The Yard

by Alex Grecian

  “Pardon?”

  “I can’t stop mulling it over, the possible connections between the two murders.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a reason Little’s desk was located far from mine.”

  “Was Little … Was he disliked?”

  “Disliked? I wouldn’t say so. But few of us associated closely with him. It was unpleasant to be too near him.”

  “In what way?”

  “He was somewhat … odiferous.”

  “He smelled bad?”

  “Quite. When I first found you here this evening, I thought that Little had returned from the grave. That box you had in here smelled very much like him.”

  “Could he have been killed for that? For a lack of hygiene?”

  “What, by someone with hyperactive nostrils?”

  “Perhaps by a neighbor who tired of his scent?”

  “A neighbor who was so tired of his scent that he killed the man, sewed shut his eyes and his mouth—but not his nose, mind you—and pounded his limp body into the bottom of a steamer trunk, then dragged that trunk to the train station?”

  “It does sound ridiculous.”

  “No, I agree that it might be worth following up with the neighbors. After all, I’m the one who brought up his body odor in the first place. I’m simply laying it all out to look at. There’s no part of this case that isn’t ridiculous in the most morbid way. A foul body odor is as likely a motivation as any, I suppose.”

  “Not for a sane man.”

  “What sane man does any of these things?” Blacker indicated the mounting stacks of case files on the desk. “If all men were sane, we would be blacksmiths.”

  “I believe I would be a lord to the manor born.”

  “Ah, well, if we have that much choice in the matter…”

  Blacker chuckled and they hurried through the rest of their files. There was nothing else in Little’s files as promising as the beard-hater who had killed John Robinson twice in the same bathtub.

  “Listen,” Day said. “Whoever killed Robinson, if he killed Little, too, what if he killed others? There are dozens of unsolved murders here.”

  “You mean he’s like the Ripper, he kills again and again?”

  “I know it’s a horrible thought, but…”

  The idea of someone who killed from habit and need was a relatively new one and something the detectives weren’t prepared to deal with. Murder was usually between spouses or involved money. Crimes of passion were frequent. Prostitutes were killed, bankers bludgeoned, landladies buried alive. Madness was sometimes a factor, but madmen were most often public and demonstrative about their crimes. The Ripper had been something new. He had killed in secret and for no apparent reason. He had done it again and again with impunity.

  “No, you’re right. If it isn’t the Ripper, it’s possible there’s someone else like him out there, though I shudder to think.”

  “We need to look at other cases. It’s possible another murder committed by this same person has been looked at by one of the others.”

  He swept his hand over the room, indicating the three rows of four desks each. There were eight other detectives in the big room who might be working other murders and have clues that separately added up to nothing, but could be put together in a useful way.

  “I’ll go to Sir Edward first thing in the morning,” Blacker said.

  “Let’s not bother him yet. He gave me leave to do what I need to solve Little’s murder. I’ll use my authority and get everyone to look through whatever they’ve got.”

  “There’ll be some who won’t like it.”

  “I know it.”

  “I’ll throw my weight behind you. I may not be the most respected peeler in the room, but I think I’m well liked. If I vouch for you, I’m sure the others will cooperate.”

  Day smiled. “Thank you. It means a lot that you’re willing to trust me. I’m not sure I trust myself on this.”

  Blacker nodded, but he didn’t smile. “I’ll be honest with you, Day, there are men here that I’d rather were looking into this. But I trust Sir Edward, and if he picked you for it then there must be a good reason and I’ll go along. I’m behind you on all this, but I’m not blindly following.”

  He stared pointedly across the desk until Day had to look away. When he looked back, Blacker’s scowl had dissolved into his trademark grin. The atmosphere in the room was lighter again.

  “But you’ll find no more loyal hunting dog than me,” Blacker said. “You point me in the direction of the bird that did this and I’ll bring the bloody bastard back to you with his head hangin’ out me mouth.”

  He winked and Day laughed.

