Antidote to Murder

by Felicity Young

  “They say he’s not available, won’t tell me where he is. That’s Special Branch for you—cloak-and-dagger nonsense.”

  “He was supposed to be taking leave after his knee operation to convalesce,” Dody said. “I believe he was planning to help Violet prepare for the new school term.” Dody lifted her chin, determined to remain calm and rational, although Florence’s insistence on bringing Pike into this was making it increasingly hard to do. “I hope he is seeing more of Violet, for both of their sakes. She does not enjoy holidaying with her maternal grandparents.”

  “Brave of you to say that, darling,” Florence said, “but you and I would still rather he were here, wouldn’t we?”

  The gentle tone had the opposite effect of what was intended on Dody. Pike’s bolt from the hospital had more than adequately shown that he did not desire her help, and Dody had no intention of letting him think she needed his—Spilsbury’s maybe, but not Pike’s. Men did not have a monopoly on pride. She jumped from her seat and strode towards the morning room. “I don’t need Pike.”

  The room was hung with thick green curtains drawn all week against the heat, and the fireplace was an empty black hole. Florence turned the electric switch and flooded the room with unforgiving light. Dody glimpsed her reflection in the mantel mirror, purple rings under her eyes, deep lines on either side of a pursed mouth. It was as if she had aged ten years. The fiasco with Pike, the day in court, and the subsequent confrontation with the police had taken their toll. The face in the mirror was that of a bitter, desperate woman.

  And one she must take control of again.

  “Sit down,” Florence said. “I’ll pour you a sherry and we’ll try and make some sense of it all. No doubt Spilsbury will be able to extract you from this mess, but that shouldn’t stop us from contemplating the fact that someone put Robinson up to that statement and that someone is trying to lay the blame for Esther’s death on you.”

  “Not necessarily true. Robinson might genuinely have been drunk and confused.” Dody found herself playing devil’s advocate. Objective impartiality was, after all, what she had been trained for.

  “Then he should have been screened out as a witness,” Florence said.

  “Society has not yet come to terms with the notion of a female autopsy surgeon. I am a handy scapegoat—an easy way out of what might otherwise prove to be a time-consuming and costly case.”

  “I see. What they don’t understand, they blame on the witch.”

  “Quite.”

  “Have you crossed paths with this coroner before?” Florence asked.

  “No, but Mr. Carpenter would surely know of me. If I had only found that wretched book, I could at least plant the seeds in the jury’s mind that there might be a correlation between the pills and the abortion deaths. Now they will just have to take my word for it.”

  They had not been talking long when Annie announced the arrival of the policemen.

  “Not again,” Florence said.

  Dody sighed. “It was to be expected.”

  They led Fisher and his constable to Dody’s third-floor rooms. The policemen weren’t interested in the bureaus and wardrobe in the dressing and bedroom. Instead they made a beeline to her study. “I’d like to look at your instruments, please, Doctor,” Fisher said.

  Dody opened the glass doors of a display cabinet housing her surgical and specialist instruments in labelled leather cases: OBSTETRICS, ORTHOPAEDICS, POSTMORTEM, OPHTHALMOLOGY, and so on.

  “Your women’s, ah, tools, please, Doctor,” he said.

  She reached for her obstetric set and flipped the catch to reveal varying sizes of specula and forceps, dilators and curettes, resting in their individual niches on a velvet bed. Fisher cast his eye across the row of gleaming nickel plate. “Do you have any others?”

  “My destructive instruments, yes.” Dody reached for another box and flipped the catch, pointing out the hook, perforator, and transforator. Fisher seemed particularly interested in the hook, holding it up to the electric light and turning it through his blunt fingers.

  “Looks like a crotchet hook,” the younger policeman muttered, clearly horrified.

  “What are these instruments used for, Doctor?” Fisher asked.

  There was no delicate answer to that question, nor any that would lessen his suspicion of her. She braced herself. “These instruments are used in the case of a severely obstructed labour,” she said. “The transforator crushes the foetal skull and the hook is used to remove the foetus piece by piece.”

