Antidote to Murder

by Felicity Young

  “I am: Dr. McCleland. I believe your baby sister has been discharged from hospital,” she said.

  The boy grunted.

  “Did you hear what he said, Dody?” Florence asked loudly, one hand cupping her ear. “Because I did not.”

  John thrust a grubby hand towards Dody. “Why should I talk to ’er? Me dad might swing ’cos of ’er.”

  “Suspected infanticide,” Dody murmured to Florence, deducing from John’s response that the case had been heard and the findings doubtless unfavourable for the family. “Are either of your parents home, John?”

  “Dad’s taken off. Ma’s upstairs, but yer won’t get nuffink outta her.”

  Upstairs they found Mrs. Kent slumped over the kitchen table next to an empty gin bottle. A child of about two, obviously soiled, sat on the floor gorging itself from a jar of jellied eels. Florence put her hand to her mouth, unable to hide her horror.

  Dody touched her sister on the arm and whispered, “Do you feel sick?” Florence stoically shook her head. “Good girl.” Dody swallowed down a rush of nausea herself. “I’d like to have a look at Molly, Mrs. Kent.”

  “’Elp yerself.” The woman nodded towards the bureau.

  Dody found the baby sleeping soundly in the open bottom drawer. Her temperature was normal and she appeared clean and well fed.

  Dody pointed to the gin bottle. Mrs. Kent could not meet her eye, but she did attempt to pull her frazzled greying hair into some kind of order.

  “John got paid yesterday, love,” she said by way of explanation. She picked the toddler off the floor, laid her on the bed, and began to clean her up with a wet rag from a bucket. The child whined and squawked, desperate to return to her eels.

  “Have you still money left to buy milk for the baby?” Dody asked her.

  “John takes care o’ that.”

  “And your husband?” Dody asked, raising her voice against the crescendo of wails. “Where is he?”

  “Done a bunk straight after the inquest, before the rozzers could get ’im—doubt as we’ll see ’im again. Tosser.”

  No wonder John looked so miserable. He was probably now the family’s sole wage earner.

  “God in heaven.” Florence, until now unexposed to the machinations of poverty Dody had come to know so well, sank pale and speechless onto the edge of the bed, as far from the odiferous toddler as possible. Her summer dress of blue and white looked as clean and fresh against the filthy mattress as a water lily on a stagnant pond.

  “I have to find out where your husband got the tablets that killed your child Billy,” Dody said. “You have nothing to lose now that Mr. Kent has vanished. He might never reappear to face the charges.”

  Mrs. Kent licked her dry, cracked lips and looked Dody up and down.

  Dody asked, “You want me to pay you for the information?”

  The woman nodded, lowered the child gently to the floor, and handed her back the jar of eels. Silence at last.

  Dody delved into her purse. All she had left was a gold sovereign and the sixpence they needed for the train home.

  Mrs. Kent snatched the sovereign from her hand and bit it with her teeth. “’E got the pills from a bloke in a pub.”

  Dody’s heart sped. “That’s what you said before. I gathered then that you wanted to tell me more.”

  “What I said, a bloke in a pub.”

  “Did this man have a name?”

  “’Ow should I know?”

  “What did he look like?”

  “An ugly bugger, according to Bert, but I never seen ’im.”

  “Which pub?”

  “One hereabouts, I ’spect; Bert wouldna gone far.”

  “But which pub?”

  “Gawd knows.”

  Dody caught Florence’s eye. This was a useless exercise. “Time to go,” she mouthed.

  “Don’t spend that sovereign all at once,” Florence said to Mrs. Kent as they headed for the door. “Save it for winter to buy boots for your children.”

  “Wouldn’t fink of nuffink else, love,” Mrs. Kent said with a gap-toothed smile.

  The sisters left the tenement and returned to the street. The girls were still playing with their skipping rope and chanting their morbid rhyme. John, though, was no longer leaning against the wall half asleep, but talking with a small man, thin as a rail and wearing a greasy cloth cap.

