The Yard tms-1

by Alex Grecian

  13

  Day was only a quarter of the way through the enormous pile of papers on his desk when Inspector Michael Blacker swung open the gate and entered the detectives’ warren of the common room. Blacker had his topcoat draped over an arm, and he stopped at Day’s desk on his way to the coat hooks at the back wall.

  “Still here or returning?” Blacker said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Coming up midnight. I’d have been back here sooner if there were any police wagons to spare tonight. Always a shortage of those, it seems. What about you? Thought you had a pretty young wife to go home to.”

  “I do. I mean…” Day sat back and tossed a sheaf of papers at the larger stack on the desk. The impact made a few of the topmost pages slide off the desk onto the floor. “There’s so much here.”

  “Little’s files?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why I came back. Couldn’t sleep knowing someone’s out there killing detectives.”

  “I had no intention of being here this late. I thought I’d move Little’s papers over here and perhaps organize them so that I could start in on it all tomorrow morning, but I had no expectation that there would be so much to deal with.”

  “No shortage of crime around here, Day. And no extra time in the day to deal with it all. Never any extra time in the day.” Blacker waved a finger at Day and grinned. “Your name is a blessing, Day. I’ve made a crack without even realizing it.”

  Day sighed and bent down to pick up the fallen papers while Blacker finally hung up his coat and hat. Blacker came back to Day’s desk and pulled a chair up to the other side of it.

  “You want some help with this?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t turn it down.”

  Blacker sat and pulled a folder from the stack.

  “You’re still assuming Little came upon something in an investigation and that it led to his death, then?”

  “I have no idea. This is a place to start. I thought I’d give his family the day to mourn before I call on them tomorrow.”

  “Good of you.”

  “They may know something, but it would be indecent to intrude upon them today.”

  “Of course. What about the scene?”

  “The train station? Kingsley seemed quite certain that he wasn’t killed there. I doubt very much I’d find anything more than the doctor already did.”

  “If we could determine where he was killed…”

  “Yes. Or who did it.”

  Blacker smiled and nodded. “Point taken. This is a place to start,” he said.

  He opened the folder and began to read. Day rummaged through the papers until he found the sheaf he’d been looking at and resumed where he’d left off. Little’s filing system seemed to be completely random. His case files had been shuffled together in no particular order. Day skimmed through case after case, trying to impose order on them, trying to find some possible connection between Little’s job and his death.

  “What is that stench?”

  Blacker was sniffing the air in the closed room.

  “I didn’t want to sit at his desk, so I moved the files over here.”

  “Right.”

  “But I couldn’t find a box to do it. There’s so much here, I didn’t want to spend the night going back and forth. There are no boxes anywhere in this building.”

  “Sir Edward likes to keep a clean workplace.”

  “Clearly. I had to borrow a box.”

  He pointed to the milk crate on the floor.

  “How can a box stink up the entire room?” Blacker said.

  “Its origins are dubious.”

  “Well, we don’t need it now.”

  “I promised the owner I’d leave it outside for him.”

  “Outside is a good place for it.”

  Blacker stood and picked up the crate. He left the room by the back hall and returned a minute later, wiping his hands on his vest.

  “We need a window,” he said. “It’ll take all night for this odor to leave us.”

  “In hindsight, I should have left the box where I found it. Once I was committed to getting it, I felt I had to follow through.”

  “Good trait in a detective. Shall we get back to the business at hand?”

  “There’s just … How could any one man possibly hope to solve so many cases?” Day said. He waved his hand over the stacks.

  “How many do you have? How many cases have collected on your own desk in the week you’ve been here?”

  “Including Little’s cases?”

  “Just your own.”

  “More than a dozen. I’ll never solve them all.”

  “No, you won’t,” Blacker said. “So which case is most important? Of course, that’s been decided for you: The murder of another detective has to come first. But when you’ve solved that one, you’ll have to choose the next most important case from the stacks.”

  “But how? How do you decide that?”

  Blacker shrugged. “You just do. Give it time and you’ll get a feel for it.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then you’ll go back to wherever you came from and probably live a much happier life.”

  Day stared at the papers in front of him without seeing them. He looked up when Blacker began talking again and realized that the other detective had been watching him.

  “Being an inspector with the Yard is a responsibility and an honor,” Blacker said. “You keep that front and center in your mind and it all tends to seem a bit more manageable.”

  Blacker grinned his lopsided grin and bent his head to read. Day sighed and did the same.

  Judging by Day’s preliminary count before moving the files over to his own desk, Little had been working on at least a hundred cases at once and had made almost no headway on any of them. Day tried to organize the files as he went along, creating three separate stacks on his desk.

  In the first stack, he put Little’s notes on cases that seemed to Day to be solvable, things he could follow up on once Little’s own unfortunate case was resolved. That first stack was the largest of the three by far, but as the night wore on, fewer case files made their way there. Day became jaded as he worked. There was too much crime for any one man to care about it all.

