The Ring

by M. J. Trow

  He was far upstream now, watching the little eddies of dark water under his oar blades – Father Thames trying to decide which way to run. The river had its ways, difficult and meandering, still furious at the way that Joseph Bazalgette had hemmed it in downstream with his concrete embankments, burying the soft warm mud for ever as London grew into a new kind of jungle. To his right the fields lay a dull gold as the sun’s early rays lit them, stretching across Chelsea to the Hospital where a few little old men in scarlet tottered around their gardens. Soon, Crossland knew, they would change into their regulation blue; the season was September and Winter Dress would come in.

  To his left, the dark trees of Battersea Gardens dipped over the bank. Bazalgette’s blocks had not spread this far upriver and the mud still ruled. When Crossland had first joined the River Police, there had been mudlarks along this stretch, up to their thighs in the grey-brown sludge, up to their elbows in its cold clamminess, looking for anything dropped from a passing boat. George Crossland had only a passing acquaintance with history, but he knew that men had lived along the river for centuries and men in every age were careless with their belongings. Thomas More, someone had told him, once lived somewhere along this river stretch. He had been King Henry the Eighth’s right-hand man and was richer than God. He was always dropping stuff on his way home by watermen, or so the story went.

  But perhaps the mud at Battersea was all played out, because there were no mudlarks here now. They’d all moved downstream towards the docks. That was where the real rubbish lay, pennies, trinkets, bonnets and shawls. All right, the clothes stank and had to be washed and dried in the sun, but they would do for the old clo’ markets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields; and people couldn’t afford to be too choosy these days – not if they scratched a living with the Irish in the East End.

  Crossland steadied his oar as he let the galley’s prow nudge the old jetty. It was still marked clearly on all the maps but no one used it now. London had grown so fast that most people visiting Battersea Gardens went by bus or train. It was still quicker to walk than to haggle with a pleasure-boat owner on the river and a damned sight cheaper. He looked across to the north bank again. A solitary copper from V Division was ambling at the regulation speed past Turk’s Row. There was no one else about. The carters had been up for the best part of an hour now and already hauling hay and carrying carcases for the great markets of west London. And it would be hours before the doxies of Chelsea tumbled out of their shabby bordellos looking for work. For the moment, that blissful moment that George Crossland appreciated only too well, that copper from V Division was all alone, lost in the private thoughts inside his head.

  If ‘Daddy’ Bliss had asked George Crossland later – and he did – precisely at what time he had seen it, Crossland couldn’t have been sure. The River Police, alone of the Met Divisions, had been issued with watches. Coppers on dry land, pounding their regular beats, always had a clock somewhere in their eyeline. St Andrew’s clock was three minutes slow and St Sepulchre’s a minute and a half fast, but that was good enough. Only on the railways were they obsessed with time. A landlocked copper could always tell the time, near as damn it. But the river was different. In the morning, the mist made all the clock towers invisible. The darkness of night hid them entirely and downstream, the derricks and walls of the wharves blocked everything. The water worked as a sounding board which absorbed, baffled and re-echoed every sound, so the chimes were hard to count, seeming to come from all directions at once, their voices warped beyond all recognition.

  But it must have been a little before six that Crossland saw it, something floating white near the centre of the stream. He couldn’t make out the shape, but it was large. And he had the oddest sensation that it shouldn’t have been there, like a whale on a beach he had once read about. The river took the object, as Crossland knew it would, back upstream for a moment, then down again and further out, twirling it in an eddy so the shape was hard to fathom. Anyone who didn’t know the river would think that the white thing had a life of its own, perhaps some huge fish coming to the surface to die; to have one last look at London before, like the Kraken, submerging for ever. But Crossland knew it was just the currents carrying some lifeless thing with the secret patterns that only the river knew for sure. Water, playing with its old partner-in-crime, the wind, mocking the humans who pretended that they could understand and control it.

