Against the Light

by Marjorie Eccles

  He indicated his cab and Inskip opened his mouth to frame a question, but there was no stopping him.

  ‘Spoke like a toff, he did, polite and all that, and they was laughing a lot … I reckoned they’d been making a night of it. But before we got here the big fella leans forward and tells me to stop. Calls out goodnight, still having a laugh, and then he was out and off into the rain with only a “Goodnight, then.” The other one didn’t answer him. Passed out, or fallen asleep most like. As I said, I thought they’d been out on the razzle. I carried on till I got here then I says, “Here we are, sir,” but he doesn’t stir, does he, so I goes and opens the door to give him a prod. Wondering what to do with him, see, hoping he hadn’t been bleedin’ sick. I’ve had drunks like that before, but usually it’s taking them home and leaving ’em to somebody else. Gawd! I’ve seen some sights in my time but that …’Orrrible, it were. Didn’t take me long to see he wasn’t with us no more, I can tell you.’ He took a red-spotted handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose loudly and gave a rattling cough.

  ‘Nasty shock,’ Inskip agreed.

  ‘You can say that again. Not nice at all, and blood all over me cab!’

  ‘We’ll see about getting it cleaned up for you when we’ve finished with it.’

  ‘Finished with it? And what am I supposed to do without it meantime? I’ve already been diddled out of one fare tonight. It ain’t my fault he got hisself topped.’ He coughed again, his eyes streamed and he put his head in his hands. The moustache drooped mousily.

  Inskip had every sympathy with him. The fellow was not only aggrieved, he was understandably worried, since his livelihood depended on this motor. He walked over to Gaines, who was with the doctor, and spoke to him for a while. He came back with the news that the inspector would see he was provided with a substitute vehicle until his own could be returned to him. ‘You may as well go now, Mr Sheldyke, get yourself to bed. Come in and see us tomorrow morning and we’ll see about arranging it. We’ll need you to sign what you’ve just told us, as well. Don’t forget to leave your address.’

  The cabbie didn’t know it, but he wasn’t yet ruled out as a suspect. There was only his word for it that there had been two passengers. If the victim had been alone and flashed money about, who was to say the cabbie hadn’t killed him and relieved him of it? There was no blood on his clothing but if he lived so near he could have stepped home to change it and got rid of the money before calling the police. Inskip didn’t really think it likely – there was no doubt he felt as rotten with his cold as he looked, and he seemed genuinely shaken, but who wouldn’t be if they’d just killed someone?

  Sheldyke didn’t seem altogether reassured by what he’d been told, but he thankfully staggered off, shivering, in search of a hot drink and his bed, and Inskip rejoined Gaines and the doctor, having now finished his examination, while they waited for the ambulance to come so the body could be removed from the cab. The dead man was propped upright, his head to one side, slumped against the side of the cab, almost as if he might have fallen heavily asleep. But the wide bloody gash just under his jaw instantly removed any suppositions of that sort. One side of his clothing was soaked with the blood that had flowed from the wound and pooled on to the leather seats. ‘Somebody knew what he was doing,’ remarked the doctor, ‘severed the jugular and the carotid vein, clean as a whistle. Poor devil,’ he added. He was elderly, on the point of retiring, a man who had seen it all before and whom nothing could surprise, but he hadn’t yet lost his compassion.

  ‘The driver says he heard nothing, but wouldn’t he have cried out when he was attacked, Doctor Fenton?’ Gaines asked.

  ‘He’d hardly have known what was happening. Death would have been instantaneous, or very nearly. And he may have been in a drunken sleep when it happened … smelling like that, I don’t need to examine him to know he’d had fair amount.’

  The victim was a young man of under medium height, slightly built. His now blood-soaked tweeds were well worn, his shirt cuffs slightly frayed. His shoes were down at heel and badly in need of resoling, but as far as anyone could tell, everything he wore appeared to have once been of good quality. Hopefully, there might be a tailor’s label inside when it was possible to divest him of his suit.

