by Alex Reeve
‘So?’
Hooper sighed as if to imply that explanations were beneath him. ‘On the same evening as the …’ he squinted at Aiden, who was staring out of the window ‘… as the tragic event, two men were seen at the mill who shouldn’t have been, skulking around. They ran away when they were spotted. We’re getting descriptions of them as we speak, though we’re quite certain who one of ’em is.’ He gestured towards the children. ‘Something like the tragic event happening at the same place as they’re plotting a major crime. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection, does it?’
Now I knew why John Thackery had needed an alibi; he had gone to scout the mill as part of a plan to set fire to it. That mill was the thing his father cared most about, and John wanted to take it away from him.
Of course, he might also have murdered Dora Hannigan and orphaned her two children.
‘Do you think Miss Hannigan was involved in the plot?’ I asked.
‘More than likely.’ He looked at me closely. ‘You show an awful lot of interest for someone who claims not to be part of all this. Were you really with that fellow what’s-his-name?’
‘Duport. And yes, of course.’ I could hear my voice quivering. ‘Why would you doubt it, Detective?’
‘It’s Detective Inspector. And you’re each other’s alibi, which always makes me suspicious.’ He steepled his fingers together, watching me. ‘If I find out you’re lying, Stanhope, I’ll be coming to arrest you.’
There was a knock on the door and a friendly-looking constable came in. He patted Aiden on his head, and the boy flinched away.
‘Do they have any possessions?’ he asked me. ‘Clothes, toys, anything like that?’
‘No.’ I felt foolish for not having thought of it before. ‘I suppose their things are still at the club.’
He led them away and I watched them through the open door. They seemed very small, and I couldn’t help but feel I was betraying them.
Aiden looked back once, his dark eyes unreadable.
7
I left the hospital at dusk that evening, worn out by the extra duties my foreman had given me for arriving an hour late. He was not a stern man by nature but was so concerned that one of us might realise it, he punished us all the more.
The pharmacy was empty, so I sat at the table in the back room, relishing the silence and solitude. This was my favourite place. It was dusty from the permanent haze of talcum and bicarbonate of soda that Alfie mixed with lavender for tooth powder and kaolin for face powder, and I loved to sit there and surmise the day’s events from our footprints: Alfie’s chunky ex-army boots, Constance’s flat slippers, my own long, slim shoes and Colly’s eager paws.
Constance burst in, rosy-cheeked as if she’d run all the way from school.
‘Is Father here?’ she demanded.
‘No. I take it you’ve had a good day?’
She nodded enthusiastically. ‘I am inspired!’ Her eyes were positively glowing. ‘Where’s Father’s Materia Medica?’
I reached the book down from the highest shelf and handed it to her. It was a big, lumpy thing coming apart at the spine, with discoloured pages that were apt to fall out, but she cradled it in her arms as if it was as precious as a baby.
‘Don’t tell him, Mr Stanhope. Not yet.’
‘Don’t tell him what?’
She rolled her eyes as if I was incapable of understanding the simplest thing. ‘Isn’t it obvious? I’ve decided to become a doctor!’
She staggered into the pharmacy with the book, and I heard the thud of it being dropped on to the counter, the whisper of the pages being turned and finally her contented sigh as she started reading.
It wasn’t all that long ago, a few months at most, that she’d persuaded Alfie to allow her to follow him into pharmacy once her schooling was complete. He considered the long years of study and gruelling examinations to be too much for a young lady, but had been forced to accept her aptitude when she made a batch of cinnamon powders in his absence, and immediately sold a packet of it to the bank manager for one and six. The fellow had returned twice since then for a new supply and would let no one mix the stuff but her, saying it relieved his digestive agonies like nothing else he’d tried.
I must confess, I was jealous. At her age, I had already been removed from school by my father, and even before that our classes were mostly dreary hours of poetry and sewing. The closest we’d come to meeting a member of the medical profession was a visit by a flinty Scottish nurse who’d inspected the skin between our fingers for the itch and scraped our scalps with a comb for nits. She saw us in alphabetical order, starting with Nicola Antrobus, so I had to watch the suffering of more than half the alphabet before she got to P for Pritchard. Lord knows how it felt for poor Susan Watkins.
Now, women could become doctors themselves, apparently. If Jane had ever suggested such a thing to our father, he would have removed every science book he owned – which was several as he had a passing interest in anatomy – and forced her to spend her days playing the piano and singing in the choir.
But that didn’t mean he was wrong. No one could doubt she had the brains for the profession, but I knew well how much strength was required to crank open a chest or saw through a bone. And if the argument were made that I was a hypocrite, having myself performed those tasks despite my female physique, I would respond that I have, on occasion, been required to climb on to the table with the ‘patient’, who was invariably already dead and therefore unaware of the intimacy, to gain the necessary leverage. No lady would be willing to do such a thing, no matter how clever she was.
Constance’s ambition would surely prove a step too far for Alfie.
I followed her through to the pharmacy, but she was so engrossed she didn’t notice me until I cleared my throat.
‘I met a little girl a few days ago,’ I said. ‘She told me she’d seen a lion in London, roaming free.’
