“You understand,” Rathbone said, “that drownings are usually suicides or accidents, yes? There are plenty of easier ways to murder someone.”
“I understand.”
“And it’s very difficult to tell whether someone was drowned at all, as opposed to being immersed in water postmortem, yes? Let alone whether they were drowned voluntarily or against their will.”
“All I’d like you to do is to tell me how he died, and who he was.”
“Well, ha-ha, I’m no alchemist, Detective Inspector…?”
“Smith.”
“First things first, yes? Let’s find out how long it’s been there.”
It’s, Herbert noticed, not he’s. Well, that was only to be expected. If he had had corpses coming across his table as though on a conveyor belt, he would probably have tried to regard them as objects rather than human too.
Rathbone took a thermometer and rolled the body onto its side. It stared at Herbert with bulbous eyes in which he read accusing disappointment. The corpse’s cheeks were swollen and its skin wrinkled, like a washerwoman’s hands. Drained of color, its face seemed to leach into the air.
Rathbone pushed the thermometer towards the rectum, and stopped.
“What?” Herbert said.
Rathbone placed a hand on each of the dead man’s buttocks, pulled them apart, and nodded for Herbert to come closer.
Herbert thought of several snappy replies, all of them inappropriate.
He stepped forward, looked, and winced.
The man’s backside was a disaster zone; red raw, swollen into puffy ridges of flesh, and crisscrossed with scratch marks.
“Raped?” Herbert said.
Rathbone shook his head. “Not tonight. Many of these marks are several days old.”
“Homosexual, then. And practicing.”
“Very.”
All things being equal, Herbert would rather this particular can of worms had remained unopened. Homosexuality was illegal—“gross indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885,” as the law had it. Like most things illicit, it was also widespread, albeit necessarily furtive.
Every queer therefore lived with the same question: who knew? Among their own, they were usually safe; but, if caught, they faced chemical castration, the introduction of female hormones for what the law saw as their abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urges. Estrogen would make them impotent and obese, their looks suffocated in a welter of fat, their touting reduced to receiver status only.
As King George V had famously, or infamously, said about homosexuals: “I thought men like that shot themselves.”
Herbert had no particular beef against homosexuals, certainly not by prevailing standards of intolerance. He simply did not relish the prospect of poking around a closed community trying to find a truth that was liable, like many deaths, to end up being petty and sordid.
Rathbone busied himself around the man’s rear end for a few moments.
“No trace evidence,” he announced at length. “No bodily fluids.”
“You mean he’d taken a bath since his last, er, last…”
“Encounter?”
“Exactly.”
“Probably. But the water in the park could have washed such evidence off, yes?”
“The Long Water has no current. It’s like a millpond tonight.”
Rathbone pursed his lips and nodded. “Unlikely, then.”
He inserted the thermometer into the corpse’s rectum, waited a few moments, extracted it, and read off the digits.
“Eighty-eight degrees.” He looked at his watch. “It’s half past nine now. Normal body temperature is ninety-eight degrees. Bodies in water cool at about five or six degrees an hour, twice as fast as they do in air, yes? But these measures are approximate. Very generally, therefore, I would estimate the time of death at between half past six and eight o’clock this evening.”
In other words, not long before the body had been found; eight o’clock was when Elkington had phoned.
“You might want to go outside for this next part, yes?” Rathbone said.
“I’m not squeamish.”
Rathbone shrugged—suit yourself—took a small handsaw, and began to slice at the cadaver’s right shoulder.
He was right. Herbert did want to go outside.
After a small eternity while Herbert waited in the corridor, Rathbone popped his head round the door and beckoned him back inside.
Herbert followed him through, and almost immediately went straight back out again. The subject—see, Herbert was already beginning to think like Rathbone; hard not to, when they were in a glorified butcher’s shop—had been sliced open in three neat cuts, a perfect Y from shoulders to sternum and sternum to waist.
