by Steven Price
His father spoke little about his own blood. He left it for his wife to sing Scottish ballads in the evenings with a misty eye. He did not believe in looking backward and took what he could from his life at hand and leaned knifelike into the future with it. But one afternoon when William was nine he spoke about his own father, dead in Glasgow. They were standing in the unscythed grass behind the woodshed. He said his father William’s grandfather and all six of his own great-uncles had eyes the silver of cooling iron and that such eyes in the Scotland of his youth were believed the eyes of ancient Highland warriors. Eyes born with brutality in them. Or so legend claimed. Those men had been blacksmiths each and as if to prove the legend true each had killed a man in a bare-knuckle fight before his eighteenth year. The English had killed them all, one way or another.
William had brushed his own face in wonder. Do I have eyes like that too, Pa?
You, his father had grunted. You take after your mother.
As he approached the gates of the dock works he could hear it. A roaring muffled and thrumming up through the cobblestones like some vast machinery at work deep in the earth.
Then he came around a corner and saw them. Hundreds of men, blowing on their fingers, stamping their feet for the cold. Constables with truncheons and dock officers with their red hands bared kept back the crowds with a lazy swing of their arms and the labourers lingered in ragged shirts and coats, smoking, sullen, gaunt, unwashed and reeking, their fists plunged down the fronts of their trousers for warmth. It was only just half seven and all at once there was a ripple in the throng as faces were raised, listening, and then the great iron gates screeled open and there came a pouring of men through, shoulder to shoulder, the breath steaming off them like cattle driven to some enclosure beyond. He could hear the foremen on their platforms crying the names of men like a blessing and he could see the haggard and the lost of that city hollering and waving and showing the whites of their eyes in their desperation to be hired.
Somewhere in all that stood the Irishman Malone who had found Charlotte Reckitt’s head.
William gripped his wallet in one fist, swore softly at the futility of ever finding the man. Then he went down into it.
A world all its own in its breaking. Slowly he went from basin to basin along the quays, the ships in their locks raised to differing heights. He could see the green copper sheathing of an American schooner with its weeds and barnacles looming high above him and creaking in the faint breeze and at its stern he saw a goat tethered and bleating and he could see beyond that the line of planks and gangways stretching from ship to ship along that basin. Other vessels drifted low under his eyeline and ladders leaned up against the edges of the stonework where dark-skinned sailors ascended in weary single file. He could see a heavy sack of meal misshapen and twisting sluggishly on its chains above a quay like a hanged man in his hood and he watched a thresher guide the burlap by its base as if to hold the ankles of the dead steady. He could smell the open crates of fish in their glister and the reek of bundled tobacco mingling with the cinnamon and rum. He passed a box of open horns and ivory with the flesh tufted and rotting at the bases and the stink of it made his eyes water. His soles stuck to and peeled from the slatted boards of the wharf and he realized it was old sugar spilled from the sheds nearby and he walked on, his steps blatting and slapping messily in the cold. Blinking and shivering and wondering if he was coming down with something.
He passed through the warehouses, the low sheds with their vast grinding wheels turning through their roofs like paddle steamers on the Mississippi, the brown water turning lazily under their laden barges, and he wended his way through the crates of cork, the bins of raw sulphur. The rattle of empty casks rolled along the cobbles, the clatter and hiss of chains slung up in a spray from the river, the brassy hammering of coopers at their barrels. He passed down into the storehouse vaults with their foul moulding dry rot and their spilled wine where orange lanterns smouldered on iron rings and then he ascended through the far tunnels and everywhere he walked men regarded him uneasily but did not slow at their labours and at each basin he stopped and asked but no man had word of the one he sought.
At last one foreman did not turn from his query but spat a slick of tobacco onto the wharf and stood waiting. William watched it bubble there like a dripping of grease. The ache in his skull beetled deeper. The man’s crew was unloading a collier moored to a rickety dolphin a little ways out in the river and he watched the whippers in their black-stained greatcoats and fustians bend and hoist along the ladders.
Who? Malone? The foreman smeared a wrist across his forehead. There’s a Molloy works for us sometime. Skinny little fellow, big hands, Irish. No lighterman though. He’s a lumper in the right season.
Was he unloading a cargo of bulbs last Friday?
The foreman shrugged, rolled the wad of tobacco from cheek to cheek.
It’s about the head.
What head?
Wasn’t there a woman’s head pulled out on Friday?
I reckon I’d remember it.
William frowned. You didn’t find part of a dead woman here Friday?
Oh we got lots of stiffs round here. He grinned. But they all swear they’re here to work.
William smiled.
Listen. I tell the lads to roll the bug-logs back out in the river. It’s just too much bleedin fuss when you drag one up. You be at it all day.
Bug-logs?
The foreman squinched up one eye, spat again.
Are there any other docks would have been unloading cargoes of bulbs that day?
I don’t keep the manifests do I.
Of course not. No.