  Crossland watched the white blob slide nearer. It would pass him in a minute and something in his head told him that that would not do. He must stop its progress downstream, halt it in its journey to the sea, its attempt to beat the river at its own game. And there was something he didn’t like about it, the thing dancing with the tide. As it rolled, the shape seemed somehow familiar; yet odd, because, again, it shouldn’t have been there.

  He wrenched the left oar around, twisting his body so that the galley moved out to the centre. Crossland steadied himself. Each of the River Police galleys had a mind of its own and Number Eight was no different. It rolled in rough water and slewed to the left, only coming into its own with a full crew on board. Against one man, it played silly buggers and many was the morning that carters on their way along the banks or gentlemen out for a morning ride heard George Crossland talking to Number Eight in decidedly unfriendly – and unprofessional – terms.

  Number Eight rocked a little as he stood up; then steadied itself as it sensed the rising unease in Crossland himself. His brain and chest were pounding, his mouth hanging open in disbelief. As his oar-blade caught it and he held it fast to Number Eight’s ribbed, wet side, he knew exactly what the white thing was. It was the left side of what had once been a human being, sliced neatly at the hip and below the breast. There was no arm. No head. No legs. It was pale and curved, like the carcases hanging outside the butchers’ shops or in the meat market at Spitalfields or Smithfield.

  In the sudden chill of the morning, Constable George Crossland of the River Police had found a body.

  TWO

  Mrs Rackstraw, as she would tell anyone who would listen, was not a nosy woman. Her neighbours could do exactly as they liked, and she would scarcely notice a thing. If the brazen hussy across the road was fool enough to let her fancy man out of the side door in the grey light of dawn while her husband was away on business, then that was her own affair; quite literally, Mrs Rackstraw would tell the baker’s boy with a disapproving sniff. If the bailiffs called more frequently two doors down than any delivery boy, then that, too, was none of Mrs Rackstraw’s business; they had carted off a rather nice Sheraton desk last time, she told the charwoman in hushed tones.

  But what she would admit to, without demur or condition, was that she would look out for her two young gentlemen to her dying day. As her eyes clouded over with the film of death, they would nevertheless be peeled to watch for danger. So she noticed the man outside straight away, from her vantage point behind the drawing-room curtains. It was true that ‘danger’ was not the first thing that she thought when she saw him. Scrawny, yes. Furtive, certainly. Even underhand. But unless he had the skill to hide an extremely large, heavy and sharp weapon under his coat, he would be little danger, even to a household of women, as they were until the young gentlemen came home. Mrs Rackstraw, though not at all fat, was tall and rangy. The char, finishing off the rough in the kitchen, was seventeen stone at a conservative estimate and had a nasty temper. The between maid – a bone of contention between Mrs Rackstraw and the men who erroneously assumed themselves to be her employers – was small and timid but had once proved to an overly forward butcher’s lad that she had a vicious bite. So they would all be safe enough. But the man’s behaviour was plenty to arouse Mrs Rackstraw’s suspicion. She had been watching him for a while and his movements had taken on the rhythm of a sinister pavane.

  She had noticed him first as a shadow under the porch of the house across the way. Surely, she had thought, the hussy hadn’t got herself another fancy man? But no; the shadow had peeled itself from the wa
ll and crossed the road, jinking and jittering around the cabs and carts which trundled through Alsatia all day long. On reaching the pavement on the other side and so close to the wall beneath her window that she could see the nap on his hat, he waited, looking up at the front door almost longingly. Then he walked a few yards to the left, then stopped and turned, walking the same distance to the right and, looking up at the house again, almost met her eyes. She ducked behind the curtain and when she looked again, he was at the bottom of the steps, looking now right, now left.

  She stepped away from the window and made her way to the door. The daft girl she had employed as a between maid – young gentlemen of her calibre, she had told them, should not just have a housekeeper; what would people say? The younger, the apple of her eye, if she had been forced to the point, had said that people would say how sensible of them to save money by not having a between maid, but his remark had fallen for once on deaf ears – the daft girl sometimes opened the door when the knocker sounded; more often she didn’t. Time and again, Mrs Rackstraw had hauled her out of the coal cellar where she was hiding, her hands over her ears. Time and again, she had told her that it was her job to answer the door, to take a message, to put visitors in the drawing room, whatever was appropriate. But poor Maisie was not one who could appreciate the subtleties of choices that complex and she preferred to hide.

