The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  A fortnight had passed since that attack in the streets that had been thwarted by Irish Meg, but it did not take a Gypsy seer with a crystal ball to realize that trouble seemed to be gathering around Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Women’s Emancipation Society, which her bank sponsored. Threatening letters, basher attacks in the street—these troubling events had occasioned Field to assign police protection to Angela. And whom had he chosen to serve as her personal bodyguard? None other than Tally Ho Thompson. I personally felt that was tantamount to welcoming the fox into the henhouse, but all the others seemed quite sanguine about the arrangement. But then the worst happened, and raised the stakes in the game beyond what any of us might have imagined.

  On the morning in question, it took me a long moment to identify the sound which had awakened me from the deep embrace of both my loving Meg and the sweet oblivion of sleep. At first I thought, whimsically, that a large woodpecker was at persistent work upon the windowsill of our sleeping room, but then I realized that I had been battered out of slumber by an insistent knocking upon my hallway door.

  “I’m coming. I’m coming!” I shouted as I padded unsteadily across the outer parlor. Mercifully, those harsh reports ceased at the acknowledgement of my voice. When I opened the door, I confronted Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts, each looking as grim as a hangman. “Charles, what is it?” I asked as they charged past me into the room. “What time is it?”

  “There has been a murder at Coutts’ Bank.” Dickens’s voice was somewhat shaky, as if under great strain. “You must dress immediately. The Protectives have been notified. Hurry. We have a coach. We must go.”

  “Wot is it?” Meg, en deshabille, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, leaned in the doorway to our sleeping room.

  I was stunned by her indiscretion. To my great surprise, Dickens and Miss Burdett-Coutts took no notice of her.

  “Wilkie, get dressed, we must hurry,” Dickens insisted.

  Within short minutes we were climbing into Angela Burdett-Coutts’s sleek black brougham for the short gallop to Trafalgar Square. As I had left our rooms, still buttoning my clothes, Meg had promised to follow as quickly as she could dress herself.

  “A body has been found inside the bank.” Dickens apprised me of the facts of the case as the coach carried us toward our destination. “A night guard has disappeared. The day guard, coming on duty at half six, discovered the corpse.”

  “The security of the bank has never been penetrated before.” Miss Burdett-Coutts seemed quite shaken.

  “Angela was notified immediately by runner,” Dickens took up his narrative. “She came straightaway to me, though she sent the runner on to notify the Protectives.”

  “To Bow Street?” I asked.

  “No, that is part of our problem.” Dickens exhibited his nervousness. “It will not be Field and Rogers on the scene. I have sent a messenger to Field, but it may be too late.”

  Too late for what? I was struck by the agitation in Dickens’s voice.

  “Who has been murdered, and why in the bank?”

  “We do not know.” Dickens leapt upon my question, sparing Angela. “But we shall soon see.” Dickens pointed to the police post-chaise pulling up in front of us at the bank as our coachman, with a jolt and a small skid, brought our horses to a halt.

  As we disembarked, two policemen were stepping down from their official post-chaise. The Metropolitan Protectives shield and the designation “St. James Station” were painted on its door. Angela Burdett-Coutts, with Dickens and me in tow, cut them off before they reached the bank’s wide stone steps.

  “Gentlemen, I thank you for coming so quickly. I am Angela Burdett-Coutts, governing officer of the bank. I sent my personal bodyguard to assure that nothing would be disturbed. I am told there is a dead body on our premises.”

  “Ahem, yes mum.” The inspector, a short, pale, balding man with tiny eyes and a tight mouth, stared at her in amazement. He was clearly unprepared to accept this woman as the governor of an establishment as huge and important as Coutts Bank.

  “Ahem, yes”—his tiny eyes blinked so rapidly that one almost expected them to give off a ticking sound—“Inspector Collar here, and this is Serjeant Mussbabble.” He indicated his black-coated, stovepiped assistant, who seemed of some Thugee descent.

  Much to our relief, and Inspector Collar’s annoyance, at that very moment the black Bow Street post-chaise pulled up, and Field and Rogers stepped down.

  “Collar.”