‘A lion?’
Her expression was much the same as I suspected my own had been when Aiden told me.
‘Yes. Assuming it wasn’t a real lion, can you think what she might have seen? Is there a … I don’t know, a place where there are model lions, or a puppet show or something?’
She thought for a moment and then shrugged. ‘There’s the zoo, of course. Other than that, no. Is it important?’
‘Perhaps, yes. She was a witness to something very bad. Her mother was killed. She and her brother are orphans.’
Constance nodded, her face blank, though not through any lack of empathy. Quite the opposite. She had once told me she could hardly remember her own mother and felt her loss not as a person whom she missed, but as a gap in the world, an emptiness where someone ought to be.
‘The girl I met is very young,’ I conceded. ‘It’s possible she was confused or dreaming.’
‘Perhaps you should take her to the zoo to see a real lion.’
‘Perhaps.’
Constance turned to face me, leaving her finger on the page, which, I noticed, described the medicinal properties of ox bile.
‘I’ve never been,’ she said. ‘You could take the little girl and I could come with you.’
‘It’s probably expensive.’
I was hoping she would take the hint and stop talking about it, but, of course, she was Constance.
‘You can’t mope all the time, Mr Stanhope. Have you ever been to the zoo?’
‘No, but—’
She frowned at me. ‘The girl could look at a real lion and you’d know for sure, wouldn’t you? You did say it was important.’
I supposed she might be right, but I was determined not to admit it. With Constance, an inch conceded now would become a yard and then a mile, and I might end up taking her to Africa to see wild lions or buying her one of her own to keep in the yard.
‘I’ll consider the idea.’
‘You’re not working on Saturday afternoon, are you? We can go then.’
She nodded firmly as if to suggest that she
had solved my problem, and if I wouldn’t act upon her solution there was nothing more anyone could do for me.
Over the following days and nights, I found my mind engulfed. At night I was unable to sleep, turning and twisting in the bedsheets, and at work I was continually distracted, putting towels and bandages on the wrong shelves and forgetting the most basic of chores. A pile of letters sat in the tray for two days without being posted.
When I wasn’t worrying about the police and the lie I’d told them, I was fretting about the orphans. My own mother had been dead for six years. She had died slowly, bedridden, knowing that the end was coming. I had not been there to read ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to her and stroke her cheek. It was not my fault. It was not. I had not even known she was dying. The first I’d heard of it was from Jane, long after it had happened, sitting in a tea shop on Warwick Avenue. It didn’t seem real. I wondered whether she was lying, and our mother was alive and well, sipping tea and embroidering cushions in the vicarage parlour. But Jane’s breath was uneven and her face flushed. She was trying her hardest not to weep.
‘I couldn’t find you,’ she explained. ‘I sent a letter to your last address, but you didn’t reply.’
‘What name did you use?’
‘Your name, Lottie. What was I supposed to do?’
She knew perfectly well what my correct name was.
I didn’t see my sister or speak to her for two years after that, and even then it was intermittent and laced with resentment. For the past year, we’d been utterly estranged.
It was far longer since I’d spoken to my brother; not since I’d left home.
And my father? He meant nothing to me now.
I was lost from my family.
I was an orphan too.
On the Friday after I had left the children with the police, the first day of April, I set out through the evening fog for Rose Street. I had no faith that Hooper would search for a relative of theirs to look after them, so I would have to do it myself.
Of course, someone at the club might be the murderer. I had to be careful. If the killer knew Ciara was a witness, he might want her dead as well.
I knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I knocked again and tried the handle. It turned, so I let myself inside.
The corridor was narrower than I remembered and dim, lit by a single lamp, low on its wick, on a shelf by the back door. People were talking in the rooms on either side, and a woman was singing somewhere upstairs, accompanied by a violin. The smell was musty and thick as though the windows were rarely opened or, given the labyrinthine layout of the building, the air in the distant hallways and stairwells had stagnated, unable to circulate. I put my hand on the wall, expecting it to be damp, but it was dry and flaky under my fingertips. The picture frames nailed to it were coming away, and dust from the holes had collected on the dado rail.
I knew I would never be able to find John Thackery’s office again even if I wanted to, and I was too nervous to set off exploring, so I continued down the corridor. Near the end, on the left, a door was marked steward.
I was about to knock when I realised someone was watching me. The back-door window looked out on to the courtyard, and I could see three men, two standing on the ramshackle steps that led up to the first-floor gallery, and one sitting on a box on the ground, squinting at me, smoke drifting from his nostrils. He was bald, with narrow eyes and a wide nose as if he’d been punched a few times. He nudged his friend and pointed in my direction.
I shrank back from the lamplight and tapped on the steward’s door, before opening it.
To my surprise, a woman was sitting at a desk, wearing a leather thimble on her index finger. She looked up from her ledger as I came in, indicating one of the chairs.
‘Are you the … stewardess?’ I asked.
‘Steward will be fine,’ she muttered. ‘Just a moment.’ She continued at her ledger, adding totals with a scratchy pen, apparently doing the calculations in her head.
