The Slum Reaper: Murder and corruption in Victorian London (Esther & Jack Enright Mystery Book 4)

by David Field

Percy’s face set even harder.

  ‘I’m well aware of that, my friend. But in my experience and contrary to what people might think, prisoners in condemned cells tend to put on weight. So how did Mr Maguire manage to lose forty-seven pounds in less than a week, not to mention five inches in height?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, obviously. Perhaps we should speak to Mr Barrington — he’s the turnkey in charge of the Condemned Suite.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps we should,’ Percy replied acidly. ‘And could you also ask him to bring the prison record for Charles Grieves, who should have hanged alongside Maguire?’

  ‘I can save you the trouble on that one,’ Tillotson smiled reassuringly, but rather too glibly, Percy thought. ‘Grieves was a suicide.’

  ‘Perhaps, while we’re waiting for Mr Barrington, you might explain why someone who’s scheduled to hang anyway would want to commit suicide. And for that matter how he managed it, given that he was presumably under continuous watch, as is required by regulation.’

  ‘Certainly. I’ll just send for Barrington.’

  ‘Along with the jail records for Grieves,’ Percy prompted him.

  John Barrington appeared after a delay so short that one could have suspected him of lurking outside in the corridor. He had a small folder in his hand, which Percy took from him after they’d been introduced and Barrington had taken the other seat in front of Tillotson’s desk.

  Percy ran his eyes over the contents of the folder, then looked up accusingly at Barrington.

  ‘Not exactly your finest moment, was it?’

  ‘Meanin’?’

  ‘Meaning that you had a man on suicide watch, allegedly being supervised from dawn till dusk, who succeeded in committing suicide.’

  ‘Unfortunate, certainly.’

  ‘Dereliction of duty, certainly!’ Percy thundered back, but Barrington appeared unmoved. ‘How did it happen?’

  Barrington shrugged.

  ‘We was under-staffed as usual an’ one o’ the men went fer a leak while the other were called to the other cell, where a bloke called Maguire were goin’ off ’is nut, an’ ’ad ter be restrained wi’ ropes. While there were nobody in Grieves’s cell — an’ it were only fer a minute or so — ’e slit ’is throat wi’ a bit of metal sewn inter ’is trousers. It musta bin there fer a while.’

  ‘Are these men not searched at regular intervals?’ Percy demanded.

  ‘Like I said, we’re under-staffed in the Condemned Suite, ’cos nobody likes the duty, an’ they ’as this ’abit o’ claimin’ sickness when they’re put on it.’

  ‘I presume that nobody was called in to certify Grieves’s death? The Jail Surgeon, for example?’ Percy asked resignedly.

  ‘That’s only for the ones who are hanged,’ Tillotson advised him. ‘That’s regulation, of course.’

  ‘And Grieves’s body, as if I didn’t know already?’

  ‘In the communal grave, in a lime filled coffin,’ Tillotson confirmed.

  Percy glared down at the prison record, the copy of which Jack had already supplied to Percy. The original record confirmed what Percy already knew.

  ‘The man who was hanged on the sixth of March 1893 weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds and was five feet seven. That matches almost exactly the admission details for Grieves. Did you hang a dead body?’

  ‘The man hanged that day was a Michael Maguire,’ Barrington insisted.

  Percy snorted.

  ‘I suggest that the man hanged that day was Charles Grieves, as scheduled,’ Percy insisted. ‘He didn’t commit suicide at all — as your own records confirm, completed, no doubt, by someone who couldn’t be either bribed or threatened and who wrote it down the way it was. Look at your own figures, man! They describe Grieves perfectly!’

  ‘Then what happened to Maguire?’ Barrington challenged him.

  ‘You’re not surely insisting that he’s still in here, having somehow dodged the gallows?’ Tillotson enquired, seemingly unmoved by what was being suggested and the utter corruption of his own men that was being revealed.

  ‘Of course not!’ Percy yelled. ‘Do I look that stupid? He was sneaked out of here, wasn’t he?’

  ‘London’s a big place,’ Tillotson smiled unctuously. ‘You’ll have a difficult job justifying your unfounded allegations.’

