished me to see him when I returned. Probably a letter to be taken in dictation, I told myself, or another to be picked up at the Post Coach House.

  “Did he seem specially eager to see me? Worried? Angry? It’s a question of whether I bring the groceries up before or after I report in to him.”

  “Well,” said he, with a bit of a wheeze, “he didn’t seem worried, exactly, but—” He coughed, then: “Not worried, exactly, but angry, I s’pose.”

  I sighed. “I’ll go see him now.”

  Putting down the two bags of groceries, which I had hauled back from Covent Garden, I trudged down the long hall to the magistrate’s chambers. There I found him head bowed, pacing the floor before his desk. There was a space of no more than eight feet square, which he crossed and re-crossed. He knew full well that if he were to venture farther in any direction, he would come crashing into a row of chairs. Though blind, he had memorized the room exactly. I held at the door, unwilling to interrupt his thoughts. I stood thus, waiting, for less than a minute. He stopped, turned, and faced the door.

  “Well, what are you waiting for, Jeremy?” he demanded. “Come in, will you?”

  I did as he bade and took a place upon one of the rear chairs, expecting him to retire to his desk. He did nothing of the kind but continued his pacing, saying nothing for some time. Then at last he did stop and turn in my direction.

  “First of all, where were you? It’s been near an hour since I put out the call for you.”

  “In Covent Garden, sir, showing Clarissa about and introducing her to one and another. She chose the makings of tonight’s dinner.”

  “Oh . . . well, that’s needful and necessary, I suppose, but dammit, lad, could you not have cut it short—or at least hurried things along just a bit?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Oh, never mind—but listen, ’twas near an hour ago that a little street urchin came running in, demanding to be heard. He’d been sent by a waterman at Billingsgate Stairs to report that he had pulled from the river the body of a child. A girl it was, of no more than six or seven years of age. I think it may be that one reported stolen by her mother a month ago. You recall, do you?”

  “Oh, I recall,” said I. “You pointed out to me that it was the second such disappearance that month. You said you suspected that they were being sold.”

  “Yes, but to what purpose? The earlier abduction was of a boy of about the same age. When kids are napped from the rich, they are held for a price. There was no demand for money in either case, nor would the parents be the sort you might hope to extort money from.”

  “Too poor?”

  “By half.” He sighed. “I recall my brother Henry talking of a series of kidnappings of adolescent children, yet they were shipped off to Jamaica and sold into slavery. But this was years ago, mind you, back in Jonathan Wild’s time.”

  “The thief-taker general,” said I.

  “So he proclaimed himself.”

  “What will you have me do, Sir John?”

  “I want you to collect the girl’s corpus and bring it to Mr. Donnelly. You had better notify him before you go all the way to Billingsgate that we’ll require his services as medical examiner this morning. If she died a violent death, I want to know about it—and quickly. Get on it, if you will, Jeremy.”

  “I will, sir.” I rose from the chair that I had taken and started for the door.

  “Oh, and Jeremy, do forgive my unhappy outburst when you did enter. I’d been awaiting you for a bit and had naught to listen to but Mr. Marsden’s snuffling and coughing, and the woesome cries of drunks arrested the night before. In short, lad, I was impatient for your return. I could not, for the life of me, remember where you had gotten off to.”

  “Think nothing of it, sir,” said I. “There can be no more said.”

  “Go then,” said he. “Give me a report as soon as ever you can.”

  As I left him and started back down the long hall, it occurred to me for the first time ever that perhaps Sir John was, in some sense, growing old.

  The Billingsgate Fish Market smelled, if it were possible, even worse than did the Smithfield Market. The offal of hoofed beasts gave off a thick and heavy smell, it’s true. Nevertheless, the innards of sea creatures, most specially fish, stunk far worse. They were insidiously foul in a manner that can only be imagined as one might suppose hell might smell, and in the heat of the summertime could not even be imagined in such an approximation as that.

  Billingsgate stands just off lower Thames Street, not far from London Bridge. ’Twas even before I reached the bridge that I smelled what lay ahead. Turning in at Billingsgate Dock, however, I found to my surprise that the deeper I penetrated the effluvium, the less I minded the odor. This m
ay have been an actual, observable phenomenon, or it may have been because my attention was fully devoted to the closer handling required by the horses. (Yes, reader, I had, at last, learned from Mr. Patley, formerly of the King’s Carabineers, the tricks of handling a wagon and team through the streets of London.) I had hardly got the two old nags turned round and properly placed when they began to balk and carry on. I could think of naught but the foul smell of death that would make them carry on so. At last I got them under control and safely hitched.

