Inspector of the Dead

by David Morrell

  “That would be a blessing.”

  In the shadows outside the ballroom, Lady Palmerston and I watched the two elderly men pace. They started at the same time, but despite Father’s short legs, he soon outdistanced the home secretary. They looked incongruous, Father’s diminutive figure as opposed to Lord Palmerston’s tall bearing and powerful chest.

  “You’re speedy for an old man,” Lord Palmerston said grudgingly.

  “Thank you, My Lord.” Father didn’t point out that, at seventy, Lord Palmerston was one year older than Father. “I try to walk at least twenty miles each day. Last summer, I managed sixteen hundred miles.”

  “Sixteen hundred miles.” Lord Palmerston sounded exhausted just repeating the number.

  Father was the first to reach the opposite side of the ballroom and turn.

  “The Times has invented a new creature of the press: a war correspondent,” Lord Palmerston murmured.

  “Yes, I’m familiar with William Russell’s dispatches from the Crimea,” Father said.

  “Russell does not tell the truth about the war.”

  “It isn’t going as badly as he describes? Expose his lies, My Lord.”

  “I wish they were lies. Because of incompetence, the war is going even worse than Russell claims. More soldiers are dying from disease and starvation than from enemy bullets. Who could have imagined? A journalist with the power to create such a clamor that he toppled the government. Oh, dear. My head.”

  The next morning, Lord Palmerston behaved as if the conversation, with its suggestion of a budding friendship, had not occurred. In fact, he spoke more gruffly than usual, perhaps embarrassed at having revealed weakness. It became obvious that Father and I needed to leave, even if that meant confronting our numerous debt collectors in Edinburgh.

  Meanwhile, Inspector Ryan (whom I call Sean in private) had recovered from his wounds sufficiently to accompany us to church. Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Becker (I call him Joseph) joined us also. When I had first met them seven weeks earlier, their suspicion that Father was a murderer naturally made me hostile to them. But after the four of us joined forces against the danger facing not only us but London itself, I discovered a growing fondness for both of them, although in a different way for each.

  At twenty-five, Joseph is only four years older than I. Our youth naturally creates a bond between us, and I confess that his features are appealing. In contrast, Sean—at forty—is almost two decades older than I. Normally, that might have created a distance, but there is something about Sean’s confidence and experience that appeals to me. I sensed a subtle competition between them, but none of us felt at liberty to speak about any of this and weren’t ever likely to, given that this was to be the last Sunday morning that we spent together, appropriately at church services, where we intended to give thanks for our lives and our friendship.

  The Reverend Samuel Hardesty kept screaming. Among the congregation, whispers became murmurs. Had the vicar taken leave of his senses? Why in heaven was he pointing toward Lady Cosgrove’s pew?

  Adding to the shock, one of the shabbily dressed men in Lord Palmerston’s pew vaulted from it and rushed toward where the vicar pointed.

  A woman’s screams joined those of the vicar. So did another’s. At the front, Colonel Trask opened his pew. With his left hand supporting the sling on his right arm, he stepped out to determine the source of the commotion. The sight of the hero’s scarlet uniform prompted other gentlemen to decide that they too could investigate.

  “God save us!” one of them shouted.

  “Blood! There’s blood all over the floor!” another exclaimed.

  Amid further outcries, the congregation hurried in two directions, toward the front to discover what was happening or else toward the escape of the rear doors. Nobleman crashed against nobleman, lady against lady. Agnes, the pew-opener, was nearly trampled until a churchwarden pulled her to the side.

  “Blood!”

  “Get out of my way!”

  As the vicar lurched toward Lady Cosgrove, his vestment caught under one of his boots, toppling him. The shabbily dressed man who’d leaped from Lord Palmerston’s pew grabbed him just in time, pulling him upright before he would have fallen into the crimson liquid spreading across the floor.

  Now the second shabbily dressed man unlatched the entrance to Lord Palmerston’s pew and blocked some of those charging forward. He held up a badge, shouting, “I’m a Scotland Yard detective inspector! Calm yourselves! Return to your seats!”

