by Steven Price
He awoke to a hammering at the door, to a muffled voice calling for him. He rolled over, shut his eyes, pulled a frilled pillow over his face.
When he next awoke, the sound of the knocking had altered. A high, reedy voice was calling to him through the wood.
Mr. Pinkerton, sir? Mr. Pinkerton?
He wet his lips.
Are you awake, sir? Mr. Pinkerton?
He opened one slow eyelid.
Sir? Chief Inspector Shore sent me.
He got groggily to his feet and peered about at the room, recognizing none of it. He could hear the faint clatter of horses in the street outside, the sound of hawkers shouting from the corner of the square. It was still morning.
Sir?
Just a minute, he barked.
When he unlocked the door and opened it he found a boy in corduroy trousers, a heavy jacket, a squashed cap of wet red wool. Not ten years old if a day. His raw-looking nose was slick and he licked at his glistening upper lip and blinked twice and then he took off his cap. His fingernails were black. William did not know him.
He glanced along the corridor in both directions and then glowered down at the boy.
Persistent little devil, aren’t you.
Sir?
What time is it?
Half ten, sir.
You weren’t knocking earlier?
Sir?
He shook his head. Never mind. What’s this about Shore?
The boy straightened. If you’ll come with me, sir. It’s something you should see.
What is it?
If you please, sir. He said not to tell you.
You’re a runner from the Yard?
Yes sir.
Has he recovered the body?
The body, sir?
A door opened across the hallway. A man with red hair and waxed moustaches emerged in his shirt sleeves and there was ink on his fingers and William glared at him, then ran one bruised hand down his face.
For god’s sake, he said, steering the boy by one shoulder out of the corridor. This better be about Charlotte Reckitt.
He was not, officially, in London.
He had arrived on the last Friday in November when the Chicago office had slowed for the season and that date now was already six weeks gone. It had been the first Christmas with his father dead and he thought of his daughters guiltily and of his wife’s recriminating letters with sadness. His brother had written from the New York offices wondering at his absence but he had not written back.
After their father’s funeral they had spoken little but as brothers it had never been their way and it did not mean what it might have. Robert was the second son and could do little right in their father’s eyes and William knew this and watched his brother at the cemetery feeling a heaviness in his throat. They had gone over their father’s office at the Agency for outstanding business but there had been little for the old man to do in those final months and his desk had been uncommonly tidy. Robert had taken a brass statuette of a racehorse from the bureau, nothing else. All that July William had slept badly and worked long hours while the daylight lingered in an attempt to quiet his heart but nothing it seemed could do so. At last in September he went alone to their mother’s house and ate a quiet dinner with her while the candles blazed in their sconces and when she kissed him good night he followed her heavily upstairs and went into his father’s home office. He sat awhile in the dark. Then he lit a fire in the grate and began to go through the old man’s things.
It was midnight and he had opened his father’s safe and was unpacking its documents when he came across the file marked Shade. The green papered walls, the desk gleaming in the window glass. The house creaking around him. He was on his knees amid a storm of papers and he read carefully. That file had included memoranda and notes in his father’s cribbed hand and in the papers mentioning Shade’s accomplices he found an old photograph of Charlotte Reckitt with her measurements on the back. There was a list of partial aliases also. The file still smelled of his father’s cigars and William closed it and sat thinking. Later that week he sent out a circular with Charlotte Reckitt’s description but heard nothing back and thought little more of it.
Then in October word reached him of a failed heist in Philadelphia. Such reports were routine and he almost did not read it. Seated in his leather desk chair staring out at the late autumn sunlight while the traffic passed in the street below. Feeling a hollowness coming up in him. He had started to leaf through the pages and then stopped and turned back to the first page and started to read it again, more slowly.
The thief had spooked, had left in a hurry. Although the heist had been aborted the Agency’s operatives had canvassed the neighbourhood to collect the details. A Mrs. Eliza LeRoche, widowed, still young, had leased a shopfront on Congress Street in the last week of September ostensibly to promote Dr. Gilliam’s Mendicant Oil & Miracle Cure. There were the slender green bottles pyramided into window displays, the illustrated broadsides with testimonials from South America, the daily notices paid in advance in the Boston Advertiser. But behind a japanned screen in the rear of the shop a tunnel led through the floor and under a vault of the bank next door. LeRoche’s handwriting was on the lease and on the papers she had left amid the complete stock of Dr. Gilliam’s Mendicant Oil & Miracle Cure. A pair of clean high-heeled boots with laces tied had been placed neatly at the mouth of the tunnel. Something in all this would not leave him alone and two days later while eating breakfast William remembered where he had heard that name and he set his spoon down in his porridge and stared at his hands and Margaret had stopped eating and watched him.
He was careful, he made inquiries. She had been seen locking up her shop in the early hours of October seventh by sweepers working the crossings. A postman claimed she had spoken with a Continental accent and that she was either Irish or Polish. The high-heeled boots had been cobbled by Smiley & Sons of Glasgow and were sold only in Britain though the company had mailed out several orders directly to customers in Philadelphia during the past six months. In August three pairs had been delivered to a brownstone rented to LeRoche just off Independence Square. Then the two sweepers identified Charlotte Reckitt through her rogues’ gallery photograph, hair cut shorter, yes, a little older, aye, but those eyes, it was her.
