The Ring

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Yes, but everyone knew how much you loved her. Taking her would be a way of getting back at you, of hurting you. Is there anyone who would do that, do you think? Do you have any enemies?’

  Byng shook his head but soon stopped. He smiled up at Kempster. ‘Giddy,’ he said.

  ‘Be quick,’ Kempster said quietly to Grand. ‘He’s starting to go.’

  ‘So, now you’ve had a think, is there anyone?’ Batchelor prompted.

  ‘There was Murphy Minor at school. He hated me. He kept making me apple pie beds.’ He gave a reminiscent little chuckle. ‘But I put woodlice in his tuck box so that showed him.’ He looked down at the firelight reflected in the brass of the fender and turned his head this way and that, watching the light change.

  ‘Quick,’ urged Kempster.

  ‘Since then,’ Grand said. ‘Who has hated you since then?’

  Byng looked hurt. ‘No one hates me, I don’t think,’ he said. He held out his hand to the fire. ‘Look,’ he said to the doctor, ‘pink.’ He smiled again, then frowned. ‘Except my father of course. He hates me.’ A tear ran down his cheek. ‘Always has. Always will. He didn’t hate Emilia, though. He loved Emilia. Everyone loved Emilia …’ And with that, his head dropped forward onto his chest and he was asleep, drifting on clouds of poppy.

  Fanny Kempster was, as always, keen to join in the discussion of the case, but the three men could see an embarrassing conversation in the offing and persuaded her to sit this one out. Incest was a tricky enough subject without it becoming a family issue.

  They sat around the desk in the doctor’s surgery for a long time, busying themselves with cigars and a small snifter of brandy each before finally, Batchelor cracked.

  ‘Would Mr Byng senior really …?’

  ‘I don’t know the man,’ Kempster said, ‘but it certainly isn’t unknown. I’ve had cases … mostly with blood relations. Of course, it isn’t strictly incest without a blood link, but I think most people would frown … oh, dear, this is most difficult …’

  ‘She was a very pretty girl,’ Batchelor said, ‘but not one to make a man mad, I wouldn’t have thought.’ He didn’t think that counted as speaking ill of the dead, more a damning with faint praise.

  ‘Look at the state her husband’s in,’ Grand said. ‘She certainly has incited a grand passion in him.’

  ‘Yes, but …’ Batchelor had nothing more to add.

  They sat there, intent on their cigars, until the gloom in the room was such that only the glowing tips revealed their presence. Mr Byng senior, they were all thinking. There’s a turn-up for the books.

  Daddy Bliss was up to his rowlocks in the dealers of horror, those ghouls who crept from the rat-infested wainscoting at moments like these, determined to see for themselves the ghastly spectres thrown up by the river. So it came as no surprise to Inspector Bliss that yet another ghoul turned up on the gangplank of the Royalist late that September Thursday, one that Constable Gosling had allowed on board. She was a well-set-up woman, perhaps thirty, with blonde hair swept up under a fashionable bonnet. Her boots were spring-sided and the train of her skirt was looped up to show just an inch or so of lace to keep the hem out of the river mud. Bliss sat at his table under the swaying oil lamp, blinking and trying to take it all in.

  ‘Who did you say you were again?’ he asked.

  ‘Cailey,’ she said. ‘Mary Cailey. Mrs.’

  Bliss never liked to appear taken aback, especially not by a woman. ‘So … reports of your demise were exaggerated, then?’

  ‘Who said I’d demised?’ Mrs Cailey wanted to know.

  ‘Well, your landlady thought it might be a possibility,’ he told her.

  ‘Christian?’ Mary Cailey almost spat the word. ‘Interfering old trout. I never liked her, not from the first day.’

  ‘Then there was …’ Bliss checked his ledger, open on the table in front of him, ‘… a Mr Abel Beer, who positively identified a corpse found in the river as you. He is your brother?’

  ‘Sadly, yes,’ she sighed. ‘But Abel’s a few trapeze artistes short of a circus. He loves all that sort of thing. Cried for days when Granddad died and he couldn’t stand Granddad. Bloody drama queen.’

  ‘Then there’s your other brother, Mr Ambrose Beer. He thought it was you.’

  ‘Until recently,’ Mary Cailey scowled, ‘Ambrose thought babies came from gooseberry bushes. Not quite the ticket.’

