Adams shifted awkwardly; he didn’t like to be thought remiss. “One place was shut up, sir. Looked like nobody’s been there for donkeys’.”
“Interesting...” said Kipper, although he was not yet sure why he might think so. “Whose is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What?”
“You’re right, sir.”
“I am?”
“That’s why you’re the detective and I’m just a lowly sergeant.”
“What are you blithering on about, man? Tell me, whose is the shut-up shop?”
“It is, sir! Got it in one, sir.”
Kipper thumped the desk. The cup rattled on its saucer. “Damn it, Adams. Who is the owner?”
“I know he is.”
“Who is?”
“Yes, sir!”
Kipper leapt to his feet, roaring with frustration. Adams flinched.
“Says so right here, sir,” a quivering hand showed the inspector the entry in his notebook. “The shut-up shop is leased to a fellow what goes by the name of Doctor Hoo.”
***
Having dismissed his cab at Baker Street, Inspector Kipper stood at the top end of Harley Street; walking the rest of the way gave him a feel for the place.
Whitechapel it ain’t, he reflected as he took in the elegant terraces and gentrified townhouses. Most of the columns bore brass plaques engraved with the names of physicians, each - it seemed to Kipper - to have more letters after his name than the last. There were doctors elsewhere in London - elsewhere in the world! - but unless you’d set up shop on this particular thoroughfare, you would not be counted among the best. It was unfair and Kipper could empathise with those medics who could not find or afford space on Harley Street. It was a bit like coppers. If you said you were from Scotland Yard, people were much more impressed.
Kipper of the Yard! It had a ring to it...
But no; he was lowly John Kipper of Bow Street nick, trying his best to do his job.
He checked the list Sergeant Adams had given him. Good old Sergeant Adams. Closest I’ll ever come to having a butler!
His first appointment was with a Doctor Lorrimer, F.R.C.S. Good old Sergeant Adams had taken the trouble to book appointments in order, from one end of the street to the other and then back up the other side. It was a commendable feat of organisation. Kipper resolved to buy the sergeant a pint of stout as reward for his diligence.
He climbed the five or six steps to the front door and tugged the bell-pull. A faint tinkling could be heard on the other side and before long the door was opened to reveal a pinched-faced woman in a starched grey blouse. Kipper took off his hat.
“Yes?” the woman intoned. It was like being sneered at by a cat’s bum.
“I’ve got an appointment,” Kipper, humbled by the sneer, wrung his hat in his hands.
“You must be the nine o’clock,” the woman’s thin lip curled. She took a step back to admit him into a hallway of chequerboard floor, dark panelled walls and a sprawling aspidistra on a stand. She pointed at a chair in an unspoken instruction for him to wait there, before gliding away. Kipper sat and reshaped his hat. Somewhere a clock ticked away the seconds, chipping away at his life, until it let out a peal of chimes, striking the hour. In an instant, the starched woman was back. She opened a door opposite Kipper’s chair and ushered him through. Kipper nodded his thanks but she ignored him and withdrew.
“Do come in!” said Doctor Lorrimer, standing behind a broad desk. Kipper took in the room: more dark panelling, bookshelves crammed with important-looking volumes, potted ferns... “I won’t shake your hand, if you don’t mind. Not until I know what you’ve got, what!”
He laughed. Until he saw Kipper’s warrant card.
“I’m afraid the only cure for that, Inspector, is resignation.”
He offered the inspector a seat and took one himself, the leather squeaking beneath his weight.
“What’s all this about, Inspector? I imagine you won’t be paying for my time so I hope you will keep things brief. Time is money, you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Kipper. “Just a few quick questions. First off: can you tell me your whereabouts on these three nights?”
He slid a piece of paper across the blotter. Doctor Lorrimer glanced at it.
“That’s easy. I keep a diary of all my engagements.” He took a book from a desk drawer and leafed through it. “Ah, yes. On the first occasion, I was at the opera. Verdi. Il Trovatore. Do you know it?”