  A Scotland Yard detective? The congregation reacted with greater shock. Here in our midst? In Mayfair? In St. James’s?

  The panic intensified.

  “You’re blocking my path!” a gentleman warned another, threatening with his cane.

  “Stop!” the inspector yelled, holding his badge higher. “Go back to your pews! Restrain yourselves before someone gets hurt!”

  “Before someone else gets hurt!” a lord insisted, telling another lord, “Step out of my way!”

  Colonel Trask returned to his pew and climbed onto a bench. Tall to begin with, he now towered above the congregation.

  “Listen to me!” he shouted with the commanding tone that only a man who built railways and an officer who’d just returned from the hell of the Crimea could project. “You! And that also means you, sir! All of you! Do what the inspector requests and return to your pews!”

  The commotion persisted.

  “Blast it all!” Colonel Trask yelled.

  That caught their attention. It was as close to an obscenity as anyone had ever heard in St. James’s.

  “Bloody hell, do what you’re told!”

  The shock of those words struck everyone motionless. Some noble ladies had perhaps never heard those words in their lives. Mouths opened. Eyes widened. A woman collapsed.

  “The sooner we establish order, the sooner we’ll have answers! Don’t you wish to know what happened here?”

  The appeal to their curiosity, along with the impact of Colonel Trask’s language, persuaded them to ease into their pews.

  As tall as the colonel, the inspector followed his example and stepped onto a bench. His Irish red hair attracted as much attention as his badge.

  “My name is Inspector Ryan! The man talking to the vicar is Detective Sergeant Becker!”

  Another detective!

  Ryan’s raised voice betrayed a hint of pain. His left hand pressed against his abdomen, appearing to subdue an injury. “Stay where you are! We need to speak to each of you, in case you noticed anything that will help us!”

  Becker steadied the vicar, then pivoted toward the pool of crimson in front of the curtained pew. Its source was the bottom of the pew’s gate. Avoiding the blood, Becker returned to Lord Palmerston’s pew and again vaulted the partition. Iron rings scraped against a rail as he pulled the curtain aside and peered into the next compartment.

  With so many people staring at him, Becker strained not to show a reaction. After the events of seven weeks earlier, he’d assumed that he wasn’t capable of further shock.

  The black-clad woman he’d seen enter the pew was sprawled on the floor. Or rather, the woman had once been clad in black. Now her garments were soaked with the crimson that pooled around them. Her right hand clutched a black-bordered note. It and a black envelope were stained with blood also. Her head was tilted so far back that her veiled face peered almost behind her. Her throat had been slit so deeply that Becker could see the bones at the back of her neck.

  After five years as a uniformed patrolman, he almost reached for the clacker that would normally have hung on his equipment belt. He was prepared to unfold its wooden blade, run from the church, and swing it. The base of the rotating blade would repeatedly hit a flap in the handle, causing a noise loud enough that constables would hear it from as far away as a quarter mile.

  But of course, he no longer had a clacker or an equipment belt. He was a detective sergeant now, wearing street clothes, and it was his duty to take charge
as much as to summon help.

  Feeling a presence next to him, he turned toward the vicar, who had entered Lord Palmerston’s pew and whose cheeks lost their color when he saw what lay beyond the partition.

  The vicar’s knees bent. Becker grabbed him, easing him onto one of the benches.

  Someone else stood next to Becker: De Quincey. The little man rose on his tiptoes to peer over the partition. The grotesquely sprawled corpse, the quantity of blood—these horrors seemed to have no effect on him, except to intensify his gaze.

  “Are you all right?” Becker asked.

  The Opium-Eater’s blue eyes were so focused on the body that he didn’t reply. For the first time that morning, he wasn’t fidgeting.

  “I don’t know why I asked. When it comes to something like this, of course you’re all right,” Becker concluded.

  He turned toward Emily, who remained seated, watching her father. “And you, Emily? Are you all right?”

  “What’s over there?”

