‘And Dr Christie also – though it is the criminal mind that most intrigues the two of them.’ He chuckled again. ‘There are so many mad, bad women! I have known Christie for a long time, though my methods are more cultured, more addressed to the soul of the patient than the mind.’
‘Dr Christie’s father was an asylum doctor too?’ I said, thinking of the name I had seen on Dr Christie’s watch.
‘Yes indeed.’ He shook his massive head. ‘It is a sorry story indeed. Christie’s father died . . . precipitately, in his own asylum. I’m certain I can rely on your sympathy and understanding, as well as your professional discretion. Besides, it is a tale not unlike that of your own father—’
‘Quite,’ I said sharply. I would not discuss my father’s fate with this bloated stranger.
Dr Mothersole regarded me with amusement. ‘I see I am correct in my assessment.’ He whispered the words, as if he sought to tiptoe from a sickroom he had inadvertently entered. ‘I am rarely, if ever, mistaken. I should be careful, if I were you, Mr Flockhart,’ he added, ‘if you do not wish to give yourself away.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, sir,’ I said.
‘Most people don’t observe. They see, I grant you. They see enough to allow them to get by, enough to allow them to feed and clothe themselves, to eat and work, and to manage their affairs with others. But there are things before them that they do not see: the unconscious gesture, the involuntary hesitation, the hasty rebuttal. These things give us away, show who we really are. There are few who can master these tricks of the body, few who can read them as well as me. And yet I can read you as easily as I can read Constance here.’
‘Can you?’
‘You are ashamed, sir,’ he said. ‘Ashamed of who you are, I can see it quite clearly.’
He fell silent. His tiny eyes glittered, though whether this was due to mirth or craftiness I could not tell, for his face was so bloated with fat that all meaningful expression was obliterated from it. But I have been scrutinised all my life, pitied for my looks, my ugly face and tall thin figure. I have hidden who I am from the world for over twenty years, and I was not afraid of Dr Mothersole with his oblique threats and guesses.
‘I confess I am still at a loss as to what you mean,’ I said, more loudly than I had intended.
‘There is no shame in madness, Mr Flockhart, for it cannot be helped. But there!’ He slapped his legs. ‘To the purpose, Mothersole! Mr Flockhart, I am here because I believe Dr Hawkins has asked you to . . . to make inquiries concerning the death of our dear colleague Dr Rutherford.’
I waited.
‘The arrest of Edward Eden, which I’m quite sure you know about, is most likely mistaken and ill advised – his father will be furious, which is most unfortunate as the fellow is one of Angel Meadow’s chief benefactors – not to mention the fees he pays for his son’s accommodation—’
‘More to the point is the fact that Edward Eden has no history whatsoever of violence. Why would he suddenly start now?’
‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Dr Mothersole. ‘Well, he is bound to be released at any moment and then where will we be? Is there another likely suspect? I think there is, Mr Flockhart, I think there most definitely is.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. You see there is . . . there is something about dear Dr Rutherford – I would remain silent, but I fear it is now germane to our current sad circumstances. You are aware that Dr Rutherford was well acquainted with Mr Stiven’s ward, Miss Susan Chance?’
‘Yes, Dr Hawkins told me.’
‘He told you too, no doubt, that Rutherford wished to condemn the girl to the gallows? That he was convinced of her guilt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you also know that Rutherford had met the girl before? That he had reason, and experience, to believe that she was capable of the most monstrous of crimes?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I did not.’
‘Well, Mr Flockhart, I shall be brief, as it is brevity that suits such a tale as this.’ He cleared his throat, and held a knuckle to his lips as if overcome with nausea at the prospect of further exposition. ‘I understand that Rutherford originally met the girl some years earlier in the most benign of circumstances,’ he said. ‘Her mother was a seamstress, and the child Susan her helpmeet. Rutherford began intimate relations with the mother. It was against his better judgement, he said, but she was well known as a prostitute and such women make temptation their business. Besides, a man has urges and we must forgive what cannot be helped or undone. The girl was indifferent to her mother’s casual affairs, or so it appeared, and was happy to continue with her needlework while Rutherford disported himself with the mother in the next room.
