by Carol Hedges
“Am I addressing Miss Landseer, the private detective?” she inquires, in a pleasant voice.
“I am indeed she. Pray enter,” Lucy says, standing aside to let her visitor walk into the consulting room. A pleasant scent of lavender rises from the woman’s skirts as she passes.
“Please sit down and tell me what has brought you here,” Lucy says, drawing a brand-new notebook towards her and choosing a pen from the tray. “I promise I will do my best to help you.”
The woman sighs. Then she lifts her veil, revealing a pale, youthful face, with deep-set eyes under strongly-marked black brows. Her forehead is clouded and her expression one of haunting sadness.
“My name is Rosalind Whitely, and my story is simply told, Miss Landseer. As you see, I am in mourning. It has been six months since my beloved mother passed from this earth to a better world. She endured much suffering: a cruel disease took its toll of her body, but she bore it bravely.
“My father, who was a saint on earth, died some years previously. I am an only child, Miss Landseer, and so the care of my mother has been my sole preoccupation since his sudden and tragic demise. We were very close and shared everything. Our lives were entwined together: we read aloud to each other, worked upon our various sewing tasks in the evening and it was my joy to provide tasty meals in an effort to coax her to eat.
“You see how we were all in all to each other? But that idyllic time was to change. Last year, her doctor recommended the waters at Bath, which are supposed to be good for rheumatism. My mother, in the company of a nurse, left London for a sojourn there to try the treatment for herself. I remained here to oversee the house and the servants.
“Imagine my emotions when, out of the blue, I received a letter from my mother stating that she had met a gentleman ~ and that they were engaged to be married!” The young woman swallows and grips her hands together convulsively. “It was a very sudden and whirlwind courtship, Miss Landseer. I saw my mother off on the train with a paid nurse and one of our maids. Six weeks later, she came back married to my stepfather. He was a widower, considerably younger, who had also gone to Bath to take the waters. I confess that I was bewildered, but I tried to swallow my feelings for her sake.
“They seemed perfectly happy together, and I could not fault his attention to her, but naturally, his presence in the house meant that our former intimacy lapsed, and I was forced to rely on my own company in the evenings, for I did not care to sit with them. Sadly, a few months after her return to London, my mother’s health began to fail once more. I was absent from the house, so not able to comfort her in her final moments and I shall have to live the rest of my life with the guilt of that upon my conscience.”
“I am very sorry that you have been left to bear this burden on your own,” Lucy says. “May I enquire where you were at the time of her death?”
“I was visiting the seaside,” the young woman answers. “It was suggested by her doctor that, as her health had not improved after her sojourn at Bath, some sea air might be good for Mama. I had gone down to Torquay to select a suitable hotel and make arrangements for her stay there. When I returned, it was to discover that she had been dead for three days.” She bows her head and sighs.
“You were not to know that her death would follow so soon after your departure, Miss Whitely,” Lucy says. “I fear none of us can predict such an event.”
“But I should not have left the house!” the young woman exclaims. “My stepfather, Mr Brooke, persuaded me to go. He said that a woman would be better placed to select the right hotel, to ask the right questions about accommodation, the provision of invalid fare. He also assured me that my mother was in the best medical hands in London.”
Ah. The stepfather again. Lucy circles the words thoughtfully.
“Do you suspect foul play, Miss Whitely? Is that the reason you are consulting me?”
The client wrings her hands, her mouth moving tremulously. “I do not know what I suspect, Miss Landseer. My thoughts whirl around in my head. I have nothing to accuse Mr Brooke of directly. Nothing at all. My mother seemed perfectly happy to be married to him. I never heard a cross word pass between them. Nothing I could reproach him with, although the loss of our previous closeness was a hard blow for me to bear. And yet …”
“You wish to be reassured that her death was from natural causes and could not have been aided or hastened by any human intervention, is that it?”
