Three Bodies in London

by L. A. Nisula

  After figuring out how to boil water for tea in Milly’s flat, not the easiest thing in the world as she didn’t seem to have a kettle and none of her pots really fit the burner, I had my dinner, found blankets to make up a bed on the couch by stealing them from Milly’s bed, and settled in for my first night in London. Not at all the sort of night I had been expecting.

  As I settled under the blankets, I could hear the carriages outside the window. There were carriages all night back home too, but these seemed louder. The building wasn’t far from the Thames, so there were plenty of noises I wasn’t used to as well. There was the metallic clang of the mechanical horses every half-hour as they made their rounds, moving things between warehouses a few streets away, and I could faintly hear the sound of the airships firing up their balloons to rise above the buildings nearby. The pub closed up just after midnight—and I could hear the patrons yelling to each other as they walked down the street. And then it was quiet except for the dripping of water outside my window. That seemed worse than the noise from the street. A steady drip, drip, dripping that told me I was far from home and the one person I knew in the city, in the whole country really, was in jail and counting on me to get her out. I rolled over and put one of the pillows over my head to block the noise.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  I must have slept since I woke up feeling groggy, but knowing exactly where I was and what was wrong. Since everything had seemed wrong the night before, I suppose that wasn’t much of an accomplishment.

  I made another search of the kitchen, but only managed to confirm that there was no breakfast, not even any tea other than the little bit I’d bought the night before, which I had thought was a capital offense in Britain. Then I remembered where Milly was and decided I really shouldn’t be joking about such things. The tea and sandwich I’d bought at the shop on the corner had been reasonable enough, so it seemed a place to start in my hunt for breakfast. By then, I should be awake enough to figure out what to do about Milly. That meant getting into my suitcases and finding something to wear. As I poked through my things, I double-checked that everything was where I had put it when I’d packed, and as the only things that had moved could be accounted for by the suitcases banging around on the ship or the train, I decided Mrs. Fitzpatrick had probably not managed to get into them. That was some comfort, at least.

  Once I looked presentable enough, I went downstairs, planning to slip out of the building unnoticed, giving me time to think about Milly’s situation while I walked. But I ran into Mrs. Fitzpatrick in the front hallway. “Off to visit your cousin already?”

  I considered saying I was, but if I was planning on buying something for breakfast that had to be prepared, then I would have to return to prepare it, and the way my trip had been going so far, there was no doubt in my mind Mrs. Fitzpatrick would find out that I’d lied to her. Which meant the truth was all I was left with. “Visiting hours won’t be for a while yet. I was going to look at the shops and see if I can find a place that serves tea.”

  “Milly was not known for her housekeeping I’m afraid. Come on through, and I’ll fix you some breakfast. I don’t normally include it, but seeing as it’s your first morning here.”

  “It’s not necess—” But I was steered through the hall and the chintz-covered sitting room and back into the chaotic kitchen. Mrs. Fitzpatrick set a plate of toast and fried tomatoes in front of me and started frying up eggs before I could tell her that was enough.

  “There’s plenty of tea in the pot, just help yourself. Would you like beans on toast too?”

  “No, toast and butter is really all I can manage.”

  “No eggs then? Mushrooms? Kippers?” She tipped the eggs onto a plate. “Cream? Milk? Sugar?”

  My mouth was full of toast so I shook my head.

  “All right, then. You’ll need to get yourself some supplies, unless you plan to eat out for every meal like Milly did. Does. Now, I go to Lescott on the corner for staples. You’ll want the market for your veg. I’ll draw you a map.” I allowed Mrs. Fitzpatrick to babble on while I ate and considered Milly’s problem again.

  If Milly had been truthful when the police interviewed her and had remembered correctly—and I was going to assume both of those were true for the moment, at least, or I’d have nowhere to start—what did it mean? “Why would the killer pull the dagger out, then drop it on the floor?”

  “What, dear?” Mrs. Fitzpatrick had finished drawing the map and was adding still more names to the list on the back of the paper.

  I swallowed my toast quickly. I’d have to remember not to talk to myself when I wasn’t alone. “I didn’t realize I was talking out loud. I’m just trying to make sense of what I learned yesterday. Why would the killer pull out the dagger?”

  “To hide it?”

  I nodded. “That’s what I thought too, but then why did they leave it behind?”

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick put a large plate of food down in front of her chair and sat down across from me. “Perhaps Milly scared him away when she came?”

  “Then you believe that Milly is innocent?” That surprised me, considering how willing to rent the apartment she’d seemed the day before, before she knew I was related to Milly.

  “I’d certainly like to.” She picked up her fork and tucked into her food.

  Having an ally made me feel friendly towards her. I finished the last bites of my toast and took the map she’d drawn for me. “Thank you for this. I think I’ll go out and buy some things, and hopefully, by the time I get back, I’ll have come up with something to help Milly.”

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick patted my arm as I passed her chair. “I’m glad she has a friend in this,” she said, followed by several more suggestions of where to buy things.