  ‘Take that fat smirk off your face,’ Percy snarled as he stood up to leave. ‘I know exactly where to find Mr Maguire and when I do you two will finish up in the Poorhouse. No job, no pension, no good character. Even better, you might even finish up chained to the wall in the very place where you once used to strut around like gods, until greed got the better of you. I’ll see myself out.’

  ‘I’m not so sure I’m all that hungry, but I seem to recall that fish and chips went down well on the previous occasions when I brought them in from Farringdon Market,’ Percy said as he handed the warm package to Esther and the bottle to Jack. ‘Hurry up and open this bloody thing — I need a drink or three after my frustrating afternoon down in Newgate.’

  ‘I’ll put these in the oven to warm up a bit more, while you two boys talk business,’ Esther offered, ‘but keep it quiet, because Bertie’s only just gone to sleep.’

  ‘So how did it go?’ Jack asked.

  ‘Exactly as we thought. Michael Maguire’s almost certainly doing dirty deeds for the builders and demolishers who’re flattening The Old Nichol, while his partner Grieves took the drop in his name. If nothing else comes of all this, Newgate will soon be looking for a new Deputy Keeper. And the way I feel at the moment, I might apply for the job myself.’

  ‘I looked at those company records, by the way,’ Jack advised him as he reached into his jacket pocket, ‘although they didn’t mean a great deal to me.’

  ‘Show me anyway,’ Percy requested as he took a seat at the kitchen table and a long swig of the wine that Jack poured him as he began reading. Over the top of the wine glass his eyes widened in total surprise.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jesus blooming Christ and all the bleeding angels!’

  ‘Uncle Percy!’ Esther protested from the drawer from which she was extracting the cutlery. ‘I asked you before to keep it quiet for the sake of the children. I don’t want our daughter to develop the same foul mouth as you! She can talk quite fluently now and I don’t want her sounding like she grew up in Whitechapel!’

  ‘Sorry my dear,’ Percy explained, ‘but guess who’s one of the two directors and principal shareholders of “Gregory Properties?”’

  ‘One of those names was vaguely familiar, certainly. “Mallory”, wasn’t it?’ Jack replied.

  ‘“Spencer Gregory Mallory”, no less. The middle name was the one he chose for his company, no doubt intent on keeping his true identity secret from everyone except those with access to company records. But think — why was that name familiar to you?’

  ‘I’ve been racking my brains ever since I read it,’ Jack admitted, ‘but it still eludes me.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the name of the man who employed Alice’s niece Emily?’ Esther said as she leaned across the table to place the sauce bottles in its centre.

  ‘The very same!’ Percy confirmed. ‘You have a better memory than the man you married who calls himself a police officer, my dear. I don’t suppose the other name means anything to you either?’

  ‘“Victor Bradley”?’ Jack asked. ‘No — should it?’

  ‘Take my advice and stay out of the Fraud Branch when you’re back on two legs,’ Percy smirked. ‘He’s an Assistant Leader of the London County Council and I’ll bet Bermondsey to a brick that he’s in some position of influence over the land acquisitions down at The Old Nichol.’

  ‘Ah, got it now,’ Jack replied. ‘Civic corruption, you mean?’

  Percy smiled broadly at Esther, who was lowering a plate of haddock and chips onto the table in front of him. ‘The loud clang you just heard, Esther my dear, was the noise of a penny dropping inside your husband’s head.’

  ‘So, what
do you propose to do?’ Jack asked as Percy raised his knife and fork.

  ‘Satisfy the raging appetite that just returned. Bon appétit, everyone.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Here’s a toast to Jackson,’ Constance Enright announced as she raised her glass high in the air. ‘This doesn’t mean that I approve for one second of the irresponsibility of my late husband’s brother in encouraging my only son to risk his life and financial prospects in a police career. But, being an Enright, he proved himself the best at what he eventually chose to do, although I’ll never understand why. So, I give you “Jackson Enright”.’

  As the glasses of champagne rose in unison and his name was quietly repeated by his proud immediate family members, Jack smiled back with some embarrassment and reflected on the eventful morning behind them.