  So Mrs Rackstraw straightened her apron, patted her hair and waited, hands folded, inside the door, ready to whip it open as soon as the knocker hit the wood.

  Nothing.

  Puzzled, she went back to the window and peered out. And there he was again, on the pavement. Ten feet one way, ten feet back. Up the steps. Down the steps. Ten feet one way, ten feet back. She began to feel quite giddy, but wouldn’t relinquish her post. Danger. Or if not danger, then at the very least an escaped lunatic and if everything she had read in the penny press was true, people like that could have the strength of ten.

  The clock in the hall struck twelve. Twelve and a half; she made a note to herself to remember to call the clockmaker around the corner in the Strand to come and check it over. It had never been quite the same since a client of the young gentlemen had gone berserk and set about it with a knobkerrie under the impression it was his mother-in-law. She had said from the start that the man was as mad as a bloater, but they would have it they were the experts and look where it had got them. But twelve or twelve and a half; they would be back for their dinner any minute and they could deal with the lunatic themselves. She took herself off back to the kitchen, to make sure that Maisie had remembered to move the stew over onto the hot plate. September could be treacherous, and her young gentlemen would be ready for something hot.

  The lunatic was on his ten feet to the left when Matthew Grand and James Batchelor came swinging around the corner from their office in the Strand. They had had a good morning. Not only had the Duke of Buccleuch paid his bill – finally – but they had also discovered who had been stealing the lead off the roof of St Andrew Undershaft, so had had the blessing of the Bishop of London. Money would be nice, but the wheels of Christendom grind slow, they knew; they could look forward to that sometime in the next decade, probably, but the good wishes of a bishop were as good as money in the bank. Almost.

  ‘So, James,’ Grand said, bounding up the steps two at a time. ‘I believe I had ten shillings on it being chops for lunch.’

  James Batchelor smiled a slow smile. ‘It’s as good as mine, Matthew,’ he said, smugly. ‘It’s Tuesday. It’s never chops on Tuesday; it’s stew or my name is Guillermo Fazackerley.’

  Grand turned the doorknob and pushed open the door, releasing a savoury waft of stewed beef. Without another word, he passed a folded banknote behind him to Batchelor, who followed him into the house, laughing.

  The lunatic turned at the end of his ten-foot march and looked after them, need and hunger in his red-rimmed eyes.

  The stew was, as always, magnificent. Mrs Rackstraw was not perfect, Grand and Batchelor would be the first to admit, but her cooking skills were never in doubt. Grand was still having trouble coming to terms with cow-heel pie, but that was more a failing of English cuisine than the woman herself, so he was prepared to let that one go.

  ‘Is that lunatic still outside?’ the housekeeper demanded, spooning out seconds.

  ‘Lunatic?’ Batchelor paused in mid-slurp to check.

  ‘Yes. Lunatic.’ Sometimes, she wondered how they made a living as detectives at all; they noticed nothing, not even when it was under their noses. ‘You can’t miss him. About so high,’ she held out a hand at about her own head height, ‘scrawny-looking. Pale. Derby hat. Brown coat.’

  They both looked at her and shook their heads.

  ‘He’s been there most of the morning.’

  Two identical shrugs.

  She sighed and put down her ladle with a splash. ‘You can’t have missed him.’ She sounded almost plaintive, not her usual confident self at all. ‘About so high …’

  The dining-room door opened, and Maisie’s red-tipped nose came around it. ‘Mrs Rackstraw,’ she murmured, resolutely refusing to look at either Grand or Batchelor. Her mother had told her without mincing words what happened to girls who looked directly at gentlemen. She had stopped listening in detail when the litany had reached the drawers, but it hadn’t sounded nice at all.