Look at them buggers, he muttered. He nodded at a group of labourers leaning against a post where an unlit cauldron twisted and untwisted on its chains. Like they ain’t even here. Ain’t much to pick from in a morning. You just go down to the Bird & Whistle and hire the first damned butcher or old soldier from the Crimea you can find. Be lucky to catch a clerk or a old servant, any what wants the work. It don’t take no skill but aught you can pick up a heavy and get from one side to the other. Pick it up now darlins, he hollered. Go on get your skirts dirty.
A ducking of heads, a sudden scrambling.
They ain’t all worthless, he said. But nearly.
William nodded. She’s adrift, he said, nodding at the collier.
Aye she’s cranky. Like to get worse before she stiffens. The foreman did not offer his hand as he moved away but after a moment paused and called back over one shoulder. You could try out at St. Katharine, he said. They’s just bloody crazy enough to be toolin a jill’s head from the waters.
William tipped his hat but the man was already lost in the roar.
This is what he wanted to ask.
Where was it pulled out. How did it appear to the eye. Was it bundled and tied or no. How long had it sat unwrapped in the close air of the docks and who had touched it and who had not. Was there any other cloth swaddling it. Did anything fall from the package as it was lifted out. Where was the boathook that took it. Why haul it out at all and not pole it back into the river. What of the currents and where was the likely drift of it from. How many other dead had been found that week. That month. That year. What of the woman’s hair.
Yes. What of her hair.
Oh and who was the bastard pulled her and where did he live.
Scotland Yard’s offices on the old palace grounds at 4 Whitehall Place had spread like a cancer until they had taken over the surrounding buildings and carriage houses, numbers 3 and 5, 21 and 22, and still there was not enough room. William’s father had told him of a time when the old building had dwarfed its purposes but William could not imagine it. The public entrance was at the rear and he came in off the narrow cobbled street of Great Scotland Yard shrugging the cold from his neck At the Back Hall sergeant’s desk he stopped, waited, announced himself. It was a tall angled drafting desk on a dais with a leather-bound records book laid out upon it and the hall serge
ant perched behind it, high on his backless stool, a pencil in one hand and his other pressed flat on one knee. The man was a stout, rough-hewn veteran of the force, with a powerful neck and a grey walrus moustache that lent him an air of thuggish dignity. The second finger of his right hand looked to have been broken and reset badly many years ago. William asked for John Shore and the sergeant eyed him where he stood, grizzled and hatless, stinking yet of the dockyards, then leaned out and seized a runner by the scruff of his neck as he went past.
Take this here gent up to John Blunt’s office, lad, he said. Mind ye be quick about it. We don’t get so many American detectives we can afford to be rough with them.
William grimaced. His head was aching and he closed his eyes momentarily. I’m here to see Shore. Not Blunt.
Aye, the sergeant nodded irritably. I know the man ye want. Go on.
The runner ascended the stairs to the offices and William followed, surprised by the stiffness in his bad leg. Shore’s office was a cramped low-ceilinged room cluttered with a black walnut bookshelf and twin bulleted armchairs and the chief inspector’s desk filling the whole of the back quarter. A high window filtered in some light and he saw Inspector Blackwell there, next to the curtains, hair slicked, clothes smelling of peppermint.
Shore half stood in greeting.
A better morning, Mr. Blunt, William said.
Shore smiled wearily. It’s a nickname.
A compliment I take it.
They always are. Shore sat back, round-shouldered and red-faced in his rumpled waistcoat. His shirt sleeves were rolled and he did not trouble to make himself presentable. He wore wire spectacles low on the bridge of his nose and he peered over the tops of them and then back down at his desk. There were boxes of files and reports strewn about the floor and William lifted a lidded box from one of the two leather chairs and set it at his feet and sat down uninvited. The chief inspector ran a harried knuckle under his chin.
These bloody Fenians. Tell me how blowing up the Underground helps to free the Irish from their English masters. Tell me what this poor flat had to do with it.
He crackled a report across the desk and William took it from him without seeing.
Shore unhooked the wire spectacles from his red ears. He was a haberdasher, for god’s sake. On his way to work.
A haberdasher.
Some threat to the free Irish.
After a moment William said, My father fled Edinburgh to get away from you English. He used to say you can go in the harness or holding the reins and both are aimed in the same direction but which one would you rather.
Your father was a wise man.
William frowned slightly. Somehow Shore’s saying it made him bristle. This Fenian business has been going on a while I take it, he said, changing the subject.
Aye. We’re under an awful pressure. The Home Office wants this ended, Gladstone wants this ended. We’ll tear them out by the root. He blinked and regarded William and frowned. What are you doing here?
I’ve been out at the docks. No Malone.
Shore sighed and leaned back in his seat and set a quiet hand on the papers before him. He looked at Blackwell and back at William. Dr. Breck should be here shortly, he said. He’s been occupied with this mess at Gower Street. But you can ask him about your Charlotte Reckitt.
I will. The sacking her torso was found in might provide some direction.
The sacking. Aye.
Blackwell cleared his throat. He stood profiled at the window as if posing for a portrait. Maria Marten cut her hair when she went out to meet Corder, sir. To disguise herself.
Maria Marten? William said. Is this a recent case?
