The Hourglass Factory

by Lucy Ribchester

  ‘Would anyone be able to mimic it?’

  Milly laughed incredulously. ‘You think she might have been done in after all? There’s no one who could do what she did. Foucaud even looks like a buffoon. He only gets away with it because the timeframe is so tight when he’s in the costume, no one has the chance to notice the tiger is moving like a pantomime cow.’

  Frankie chewed this over. ‘So it can only have been her.’

  Milly opened her plush lips slowly. ‘I wouldn’t stake my life on it . . . But I should say so.’

  They both looked up at the huge columns of Lincoln’s Inn House emerging from the pavement like tree trunks. It had a high imposing façade, Greek lines and classical edges striking an odd note with the houses on either side. It was a fine headquarters indeed. There must have been supporters with bottomless pockets.

  Milly took a couple of breaths and fiddled with her cuffs. ‘I could murder a cigarette.’

  Frankie raised an eyebrow at the phrase, then fumbled in her jacket catching the fruity whiff of herself. She would have to change her cotton shirt soon. She held out a pack of Matinees. Milly waved a hand. ‘It’s all right. Best not in front of here anyway. Blow my cover.’

  ‘Smoking? It’s emancipation.’

  Milly raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what you think?’ She brushed down her skirt. ‘Right.’ Her lips curled tentatively into a smile. ‘Where are you off to anyway?’

  ‘The morgue.’

  Her smile disappeared. ‘Why?’

  Frankie stared at her. ‘That Turkish Delight jam rot your brain did it? The body of Mr Smythe, Inspector Millicent. Where d’you go when there’s a body?’

  Milly’s lips sulked down. ‘I was only asking.’

  ‘Besides, I got my contacts,’ Frankie said smartly, watching Milly’s slim back weave a few paces away from her. Just before Milly reached the door, she turned. ‘Frankie, where shall I meet you next?’

  ‘Lyon’s tea room, Piccadilly, six o’clock?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she paused. ‘Have fun with your cadavers, Constable Frankie.’ Moving like a roe deer, she hopped up onto the doorstep and had her hand brandishing the knocker in an instant.

  Frankie watched a motor bus puff past the building then turned back up Kingsway towards Covent Garden. She reflected that it had not been twenty-four hours since she had first learned Millicent’s real name, and yet she was trusting her in a way she wouldn’t have trusted any of the staffers from Stonecutter Street. Before last night she had just been one of the exotic West End figures Frankie would pass from time to time on shady streets, dolled up in curious costume. Artists’ models, mannequins, girls whose jobs you didn’t know, but who insisted on making their own living. How had her fleet, fragile, perfectly crafted feet ended up on Jojo’s doorstep? ‘I wasn’t born a showgirl,’ she had said. So did Milly, unlike Ebony, have a safety net she could escape into if someone was on her heels?

  Frankie walked on carefully, feeling the burden of what she had set out to do creeping up onto her shoulders. She had wanted this. She had pictured herself time and again in sharp tweeds working her way through London on an investigative piece, had scoffed at Teddy Hawkins’s shoddy reporting, known she could do better. She convinced herself when there was a murder in the papers that she could slot the facts together silky and quick, not like the lead-headed coppers and dozy reporters covering it, if only she was given the chance. But the flip side of that was that undeniably, most things Frankie had done up until now hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d expected them to. Being a society columnist wasn’t champagne and sparkling ideas, it was gin and Twinkle’s bizarre whims. Being a cartoonist wasn’t coffee houses and satire, it was sketching to please others without thinking about the consequences.

  She tried to shake off her fermenting self-doubt as she stopped outside the Endell Street Hospital, and looked up and down the street. There was a back entrance where the undertakers’ carts pulled up out of sight of the main road. She hopped the fence and passed down an alleyway alongside a high wall. From a couple of the open windows the sounds of the hospital drifted outside; quiet feet padding on wood floors, the scraping of gurneys being moved. Someone inside moaned, low and guttural.

  The entrance to the morgue was discreetly screened from view by a patch of shrubs, but she didn’t get that far before she felt the hands: one slapped straight across her eyes, the other smothering her mouth and nose with the thick taste of something chemical.