  “What say we get a couple hours’ sleep and freshen up? We’ve got a lot to do in the morning.”

  “I think morning is already in progress.”

  “If you’re willing, once the sun’s up and the milk’s delivered, I think it would be best if you questioned Little’s family, while I handle the neighbors,” Day said. “You’ve got a lighter touch, and the family might be more open with you.”

  “Will do.”

  “One other thing. Are there any constables we could trust? Smart men who can be discreet?”

  “There’s one or two I can think of.”

  “We may want to enlist them. There’s a lot to track down here, and some help would be welcome.”

  “I’d go to Hammersmith first.”

  “Hammersmith? He was at the crime scene this morning. Good man?”

  “He rarely laughs at my jokes, but he’s a born lawman.”

  “Hammersmith it is, then. I’ll see about getting him reassigned when Sergeant Kett comes on duty.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be Little’s killer right now,” Blacker said. “We’ll have the noose round his neck by sundown tomorrow.”

  Day nodded, but he didn’t smile. He stood and got his hat and jacket from the hooks on the wall and left without a word for the desk sergeant. On his way out, he saw that Blacker had left the dancing man’s wooden crate on a pile of rubbish at the end of the block. He picked it up and carried it to the back door of the Yard and left it there.

  14

  Constable Nevil Hammersmith didn’t return home until after midnight. The flat was empty. Colin Pringle was still away on his date with the shopgirl, Maggie.

  Hammersmith and Pringle shared a two-bedroom flat above a confectioner’s shop. The aroma of chocolate and sugar filled the rooms day and night, and they were locked in a constant battle with rats that migrated upstairs and skittered through the walls. The entirety of the floor above them was leased by a young man who received a yearly stipend of five hundred pounds from his grandmother. He didn’t need a flatmate. Hammersmith and Pringle, being eligible men of no social standing and of limited means, struggled to make their rent each month.

  Despite the hour, Hammersmith started a fire. His thoughts returned to the dead boy, and he unconsciously studied the dimensions of his own fireplace. It was, he thought, too small for even a child to fit in, too narrow for anyone of any size to shimmy up. When the fire was going, he put the kettle on to boil. He lifted the teapot and a small tin of tea from the mantel and spooned green leaves into the pot. Pringle generally filled the tin with “renewed” tea from a street vendor who collected used leaves from people in the neighborhood. The damp tea leaves were dried, spiced, and colored green with copper. It was weak but affordable. When the water began to boil, Hammersmith poured it from the kettle into the teapot and fit the lid back on. While the tea steeped, he paced back and forth through the small parlor.

  A piece of paper, disturbed by the breeze he was creating, fluttered at the edge of his vision as he passed by the door to his bedroom. A note was tacked to the wall there and he pulled it down, leaving the tack where it was. He read it and tossed it into the fire. He rubbed the back of his neck and forced his thoughts to return to the case at hand.

  He was startled from his reverie by irregular footsteps
in the hall, and a moment later, Pringle staggered into the flat and tossed his hat on the well-worn chair by the door.

  “Hullo, old boy.”

  Pringle’s face was red, and Hammersmith could see a smudge on the knee of his flatmate’s trousers. A sober Pringle would never be seen in soiled clothes.

  “How’s Maggie?” Hammersmith said.

  “Oh, my dear Mr Hammersmith, Maggie’s fine, all right. Quite fine, indeed.”

  “Good to hear.”

  “And what are you doing awake and prowling about at this beastly hour?”

  “I’ve made tea.”

  “Thank you. I’ll have some.”

  “Good.”

  Hammersmith strained the tea into two cups and set them on the small table under the window. The curtains were drawn back, and outside on the street, sweepers were already hard at work, shoveling horseshit into their foul carts, trying to get a head start on the coming day’s traffic.

  “There’s no milk.”

  “Did we drink it all?”

  “It was spoilt.”

  “You threw it out?”

  “Should I have kept spoilt milk?”

  “Well, I suppose we’ll have more in the morning.”