‘But one morning, Rutherford was awakened by a sudden feeling of draughtiness about his person. He opened his eyes to find the bed clothes pulled back. Susan Chance was standing over him with a pair of scissors in one hand and his manhood in the other, and an expression on her face of such murderous fury that he scarcely knew her for her mother’s child.’ Dr Mothersole’s porcelain cheeks had turned a dull crimson. He licked his lips. ‘Dr Rutherford sprang from the bed and, to his lasting good fortune, the girl’s blades snapped closed upon nothing but the bed sheet.
‘There was no sign of the mother; it appeared that she had gone out to get breakfast, so Rutherford and Susan Chance were quite alone. What happened next is most unfortunate, though perhaps no more than the girl deserved.’
‘What happened next?’ I said.
‘It seems that, after a tussle, Rutherford seized the scissors. Then – as he put it, “so that she might learn a little respect for the organ she had been about to cut off’, he gave the girl a beating, and a vigorous taste of what her mother had been enjoying for the past seven nights.’
All at once the air in the room had become heavy, stifling and still. The scratching of Constance’s pencil stopped. She and I exchanged a glance. She looked appalled, and I could feel my cheeks flaming, but Dr Mothersole was talking once more. He had not noticed the horror on our faces, despite his much vaunted powers of observation.
‘As you can imagine,’ he said, ‘Dr Rutherford never went back to the place, and it is no fault of his that the girl’s mother sank so deep into degradation and infamy that a few years later she put her own daughter out to tender. The consequences of that are well known to us all.’
I said nothing. Why had Dr Hawkins not told me this? Perhaps he had not known of it if it had taken place some years before Susan’s trial. ‘Is it true?’ I said at last. ‘Can you be sure? Has Susan Chance corroborated it?’
‘There is no reason to think it is not true. Whether Susan Chance has spoken of it or not is hardly relevant now – who would listen to such a one even if she did? But now that Dr Rutherford is dead, and under such circumstances, it seems only right that the matter should be revealed. And I am the one to reveal it! It was Christie who told me the tale, though he was reluctant to come to you himself.’ He shook his head. ‘Christie is a man of circumspection, but I am a man to seize the moment where others fear to act. Constance, write that down!’
‘Why did Rutherford not mention this at her trial?’
‘He told Christie that the girl should be judged on the facts of the case in hand, and not by her previous actions.’
‘How magnanimous of him,’ I murmured. ‘I imagine he was also reluctant to reveal himself as someone who sees fit to violate a child and turn her mother into a whore. But why are you telling me, sir? Would it not be more prudent to tell the police?’
‘I feel you are a far more useful repository for the information I have just divulged than any police inspector might be. When the facts of the matter pertaining to Dr Rutherford’s death are finally discovered I will be sure to testify as to the truth of its account. Dr Christie and I are in full agreement.’ Dr Mothersole rose to his feet. The seams of his waistcoat creaked like the timbers of a galleon as he drew himself up. ‘I have said what I came to say, and y
ou may do as you see fit with the information. I’m sure you see it as Dr Christie and I do, Mr Flockhart.’ He shook my hand. ‘Good day to you, sir.’
Chapter Nine
Will came back from the House of Correction in the afternoon just as I was making a pot of tea. I could tell straight away that he had something to tell me, but I was too full of my own news, too eager to have his opinion on what Dr Mothersole had said to let him speak. When I came to the part about the scissors, and Dr Rutherford, I saw him blanch.
‘If what Mothersole says is true,’ I said when I had finished, ‘it gives Susan Chance an even stronger motive. Especially as Dr Stiven and Susan Chance were both staying in Dr Hawkins’s old rooms at Angel Meadow that evening.’ I shook my head. ‘I cannot believe it of her. She has too much to lose.’
