‘How can you refer to the mortal remains of a young woman as meat?’ I asked.
‘Skin, muscle and bone.’ He tracked the salt up and down his plate. ‘Meat by any definition. Throw a leg of mutton with a leg of man into the lion’s pit and see if it differentiates between them.’
He speared a piece of carrot on his fork and popped it in his mouth.
‘How can you be so callous?’
‘Weep for the living,’ he dabbed his mouth, ‘and, as for your charge of being callous, it is not I who feeds upon the dead.’
‘But if you allow yourself to think like that you would never eat any meat at all.’
‘I do not.’
‘Not even ham?’
‘Especially not ham. I have known pigs that are as wise as judges and a great deal more intelligent than juries, and certainly more fragrant.’
We had water with our meal, a small etched carafe each with a crystal glass tumbler.
‘Tepid,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘You should bring a book to the table, March. It would relieve me of the strain of making pleasant chatter. What are you reading at present?’
‘I have not a book with me yet,’ I said.
‘Then I shall lend you Swinburne,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I love his ode to Sappho.’
‘Not that degenerate half-wit’s perverted gibberish.’ My guardian wiped his mouth on a cloth napkin. ‘Samuel Swinburne’s Treatment of London’s Sewage. His chapters on the problems of disposing of human waste are most informative and entertaining.’
‘Is there to be a sweet pudding?’ I asked, still hungry.
‘Sugar blackens the teeth, which is why I only partake of it once a week,’ he told me and I laughed. ‘How could anything so white and pure do that?’ Then all the images rushed back. ‘Oh, how can I be amused on such a day as this?’
‘The human mind is not capable of comprehending or containing this world’s agony,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘or we should all go mad.’
I took a drink of water. ‘Whoever savaged that poor girl must surely be insane.’
‘I have seen one hundred and eighty-six bodies in my professional capacity.’ My guardian mashed his potatoes with his fork. ‘But I have not seen any murder so coldly calculated as that we witnessed today.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘And I am not sure that I do either,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘yet.’
And so to my room.
I looked out of the window and saw the same full moon that I had watched last night hanging over Hunger Hill, but which shone tonight on the roofs of a vast metropolis which I and four million people called their home. It was difficult to believe that I had begun the same day in my own home two hundred miles away.
I performed my toilet, brushing my hair one hundred times, changed into my cotton nightdress and bedsocks, for the night air was chill, and wrote my journal at the table.
I put the journal back in my writing box and pressed the button under the inkwell to open the secret compartment.
They were still there, your twelve letters carefully bound in a black ribbon with a band of gold. I read the first one.
Always remember… you wrote, but I could not read on. I retied the ribbon and touched the gold.
And afterwards I read my Bible. Oh, death, where is thy sting?
But what of Sarah Ashby? Was the victim of such savagery now at peace? I kneeled by my bed and prayed for her and for those I had loved and lost, and for the mother I hoped to know one day, and for the first time I prayed for the soul of Sidney Grice, for surely even he had one.
10
The Scene of the Crime
Mangle street ran short and straight, connecting two busy thoroughfares, and the shop was easily found terraced between two houses, one boarded up and the other serving as stabling for a team of donkeys, two of which peered mournfully out at us as we passed.
‘They do not even have room to turn round,’ I said. But Sidney Grice was crouching to inspect a dead rat on the pavement.
‘Poisoned,’ he said, ‘like Cochran’s vicar.’
There was a shop of Curious Objects opposite.
‘The only thing curious about those shops is that they exist.’ My guardian stood up. ‘They are nothing more than a staging post from the dustbin to the rubbish tip.’
Under a sheet metal canopy by the front door, a police constable with a drooping straw-coloured moustache sat smoking a briar on an empty beer crate, with his regulation cloak wrapped around him. He stood wearily as Sidney Grice introduced himself.
‘Inspector Pound told me you’d sent a telegram.’ The constable tapped his pipe out against the wall. ‘He didn’t say nothing about the girl, though.’