“Yes. Yes. That is what I want to find out. I feel that my life cannot continue upon its way until I am at peace over her final days in London. I have such dreadful thoughts …”
“Then I shall do my best to set your mind at ease,” Lucy says firmly, adding, “it might aid me in my investigation if I could visit your house ~ the investigating mind works better when it can see the actual places in which events occurred.” (She has read this somewhere.)
“Yes, of course, Miss Landseer. I quite understand your request. My stepfather leaves for his office every morning at nine. I usually perform various household tasks after he has left and spend my afternoons in varied domestic pursuit. If you care to call upon me any afternoon, I shall be delighted to welcome you, and answer any further questions you wish to ask me.”
“Then it shall be so,” Lucy says. She rises, proffers her hand, and shows her client to the communal stairs.
Once the front door has closed, Lucy Landseer returns to her desk to write up her notes. Writing up notes is an integral part of the investigative process. She opens her brand-new notebook, picks up her brand-new pen, and in her best handwriting, writes: Case Number 1: The Suspicious Stepfather.
****
While Lucy Landseer is busily engaged with her first client, across town in Mrs Cordelia Brimmer’s lodging-house (Clean Beds. Mangling Done), breakfast is being served. Porridge steams in a large pot, despite the summer heat, and hunks of day-old bread are cut up and piled on a cracked platter.
Mrs Brimmer’s lodgers belong to the class of individuals for whom fear of hunger is always present, so anything that fills their stomachs is welcome. They sit around a wooden table in the small back kitchen, with wet washing piled in baskets and draped on racks over their heads, consuming lumpy porridge, with the occasional drip from the clothes hung above falling into their bowls to flavour it.
There are currently four people lodging with Mrs Brimmer: George Spiner, Jewish, a shirt maker, John Denny, who works in a halfpenny shaving shop, and Micky Mokey and Little Azella, music hall artists, who have come to London for the summer season, and share a small room together on the top floor.
Micky Mokey is a slender young individual in his early twenties, always dapper in his attire, with a habit of thrusting his hands deep into his trouser pockets and whistling under his breath. His skin is smooth and beardless, and he wears his dark curly hair parted on one side and just a little too long. (“Them music hall people is a bit bourgwoir for my taste,” says Mrs Brimmer to her neighbour).
Little Azella, as her name suggests, is a tiny female of uncertain age, fond of appearing at the breakfast table in spangly frocks, with a faded pink velvet rose tucked behind one ear. She is an acrobat and female gymnast. He sings popular songs. They both currently appear thrice nightly at the Varieties Music Hall in Bishopsgate Street.
It is assumed by the other lodgers and their landlady, from their closeness, shared hair-colour and a tendency to finish off each other’s sentences, that the two are brother and sister. It is assumed incorrectly. Breakfast over, they return to their room, where Little Azella packs her tights, her sparkly vest, her chalk and her shoes, bids her companion a cheery farewell, and sets off to rehearse.
Meanwhile, Micky Mokey thrusts his hands into his trouser pockets and stares gloomily into the fly-blown looking glass. He frowns. Last night, while belting out that popular music hall ditty ‘You don’t have to be a lady to be my bestest gal’ in his pleasant light tenor voice, a member of the audience sitting in the pit had suddenly caught his eye. Somebody he had not see
n for a very long time. It was all Micky Mokey could do to hold the tune and get to the final verse without drying.
As soon as the chairman had banged his gavel to usher him off the stage, Micky Mokey had fled to the tiny dressing-room shared with whoever else was on the bill. There he had shucked off his stage costume, donned his street clothes and hurried out into the airless night.
Of all the music halls, in all the cities, in all the country, he had to walk into mine, he’d thought ruefully, as he set off back to his lodgings. It was an omen. Though whether of good or ill, he could not yet tell.
****
Detective Inspector Stride is struggling to get to work. It is another blazing hot day, and the streets are like an oven. The glare of sunlight from the new staring yellow-brick buildings is almost painful to the eye. Hard to believe that these are the same streets that loomed so gloomily during the fogs of winter. He passes a news-stand and is gratified to see that no morning paper is featuring a ‘Mysterious Theft of Dead Body from Police Mortuary’ story, which means that The Inquirer must be still unaware of it.
