Sweet Thames

by Matthew Kneale

  Superintendent Lisle I discovered in an upstairs room – probably once the living quarters of some beer-bellied landlord – with a view down upon a narrow thoroughfare, clattering with traffic. He was a lean, stiff type, whose manner – though affable – gave little away.

  ‘You’ve come to us very promptly, Mr Jeavons.’ His words seemed to contain something like criticism. ‘You say she’s only been gone a few hours.’

  ‘It’s so unlike her to do such a thing.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ He leant forward upon the desk. ‘Perhaps you can tell me a little of the background to the matter.’

  Quite a barrage of questions he asked, occasionally taking down a note – jotted so swiftly that his pencil seemed only to dart across the surface of the paper – though usually he wrote nothing, only silently listening. His eyes, I observed, as I endeavoured to answer as best I might, watched me with care, even intensity, in a way I found unsettling. What was he examining? My clothes, true, were in a poor state, as I had been wearing them without a halt since the morning before. My face, too, was quite a sight – I had glimpsed it, with some surprise, in a mirror at the Lewises’ only an hour before – with rings of sleeplessness below my eyes. But what was my appearance to do with the issue?

  ‘Have you, perhaps, had any recent disagreements with your wife?’ Lisle listened quietly, tapping his knuckles with his pencil, as I recountered the matter of the poison-pen letters and my fruitless visit to the Lewises. He sat back neatly in his chair. ‘I see.’ That watchful look. ‘You must have been angry.’

  ‘I was upset.’

  ‘But not moved to violence?’

  ‘We had a row.’ I was beginning to wonder at the man’s questioning; wonder at his thinking. ‘You are suggesting, perhaps, that I am responsible for her disappearance?’

  The pencil danced in the air in light denial. ‘I’m suggesting nothing, Mr Jeavons. I’m merely asking questions.’

  For a moment I imagined Felicia hurrying hither before me to set the man’s suspicions against myself; feigning the concern of a dutiful subject. But how could she have known I would choose this station and not another? Unless, of course, she had visited them all. But then… I rebelled against my own train of thought, striking me, as it did, as most improbable.

  But could one be sure? I was struck by another possibility; what if I had fallen victim to the machinations of some jealous rival in the world of drainage? Isobella’s very disappearance might be explained thus; an attempt to distract me from my precious work. Of course it was most unlikely, but still…

  ‘Let us hope your visit here will prove needless.’ Lisle spoke now in a concluding voice. ‘But if you’ve heard no word from her by this time tomorrow, then I ask you to come back. There are measures that should be taken.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Tap, tap, tap with the pencil upon his knuckles, as he observed me. ‘We have quite a number of unknown persons discovered, many of them female. Drownings and other accidents for the most part.’ A frown. ‘You must know of course that I hope and believe such things will have no bearing upon this question. But if nothing is heard, and you have no objection…’

  ‘None, of course.’

  Thus began, the next day, my expeditions with Constable Collins, to hospitals, parish rooms, undertakers’ shops and more. Whether it was the corpses’ identities that were the subject of Lisle’s interest, or whether it was really my own behaviour, I could not have said. Nevertheless I joined these grim expeditions willingly enough. At least they gave me a sense of something attempted. And if Isobella lay pale and bloodless in such a place, then I must know.

  In the meantime I embarked also upon a few studies of my own. Three nights running I took my place opposite the Lewises’ home, always in the same spot; in the entrance drive to a grand house just opposite, conveniently placed in the shadowy space between two streetlights. Here there was foliage enough for me to stay largely unseen – though I caused occasional startlement to a few more observant strollers – and I was able to keep watch in peace. The most productive hour, I soon discovered, was late dusk, when lamps had been lit within but the curtains not yet drawn.

  Not that I saw any sign of my wife. Indeed the only event of interest – which I observed on the first night – had no proven connection with her disappearance.

