Murder as a Fine Art

by David Morrell

“I’m Ann!”

  “No, I’m Ann!”

  “I’m Jane!”

  “Elizabeth!”

  “Catharine!”

  “Love us, Thomas!”

  He shrieked, the wail coming from the depth of his soul, from the pit of his despair. His tears burned his eyes. He sank to his knees, screaming, “No! No! No!”

  WE NEED TO SEPARATE!” Ryan said. “You take that path! I’ll—”

  “Wait. I hear something,” Becker said.

  “Voices. Women’s voices,” Emily said. “They’re calling names.”

  “That way!” Ryan pointed to the left and started to run.

  Becker hung back, needing to stay with Emily and protect her. But she surprised him by rushing ahead, her bloomer dress and her frantic need to reach her father giving her a speed that Becker had difficulty matching.

  They rounded a corner.

  “No!” De Quincey’s voice shrieked from the trees.

  “Ann! Jane!” the women’s voices shouted.

  “Here!” Ryan charged into the undergrowth.

  “Elizabeth! Catharine!” the women chanted.

  “Emily, stay back!” Becker warned.

  But she was too determined. Branches snapped as they forced their way through the trees.

  De Quincey kept wailing.

  “Ann! Jane! Elizabeth! Catharine!” the women chanted.

  Becker pulled his truncheon from beneath his coat, charging past bushes.

  Emily hurried to follow.

  Ahead, Ryan abruptly stopped at the sight of De Quincey on his knees, sobbing. Becker joined him, gaping at ragged women—streetwalkers, old and infected—who shouted the mystifying names.

  “Emily, you shouldn’t see this!”

  “But what’s happening?”

  Becker had no idea. He braced himself, scanning the trees for a threat. All he saw was the women.

  De Quincey’s shoulders heaved, his convulsions rising from the deepest part of his soul.

  “Father!” Emily ran to him. “Are you hurt?”

  De Quincey sobbed too forcefully to answer.

  The women focused on the truncheon in Becker’s hands. With panicked sounds, they backed into the trees.

  “Stop!” Becker ordered.

  But the women hurried away.

  De Quincey sank all the way to the ground.

  “He doesn’t seem injured!” Emily said, straining to hold him up. “I don’t understand!”

  Becker removed another piece of equipment from beneath his coat—the clacker that he used to sound emergencies. He gripped the handle and spun the blade. Its ratcheting alarm was ear-torturing, easily heard throughout the gardens.

  The last of the wizened women vanished into the trees.

  “Inspector!” a man yelled. The newcomer hurried toward them through bushes, one of the plainclothes constables who’d arrived earlier and positioned themselves throughout the grounds.

  “Run to the entrance!” Ryan shouted. “Lock the gates! Don’t let anybody out!”

  As the newcomer raced away, other constables charged through the undergrowth.

  “There are women in the forest!” Becker told them. “Prostitutes! Catch them! Be careful—they might not be alone!”

  Continuing the Journal of Emily De Quincey

  In all my years with Father, I have seen him weep only twice before: at the deaths of my brother Horace and that of my beloved mother, his dutiful wife, Margaret. But now the severity of his grief far exceeded his deep reaction to those losses, and when I came to realize the significance of the names the women had shouted, I understood why.

  Constable Becker lifted Father and carried him through the trees. The constable is so tall and Father so short that Father seemed like a child in the constable’s arms. Inspector Ryan walked with me, warily looking around at the forest as if he expected that at any moment we might be attacked. That Becker now wore street clothes instead of his uniform and Ryan now wore go-to-church clothes instead of his ruffian’s costume only made the world seem even more upside down.

  We reached the performance area of the gardens, passing the hot-air balloon and the tightrope walker, who now stood on the lawn and looked fearfully at the commotion.

  The spires, arches, and towers of the East Indian pavilion beckoned us. Inside, a spreading flower was painted on the vaulted ceiling. The walls depicted Oriental scenes: a tiger in a jungle, a turbaned man on an elephant, a magician playing a flute to an upright hooded snake, a crowd marveling at wonders in a colorful bazaar.

  Constable Becker set Father on a bench against a wall. No matter how fervently I tried to calm Father, he didn’t seem to hear me. His sobs came from a part of him that I couldn’t reach.

  Becker and Inspector Ryan were manifestly disturbed by this dramatic show of emotion. I suspect that they had never seen a man weep before, ever, so strenuously have most people been taught to keep their feelings to themselves.

  The constables who brought in the pathetic women I’d seen in the forest were disturbed by Father’s weeping also, as were the captives who almost certainly had never seen a man weep and who had probably allowed themselves to weep only if alone or with a few trusted friends. Everyone in the strange pavilion had been trained to believe that a show of emotion is a weakness, and Father’s helpless display of absolute sorrow was something they couldn’t comprehend, almost as foreign as the Oriental scenes on the walls.