  “Ask ’er yerself,” John said to the man, nodding to Dody.

  The man turned and doffed his cap. “Good afternoon, Dr. McCleland. Miss.”

  “You wanted to see me?” Dody asked. The man looked familiar, but she could not place him.

  Restless eyes jigged above a flattened visage, bony fingers worried at the worn cloth of his shirtsleeve. He dropped his gaze. “No, sorry, ma’am, I must ’ave been mistaken.” At that, he turned tail and scampered away down the street.

  Florence whispered, “Most suspicious; a spy, do you think?” Dody pretended not to hear her.

  “What on earth did he want, John?” she asked as her gaze followed the man’s retreating form.

  John shrugged. “Dunno. ’E ’appened by just as you went upstairs. Said ’e needed to know what you wanted with Ma.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “That you was checkin’ up on Molly.”

  Puzzled, Dody nodded good day to John and took her sister’s hand. And then she remembered where she’d seen the man before. He was the man who had stolen Everard’s bag, and possibly the Book of Lists, too. It was the caved-in brow and the flattened nose that jogged her memory, despite his manner being so different. The movements of the man she had seen outside the mortuary yard were slow and languid, weighed down by unspeakable sadness, or so she had assumed. That he had something to do with her case was undoubtable; that he might have been following them, disconcerting to say the least.

  “Let’s go home, Florence,” Dody said. “And on the way I’ll pick my medicine up from the chemist.”

  * * *

  The mob was still congregated outside the front railings of their house, so the sisters entered from the mews. Annie met them at the scullery door in quite a fluster. Cook had made scones for tea and had been taking it out on the maid for not informing her when her mistresses would be home.

  “No one likes cold or reheated scones no matter how hungry they are,” Annie said.

  They handed Annie their bags and the parasol with their apologies and then proceeded to the morning room, where a sumptuous afternoon tea was laid out for them.

  Florence played mother and poured the tea but refused the scone offered by Dody.

  “I’m not very hungry, thank you, Dody,” she said. “But don’t let me stop you.”

  Dody’s appetite had finally returned—they’d done a lot of walking. She took a scone and told Florence about having seen the man they’d encountered outside the tenement before. Like her, Florence had not been aware of him following them. But they both agreed that with the East End as crowded as it was, he would have been very hard to detect.

  Dody’s brooding was interrupted by Annie’s announcement that Chief Inspector Pike was in the kitchen, having also entered through the mews. “Shall I show him into the morning room, Miss Dody?” Annie asked.

  A door closed on Dody’s thoughts and sent her mind blank.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They spent some time on small talk, with Florence doing most of it. Dody tried to keep her eyes off Pike’s raw, scratched cheek. She wondered what had happened; the striped wounds looked to have been inflicted by a woman’s fingernails. And then she decided that she did not want to know.

  When Florence was called away to take a telephone call, they sat for an interminable time in awkward silence, looking at each other as if across an abyss. They broke the silence at the same time:

  “How are you, Pike?”

/>   “Are you well, Dody?”

  And smiled awkwardly.

  “You’re looking pale,” Pike said.

  “I don’t feel pale.”

  “Apparently Violet, too, has been under the weather,” Pike said in an unconvincing attempt at a conversational tone. “In her last letter she mentioned that her grandmother is giving her marrow bone jelly to strengthen her blood—perhaps you should try it?” When Dody failed to reply, Pike said, “I’m sorry. I suppose I shouldn’t be giving a medical doctor dietary advice.”

  Dody could not help smiling. She knew Pike’s daughter well enough to guess that she would not be eating her grandmother’s disgusting concoction. She was probably throwing the marrow out of the window or burying it in an indoor pot plant.

  Florence breezed back into the room. “What’s this about Violet?”

  “Pike says she’s pale,” Dody said.

  “I hope it’s not because she’s become a vegetarian.”

