by Chris James
I needed to sit down. So, they had seen each other, and Emily had not breathed a word. Had she feared Rebecca would have taken me from her? And then I remembered who I was to Rebecca: the crippled boy she couldn’t take anywhere.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she finally breathed.
After composing myself in Jean-Louis’ office, I scowled at Rebecca. I could easily have throttled her. ‘You helped Emily take her own life?’ Rebecca stepped away, held her hands up to ward me off. ‘You killed her as sure as stabbing her in the heart!’ I yelled.
‘No, no. She was in pain and–’
‘You killed your own flesh and blood. You bitch! If I had known what her ailment was, I could have cured her. Why wouldn’t she tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?’ I went to strike her across the face but held back my hand, inches from her cheek.
‘Jacob!’ she yelled. ‘I was trying to save her pain…’ Rebecca dropped to her knees in front of me, gripping my hands, pleading. ‘If you had seen her begging me to do it, making me swear I would not tell you. You, her darling dear boy, would have done the same. A wounded animal, put out of its misery.’ She began to sob, her whole body convulsing. After regaining a little composure, through her tears she added, ‘I loved her. Truly, I loved her, Jacob. I could not let her suffer any longer. I begged someone tell me what was best. Mama just wanted her preserved, through whatever pain the poor girl had to endure. I thought of you. And what you would do. But neither Mama nor Emily would permit me to tell you of her deterioration.’
I sat in silence with Rebecca still at my feet. I must have then asked about the colour of the poison.
‘Purple. It was vivid purple,’ she said.
Purple. How could I ever forget? The purple puddle around Emily, her helpless body behind my shop counter. It was true. She had as good as murdered Emily.
‘You should have told me! Someone should have told me!’ I said, somewhat harshly, forgetting she was equally as bereaved as I. ‘I would have found a cure.’
‘There was no cure, Jacob. Only tonics to ease the pain, and you gave her ample of those. And you yourself were one such tonic,’ Rebecca said, remaining calm.
‘I would have created a cure, I tell you. I would have made it my life’s work to save her,’ I snapped, thumping on the desk.
Jean-Louis tapped lightly on the door before stepping inside his own office, clearing his throat quietly, then, ‘Forgive the interruption, a footman is here, asking for madam’s parcels. He’s anxious that the lady outside is growing impatient.’
‘My mother,’ Rebecca explained. And then to Jean-Louis, ‘Give him the paintings while I finish with Mr Silver, if you please. Do you have brandy? I think he needs it.’
Jean-Louis obliged, extracting a decanter from the sideboard and providing just one balloon glass.
‘Jacob, sit quietly. Sip the brandy. I shall be back in a moment or two. Then we’ll make plans for my portrait,’ Rebecca said, patting my head before leaving the office.
*
‘Show me those paintings he just brought in, Monsieur St Clair. I want to see what he’s up to nowadays,’ Rebecca asked Jean-Louis quietly.
Jean-Louis took her to the back of the salon where Jacob’s new offerings leaned facing the wall. On the reverse of each canvas, painted in burnt umber, the portrait’s title: Masquerade ~ followed by each girl’s name: Penelope, Leticia and Isadora. Jean-Louis turned all three of the paintings around to face her.
Rebecca sucked in her breath. ‘Oh my God!’
‘The artist’s first in a new line of horror paintings, madam. Highly fashionable.’
‘My God! I hope he won’t paint me like this!’ she gasped, picking one up and holding it at arm’s length.
‘Very much in demand, right now, madam. I’ll have no trouble selling these.’
Each girl, naked, sat on a chaise with her back to a large mirror. The hair, full of beads and pearls, was stacked high on her head. Dressing-up for the Masquerade Ball. Each face was identical – a plain white porcelain mask. Blood dripped from under the mask. The eyes in the mask were missing; one saw right through the empty eye sockets into the mirror behind.
In their hand, each girl held an ornate stick with an oval frame at its end – where one would normally find the masquerade mask. But in Jacob’s version the girl’s real face was portrayed – horribly distorted and screaming in terror.