  It was a row – if so one-sided a battle can be so described – and a furious one. Unfortunately it took place in an upstairs room, allowing me sight of the two involved only when they stepped before the window. Gideon seemed all but silent, loitering abjectly – waiting for the next assault – as some spineless child caught stealing from his mother’s purse. By contrast Felicia was constantly on the move, marching into view and away, then back once more, jaws working without halt, as if part of some clockwork device.

  If only I could hear their words. Despite the warmth of the evening the window was tight closed – an arrangement somehow typical of their household – and I could discern nothing more than faint and meaningless mumblings. Except, this was, at moments of crescendo, when Felicia’s shouts carried clean through the glass, offering me a stunted phrase or two.

  ‘How could you have thought…’

  ‘... any brother of mine…’

  Intriguing, but hardly of much utility. Darting a quick glance into the street below – though not in my direction – she quickly pulled shut the thick green curtains, and all was hidden.

  The house in Lark Road grew much changed in four days. Most of all there was the silence; a hanging quiet – broken only by Pericles’ sudden outbursts of barking – that seemed to permeate the rooms, almost as a smell. There was a smell too, and one ever more pungent: of the remnants of the great dinner. A servant of Farre’s aunt had washed and retrieved the dishes and cutlery, but the uneaten courses remained in the kitchen, still glistening with Miss Symes’s projections, and some of them gnawed by the dog. Really I should deal with them, I knew. But there was so much else to think of.

  I had taken to spending almost all my hours in the parlour, as the study had become abhorrent to me. It was a pleasant room, suffering only the disadvantage of looking directly upon the street, so that the steps of those passing were well audible; I could not help myself, each time I heard a light and feminine tread, from glancing through the window, in case the maker might be my wife.

  I had brought my desk into the room, placing it before the piano. There, beneath the watchful faces of Victoria and Albert, staring proudly from beneath their glass domes, I continued labouring upon my drainage plan. Laboured hard, too, despite the reverses so lately suffered. Indeed, rather than growing distracted from such matters, I worked harder than ever, late into the night, using every hour remaining to me after my investigations seeking Isobella. I found in the scheme something like comfort; questions of land heights, effluent flows and depository sites offering a rare sense of the ordinary, of matters achieved.

  And I made good progress. The field work, fortunately, I had already all but dealt with before my wife’s vanishing. This left me only remaining parts of the description, and of these I was, in four days, able to finish the written text, the diagrams of transformational depositories, and even the drainage map of a future London. In other words, the plan was finally complete.

  Not that I considered my task done with. Far from it. Two full weeks remained before I was required to submit my notion to the Committee for Sewers and I had determined to use that time to make a full copy of the whole document. Quite an undertaking this would prove, I knew – it ran to some one hundred and sixty pages, with several dozen maps and illustrations – but how well justified. After all, how could I submit a treatise so valuable to the risk of accidental loss – an inefficient clerk, sifting through papers without proper care, perhaps – or fire. Or deliberate sabotage by rival drainage theorists.

  ‘The logic of the Effluent Transformational Depository is the logic of the unalterable laws of gravity. Thus, we may see, the means of…’


  My copying of the introduction to my drainage scheme was interrupted by a slow rapping on the front door. Could it be…? The thought was instinctive rather than logical. Isobella’s knock was different; never so harsh.

  I had had only two visitors since her vanishing. Farre had appeared on the evening of the first day, to offer any help he might give; a kindly thought, if one of no great utility. Then Miss Symes had come, twice, though less charitably of motive, claiming on each occasion to have neglected to collect some dismal possession, ‘... that I thought I’d best take ’fore someone makes off with it.’ The objects – old dishcloths and the like – were so foul and valueless that I was sure they formed no more than an excuse, her real purpose being a malicious curiosity to learn the extent of my disaster. If it were her now, I considered, making my way towards the hallway, then I would not so much as allow her into the house. I would suffer no more of her loathsome gawpings.

  Opening the door, however, I found before me not the bulk of Miss Symes’s person, but the pale and wizened form of the Reverend Michael Bowrib. He looked flustered. ‘Oh Mr Jeavons. I’m so glad to have found you in.’