  She bit down on a set of fat fingers. The voice behind her let out a shrill cry. ‘Ow! You’ve got teeth like a bleedin’ wolf.’

  She jabbed her elbow behind her and wrenched herself free. ‘You think I don’t know the stink of your fingers, John Bridewell? You should be locked up, creeping around hospitals, frightening young women.’ Though she was scowling, her voice was shaky. He had caught her off guard.

  The fat boy in the white apron shook his hand up and down furiously, a sheepish smile pushing into his heavy cheeks. He hadn’t changed a bit, not in the two years since she had seen him last, except for putting on even more weight around his hips and belly. He’d always been one for sinister pranks, whenever she’d been sent to him by the Tottenham Evening News editor, to sniff out dirt on a gruesome death or suicide. It seemed he was still a crafty little bastard. He extended a hand. Frankie took it reluctantly. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t bite it off.’ She spat the nasty taste onto the ground. ‘Formaldehyde. You’re a sick boy.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’ He chuckled, loud and ribald.

  They stood for a few seconds eyeing one another up like cats not knowing whether they were about to fight. ‘You’ve grown taller I think,’ he said after a while. ‘Must be the Fleet Street ale.’

  ‘It’s perspective. Maybe you’ve shrunk.’ She forced a grin.

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again. Aren’t you too busy writing about the colour of the Queen’s knickers?’ He laughed again but there was a note of nervousness in it. ‘What’s the matter? You told them she didn’t wear none so they kicked you off back to the morgues to write about people who can’t sue?’

  ‘I need a bit of help, John. You got much work on just now?’

  ‘Few waiting to be picked up.’

  ‘It’s someone important.’

  He narrowed his puffy eyes.

  ‘Olivier Smythe.’ She watched him but his face gave nothing away. ‘I think he was murdered.’

  ‘Your paper went with “accident” on that.’

  ‘So you do read it then?’ she smiled.

  He stiffened. ‘If it’s lying around.’

  Frankie ran her fingers through her hair, taking a few seconds to let his surprise attack wash off her. In his apron, stained with thin smears of yellow fat and brownish red there was something singularly unsettling about him. His nose had a proud little turn up and his skin was always ruddy and mottled, the way dead flesh looked. It was a pity; he was a nice boy who had been unlucky enough to be in the wrong place when there was a job going spare as a mortician’s assistant. Even after all the times he had bailed her out, broken the rules to let her have a glimpse of a corpse, or gone through with her the exact mechanisms of the body of a person who had drowned or suffered a heart attack, she still felt her skin recoiling slightly at the sight of him. It was his soft round belly more than anything. How could a man who did his job have such an appetite?

  ‘He was collected this morning, there’s nothing to see.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Solicitor’s arrangements.’ He looked around at the small yard. From the street came the sound of a cab passing. ‘Look, if you’re coming in you’d better do it now. Master’s had to nip up to the office for a minute. But,’ he held up a chubby finger. ‘It’s going to cost you, Frankie.’

  ‘I don’t have any money.’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t mean money.’

  A quick wave of nausea passed over her. She wasn’t swift enough to hide it and she saw John Brid
ewell’s cheeks stiffen and felt ashamed.

  ‘Come on, Frankie, I don’t mean that and you know it,’ he said quietly. An awkward livid blush spread over his face and she felt even worse. ‘I’m applying for the university. He said he’ll cover the costs for me to study anatomy. Don’t want to be a trolley boy all my life and I know the organs, I’ve got good cutting skills.’ She stifled a shiver. ‘Can you read over my letter?’ There was a note of defence in his voice, hurt pride.

  ‘Of course, John,’ Frankie said too quickly.

  ‘You was always good with letters.’ He nodded softly, then inclined his head to the green painted door. ‘Come on.’