  First the cab ride into Buckingham Palace, with Esther sitting proudly alongside him and his mother squeezed in on his other side, as the hansom swept through the front gates. Then the shuffling and queue formation supervised by some flunkey in coat tails in the ballroom, followed by a long wait until a bustling movement in the doorway proved to be the entrance of Her Majesty herself, accompanied by a senior naval officer in full dress uniform who looked as if he’d just escaped off stage from one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that were currently playing to packed houses down the road at the Savoy Theatre.

  As he stood in line, Jack felt like an imposter as he listened to the naval type advising the Queen of the actions that had led to those in the line ahead of him being nominated for their awards. A Welsh coalminer who’d re-entered a caved-in seam half a mile underground in order to rescue five of his workmates; a nurse in Leeds who’d crawled into a collapsed building to administer morphine to someone trapped under a roof beam; and a fireman who’d risked being blown to pieces when he continued hosing, at close quarters, an inferno in an ammunition dump in Colchester that threatened to destroy neighbouring houses if it went up. By comparison, stopping a runaway horse seemed like a routine daily chore.

  Of the Queen herself, Jack had only two memories. The first was that she was as wide as she was tall, a detail usually obscured from the general public by the fact that they only ever saw her seated, either in her processional carriage or in the traditional photographs of her with her sons and daughters during the Summer months at Osborne House, ready for circulation to the newspapers in time for their Christmas editions. His second memory was that she smelled faintly of mothballs.

  ‘Police Constable Jackson Enright, Ma’am,’ the equerry had advised her when his turn came. ‘Saved two young children from a bolting horse in Limehouse.’

  ‘Why was the horse bolting, young man?’ the Queen asked.

  ‘Someone had let off a fire cracker, your Majesty.’

  ‘Yes, quite. Skittish things, horses, as my dear late husband Albert once had occasion to learn to his cost. Well done, young man. You’re too tall for me to pin this thing on you, so my equerry will do the honours. Who’s next, Admiral?’

  A quick pose in the Palace gardens for a police photographer who’d been commissioned to preserve the proud moment for the benefit of the Police Gazette, then off to the splendid lunch hosted by a very proud mother in a private room in a very exclusive restaurant in nearby Knightsbridge. The beefsteak was excellent and the celebratory cake baked by a leading boulanger recommended by Jack’s sister Lucy melted in the mouth so easily that everyone was into their second helping before Constance remembered the toast.

  ‘What’s your next move?’ Jack asked in little more than a whisper to Percy, seated to Jack’s right as he occupied pride of place at the other end of the table from his mother, with Esther on his left, Lucy’s husband Edward next to Percy and Lucy seated alongside Esther.

  ‘I’m not sure which of them to tackle first,’ Percy admitted. ‘The obvious one’s Victor Bradley and allegations of civic corruption. He was ideally placed to award the contract to Mallory’s company and I need to find out if that contract came before or after Mallory started buying up properties in The Old Nichol. If it came afterwards, then clearly Mallory knew in advance where the contract would be awarded and Bradley clearly had a financial motive for awarding it to a company of which he’s a leading shareholder and director. That’s probably enough in itself to get him put away for a long stretch, given what is called in polite circles his “conflict of interests” in the award of Council contracts. But I haven’t forgotten the other matter involving Mallory — the missing Emily Broome. I don’t want to get too far up his nose until I’m satisfied that he can no longer help in our enquiries regarding the girl’s disappearance.’

  ‘That’s quite enough of that work nonsense,’ Constance boomed down the table. ‘This is meant to be a momentous family occasion, not another opportunity for Percy to lead Jack astray.’

  ‘I quite agree, Mother,’ Lucy chimed in, still not having quite forgiven her Uncle Percy for persuading her to play the role of a ghost during a dreadful investigation in a remote part of Wiltshire the previous year, which had gone horribly wrong when a man finished up under a coal train. Lucy preferred her comfortable life as the wife of a successful Holborn architect, a mother of three and a much lauded amateur Thespian in a local theatre group. Whenever Uncle Percy was around, family members tended to get themselves recruited into unofficial roles with Scotland Yard and it was presumably only a matter of time before Constance became his next dupe.