The ash blew over my dress and I shook it off.
‘I am helping Mr Grice,’ I said.
‘In whose opinion?’ Sidney Grice murmured.
The shop window was barred and had no curtains or blinds. Above it was fixed a white board on which Ashbys Ironmongery was painted in black.
‘Lord preserve the apostrophe.’ I pointed up. ‘It is going the way of the dodo.’
‘Horrible squiggly things.’ My guardian shuddered. ‘The sooner we are rid of them the better.’
‘I was supposed to get my breakfast an hour ago,’ the constable said, and waved us through as if we were traffic.
‘Regular habits are essential to the digestion,’ Sidney Grice told him. ‘I would lend you a book on the subject if I supposed that you could read.’
‘The way I feel I could probably eat it.’ The constable plonked himself down again.
‘Why are you so rude to people?’ I asked.
‘That is not a person. It is a policeman.’ Sidney Grice twisted the door lever. ‘And he can no more afford to have feelings than I can. Note the bell.’
It clanked twice when I opened the door and twice again when I closed it.
I looked up. ‘Hinged, as Mrs Dillinger told us.’
We found ourselves in a short narrow shop, a wooden-topped counter with a raised flap facing us.
‘Look at the floor.’ Sidney Grice pointed.
‘So many muddy footprints,’ I said.
‘Not mud.’ He scraped a line with his toe. ‘Blood – and this floor was well swept and washed recently.’ He tapped it with his cane.
I looked about me. The walls to either side had shelves piled with boxes of nails and screws and assorted carpentry tools, some hanging on hooks on the wall behind the counter, some in baskets on the floor, hammers, axes and a rack of knives behind the counter.
‘No shortage of weapons here,’ Sidney Grice said as we went behind the counter and through an open door into the room behind.
It was there that we came upon the scene of the murder. The sitting room was small and windowless. It was furnished with a bed to our left, a misshapen armchair to the right, and two pine chairs facing each other at a small square wooden table before an unlit fireplace in front of us.
‘Oh dear God,’ I whispered.
‘You will not find much sign of him here,’ my guardian said.
I saw now what Mrs Dillinger had meant by so much blood. The walls and furniture were splattered with it, dried and blackened, and there was a coagulated puddle with dozens of bootprints all over the uncarpeted floor. The stench was unmistakeable. It was my father’s surgery the day after battle. In the cold silence it reeked of the screams of the slaughtered.
‘Not much room to move in here.’ Sidney Grice swung his cane in an arc. ‘And yet there is no other sign of a disturbance. Not a chair has been overturned; nor an ornament broken. How does that tie in with your idea of a frenzied attack? Hello,’ he stepped forward to peer more closely at the wall to the left of the fireplace. ‘What is this here?’
I went to look with him and saw that what I had assumed was another splash was in fact a word, written in blood, at about eye level on the wall beneath a broken gas mantle. The letters were crude and smeared and a
bout a foot tall, fading towards the end, but their meaning was unequivocal.
‘Rivincita,’ I read out. ‘It is Italian for revenge.’
‘Oh, how disappointing,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘I had hoped it would say something sensible. A name might have been useful.’
‘Was that word not found at the Slurry Street murder scenes?’
‘Possibly.’ He turned. ‘There is a lot of blood on this table.’ He pointed to a crusted pool, kneeled, and looked up. ‘But none underneath it except what has seeped through the cracks.’ He prodded the floorboards with his cane. ‘This is the only space large enough for her to have fallen – here between the table and the door we came in. The rug has been saturated and a dozen oafs have trampled it everywhere. If she hit her head on this old sewing machine as she fell that would account for the fractured skull. See, there is a cake of blood and some hair on the wheel, the very match of hers.’ He bent to put a few strands in an envelope, sealed and wrote upon it, and straightened up to look about again. ‘What is in the fire?’
‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘Just ash.’
