by Alex Grecian
“True. Very true. And I appreciate your noticing. But my personal needs are filled quite well at the moment and I’m afraid it’s my solemn duty to wag my finger at you and send you on down the road so you may think on the error of your ways. That or I have to run you in for looking after the needs of strangers. I don’t think any of us would enjoy that.”
“Just as well,” the short one said. “We prefers ’em with beards anyway, don’t we, Esme?”
“That we do,” Esme said. “But you’re very nice, anyhow. For a bluebottle.”
Pringle smiled at her again. Her scar was actually a bit fetching. Hinted at a hard life and a stubborn nature. Character is what he’d call it.
“Thank you,” he said. “Likewise, I’m sure.”
“We’ll be on our way, then.”
“And I will be on mine,” Pringle said. “You ladies have a lovely evening.”
He watched the prostitutes walk away from him down the street and shook his head at the unfairness of life. The company of two such tasty tarts would have been interesting. But it wouldn’t do to be seen in uniform and in the company of working women. The uniform might be taken away from him.
At the thought of his uniform, he glanced once more at the locked door of the tailor’s shop and shook his head.
Life, he thought, ought to work itself in a man’s favor more often.
11
Constable Nevil Hammersmith stood at the foot of the stairs that led up to the main house. From here he could direct the other police as they arrived. He had explored the entire brownstone without finding anything of interest, but two other constables had rolled out the Turkish rug and were looking for clues. He watched them work, but his mind was elsewhere.
Blackleg had disappeared soon after they dragged the boy’s body from the chimney. His parting words before climbing back out through the window were “Don’t you worry, bluebottle, I’ll find the man to answer for this.”
Hammersmith felt restless, hemmed in by the crime scene. He wanted to be there when the chimney sweep was found, wanted to confront him, look him in the eye, make him understand his crime.
“The body was found in the chimney?”
Hammersmith turned to see Dr Kingsley descending the stairs. The girl from his laboratory trailed silently behind. The doctor nodded at Hammersmith and glanced at the fireplace.
“You’re in charge here?”
“At the moment I am,” Hammersmith said.
“I’m Kingsley. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting long.”
“We’ve met, sir. Just today, actually.”
Kingsley peered at Hammersmith and nodded. “Of course. Constable Hammersby—no, Hammersmith. I apologize. I’ve been learning about furniture. Far more interesting than you might think.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sure it is. Thank you for coming. The body was wedged in part of the way up there.”
“Well, let’s see what we can discover.”
Kingsley crossed the room and lay flat on his back on the hearth. He slid across the marble until his head was in the fireplace. From across the room, Hammersmith could see part of the way up Kingsley’s left trouser leg. The doctor’s garter was worn out and his stocking had holes. Someone at home hadn’t kept up with the mending.
Kingsley’s girl had already taken up a post in the farthest corner of the room with her arms folded, clutching her tablet of paper to her chest. Hammersmith waved her over.
“Hello again,” Hammersmith said.
The girl nodded. Her thin hair was light, almost blond, and her eyes, when she lifted her head to look at Hammersmith, were too large for her narrow face.
“What’s your name?”
The girl stared at Hammersmith’s shoes.
“Are you a student of Dr Kingsley’s? At the college?”
Hammersmith heard a giggle, but the girl’s face was hidden behind a golden sweep of hair and the sound was abruptly stifled. He smiled, pleased to have flattered the girl that she might be older than she appeared.
“Ah,” Hammersmith said. “You’re his daughter, aren’t you?”
The girl nodded, her hair swinging back and forth between them.
“Why aren’t you with your mother? Or at school somewhere?”
“Fiona!”
Kingsley’s voice echoed up the chimney and back down, booming from the mouth of the fireplace. The girl jumped and turned around, hurrying to the hearth, where her father’s legs were still the only visible parts of him.
“My scalpel, please,” Kingsley said. His voice filled the room, causing the other two constables to stop what they were doing with the rug and watch the unmoving legs, waiting to see what would happen next.