  Florence gasped. Dody kept her eyes on Inspector Fisher, hoping he now regretted his question.

  Fisher tossed the hook back into its case with disgust. His voice trembled slightly. “Could you perform an abortion that way?”

  “No, a dilation and curette would be performed on a much less advanced foetus. The procedure I described is used to save the mother’s life in the case of obstruction. If an abortion was performed this way, the patient would most likely bleed to death.”

  “Which is what happened to Esther Craddock,” Fisher reminded her.

  “No one with any obstetric knowledge would make such a mistake. Miss Craddock was not in an advanced state of pregnancy. I expect she died from a perforated uterus.”

  “Do you have any more of these?” Fisher asked, pointing to the hook and transforator.

  “No need,” Dody said, looking at him levelly. “I hardly ever have to use them.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Despite the suffocating humidity, Elizabeth Strickland shivered. She’d had to feign illness to get off work at the Mail’s typing pool and would have been almost home now if she’d caught her usual train. So far everything had gone to plan—Jimmy’s plan, scribbled in haste on a piece of printing paper in an alley behind the newspaper building: omnibus times, routes, and street names. It was too risky for her to go to her local chemist, so he’d suggested this place, Whitechapel, where his father had grown up. Whitechapel was miles from where she lived and, though geographically closer to work, felt another world away.

  This chemist shop was even more lurid than the one they had at home in Lewisham. The window was filled with tall jars of all shapes and sizes holding coloured water of red, pink, emerald green, and blue. Gaudy as a gin palace, the shop was easily recognised by those who could not read. Elizabeth glanced down the street at the ragged children playing in piles of rotting rubbish. Groups of wan, grey people leaned in doorways; grimy lines of laundry stretched across the smaller streets and alleys. There would be no shortage of illiterates here.

  She took a breath for courage and crossed the threshold, her arrival announced by a spring bell on the door. A long counter with a backdrop of well-stocked shelves stretched across the entire back wall. The shiny mahogany surface was jammed with commercial products, their garish signs advertising everything from custard powder, toiletries, and gripe-water to products guaranteed to “remove obstructions.” A brass cash register, a set of scales, a large marble mortar and pestle, and a brass bell dominated the counter.

  Elizabeth pressed the bell and the white-coated chemist appeared within seconds.

  “Good afternoon, miss, what can I do for you?” He smiled pleasantly.

  Elizabeth felt herself flush. Glancing around the shop to ensure there was no one else about, she whispered, “I need something for my courses. They seem to have stopped.”

  The chemist lost some of his friendly demeanour. “I’m sorry, but we don’t sell that sort of thing here.”

  She hadn’t travelled all this way to give up so quickly. Her words left her in a rush. “I’ve tried Widow Welch’s—the whole packet—but they haven’t worked.” Jimmy had picked up the pills for her from the apothecary near the Mail’s office; they were the only things he could find purported to do the job.

  “I see.” The chemist looked her up and down. Perhaps now he could see how seri
ous she was. His passive face revealed little, and she wondered what he was thinking.

  Before leaving work, she’d changed into her second-best dress: red and black with patterns of paisley swirls, so different to the drab grey she wore when working in the typing pool. The bright outfit was her attempt to make herself feel bright. So far the strategy had not worked. In her head she saw herself wearing it in a few months’ time with her pregnant belly straining its seams. When her parents found out, they would throw her into the street, telling their friends at church that she’d died from the diphtheria that had taken her little brother.

  Before she knew it, she found herself grabbing hold of the chemist’s hand. “Please help me, sir,” she cried.

  He extracted himself and frowned for a moment, then glanced as if in great thought down the shop’s aisle beyond the shelves and into the street. Elizabeth followed his gaze to a shadowy figure in a cloth cap peering in at the window display. Was the chemist’s resolve faltering? Elizabeth’s heart leaped with hope.