  Breakfast had not taken particularly long, so it was still far too early for me to set out for Scotland Yard. I felt bad leaving Milly to fend for herself, a little relieved that I could put off trying to drag some information out of her a little longer, and guilty for being relieved. At least I had shopping for supplies to give me something to do while I waited. Most of the places Mrs. Fitzpatrick had recommended were stalls in Covent Garden, so I had my first walk through a London market building. There wasn’t much room in Milly’s kitchen for anything, even preparing food, so there was only so much I could buy, but I enjoyed poking around the stalls, picking out a bit of fruit, a nice piece of cheese, bread, even a nice little bouquet of flowers that would hopefully cheer the place up. When I’d bought enough to last me a couple of days—if I managed to get Milly out of prison, a nice outing to the market would do her good—I walked back past the small shop I’d visited the night before to pick up a few staples now that I had time to look around.

  Walking back to Milly’s building with a shopping bag full of food made me feel like I fit into the neighborhood. I was going to a flat to put away my groceries and later I would cook myself some dinner and do the washing up and act just like a real Londoner, or at least my idea of one. And then I would sit with a cup of tea and try to sort out the mess Milly had made for herself. But that was for later. First, I had to find out just what sort of a mess Milly was in.

  Once I’d got my shopping put away, I decided Scotland Yard was probably open to visitors and set out. The trip back to Scotland Yard seemed to go a bit faster, although whether that was because I knew my way around the Underground a little better, or because I wasn’t quite so worried about what I’d find when I got there, I wasn’t sure. Inspector Peterson had remembered his promise, and after standing in one line to get the proper forms, I was given a different set of forms than the ones I’d been given the day before and a different window to bring them to once I’d filled them out. The new window had a much shorter line and the forms needed less information. No doubt they assumed that whichever police officer had left the names knew why they wanted the visitor there. Once my paperwork had been approved, I was sent past all the other lines and directly to the one that would lead to the visitors’ elevator. Clearly, an impro
vement over my last visit.

  The improvement continued when I got out of the elevator and the constable who had been sent to meet me led me to a small room with a table and two chairs. Plain, institutional, but private, and slightly more comfortable than the visiting room I’d been in before. Apparently, this was one of the interrogation rooms. I took the chair facing the door, which I assumed was the one the investigator preferred, and passed the time trying to determine if the room was what I had expected from the interrogation scenes I’d read or not. As most of the interrogations I read about happened in country houses or drawing rooms, I didn’t have much to compare it to. I still hadn’t made up my mind when Milly was brought in by a different matron than the one I’d seen before.

  “You’ve been given half-an-hour. If you want to leave sooner, knock on the door. I’ll be right outside to let you out.” She didn’t wait for me to thank her, just left, closing the door behind her. I could hear the heavy clink of the bolt slipping into place as she locked us in. I’d been resenting the idea of her standing outside the door, most likely within hearing distance of what Milly and I said, but hearing the final sound of the lock, I was rather glad to know she was just outside, in case the place caught fire or something and we needed to escape.

  “Hello again, Cassie. How are you liking Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s?” Milly sounded as if she were merely staying at someplace else in town and this was a perfectly normal meeting over tea and scones.

  “Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s is fine, but that’s not why I came back.”

  “The letter to Mother, yes, I do remember. But I’m not sure we should write to her. I mean, I assume you sent a telegram when you arrived to say you’d made it, so they won’t worry about you there. That should be sufficient.”

  I added another thing to my list of things to do. I had intended to send a telegram as soon as I’d gotten to London and settled in at Milly’s, but the combination of the Mystery of the Missing Cousin coupled with the Affair of the Arrested Cousin had shoved thought out of my mind. At least everyone at home would probably blame the time difference or something. And as I only had half-an-hour, I had to figure out how to get Milly to see reason, then extract whatever information I could get out of her. Hopefully, somewhere in it, I could find something that would help her case. “Forget the letter to Aunt Lydia for the moment.”

  “That’s an excellent idea. But if you know anyone at one of the newspapers...”

  I assumed she meant the newspapers in Cleveland. I filed that question away for later. If nothing else, perhaps I could tell her I was sending someone there notes for a story. I still had the newspaper I’d bought to read on the train from Cleveland to New York. I could always grab a reporter’s name from there just in case she was a more diligent newspaper reader than I thought. But even in my head, that plan sounded a little too ridiculous to work, even on Milly. I tried a more direct approach. “Milly, I need to know exactly what happened when you went to visit Mr. Hilliard.”

  “It’s kind of you to be curious...”

  I cut her off. “Inspector Peterson wants to find the real killer. To do that, he needs all the facts.” That didn’t seem to be swaying her. I sighed. I wasn’t quite ready for the reporter story yet, but I was beginning to worry that I’d need it. But if she thought I was curious... “So how did you meet Mr. Hilliard?”

  “He owns a tinkering shop in Mayfair. I thought I’d apply for a job as a salesclerk.”

  “How did you know he was hiring?”