Reflected in the mirror behind, one could see the headless torso behind the porcelain mask, the beaded hair floating above in mid-air. The reflection showed the back of the severed head, dripping with blood, attached to the stick held in the hand.
Rebecca winced as she ran her fingers over the horrified face. ‘You can sense the terror. So incredibly unique. I can sell these. I’ll take this one on approval, if I may?’ Rebecca said, selecting Penelope. ‘I have just the client, a perverted letch in Putney. With any luck this’ll frighten him to death,’ she laughed. ‘As long as it’s after I get paid.’
Jean-Louis smiled and bowed, took the work of art and placed it into a canvas bag, taking it to the door to give to the footman from Rebecca’s carriage. Rebecca then returned to the gallery office where she made an appointment with Jacob to call at his studio and sit for her portrait.
‘Above the apothecary’s shop,’ Jacob told Rebecca, handing her his business card. ‘I’ve a large studio.’
She would call on the last Friday of the month, the twenty-eighth of September, she explained, when her mother had no need of her services for the whole weekend.
‘I daresay we’ll find something to do with ourselves over a whole weekend. What fun!’ she exclaimed as she left, the assisted murder of her sister Emily quite forgiven and forgotten.
What fun indeed.
In Berkeley Square, Rebecca arrived home having put her mother on a train to Finchingfield. It was late evening and she took Masquerade ~ Penelope upstairs, placing it in her bedroom on the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed. A little later, she climbed into bed and sat mesmerised by the painting for a few minutes. Every detail had been exquisitely executed, she mused. There was no doubt in Rebecca’s mind that underneath that veil of terror, a beautiful woman posed. In her hair, pink pearls reflected the pink polka dots of her dress, draped across her lap. She thought about Jacob and how the crippled moth had developed into an elegant butterfly.
Rebecca finally turned out the gaslight and pulled the covers over herself. After tossing and turning for a while, unable to sleep, she jumped out of bed and turned Penelope to face the wall. Only then was she able to drift off and dream of what she might do to Jacob, once she had him all to herself.
On the River Thames, between Blackfriars and the Tower Bridges, a uniformed police constable leaned out of a rowboat as two boatmen pulled on the oars. Swinging a hurricane lamp, he was searching the river. The constable called out and pointed off the bow.
A boathook snagged some floating cloth. They eased alongside and while one of the oarsmen made excuses and retched over the side, the other assisted the constable to lift the object into the boat – a female body. She wore a pink polka dot dress.
Her head was missing.
Further down the river, Big Ben struck midnight.
At precisely that same moment, in Berkeley Square, horrific screams awakened Rebecca, terrifying her. She jumped out of bed, raced over to the portrait and turned it around.
The last thing Rebecca would remember before collapsing on the bedroom floor were the screams coming from Penelope’s gaping mouth.
Chapter 17
At Stepney police station in East London, five days after the discovery of the unidentified woman’s headless body in the Thames, middle-aged and poorly-shod, Gertrude Cummings, dragged in her four mischievous boys, aged between six and sixteen, to report to the duty officer at the front desk.
‘It’s me gel,’ she began. ‘Letty. Got me worried,’ Gertrude announced.
Constable Higgins put down the worn copy of the London Illustrated News and
tutted. ‘If everybody worried about their kids came in here we’d have people lined up to Buckingham Palace, madam. Spent the night out, did she?’
‘That dress in the paper. The spotted one what the gel with no head was wearing,’ Gertrude continued, the constable now listening more closely.
‘Your girl, she’s got a dress like that?’ the constable asked, picking up a report sheet and pencil.
‘No,’ said Gertrude. The officer threw down the pencil and sighed. ‘She did have,’ Gertrude continued, ‘but she swapped it wiv a friend of ’ers, Polly.’
‘And where will we find this Polly?’
‘Dunno. That’s why I come ’ere,’ Gertrude said, as she commanded her youngest boy to come and have the snot wiped from his face. ‘See, my Letty’s missin’ and she’s often at Polly’s. But I couldn’t find Polly neither, see. She ain’ ’ome, that’s for sure. Then I see the pitcher in the paper.’