  A rash of burglaries in Highgate had stumped Little for some time. The intruder had entered through half-open windows, often two or three stories up, only to take small trinkets and baubles. The circumstances seemed to rule out all but an extremely agile child, but a smudged handprint on one window frame had led Little to conclude that a trained monkey was involved. The task of rounding up every organ grinder in the vicinity had apparently been too daunting for Little and, after forming the idea, he had abandoned it. Day made a note to follow up on the case to see if any organ grinders had been contacted and filed the case in his “probably solvable” stack. But it seemed to have no bearing on Little’s death.

  The second stack of papers on Day’s desk was for cases that seemed on the surface to be dead ends. Either there were no witnesses or the injured parties were criminals themselves or, in many cases, Little had hit upon a false trail and Day could not see from his scant notes where to go from there. At first, few case notes went into this pile, but it grew disproportionately larger as Day grew more tired and disillusioned.

  The remains of a newborn baby had been found behind an apartment wall, again in Highgate. It wasn’t uncommon for a couple to hide the miscarried evidence of a tryst, but Kingsley’s preliminary examination had led him to believe that the baby was buried after it was born, which made it murder. The couple currently living in the flat didn’t seem suspicious, and there was no evidence that they’d ever had a child. Moreover, they’d brought the matter to police after discovering the tiny body, which would seem to point to their innocence. According to the landlady, there had been a young woman living in the apartment some years before, but Little had found no leads on her current whereabouts. Day initially put the file in the stack of cases to
be looked into, but as the evening went on, he withdrew it and moved it to the “dead end” pile.

  Many other cases joined it there…

  A boy named Fenn had been stolen from his front yard while playing. There were no witnesses, and Little had made a notation indicating that he might make inquiries among local chimney sweeps to see if the boy had been nabbed as a climber. Day couldn’t see that Little had ever followed up on his own suggestion, and the case seemed hopeless considering how many children disappeared every year.

  A prostitute had been cut and strangled to death in the East End, and Little had made an alarming one-word notation: Ripper? But there was nothing to indicate that Jack the Ripper had returned to haunt the city, and the modus operandi was entirely different. The woman’s purse had been stolen, never a motivation for Saucy Jack. The case was clearly unsolvable unless Day wanted to devote all his energy to it.

  A third pile was for cases that might have some bearing on Little’s death. This was the hardest criterion to judge for, but it was the reason he and Blacker were there.

  “I might have something,” Blacker said.

  “Little’s killer?”

  “I don’t know. Listen: This man, John Robinson, was found in his bathtub with his hands and ankles bound and his beard shaved off. The razor was also used to slit his throat and was then left in the washbasin, covered in blood.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Indeed. The man’s whiskers floated all about him in the bathwater.”

  “Was he shaved before or after he was killed?”

  “I think that would be impossible to say except that … wait.”

  Blacker paused to continue reading the notes Little had left behind.

  “Kingsley cut the victim up and determined that Robinson was already dead when his throat was slashed.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “His lungs were full of water. He drowned.”

  “So the killer slashed the throat of a corpse.”

  “And here, your question is answered. Bits of his whiskers were found in his lungs as well. So he was shaved before he was drowned.”

  “And he was drowned before his throat was cut.”

  “Someone bound him, shaved him, pushed him under the water, and then cut him open from ear to ear with the same razor used to shave him.”

  The two men looked at each other across the cluttered desk. Blacker’s eyes were wide with excitement.

  “Did Little have a clue?” Day said. “Was he on the trail of the killer?”

  Blacker went back to reading, moving quickly through the file, flipping pages over as he read. Day waited patiently. It didn’t take long. Little had left them only six pages of notes on the case.

  “There isn’t a lot here. A bloody handprint on the bathroom tile and a smashed pocket watch that was stopped at midnight.”

  “Bizarre.”

  “And attention-seeking, don’t you think?”

  Day nodded. “Quite. So if Little was close to finding this killer-”

  “Even if he wasn’t. Whoever did this might have been watching Little, rather than the other way around.”

  “And killed him.”

  “Both bodies were ill-treated.”

  “In different ways.”

  “But strange ways.”

  Day tapped on a stack of case files. “Let’s keep looking.”

  “This is it, Day. Don’t you think so?”

  “It could very well be. But we should sift through the rest of this just in case.”

  Blacker pursed his lips and returned to the files in front of him, but he appeared reluctant, and Day could tell that he wasn’t really reading anymore. Finally Blacker stopped and leaned forward.

  “I want to talk to Kingsley about this,” he said.

  “As do I, but Kingsley is most likely home in bed.”

  “True.”

  “And if we can sort out the rest of these files, we can both go home to our own beds.”

  “Point taken.”

  The two detectives read in silence for a few more minutes.

  “The killer may have changed his methods because he wasn’t able to lure Little near enough to a bathtub,” Blacker said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I can’t stop mulling it over, the possible connections between the two murders.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a reason Little’s desk was located far from mine.”