  Pike looked from one sister to the other, mystified.

  “She told us so in a letter,” Florence explained.

  “She never mentioned it to me,” Pike said.

  “There are lots of things that fourteen-year-old girls don’t tell their fathers,” Florence said knowingly. It did not seem that long ago to Dody that her sister was one herself and leading their parents a merry dance.

  “Violet will be the first to tell you that she is now fifteen,” he replied with a slight smile.

  “Is she enjoying the holidays with her grandparents?” Florence asked.

  “They lead a quiet, country life. I think Violet prefers the city.”

  “Then you must invite her down to London for the weekend. She can stay with us, can’t she, Dody?” Florence suggested.

  Dody nodded, doubting Pike would take up the invitation. While he was fond of Florence, he was not fond of her radical ideas, and Violet’s involvement with the suffragettes had already exposed her to danger once. Dody didn’t doubt that right at this moment Pike was blaming Florence for his daughter’s vegetarianism. Strange, how well she had learned to read him.

  And if he thought she was looking pale, he should look in the mirror. The skin on his face was taut with worry, the creases under his deep blue eyes deeper than she remembered. Something was bothering him, but she was not conceited enough to believe it might be renewed contact with herself. A case, she decided, it must be a case.

  “Surely you can spare one weekend for her now that your top secret operation is at an end,” Florence went on.

  Dody noticed the pulse beating at Pike’s temple and knew Florence was on dangerous ground.

  “Thank you for your invitation,” Pike said. “But when she visits the city, we usually stay in a small hotel near Hyde Park. It’s very comfortable and only a short walk to the bandstand, which she very much enjoys—she is passionate for Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “We’re not that far from the park,” Florence persisted. “Only an omnibus ride away.”

  “Mm.” Pike flicked them a smile, put his cup down, and rose from his chair, moving towards the large bay window that looked into the street. For a moment he stood there, silent. Unlike some men, Dody reflected, Pike’s presence didn’t fill a room; it became a part of it.

  He twitched the curtains and peered at the chanting mob. “How long have they been doing this?” he asked.

  “On and off since the coronial verdict,” Dody said, perched on the edge of her chair.

  The conversation about Violet had been a distraction, but now that they were back to the reality of her situation, she felt the spring coiling inside her once more. The roaring mob did not help matters; their numbers had grown since earlier that morning.

  “I attempted to question some of them at your back door,” Pike said.

  “They are keeping vigil at the mews now?” Dody asked, aghast.

  “I’m afraid so. I showed them my warrant card and they took off. But they’ll return to the back entrance, I’m sure, now they know where it is.”

  “They’re definitely not reporters?” Florence asked.

  Pike shook his head. “Paid troublemakers.” He withdrew from the window and sat in the winged chair opposite Dody. Florence was right—there was a sprinkling of grey in his dark hair now.

  “I only know what I’ve read about your case in the newspaper reports,” he said. “It surprises me that the court chose to focus such heavy suspicion on you when the evidence is clearly so circumstantial. Then again, it was Mr. Carpenter presiding, wasn’t it? The man does have a reputation for idleness. He probably wanted to pass the case on as quickly as possible.” He reached into his coat pocket for a notebook and pen. “I’d like to help you, Dody, if I can and if you will permit it.”

  Tired though he seemed, the antique blue of his eyes was as intense as ever, and the obvious sincerity of his words caused a warmth to open up inside her. She swallowed and nodded her head. Of course she would permit it.

  “Are you happy with how the police are handling the case so far?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure yet, Pike. They have gathered evidence—”

  “If that’s what you call a few bottles of medicine,” Florence interjected. “And try as they did, they couldn’t link the crime to any of Dody’s own surgical instruments.”

  “But I think the coronial decision rested largely on the word of the witnesses,” Dody said.

  “And the letters,” Florence added.