‘There is no such thing as just ash.’ He picked up an iron poker to rake it around. ‘Every burnable substance on this unnecessarily large and absurdly varied planet produces its own distinctive product of combustion. This is paper ash. Now, March, why does anybody burn paper?’ He tapped the wall.
‘To start a fire.’
‘This paper was the fire.’ He crouched beside it. ‘And why have a paper fire which gives little heat, and only for a while, when you have a scuttle of coal on the hearth? It is quite warm in here anyway. Both you and I know that paper is not cheap and it is always useful even when it has been written on – for lighting purposes as you say, but also for wrapping, and very handy in a shop where the profit on the sale of a few nails, for example, is negligible. No, this paper has been burnt for one reason only, to hide whatever was written on it. See how finely it has been powdered.’ He poked under the grate. ‘Not so much as a legible scrap. What is all this stuff?’ He raked the ashes and some cinder out. ‘Looks like bones to me.’ He picked up a charred piece the size of a forefinger. ‘Rabbit thighbone, I should say. Yes, and there is a rabbit’s tooth and – what have we here? – this blackened ring,’ he took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped it, ‘is a wedding band. To whom do you suppose it might belong?’
‘Sarah Ashby,’ I said.
‘If I were a betting man I would wager a considerable fortune on it.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘But why is it here?’
‘Perhaps her murderer put it there.’
‘But why? You could not hope to destroy it in such a feeble blaze, and why would you want to? Why not take it and pawn it? It is not engraved and so not traceable, and you could probably get a pound or so for it.’ He put the ring into an envelope in his satchel and got to his feet again, wiping his fingers clean. ‘So what are we to think? That a criminal lunatic hacked Mrs Ashby to death without waking her husband or disarranging a stick of furniture, lit a fire of manuscripts, slipped her ring off and threw it in, then pulverized the ashes, pausing only to write a cryptic foreign message on the wall in her blood?’
‘What do you think happened?’
‘I do not know,’ Sidney Grice looked about him, ‘but I will find out. Let us have a look through here.’
11
The Jewelled Dagger
A plain-planked open door led directly into the back room, a kitchen with a rust-holed woodstove, a wooden stool and an upright chair painted brown. There was an uncurtained window with four cracked panes above a stone sink and an iron hand pump on a rickety draining board. Sidney Grice tapped the floor and walls and leaned back to look at the ceiling.
The back door led into a small cobbled yard with a privy to the right. He glanced into it, then strode to a high solid-wooden gate to the rear left. The ground was littered with broken roofing slates and old nails.
‘This has not been locked for a long time. The bolt is covered with rust.’ He looked at his fingers. ‘And blood.’ He tugged the gate open. ‘And some on the outside handle too. That’s nice. Must be a burst drain.’ He wiped his hands on the towel from his satchel and left it hanging out.
The alley we looked on to was a running sewer, awash with a stream of slow-swirling water, thick with effluent. I put my handkerchief over my mouth and nose and saw that my guardian was doing the same as he leaned out, holding on to the gatepost as he peered up and down. He pulled himself back. ‘So what do we have? Let us assume the murderer came in through the gate and across the yard to the house. See those smudges? A little faint, but obviously sludgy footprints, and clear enough to distinguish toe from heel.’ We followed them to the back door. ‘But there are no footprints going back again or into the house. In fact the kitchen is the one room with a clean floor. Why might that be?’
‘The murderer could have taken his boots off so that he did not awaken William Ashby,’ I said.
‘But where did he put them down?’ he asked. ‘I did not notice any mud in the house and it is my job to notice everything.’
‘Perhaps he put them on some paper and threw the paper in the fire.’
‘Perhaps he did.’ Sidney Grice looked doubtful. ‘In which case William Ashby slumbers peacefully in one of those two chairs while the murderer stands on the threshold three feet away unlacing his boots, with the door open wide, and Monday night was quite blustery as I recall. Then he goes into the sitting room where he comes across the unfortunate Mrs Ashby, places his boots on some paper and stabs her forty times.’ We went back through, the blood gleaming dully in the light from the back door. ‘Nobody could expect to hack a woman to death without even an audible gasp, therefore he must have closed the door first… If you would perform that deed please, March.’