  ‘And of course, your sister …’

  ‘Millicent would say anything Abel told her to. Look, Inspector, I’m not too proud to admit that the Beers of Wookey aren’t made of the sterner stuff. Well, there’s still a lot of in-breeding, if you know what I mean, in the West Country. That’s partly why we moved to Uplyne.’

  ‘But you …’

  ‘I was lucky enough to escape all that. Every generation produces a normal one and I’m it.’

  ‘So where have you been, Mrs Cailey?’ Bliss asked, ‘if you haven’t been bobbing about in the river or lying on a mortuary slab?’

  ‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘I have been to Scotland with a gentleman.’

  ‘His name?’ Bliss, like Grand and Batchelor, liked to leave no stone unturned.

  ‘Is none of your business,’ she told him flatly.

  ‘And your solicitor, Mr Thompson of Lincoln’s Inn?’

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she shrugged.

  ‘And the dear old lady you spent time with, at an address in a London square that doesn’t exist?’

  ‘I don’t know what they’re putting in your tea,’ she remarked with a laugh, pointing to the tin cup on the table.

  Bliss, of course, wasn’t laughing. ‘I could charge you with wasting police time,’ he said.

  ‘Look,’ she snapped. ‘I only come here out of the goodness of my heart. I read in the papers about the missing Mrs Cailey. Well, I’m not missing. I never was.’

  ‘Indeed not. Constable Gosling,’ the inspector bellowed up the stairs.

  ‘Sir?’ The constable appeared in the hatch doorway.

  ‘Take Mrs Cailey to 15, South Street, Battersea Fields, will you? The landlady there is Mrs Christian and Mrs Cailey owes her several weeks’ rent. See to it that she pays, will you?’

  ‘’Ere,’ Mary Cailey shrieked as she felt the constable’s iron grip on her elbow. ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘Yes, he can,’ Bliss assured her. ‘He’s the River Police.’

  And Mary Cailey was still shouting the odds as Constable Gosling hailed a cab on the moonlit dockside and bundled them both into it.

  ‘What was all that, Inspector?’ Constable Brandon was up on deck with his boss, a steaming mug of tea in his hand.

  ‘That, lad,’ Bliss said, ‘was the unusual sight of a member of the public helping the police with their enquiries.’

  ‘Did I overhear right,’ the constable asked, ‘that all her family identified her as the second … you know … body?’

  ‘They did,’ Bliss took the cup that cheered, ‘and I’m still, after all these years, amazed by the stupidity of folk. It’s my guess that our Mrs Cailey earns her money on her back – or any other position her gentlemen friends require of her. Her brother Abel may or may not act as her pimp and they thought they’d try a new manor here in London. I don’t know much about this Wookey place, or Uplyne, but I’m prepared to bet they’re quite small, Metropolis-wise. More money to be made where the streets are paved with gold, eh?’

  ‘But, all her family …’

  ‘Identified her, yes. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the one eye in the middle of their foreheads. More likely, they sniffed some sort of reward and thought they could cash in.’

  ‘Whereas …?’

  ‘Whereas it’s my guess that said Mrs Cailey had met a client who whisked her away – maybe even to Scotland, who knows? She invented the business deal, the solicitor, the old lady, just to keep Mrs Christian quiet. As for the four men on Victoria Bridge, that sort of thing says it al
l, doesn’t it? What class of woman is most likely to be set upon by roughs, Brandon?’

  ‘Er … the underclass, sir.’ Even in the moonlight and the Royalist’s swaying lanterns, Bliss could see the constable blush.

  ‘Exactly. Nobody’s knocked Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales about much recently, have they?’

  ‘No, indeed, sir.’ Lloyd Brandon was sure of that. ‘The only question is – who knocked the women in the river about?’

  Bliss paused in mid-slurp. ‘That’s right, boy,’ he said, patting the lad’s shoulder. ‘And that’s why I keep you on. Somewhere underneath that lily-livered exterior, there are the faint stirrings of a policeman.’ He pulled a face. ‘And talking of faint stirrings,’ he said, ‘any sugar in this tea?’