‘And yet, she has been diagnosed as insane already. There’s every chance the malady might come upon her again. Dr Stiven always carries a strait waistcoat when he is out with her, but what of those times when she slips away from him? She was alone in Prior’s Rents this morning. How many other times might she have been at large and unattended?’
‘So you think she is mad?’ I said.
‘I think it might come and go. Is such a thing possible? With the evidence placed before us in this way it’s hard to think otherwise. And yet,’ he flung himself back in his chair. ‘Perhaps it is just that she defies convention. We saw her today in a place no lady should ever be seen – the front row of a bare knuckle fight. Some might say she looked wild – ungoverned and devilish – a vision of madness. But that’s only because we expect her to be demure and ladylike. Perhaps we just saw someone who was happy, excited and uninhibited. Someone who was already sufficiently familiar with that milieu to derive pleasure from the spectacle.’ He sat forward again. ‘There is something about the girl that intrigues me, Jem, I admit it. I’ve no love for the vain and cosseted women of London. I’m drawn to those who speak their mind, those who show spirit, who resist the harness others would put upon them, those who are not like everyone else—’
‘Goodness, Will!’ I said. ‘I think you might actually be a little bit in love with her!’ My voice sounded shrill in my ears.
He grew still at that. His face was in shadow, so I could not make out his expression, but I could sense he was looking at me. ‘If I am it is only because she is something like you,’ he said. He sighed, and looked away.
I could not think what to say. I had thought he was falling in love with Susan Chance. And yet here he was telling me . . . what, exactly? That he loved me? He had said as much once before – back when St Saviour’s was still standing, when my father was alive and my heart was owned by Eliza Magorian. I closed my eyes at the thought of her. I knew I could not offer Will more that my friendship, but I could also not bear to have less than his love.
‘This is not the time for a conversation such as this,’ I muttered.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I suppose it isn’t.’
For a moment there was a pause, a heaviness between us. I took a searing mouthful of tea and said, ‘Well then, are you going to acquaint me with what happened to you today, or not? There’s something on your mind, I can tell.’
‘Can you?’ He sat back in his chair, putting his boots up onto the stove to warm his feet. ‘Why, Jem, we are just like an old married couple, whether you like it or not!’
I grinned. ‘Well?’
‘I had been wondering about this.’ He put his hand into his pocket and drew out the ruined photograph, the burnt edges still flaked with ash, turning his fingers black. ‘You remember I said there was something that was familiar about it, but I could not place what it was? Today, I found out. Look at it closely. What do you see?’
I stared at the burnt-away face, the ragged dress, the tangled bouquet. I turned the picture over. The back was blank. ‘I see nothing,’ I said.
‘And yet there is something,’ said Will. ‘Something about this that is unique and revealing.’
I sat forward. All at once I sensed we were about to make progress.
Will told me that he had gone to the House of Correction for a meeting with the prison governors. He had arrived early because he wanted to examine the roof space and the top floor of the building with a view to arguing against the expansion of the existing structure. One of the wardens was sent to accompany him – she had a full set of keys, and was familiar with the quickest ways about the place. She took Will up a winding staircase that emerged at the topmost corridor, and along a narrow passage that traversed the length of the main building. Windows on the right-hand side looked out over the flat roof of the floor below; on the left-hand side a row of doors gave out into various attic storerooms and cupboards. Will climbed out onto the flat roof, peering down into the dirty patch of mud and cinders that was the women’s exercise yard, and made his examination. He climbed back inside, and then went in and out of the various rooms, opening windows where he could, investigating the quality of the brickwork and the pointing, and measuring the width and breadth of the walls. Mostly the rooms were used for storage. In one of them they came across contraptions of restraint – gyves, bridles, manacles, heavy chains and straps – so cruel and wicked-looking that Will could not look at them. The warden laughed at his squeamishness.
‘You think we don’t use them things now?’ she said. ‘Course we do! We got plenty more downstairs. These was for them what was bound for Van Diemen’s. And them what misbe’aves.’ She chuckled. ‘They don’t misbe’ave for long once they’ve got the bridle on! It don’t take long to make ‘em quiet in this place.’