  More constables came in, bringing more women. Many of the prisoners were weak from visible illness, but all of them struggled as best they could and cursed with such crudity that heat singed my ears.

  “Perhaps you should go,” Ryan told me.

  “I won’t leave Father,” I responded.

  The women were handcuffed in a line, right wrist to a neighbor’s left wrist, then led around a pillar where the final two wrists were secured and the group formed a circle.

  Although I had witnessed streetwalkers in Edinburgh, I had never seen any in a worse condition. Disease had ravaged them. Their faces were riddled with sores. Some had almost no hair. Their shriveled mouths showed gaps where teeth had been. Their complaints reverberated off the arched ceiling.

  “Quiet!” Becker yelled.

  “You won’t get my money!” one shouted.

  “We don’t want your money!” Ryan yelled back. “Not that I believe you have any for me to steal.”

  “Got plenty of money.”

  “Sure.”

  “Earned it, I did!”

  “I’m definitely sure of that.”

  A constable brought in another woman and handcuffed her to the others.

  “How many so far?” Ryan asked.

  “Twenty-three,” Becker answered. “And here comes another one.”

  “Found these on her,” the arriving constable said, holding up two gold coins.

  “Them’s mine! Give ’em back!”

  “Two sovereigns. That’s more than most clerks earn in a week. Where’d you steal them?”

  “Earned ’em.”

  “Tell me another one,” the newly arrived constable said. “Nobody paid two sovereigns to play Bob-in-the-Betty-box with you.”

  “Constable,” Ryan warned and nodded in my direction, making the newcomer aware of my presence. “A lady’s here.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Inspector. I apologize, miss.” The man turned red. “Sometimes they don’t understand unless I speak to them in their language.”

  “Didn’t play Bob-in-the-Betty-box,” the woman objected. “Earned ’em, I tell ya. Honest work.”

  Becker studied the women and said, “If one of them has gold coins, maybe others do.” He approached a woman on his left. “What’s your name?”

  “Doris.”

  “Show me the inside of your pockets, Doris.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll search you if you don’t.”

  “Now I’m scared. He wants to search me, girls.”

  They laughed.

  “I charges for men
to search me,” Doris said. “How much do you want to pay for me to search your pollywog?”

  The women laughed harder.

  I tried to make it seem that I heard this kind of talk every day.

  “Gibson, give me some help,” Becker told the newly arrived constable. With distaste, the two men searched Doris’s pockets.

  “The bugger’s thievin’ from me!” Doris objected. “Yer my witnesses!”

  “I’m not trying to steal from you,” Becker insisted. “Stop fighting. What have you got here?”

  Becker held up two gold coins. “Who else has these?”

  A noisy, frenzied struggle resulted in the discovery that each of the women, all twenty-four of them, had two gold coins.

  Becker frowned. “Where’d you get your coins, Doris?”

  “Worked for ’em, and not the way you think.”

  “Then how?”

  “A gentleman paid me.”

  “To do what?”

  “To sneak in this morning before the gardens opened.”

  “And then what?” Ryan interrupted.

  “To hide in the forest.”

  “And then?” Ryan persisted.

  “When he came along”—the woman pointed toward Father—“I was to call to him.” Doris mimicked the tone that I had heard earlier among the trees. “Thomas. Thomas.”

  She sounded as if she were pleading for help.

  At the sound of his name, I felt Father become tense.

  “Thomas! Thomas!” the other women joined in. The sound boomed violently off the Oriental walls.

  It hurt my ears.

  Father stopped weeping.

  “All right!” Ryan shouted, raising his hands. “Stop! If you want your sovereigns returned, shut up!”

  Gradually, they quieted.

  “The gentleman told me to say I was Ann,” one of the women volunteered.

  “And I was to say I was Jane,” another said.

  “Elizabeth,” a third joined in.

  “Catharine,” a fourth added.

  “No, I’m Ann.”

  “I’m Jane.”

  “I’m Elizabeth.”

  “I’m Catharine.”

  I felt Father’s head rise from where he slumped next to me. Holding him, I looked down and was struck by how red his eyes were from sobbing and how hard the blue of them was.

  The litany of names resounded off the walls.

  Again Ryan shouted, “Damn it, stop!”

  His stern look had its effect, although the harsh echo of their voices took long seconds before the room became still.

  “A gentleman told you to say these names?” Ryan demanded. “What gentleman?”

  They pouted and didn’t answer.

  “I asked, what gentleman? Describe him!”

  Doris looked at Becker. “I don’t like the way he speaks to me. You’re much nicer.”

  “Thank you, Doris,” Becker responded. “Tell me about the gentleman, and I’ll bring you hot tea.”

  “Hot tea?”