Stride enters Scotland Yard, once again minus his usual mug of hot, strong, black coffee. As he passes the Anxious Bench, where members of the public wait to hear news of their nearest and dearest, who have been arrested for crimes they did not commit, a familiar figure rises lazily and hails him.
“Wotcher Stride. I hear you recently lost a dead body. Bit careless, eh?”
Damn. Just when he was congratulating himself on the story not escaping. Stride feels a frisson of dislike run through him as he turns to face Richard Dandy, known colloquially as Dandy Dick, chief reporter on The Inquirer, a thorn in the side of the detective division and his own particular nemesis.
“Detective Inspector Stride, Mr Dandy,” he replies stiffly. “As you well know. And is there a reason for your visit?”
Dandy Dick smirks. “Just doing my job. Asking questions, getting answers. I thought I’d stop by and inquire, on behalf of the Man in the Street, who pays your wages, by the way, whether it had turned up yet. The body. That you lost. Because from where I’m standing, it’s not so much the forces of law and order, as the farces of law and order. Ha ha. So, has it? Turned up?”
Stride grinds his teeth and spins on his heel.
“I’ll take that as a ‘no’, then,” Dandy Dick calls after him. “Watch out for my piece in the evening edition. It’ll make a nice little story. ‘Dead Man Escapes the Clutches of Criminally Careless Cops!’”
Stride turns, his face red with fury. “Don’t you dare …” he begins, but Dandy Dick has already left. Stride glares at the desk constable, who is yet another member of the new intake and so unfamiliar with how things work viz-a-viz members of the fifth estate.
“Have you been talking to that individual?” he demands.
The shifty look on the constable’s face provides him with the answer. Stride groans inwardly. “If he ever tries to set foot inside Scotland Yard again, you are to arrest him. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir. Of course, sir. On what charge, sir?” asks the constable.
“For being a total waste of my time,” Stride growls. “Look, when Detective Sergeant Cully comes in, tell him I’d like a word, would you? And in the meantime, don’t talk to any newspaper men who breeze in here asking questions. Ever.”
Stride steams his way to his office, where he throws stuff around his desk in an attempt to calm himself down. After a while, he settles and begins drafting a stern memo to all members of the police force, reminding them that they are not to give any interviews to any members of the press without consulting him first.
By the time Jack Cully knocks at his office door, Stride has worked through a couple of drafts, and finally come up with a copy that satisfies him and doesn’t contain too much invective.
“Read this,” he says, waving a sheet of paper at Cully. “Do you know, I actually caught Richard Dandy in the front office this morning, trying to get information about that missing body out of the new constable. The very idea! We simply can’t allow penny-a-liners like that just to walk in and start interviewing random members of the police force. Who knows where it will end?”
“Indeed,” Cully murmurs. He reads Stride’s instructions, mentally re-phrasing some sentences and toning down various paragraphs. “I’ll get someone to type this up and make copies of it for you, shall 1?”
Stride fans himself with one of the discarded drafts. “I hate this weather, Jack. It’s too hot. It’s not natural ~ I can’t think in this heat,” he complains. “Has anyone come forward to identify the wretched man? No? Why not? People are usually keen as mustard to stick their noses into police business. The sooner we know who he was, the sooner we can stop people like Dandy Dick writing their rubbish and making our lives difficult.”
Cully demurs. Since finding the half-smoked cigar, he has moved away from the need to identify the missing man. The ability to lead an investigation often means knowing when to shift tactics. Cully’s tactics have shifted. Now, he is more focused on discovering who the man might have been with, rather than who he was.
Carefully, he explains his new strategy to Stride. Cully knows his colleague of old, and knows that, like some giant steel ship, Stride is difficult to turn around once he has set off, so to prepare the groundwork, he describes his early morning visit to the Docks, accompanied by young Constable Tom Williams.
