City of Light (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  The Duke of Clarence, born Albert Victor and commonly known as Bertie, was the Queen’s eldest grandchild - in fact, he was the first born son of her first born son and thus in direct line of succession. Through the years this heir to the British throne had somehow managed to associate himself with every tawdry crime in London. Rumors of illegitimate children abounded, as did whispered stories of the darkest sorts of amusements, visits to brothels of every imaginable sort. At one time he had even been considered as a possible suspect in the Ripper case. He always managed to emerge from the gutter unscathed, but, nonetheless, Bertie was a perpetual headache to the monarchy. By the light of day, the Duke of Clarence was petulant, spoiled, obsessed with dandyish clothing, almost certainly riddled with syphilis, and partially deaf. By night things grew worse. It was widely claimed that Bertie was bisexual and possessed a special penchant for equestrian gear.

  “I’m surprised the Queen hasn’t already contacted you,” Tom said.

  “She has,” Trevor finally admitted.

  “So this is why the forensics unit has been put on a case that doesn’t involve murder?” Tom asked irritably. “It all makes sense now. We’ve been enlisted to ensure that no evidence arises to connect the Queen’s grandson with a male brothel.”

  “Remember yourself,” Trevor said sharply, thinking that Tom was always the first of them to suspect an ulterior design in any act of patronage. The Bainbridges weren’t titled, but their money was old, and aristocrats rarely seemed to hold any illusions about the aristocracy. In the brief time they had all worked together, Tom was proving himself prone to abrupt swings in mood, sometimes jovial and sometimes snappish, just as he was this morning. The rich could literally afford to be heedless with their words, Trevor knew. They could freely express the sort of opinions that the working class must swallow. But it was still a bit shocking to hear Tom so directly challenge the motives of the Queen.

  “No one ever suggested we would work exclusively on murder cases,” Emma said. “Forensics has a role to play in the investigation of many types of crimes, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” Tom said. “But our ranks are so thin and our resources so limited I would imagine we would only be called into the most heinous cases, not to investigate predictable depravities like those taking place on Cleveland Street.”

  “Predictable depravities?” Emma said sharply. “You consider this a minor case, simply because we have yet to stumble upon a body? Think of those boys, what the future holds for them. Is not the ruination of a life as big a crime as the termination of one?”

  “I don’t wish to argue the truth of your observations,” said Tom. “Only to point out that we’ve been given this assignment for one reason alone. Not to protect young boys from ruination but to protect the royal family from yet another scandal.”

  “Her Majesty doubtless has many reasons for taking note of our efforts,” Trevor said, consciously striving to bring a bit of gravitas to his voice. Tom might be the best educated and most privileged among them, but Trevor could not allow a boy of twenty to assert himself as the leader of the group. “Naturally she wishes to contain the criminal element in England and, just as naturally, she wishes to encourage cooperation among the law agencies across the continent. Considering that Her Majesty’s own children and grandchildren reside in every capital in Europe, this can scarcely be viewed as surprising. Besides, we must not forget that she herself has been the intended target of crime in the past, and that her station in the world all but guarantees she is the focus of any number of lunatic obsessions rising from untold corners of the globe. The Queen has reasons to support our work that extend far beyond the antics of Bertie.”

  Two heads quickly nodded and, a second later, Tom’s reluctantly joined them. Looking around the circle, it occurred to Trevor that none of the others had been alive on that terrible morning when the young Victoria, fresh to the throne, had been attacked while riding in her coach. The gunman, thank God, had proven spectacularly inept, but the Queen’s beloved husband Albert had been injured in the scuffle, guaranteeing that her memory of the incident would never fade, no matter how many years might subsequently pass. Nor would they remember the worldwide paranoia which had followed the assassination of the American president Abraham Lincoln, another event which Trevor knew preyed heavily on Victoria’s mind. The unique vulnerability of those in power distressed the Queen, and who could blame her? In a time of political unrest – which, Trevor supposed, could be any isolated year in history – the murder of a single individual could change the course of history. A chance to reshuffle the deck and bring new cards into play.

  Yes, the heads of state were perpetual targets for the disgruntled, and no one headed a greater state than Victoria. Trevor was one of the few people who could claim to know the full depth of the Queen’s obsessions, and that not all of the darkness swirling around her was merely mourning for her long-departed husband. Victoria’s fears had not only defined her reign but her entire era. Her personal morbidity – well-founded or not - had infected her people and from there traveled to every civilized corner of Europe.

  “We shall follow the trail of the Cleveland Street arrests wherever it may lead us,” Trevor said. “Even if it pulls us into the very stables of Buckingham Palace. Is that understood? Our first loyalty is to the truth, and this surpasses all other loyalties, even those to friends or family or our own government.”

  “Shall we take an oath?” Tom asked sardonically. Judging by the curl of his upper lip, he was still evidently not wholly convinced. “Shall we bleed?”

  “Before it’s over, perhaps we all shall,” Davy said, and his eyes met Tom’s for the briefest instant.