  It was startling how quickly the smell came back to her, and with it waves of memories, a different life, handwriting by paraffin lamp, stories of the dead people who lay like soapstone on the morgue shelves. She thought of the man who was savaged by a pig, the woman who bleached her stomach. Tottenham Evening News had gone to town on that one. Page two with an illustration. She had felt proud at first, until one of the leader writers told her that the reason they asked her was that no one else wanted to do it. Then she had felt ashamed, like she was only one step up from the body snatchers of the last century. Wait until I’m on Fleet Street, she had thought. I’ll show you. And now she was back at the morgue, fighting Teddy Hawkins for the privilege. It flashed across her mind how strangely the world worked.

  There was a dripping sound coming from somewhere and the air was cold but sweet. John Bridewell moved efficiently through the cluttered space, clearing one empty trolley out of the way, moving instruments onto a wooden table scattered with an assortment of knives and hooks. Two naked bodies lay in the far corner, wizened at the necks, swollen at the wrists. Frankie tried not to look but it was hard not to and her gaze ended up falling on a row of pickled body parts, ears, fingers and tumours in large jars.

  ‘What’s this for, Frankie?’ His question caught her off guard. ‘Is this personal? Because I know your paper’s covered it already, I spoke to Teddy Hawkins.’

  ‘You spoke to Teddy Hawkins?’ She could barely conceal the jealousy in her voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it was you that told him it was an accident?’

  ‘I said nothing of the sort. I said you get all kinds of corset-related deaths. Typically when they say accident, they mean over a period of time.’ He shifted his hand on the corner of a trolley.

  Frankie looked around and her eyes fell on a pile of clothes soaking up the damp around a drain in one corner. ‘You worked on him?’

  He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I thought I was going to be sick. Haven’t felt that way since I took my first turn with a scalpel.’

  ‘So what really happened? Was it progressive? Or had he just laced himself in too tight?’

  ‘Tight? When we took the corset off him, you could see his shape, the ribs went in, right in, like they’d been stunted, dug up to his lungs. His arse was an upside-down heart. His liver was dented. Boss says he must have been wearing one since before his bones hardened. Call himself a man.’ He looked away. ‘I don’t know what happened. You can guess what happened, I don’t need to know.’

  Frankie tried to hold his darting gaze. ‘John.’

  John Bridewell shifted uncomfortably. ‘No one wants to read about that over their toast and marmalade. Perhaps . . .’ he pushed back his hair, ‘you paper folk like this stuff but . . . Frankie, perhaps there’s some things that should be left alone. For the dignity of everyone.’ He wouldn’t meet her eye. He was holding something back.

  ‘What time did he die?’

  ‘Not certain.’

  ‘But he was found in the morning?’

  ‘It was during the night. Rigor mortis was full. One of the girls worked for him found him.’ He chewed on his lip.

  ‘Spit it out, John.’

  ‘Frankie.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘I don’t see what relevance it has. The man had funny leanings.’

  ‘So he liked to wear corsets. So what? Come on, God knows what people say about me. Or you.’

  The blood rose rapidly in his cheeks. His eyes flicked to the door. ‘You ought to watch your tongue.’

  ‘You’re not telling me the whole story are you?’

  He sighed deeply. ‘You heard of Toxicodendron radicans?’

  ‘Yes, I had some with my morning coffee. What do you think?’

  ‘Poison ivy. You get it in botanical houses. It’s an exotic plant, from America.’ He shifted his weight anxiously. Frankie stared at him. He let his breath out and his eyes lowered. ‘All right. There was a rash on his body, the torso, underneath the corset. I think, well, boss thinks – although he wouldn’t commit to it – that was what made him swell. He bloated up inside the corset, you know like when you get stung by a bee, and it suffocated him. It was front opening so he could have put it on, then when his body reacted, it expanded, strangled him. Whoever put the poison on, if that was the case, wouldn’t have needed to be there.’

  ‘Have you tested it?’

  ‘Frankie, there’s some things should be left alone. Don’t put that picture in people’s minds. You’ll be put on trial for . . . well, you know he made corsets for the royals.’

  She cut him off. ‘He was murdered. He deserves justice.’

  ‘If you knew that already, why did you come here?’

