No, solid burgher stock lived in these precincts around Southwark Bridge. St. Paul’s loomed above everything. As they crossed the bridge, Lenox saw the thin townhouse facing the river where Christopher Wren had lived as St. Paul’s was being built, so that he could see it from a distance each morning and evening, step back from it after a day spent amidst the dust and mortar. Not dissimilar to a detective’s work.
As they neared the south bank, Lenox saw the official bustle of a police investigation. There was a swarm of ten or fifteen uniformed men keeping order, and perhaps ten times as many bystanders who had stopped to gawk. They were almost exactly where Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre had been, though that was of course many centuries gone.
“This is one for Tussauds,” said Graham.
Lenox nodded. No question about it. The anonymity of the Walnut Island murder had met its exact opposite; the murderer would have his notoriety. Nothing could be more certain. There were already a few enterprising men among the crowds, one selling oysters, another copies of the Telegraph, no doubt at a markup. Three people were reenacting the infamous murder of Joseph O’Connor (even at a few hundred yards, Lenox could spot the top hat that always marked O’Connor as a rich man in these impromptu productions) for a small but enthusiastic group they had siphoned off—the kind of street theater that was immensely popular in London, a long and lurid performance that would culminate in enormous lengths of red handkerchief streaming from one member’s collar as he convulsed upon the ground, O’Connor dying for the ten thousandth time, victim of a dashing, young, poor couple named the Mannings, who had set him for their mark.
Stand up, bow, circulate the hat for pennies, perform it again.
The Mannings were in Tussauds.
“The letter writer will find the fame he sought, sir,” Graham said, echoing Lenox’s own thought.
Lenox nodded. “As he counted upon.”
The article had been short (little information, and a brief time in which to get it to press—the presses held for it, in all likelihood). Its subheadline had virtually summarized what the Telegraph actually knew, adding a nickname.
Thames Ophelia; strangled own hair; bedecked and set adrift
Then the article, whose tone was just a step down from the Times in ways that were subtle but obvious to the avid consumer of newsprint:
The body of an unknown woman was recovered just off Bankside this morning at a little after five o’clock, in remarkable circumstances. It was discovered by a clerk from the Customs House nearby, on his way to work, who immediately alerted P. C. Wright, Number 144 of K Division.
The unfortunate woman was of dark complexion, with ringlets of dark hair upon her brow. The cause of death appeared to be strangulation of the most brutal variety. Most astonishingly, surrounding and surmounting her body were long and numerous garlands of flowers.
She had been floated down the river on a loose board.
Nothing else is known about the victim’s identity. Members of the Metropolitan Police are present, among them Inspector Field. Sir Richard Mayne is expected to attend the scene himself shortly.
Evening edition for further details.
Next to this was a long history—all filler—about unsolved London murders. Nothing about Walnut Island.
As they drew closer to the site, Lenox could indeed see Inspector Charles Field, the two most respected of the plainclothes detectives of the Metropolitan Police, one of the eight original detectives of 1842. Mayne was already there as well.
Heavens, that made four: Mayne, the commissioner; Field, the preeminent detective, famous across England; and Sinex and Exeter, who had drawn the Walnut Island case.
It was hard for Lenox to imagine where he fit into this battalion of people. But he was doggedly committed that it would be somewhere.
Around Mayne and Field were a variety of police officers, some in blue, others in suit and tie. A number of constables held the crowd at bay, but the crowd saw plenty anyway. Lenox himself could perceive that all attention was centered on a small area of the river’s bank, though he was angled too low to see what was there.
“I’ll attempt to get through to the body,” Lenox said as they came onto Bankside, the hansom attracting a few glances. “You take a scan of the crowd—the civilians, that is. Jot notes on the faces you see, clothes, telling scars, markings, but be quick about it, since there’s so much to do.”
Graham nodded. “Yes, sir.”
It was an article of faith among the few criminal manuals available that murderers enjoyed watching the commotion they had instigated. Lenox wasn’t sure if it was true, but it couldn’t hurt to be safe.
He rapped the cab to stop, and steeled himself: mayhem, death, blood. Yet he knew somewhere deep in his mind, from the same mysterious depth that had noticed Graham’s failure to knock on his door half an hour before, that opportunity lay within the chaos.
He wondered how quickly this would be connected to the previous morning’s letter to the Challenger. The Telegraph hadn’t done it. The Challenger would do it by the time it published its evening edition, of course. Still, for a few hours, at least, he and Graham would be among just a dozen or so men in England who suspected that two murders, a month apart, were connected.
One of those dozen or so being the murderer; and contemplating this person, Lenox felt, surfacing to his skin, a profound unease that had been lingering somewhere hidden within him for the past half hour. It had to do with: Who was this fellow? What kind of murderer was he?
For that matter, what was a murder?
Usually he thought he knew. It was a question that seemed to have a single simple answer. And yet in cases like this, its illimitable secondary ones occupied a great deal of his time and thought.
He had been discussing just this with Elizabeth a few weeks before, over tea in her pretty yellow drawing room—not a subject at all appropriate for either teatime or for discussion with a gentlewoman, or for a pretty yellow drawing room. But they were close enough that they could discuss all subjects with equal freedom.