  I made quickly for the stairs down to the river and descended to near water level. There were men grouped upon the platform, talking in low tones, discussing the bundle that lay at their feet. Undoubtedly, the child was wrapped within the blanket. I shouldered my way through them, begging their pardon as I went, until I came to the focus of their attention—a blanket-wrapped parcel of no particular shape and not much more than three feet in length.

  “Is this the child found in the river?” I asked, looking round me at the glowering faces of the watermen.

  “This be her,” said one of them just opposite me. There came a chorus of “ayes” and affirmative grunts, giving confirmation.

  “Who was it pulled her out?”

  “’Twas me,” said the man who had answered my first query. He was in midlife, bearded, and wearing quite the most doleful expression that I had ever seen on the face of one in his work.

  “Where did you pull her out?”

  “Right here,” said he. “I was first one round this morning, and I found her a-floatin’ right here.”

  “Right here? I don’t quite understand.”

  “Well, it’s simple enough. She’d floated down near the mudbank and bumped into one of the boats—that one there. Her hair got tangled in the lines just enough to hold her till I got there.”

  “A right, now—”

  “Just a minute,” he interrupted. “Who are you, anyways?”

  “Sir John Fielding sent me,” said I. “You sent a boy to report this to the Bow Street Court, didn’t you?”

  “I did, right enough.”

  “Well, they sent me to pick up the body.”

  “You one of those Bow Street Runners I hear so much about?”

  “No, I’m Sir John’s assistant.”

  “Is that like a helper-outer?”

  “That’s close enough,” said I. I noticed the rest of the men had stepped back and seemed to be regarding me with renewed respect. “Now, can we go on?”

  “Yes, awright, I just wanted to know is all.”

  With that, I resumed my interrogation of the man. His name was Abel Bell, and he had been a waterman for better than fifteen years. He gave his address as one in Cheapside. He said that he reckoned every waterman had pulled at least one deader out of the Thames. This was his third. It had come about as he said: he was simply earliest upon the scene. I asked how long, in his estimation, she had been in the water. When he responded that he thought it was no more than a few hours—five or six at the most—I suggested that it was possible she had fallen off London Bridge.

  “She didn’t fall off no place,” said the waterman.

  “How can you be so certain?” I asked him.

  “Well, one thing, she was nekkid when I found her. She wasn’t walkin’ London Bridge without no clothes on. You can be sure of that.”

  “I suppose not. Were there any marks of violence upon her? Wounds or bruises?”

  “Nothing I could see.”

  “What about the blanket? Is it yours?”

  “It’s mine. Like I said, she was just plain nekkid in the water. I threw the bum blanket I had in the boat round her just to make her decent, poor child.”

  I sighed. “Well,” I said, “perhaps you could give me a hand taking her up the stairs. I’ve a wagon up there.”

  “No, I’ll carry her,” said he. “It’s the least I can do.”

  “Well, all right then. I’ll thank you for it.”

  He picked her up carefully, keeping the blanket wrapped round her, as the group on the little pier made a path for us to the stairs. We climbed, but it was only when we reached the top that we met the stink of the dead fish, which were ranged in piles all the way to Thames Street. The wagon and team awaited us, the horses still restive but secure at the hitching post.

  The waterman lifted the body carefully into the wagon bed and turned to me. “I said there wasn’t no wounds nor nothin’ upon her, but you’ll find there’s some raw places round her . . . well, down there in her privates. Maybe some fish fed upon her or maybe not. That’s why I had her all wrapped up—like. I wanted to hide that.”

  “You want your blanket back? I could throw the tarpaulin over her.”

  “No, you keep it round her. My bum can go cold this day.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll leave you now.”

  With that, he turned and walked away, mumbling to himself. I’m sure that I heard the phrase “poor child” repeated. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that though the waterman and I had discussed the discovery of the body in all its aspects, I had not so much as taken a peek at the corpus itself. For all I knew, there could be a medium-sized dog bundled in the blanket. And so, once Abel Bell had disappeared down the steps, I unwrapped the head and took a look at the face of the dead girl. She was quite beautiful in death—though beautiful in the way of so many of her age: short-nosed, round-cheeked, and blond-haired. If you met her upon the street, you would not think her in any way unusual. Yet her early death conferred upon her a special quality, an air of pathos. Having taken but a brief look, I wrapped her face again and covered her over with the tarpaulin supplied by the livery stable. It bothered me a little that I could not remember the girl’s name.