The two eldest boys began squabbling. The constable warned Mrs Cummings that their language would frighten a police horse and demanded she shut them up before the superintendent appeared. Gertrude went over and clumped them both about the ears. ‘Be’ave!’ she yelled.
‘What makes you think it’s the same dress, may I ask?’ the constable pressed, sure this was a non-runner and eager to get back to his magazine.
‘Cos one of the dots is missing; near the arse – same as Letty’s. I mended it wiv a piece I cut from a sheet.’
The constable pricked up his ears, and said, ‘Keep your kids under control a few moments, I’ll get someone who can help.’
The constable returned with a detective in plain clothes, Sergeant Thorpe. Lifting the counter flap, Sergeant Thorpe invited Mrs Cummings to follow him to his office. The constable smartly banged the flap down to ensure her rowdy flock didn’t follow.
‘Wai’ ’ere, you lot!’ Gertrude yelled at her kids, ‘and bleedin’ be’ave or you’ll get the back o’ my ’and! You ’ear?’
‘I think they heard, madam,’ the constable said, grinning at the kids. The youngest poked his tongue out, and as soon as a door closed behind his mother, blew a loud raspberry at the constable.
After a poor connection and having to ask for the Scotland Yard number three times, Sergeant Thorpe replaced the telephone receiver on its pedestal and turned back to Gertrude Cummings, a solemn look on his face.
‘It does look like this could be your daughter’s dress, Mrs Cummings,’ he said. Gertrude chewed on her fingers nervously. ‘But let’s not jump to any conclusions, shall we? When did you last see your daughter?’
‘She said some well-to-do geezer was paying to paint her pitcher. She came ’ome wiv some flowers and left her little un wiv us to go sit for ’im again.’
‘She say where the gentleman lived?’ Sergeant Thorpe asked.
‘The city, she said.’
‘Where in the city, did she say?’
Gertrude shook her head and started trembling. ‘Anyfink ’appens to her I’ll kill the bastard meself, I’ll tell yer that for nothin’,’ she said, fidgeting and twisting a dirty handkerchief into knots. Tears welled in her eyes.
‘You watch, you’ll get home and she’ll have a nice cup o’ tea waiting for you, eh?’ Thorpe said, trying to settle her. But Gertrude was not consoled.
Just then, the sound of a howling youth broke through into the sergeant’s office. The constable from the front desk knocked and entered. ‘Scuse me, Mrs Cummings. But I felt obliged to clip your eldest’s ear.’
‘What’s he done now?’ she asked.
‘Peed in the gutter out the front. So I clipped him and showed him the lav.’
‘Bloody good job. Clip ’em all, willya?’ Gertrude said, adding, ‘No man about the ’ouse, that’s my bleedin’ problem.’
‘Be much longer, sarge? Dunno if the super can take too much of these little blighters,’ the constable asked Sergeant Thorpe, ‘No offence, ma’am.’
‘Shoulda drowned ’em at birth,’ Gertrude quipped, ‘ ’ad a much quieter life.’
‘Few more minutes,’ Sergeant Thorpe replied, adding, ‘Close the door behind you, constable.’ After the door was closed, ‘How well do you know Polly?’
Gertrude was leaving with her kids when she passed by the noticeboard in the lobby. ‘That’s our Nora. She missing, too?’ she called out to the sergeant, looking perplexed and stabbing her finger on a faded photograph pinned to the board. It was pinned among a half-dozen others with a label above them: Missing.
‘Her mother reported her missing a couple of nights back. Why, you know her, too?’ Detective Thorpe asked.
Detective Inspector George Neville, by the rule of numbers, was the Metropolitan Police’s finest detective. He had always been outshone by an inspector with a better record of detection – but Jack the Ripper helped him out, bringing Neville to the top of the pile sooner than expected. The Whitechapel murderer’s rampage in 1888 left seven murders on Inspector Frederick George Abberline’s sheet unsolved – destroying his detection rate. Abberline, bitter as he became further overshadowed by Neville’s continued success, accused Neville of cherry-picking, only accepting the easier, solvable cases – as if Neville had a choice. The fact was that Neville was thorough to a point of obsession. He would not advance a case until he had sound reasoning to back up his deductions. ‘Hunches are for amateurs,’ Neville told his junior officers. ‘Sound and logical evidence is what convicts. It’s there somewhere. If necessary, go back and find it. Dig it out of people, dig it up from wherever it is, from whatever it’s buried under, but woe betide you if you make it up.’