The girl, Fiona, opened the black satchel that sat next to her father’s legs on the giant slab of marble. She dug around in the bag for a moment before producing a short blade, which she carefully placed in Kingsley’s questing hand. The hand disappeared back into the fireplace.
“Paper. Quickly, girl, I can barely breathe in here.”
Fiona opened her tablet and tore out a blank piece of paper. It was snatched up by the hand. A faint scraping sound filled the room, then the legs on the hearth began to wriggle and dance as Kingsley slid himself slowly back into view.
Kingsley moved carefully, the torn piece of paper balanced on his chest. In the middle of the paper was a small pile of black dust. As soon as Kingsley’s arms were free, he grabbed the paper and folded it over on itself again and again until the black dust was completely contained; then he sat up and took a deep breath. His face was smudged with soot, and his wild grey hair was streaked with black.
Kingsley sat for a long moment, staring at Hammersmith. The girl busied herself with the tablet of paper, minding her own business.
“It’s been a busy day for you,” Kingsley said. “And your color’s not good. Have you eaten?”
“Thank you, sir. I’m not hungry.”
“The laboratory … Inspector Little’s corpse. That was unsettling, wasn’t it?”
Hammersmith shrugged. “Murder’s never pretty, sir.”
“Of course not,” Kingsley said. “But that was perhaps a bit worse than other cases you may have seen before. The number of maggots I found in Little’s corpse was unprecedented in my experience. Particularly in the region of his crotch. Normally, flies will be drawn to a body’s orifices almost immediately upon death, but they’re drawn to filth as well. The man’s hygiene must have been—”
“What’s going on here, then?”
Kingsley and Hammersmith turned to see Inspector James Tiffany peering in through the open window at them. Tiffany squinted at the small body on the floor and withdrew his head. A moment later he bustled down the staircase into the room.
“Inspector Tiffany,” Kingsley said, “the constable and I were just discussing venereal maggots and the importance of regular meals.”
“Lovely,” Tiffany said. He turned to Hammersmith. “Perhaps you would be so good as to tell me why we’re here, Constable.”
“Of course, sir.”
“And you, Doctor, get up off the floor. You look a fright.”
Kingsley frowned and clambered to his feet. He brushed off his shirt with both hands, smearing more soot down the front of it. The doctor didn’t touch his wild, streaky hair, and Hammersmith thought he might have given up on it in advance as a hopeless cause.
“Sir,” Hammersmith said, “I was passing by and saw the body of a child—well, his foot at least—hanging from the fireplace here.”
He had decided to leave Blackleg’s involvement out of it. Tiffany was the most rigid of the Yard’s inspectors, and Hammersmith suspected the detective would stop listening as soon as he heard that a criminal was involved in the body’s discovery.
“So you sent for an inspector.”
“Yes, sir. It all seemed very suspicious to me. The house is empty and there’s something—”
“And you sent for the doctor here, as well?”
“I d
id, sir.”
“Well, you’ve certainly been busy.”
“Sir?”
Tiffany sighed again and gestured at the floor. Hammersmith turned around and saw Kingsley crouched over the body, probing the boy’s throat and chest and armpits, his fingers darting here and there under the boy’s shirt. Kingsley angled a mirror so that it caught the dying sunlight in the room and cast it on the boy’s face, then he peeled back the boy’s eyelids and leaned in close. Twice he turned the boy on his side and pointed out some matter of interest to Fiona, who had her tablet open and was sketching furiously.
“Hammersmith, are you aware that Inspector Little was found dead today?” Tiffany said.
“I am, sir.”
“Do you feel that this is making good use of the doctor’s time, when he might instead be leading us to Little’s killer?”
“Sir?”
“You found this corpse in the chimney, correct?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Do you have any doubt whatsoever that this was a chimney climber, engaged in cleaning out the flue? That he got himself stuck up there and suffocated to death?”