  SIXTEEN

  By the time the cab had rattled through Southwark, Mary Cailey had calmed down. She had been this close to policemen before, but not from this constabulary and she didn’t quite know what Inspector Bliss had in mind for her. Wasting police time, he had said, but that could be the least of it. And there was the matter of the unpaid rent to that miserable old cow who had briefly been her landlady. All in all, the decision made by Abel and herself to move to the pastures new that were London had not worked out too well.

  ‘It’s nice of you to see me home,’ she smiled at Tom Gosling sitting alongside her in the cab. ‘Not that I’ve actually got a home, of course, not anymore.’

  ‘All in a day’s work, madam,’ the constable said. He’d been up and down the river a few times, had Tom Gosling and he knew every ploy in the book. In a minute, this woman would not only be asking him to let her go but suggest he pay her back rent too.

  ‘No, I feel really bad about those stories I told that nice Mrs Christian. And your inspector, too, come to think of it. He must be a really great bloke to work with.’ She grinned up at him.

  ‘Oh, the best,’ Gosling assured her.

  ‘I think it’s time I told you the truth.’ She bowed her head.

  Here we go, thought Gosling.

  ‘Your inspector, brilliant man that he is, was absolutely right. There is no solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn. Nor is there a sweet old lady in Chelsea – well, there are probably loads of ’em, but I don’t know any. That was all Abel’s idea.’

  ‘Abel Beer,’ Gosling checked. ‘Your brother.’

  ‘And my … what do you call them here? My bully.’

  ‘Oh, you mean pimp,’ Gosling realized. ‘I believe the term “bully” went out with the late Mr Dickens.’

  ‘He made me do it.’ Mary Cailey was sobbing demurely. ‘Ever since we were kids. He’d hire me out to his mates, in the barn, down the orchard. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’

  Gosling started and then realized that this was simply part of the narrative and sat back again.

  ‘They’d pay sweets at first. Then it gravitated – is that the word?’

  Gosling shrugged. It might have been.

  ‘Gravitated to money. And there was no stopping him. For every quid he made, I got five bob.’

  ‘Hardly seems fair,’ Gosling commented.

  ‘You’re right, Constable … er …?’

  ‘Gosling, miss.’

  ‘Constable Gosling.’ She laughed through her tears. ‘That’s funny.’

  Tom Gosling had lived with his surname for so long now, he’d ceased to see the funny side. ‘Is it really?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I mean, when I was a little girl, back in Wookey, I used to look after the geese. I used to love feeding the goslings. All warm and fluffy.’

  Was that a gloved hand fondling the constable’s knee or had he imagined it?

  ‘Of course, as we got older and Abel began to charge more for my services, those services got ever more … shall we say … adventurous?’

  ‘Did they now?’ Gosling was trying not to look at her.

  ‘Oh, I don’t suppose any of it would turn a hair here in London, but back home … Well, I mean …’ She reached over, cupping her hand as she whispered in his ear. He missed some of it due to the noise of creaking harness and clopping hoofs, but he got the general gist. ‘… with two choirboys … in the squire’s parlour … well, I’m not sure how he got there … I’m not sure who he was, but he was wearing – briefly – the get-up of a bishop.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Gosling, beginning to feel a little hot under the collar in spite of himself. ‘Well, here we are.’

  They were. The cab rocked to a halt outside Number 15 and the constable was only too pleased to leap out onto the pavement. He paid the cabbie, well aware of Daddy Bliss’s constant warnings about bribe-taking and turned to face his ex-fellow traveller.

  Gosling stood rooted to the spot. Mary Cailey was in the grip of an assailant, as the constable would have put it in court. In short, a mad bastard in threadbare clothes had her held fast from behind, one arm across the woman’s breasts, the other holding a knife at her throat. Mary Cailey’s eyes were wide with terror and her mouth was open in a silent scream. As though her attacker realized the danger, he clapped his hand over her mouth and pulled her backwards towards the shrubbery.

  ‘Now, then,’ Gosling held up his hand, about to take a step forward. ‘We don’t want any trouble, do we?’

  Gosling had talked down lunatics before, those dribbling, wild-eyed men who haunted both banks of the Thames. He knew the drill – keep the movements slow, the voice soft and gentle.

  ‘Who are you?’ the attacker asked him.

  Mary Cailey recognized the West Country burr at once, but the subtlety was lost on Gosling.