  “Not long now. Still, there’s no milk.”

  Pringle shrugged and burnt his tongue on the tea.

  “Let it sit,” Hammersmith said.

  “Easy for you to say. I’ve already burnt myself. Say, did you get the note I left? There was a message sent over from a doctor at St Thomas’ this evening. Dr Brindle, I think his name was.”

  Hammersmith blew across the surface of the tea and took a sip. He could taste the sharp tang of copper and wished again that they could afford to spring for fresh tea.

  “I got it,” he said.

  “You ought to visit him. Sounds like the old man’s not long for this world.”

  “There’s no sense in it, Colin. He doesn’t know me anymore.”

  “It might do you some good to say your piece to him. Whether he knows you or not.”

  “If I get the time.”

  Pringle nodded and tested his tea with a finger. Hammersmith was grateful that his flatmate didn’t press the issue. He hadn’t visited his father in months. The last time he’d been to St Thomas’ Hospital, his father had called him a stranger and cursed at him, the stream of invective finally halted by a spasm of coughing and a spray of blood across the dirty white sheets in the consumptive ward. Hammersmith wanted to remember his father as a tall, strong man with a ready smile and quick hands, not as the shrunken, angry old man who had to be tied to a bed so that he wouldn’t bite the nurses who fed him.

  “It’s not just him eating at you, is it?” Pringle said. “I can see by that faraway dreamy look on your face that there’s a case boiling away inside your skull.” He sat forward in his armchair and scowled at Hammersmith. “Was there something in that thug’s story, then?”

  Hammersmith nodded, glad to put his father out of his mind for the moment.

  “A child,” he said. “A dead boy in one of the homes along the row there.”

  “Damn it all, I should have gone with you.”

  “Nothing you could have done to change things. The boy was long since dead and stuffed up a chimney.”

  “Stuffed up?” Pringle gazed into his tea for a moment before looking up. “Stuffing a body up a chimney’s no easy feat. Could the boy have been dead in advance and stiff? If he was rigorous stiff, it might make it easier to push him upward.”

  “I may have misspoke. Stuffed isn’t the right word for it. It appears the boy crawled up the flue of his own accord. Got stuck and was left there.”

  “Oh, so it was a climber.” Pringle sat back again and took another sip of tea.

  “Yes, I think the boy was a climber,” Hammersmith said. “But climbers shouldn’t be abandoned in chimneys.”

  “Of course not. But the job does come with risks, and it follows that croaking in a chimney is one of them risks.”

  “No five-year-old should be made to face those risks. What five-year-old would even understand that kind of risk, let alone agree to it?”

  “Whoa,” Pringle said. He waved his arm at Hammersmith and tea sloshed out of his cup, dotting his shirtfront. “Oh, damn.”

  He stood and Hammersmith handed him a cloth from the table. Pringle dabbed at his shirt, shaking his head.

  “Too much drink, I think.”

  “It’ll come out.”

  “I’m sure. Never mind the shirt.”

  “Never mind the shirt? Who am I talking to? What’s happened to Colin Pringle?”

  Hammersmith smiled weakly and Pringle shook his head again.

  “No, look, I’ve given the impression that I don’t care about a dead child.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I do. I really do. Every death is a tragedy, but I don’t understand what makes this one so special.”

  Hammersmith looked down at his shoes. Hammersmith’s own shoes were old and worn and cracked. They had never been polished. He looked over at Pringle’s shoes, which reflected the room’s ambient lamplight. He and Pringle shared mutual respect, but had nothing in common. They had been thrown together simply because they’d started as constables on the same day at the same station. Pringle cared deeply about the trappings of life. Being a policeman allowed him access to material privileges and opportunities that Hammersmith cared nothing about. The job mattered to Hammersmith. The job and the people who needed him to do that job properly. He had never been able to make Pringle understand.

  “It’s not…” he said. “It was a child, Colin. He was used and discarded.”

  Pringle nodded, but said nothing. He waited for Hammersmith to continue.