  Once upon the table in Gabriel Donnelly’s surgery, she had once again become no more than a thing—a dead thing, a body. As we did unwrap the bundle, I passed on to Mr. Donnelly the waterman’s hesitant comments upon her condition.

  “Where did he say?” asked the medico.

  My embarrassed employment of euphemism had evidently communicated nothing to him. “I shall quote him exact,” said I. “‘There were raw places,’ he called them, ‘down there in her privates.’”

  “Hmm, well, all right, let’s have a look, shall we?”

  That he proceeded to do—probing, inspecting, shaking his head, and, finally, letting forth a great groan of dismay.

  “How old did you say this child was?”

  “Six or seven seems to be the general consensus. Until her mother comes and claims the body, let that stand.”

  “From the look of her, she could be younger. But never mind that. Whether she’s five, six, or seven, she’d had intercourse with a full-grown man—and probably far more often than once. That’s hideous. The cause of death I’d give as an infection of the kidneys caused by the piercing of the walls of the vagina and the womb.”

  “Could you write that down, sir, so that I might present it to Sir John?”

  “I certainly can and will,” said he. “And you may tell him for me that I have never seen the like of it. Raw places indeed! The whole area was a mass of scabs. The water cleaned it off a bit and reveals it for the horror that it most certainly is.”

  He went straightaway to the wash stand and cleansed his hands well. Then did he sit down at the writing table and write his report to Sir John. I took it and ran down to the street. I jumped into the wagon, which I had hitched just outside Mr. Donnelly’s surgery. In no more than a few minutes’ time I was at Number 4 Bow Street.

  There was this to say of Gabriel Donnelly’s reports. He wrote them in plain, clear language. There was no mistaking the brutality which had been practiced upon the little girl. Poor child indeed! I had never known the magistrate to respond so violently or so immediately to any report that I had brought him. As soon as I had finished reading it to him, he jumped to his feet, stamped loud upon the floor, and shouted, full-voice: “But this is monstrous!”

  Sir John raged on for minutes more—or so it seem
ed to me. I have found, as you may have also, reader, that it is difficult to judge time when the air about you is, all of a sudden, filled with invective and fury. I could do little to persuade him to quieten his anger, for I felt also as he did. Still, I knew that we must get on with it now that it was to be a proper investigation. Perhaps, I thought, I might offer a suggestion. And so did I await the first gap in his tirading, cursing, and venting; and, finding it at last, I did jump in quickly to fill it.

  “Sir John,” said I, “would it not be opportune to search out the mother of the girl that you may question her further upon the details of her daughter’s disappearance?”

  He, now quite panting from his expense of anger, stood silent for a spell, red-faced and spent. Then, at last recovered, he turned toward me and nodded in the affirmative.

  “Yes,” said he, “that would be a good place to start. I quite agree, Jeremy. She must also identify the body. Get from Mr. Marsden her name and location, and bring her here to me. Do you recall who it was took the initial report?”

  Though not entirely certain, I put forward the name of Mr. Patley, for I recalled discussing the matter with him. He had, as I remembered, certain doubts about the woman.

  So it proved to be. Mr. Marsden took me to the small desk file of active cases that he kept, thumbed through it till he found the proper one, then pulled it from the drawer. He spread it out before us upon the desk.

  “Here it is, as you see, Jeremy. Now, what was it you wished to know?”

  “What her name might be, where she lives, that sort of thing. Sir John wants me to bring her in to ask some questions of her. The little girl died. They pulled her out of the river this morning.”

  “What a shame for the mother.”

  “What a shame for the little girl.”

  I copied down the necessary facts (Alice Plummer and daughter Margaret of Cucumber Alley), read quickly through the report, and noted that, indeed, it had been written by Mr. Patley. Then, with a stop at the livery stable that I might return the wagon and team, I made my way to the notorious Seven Dials area, just above Covent Garden. There she lived, somewhere in a rookery that faced onto the square—in Cucumber Alley, which was known to one and all as a place of ill fame.