  ‘Vicar, what a surprise.’ I had never greatly liked the man, and wondered what could have brought him. ‘Come in.’

  ‘I can’t stay.’ He ventured no more than a step inside the hallway. ‘You see I’ve just heard about this awful business of...’

  So he knew; it came as a slight surprise to me, as I had not yet so much as visited the church. But such news travels fast. The same network of gossiping informers of which my wife had formed a keen – if temporary – part, had now been carrying accounts of her own scandal.

  ‘Has she returned?’ Bowrib was excited; he seemed even forgetful of uttering the sympathetic words one would expect of one in his profession. I wondered if his motives for visiting differed greatly from Miss Symes’s thirst for news of my catastrophe.

  ‘She’s not.’

  A deep nod. ‘Then could I talk to you?’

  His eagerness was beginning to gnaw. ‘It’s kind of you, vicar, but I really don’t need any help. The matter will soon be decided, I’m sure.’

  ‘But, Mr Jeavons, you don’t understand.’ He seemed at risk of bursting quite open. ‘I’ve seen her. Just yesterday afternoon.’

  Oddly enough, the thought of her walking freely about, for all to meet, was one that had hardly occurred to me. ‘Yesterday?’ Three days after her vanishing. Why had she not visited me? Written to me? Something.

  The nub of his message out, Bowrib subsided a little. ‘I thought nothing of it at the time, but then I had no idea what had happened. I only learnt this afternoon, you see…’ He wrung together his bony hands, uneasy now at the subject.

  I regretted the suspicions I had felt towards the man; he had been motivated only by concern. ‘How did she appear?’

  ‘Distracted, I suppose – she hardly replied to my greeting – but otherwise there seemed nothing amiss about her.’

  Nothing amiss? I felt chokingly angry. ‘Where was she?’

  ‘Pall Mall. Going towards Haymarket. At a stiff pace, too.’

  Perhaps she was in trouble; beset with some horror she could not confide. It was not likely, true, but possible. Or…

  ‘Have you seen this woman? Round about here, yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘Should I ought’er ’ave?’

  Constable Collins towered over the match-seller, so huge and straight of bearing that he looked – though his clothes were those of a rakish young costermonger – almost more exactly like a policeman than when in his uniform. He regarded his quarry with a certain glumness. ‘Then you’ve not seen her?’

  ‘Certainly I’ve not, I’m sure, Mr sir.’

  The constable ignored the fellow’s snide tone, merely taking back from him the locket I had provided, with its likeness of Isobella. As we turned away, however, the other murmured, in an under-breath voice calculated just to be within our hearing, ‘And a merry Christmas to you, Inspector.’

  Collins seemed faintly to wince. Not for the first time that afternoon.

  It was not his fault that he was so visible of profession; if any were to blame it was rather Lisle, who had suggested he attempt such disguise. Collins, for all his lumbering size, was sharp aware that – in the eyes of metropolitan scavengers, and managers of dubiously smart cafes – his civilian dress left him as inconspicuous as a pyramid of ancient Egypt lodged upon Oxford Street, claiming itself a mere lamp-post.

  As the hours had passed and we had made not the slightest progress, he had shown increasing unhappiness.

  The Haymarket of London; magnet of fashionable wealth and fashionable vice, grand carriages clawing their way up the slope and rattling keenly down, before the most splendid of shops and cafes; where every kind of bauble may be bought, and outside which every manner of beggar, thief, pimp, and seller-of-nothings lurk, in hope. For all my anger I could not help still wanting to catch a glimpse of her. My eye would be caught by some back-turned girl with faint resemblance, capturing – for an instant – all my concentration, until she laughed into the air, showing her stranger’s profile.

  ‘I ought to be getting back to the station before long, I s’pose, sir.’ Collins glanced at his watch, guilty at his lack of success. ‘Perhaps she didn’t come this way after all.’