  “The woman in black.”

  “Dead?” Emily asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she perhaps fall and strike her head? Perhaps an accident?”

  “I expect it’s more than that.”

  Someone other than Emily would have blurted further questions—She was murdered? How? Why is there so much blood? Are we all going to be killed?—but Emily merely absorbed the implications of Becker’s statement and nodded resolutely.

  “Do what your responsibilities require, Joseph. There’s no need to concern yourself with Father and me.”

  “Yes, seven weeks ago you more than proved that you’re steady,” Becker said.

  At that moment, Inspector Ryan came along the front of the pew and stopped before the blood.

  Colonel Trask followed. Seeing Emily, he frowned as if something about her troubled him. Emily couldn’t help being puzzled. The colonel’s expression suggested that he had seen her somewhere before, but she had no idea when that could possibly have happened.

  Immediately Trask turned toward the woman’s pew. He was tall enough to look inside without stepping in the pool, and what he saw made his cheek muscles tighten, presumably with surprise but not with shock. In the war, he had no doubt seen too many examples of violent death to be shocked.

  He stood straighter. “Inspector, how can I help?”

  “We need to keep people away from this area,” Ryan told him. “If they come near, someone will inevitably step in the blood. We won’t be able to tell which marks were caused by the crowd and which by the killer.”

  “I guarantee that won’t happen.”

  The colonel assumed a protective stance in front of the blood.

  “Becker.” Ryan turned.

  “I don’t understand,” the younger man said. “How did the killer get into the pew without being seen? How did he escape?”

  Ryan sounded equally baffled. “Yes, there’s so much blood, the killer would have been spattered with it. Even in the commotion, he couldn’t possibly have left the church without being noticed.” A sudden thought made Ryan pause. “Unless he didn’t escape.”

  “You think the killer’s still in the church, hiding somewhere?” Becker looked around sharply.

  “Bring constables,” Ryan told him. “As many as possible.”

  As Becker hurried along the center aisle, he saw a blur of terrified faces. He told a churchwarden, “Make a list of everyone who left! Lock the doors behind me! Don’t let anyone else go out!”

  Hearing Becker race from the church, Ryan focused on the vicar.

  The man was seated in Lord Palmerston’s pew, bent forward, his head between his knees.

  Emily sat next to him, a comforting hand on his shoulder. “That’s right. Keep your head down. Take slow, deep breaths.”

  “Vicar, are you able to answer a few questions?” Ryan asked. “The woman in the pew next to us—I heard the gentleman who escorted her refer to her as Lady Cosgrove.”

  “Yes, that is her name.”

  “I know a Lord Cosgrove. He directs the committee that oversees the prison system.”

  “That’s her husband,” the vicar said.

  “Why is she dressed in mourning? Did Lord Cosgrove die?”

  “I saw him only yesterday—in the best of health.” The vicar’s voice sounded muffled from keeping his head down. “I was extremely confused when I saw Lady Cosgrove dressed this way this morning.”

  “Did you see her attacker?” Ryan asked.

  “I saw no one else in the pew.” The vicar shuddered. “She was kneeling with her forehead on the front partition. Then I noticed the blood spreading across the floor. Then her body slid down. Her head tilted backward. God save us. How could it possibly have happened?”

  “Take another slow, deep breath,” Emily advised.

  Ryan walked to the partition between Lord Palmerston’s pew and Lady Cosgrove’s.

  De Quincey remained there, continuing to stare over the partition toward the corpse.

  “Did you hear what he said?” Ryan asked.

  The little man nodded thoughtfully.

  “The attacker must have been hiding beneath a bench at the rear of the pew,” Ryan said. “Then the vicar was distracted by the procession.”

  “Perhaps,” De Quincey told him.

  “There’s no other way.” Ryan kept his voice low to prevent being overheard. “The killer would have attracted attention if he’d parted the curtains to enter the pew from the back or the sides. Our vantage point was such that we ourselves would have seen him climb over the front. In any of those cases, Lady Cosgrove couldn’t have helped noticing him. She’d have cried out in alarm. The only way the killer could have done this is if he crept toward her after he’d hidden beneath a bench at the back of her pew. While he struck, the procession and the music distracted everyone.”