  “Field.”

  They exchanged wary businesslike nods.

  “There has been a murder in the bank.” Dickens stepped forward, ever helpful.

  Field ignored him as if he were a total stranger.

  “I did not know the Protectives were already on the scene.” Field, apologetic and conciliatory, directed his attention toward Inspector Collar. “Rogers and I shall withdraw,” he bluffed.

  “No. Not at all,” Collar buckled. “We have not gone in yet. Come along. We shall both take a look.”

  As Collar and his man turned to lead us up those broad stone steps, Field sneaked a quick triumphant look at Dickens, accompanying it with a swipe of his crook’d forefinger to the side of his right eye.

  We followed Inspector Collar up the steps and through the high oak doors into the bank. Tally Ho Thompson stood alone, on guard, just inside the doors. When we entered, a look of relief accompanied by his ever present grin burst out upon his face.

  “Nothin’s been touched,” he informed us. “Nobody’s been let in. The guard’s sittin’ down over there; he’s as shaked as a saltcellar.”

  “Where is the body?” Inspector Collar rushed to assert his control over the crime scene. Field raised his eyebrows and sent a silent message to Dickens that said we all must tread softly around this other inspector who mistakenly thought it was his case.

  “Over there.” Thompson pointed to the center of the bank’s high atrium.

  Inspector Collar led off in that direction. Tally Ho Thompson formed with me the rear guard of this troop marching resolutely toward the victim. The vast atrium of Coutts Bank was floored completely in marble, which was softened here and there, often under a bank official’s desk, by a number of large oriental rugs. The body, however, rested on its stomach in the center of a wide expanse of grey marble directly in front of the long tellers’ counter. A heavy woolen cap, unusual for summer, covered its head. A deep green woman’s scarf was pulled tight and twisted around its neck. The corpse was a man dressed in a tweed suit, again rather heavy and unusual for the August heat. He also wore walking boots.

  “Strangled, eh?” Collar stated the obvious.

  “Yes, quite so,” Thompson answered from the rear.

  “Yes, of course,” Dickens and Field politely agreed in the same breath.

  “Strangled from behind, I’d say.” Collar was an absolute wonder of deduction.

  “Yes indeed,” Field humoured him.

  “With a woman’s silk scarf, she looks like.” Collar went down to one knee over the body.

  “Yes, a woman’s scarf,” Field agreed, “but it takes great strength to strangle a strugglin’ man.”

  “Not a woman done it then, you think, eh?” Collar was not at all slow in following someone else’s line of reasoning.

  “Just sayin’ it takes great strength to strangle a man, is all. A strong woman could do it.”

  “Ahh.” Collar rose and stood next to Field. The two detectives contemplated the body for long moments. We all—Dickens, Angela Burdett-Coutts, myself, Thompson—waited for one or the other’s next pronouncement.

  “There is somethin’ wrong here,” Field finally broke the awkward silence.

  Collar started as if awakened suddenly out of a dream.

  Field dropped quickly to one knee over the corpse.

  “Wot is it?” There was panic in Collar’s voice, a fear of being overshadowed.

  “Just as I thought.” Field sank back away from the body onto both knees with his weig
ht resting upon his heels.

  “Wot is it?” Collar repeated himself.

  “It is this.” Field reached out with his left hand to snatch the hat off the corpse’s head while, with a push to the shoulder with his right hand, he rolled the corpse over onto its back.

  A collective gasp burst forth from all of us.

  “My God!” Dickens exclaimed.

  “Oh.” Angela Burdett-Coutts covered her mouth with both hands in horror.

  Thompson and I stared wide-eyed.

  When Inspector Field plucked the hat off the corpse’s head, curly tresses of long brown hair cascaded out and formed a pool beneath the corpse’s upturned countenance. When Field rolled the body over, it revealed a woman’s full form secreted within ill-fitting men’s clothes.

  We all stood staring down at this unnatural apparition.

  “Oh good Gawd!” Irish Meg’s voice—she must have arrived when Field was busy with the corpse—turned all of our heads. “It’s Eliza Lane!”