  She sighed deeply, thinking of Mr Stark’s words. ‘Because I need facts.’ A noise from outside whipped both their heads up sharply. Frankie looked at the door. John Bridewell saw her skittish eyes.

  ‘It’s cats, Frankie. They’re everywhere in the yard. I’ve never seen you like this before. Anyone would think someone was out to murder you.’ He laughed his nervous laugh but there was a questioning edge in his eyes.

  Frankie let her breath out again slowly, resisting the urge to steady her heart with her hand. She realised her whole body had tensed, bracing just in case another stone came flying through the window. ‘I went to Smythe’s corset shop to interview that acrobat, Ebony Diamond, for the paper the day before she went missing. You must have heard about her going missing.’

  He nodded uncertainly.

  ‘Well, you want to talk about skittish? She was bloody skittish about something. I saw her again at his shop, the day they found him, and she was even worse.’ She breathed out. ‘I know something’s going on, John, something I don’t understand. It’s not like them suicides I used to write about for the Tottenham.’

  John looked shiftily at the pile of clothes in the corner. ‘Look, there was something else,’ he said slowly. ‘It came in with the body. I haven’t given it to the police yet.’ He headed over to a short cabinet in the far corner of the room, near a high window with panes dripping yellow-tinted condensation. From the third drawer he withdrew a small silvery object and flicked it into his hand.

  ‘A gift from a lover?’ He held it out to her. It was a brooch, a small silver brooch, long and thin, with a bronze or gold picture carved into the front, a shield with a trio of lions heads surrounded by vines.

  ‘Boss said it looks like a family crest. But it wasn’t his. Wasn’t the crest of the shop.’

  Frankie shook her head, not understanding. ‘It was on his body?’

  ‘He had it in his hand. Tightly gripped. Police couldn’t even prise it out, we had to wait overnight for the rigor mortis to subside. Don’t know if it means anything. Most likely a token. But it’s always the lovers that drive folk over the edge, isn’t it?’ He gave a cheerless smile.

  ‘Always the lovers,’ Frankie repeated quietly.

  It was an odd lover’s gift, a family crest. Surely the gift a husband would give, not a lover. And why would he have been clutching it? Why would he have clutched hold of anything if his corset was strangling him? She turned the brooch over in her hands. If he knew there was nothing to be done, he would know that he was going to be found. He would know that eventually someone would peel his hand open. Suddenly she remembered Smy
the’s words to his seamstress: ‘I’ll try it myself.’ They had been talking about a costume the girl was stitching for Ebony. Was it possible that was the very garment he had died in? That whoever had laid the trap had meant it for . . . ?

  She pulled her thoughts back. ‘Can I keep this?’

  John Bridewell looked doubtful. ‘It should go to the police really.’

  ‘Even if it was all just a nasty accident?’

  John looked uneasily at the clock.

  An idea struck her. She quickly took out her notebook and the one blunt pencil she had left in her jacket. Sliding the brooch between the pages she took a hasty rubbing. The carving of the lions didn’t come through but it was enough to see that it was heads and leaves. As she was finishing, John began to snap his fingers. She withdrew the brooch and tossed it back to him. He placed a fleshy index finger to his lips. Just as the door began to creak open he managed to slip it back into the drawer and extract from the top of the cabinet a sheaf of papers. He tucked them close to his body, using his other arm to usher her quickly to the outer door. She didn’t look behind her until they were back in the yard. John was sweaty-faced and panicked. ‘He don’t like journalists.’

  ‘I know,’ Frankie said, tucking her notebook back into her jacket. ‘Thank you.’ She met his puffy blue eyes for a second then looked back towards the door of the morgue. It waved in the wind and closed with a nasty creak. ‘You don’t still have the corset?’

  He shook his head. ‘Took a sample for the laboratory and we burned the rest. Safety.’

  She narrowed her eyes.

  ‘Safety from your Fleet Street lot. You’re the second one come asking for it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he scratched his head. ‘Woman came by the day we got him in, said she worked for him. Horrible-looking woman. If I was a cynical man, which I’m not, I would have said she was one of yours in disguise.’ He chuckled stiffly.