  ‘He wore glasses,’ Gaines remarked, ‘look at the mark across the bridge of his nose.’ But if they had fallen off, there was no sign of them. ‘Ask the cabbie tomorrow if he remembers him wearing them, Joseph.’ After addressing him formally as ‘Sergeant’, ever since they’d first begun to work together, the inspector had lately gone so far as to call him ‘Joseph’ on occasion. Inskip took that as a step forward in their hitherto fairly cool, though not actively unfriendly, relationship. ‘Or a hat,’ he added. ‘No sign of that, either.’

  It was slightly bizarre to think of the spectacles being removed after he was dead, either because they’d been knocked off accidentally in the attack and the killer had simply taken them with him, which seemed unnecessary, or even if they had been the expensive, gold-rimmed sort which could have been sold, since robbery as the motive for the murder wasn’t immediately apparent: although the victim’s pockets were empty of everything but a handkerchief tucked into his top pocket, and a few coins of low denomination in those of his trousers, he still wore an old-fashioned but expensive gold ‘Albert’ watch chain stretched across his waistcoat, to which was attached a gold half-hunter of some considerable value. From the chain also depended a gold wedding ring. Had this young man tragically lost his wife? It seemed reasonable to assume that if he’d been the sort of person who had been moved to keep her ring, he might also have had her photograph, or even a lock of her hair, tucked into his wallet. Except that any wallet he might have had was missing. Maybe it had held paper money and had been taken for that – though that still begged the question of why the gold watch and chain had been left.

  It was in the nature of their work – their fate, George Gaines sometimes thought – to face the sordid details of life, and all too often death, but nothing saddened him more than the futile waste of a young life. And this man was young, still in his twenties, he guessed, with most of his life before him, now abruptly cut off, for whatever reason. Not apparently through any sudden quarrel, according to the cabbie. Both his fares had been in high spirits when they entered his cab, and he would certainly have heard if it had degenerated into something else, and indeed, the murderer – chilling thought – had still been laughing when he left the cab. No, this killing indicated malicious forethought: the possession of a knife ready to be used for the murder, the quick, no doubt planned, exit.

  ‘Let’s have a look at that handkerchief. There might be a laundry mark.’

  Inskip gingerly inserted two fingers and eased out the folded handkerchief that was tucked into the top pocket with two jaunty points showing, but its fine, hemstitched cotton was scarcely soiled, the thickness of the tweed having protected it somewhat. He shook it out, showing the ironed creases it still retained, but there was no laundry mark. Home laundered, then. His shirt, what part of it that wasn’t blood-soaked, revealed itself as snowy white and his collar was stiffly starched. A man who had pretty obviously come down in the world was unlikely to have servants to wash his linen, so if the wedding ring had belonged to his dead wife, perhaps he’d returned to the parental home to live. Gaines did not welcome the thought of having to inform a mother of the bloody murder of her son.

  Inskip bent to retrieve a folded scrap of paper which had come out with the handkerchief and fluttered to the ground. It too had escaped the worst of the bloodstains. It was folded into four and when he opened it, the address pencilled on it was clearly readable. He stared, and went on staring.

  ‘Well?’ Gaines’ voice roused him. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe this, sir. It says Nine Catesby Street.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s my Auntie Orla’s address!’

  Four

  Unrefreshed after a restless nig
ht, her body stiff from unconsciously lying tensed while she slept, Alice woke late, to another cold but sparkling spring morning, the sort of day that had made her father say he wished he could bottle it and give it to his patients as medicine. One of those days when it felt good to be alive. And indeed, it was impossible to give way to the sort of thoughts that had drifted through her mind while she slept; they were even now slipping away as the bright sunshine filled her room and came to rest on the chocolate truffles, still wrapped in the white linen handkerchief. She moved them to one side, out of the sun, still amused at the thought of Edmund – Edmund – snaffling them! He hadn’t forgotten her, even as he socialized, though it didn’t appear as though he’d enjoyed the event. It had been thoughtful of David Moresby, always with his finger on the pulse, to give the tactful reminder that she herself hadn’t been under any obligation to attend.