  “Hardly a tight case. No surprises there—Fisher is new to the job, inexperienced . . .” Pike looked as if he was about to say more, but stopped himself. “Please, tell me about the trial,” he said.

  As soon as he put himself in policeman mode, he seemed to lose his awkwardness. He questioned Dody about the details of the inquest and the names of the witnesses, writing her answers in his notebook, now perched on his knee.

  “Did Esther give you the name of the child’s father?” he asked.

  “I don’t think she knew.”

  “She was a dollymop?” Pike cleared his throat as if he had made a faux pas. “I’m sorry, Dody, I mean was she a part-time prostitute?”

  The slang term did not shock Dody, and it amused her to think that Pike thought it would. “It would not have surprised me—not with the wages she was paid,” she said.

  When Dody explained the nature of the letters that had sealed her fate, he ceased writing and snapped his notebook shut.

  “That’s it then,” he said with some satisfaction. “You are being framed.”

  “That’s what my lawyer seems to think. He says if we can prove it, my case may never go to court.”

  “He’s right. Have you any idea who might have sent those letters?” Pike asked.

  Dody hesitated. She had asked herself this question over and over again during the sleepless nights following the hearing. “Dr. Spilsbury has in the past received death threats,” she said. “An expert witness whose evidence frequently sends men and women to the gallows is bound to have enemies. But I am no more than his assistant; I sometimes support him in court, but in the main I deal with the paperwork and assist when required with the autopsies, and that’s about it. Up until now I have never been aware of any animosity personally directed at me.”

  “But you had been asking questions about the lead tablets?”

  “A few enquiries, that is all. I was going to speak to Esther again, but she died before I got the chance to see her.”

  There was a long pause while Pike considered this. Dody met her sister’s eye and Florence spoke for both of them. “You don’t think Esther Craddock was deliberately murdered, do you, Pike?” she asked.

  Pike shrugged. “Well, Dody’s the autopsy surgeon. Can it be proved that the girl’s injuries were deliberately inflicted?”

  “That had not crossed my mind,” Dody said. “In a
case like this it would be impossible to tell the difference between accidental or deliberate damage.”

  “Well, let’s put that possibility aside for the time being,” Pike said. “Can it be something to do with your stance on contraception? The newspapers made quite a thing of it.”

  Dody appreciated the forthright way Pike had asked the question. She had been wondering how she was going to bring up the topic without embarrassment, and now realised she need not have worried.

  “I have been somewhat vocal on that matter, I suppose. I can see that someone with a savage sense of irony might enjoy seeing me convicted as a so-called abortionist,” she said.

  “There’s a doctor who works at the mortuary with Dody called Henry Everard. He’s made life quite difficult at times, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes, Florence, he has,” Dody said quietly, her mind back in the school hall and his useless defence of her.

  “He plagiarised her paper,” Florence told Pike, “and almost caused a riot in court.”

  “Did he now?” Pike paused. “I take it the letters were delivered to the coroner by hand?”

  “I believe so,” Dody said.

  “Handwritten?”

  “Typed.”

  “Ah, now that holds some promise. Where are the letters now?”

  “With my lawyer.”

  “Can you get hold of them and give them to me? I’ll return them to your lawyer directly. You see, it’s often possible to trace the source of typewritten documents to the machine they originated from—not many people would know that.”

  “How clever,” Florence said.

  “I think I can get hold of them.” Dody glanced at the curtained window. “If they let me leave the house.”

  “We’ll come with you, won’t we, Pike?” Florence offered.

  Dody looked at her fob. “It’s too late now, the office will be closed.”

  “Then let’s have a drink to celebrate our reunion. It’s been too long, hasn’t it, Pike?” Florence glided over to the drinks trolley and poured them each a sherry.

  Pike produced a silver cigarette case from his suit pocket, flicked the catch, and offered it first to Dody, who took one, and then to Florence, who declined. Curiosity got the better of Dody. When he bent to light her cigarette, she asked, “What happened to your cheek?”