He sent out another circular, to Toronto, San Francisco, London, Paris. In November the woman was spotted in Piccadilly and William locked up his office and bid his secretary good night and walked quietly down the stairs of his building feeling the eyes of his employees on the back of his neck and knowing what his wife would say and that it would not matter. He purchased a ticket for Liverpool on the Cunard Line that week and sent a telegram to John Shore at Scotland Yard. He would seek out Charlotte Reckitt himself. It was not answers he wanted, but something else.
He found her house in Hampstead on his third night. He had known by the last week of 1884 that he had the woman cornered and she had known it also. She had slept at home on the thirtieth and changed her hairstyle for the New Year’s celebrations and William had trailed her home from the opera and watched her drift from window to window all that long, quiet, exhausted night, running her index finger and thumb over the jewels at her throat. He had tipped his hat at each sighting as if to greet her from where he stood, the street lamp casting a crescent of shadow over his eyes. He had wanted to be seen. He had wanted her to know it was finished.
It didn’t matter that he liked her well enough. In his world if you turned a blind eye you got cracked overhand with a bottle. You turned the other cheek and you woke up with your pockets turned out and your watch chain gone.
The boy led him down into the street.
The silver curvature of the cobblestones, the glassed dark of the gas lamps. Orange fog in its thick hang.
He had left a hansom waiting in the cold and William noted this but did not remark on it. When he gripped the rail and lurched up he felt the coiled springs shiver and sway under his weight and then the mare lowered its hea
d into a bag of feed and William watched a thick green knot of shit dispel in front of him.
The driver from his perch behind them was already shaking the reins, clicking his tongue, and the cab jounced and started sharply. It did not set off in the direction of Whitehall.
Where are we going?
Pitchcott’s, sir.
The mortuary? What’s there?
Bodies, sir.
William allowed himself a weary smile. Is it Charlotte Reckitt, son?
The boy grinned back. They don’t tell me nothing.
Nuffink, it sounded like. William shook his head.
The cold air smelled of snow though it had not snowed. As they went, the orange fog burned around the horse’s hooves, scattered and roiled and reshaped itself while the hansom rattled on through the chill. William knew horses and he regarded the frosted cobblestones with a wariness, thinking of the lack of traction there and how easily the beast could go down.
As they rounded the corner past Long Acre he could see a postman in his scarlet coat trudging through the fog, his breath pluming out before him. The high narrow buildings cast the shopfronts in shadow. Then they were into the traffic and the muffled life of the day. He watched a coal scuttler draw up a heavy iron plate from the footway outside a confectionery, his sleeves rolled and his big fists wielding a hook for the purpose. A roan horse and cart looming silently at the curb. He had known that work himself as a young man and hated the drudgery of it. There were clerks in their black coats and tall hats shoving their way along the footways and others trotting grimly between the slow waggons and omnibuses in the low fog and William leaned back, he closed his eyes.
He could feel the boy at his side bouncing and jostling as the hansom kept on.
What’s your name, son?
Ollie, sir.
Oliver?
Just Ollie, sir. I don’t go in for nothing fancy.
William smiled and opened one eye. You been doing this a long time, Ollie?
Near six months, sir.
You like it?
The boy shrugged, rubbed at his nose with his jacket cuff. It pays the bills an all.
That sounds sensible.
Ollie nodded. Well it’s more of a stepping stone, sir. To get me where I want to be.
And where would that be?
Detective.
William nodded seriously. That’s a hard life.
Every life is, sir, when you got a family to support.
Very true.
The boy nodded sagely and watched the street pass. He twisted all at once around and hammered at the roof of the hansom and hollered up, It’s Pitchcott’s we’re going, driver. Take us down Frith here.
William regarded him, his wet nose, his red lips, his grey skin. After a moment he said, And do you, Ollie? Have a family to support?
The boy grinned. Oh I’m not married yet, sir, if that’s what you mean.
No.
Seems like a right lot of trouble, that.
William laughed. You’re a wise fellow.
I wouldn’t like to say so, sir, Ollie said modestly, then lifted his face and leaned forward scanning the street and all at once the hansom came to a rattling halt.
Pitchcott’s here, sir, the boy said.
William glanced out. It was a squat unmarked frontage on the corner between a haberdashery and a decrepit surgeon’s offices. The windows above all three looked dark and unlet. As William swung down from the cab he stumbled and half fell and held himself upright by one big hand on the door. He brushed himself off and glanced at the boy but the boy was scrambling down on the far side, holding out the copper tuppence to the driver.
William reached into his pocket and withdrew a white handkerchief. Ollie, he said. You need this more than me. Go on, it’s clean.
The boy grinned again. A clean shilling be even better.
I’m sure it would.
That’s the chief there, sir.