Rathbone picked up a lung. Patterned in marbles of gray and crimson, it shifted over the inside of his forearms, an outsize bladder which gave the disconcerting impression of being alive. It looked far too big to have ever fitted inside the dead man.
Rathbone placed the lung in a metal tray, picked up a knife, and sliced into it. Dirty water spurted from the gash.
How Herbert managed not to vomit, he had no idea.
“As I thought.” Rathbone seemed pleased. “Fluid.”
“I can see that.”
“No, no. Fluid, which you get only when air and water have been actively inspired. Passive flooding of lungs with water—in other words, postmortem—looks quite different, yes? And see”—he indicated above and around the dead man’s mouth—“the froth? Fine and white? Must still have been breathing, yes?”
Rathbone tripped over to a set of scales and lifted a small bag from the bowl. “The stomach. Pretty full.”
“He had just eaten, then?”
“A few hours before. Perhaps a late lunch. Shepherd’s pie and cabbage, at a guess. Also weeds, silt, and dirty water. Lake water. Not the kind of thing you get even in the most disreputable of restaurants, yes?” By the time Herbert realized that Rathbone had, in his own way, cracked a joke, the pathologist had moved on. “When the victim’s dead before entering the water, very little matter gets as far as the stomach. What you find is usually confined to the pharynx, trachea, and larger airways, yes?”
So the corpse, whoever he was, had drowned, rather than being placed in the water after his death.
Accident, suicide, or murder?
He had drowned in shallow water, at a point where it was easy to enter the water, but equally easy to walk out again. It was therefore unlikely to have been an accident, unless he was dead drunk, which seemed improbable given the time frame involved; drunks tended to die later in the evening.
Rathbone would test for alcohol, of course, but both he and Herbert were thinking the same thing: the corpse did not have the look of a drinker.
Suicide was always a possibility, especially in the winter, when long nights and unremitting gloom could drive the heartiest of fellows to despair. Every suicide involved a great deal of resolve—Herbert had no truck with those who glibly dismissed it as the coward’s way out, as he imagined that few things involved more courage than the decision to kill oneself—but drowning oneself in a still, shallow body of water took more determination than most. There were many easier methods, especially for men, who tended to prefer the more violent methods of exit.
Which left only murder.
Rathbone wanted to run more tests, so Herbert found a phone and rang the Yard.
“Yes?” Tulloch’s voice was even more loaded with rage than usual, and when Herbert glanced at his watch he saw why; it was ten to ten.
He batted away a pang of childish pleasure at inconveniencing Tulloch. “It’s Smith.”
“What do you want?”
“To tell you about the dead man.”
“Couldn’t you have waited? He’s not going anywhere, is he?”
“No, but I am.”
Tulloch sighed. “Right. Tell me what you’ve got. And keep it short. Name?”
“Unknown.”
“Cause of death?”
“Drowning. Probably forcible.”
“Probably?”
“The pathologist’s running tests as we speak.”
“Is there anything you do know?”
“He was a homosexual.”
“Your ideal case, then.”
Herbert chose to ignore this last remark. “There’s not much more I’ll be able to do tonight, so I’ll come in tomorrow morning after breakfast and take it up from there.”
“And put in for overtime, no doubt.”
The last time the topic of overtime had come up, Herbert remembered, Tulloch had contended that the whole system was skewed. The men who needed the money for their families were the ones who couldn’t afford the time to make that money, he said; in contrast, the ones who had the time to spare had nothing to spend the money on.
Herbert had suggested that he do the time and Tulloch take the money. Tulloch had thought that a splendid idea.
“Well,” Tulloch continued, before Herbert could answer, “everyone else here’s too busy to waste time on a poof in the drink, so you’re more than welcome to it. You’d know their haunts better than us, that’s for sure. What about the scene?”
“I’ve sealed it off, of course. I’ll have a proper search done in the morning, when there’s enough light.”