“Can’t say I do,” Kipper shook his head, wondering why anyone would want to sing about Tories.
“After which, I dined at my club. Spent the night there too. Tied it on a bit you see.”
“Can’t say I do,” Kipper repeated. “And the other dates?”
Lorrimer turned a few pages. “Dinner with the Lord Mayor... and I was in the country. Funeral of an old friend.” He paused and reflected. “I shall miss old Cacker Thomas.”
Kipper decided he didn’t want to know how the old friend had earned that moniker. He could eliminate Lorrimer as a suspect - dinner with the Lord Mayor would be easy enough to check. His manner toward the doctor softened; Lorrimer could assist Kipper’s enquiries in another way.
“You have knives,” he said. “On the premises.” Seeing a frown cloud the doctor’s brow, Kipper clarified, “Of a surgical nature.”
“Well, yes, of course, except in the profession we tend to call them scalpels or blades.”
“I should like to see them.”
Doctor Lorrimer rose. “Through here.”
He led the inspector through a communicating door to a room that was decked out like an operating theatre. “I only carry out simple procedures here. The lancing of boils, the stitching of minor injuries, circumcisions.”
Kipper winced.
The doctor approached a lacquered cabinet and pulled out a wide, shallow drawer. The instruments within caught the light and cast gleams on the doctor’s face. Kipper peered over Lorrimer’s shoulder to see the tools of the doctor’s trade, resting on their velvet-lined bed. The blades were of different shapes and sizes. Kipper could not imagine for what purpose many of them were fashioned. He pointed to one at the end of the row.
“What’s that one there for? The one that looks like a corkscrew.”
“Opening bottles of wine. It is a corkscrew. Mrs Harris...”
“Who?”
“The housekeeper. Frightful gorgon who showed you in. I’m afraid she has a fondness for the grape, if you catch my meaning, and so I keep the corkscrew in here and the key to my wine cellar close to my heart.”
“Oh,” said Kipper. He could not care less about the proclivities of the doctor’s household staff. “Tell me, Doctor, if you were going to kill a man - or a woman, even - which one of these would you use?”
“Come, come, Inspector. Such speculation offends my belief in the Hippocratic Oath. Do no harm. Any deaths that may follow my ministrations are purely coincidental.”
“Yes, of course, but say a murderer was to get his hands on these things, which one would he be better off in the using of?”
Doctor Lorrimer held his chin as he pondered. “Any of them would do the job if one put one’s mind to it.” He picked up an implement with a tip like an ice-cream scoop. “You could give someone a nasty gouge with this, for example.”
“How about if you wanted to open somebody up, quick and easy, like, so’s you can get the insides out in no time?”
The doctor looked at his visitor. “What’s this about, Inspector?”
“Only asking.”
A glimmer lit the doctor’s eyes - from within. “This is about Foggy Jack, isn’t it?”
Kipper looked put out.
“Oh, I read the papers, Inspector, like any man. I find it all r
ather thrilling, don’t you? The police haven’t a clue - the foggiest, you might say! What!”
Kipper scowled. “The murder of young women is neither thrilling nor no laughing matter neither.”
Lorrimer composed himself. “No, no; I suppose not.”
“So, which one?”
“What?”
“Which blade would he use?”
“Ah, I have just the thing.” Lorrimer pushed the drawer shut and pulled out the one beneath. “Any basic scalpel will do the trick provided it’s long enough to cut through the fat as well as the skin. Here. Oh!”
“What?”
But Kipper could see for himself. On the velvet lining of the drawer there was a gap, an indentation of where a long-bladed scalpel had been.
***
The rest of Kipper’s interviews that morning adhered to the same pattern. All of the doctors he spoke with had attended the Lord Mayor’s dinner and all had something missing from their drawers. Surgical instruments of all kinds had gone astray but only one from each practice.