  “I suppose you have photographs,” Trevor broke in hastily. “Which verify the story of this unfortunate boy?”

  “Unfortunately, I do,” Tom said with a sigh, and, just as Trevor had hoped, their attention was promptly diverted.

  Paris

  9:20 AM

  There were those who claimed that the morgue was the most beautiful building in Paris.

  That was an exaggeration, of course, at least to Rayley’s way of thinking, but there was no denying that the structure had a certain bizarre type of charm, probably due to the fact that its opulence seemed to mock its very function. He had noted the building many times on his Sunday walks, and had originally mistaken it for an embassy, or perhaps a museum.

  A note had been waiting on his desk when he’d arrived at the station this morning. Since Carle had been nowhere to be found, Rayley used his small phrasebook to translate. Rubois, it seemed, wished to confer with him on a matter of great importance. He wished for Rayley to meet him at the morgue.

  Well, this was news. Thanks to the satisfactory conclusion of the Martin murder and the fact he now was heading up the Graham drowning case, Rayley’s status among the French officer must be genuinely changing for the better. He was moving from a bothersome adjunct, as out of place as a bed in a kitchen, to someone whose presence was actually desired. Despite his weariness from another restless night, Rayley had found himself hurrying down the avenue leading to the morgue, his feet almost on the verge of a run. And as he approached the grand entrance, with the heavy brass doors and deep crimson awnings, he found Rubois already waiting for him, having a smoke behind a potted tree while Carle hovered to the side.

  Carle pulled open the door, his slight frame bowing as he used the totality of his weight to hold it ajar for Rubois and Rayley to enter. They walked through the broad lobby single-file, their feet ringing on the tiles. Five bodies were on display, Rayley noted with a sideways glance, each propped up in front of its own window, tilted at such a pronounced slant that it seemed the deceased was surely about to push away from their beds and stand. Their eyes were propped open, presumably because their color might aid in identification, and the corpses were dressed in whatever clothing they had worn into death, thus offering another hint as to who they might have been and what station they might have held while they ha
d dwelt among the living.

  Rayley would never accept this bizarre practice of displaying the unclaimed dead. When an unidentified dead body turned up at Scotland Yard, the British police would run a description of it in the papers and hope some relative or friend might step forth to claim the remains. But that was admittedly a flawed system as well, since the newspaper descriptions tended to be vague, the deceased all looking somewhat alike. Not to mention that the class of people most likely to misplace a dead relative was also the class least likely to read the daily papers, or indeed anything at all.

  So Rayley reluctantly admitted to himself there was something both pragmatic and democratic about lining up the bodies for public viewing. The French rarely had to send an unclaimed body to an unmarked grave, a routine procedure at Scotland Yard. Rayley privately suspected that some of the bodies were claimed by people who had never met the person in life, and who now intended to repurpose their remains for heaven knows what sort of reason. Tom Bainbridge had often bemoaned the dearth of cadavers at Cambridge; presumably the French medical schools were better stocked.

  At least that’s what Rayley told himself, since the alternative was even more unsavory to consider.

  Rayley’s glance in the direction of the corpses was swift but, due to his finely honed observational skills, he could not help but notice certain things. One woman was on display along with four men. This quota was typical, men tending to stray farther from their homes and families and to take on more dangerous lines of work. The woman was dark in complexion, possibly Arabian of some sort, with her downturned mouth half-opened. Rayley had the brief but uneasy sense she was sneering at him.

  The hour was early, but a handful of onlookers had already assembled, corpse-viewing being one of the most popular free pastimes in Paris. Two men stood snickering and knocking shoulders in front of the dark woman, their amusement of a sort Rayley would prefer not to contemplate. A plump matron was lifting a small boy to the window to get a better look at one of the men. Another female, her head and shoulders wrapped in a grand swath of indigo blue silk, was all but pressed against the glass in her eagerness to observe the slackened face of a young boy who was dressed in a manner that indicated he may have spent some time at sea. On a Sunday afternoon – or a day when a young woman was displayed, or, better yet, a child – the crowd would be three times as large. It was a productive practice, but also a profoundly undignified one, seeming to simultaneously lower the humanity of both the corpse and the onlookers.

  Small wonder that they don’t sell balloons and cherry ices, Rayley thought irritably. An accordionist would add a festive touch. Pony rides for the children. Make a proper fair of it.

  Rubois turned from the broad lobby down a side hall, with Rayley following and Carle falling behind. This part of the building was forbidden to the general public, but the bored guard at the mouth of the hall did not ask for any identification and none was offered. They made one turn, then another. Thanks to the French love of vast architectural expanses of marble, their morgue was even colder than the oaken British equivalent at Scotland Yard, although admittedly not so dark. The footfalls of the three men grew progressively louder as they walked, still single file, through the maze of hallways, coming at last to one of the small private viewing chambers. They entered and stood facing each other in the center of the empty room.