“Gordon Bennett,” Tulloch said. “We have taught you something after all.”
And he hung up.
South Kensington tube station was more or less at the bottom of Exhibition Road, so Herbert managed to find it by the simple expedient of walking straight, dodging the hardened drinkers who had headed for the private clubs after lunch—membership on the spot for five shillings—and remained there as afternoon slid to evening, nursing their cut-price whiskeys and bemoaning their luck. South Kensington and Earls Court were full of such places, never-never lands of clipped mustaches, army-style overcoats, and old school ties.
Seven years on from the war, they were still weary, still clinging to their Micawberish feeling that something would turn up. War veterans were prematurely and preternaturally aged, their careers ripped apart by the conflict; many of them had stepped aside so as not to get trampled underfoot by younger men desperate to fill their shoes.
Herbert found a Piccadilly Line train heading east almost at once. The tube system was still free from fog; strange days indeed, he thought, when those malodorous and claustrophobic tunnels were cleaner and brighter than the real world above.
He sat in a near-empty carriage, flicking through the notes Rathbone had given him. There was little of surprise and even less of encouragement within them.
That the blond man had been drowned against his will was now almost beyond doubt. Threads of wool, presumably from his killer’s clothes, had been found under three fingernails on the right hand and two on the left. His right hand had also been clutching silt and weeds, presumably fixed in a cadaveric spasm.
Rathbone could have written most of what followed in Greek for all the sense it made to Herbert, but, whatever he said, Herbert was happy to take his word for it.
Bilateral hemorrhages on the shoulders and chest followed lines of muscle bundles and were therefore consistent with violent tearing, itself indicative of a struggle. Such symptoms could be confused with putrefaction, but extravascular erythrocytes provided histo-logical proof of a true hemorrhage. Moreover, petechial hemorrhaging inside the eyelid and on the eyeball itself were indicators of excessive premortem adrenaline, as were the abnormally high histamine and serotonin levels. Such indicators were all consistent with murder.
It was Herbert’s patch all right.
Since homosexuals were proscribed by law, it followed that they had an underworld. As Tulloch had insinuated, Herbert knew full well where the gates to this particular Hades were; the queer pubs, in the first instance, such as the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, the Golden Lion on Dean Street, and the Duke of York on Rathbone Street, where the landlord, whom a Five report had once superfluously described as “eccentric,” liked to cut off customers’ ties and display them as trophies.
The Fitzroy was especially notorious, not just for the marines and guardsmen who packed in there on Saturday nights looking for a quick pickup, but for the eclectic quality of its straighter clientele; Dylan Thomas (who apparently liked to pick fights with the guardsmen), the hangman Albert Pierrepoint, and the Satanist Aleister Crowley had all drunk there, Crowley evidently inventing his own cocktail of gin, vermouth, and laudanum. When the police had raided the place and the landlord been charged, the court had heard that “there can be very little doubt that this house was conducted in a most disorderly and disgusting fashion.”
Failing all other leads, Herbert would trawl such establishments, hopefully with a name for the dead man and a photograph of him which did not include a mortician’s slab and a face rendered puffy by drowning.
Before then, however, would come the usual, tedious routes to finding out someone’s identity. Dental records could be checked, fingerprints matched, public appeals launched; all involving a level of manpower the police could ill afford. The force was desperately short of men, particularly in towns and cities, and had been so ever since the war. Too many young men had died for it to be otherwise.
Herbert alighted at Green Park. Advertisements greeted him like old friends: Good Mornings Begin With Gillette. The pubs were closing; through doors pushed briefly open, he heard the usual landlord banter. “Arses and glasses!” “Haven’t you got homes to go to?” and “Let’s be having the company’s glasses,” all pronounced with the tired, ersatz flourish of the provincial actor.
The journey had taken ten minutes, and yet it was like going from one world to another. South Kensington and Mayfair might have been continents apart; London could change faces in a heartbeat, a street.