  “I promise.” Becker turned toward a constable by the door. “Webster, would you mind taking care of that?”

  The constable looked at Ryan, who nodded his permission.

  “The gardens have a shop just down the path,” Webster said.

  “And you’ll give us our sovereigns back?” Doris asked Becker fretfully.

  “I promise to give you your sovereigns back.”

  Doris smiled, showing toothless gaps.

  As when Ryan and Becker had first met Father and me, I suspected the two had a stratagem in which Ryan made the women feel threatened while Becker was solicitous, winning their cooperation.

  “Doris, what did the gentleman look like?” Becker asked.

  “Tall, he was. Strong-looking.”

  “How old?”

  “Wasn’t young, wasn’t old.” Doris pointed toward Ryan. “Like him.”

  “Did he have a beard?”

  Doris nodded emphatically. “Yellowlike.”

  I felt Father sit up beside me.

  “How was he dressed?” Becker asked.

  “Like a sailor,” Doris answered. “But he didn’t fool me. No sailor ever gave me two sovereigns. A shilling if I was lucky. Never two sovereigns.”

  “Forty-eight pounds all told,” Ryan noted. “A man of means.”

  “Doris, how did he talk?” Becker asked.

  “Not like any sailor I ever met. This one was educated, he was. A gentleman.”

  “Weren’t you afraid? After all, he was lying about himself.”

  “ ’Course I was. Since Saturday night, everybody I know is afraid. But he gave me two sovereigns.” Doris spoke as if that was all the fortune in the world. “Ain’t never seen two sovereigns before. Sometimes he used fancy words I didn’t understand.”

  “Like what?”

  Doris searched her memory. “Like ‘rehearse.’ Didn’t have the faintest. Turns out it means he needed to get us together in an alley and tell us what to say and be satisfied we remembered it.”

  “Tonight we go back and get another sovereign,” a woman near Doris said proudly.

  “Another one?” Ryan asked in surprise.

  “Hush, Melinda,” Doris warned.

  “No, tell me.” Ryan stepped forward.

  “To make sure we did what we was supposed to, he said if we was good he’d give us another sovereign tonight,” Melinda said.

  “Where?”

  “In the same alley where we…” Melinda looked at Doris.

  “Rehearsed,” Doris said, pleased that she remembered the word.

  “Tell me where,” Ryan persisted.

  “Oxford Street.”

  The name made Father stiffen as I held him.

  “Can we have our tea now?” Doris asked. “I was cold in them woods.”

  “It’s on its way,” Becker promised.

  “Melinda, will you take me to where the alley is?” Ryan asked.

  “No!” Doris objected. “Then the gentleman’ll see you and he won’t show up to give us the other sovereign.” She scowled at Melinda. “I told you to hush.”

  “He won’t see us, I guarantee,” Ryan assured her. “And for cooperating we’ll bring you biscuits with your tea.”

  “Biscuits? Lordy, you treat me just like a lady.”

  “Just like a lady,” Ryan agreed.

  “Yellowlike,” Father said, startling me. It had been a long time since he’d spoken.

  Everyone looked in his direction.

  “Excuse me?” Ryan asked him.

  “She said ‘yellowlike.’ The beard was ‘yellowlike.’ ”

  Father surprised me even more by standing. His sobbing had made his face seem narrower than usual. His blue eyes were even more stark.

  “Yellowlike. That’s what I said,” Doris agreed, uneasy about Father’s intensity.

  “Which means not yellow but somewhat like it,” Father said. “Could the color have been closer to orange? Perhaps a cross between the two?”

  Doris cocked her head one way and then the other, thinking. “A little orange, a little yellow. Ain’t seen many beards like it.”

  “That’s the color I describe in ‘Murder as a Fine Art,’ ” Father told Ryan. “In the essay, I suggest that the color might have been a disguise.”

  “Disguise?”

  “John Williams worked on ships that sailed to India. Some criminal sects there change the color of stolen horses with dyes, one of which is the color Doris describes and which I mentioned in my essay. I raised the question of whether Williams dyed his hair to disguise his appearance when he committed his crimes.”

  “You’re suggesting that our man dyed his beard for the same purpose as well as to imitate what was in your essay?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m suggesting far more. I have trouble imagining that the killer grew a beard, a several-months’ process, and kept dyeing it. Meanwhile, he would also be forced to dye his hair to match it, lest the discrepancy between his hair and his beard att
ract more attention than the unusual color of the disguise. It’s all too complicated.”

  “The beard itself is a disguise?”

  “Without question. Just as he disguises himself in sailor’s clothes. Perhaps he has a theatrical background.”

  “An actor?”

  “Someone who is an expert in changing his appearance. Make inquiries at shops that sell wigs and makeup to performers.”

  Ryan turned to one of the constables. “You know what to do, Gibson.”