  ‘At least you should now think about forgiving Uncle Percy for getting me into the Met,’ Jack said to his mother. ‘We now have a bravery award recipient in the family and I doubt that I’d have earned that as the insurance broker that you wanted me to become.’

  ‘At least in that profession you wouldn’t have fallen under a horse,’ his mother countered and it fell embarrassingly silent until Esher kicked the conversation into life by enquiring as to the health of Lucy’s children. Percy took advantage of the renewed noise cover to whisper hoarsely to Jack, ‘I’ll come up and talk to you as soon as I have more to report.’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘There’s no doubt about her identity, I suppose?’ Percy said glumly as he gazed down at the naked corpse of the latest apparent murder victim on the mortuary table.

  Dr Bebbington shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of non-committal.

  ‘You’re the detective — I only certify cause of death and from the state of what’s left of her head I wouldn’t have needed a medical degree to do that. A sledgehammer or something similar, just like the others, no doubt so as to obliterate her appearance to conceal her identity. But as for that, they either got very careless, or it’s a subtle attempt to confuse things. Her handbag finished up a few feet away in the rubble and it contained pawn tickets in her name.’

  So far as he was being led to believe, Percy’s search for Emily Broome was over. But even if he accepted, from the handbag evidence, that she was now dead, there were many other questions he’d like answered. First of all, how and why had she finished up in Bethnal Green, when her life until she became a governess in the employment of the Mallory family, had been led in neighbouring Shoreditch? Had she been living right under his nose in the two weeks or so that he’d been looking for her, or had someone left the body under the builder’s rubble of Short Street to make her look just like one of the others?

  Where had she been most recently? Certainly not with Tommy Dugdale, given that his death had occurred a week before hers. But had she run back to him, only to witness his murder and been silenced because of what she knew of his death? Was her death completely unconnected with her disappearance from Hampstead, or had she been done away with for some reason connected with that?

  The experienced investigator inside him began considering other possible motives for her death and he asked the obvious question of the police surgeon.

  ‘Any signs of sexual assault?’

  ‘None whatsoever,’ he was assured. ‘In fact, for a girl in her early twenties in this area she was q
uite remarkable in still being a virgin.’

  That ruled out one obvious reason for her departure from her employment; she obviously had not been subjected to the usual experience of many ‘live in’ female domestic staff at the hands of ‘the master of the house’. At least, not to the extent of losing her virginity, although perhaps that had been about to happen and she had fled.

  ‘I take it you didn’t know the girl well enough to be able to make a formal identification?’ Dr Bebbington cut into Percy’s train of thought.

  ‘We’d never met and the only reason I’m here’s because she’s connected with the slum clearances,’ Percy replied, opting not to reveal his additional interest.

  ‘From a public health perspective, the sooner these infested hovels hit the ground the better,’ the doctor observed, ‘but you’re right about the curious series of deaths. They can’t all be accidents or coincidence and they’ve kept me from my normal work. However, my reason for enquiring as to whether or not you knew her is that the coroner will require formal identification from someone.’

  Percy nodded down at the mangled facial features and shuddered at the prospect of requiring Alice Bridges to conduct any formal identification.

  ‘That’s going to be very difficult, obviously. Is there nothing else that might assist in confirming who she was?’

  ‘There’s this, I suppose,’ the doctor suggested as he moved down the table and pointed to the left ankle. ‘At some stage in the past — possibly during her early teens — she broke her ankle. It healed rather imperfectly, although some effort was made to set it, probably by some overworked doctor in an overcrowded admissions ward. However, this young lady probably ignored the advice which went with that setting, namely to rest it for a month or two and probably walked with a limp. Does that help?’

  ‘Probably not, but if I can find someone who once knew a girl called “Emily Broome” who walked with a limp as a teenager, would the coroner accept that?’

  ‘He’d probably have to, in the circumstances. I’ve experienced less satisfactory identifications during my extensive career as a police surgeon and the coroner’s jury would probably accept his direction to bring in a verdict regarding “a female believed to be” whatever her name was.’