  ‘Perhaps so.’ I had observed a change in the fellow, and also Superintendent Lisle, since I had brought Bowrib to see them. Not that their watchfulness towards me was gone; it was rather reduced, their suspended judgements not fallen into firm decision, but leaning less strong against me. Progress? I remained wary of them both. Who knew what was really in their thoughts; they might even be deliberately trying to lure me from my guard.

  ‘The superintendent will be in touch shortly I’m sure,’ announced Collins, in the manner of one keen to have some practical suggestion after such a day of failure. ‘Or you could come back with me now if you like.’

  ‘I have some other things to attend to,’ I answered. ‘Perhaps I could have back the locket?’

  ‘Of course.’ He fumbled it from his pocket with a huge hand. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  I watched the fellow leave – winning glances and grins from those he lumbered past – but did not myself step from my place. For some time, as we went about our fruitless work, I had been pondering that, without such a beacon for company, I might well prove more successful than he.

  In the event, setting about the task, I discovered it to be no easy one; even without the man at my side I found myself tarnished merely by having been seen in his company.

  ‘Hello, if it’s not the copper’s friend.’

  ‘And what might I do for you, Mr Peeler?’

  I elected to wait, burning away time by walking to that favourite spot of mine, Hungerford Market, then across the bridge of the same name – affording a fine dusk-time view of St Paul’s, rising smokily above the ragged City buildings – and on, as far as the huge Lion Brewery in Southwark. By the time I returned to the Haymarket it was dark. The famous street was quite altered, shining with gaudy gaslight, and teeming with life; predators and their elegant prey.

  I had shown the locket – lit up each time with the flare of a match – to no more than three fellows before I found myself in hope. It was a dog-seller I was stood before, and something in his eyes told me her face was familiar to him.

  ‘Why you asking?’

  ‘I’m a friend of hers.’ I struck a further match, fingers juggling with too many objects; he could not take the locket himself as his hands were both full with King Charles spaniels, mournfully watching the contortions going on above their heads. One made a feint at snapping at my thumb. ‘It’s important.’ Taking back the locket, I held out a clutch of coins.

  He eyed them coolly, the dogs too. ‘Oh yes?’

  I added a couple more, and, with a certain nonchalance – doubtless that he would not weaken his bargaining power by over-friendliness – he gave a nod of acknowledgement. ‘Bit older t
han that now, is she?’

  The strange excitement I felt. Though Isobella had given me the locket at the time of our engagement, the likeness had been taken a year or more earlier, and the face depicted, while recognizable as hers, was still girlish. ‘She is.’

  He gave a slow nod. ‘Yesterday afternoon it was. Came over t’have a look at the dogs, cooing and that like they does. Bit funny she looked, I remember.’ He frowned, perhaps trying to find words. ‘Angry, but with herself, sort of. Like she wanted someone to clout her one. Made me wonder if she was on the gin.’

  A curious description. Hardly respectful either, though this was no moment for indignation. ‘Was she alone?’

  He shook his head, watching me with a kind of grim curiosity, doubtless wondering at my connection with the woman. ‘With a bloke.’

  Perhaps I should not have been surprised. But to hear it told… my wife, whom I had lived with all those months, and thought I knew…

  Of course I guessed who it must be. ‘A thin man, was he? Not much older than me, with a head that seemed to bob about?’

  To my surprise the lad shook his head vehemently. ‘Naah, naah. Grey-haired geezer he was, what there was left of it up there. Dressed rich, hut sort of oily the way he moved.’

  Not Gideon. ‘But that’s impossible…’

  ‘True as can be.’ The lad spoke keenly, glancing with hard eyes at the coins in my hand. ‘See now. Here’s ’im.’ With this he began strutting before me – causing the spaniels’ ears to flap in time with his jaunty step – his chin jutting forward, and tongue licking his lips in a music-hall mime of old man’s lechery. ‘That sort. Couldn’t keep his eyes off her.’

  I was disgusted. Also baffled, as the description bore no resemblance to anyone I could think of. ‘Did you see where they went?’

  ‘Getting dark an’ that, weren’t it. Anyways, I wouldn’t be sure they stuck together long, what with her bawling at him like she was.’