Shore grunted. Maria Marten was murdered by the Red Barn butcher. That was fifty years ago.
William shook his head. I guess we can rule him out then.
Shore had opened a box of loose tobacco as they spoke and begun to fill his pipe. William could see the red locomotive painted on the underlid and he watched as the chief turned the stem in his fingers and studied it as if thinking better of it then stuffed it back into his pocket with one hand and closed the lid of the box with the other. This was back in the days of Jack Ketch, he was saying. Before there even was a police to speak of. Corder was a wealthy farmer who had got Miss Marten in trouble. He lured her out to a barn one night and stabbed her twice and shot her through the eye for good measure and then buried her there, in a shallow grave. Went off into the provinces and wrote her parents for a year or so, pretending she had eloped with him. Story goes Marten’s mother had a dream her daughter had been murdered and Marten’s father went out to the barn and poked about in the dirt with a rake and pulled up something black and rotten and that was his daughter.
I guess Corder was hanged for it?
Shore opened his hands in a rueful gesture. Afterwards they cut him up in the lecturing halls and bits of him were sold all over the country. A leather seller in Oxford Street still has his scalp on display in a pickling jar.
I’d like to see that.
Aye. Remind you of back home I guess.
Well. We like to keep our pickled scalps in the parlour.
Shore laughed. What can you do, he said. It’s the modern world.
There was an abrupt knock at the door.
Come, Shore barked.
A man came in. Leaning on a gold-tipped walking stick, his torso thin and hard like an old-fashioned scythe. He wore a sleek silk hat with a wide brim that darkened his spectacles into discs of shadow and wire and cast a strange crooked line to his nose. A purple cravat hung in a tangle off his collar where the tie pin had been stabbed at a crazy angle. William watched his head sway at the end of his neck, snakelike and grotesque.
Ah, Dr. Breck, Shore said. He rose in greeting from behind his desk. You will have heard of Mr. Pinkerton, out of Chicago. Mr. Pinkerton, our Dr. Breck. You know Mr. Blackwell.
William stood. The doctor’s fingers were red and sore-looking as if accustomed to labouring without gloves on chemical tinctures, his nails edged in grime. His hand felt warm in William’s own and it was withdrawn at once as if the touch of the living sickened him.
Doctor, William said. He hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. Mr. Shore tells me you have inspected the head?
Breck scowled at Shore. He means the one from the river?
Is there another? William asked.
More than you can imagine, sir, Breck said sourly, turning to him. He let go of his cane and removed his eyeglasses and withdrew a handkerchief from his vest pocket and proceeded to polish the lenses. It wasn’t as cruel as it might have been, he said.
William thought about this a moment. She was dead before she was decapitated.
Correct.
Her arms were tied?
Who told you that, Mr. Pinkerton?
Mr. Pinkerton has several theories, Dr. Breck, Shore said. He came with me to view the head and torso.
He’s only just putting it together now, sir, Blackwell said.
Breck scowled. In life the victim would have stood approximately five feet four inches tall, he said. She was black-haired. She had not eaten in several days. There is bruising to her arms as if she had been handled roughly. Tied up most likely. The stab wounds on the torso do not appear to have been executed in a passion. They are very deliberate, very shallow, and clean, as if the body did not twist at all as the blade was removed. The blade used was single-sided and curved slightly. The knife wounds are not deep enough to be the cause of death and the victim’s lack of movement is consistent with the poison found in the body. She would not have been conscious at the time.
Shore grunted. Poison, you say?
Arsenic? William asked.
Always with you Americans it’s arsenic, Breck muttered. No. Chloroform.
She was drugged then, Shore said slowly. Drugged, then tied up, stabbed, decapitated, and her body left in several places around the city. Is that what you’re telling us, Doctor?
It’s damned elaborate, William mu
ttered.
Rather too elaborate.
The facts are what they are. I simply report them.
But how they’re read and understood is a different matter, William said. So. She was drugged in order to subdue her, presumably. Why then tie her up?
They must have expected her to wake up.
Except she did not. She was stabbed while unconscious.
Too much chloroform, said Shore. Can that kill a person?
It would seem so.
Breck clutched the head of his walking stick with both hands.
Why so many stab wounds? Shore asked. If she was unconscious and not struggling?
How many stab wounds were there, Doctor?
Two to the upper left arm. Three to the torso. One near the heart. The angle of all of the wounds is from below. Which is commensurate with a taller assailant stabbing at her underhanded.
William considered this. What was she tied to? Not a chair. Could she have been tied upright, to a post? The angle you’re describing would mean she would have had to be high enough in relation to her attacker—
A chair is unlikely, Breck interrupted. Unless it was on some sort of platform. Or unless the assailant was a rather small person. A woman, for instance.
Shore looked offended. A woman wouldn’t do such a thing.
I’d still like to know, William said, why so many of these shallow cuts.
A weak assailant, Shore suggested. Or timid, maybe. Maybe it was their first time.
It was to wake her up, sir, Blackwell said quietly.
The men fell silent. William studied the young inspector, ran a hand over his jaw.