The hinges squeaked as I pulled the cast-iron handle, but the frame was too warped to allow the door to be fully closed. It was still ajar six inches when it jammed against the lintel.
‘More curious by the minute.’ Sidney Grice tugged but the door would not shut. ‘Then he lights a fire, throws the wedding ring in, crumbles the ashes and goes out via the shop, and then and only then, does William arise and investigate the noise.’
We went back into the shop and he opened the double glass doors of a cabinet behind the counter. Neatly hung on brass screws was everything from bone-handled penknives to a vicious-looking machete.
‘Look at these.’ He flicked a fly away from his face. ‘You could kill an ox with that hatchet. Now this one is interesting.’
My guardian indicated a knife shaped like an oriental dagger, the handle curved and encrusted in faux jewels of red and green coloured glass. But there was something wicked about the blade: no more than six or seven inches long, the burnished steel tapered to a lethally fine point and the edge, razor-thin, was wavy.
‘That cannot be the knife.’
‘What better place to hide a straw than in a haystack?’ He pulled out his handkerchief to lift the knife out and scrutinize it. ‘If it were the weapon it has been well cleaned, but it is worth looking at further.’ He wrapped up the knife and slipped it into his satchel.
‘Your hearing, as you have already demonstrated, is poor. If you will go and sit in the kitchen, closing both inner doors on your way as far as you can, we shall conduct a small experiment. You must stay where you are but call out every sound you hear, no matter how irrelevant it seems. Do you think you can manage that?’
‘I can try.’
I went back through the sitting room, my eyes fixed on the blood-soaked rug where Sarah Ashby must have breathed her last, and sat in the upright chair by the stove, trying not to imagine the blade penetrating her chest and bursting her heart, stabbing her body again and again, slitting her slender white throat and her pale little cheek.
‘I hear traffic,’ I called, ‘carriage wheels and horses’ hooves coming from the main street, I should think, and a dog is barking, a yappy one… A church clock… str
iking the quarter hour… Somebody shouting, two people, women, but I cannot hear what they are saying. The shop bell… A pigeon is cooing. Still traffic all the time, but a bit muffled now… A floorboard creaking… Rustling.’
The door from the sitting room squealed open and Sidney Grice appeared on tiptoe.
‘I was able to go out of the front door silently,’ he said, dropping on to his heels, ‘simply by putting my hand over the bell. Why did the murderer not do the same? It is all but impossible to come in without it ringing, though. Was it easy to hear?’
‘Yes, quite loud.’
‘And, even though I crept through the sitting room, you heard something.’
‘Yes, but if I were asleep…’
‘Think of all the activity that must have been going on in there.’ He knocked on the wall behind the bed.
‘Why do you keep tapping everything?’ I asked.
‘This shop is obviously part of a larger building,’ he said. ‘Often these structures are divided with flimsy walls and false ceilings, but these are solid and there are no trapdoors or secret doors. So there are only two ways in or out of here and we have been through them both.’ Sidney Grice puffed out his cheeks. ‘Come on, March. Let us go on to the street.’
12
The Little Match Girl
The constable was already on his feet when we stepped outside.
‘I told you to clear off,’ he was shouting at a ragged match girl as she scurried away, scratching the ground before her with a long stick.
‘Leave her be,’ Sidney Grice said quietly. ‘She could be our first witness.’
The constable guffawed. ‘Not much of a witness. Blind as a slug, she is.’
‘All the less reason to bully her,’ I said.
‘He is a policeman. It is his job to bully people,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘Excuse me,’ he called as the girl stepped round the dead rat.
She stopped and turned, her eyes covered in bandages torn from old sacking, as we hurried to catch up with her.
The Mangle Street Murders Page 5