Stood in his Scotland Yard office looking out onto the River Thames – the murky waters of which had delivered up two female headless bodies in as many weeks – Neville had feared this case could ruin his record. Unidentified bodies were the hardest cases to solve. And worse, Abberline would be laughing at him or claiming he could have solved it, within days, no doubt. But then came along Mrs Cummings looking for her Letty, and the unsolvable seemed, at first glance, to have turned into another cherry for picking. Thank God.
The second body found had been identified – Letty Norton, née Cummings. Her mother, Gertrude, had identified her by an appendix scar and a birth mark, a brown mole on her forearm in the shape of an old boot. Having her picture painted by someone in the city, the mother had told them. That was all they had. Suspecting the body in the faulty polka dot dress was Letty’s friend, Polly, Neville had only one means of identification open to him – the only known living relative, her adopted much younger sister, Nell, according to Mrs Cummings. The child was easy to track down. But quite how she could make a meaningful identification, without a head, was of grave concern. But murder is murder, and without certain identification of the victim the investigation was held back. Neville had no better choice open to him. Nell had to be brought to London – and suffer the consequences.
Nell was escorted by a lady from the reform school in Brighton. To make things easier on the child it was decided not to tell her about the missing head. The pathologist’s assistant used an inflated balloon in a wig to replace the missing part of Polly’s anatomy. This was then covered with a separate sheet down to the shoulders. Under no circumstances was the fake head to be revealed, warned the inspector, we don’t have to frighten the kid to death.
Detective Inspector Neville led Nell into the mortuary anteroom where the victim’s body was completely covered with a sheet. The reform school officer stood by, to help soften the blow.
‘Nell, dear, we are truly sorry that you have to do this,’ the lady officer began, ‘but if this is Polly we do need to know. She would surely want you to help us catch whoever did this to her, wouldn’t she?’
‘Can I see her face?’ Nell asked, innocently.
‘Best you don’t look dear. Bit upsetting,’ the officer explained.
‘What did they do to her?’ Nell asked shakily.
‘She was left to drown in the river, my dear.’ Then, before removing t
he sheet that covered only the top half of the body, ‘May I show you her, now?’ Nell nodded. The top sheet was drawn down as far as the victim’s waist, the head remaining covered.
Nell immediately shook her head. Then in a quiet whisper, ‘Can’t tell. I hope it’s not her.’ She then went to the foot of the trolley on which the victim lay and lifted the sheet. She caught her breath, pulled an agonised face and screamed.
After quietening Nell down, Neville heard the child say: ‘It is Polly. It’s her toes. I can tell from her toes. She had funny toes.’
Nell was led out after confirming she was beyond doubt that it was her sister’s body. Inspector Neville had evidence better than blood grouping – of no use with stepsisters, of course – because of Polly’s deformed inner toes on both feet. Each was joined to the next, up to the first joint; Polly had slightly webbed-feet.
Once Polly was identified, Neville was confident, thanks to Gertrude Cummings, they had a link between all three missing girls and a painter – the prime suspect paying a shilling a day to his victims. Neville hoped that, provided his searches were thorough enough, he could still find Nora, alive and well – before she turned up in the river like the others.
Neville had invited an old friend from the Marine Police at Wapping to talk the case through, Inspector Charlie Morgan. The biggest question was: where did each body get thrown into the river. On his desk, a chart of the River Thames bore crosses where each body was recovered.
Next to the chart was the pathologist’s estimate of how long each body had been in the river, together with printed Tide Tables for the River Thames.
‘If the killer got rid of the bodies immediately he took their heads, time and place of death would be around the same place as they were chucked into the river,’ offered Charlie Morgan, experienced in dragging bodies and every other kind of detritus from the river. ‘But if he kept the bodies and travelled to the river later, we’ve got a much harder job on our hands. Could have killed them anywhere. But transporting a headless corpse across London unseen, would be difficult.’