The thief didn’t want to be noticed, Kipper realised. Then again, there are few thieves who do. The pilfering of a scalpel here and a nasty gouging tool there would not come to light right away. Until now, Kipper thought; I’ve brought the thefts to light.
He scribbled a note, tore the page from his pad and sent a cabbie to deliver it to Sergeant Adams at Bow Street nick. In the meantime, he ordered all the doctors not to touch anything in their surgeries until further notice. He had a list of what had been nicked. More than enough to fill a doctor’s bag.
Also, there was the matter of the shut-up surgery, the one at the end of the row, leased by - he checked his notes, a Doctor Hoo.
Well, he sounds suspicious from the start - Kipper pulled himself up sharp for such thinking. Just because the name looked foreign didn’t mean the bloke was necessarily a villain. He could turn out to be another victim of the thefts and as nice as pie, could this Doctor Hoo.
Kipper was resolute; he would find a way to have a gander at Hoo’s surgery by hook or by crook.
Seven
I don’t know who woke up first: Doctor Hoo or the toff who’d had his leg off. All I know is it wasn’t me. I’d been having a little doze myself and when I opened me minces, there they was, the doctor standing at the bench and the toff sitting up on it, dangling his legs, the old one and the new, in the air and in admiration.
“I say, old boy, you’ve done a marvellous job. Barely felt a thing. Can’t wait to test it out, what!”
Hoo’s mouth puckered ever so slightly.
“Start small,” he uttered. “Toes.”
“What about them?” the toff blinked. He came across as a bit thick to me, but what do I know? I haven’t had the benefits of an expensive education.
Hoo’s gloved fingers wiggled like he was warming up for a spot of piano practice.
“Oh, I see!” cried the toff and his face became a study in concentration with the tip of his tongue poking out. Well, the toes on his old leg - the original fixtures, you might say - they moved a treat, but the others on the new leg didn’t budge at all. The toff looked at Doctor Hoo like a disappointed child on Christmas morning what’s just found out his new train set is knackered. Hoo bent over the leg and with one of his spindly tools made some adjustments to the brass kneecap. Then he stood back and invited the toff to try again.
This time the new toes moved and it looked to me, even from across the laboratory, that they was better than his old ones. I don’t know if you’ve tried wiggling your toes but they’re generally not as clever as your fingers. Go on; give it a whirl. Kick your shoes off and get your Edgar Allen Poes moving.
But these new ones of the toff’s they was each moving independently and it was like wave after wave, rippling across his foot. There was something, I don’t know, mechanical about it. Well, the toff himself was fascinated but after a while he got bored and he asked the doctor to make it stop. His new toes kept moving and no matter how much he frowned at them or shook his leg or swore at them, the toff could not get them to be still. He began to panic and his hands gripped the edge of the bench and the more worked up he got, the faster his toes wiggled until they was a blur and his leg rose in the air - I don’t know if it was the toff doing that or his new set of toes with a mind of their own, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d floated off that bench and up to the ceiling.
Doctor Hoo, by way of contrast, was calm, like a cucumber in a lab coat. He produced a hammer from somewhere about his person and approached the wayward foot with it and a stern expression (well, most of his expressions are stern ones). The look on Hoo’s face must have been enough because the toff let out a squawk like a parrot sitting on an icicle and, just like that, he got his new limb under control. He sat back, panting for breath, and his boat was red and pouring with sweat.
“I suppose it will take some getting used to,” the toff conceded. He gave his new toes another experimental wiggle and this time they behaved themselves as good as gold. But something was troubling Lord Twinkletoes. “I say,” he said, “one does not wish to seem pernickety but could you not have found a closer match?”
Hoo frowned. I did too. The pernickety bastard.
“I mean, it’s the toes. They don’t quite match their counterparts on my other foot. Do you see?” He put his ankles together so that we might make better comparison. I went closer and peered from one foot to the other. Hoo remained aloof. He does that a lot.
It was true. The toes on the new foot - his left one - were longer, especially the second one, while them what he was born with was short and pink and stubby. Hoo looked as though he couldn’t give a monkey’s.