  “The detective thinks there is something you need to know,” Carle blurted out, although Rubois had said nothing. Evidently a discussion had taken place earlier, before Rayley arrived. “There’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Another body.”

  Rayley frowned. They were in a morgue. Bodies were everywhere. “Another Englishman?”

  Carle hesitated, just long enough to make Rayley wonder if he was struggling between his instructions to translate from Rubois precisely and his desire to add a few details of his own. “A body pulled from the Seine on April 12, very near the spot where they found Graham. No obvious cause of death so it was considered to be a suicide…” With a glance at Rubois, who was standing stonily beside the door, Carle let his voice trail off.

  “I see,” said Rayley, although he was quite sure that he didn’t. Rubois had invited him here of his own volition so why the deuce were they being so mysterious? “You deemed this person a suicide, but now that Graham has shown up in the same manner at the same place you’re thinking maybe the first was drugged with chloroform too, is that it?”

  Carle nodded slowly. So slowly that the gesture confirmed to Rayley he was only getting part of the story. And probably not the good part.

  “Do you have blood samples?”

  Carle translated the question for Rubois, who simply shook his head. He was a mournful looking man under the best of circumstances, with tightly pursed lips and dark circles under his eyes, probably more the result of genetics than exhaustion. But today, regretfully shaking his head to answer the question, he looked as if he was on the verge of either giving or receiving very bad news.

  But Rayley wasn’t surprised at his answer. There was no reason to have drawn blood from a victim deemed to be a suicide, and, given the amount of time that had passed, he could only assume that the body had already been embalmed. All right then, so the police may have let potential evidence slip through their hands. Quite understandable under the circumstances, and it certainly didn’t explain all this secrecy.

  “Do you have any idea who the man was?” Rayley said. “He was displayed at the morgue, I presume?”

  This simple question brought such a pained expression to Carle’s face that Rayley found himself speaking with uncharacteristic sharpness. “Why are you both acting so strangely? Who was this fellow anyway? Or was it a woman?”

  Rubois said something and Carle nodded. “He says you should examine the body yourself, Sir.”

  Rayley nodded, his bewilderment now complete. An invitation to meet Rubois at the morgue had undoubtedly been an invitation to examine a body, but he had assumed it was a body freshly discovered, not one this long out of the Seine. If they believed it was a suicide and not the result of foul play, a transient who had evidently been put on display but gone unclaimed, then why would they bother to keep it so long in the morgue? Even the French, who had made both an art and a science out of body identification, had to admit defeat and bury unclaimed corpses occasionally.

  Rubois was speaking again, his voice fast and low, little more than a whisper. Men tended to drop their voices in morgues, Rayley had noticed, just as they did in courtrooms and churches. But in this vast catacomb, where the marble made each sound echo like an accusation, the whispering made sense.

  “He says he’s sorry to have been so obscure, Sir,” Carle finally said. “But yes, that’s why Lieutenant Rubois asked you to meet him today. He wishes for you to view the body.”

  “Ask him why he kept it,” Rayley said, now whispering himself. “If no one knew who the person was and there was nothing unusual in the death, ask him why he kept the body.”

  “But there was something unusual, Sir,” Carle said. “Please, wait here.”

  With that, both Rubois and Carle fairly scurried from the room and Rayley looked around for a chair. He found one in the corner, dropped down, and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief to press to his mouth and nose if necessary. Even if they had attempted to embalm it, examining a body that had been taken from the Seine so long ago would not be a pleasant task.

  Isabel pushed the blue scarf back from her head and moved away from the others, the muttering men and the fat woman with her sticky-nosed, demanding children. What were the odds that she and Rayley would appear here at the morgue exact same moment? Their fates were surely linked and she had known this somehow from the first time she had seen him. At the café on that beautiful Sunday. Armand, of course, had known the man’s every habit – for example, that he dined at this particular café almost every Sunday luncheon. She had been seated directly in the sight line of the detective and he had ind
eed noticed her, of course he had, just as Armand and Isabel had both known that he would. Sketching him had been her idea. Seduction on a more discreet level, a tickle instead of a grab. The sort of thing that never would have occurred to Armand.

  It had worked. The next time she had seen her, at the party for the Tower, he had been clay beneath her palms. Yielding, malleable. Willing to ascend the tower, although it was quite clear he didn’t want to. Willing to climb even higher, on a half-constructed staircase, for the love of God, just for the chance of a few minutes alone with her.

  But today Rayley had passed without recognizing her, had passed with merely a dismissive glance in the direction of the crowd. Even with the head scarf it was surprising, and Isabel was both gratified and dismayed that she had been able to blend so effectively.

  She leaned forward and looked at the young man one more time. His head was lolled to one side and his face was bloated, the fluid beneath his skin stretching his features, blurring his individuality, erasing the small details that make one human face different from another. But even with the distortion, she was certain this boy was not Henry. It was foolish for her to come here every morning, but paranoia is a powerful force, washing over the rational mind like waves breaking over a rampart. Ever since Patrick Graham had been killed she had been unable to control her fear.