“I don’t see how—”
“Well, Doctor?”
Kingsley looked up from his exploration.
“This was most definitely a case of suffocation. I found fingernails embedded in the bricks in there, so I believe I can say that he struggled a good bit before succumbing. I’d guess the boy’s been dead for quite some time, but there’s very little insect colonization here. The conditions in the chimney have preserved the body and begun the process of mummification, rather than putrefaction. An exact day and time of death will be difficult to pinpoint, but I’m happy to take the body back to my lab for further examination.”
“No. Thank you, but that won’t be necessary,” Tiffany said. “None of this is necessary in the least. Constable Hammersmith has exceeded his duties.”
“This boy couldn’t have been older than five or six,” Hammersmith said.
He didn’t look directly at Jimmy Tiffany and he kept his voice down. If he betrayed any emotion, he was sure Tiffany would see it as a sign of weakness.
“I appreciate your zeal, Constable. But surely you see your mistake here.”
“My mistake, sir?”
“You must stop thinking of this body as a boy. This is a laborer. A chimney climber, in the employ of a sweep, whose job it was to climb the inside walls of this chimney and clean it out. This person was doing his job, and he had that job because of his small size, not because of his age. His age is irrelevant here.”
“Surely not, sir.” Hammersmith was unable to rein in his temper any longer. “His size is directly related to his age. This is completely illegal. Small children are stolen from their parents by sweeps for this very purpose. They’re used and cast aside when they grow too large to do the job properly. This is not some instrument of service, as you say; this is a little boy.”
“No, this is a dead end. His employer didn’t care enough about him to pull him from the fireplace, nor did his family step forward to ask for help. Nobody cares about this body, and it is not our job to take up lost causes.”
“With all due respect, sir, I believe that is exactly our job.”
“Then I’m afraid you will not last long in the Metropolitan Police Force.”
Hammersmith had had enough of proper protocol. Tiffany had age and experience, but that didn’t earn him automatic respect from Hammersmith.
“If the job of the Yard is to look the other way when we encounter dead children, then I have no interest in lasting long. Sir.”
Hammersmith waited, braced for the dressing-down he expected would come next, but Tiffany’s expression softened.
“I’ve been at this a while now, Hammersmith. The job can wear you down if you let it. Look, I have twenty-eight open cases on my desk right now, and all of them come with family members who desperately want closure. They need justice, something they can hang their hats on. And I really do want to give them that justice. But I can’t, because there are too many of them. Most of the time, I have to hope for a lucky break. Put simply, our job is to uphold the law. We catch, or we try to catch, murderers because murder is against the law.”
He walked past Hammersmith and stood over the girl, Fiona, who had completed her sketch of the dead boy.
“It’s a good likeness,” he said.
He looked at Hammersmith, then down at his own shoes. Hammersmith noticed that Tiffany still hadn’t looked directly at the boy’s corpse.
“This boy wasn’t murdered, Hammersmith. He died. Everybody dies.”
Tiffany cleared his throat and stared at a point somewhere over the mantel.
“You said that it’s our job to chase lost causes. And I suppose you’re right. But every case that comes to us is a lost cause, because we can’t allow ourselves to care about a single one. The ones we care about are the ones that take the piss out of us. Them are the ones that kill us by degrees. The dead outnumber us, and we have no power over them. Our duty isn’t to these bodies, our duty is to the Queen and to the law. To the idea of the law. And to the living. Them’s the real victims, because they have hope, and they look to us.”
Tiffany was clearly talking about things that had weighed on him for a long time, and Hammersmith was afraid to interrupt. A window to Tiffany’s soul had opened, and anything Hammersmith said now might cause that window to slam shut again.
“This boy has no family asking us for justice. It’s horrible, but the reality is that no one really cares. No one at all. This is a lost boy, and nothing we do will change that fact. Our time and energy is best spent solving the cases that can be solved. I’m sorry, Hammersmith. But you’ve wasted my time and you’ve wasted the good doctor’s time. Have this room cleaned and go home. Get some rest. Tomorrow this hopeless job will begin again, and it will begin again for you every day until you quit it or retire from it. Unless it kills you first, as it killed Inspector Little.”