Another room contained numerous chests of small wooden drawers. Will had seen drawers just like them downstairs in the administration wing when he was first shown around the place. ‘Files,’ said Will’s guide. ‘Old uns.’ Something stirred in the back of his mind, but it was gone again before he could place it.
It was the next room, however, that gave Will pause. A bright, airy chamber, north facing, it had two windows that looked out across the city, and two skylights that stared up at the ochre-coloured clouds of the London morning. Behind the door there was a table, littered with bottles, photographic plates, cloths, and sheaves of paper curling at the edges. In the centre, beneath the skylights, was a chair – straight backed, un-cushioned and, on closer inspection, bolted to the floor. Facing the chair was a large mahogany camera on a tall tripod of wood and tarnished brass. To one side, a small darkroom had been erected, walls of cheap wood partitioning off the dimmest corner.
He asked the attendant about it, but she had no idea who had used it and why. Of course, the sight of the camera, the chair, the darkroom, reminded him of the photograph we had found that morning. He still had it in his pocket and he took it out. Had it been taken in that room? He thought it unlikely. The image was a simple one without any background to distinguish it. Besides, what remained of the image was so charred, so partial that it was impossible to see very much at all, apart from the hands and body of the subject. And yet there was something, Will said, something familiar about it that still bothered him.
The warden didn’t seem to mind the length of time Will was spending looking about the place, and she sank onto the chair in front of the camera with all the grace of a dropped laundry bag. Looking at the woman sitting there with her hands in her lap, the camera’s inscrutable eye trained upon her, gave Will an idea: What if he took her likeness? Might that curious feeling of familiarity crystallise into something real, something useful? He had some knowledge of the calotype process, though he had not undertaken any photography for a long time. Could he do it? Once the idea had gripped him it would not let him go. He used his handkerchief to clean the lens and the plates, checked that he had everything set out correctly in the darkroom, and began.
His subject was the most unprepossessing of women – short and fat, a stranger to any form of corsetry, her clothing so patched and stained that it was a wonder she was not more often mistaken for one of the inmates herself. S
he proved most adept at sitting quite motionless and staring vacantly into space, which was exactly what was required.
‘The result,’ he said now, ‘is not without merit.’ And he pulled from his pocket a small calotype the size and shape of a carte de visite. It showed a fat woman sitting in a chair, her bulldog looks and grubby dress just as Will had described.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘I see nothing that might connect the two.’
Will clicked his tongue. ‘For one so observant you are exceptionally blind today. Look here,’ and he pointed to the bottom of the image. ‘You see?’ I snatched my magnifying glass off the table. There, unmistakable in the lower right-hand corner, just where the prison attendant’s dress ended and the background began, there was a blurring, a greyish smear as if a finger had smudged a small portion of the image into indistinctness. It was plain to see, once it had been pointed out, an indelible flaw embedded in the picture as irrevocably as the image itself.
‘The lens is cracked,’ he said. ‘It shows up as a blur when a photograph is taken.’ He handed me the image he had culled from Dr Rutherford’s fire. Burnt and ruined as it was, the right-hand corner remained untouched by the flames. ‘And on this one?’
‘It is the same!’ I cried. ‘The very same!’
‘Of course I remembered then,’ said Will. ‘I had seen a box of old records, months ago, in a storeroom downstairs at the House of Correction. Each of them had a photograph attached, and each of the images had that blurred flaw across the corner. I knew there was something about it that I had seen before.’
‘Well done,’ I said. I grinned at him and clapped my hands. ‘Well done indeed. And was this image in the old files too? Did you have a look?’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Will, ‘And no it isn’t.’
‘Oh.’ I sounded disappointed. I could not help it.
‘At the governor’s meeting I asked about the camera. The superintendent said he knew nothing of it. Then, one of the others who had been there some twenty years or more said that they had only used photographs for a while as it was too time-consuming, but remembered the chap who took them.’
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