William nodded but did not for a moment move and then he sighed and glanced at the cold sky, the painful white hole in it where the sun did not burn through.
John Shore was leaning against the brick entrance with his arms folded and one leg crossed at the ankle and when he saw William he pushed off from the step and came towards him. His arm left a smudge on the wall where he had been. He was biting down hard on a briarwood pipe and his frock coat hung slackly from his shoulders, unbuttoned, parting over his heavy belly. His checked trousers were spattered at the knees with grey mud, his top hat unbrushed. He looked, William thought, deflated and sad.
The chief inspector plunged his hands into his pockets. Sleep well?
William shrugged.
Sorry about the hour.
Where did she wash up?
Who?
Isn’t this about Charlotte Reckitt?
Shore’s eyes looked rimmed and sore. Well, he said. I wanted you to see it for yourself.
Shore had a florid face and thick red fingers that reminded William of Italian meats. He had liaised with William’s father for ten years, fielding requests to the Yard for information, meeting with the elder Pinkerton on his visits to London, soaking up the rough wild stories his father liked to tell. Shore was the son of a butcher and he had spoken once of his lonely childhood going from house to house with a basket of cuttings on one shoulder while the birds flocked and circled overhead. His own father he said would keep a live calf each Christmas tethered in his shop with 6d per lb seared into the shivering thing’s chest. There was something in that, he explained, that he thought of when he took a man into custody. How so? William had asked. Does a man have what he’s worth marked out on him?
Not what he’s worth, Shore had replied. What he’ll sell for.
It was a soot-stained door he took him through with no windows and a single ancient lock of iron that William understood would keep no one out but perhaps someone in. The air inside was close, the gas in the fixture turned high. The plaster walls were crumbling from damp to the height of a man’s shoulder and the ceiling was not much higher. A stench filled the corridor that was not from the gas and William cleared his throat and squinted and regretted giving the boy his handkerchief.
Your father always brought a pipe, Shore said. I don’t imagine you—?
William grimaced. It’s not my first time in a mortuary, he said. Withdrawing his pipe from his overcoat pocket even as he spoke, tamping it, lighting it. It was an old cherrywood pipe from Virginia with the scabs of bark left on it and it reminded him of the war. To their left a door stood ajar on an empty filing room, paperwork strewn across the small desk. A single candle was burning there. The dark wainscoting behind it looked water-spotted and old.
Do I need to sign in?
It’s not that sort of establishment. You haven’t breakfasted yet?
No.
Probably a good thing. How’s your hand?
How’s it look?
Pretty as a flower. You’d fit right in at Millbank.
William grunted. Let’s get this over with, he said.
The mortuary was long, low-ceilinged, badly lit. There were short tables along both walls and a narrow space between each and on the tables were bodies both covered and not. The legs of those dead hung off the ends of the tables suspended there and the smell they gave off was foul, tinged with a peculiar ripe sweetness William knew from transporting the murdered on the railroads of the Midwest. He smoked and smoked.
There was a young constable just inside the doorway slouching in his immaculate blues and he straightened and nodded politely as they approached. He was cleanshaven, already balding, his collar badges glinting in the light as he turned.
Shore looked past him into the gloom. Who is the assistant in post here, Mr. Stone?
Mr. Cruikes, sir.
At the end of the long room a man in a stained apron was swaying between the tables of the dead. Slats of shadow, slats of light. A low soft crooning as he worked.
He’s drunk.
It rather goes with t
he job, Shore said grimly. So long as they get the bodies in and out and mostly tagged as they should be. We won’t be needing Mr. Cruikes, Constable.
Yes sir.
William said nothing. Shore led them down between the tables, their footsteps scraping in the quiet, and then the three of them stopped at the foot of a covered table. Shore pulled the oilcloth back and William stepped closer.
It was the severed head of a woman. A torso lay next to it. The legs were missing and looked to have been sawed roughly off judging by the stumps. The skin on the face had greyed and gone soft and the black hair had been shorn. A towel had been folded at the crown to hold it upright. Her eyes were rolled sightlessly up in her head and her lips were parted slightly. The skin on the torso had not greyed in the same way but in the eerie light it glowed as if lit from within. There were puckered slashes where a blade had gone in under the ribs and across the belly.
Shore was watching his reaction. Is it her?
What happened to her hair?
That’s the question you ask? She’s been carved into pieces.
William unclenched the pipe from his teeth and moved it to one side of his mouth and he said, quietly, It does look like her.
Charlotte Reckitt.
Yes.
I thought so too. We haven’t acquired an identification yet from her kin. But we brought the neighbour down from Hampstead and he recognized her also. The shape of her face and so on.
What happened? Was she cut up by a river steamer?
Shore shook his head. Irishman on the docks fished the head out of the river this morning. Mr. Stone was the first one there.
William glanced at the constable and the young man frowned with great seriousness.
His name was Malone, sir. He was working down at the loading piers on a vessel just in from Holland. Carrying bulbs, it was.
Bulbs?
Flowers, sir.