“Do you know how many murders there were in Britain in 1810?” he had asked her, smiling, after she had mentioned one of his cases.
“You know that I don’t. A thousand? Three thousand?”
“Nine.”
“Nine thousand!”
“No, no. Nine. As in, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.”
Her eyes had widened. “You’re making sport of me.”
“Never in life. Nine convictions of murder by a magistrate, out of ten million Britons.”
But of course, as he explained, that was 1810, just before the slow, significant rise in the idea of a professional police force. Nine hundred was a more likely number for how many actual murders there had been that year than nine.
All it meant was that in many ways theirs was the century in which murder had become a real notion. And the idea of solving a murder, of trailing a killer, was even newer. Ten years old? Twelve? Eight, if you reckoned the city’s own way: Field and his seven comrades in 1842 being the first men specifically tasked with solving the identity of murderers.
Lenox was a student of past crimes in addition to the daily crime of London, and within his knowledge there were very, very few instances like this—the mix of anger, arrogance, and performance. The wantonness of it—the flowers, Thames Ophelia—the two strangulations—the idea of a “perfect crime.” None of this was usual. It felt different, unmotivated by money (as the Mannings had been) or drunkenness or marital dispute. It simply felt different, disquietingly different.
What was a murder? Anyhow they were about to see for themselves.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They made their way into the scrum.
“Lenox,” said Mayne, spotting him after a double take. “I wondered whether you might come. It would appear that your anxieties were prescient, regrettably.”
“The same killer?”
“I would wager so.”
Lenox nodded g
ravely, though doing it without any authority or experience, twenty-three, he felt an impostor—felt twenty-three going on sixteen. “I got into a cab as soon as I saw the newspaper this morning.”
Mayne hesitated. “You had better come through. You know Field?”
The question was a perfunctory one. Yes, he knew Field; everyone in England knew Field. Down to his face: When a sensational case appeared in the press, there were inevitably line drawings in every paper, above the fold of the first page, portraits of the victim, the suspects, the inspector, and the witnesses, on either side of a large square picture of the scene. (Only the Times still refused to stoop to such illustrations.) Tomorrow Lenox would be able to see twelve different portraits of Field in twelve different papers.
The city loved him, and the counties loved him more. Criminals grinned and touched their hats when they passed him. He was a close personal friend of Charles Dickens, who rumor said was basing a character in his next novel on the inspector.
So Lenox knew Field—but didn’t know him. “Charles Lenox,” he said, extending a hand.
“Field. Pleased to meet you.”
It was a good face, the one that would appear in the papers tomorrow. You saw why it was trusted: round, stolid, intelligent without being nervously intellectual, proper King George side-whiskers, a shirt that covered his whole neck so that he looked a high-buttoned and tightly contained bulk of human.
“The pleasure is mine,” said Lenox.
Field chucked his chin toward Graham. “Who is this?”
“My valet.” There was a subtle change in Field’s face, and Lenox blushed. Hell and brimstone. The very first crime scene he had ever visited, and within twenty seconds he had made an utter fool of himself.
“I see.”
Field turned away slightly, and Lenox wondered if he was now suddenly recollecting Lenox’s name, a joke among the other inspectors, the amateur who bothered them with his occasional presence around Great Scotland Yard.
Mayne, too, looked at him oddly. “Your valet.”
Lenox thought as rapidly as he could. “And assistant,” he said in what sounded to his own ear like an unnaturally loud voice. “I’m a private detective, Inspector Field. I brought Mr. Graham because I was wondering, Sir Richard, if he might have permission to go to the Challenger and see whether another letter had arrived. They sat on the last one long enough. And the first was just braggadocios, enough that I wondered if its author might have written a sequel, out of pride.”
Field turned back to him, and Lenox saw that this had been the right stroke. Among other things because it reminded everyone that Lenox had connected the letter of the day before to Walnut Island. It also explained and disposed of Graham.
Mayne nodded. Field assessed Lenox, then said to Graham, “If you go, take Constable Bryant, over there, with the gold tooth, badge ninety-nine. They’ll listen to him at the Challenger if they won’t listen to you.”
Graham had previous orders—to survey the crowd—but he was very far from simple, and nodded. “I shall return here directly afterward,” he said to Lenox, wisely dropping the word “sir,” and walked away.
This goodbye, too, had been clever—it gave Lenox a reason to remain indefinitely, since he had a later reunion planned here—and the young detective silently blessed his friend, who was already walking toward Constable Bryant, badge ninety-nine, of the gold tooth, for being smarter than himself.
Field had turned away again. His hands were clasped behind his back, and Lenox watched as he returned to the water. Wavelets, cresting in small dirty-white foam from the swollen deep blue of the river’s center, rushed one over the other at the bank. Five or so feet beyond the reach of the water there was a lumped figure under a sheet; and in sacral hush around it, several constables with nothing to do except look solemn.
Among them was Inspector Exeter. So, he was here, too.
Lenox glanced behind him and saw that Sinex was among the crowds. More information there, probably.
“I hope I can be of assistance,” Lenox said to Mayne.