“Wear socks,” he said and I swear I saw his shoulders twitch in a shrug.
The toff didn’t like that, not one bit. He pursed his lips and pouted for a while until he could contain himself no longer and he burst out with, “Now, look here! There’s something else!”
I peered closer but I was buggered if I could see it.
“The hairs!” the toff wailed. “Do you not see? The hairs on my new leg are coarse and black while those on my own leg are fine and blond. Oh, no! No, no! This will not do at all.”
I don’t know about Hoo but I was ready to punch this ungrateful pillock in the throat.
Hoo levelled those oblique eyes of his at the toff’s and uttered a single word.
“Shave.”
Well, that did it. The toff sprang from the bench in a bid to launch himself at the doctor but he still wasn’t sure of his new leg and it buckled underneath him and he went down on one knee - but not for the purposes of popping the question - he went down on the brass one and his new leg bent forward at an unnatural angle and started to kick him again and again. The toff tried to scuttle away from it but everywhere Lord Beighton went, that leg was sure to go. He was like a dog being chased by its own tail. And the toff was howling and yelping like a dog and all. It was a comical sight and no mistake and it was a good job I was still wearing that little cotton mask to hide my amusement.
He pleaded - within kicks - to the doctor for help but Hoo just stood there, looking at him, like a monument to Patience or something like that, until something clicked in Lord Beighton’s mind and then something clicked in his kneecap as well and he regained control of the disobedient limb. Lord Beighton lay on the floor, panting and gasping for breath. Doctor Hoo stood over him, obscuring his view of the rafters.
“Practise,” he said.
“Yes, yes, I shall have to,” agreed Lord Beighton.
“Pay him,” said Doctor Hoo with the slightest flicker of his eyes in my direction. He stalked from the laboratory and I helped Lord Beighton to his feet. He stamped on the spot for a bit until he felt confident enough to let go of my arm.
I didn’t know if I was still barred from speak
ing to him so I just held out my hand in the time-honoured ‘pay up’ gesture.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Lord Beighton reached inside his coat and pulled out a chequebook. He must have been having a giraffe. I shook my head and beckoned impatiently, opening and closing my palm. This time he pulled out a purse, bulging with bees and honey. I snatched it from him and bowed low as if to say I was his humble servant, which, of course, I wasn’t; only Doctor Hoo can boss me about.
I pocketed the purse and showed him to the exit, having to wait while he put his stockings, trousers and shoes back on. Which took him bleedin’ ages. Not used to dressing himself, I suppose, and I wasn’t going to help him on account of why should I?
At long bleedin’ last I was showing him the way out to the street and slamming the door behind him before he could turn around and say something else that might get on my wick.
I strolled over to the little kitchen bit, tossing the purse and catching it, and it weren’t half heavy. And, I thought for a second, this is what it feels like to be rich and to have more money than sense, like a bloke I knew called Brutus used to say.
Hoo was standing by the safe, which also doubled as the kitchen table, and he held out his hand. With reluctance, I handed over the purse and he tipped it out onto the tablecloth.
Out spilled a load of washers and nuts and bolts and stuff. There was not a single bleedin’ farthing among the lot. Well, I gasped like you could have knocked me down with a feather.
“We’ve been diddled!” I cried, tearing off my mask. “That posh git has swindled us! Stitched us right up, good and proper, like a couple of prize kippers.”
Hoo’s eyes bore into mine and I couldn’t read what they was saying, but it chilled me to the marrow. His lips barely parted and his moustaches barely moved but his eyes fixed me to the spot like I was a butterfly pinned in a glass box.
“Right,” he said.
Eight
By hook or by crook...
The former method proved unsuccessful. Kipper had tried to pick the lock at the last house on the left but he lacked both tools and skills to do so. You have to admire your common or garden housebreaker, he reflected, to whom no lock is a barrier.
Trapping Fog Page 4