  “I didn’t, but I’d been by the shop enough times, and it seemed like a lovely place to work. Not many customers, plenty to look at, and the other clerk was so friendly every time I went in to browse, that one day I just asked her when the owner was likely to be in and made certain to go visit on that day so I could talk to him.”

  “And did you get the position?” I suspected I knew the answer to that. Milly had no interest in tinkering to begin with.

  “Well, no, not at that moment.”

  Hardly surprising, but that didn’t answer the main question. “So why were you in Mr. Hilliard’s flat to begin with?”

  “I told you I was asking him for a job.”

  “At his home?”

  “He turned me down at the shop, so I thought I’d try again.”

  “At his home?”

  She shrugged. “His head clerk seemed a bit—strict. I thought she might have been the reason he said no, so I was going to try when I knew she wouldn’t be around.”

  That sounded like the sort of logic Milly would use. I was almost afraid to ask, “How did you know where he lived?”

  “I waited for him, of course. There’s a café across the street from the shop, and I waited by the window until he left and followed him home.”

  Milly seemed so casual about it, I suspected it was the truth, but I could see how the police would have a hard time believing it. And it didn’t quite seem like the sort of thing the police would endorse either, or consider a perfectly innocent activity. “Tell me what happened when you got there.”

  “Well, I went up to his flat and the door was open, so I went in, and there he was, on the floor, with blood all around. I went to see if I could do anything, and I was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from, so I turned him over, and, well, it was quite obvious he was dead, so I left.”

  “And how did the dagger come into it?”

  “It was on the floor under him. I wondered if that was what had caused the bleeding, so I picked it up, and it was covered in blood, so I thought that had to be it, so I put it back where I’d found it so the police would have it, rolled him back over on top of it just like he was, and left.”

  If only she’d left to find a policeman at all, that might have worked in her favor. “Did you see anything that could point to the real killer?”

  “I wasn’t really looking around the room. And how would I have known that it was the killer’s and not his? I barely knew him.”

  Probably a good point, but it did make her being in his flat even more suspicious. I tried to think as logically as possible. “You said you followed him home, so he hadn’t been there long. He couldn’t have been dead long either. Could there have been someone else in the flat? Maybe someone who heard you coming up and hid?”

  Milly looked surprised at that thought. “You mean the killer was in there the whole time I was? He could have sprung out and killed me too. Then Mother would have found out right away what had happened.” Milly leaned back in the hard chair and considered how the news of her murder would have played out back home. She seemed to be envisioning some very satisfying newspaper coverage. Then she shook her head. “No, I don’t think there could have been anyone there. It’s not a very big place, not a lot of furniture to hide behind, and there was a lot of light coming through the windows, so no one could have been behind the curtains. And I think I would have heard if one of the doors had closed in the building. No, I’m certain the place was empty when I got there.”

  If she was right, the killer wouldn’t have had much time to get away. I’d have to get a look at the building if I could and see if there was anywhere for someone to have hidden. Perhaps a back staircase, or some way they could have run upstairs as Milly came in so she wouldn’t meet them on the stairs. It was an idea anyway.

  I had quite a few more things I wanted to ask Milly, starting with the name of the tinkering shop in Mayfair where she’d been applying for the job, but the matron came in just then and led Milly away with a look that told me there was no point in asking her for a few more minutes. She stared pointedly at me until I collected up my handbag and left the room myself and started towards the elevator.

  I knew Inspector Peterson meant well when he told me to get Milly to tell me something that would exonerate her, or at least make it possible for him to question her guilt, but he didn’t seem to understand the depth of her irritation towards her mother. She was simply refusing to see what was going to happen to her if someone didn’t find something.
And I was the only person she knew in London. The only one willing to help her, anyway. There had to be something I could find.

  Inspector Peterson had said he needed something that he could take to his superiors as a reason to keep the investigation open. He had expected Milly to have some kind of alibi, but that wasn’t the only kind of information that would help. I didn’t have the capability to find new evidence, nothing Scotland Yard couldn’t do themselves, but I could find motives. All I had to do was find someone who had a better motive than Milly and no alibi, and since Milly didn’t seem to have a motive at all, that couldn’t be too hard.

  So where to start? The victim’s family. That was where the police usually started. And if I didn’t find anything there, I’d go on to his business associates. Of course, to do that, I had to know who his family and business associates were. Since I was already at Scotland Yard, I thought I’d go and see if Inspector Peterson might let something else slip. And while I was at it, I would thank him for making it easier to see Milly this time. Perhaps I could get him to do it again after Milly had had a chance to think and maybe decide she had other things to tell me, or got bored in prison and wanted me to get her out. It was worth a try, anyway. I turned away from the elevator and went to look for the detectives’ offices.

  I managed to find Inspector Peterson’s office on my own and knocked in what I hoped sounded like someone coming to drop off papers or some other routine Scotland Yard task. It must have worked, as I heard a distracted “Enter” from inside the room.

  Inspector Peterson was seated at his desk again, with another folder open in front of him. This one seemed to require him to fill out several forms. He looked up when he heard the door open. It took him a moment to place me, but he did. “Miss Pengear. Were you able to see Miss Prynne?”