I waited. The office was neat and workmanlike, stacked with labelled files. There were twenty or more hooks on one wall, mostly empty but some holding rings of heavy, black keys. On another, a map of Britain and Europe had been pasted like a piece of wallpaper.
Eventually, she did a final tot of the numbers, running her finger down the page and moving her lips slightly, before drawing a confirmatory line under the grand total.
‘Right!’ she said in an accent straight from the East End. ‘Now, what can I do for you?’
‘I’ve come regarding Miss Hannigan. Or rather, her children.’
‘Have they been found?’
I thought I detected a note of eagerness in her manner, though it might have been no more than honest concern for their welfare.
‘They’re with the police.’ I wanted her to know they were safely out of anyone’s reach. ‘I’m hoping to find a relative who’d be willing to take them.’
‘I see.’ She smiled, but it was a formality. There was no warmth in it. ‘And you are?’
‘Stanhope,’ I answered, immediately wondering if I should have given a false name.
‘Mrs Raster. But I’m afraid I can’t help you. Our residents are very private.’
She smiled again, this time as a dismissal. She wanted to get back to her accounts.
But I wasn’t finished. ‘Their mother was murdered right here on your property. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
She sat back and met my eye. It was the first time I’d had her full attention.
‘Bad things happen everywhere,’ she said.
‘I met J. T. Whitford, the journalist on the Daily Chronicle. Perhaps you’ve seen him? I’m sure he’d be interested to know how cooperative you’ve been. He might want to write an article about it.’
Mrs Raster gazed at the columns of numbers on her desk, taking comfort, I thought, from their neatness and precision. ‘I’m the steward here, that’s all. Anything’s amiss about Miss Hannigan, it’s on Mr Cowdery, not me. I told the other gentleman the same thing.’
‘What other gentleman? You mean from the police?’
She opened and shut her mouth. ‘Yes, exactly. From the police.’
I was sure she was lying, and that meant someone else had been asking questions too. I wondered who. And why.
‘This Mr Cowdery you mentioned, is he in charge?’
She rubbed her thimble on the desk, making a squeaking sound. ‘They don’t hold with one man being placed above another. They don’t think it’s right. But yes, as much as anyone can be said to be in charge of anything around here, it’s him. Leastwise, anything political.’
‘You don’t take part in the politics?’
‘Goes straight over my head, most of it.’ She chuckled, displaying brown and broken teeth. ‘They talk, talk, talk, while I earn a crust fixing the pipes and counting the rent.’ She scratched her head and sniffed her fingers. ‘Why do you want to know, anyway?’
‘Curiosity. How long did Dora Hannigan live here?’
‘Three years, maybe? Something like that. She kept herself to herself, her and the kids.’
‘And there’s no Mr Hannigan?’
‘I’m not one to judge.’
‘Was she particularly friendly with anyone here? Anyone I could speak to.’
Mrs Raster shifted in her chair. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What about Mr Thack … I mean, Mr Duport. Was she friendly with him?’
‘I s’pose so, but there was nothing going on. No funny business. They were more like, I don’t know, like she was his older sister or something. It was her who vouched for him in the first place.’
‘What was she like?’
Mrs Raster smiled. ‘Clever, as it happens. She’s not like most of ’em. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they ever do.’ Her smile faded as she remembered that Miss Hannigan was dead. ‘Not Dora, though. She got together all the kids, including her own, and started giving ’em lessons. Reading and writing, sums, needlework for the girls and how to s
peak English for the foreigns.’
‘She ran a school?’
Mrs Raster nodded. ‘Nothing official, but she kept ’em in line. She wouldn’t suffer any cheek and they had to turn up with their slates and everything, each morning without fail, her own lad included.’
The way she said it made me think she was referring to something specific. ‘Was Aiden reluctant to attend?’
‘He’s a proper boy, that one. He don’t like being cooped up. He wants to be outside kicking things around with the lads in the street. Or fighting ’em, of course. Many’s the time I had to break up a scrap. But it’s natural enough, ain’t it? How boys are.’
I thought of Aiden’s fierce face. I had already seen that he had a temper.
‘Was Miss Hannigan involved in the politics of this place? Was she an anarchist?’
‘If that’s what one of them’s called, then yes, I s’pose so. But she was a decent person and always had enough chink on hand to pay the rent.’ She opened her ledger. ‘Here we are; first of March, three months upfront.’
‘I see. So, by my maths, you’ve been overpaid by two months. You can let her room to someone else and get paid twice.’
Mrs Raster pulled her ledger closer towards her. She seemed unbothered by my implication that she was profiting from Dora Hannigan’s death. ‘Can’t refund the dead,’ she said, as though that settled the point. ‘Anyway, there’s no one in her room yet. It’s not as simple as just getting a new lodger. Mr Cowdery has to give ’em the nod.’
I really wanted to see that room. I wanted to inhale its smells and touch its furniture and listen to the sounds of its neighbours through the walls. I wanted to understand more about Dora Hannigan.
‘Are her possessions still here somewhere? If so, I should collect the children’s clothes for them.’