“It is Field’s matter entirely now.”
“Not Sinex and Exeter’s?”
Mayne shook his head. “They will assist Field.” He paused, and some complicated arithmetic passed through his mind. “But I can let you have a look at the body.”
“I’d be glad of the chance.”
“I wouldn’t offer too much in the way of opinion to Field, unless you see something glaring.”
Lenox nodded. He had already been counting on silence as his best ally.
There had been something in Mayne’s words, though. Lenox wondered, as he followed the commissioner, if perhaps Mayne and Field were at odds. One was the direct superior, but the other more famous and influential. Perhaps that had led them into conflict?
Lenox’s path into the case became clear to him in that moment: he could be Mayne’s own eyes.
Mayne nodded as they came up to the sheet. “I’ve only just arrived myself. We’ll see her for the first time together.” He made a sour face. “Bloody foul thing to happen,” he muttered.
The crowds, sensing a convergence upon the body, pushed forward.
One of the constables, apparently first among equals, greeted Sir Richard with a grave nod, and, at the commissioner’s tilted chin, stooped down to lift the sheet. A phalanx of bodies stood behind it to conceal it from the crowd.
The Thames did that job on the other side.
Lenox had a strong stomach. One or two men stepped back—perhaps because it was a woman, for most if not all of them would have seen men’s bodies slumped outside of gin mills, thief-takers’—but Lenox leaned forward.
The woman was of early middle age, perhaps thirty, if he had to guess at a glance. Field, staring down at her intently, said, “You see that she is in an—unusual condition.”
The woman had on a thick white dress, almost a bridal gown in the style of Queen Victoria, in fact—who had first popularized that color for wedding dresses. It was muddied and soaked through. Very long plaits of hair were extended down her body.
More remarkably, though, there were garlands of flowers up and down the body, ribboned together by their stems, piled in a crisscrossing mesh far higher than her body, thick across her chest, her midsection, her legs.
Here was the source of the headline: Thames Ophelia.
She was laid out upon a large pine bier that gave her about a foot on every side, though she was quite tall, perhaps five feet eight inches, Lenox would have guessed. This bier seemed to be unmarked, at least at first glance. In fact, the edges looked cut cleanly enough that it might at one stage have been a large door or the side of a shipping crate.
There was thick white makeup on her face, in the style of a high lady of 1790 or so. It was obscene; and her eyes were raccoonlike, black kohl smeared around them more heavily than it was on the Egpytian mummies one saw in the museums.
The whole effect was uncanny—hard to look at.
“Grim,” said Mayne, more succinctly.
“Fancies himself quite a poet, this fellow,” Field said. He shook his head in disgust. He gestured to the abrasions around her neck. “Strangulation again.”
There was a moment of quiet. One constable very suddenly removed his tall police officer’s hat, and one by one all of his fellows followed suit.
“I suppose we can cover her again,” Mayne said.
But Lenox was too busy for ceremony. Instinctively, he stooped down next to Field. “What’s in her hand?”
Her thin-fingered hands were just protruding from the masses of flowers. There were numerous rings on them, two or three on some of the fingers. The left hand was open but the right was tightly closed.
Field carefully pried it open, though it was clenched in rigor mortis. Indeed, her pallid body, an unnatural purplish white, all seemed clenched around that hand. Field opened it and took something out.
He held it up. “A shilling.”
Field covered the body. Then
he asked two constables to come forward and lift the board. They did this with ease—not too heavy.
“The body was discovered here, washed ashore?” Mayne asked.
Lenox was grateful someone else had posed the question, having committed to silence as a strategy.
One of the constables stepped forward and nodded. “A clerk from the Customs House found her, sir. Nathaniel Butler. He is accustomed to walking along the strand toward his office each morning after crossing Southwark Bridge.” They all glanced up at the immense Customs House, a few hundred paces off. “He called for help. I wasn’t far.”
This must be P. C. Wright, of Telegraph fame, then. “Well done,” said Mayne. “Was anyone else in the area?”
“The usual foot traffic. Light. Nobody who aroused immediate suspicion, sir. We have detained Mr. Butler as well as a seaman who was upon the shore nearby. He is still drunk, sir. Asleep in the police wagon. He may have seen something, however.”
Mayne sighed. “The body may be taken in for examination, then. Field?”
Field nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Though it is straightforward enough. Strangulation.”
A coroner examined all victims of murder, though the bodies could pile up (quite literally) for weeks on end, due to the shortage of qualified medical examiners, a problem Lenox knew Mayne had addressed to Parliament.
Two constables covered the unfortunate woman in her makeshift shroud again, and the two who were holding the long board upon which she lay began the slow and unsteady process of taking it to the same wagon where evidently this drunken seaman was sleeping in the front seat.
Lenox’s mind was full: the river; the Customs House; the shilling; the flowers; the hair; the board; the trunk; Walnut Island.
He glanced back at the crowd, which had filled in even more. There was a woman with a yoke around her neck, selling thick paper cones of piping hot porridge from the small copper buckets on either side of the yoke for a penny.
The Woman in the Water--A Prequel to the Charles Lenox Series Page 5