The two men had gone down to the vast warehouse for the reception of tobacco. It was the first time the young officer had visited the London Docks. Cully recalls his astonished expression as they drew near and saw the forest of masts, and tall chimneys belching out black smoke.
They had picked their way through open streets, lined with low lodging-houses inhabited by dock labourers, watermen, sailors, and the poor who made a precarious living by or from the waterside. They passed shops stocked entirely with gear for sailors: brass sextants, quadrants, chronometers, ropes smelling of tar, bright red and blue flannel shirts, pilot coats and canvas trousers. It seemed every public house they passed had some crude variant of a Jolly Jack Tar upon its painted board.
Eventually Cully had hailed a passing Customs-house officer, distinguished by his brass-buttoned jacket from the sailor population that swarmed the street, and he had directed them to the Customs office, where their inquiries had been met with some initial scepticism, until Cully explained the purpose of their visit, whereupon various large customs books had been opened and consulted, and a list of the suppliers had been handed over.
Once they had got what they came for, the two made their way back to the dock gates, where they passed through the vast crowd of men of all types, ages and grades, waiting hopefully for a day’s paid employment unloading one of the great ships.
Having listened in silence, Stride pulls a face. “That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it?”
“Possibly,” Cully nods. “But these tobacconists know their customers. Know their likes and dislikes. If we can get a few names, we can make some discreet inquiries, shake a few trees as it were, and see what falls out. The place where the body was discovered is far too out of the way for anybody to be there by accident. Especially somebody who has a taste for smoking very exclusive cigars.”
Stride spreads his hands. “Do whatever you think best. But I repeat my initial comment: this is a waste of time. You would be far better off making inquiries around the neighbourhood to see if anybody noticed a couple of suspicious characters with a cart lurking round the back of Scotland Yard on the night when the body was taken.”
“Perhaps you are right. Let us see. I shall try both approaches. In the meantime, it is providing our young constable with some invaluable training. And, at the end of the day, it’s not as if we are inundated with other cases, is it? People commit far fewer crimes when the weather is as hot as this and so many smaller shops are boarded up for the summer.”
Stride agrees. “It is like a desert out there, that’s true. Any day now, I expect to turn
a corner and see a row of camels making their way along the thoroughfare, or a pyramid rising above the river.”
Cully departs, leaving Stride to fill in some rosters in lacklustre fashion until it is time for luncheon. But here again, the weather has conspired against him, for Sally, the eponymous owner of Sally’s Chop House (‘all meat guaranteed fresh and mainly from recognisable farm animals’) has taken off for cooler climes with his family, meaning Stride is served by a musty elderly woman labouring under a chronic sniff.
His beer arrives flat, his chop is flabby, the potato has a hard, uncooked centre and the walls seem to sweat something greasy and unpleasant. Stride sits alone in his customary back booth, finishing his luncheon, and missing the cut and thrust of his daily debate with Sally, so it is a disgruntled detective inspector who returns to his office sometime later, where he sits on discontentedly, doing paperwork until the end of the day. Then he walks home through the baking streets, the air still unbreathable, the sky still painfully blue, finding no pleasure in his own city.
****
Pleasure is a quality that can be found in many places or situations. For instance: ‘how good and pleasant it is,’ says the Bible, ‘for brothers to dwell in unity.’ Alas, the only unity possessed by Arthur and Sherborne Harbinger is a unity of purpose, and it comes in the form of guineas and paper notes with an image of the Queen upon them.
Here are the unified brethren, gathered on the front step of Aunt Euphemia’s house, waiting for the servant to let them in. One man carries a small bunch of flowers, purchased from a small flower-seller on the corner of Tottenham Court Road; the other man bears a basket of fruit. Both eye their brother’s gift with disapproval.
“I shouldn’t think she’d be able to eat any of that stuff,” Arthur sneers, indicating the small pineapple. “The elderly don’t like fruit. Disagrees with them.”
“Buttercups?” Sherborne responds. “Buttercups? Really?”