  ‘I am Constable Thomas Gosling of the River Police,’ he said. That was another part of the drill – honesty.

  ‘The river, eh? You’re as lost as I am, copper.’

  ‘You know my name, sir,’ the constable said. ‘Might I know yours?’

  ‘You might,’ he said, ‘if you kept your eyes open and read your own posters. I am William Bisgrove if you want to know. And I didn’t kill nobody. Did I, Millie? You’ll tell ’em, won’t you?’

  There was a muffled scream from Mary Cailey.

  ‘I don’t think the lady can tell us anything, Mr Bisgrove,’ Gosling said, ‘with your hand over her mouth. Why don’t you let her go …?’

  ‘No!’ Bisgrove pulled the terrified woman further towards the park. ‘It’s taken me months to find her. I’m not letting her go now.’

  ‘No, no,’ Gosling was understanding itself. ‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean let her go completely, just let her breathe. She’s turning a funny colour.’

  In the street lamp’s green glow, Gosling couldn’t see what colour Mary Cailey had turned, but he was playing for time. If he could just reach the truncheon at his belt …

  ‘And you’re not going to scream, are you, Millie?’ Gosling was nodding furiously, urging the woman to play along. It all fell into place now, the reports that he had read in the files and the Police News. Bisgrove had escaped from Broadmoor and a woman called Millie was involved in his case. Mistaken identity? Probably, but mistaken identities got people killed.

  Mary shook her head frantically.

  ‘I’m sorry, Millie,’ Bisgrove hissed in her ear. ‘I didn’t want it to come to …’ He stopped, frowning. ‘Wait a minute,’ and he let his hand fall. All Tom Gosling’s urgings of a moment ago had achieved nothing. As soon as her mouth was free and the blade tip had left her neck, she screamed with a noise that could shatter glass.

  Gosling saw his moment and lunged. His truncheon was in his hand and he threw himself at Bisgrove. The man turned, but too slowly and both men landed in the leaves blown by autumn into damp piles. The constable found his feet first, but he swung too high with the truncheon and the hardwood merely whistled over Bisgrove’s head. The West Countryman hurled himself forward, driving his shoulder into the pit of Gosling’s stomach and the policeman went down.

  Mary had run to the steps of Number 15, hammering on the door for all she was worth. She saw a net
curtain shiver to one side and heard the rattle and scrape of bolts. The door swung inwards and Mary Christian stood there, already in her night attire but brandishing a poker in her hand. Both women stared at the scene below them. Tom Gosling was kneeling upright, his own truncheon held horizontally under his chin by William Bisgrove, who was deciding whether to break the man’s neck or not.

  ‘Don’t!’ both women screamed and Bisgrove stopped. For a moment, he blinked, glancing around him, unsure of exactly where he was. Then he relaxed and brought the truncheon down on the policeman’s cranium. Gosling slumped onto the leaves like a child suddenly overtaken by sleep and lay there, curled and looking almost comfortable.

  To the horror of the ladies, Bisgrove was making his way towards them. This was Battersea. Nobody else was going to come running at the sound of a woman’s scream and the thudding on a door. Life was all too precious for that. Bisgrove, with the truncheon in one hand and the knife in the other, took the first step, then the second. He ignored Mary Christian completely. The last time he’d seen her she’d chased him with a broom; now she was shaking a poker at him. Unpleasant, these London landladies, and no mistake.

  He followed their gaze, to the fallen policeman. ‘He’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Just a bit of a headache, that’s all.’ He threw the truncheon down on the leaves beside him.

  Then he fixed his hypnotic gaze on Mary Cailey. He slipped the knife back into his coat pocket. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he muttered. ‘I thought you were somebody else. You look so like my Millie, but now I see you up close, I can see I was wrong.’ He turned to go, then stopped. ‘But I will find her,’ he said, ‘my Millie. She’s out there somewhere. And I’ll clear my name. You see if I don’t.’

  And he was gone, another shadow in the shadows.

  James Batchelor looked in the mirror in his bedroom and couldn’t decide whether his tie was wonky or whether there was a serious flaw in the glass. As he twisted this way and that, it did seem to fluctuate, so he decided to go and ask Matthew Grand, who was more adept at such sartorial detail. He tapped on his bedroom door and was invited in.