  ‘Yes, Maisie?’ The woman rounded on her like a cobra. ‘What is it? How many times have I told you to knock first?’

  The girl retreated and slammed the door behind her. The three people in the dining room waited patiently. This had happened before.

  A timid knock came from the other side of the door.

  ‘Come in,’ said Mrs Rackstraw, barely containing her irritation.

  The dining-room door opened and Maisie’s red-tipped nose came around it. ‘Mrs Rackstraw,’ she murmured, ‘there’s a gentleman at the kitchen door, wants to speak to …’ and her voice died away. Her mother had been unspecific, but she preferred not to use gentlemen’s names in case it brought on a Fate Worse Than Death.

  ‘Who?’ Matthew Grand said kindly. Maisie nearly died on the spot.

  Mrs Rackstraw strode to the door. ‘I’ll go and see, shall I?’ she said, bustling Maisie out in front of her. ‘It’s probably the lunatic.’ And with that, she was gone.

  It was the lunatic, but even Mrs Rackstraw, predisposed to see madness seeping from every pore, had to admit that, closer to, he seemed a little less mad, a little more simply upset. He was waiting in the doorway to the kitchen, the way being barred by the char, a woman who could stop – and, so the rumour ran, actually had done so – a runaway horse by the simple expedient of planting her feet firmly and not budging an inch. He looked even smaller and more woebegone when dwarfed by Mrs Gooding; but as that applied to most people, that was little guide. His clothes, Mrs Rackstraw decided on a cursory glance, were good if a little out of date, but as her fashion interest had last been piqued in 1854, that might not have been a very pertinent observation. After a moment, she decided he was fit to be allowed into the house and edged Mrs Gooding aside.

  ‘Would you care to step this way, sir?’ she said. ‘It is unusual for us to have visitors to the back door.’ She didn’t mean to remonstrate with someone who might yet turn out to be a gentleman, but these things were important; an Alsatia address was after all, when push came to shove, an Alsatia address. That part of London was going up in the world.

  He looked both ways and leaned in to whisper out of the corner of his mouth. ‘I didn’t want to be seen,’ he said.

  Mrs Rackstraw drew herself up and sniffed. In that case, he would have done well to have dispensed with the marching up and down outside the house, but it wasn’t her place to say so. ‘Name?’

  ‘Umm …’ the man looked back and forth again. ‘I’d rather not say.’

  She looked at him with contempt. So he was a lunatic, after all. ‘I can’t show you in to see my gentlemen without a name, sir,’ she said, firmly.
/>   ‘Smith.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked down her nose at him. She and Mr Rackstraw, may he rest in peace, had once had a memorable holiday in Ramsgate as Mr and Mrs Smith, before they had tied the knot. No one had believed it then and she didn’t believe it now.

  ‘Well … Wellington-Smith, to be accurate.’

  As they had just passed the boot-room on the kitchen side of the green baize, she was unimpressed by his flight of fancy. However, it gave her something to say as, having crossed the black and white tiled hall, she flung open the door to the drawing room and showed him in.

  ‘Mr Wellington-Smith,’ she said, almost keeping the snort of derision from her voice.

  Neither Grand nor Batchelor was feeling very amiable, having been dragged away from their meal without benefit of dessert. Stew was always followed, as night follows day, by treacle sponge and Matthew Grand had learned to love it like an Englishman born and bred. Never mind; a lunatic needn’t take up too much eating time. Grand stepped forward and grabbed the man’s hand and pumped it up and down in a friendly fashion. ‘Mr Wellington-Smith,’ he said and led him to a chair. ‘How may Mr Batchelor and I help you?’ He felt he should make something clear. ‘We do have consulting rooms, you know. Just round the corner, in the Strand.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wellington-Smith said. ‘I do know. But … this matter is extremely sensitive.’

  Batchelor slipped a knowing wink to Grand. Sensitive was their stock-in-trade, but if every wife who wanted her husband followed or every husband who wanted to find out where his wife went on alternate Tuesdays came round to the house, it would be like Piccadilly Circus.