  “Perhaps,” De Quincey repeated.

  “Why do you keep talking like that? Do you see a flaw in my logic?”

  “Lady Cosgrove’s veil is intact.”

  “Of course. To guarantee a fatal blow, the killer needed to pull her chin up in order to raise the veil and expose her throat,” Ryan explained.

  “But those several motions might have given Lady Cosgrove time to struggle and scream,” De Quincey concluded. “Also, the violence of those several motions might have attracted the vicar’s attention in spite of the other distractions.”

  “In fact, they did not, however,” Ryan emphasized.

  “It was a puzzling risk for someone who otherwise planned carefully. In addition, we’re making a great assumption,” De Quincey said.

  “Assumption?”

  “Please remember Immanuel Kant, Inspector.”

  “Immanuel…? Don’t tell me you’re going to talk about him again.”

  “The great philosopher’s question proved of immeasurable help seven weeks ago. Does reality exist outside us—”

  “—or only in our minds? That question will drive me out of my mind.”

  “We heard this woman’s escort address her as Lady Cosgrove,” De Quincey noted.

  “Yes.”

  “We saw her admitted to Lady Cosgrove’s pew. The vicar referred to her as Lady Cosgrove,” De Quincey added.

  “Yes, yes,” Ryan said impatiently.

  “But as we discussed, she’s wearing a veil.”

  When Ryan understood, he muttered an indistinct word that might have been an expression seldom heard in church.

  “How do we know that this woman is in fact Lady Cosgrove?” De Quincey asked.

  Ryan turned. “Vicar, how often do you see Lady Cosgrove?”

  “Frequently. Yesterday she invited me for tea.”

  “Thank you. Colonel Trask, may I request a favor?”

  Ryan left the pew and approached the colonel. He spoke softly. “I need you to do something that only a hero can accomplish.”

  “The men who died in combat next to me are the heroes,” Trask said.

  “I understand,
but as Mr. De Quincey often reminds me, reality is different for different people.”

  “I miss your point.”

  “For the moment, would you allow the vicar to see you as a hero?”

  Puzzled, the colonel replied, “What do you need me to do?”

  When Ryan explained, Trask’s features became solemn. “Yes, and that will require the vicar to be a hero.”

  They returned to Lord Palmerston’s pew.

  “Vicar,” Colonel Trask said, “please look at me.”

  The vicar raised his head from his knees. His face was gray.

  “I’m going to tell you something that I never revealed to anyone,” Colonel Trask said.

  The wrinkles in the vicar’s forehead deepened.

  “During the war, when the enemy charged, I was so terrified that my legs shook. I almost dropped to the mud and hid beneath corpses.”

  The vicar blinked. “It’s difficult to believe that a man such as you could be afraid.”

  “We want to hide. Even so, we need to do what’s required. Can you do what’s required, Vicar?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “In a few moments, I’m going to ask you to look over that partition.”

  “But Lady Cosgrove is there,” the vicar objected.

  “Indeed. You’ll soon know what I need from you,” Colonel Trask said. “Can you do what’s necessary? Will you be a hero for me?”

  The vicar hesitated, then nodded.

  “No matter the effort, for every monster, men such as the vicar and the colonel must strike the balance,” De Quincey murmured.

  “Especially the vicar,” Colonel Trask said. He turned toward Ryan. “Whenever you’re ready, Inspector.”

  Ryan drew a breath and lifted his right trouser cuff. The congregation inhaled audibly when he removed a knife from a scabbard that was buckled against his leg. Sunlight through the windows glistened off the blade.

  Ryan whispered to Colonel Trask, “The killer might be hiding under one of the benches in Lady Cosgrove’s pew.”

  “If he is, I promise you, Inspector—despite my injured arm, he won’t get far should he try to run.”