Where there had been sad sacks, now there were men a decade their junior, the generation who had not been sent away to fight and who consequently brimmed with energy and vigor; spivs with padded shoulders and pencil mustaches, who winked with conspiratorial jauntiness as they checked the time on their Cartier watches and lit cigarettes with gold-plated lighters.
Some called them con men; they themselves would say that times were changing and, perhaps as never before in Britain, the race was to the swift. The pubs they frequented had once been the preserve of the domestic servant seeking ale and dominoes. Now they were crowded out by wide boys and posh girls.
It was change, all right; whether it was progress was a different matter.
Herbert fancied a nightcap before closing time, but one glance through the window of the Chesterfield pub put him off going in there. The place was brimming with Five officers, most of whom he recognized, and most of whom were also doubtless drunk and loudly discussing matters of national security.
Five’s oppressive regime and culture of secrecy had with grim inevitability fostered an endemic culture of excessive drinking. The Chesterfield was almost an official service watering hole, so much so that it was known within Five as Camp Two. Camp One was the Pig & Eye Club on the top floor of Five’s HQ, Leconfield House, established precisely to avoid too many people decamping to the pub; but the woeful lack of atmosphere within the club ensured that decamp they did.
This was, as if Herbert needed any reminding, the outfit charged with defense of the realm.
He walked through Shepherd Market, a curious enclave of passageways which sprouted pubs, bistro restaurants, galleries, antique shops, and brothels in more or less equal quantities. Herbert lived in the heart of the Market—his flat gained in the desirability of its location what it lacked in size—and as he approached his front door he saw through the fog that someone was standing on the pavement outside.
“You look like how I feel,” a female voice said, when he was close enough to make out her features. “Anything I can do to help?”
Herbert smiled. It was Stella, the doyenne of Shepherd Market tarts, universally known as “the Auld Slapper
,” a name bestowed with affection or bile according to whether one had come across her sunny side or her dark one. She could be piercingly understanding and bitterly funny, but behind the façade, the set of her mouth and the waves of dullness in her eyes betrayed her.
Tonight, her makeup looked as though it had been applied by a plasterer. Dark roots streaked through her badly bleached hair. Business was clearly slow.
Propriety should perhaps have prompted Herbert to rebuff her, politely but firmly. Corporeal weakness had him following her gloomily upstairs.
Outside the office, Stella was the nearest thing Herbert had to a friend; seven years older than him, perhaps she was in a strange way the elder sister denied to an only child. She was also, rather unimpressively, the extent of his sex life.
That part of proceedings was over in short order, as usual. Stella made her habitual crack about the oldest profession in the world encountering the second oldest, and Herbert made his equally customary reply that he was no longer a spy, and that even if he had ever been one, he could not possibly have told her. It was a routine as old and sagging as the bed on which they had bounced with a distinct lack of luster.
He dug a couple of pound notes from his pocket and handed them over. He always paid; if he was to be in debt to her, he wanted it to be for her companionship rather than her services. Correspondingly, she never feigned ecstasy, and he would no more have wanted her to do so than he would have expected the grocer to hand over his shopping with piercing yells of fake rhapsody.
Dressed again, Stella stroked Herbert’s cheek with the backs of her fingers.
“Be careful what you wish for,” she said.
This was one of her favorite sayings, and he knew how it finished.
“Because it might just happen, right?”
“Right,” she said. “And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Herbert’s flat was nothing to shout about; a small kitchen area with a porcelain sink, a wooden draining board, and a small cupboard in the coolest part of the larder which served as the next best thing to a refrigerator. The pictures on the wall of the living room were plain and the furniture even plainer; most pieces carried the “Utility” mark, designed for newlyweds and those whose homes had been destroyed by the war. How they had ended up here was anyone’s guess, and Herbert was not much inclined to try and find out. They had come with the flat, and that was that.
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