  It was some time since she’d seen David. Disconcertingly blue eyes that tended to laugh at odd moments. The dark unruly hair disciplined with a judicious amount of brilliantine but still sometimes looking as though he shoved his fingers through it. Popular, ambitious, easy with people, bespoke suits that showed off a lithe figure, he was all set to become the rising young politician he aspired to be, though David Moresby occupying a similar position to Edmund would be an entirely different proposition, she thought. Perhaps if she’d gone to the Essendines’ last night it wouldn’t have been as boring as she had imagined it would be. They could have shared a joke or two at the expense of the more pompous of those present. David was undoubtedly a young man in a hurry, but one who didn’t let his ambition overrule his sense of humour.

  A glance out of the window revealed no sign of the Napier below. Edmund must have left earlier and let her sleep on without disturbing her, knowing it wasn’t her scheduled day at the Dorcas. The reminder caused her to hesitate. For a wonder, she had nothing else planned to fill her time that day. So why not profitably spend it at the clinic? Edmund would no doubt say she was ‘wasting’ her free day. She refused to allow the sneaking suspicion that he thought of it as something to keep her from mischief to linger, and decided she would cycle there, hoping the day wouldn’t cloud over and bring the rain to catch her on her way home, as it had yesterday. If it did, so much the worse. She wasn’t in the mood to suffer one of Lowther’s sour monologues, and the exercise would ease the stiffness from muscles that had been tensed and unrelaxed all night.

  Coincidences like this just didn’t happen, Inskip told himself. His Jewish friend, the tailor who made the natty suits Inskip indulged himself with, said that the Hebrew word for coincidence could be rearranged to mean ‘only from God’ which meant there had to be a reason for it. Be that as it may, he knocked on his aunt’s door in the East End and waited with a tingling sense of anticipation.

  Unlovely as it was, busy, workaday Catesby Street was no different to any other in the confusion of streets and alleys round here, where mean houses, shops, sheds and tenements, crammed together in various stages of neglect and disrepair, rose to the sky, obscuring any light that might venture to penetrate its murk. Even this bright, breezy day couldn’t banish the vile, acrid stink from the tannery close by. From behind the street came children’s voices in the playground of the nearby elementary school, shrill above the hoarse calls of a rag-and-bone man perched on a cart being dragged along by a dispirited horse. More raised voices came from two women who were loudly berating the owner of a makeshift market stall over the bulged apples he was trying to pass off as sound. And it looked as though a fight might be starting in a crowd collected outside the public house on the corner. Luckily, before Inskip could be expected to intervene, the door was opened.

  ‘Why, if this isn’t a miracle – just when I’ve been asking myself if I was ever going to see you again, Joseph. You’re as welcome as the day!’ His diminutive Aunt Orla beamed, opened her arms and reached up to fold him in a pillowy embrace. ‘I suppose you’ll be telling me you’ve been too busy again to come and see your old auntie!’

  ‘Never too busy for that – and hey, I was here only last week, remember?’

  ‘Last week, last month, it seems longer,’ she returned equably. ‘And what are we doing, standing on the doorstep? Will you come in then, and let me be having a proper look of you. Sure you’re a real bobby-dazzler!’

  Inskip was pleased she’d noticed his new suit. But had she really forgotten he’d called to see her only last week? Or was it just a way of making him feel guilty? Orla was sharp, and on reflection, he had to admit it might just have been two weeks … perhaps three?… since his last visit. He’d always been close to her, his favourite aunt, and he tried to make it in his way to pop in and see her regularly. But it was true, the boss hadn’t left him time for much else just lately; Gaines could be a bit of a slavedriver on occasion. It gave him a pang of remorse to think it had only now occurred to him that she might be lonely, living alone, despite her cronies from St Bede’s Church, and that was maybe why she took in lodgers. He vowed to make more time for her in future.

  Following her into the steamy kitchen, the familiar laundry sights and smells greeted him: a copper simmering in the corner, a scent of warm, ironed linen and yellow Sunlight soap. It was crowded with two dolly tubs and a mangle, as well as the kitchen table and chairs. Two flat irons heated on the open coal range. He ducked under the laden wooden ceiling rack worked by a pulley, used for laundry on wet days – and on days like this, too, when the odds were not great on it coming in from the line outside without smuts. The moist heat bathed around him – the Turkish baths down the road were less steamy – but he wouldn’t have dreamed of suggesting it would be more comfortable in the parlour, which he knew would be no less cluttered.