  The Night Guard

  August 11, 1852—Morning

  “It is a woman.” Inspector Collar spoke aloud, rather anti-climactically, what all of us were thinking.

  “So it is,” Field agreed thoughtfully, his crook’d forefinger working at the corner of his right eye as if at a scab.

  “It’s Eliza Lane,” Meg restated her identification.

  “So it is, yes.” Angela Burdett-Coutts, who I think had gone into a temporary state of shock, seconded Irish Meg’s identification.

  Dickens looked at Field, but Field said not a thing. He was waiting.

  Collar looked briefly at Irish Meg, who was dressed respectfully enough, like a young working woman, but dismissed her in favor of Miss Burdett-Coutts.

  “Who is this Eliza Lane? And wot would she be doin’ on these premises so late at night.”

  “Oh, she was here last night. She was very angry at all of us,” Angela Burdett-Coutts spoke in a rush.

  “Yes, she wos,” Irish Meg seconded Angela Burdett-Coutts. “She all but cursed us, every one.”

  “Angela, slow down. Here, sit,” Dickens ordered, and with that solicitous gravity which he assumed whenever his Saint George protectiveness toward a vulnerable woman came upon him, he pulled a wooden desk chair across the marble floor.

  After a proper hesitation in respect of the shaken woman’s nerves, Inspector Collar pressed on.

  “Wot wos that, again, Miss uh, uh…” He broke stride on her name.

  “Angela Burdett-Coutts,” Dickens prompted him rather testily, impatient, perhaps, that Field was just standing in passive attendance while this booby of a policeman blundered about the scene of the crime.

  “She, Eliza, poor thing, was angry at all of us.” Angela Burdett-Coutts gathered up her voice. “She broke in upon last evening’s meeting of the Women’s Emancipation Society and accused us all of ugly things.”

  “And now she’s been murdered.” Inspector Collar seemed to have a genuine talent for restating the excruciatingly obvious.

  Dickens and Field exchanged eyebrow-raising looks which silently commented upon the torpid deductive powers of Inspector Collar.

  Said inspector, however, with rather surprising dispatch considering the abundantly evidenced slowness of his intelligence, gathered the crime scene’s obvious available information.

  From Angela Burdett-Coutts he obtained the names of all the members in attendance at the previous night’s meeting of the Women’s Emancipation Society.

  Next he turned to the day guard, one Mortimer Fix, who had discovered the body upon arriving for duty that morning. “I knew summat was wrong when I arrived an Frenchy wosn’t on the doors,” the man commenced his narrative. By his speech, he was clearly a refugee from the country who had taken on the aggressive bluster of the city streets. “Nobody wos on the doors. The doors wos wide open an unlocked. That’s when I knew summat wos wrong.”

  Field rolled his eyes at Dickens.

  Irish Meg and Angela Burdett-Coutts listened politely. Irish Meg was standing next to Angela’s chair with her hand on that lady’s shoulder. As I glanced at them, the thought flashed in my mind of how very far my Meggy had come. A mere fourteen months before she had been a foulmouthed, gin-swilling whore of the streets, yet here she stood offering a consoling hand to one of the most powerful women in the land.

  “I come right in,” Mr. Fix picked up his story, “an there wos no night guard to be found nowhere on the premises. Then I saw the body an I knew summat wos wrong.”

  A long silence ensued as Inspector Collar slowly ruminated upon the details of the day guard’s story.

  “The night guard, this Frenchy you called him”—Field stepped in quietly and took over the interrogation—“who is he? Wot do you know about him?”

  “He can read, he can,” Mr. Fix declared. “He’s always got his nose in a book when I comes in the mornin’s.” The man seemed especially pleased with this revelation, as if it were the capping evidence in the case.

  “His name, do you know his name?” Field was displaying a remarkable patience.

  “His name?” Mr. Fix’s face twisted up quite painfully as if he had been asked to solve the riddle of the Sphinx.

  “Yes, his name?” Collar reasserted himself.

  “Don’ thinks I knows his name”—Mr. Fix’s face still writhed in perplexity—“just Frenchy it always wos.”