  “It’s true, we do see bodies often enough. This was different.”

  “They’ll put a detective on it.”

  “No. They won’t.”

  Pringle was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the floor.

  “Did they tell you to let it go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to let it go?”

  Hammersmith took another sip of tea. It was cold now.

  “No.”

  Pringle nodded at the floor.

  “I’m going round to Kingsley’s,” Hammersmith said, “to see if he has any more information about the body yet.”

  “Nevil, no. It’s the middle of the night. He’s a family man. Probably as sound asleep as we should be.”

  “He might be awake.”

  “He might be, but he won’t want to see our ugly mugs. Let ’im be till morning.”

  “I feel restless. I need to act.”

  “Well, Kingsley won’t have cut on the body yet, anyway. And besides, what’ll he tell you that you don’t know?”

  “You’re right. I know how the boy died.”

  “And you know there’s nobody to bring in on this. Nobody killed him. He died of natural causes.”

  “Not natural causes.”

  “He stopped breathing of his own accord. Nobody held a pillow over his face. There’s nowhere to go with this.”

  “And the people he trusted? The ones who abandoned him?”

  “What can you do? They’ve broken no law.”

  Hammersmith ran a hand over his chin. He needed a shave.

  “I can scare them.”

  “You’re scaring me right now, Nevil.”

  “I need to do something about this. You needn’t involve yourself, but if I sit on my hands here it will eat away at me until there’s nothing left.”

  “You could lose your commission. You might as well toss your entire career with the Met on the rubbish pile. You’ll be shoveling horse manure in the street.”

  “It’s honest work.”

  Pringle shrugged. “It is at that. All right, I’m in.”

  “You don’t need to—”

  “What’s a mate for, then? I’m in it. But I’d like about three days of sleep first.”


  “What about your career?”

  “As long as I get to keep the uniform, I’ll be fine.”

  Hammersmith grinned and finished his tea. He hardly noticed the metallic aftertaste.

  15

  Inspector Day walked up Northumberland Street, away from the Yard. His heels clicked on the road and echoed back from the high walls of the hotels on either side of him. There was a hole in the bottom of his left shoe, and he could feel the cold of the paving stones under his feet. The bulk of the Hotel Victoria loomed out of the fog to the left of him, and to the right the Hotel Metropole, tall and elegant. Ahead, a cab rank split the street. In the morning it would be filled with hansoms and buses and growlers, queued up in the median between the great hotels, letting off and picking up and waiting, but now the rank was empty. An omnibus rattled past him, its yellow sides dull in the lamplight, a feedbag hung over the horse’s nose. Day moved aside and watched it disappear into the mist.

  The road widened out, and Day crossed the Strand to Trafalgar Square. On a clear day he would be able to see the National Gallery on the other side of the park, but tonight he could barely see fifteen feet in front of him. A tide of mist rolled over and past him. He thought he could make out the pillar with Admiral Lord Nelson’s statue against the pale night sky, but it might have been nothing more than a thin distant layering of fog upon fog. The square was silent, the fountains shut off for the night, and the hugeness and the openness of the space seemed cathedral-like to Day, who was still used to the intimate marshes and woodlands of Devon.

  He was at the southeast corner of the park. He oriented himself and walked diagonally toward the far end. Within two or three minutes he came to the outside of a low wall that encircled the nearest fountain. He followed it, walking slowly. This close, he could hear the breeze shaping ripples across the water.

  After a few yards the wall angled back north, toward the fountain, and Day stopped at the corner where a massive lamppost squatted, joining the two ends of the wall. He had passed this lamppost before, he thought, but had never noticed how much bigger it was than the others that were dotted about the square. The lantern globe atop its pillar was dark. Day ran his hand over the smooth stone of its base. In the center of the structure was a door, two steps up from the flagstones beneath, and in the center of the door was a small, round knob. Now that he was looking directly at it, it was unmistakable, but he knew that the door went unnoticed by hundreds of passersby every day.