  Orla Maclusky was his mother’s sister. Despite a sprinkling of grey in her dark curly hair and the extra pounds she’d accumulated over the years, she’d lost none of her Irish beauty. Her skin bloomed like a young woman’s, except where the laughter lines showed, and her eyes were as bright and blue as they had been when she’d first left the shores of Erin with his parents for England. She’d come to London in her twenties but she still had a lot of the Irish in her speech, richly embellishing the acquired accent of East London, particularly in moments of excitement, or stress.

  She’d never married, but she’d done well for herself with the little business she ran, the profits from it enabling her to buy a modest house in this poor district, where she had set up as a dealer in second-hand clothes. Nothing ratty, she insisted, priding herself on the quality of the garments she sold to those who could afford them, earning a good reputation by never offering anything for sale unless it was clean, and in reasonable repair. Her trade kept her ceaselessly busy, washing, ironing, mending and setting out the clothes for display in her front room, yet she still found the time and energy to take in the occasional lodger to augment her income.

  He let her rattle on until he had the opportunity to steer the conversation the way he wanted it to go. ‘Well, then, how is the new resident?’ he asked when they were sitting down with their tea steaming in front of them.

  ‘My lodger, is it? Now, that’s funny you should ask. He came back only yesterday. I’d scarcely seen neither the hide nor the hair of him for more than a month until then.’

  ‘He’d left you?’

  ‘Not for good. His things were still here and I knew he’d come back. And so he did.’

  ‘You weren’t bothered at him disappearing like that, Auntie Orla? Anyone else would have thrown him out. Sounds as though he was up to something fishy.’

  ‘The police are giving you a nasty suspicious mind, Joseph. Lennie’s not one of your bad lads. I like him, and besides, he’d paid his rent well in advance, although he doesn’t have much money to spare. But things are going to get better for him soon, he says, and I believe him. He’s quiet and considerate – and he never misses going to mass,’ she added, taking the opportunity of throwing out a broad hint to Inskip, which he pretended not to hear. ‘He n
ever goes out much, or not until lately. Keeps his room tidy and has his meals with me.’ She thought about what he’d said for a moment. ‘But I have been a bit worried, to tell the truth. I think he hasn’t been well, he looks delicate to me. He didn’t come home last night. I don’t suppose he’d have gone out at all if Danny hadn’t persuaded him.’

  ‘Danny?’

  ‘Danny O’Rourke,’ she said carefully, watching him. ‘He came to see me last night.’

  ‘And you let him in?’ said Inskip, when he could. ‘O’Rourke?’

  ‘Would I have left him on the doorstep, and he with messages from the cousins still in the old country? The old folk there still remember me, I’ll have you know.’ She sighed a little, a faraway look in her eyes. Did she still hanker after going back to Ireland? he’d sometimes wondered. She always welcomed anyone who brought her news of her old home with open arms. But O’Rourke being back in London was not welcome news for anyone, especially Inskip. There were unresolved issues between them, going back a long way. Once there’d been a girl, Cathleen, who could have amounted to a great deal for Inskip, had she not been dazzled by smiling eyes, and been taken in by the blarney. He might have learned to live with that if O’Rourke hadn’t taken off and disappeared when she became pregnant. A good Irish Catholic girl, having a baby out of wedlock, an absent father … it had been too much for Cathleen and she had let the river claim her life.

  How dared the bastard show his face back here? Inskip wasn’t the only one who had matters to settle with him. Cathleen’s parents, and her three brothers, had never forgiven him for the sadness and shame he had brought on them.

  Orla, watching him, divined his thoughts. ‘Sure, it’s tempting to believe that one’s the divil on three legs,’ she said, crossing herself even as she spoke. ‘He’s back here for something, that’s for sure, but as Father Finucane tells us, forgiveness is …’ Catching Inskip’s eye, she stopped and hastily changed direction. ‘Only yesterday he was wondering why he never sees you at mass lately? Father Finucane, I mean.’