Tiffany walked to the stairs and hesitated, but didn’t turn around.
“Choose your causes more judiciously, Hammersmith.”
Then he took the steps two at a time up and out of sight.
Hammersmith stared at the Turkish rug as the other constables began rolling it back up against the wall.
“He’s wrong, you know,” Kingsley said. “About your duty to the living, I mean.”
The doctor had stood silent throughout Tiffany’s long speech, but now he stepped closer to Hammersmith and put a soot-smudged hand on his arm.
“Your duty is to society, and the dead have always been a part of society. How we treat the dead says much about us. Tiffany has never been the best that the Yard has to offer. He’s too easily overwhelmed, and now he’s frightened and cowers at the thought of more work. Don’t learn from him.”
Hammersmith shook his head, unsure about what to think. It was possible he was letting his own history, his time in the mines, cloud his judgment. But a glance at the tiny body on the floor helped him regain some focus.
“How long? You said he struggled. How long was he up there in the dark before he died?”
“I can’t say with much certainty, but it looks as if it took him a long time to finally suffocate. I’ll know more when I have a chance to examine the fauna nesting within his body. That is, if you plan to pursue this case.”
He watched the constable patiently, but Hammersmith avoided his gaze. He went to the body and knelt over it, moved a lock of the boy’s hair, and smoothed it back over his head. The boy’s forehead was still smooth and pink where his hair had covered it. Hammersmith licked his thumb and wiped away a smudge of grime. The room was quiet. Kingsley and his daughter stood like statues until Hammersmith finally spoke.
“It was difficult but not impossible to pull him from the chimney. Someone could have done it while the boy was alive, but nobody did.”
“The body has undoubtedly shrunk slightly due to the heat and the closene
ss within the chimney,” Kingsley said. “The bricks acted like an oven and he was virtually roasted by his own body heat.”
“Maybe. But someone left him there to die. This was murder by neglect, and that means the law was broken.”
“Shall I remove the body to my lab, then?”
“Please do, sir. I have no intention of dropping this case.”
“That’s good,” Kingsley said. “That’s a good lad.”
12
Day rummaged through the supply closet at 4 Whitehall Place. It was surprisingly free of clutter. He had assumed that Scotland Yard would be as filthy and hectic as the rest of London, but in the past week he had discovered something quite different. Sir Edward had made sweeping changes upon being installed as commissioner. The place was kept clean and neat, and while detectives, sergeants, and constables were expected to stay busy, they were not encouraged to treat the place like a home away from home. Sir Edward preferred that his police be family men and that they spend at least eight hours a day at home. Drinking was tolerated, but tacitly frowned on if it became excessive. And a cleaning service was now employed to keep the premises from looking like a bachelor’s flat.
Which meant that Day couldn’t find an empty box anywhere in the building. He returned to Inspector Little’s desk and leaned on it, staring at the piles of paper he’d gathered, until inspiration struck. He ran down the back hall, past Fawkes, the sergeant on duty, and out into the street. Fawkes looked up from his penny novel and said something, but Day was already out of earshot.
The evening was cool, and Day had left his hat and jacket hanging on the back wall of the common room, but he didn’t notice. He looked to his right and left without seeing what he wanted and, after a moment’s consideration, took off at a brisk pace down the right side of the street. A block and a half later, he stopped at the mouth of an alley and peered down it. He had just about screwed up his courage to enter the narrow passage when he noticed a bulky shape against the outside wall of the inn across the road.
Day looked both ways and crossed the road. Streetlamps cast his shadow out over the cobblestones, where it broke apart and flowed back together in increments. There was little traffic, and the nearby police station meant that prostitutes and pickpockets were scarce here. But Day knew there was one loiterer who had no fear of the police.