  “He is a Frenchman then?” Inspector Collar jumped to his next question, perhaps fearful that Field would once again usurp his interrogation.

  “No sir, no sir.” Mr. Fix was quite adamant on this point. “Englishman just like me an you, but lived in Paris, come here from Paris he did.”

  “Aha!” Inspector Collar meaningfully caressed his chin with his right hand.

  “You never heard this Frenchy’s real name?” This time Dickens intruded upon the interrogation, drawing severe looks from both Collar and Field, and an absolutely murderous stare from Serjeant Rogers.

  “I did once, I think, sir.” By the painful twisting of his countenance it was clear that Mr. Fix was trying his very hardest to remember. “A B it wos, I think. A B sir, I’m summat certain.”

  This declaration threw everyone into confusion. None of the detectives of either the professional or the amateur persuasion had the slightest idea what the man was trying to say. We all stared as he scratched his head and screwed up his face, trying mightily to remember.

  “Birchwood it wos, or Barsad, or Bluffnose, or somethin’ like.” Mr. Fix finally tried a few possibilities. “Began with B. Barnbottom. Barbait. Beerbag.”

  “And wot sort of books wos this Frenchy always readin’?” Field asked the question with a smile toward Collar, as if it were a joke.

  “Ol’ leather ones, sir, and thick they wos.”

  Collar seemed stumped for another question, but Field calmly prompted him.

  “Perhaps a description?” Field spoke his suggestion in a very low voice as if only addressing Collar.

  “Ahem, of course,” Collar blustered. “Wot did this Frenchy look like?”

  “Oh, tall he is, for an Englishman I mean, nearly six feet I’d bet. An with a bushy brush on his face, so big you can’t hardly see nothin’ but his eyes.”

  “Tall with a bushy mustache it is then.” Field seemed almost talking to himself.

  This ended our interview of the only person who even resembled a witness in this murder case. Collar dismissed the man, made certain that he had overlooked nothing at the scene, and ordered his Serjeant Mussbabble to have the body taken away to the police surgery at St. Bart’s.

  Inspector Collar was looking around as if trying to find something more to do when Field, who had quietly wandered off, spoke out from near the high entrance door.

  “Strange,” Field mused, loud enough to turn everyone’s head.

  “What is it?” Dickens was ever alert to Field’s detectiving instincts.

  “What is strange?” a hint of panic at the prospect of Field having found
something that he had overlooked quavered in his voice.

  “Here, and here, and here.” Field stooped as he made his way across the floor picking up minute particles of something. “Look”—and he held out his cupped hand toward us—“little bits of cork across the floor in a trail from the door.”

  With that, Field moved quickly to the corpse of the young woman.

  “And yes,” he exclaimed in quiet triumph, “her boots are corks. See how the backs of the heels are crumbled. She wos murdered out in the street and dragged in, she wos.”

  “In the street? Dragged in?” Collar’s head was swiveling from the doors to the corpse in confusion.

  “Yes. See here. As the backs of her heels were dragged across the floor, the edges of the marble slabs crumbled pieces off. She left a trail of little crumbs of cork.”

  “So she did.” Inspector Collar saw it now, and even bent to pick up a little piece of cork that Field had missed.

  “Yes, that is interesting.” Dickens could not help but enter the colloquy. “But why in the world kill her outside and then drag her in here?”

  Field did not answer, perhaps aware that he had already overstepped his jurisdiction in the case. He had clearly surprised Inspector Collar in detecting this trail of evidence.

  Everyone looked to Collar for the answer, but none was immediately forthcoming. After a long and awkward pause as Collar contemplated the bit of cork in his hand, he finally answered. “Yes, we must look into this and all the other evidence that I am sure this crime scene holds. We shall study it very carefully. Thank you, Inspector Field.”

  That seemed our signal to take our leave, and Inspector Field leapt to grease his colleague Collar with the oil of conciliation.

  “Inspector Collar,” Field began with righteous deference, “thank you for lettin’ Serjeant Rogers and me observe. This seems a very interesting case, and one I would like to follow along. If there is anything we can do to help in the case, just summon us from Bow Street.”