  “I’m sorry, miss, there is nothing I can do for you.”

  And plummeted. Her nose fizzed, her face crumpled. She pulled the handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes.

  “Hush now; control yourself. Here comes a customer. Best make as if you are buying something.”

  Elizabeth was used to doing as she was told. Without thinking, she reached for a bottle of shampoo from a display near the counter. “And I’ll have this, too, please, sir,” she said, doing her best to keep the tremble from her voice.

  As she fumbled in her purse for the money, she heard the heavy tread of a man approaching from behind. Had he been in the shop all along? Had he overheard the conversation? She panicked and dropped her purse. Coins clattered and rolled. Bobbing down to retrieve her money, she glimpsed smart, cuffed trousers atop a pair of shiny boots.

  “No hurry,” the chemist said as she scrambled for her coins. “Take your time and I’ll serve this gentleman first. “Have you come to pick up your order, Doctor?” he asked the new arrival.

  A doctor, oh no!

  “Yes I have, but let’s help this young lady first, shall we?” the doctor said, bending from a great height to help her retrieve her spilled coins. Elizabeth thanked him. He was tall and well dressed, but unfortunately featured with yellowed skin and eyes and an ugly scar on his temple. It took all her fortitude and good manners not to pull away. He dropped the last of the coins into her palm and she thanked him, insisting that he be served first. Elizabeth stepped back from the counter to rearrange her purse and gather together the money she owed for the shampoo.

  The chemist ducked behind the counter and reappeared with a brown paper parcel.

  Elizabeth watched the exchange. Impeded by shaking fingers, the doctor struggled with the knots. When he finally managed to unwrap the parcel, he took some time to inspect the contents, muttering like a wizard reciting a spell.

  “Salves, salvarsan powder, cotton swabs, bottles of sterile saline, four brass syringes, and”—he counted out the remainder under his breath—“one dozen twenty-two-gauge needles. Where’s the bromide?” he asked suddenly, his voice louder.

  The chemist inspected the supplies strewn across the counter and wrinkled his forehead. “My mistake,” he said, turning to the myriad bottles arranged on the shelves behind him. He selected a small brown one and placed it next to the doctor’s pile of goods. “There you are. Someone needs calming, do they?” he asked.

  “Sick people always need calming.” The doctor turned to Elizabeth and smiled. She wanted to run away, but she had not yet paid for her shampoo and felt obliged to wait for him to finish his business.

  “That’ll be fifteen shillings and eight pence, please,” the chemist said to the doctor.

  Elizabeth could wait no longer. She extracted her money and clattered it on the counter, thanked the chemist, and hurried from the shop without waiting for her change. Outside she took some deep breaths. She must stop herself from crying—give the red a chance to leave her eyes before she got home. She dabbed her nose with her handkerchief and glanced at her reflection in the shop window. It would be no problem convincing Mother she’d been ill; the pale face and stooped shoulders said it all.

  And then her attention was drawn from her own image to another on the rippling surface of one of the decorative jars. It was the reflection of the man she’d seen earlier, still loitering outside the shop. She turned and faced him.

  The man gave her a little wave. He wore a dusty suit jacket with mismatched trousers. His cloth cap was pulled low over his face, but she glimpsed a pushed-in mouth and a flattened nose.

  She nodded him a smile—because it was polite to do so, not because she felt like it—and prepared to cross the road.

  “Oi, miss, wait.”

  She turned back to see the man holding up her handkerchief. He didn’t hold the sodden fabric up by its corner as most would, but held it balled in his hand, as if he couldn’t care less what it had been used for.

  “What’s wrong, love?” the man asked as he handed the hanky back.

  “Thank you, sir, it’s nothing. I’m all right.”

  The man had a weeping sore on the side of his face. “The chemist givin’ you an ’ard time?”

  “No, no, not really.”

  “Bloody toff, what would ’e know, eh?”

  The shop bell rang; the doctor’s form loomed in the doorway. The little man quickly stepped away from Elizabeth.