  “Was Little … Was he disliked?”

  “Disliked? I wouldn’t say so. But few of us associated closely with him. It was unpleasant to be too near him.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was somewhat … odiferous.”

  “He smelled bad?”

  “Quite. When I first found you here this evening, I thought that Little had returned from the grave. That box you had in here smelled very much like him.”

  “Could he have been killed for that? For a lack of hygiene?”

  “What, by someone with hyperactive nostrils?”

  “Perhaps by a neighbor who tired of his scent?”

  “A neighbor who was so tired of his scent that he killed the man, sewed shut his eyes and his mouth-but not his nose, mind you-and pounded his limp body into the bottom of a steamer trunk, then dragged that trunk to the train station?”

  “It does sound ridiculous.”

  “No, I agree that it might be worth following up with the neighbors. After all, I’m the one who brought up his body odor in the first place. I’m simply laying it all out to look at. There’s no part of this case that isn’t ridiculous in the most morbid way. A foul body odor is as likely a motivation as any, I suppose.”

  “Not for a sane man.”

  “What sane man does any of these things?” Blacker indicated the mounting stacks of case files on the desk. “If all men were sane, we would be blacksmiths.”

  “I believe I would be a lord to the manor born.”

  “Ah, well, if we have that much choice in the matter…”

  Blacker chuckled and they hurried through the rest of their files. There was nothing else in Little’s files as promising as the beard-hater who had killed John Robinson twice in the same bathtub.

  “Listen,” Day said. “Whoever killed Robinson, if he killed Little, too, what if he killed others? There are dozens of unsolved murders here.”

  “You mean he’s like the Ripper, he kills again and again?”

  “I know it’s a horrible thought, but…”

  The idea of someone who killed from habit and need was a relatively new one and something the detectives weren’t prepared to deal with. Murder was usually between spouses or involved money. Crimes of passion were frequent. Prostitutes were killed, bankers bludgeoned, landladies buried alive. Madness was sometimes a factor, but madmen were most often public and demonstrative about their crimes. The Ripper had been something new. He had killed in secret and for no apparent reason. He had done it again and again with impunity.

  “No, you’re right. If it isn’t the Ripper, it’s possible there’s someone else like him out there, though I shudder to think.”

  “We need to look at other cases. It’s possible another murder committed by this same person has been looked at by one of the others.”

  He swept his hand over the room, indicating the three rows of four desks each. There were eight other detectives in the big room who might be working other murders and have clues that separately added up to nothing, but could be put together in a useful way.

  “I’ll go to Sir Edward first thing in the morning,” Blacker said.

  “Let’s not bother him yet. He gave me leave to do what I need to solve Little’s murder. I’ll use my authority and get everyone to look through whatever they’ve got.”

  “There’ll be some who won’t like it.”

  “I know it.”

  “I’ll throw my weight behind you. I may not be the most respected peeler in the room, but I think I’m well liked. If I vou
ch for you, I’m sure the others will cooperate.”

  Day smiled. “Thank you. It means a lot that you’re willing to trust me. I’m not sure I trust myself on this.”

  Blacker nodded, but he didn’t smile. “I’ll be honest with you, Day, there are men here that I’d rather were looking into this. But I trust Sir Edward, and if he picked you for it then there must be a good reason and I’ll go along. I’m behind you on all this, but I’m not blindly following.”

  He stared pointedly across the desk until Day had to look away. When he looked back, Blacker’s scowl had dissolved into his trademark grin. The atmosphere in the room was lighter again.

  “But you’ll find no more loyal hunting dog than me,” Blacker said. “You point me in the direction of the bird that did this and I’ll bring the bloody bastard back to you with his head hangin’ out me mouth.”

  He winked and Day laughed.

  “What say we get a couple hours’ sleep and freshen up? We’ve got a lot to do in the morning.”

  “I think morning is already in progress.”

  “If you’re willing, once the sun’s up and the milk’s delivered, I think it would be best if you questioned Little’s family, while I handle the neighbors,” Day said. “You’ve got a lighter touch, and the family might be more open with you.”

  “Will do.”

  “One other thing. Are there any constables we could trust? Smart men who can be discreet?”

  “There’s one or two I can think of.”

  “We may want to enlist them. There’s a lot to track down here, and some help would be welcome.”

  “I’d go to Hammersmith first.”

  “Hammersmith? He was at the crime scene this morning. Good man?”

  “He rarely laughs at my jokes, but he’s a born lawman.”

  “Hammersmith it is, then. I’ll see about getting him reassigned when Sergeant Kett comes on duty.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be Little’s killer right now,” Blacker said. “We’ll have the noose round his neck by sundown tomorrow.”

  Day nodded, but he didn’t smile. He stood and got his hat and jacket from the hooks on the wall and left without a word for the desk sergeant. On his way out, he saw that Blacker had left the dancing man’s wooden crate on a pile of rubbish at the end of the block. He picked it up and carried it to the back door of the Yard and left it there.