  “Hey, you!” The doctor pointed his finger at the man and bellowed as if to a scavenging dog. “I know what you get up to, you and your gang. Leave the young lady alone. I’ll be going to the authorities about you, mark my words.”

  “And expose yerself in the process? I don’t fink so, Doc.” The smaller man shrugged and turned to Elizabeth. “I’ve done nuffin, ’ave I, miss?”

  “Preying on the weak and needy,” the doctor harangued.

  “You can talk an’ all,” the little man retorted.

  Elizabeth looked desperately for a break in the traffic. She’d had enough of this place and needed to get away from these ghastly men.

  As she was about to dash across the road, the doctor clutched at her arm. “What are you doing here? A nice girl like you shouldn’t be in this area alone,” he said.

  She cricked her neck to look up at him. “Please let me go, sir, I have a train to catch.” Before she could wriggle free, he pressed a business card into her hand. “If you find yourself in trouble, come to me.”

  “I’m no worse than you, mate,” the smaller man bravely shouted from a distance. “Oh, yeah, I know all about you—least I ain’t no pre-vert.” He paused, as if searching his mind for an even worse insult. “Nor no Kaiser-Bill spy, never!”

  Elizabeth didn’t know what a pre-vert was, but she knew what a spy was. The strange doctor certainly behaved in a suspicious manner. Could this be true? Was he really a spy?

  “Everything’s all right. Really,” she said through the thumping of her heart. She shrugged from the doctor’s grip and just missed being knocked down by a boy on a bicycle with a tray of fruit. Carts and delivery vans rattled by in a continuous stream, and crossing the road was now impossible. She joined in with a crowd of jostling people on the footpath, walking with them for some yards until she spied a gap in the traffic. Picking up her skirts, she slipped between a teetering furniture cart and a blistered old carriage and just missed having her shins rammed by a costermonger’s cart. What a disaster this had been. She was no closer to solving her problem than she was at the start of her miserable journey.

  The thunder of the traffic masked the small man’s tread. She didn’t notice him until he was almost on top of her, pulling her around by the shoulder and shoving his pug-like face into hers.

  “Horse Feathers most nights till late. Ask for Dan.”

  * * *

  Van Noort caug
ht the omnibus from Whitechapel and disembarked at St. James. His own pounding footsteps echoed the beating of his heart and kept time to the desperate rhythm of his prayers: prayers for the unfortunate girl in the chemist; prayers for her exploiters; prayers for his wife—dear Matilda; and for Jack and his family and all those who suffered. The prayers went on through the list until he reached the Beast. What prayer for the Beast? There was one, he was sure, but he could not recall it. All he could do was hope that it would come.

  With his destination in sight, his pace increased. He barely noticed his surroundings and cursed his feet for leading him on in such furious haste. He passed the venerable gentlemen’s club, the hotel with the flags, dodged a pile of dog filth in the middle of the footpath, and strode by a building with window boxes of leggy geraniums, seeing them but not seeing them.

  Instead he saw a line of verse unfurling in his mind and he clung to it like a falling man.

  Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

  He slowed down slightly. Of course, his prayer: The Beast’s prayer—that which absolves and justifies. He immediately felt the better for it. He mounted the steps of the Satin Palace with renewed vigour, his conscience clearer . . . at least for a while.

  With its crystal chandelier winking through the glass above the door, this place could be mistaken for a respectable gentlemen’s club itself. Van Noort nodded to the uniformed doorman, who unlocked the door for him. In less than an hour’s time the door would be fixed open and the red lamp lit. Until then there was much work to be done.

  Heading down the passage to the back of the building, he ran into Jack, barefooted as usual and wearing his trademark bargeman’s cap. Jack dumped the heavy basket of linen he was carrying and greeted Van Noort with a cheeky smile. The brothel generated more washing than the laundress—an old whore who was no longer suitable for the shop floor—could cope with, and Jack worked in the laundry room as her assistant several evenings a week.