A Spider in the Cup

by Barbara Cleverly

  “Do you have a record of people arriving at the clinic for purposes other than visiting?”

  “Of course. If you wish to see when exactly our groceries were delivered, when our drains were last inspected, you may see the blue book.”

  The blue book joined the red one on the desk and Joe made a cursory inspection, noting that no traffic was logged for the time Julia had rung the bell. One courier arriving at nine that evening was listed. Apart from that—an uneventful Friday evening.

  “What other record of arrivals do you keep apart from this?”

  “Only the record of our clinical clients. Established patients or ladies seeking appointments and that I will not let you see.”

  Joe knew that she was within her rights. It would take a good deal of time and argy-bargy to get a search warrant in the circumstances. With their connections, he acknowledged it might never be forthcoming. He was never going to be allowed to open the black book.

  The two men expressed appreciation for the excellent coffee they were served and made polite conversation with Matron over the Worcester china cups. Ellen Frobisher showed no sign that she was eager to be rid of them. She even refrained from consulting the large watch that dangled distractingly on a red ribbon over her left breast.

  As they stood and shook hands, Joe held her long cool fingers and asked one last question. “Could you tell me his name? The father of Natalia’s baby? I should like to speak to him.”

  She snatched her hand away and took a pace back from him. “What on earth are you talking about, man? Miss Kirilovna was not even pregnant.”

  “WELL SO MUCH for turning the clinic upside down,” Bacchus commented grumpily as they retreated to the squad car. “Not the slightest touch of pregnancy, eh? That rather wrecks your theories, doesn’t it? You’re absolutely sure of the day and time of the maid’s second visit?” Bacchus asked grumpily as they retreated to their car.

  “Armitage and I both noted it. She rang the bell and we watched her go into the reception hall. We waited for a quarter of an hour. She was back at the hotel two hours later.”

  “Well, she wasn’t there to visit or make a delivery so—if they recorded it at all, and that must be a big ‘if’—she has to have been there in the capacity of patient herself. Or making an appointment. Your Julia was a black book entry.”

  “Why would she do that? Women’s problems? She appears perfectly healthy.”

  “No, she’s not, Joe! Even I noticed she’s had infantile paralysis and she’s coping with the effects of it still. It can’t be easy for her. She makes the best of it when she knows there’s someone watching but I’ve spotted moments when that pretty face shows she’s going through agony. Massage required? Painkillers? Drugs of some sort? A place like that—they could probably prescribe and supply just about anything, legal or illegal.”

  “Telephone. Let’s get back to my office. That annoying woman may have held back on her clients but I had a good look at her blue supplies and deliveries book. There’s a laboratory whose name appeared two or three times last week. I’ll look up their address. They sent a courier to St. Catherine’s a couple of hours after Julia called by. I’ll see if I can trick some information out of them.”

  JOE WAS GLAD Bacchus was driving an unmarked police car. No taxi driver would have agreed to venture out here. A squad car would have been stoned. He was down in the dark and dirt among the roots here all right.

  “Well, this is it, Joe. Tower Bridge and civilisation behind us, the Highway and two miles of derelict port facilities in front. Half way between Wapping and Whitechapel. A stride or two away from the Thames. I bet Miss Frobisher hasn’t ventured out this far to check the credentials of her suppliers.”

  “Not the back of beyond you might think. It’s minutes from the centre of London, access to the river and all the space you might need for little outlay. Number One, Waterman’s Reach, is what we’re looking for. This place was badly bombed in Zeppelin raids during the war. But I see signs of rebuilding. There! That’s it. That new place. Huge. Warehouse size. High windows, barred. I expect security’s a problem in these parts.”

  Bacchus grunted. “Are they keeping crime out or crime in? That’s what we need to know. How are you going to find out?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Keep your hand in your pocket and look sinister.”

  Joe banged heartily on the door.

  The single man who greeted them claimed to be the manager, Mr. Kent. Joe noted he affected a flapping white surgical coat over his everyday clothes. He was young, too young to have been in the war, and brash with it. A Londoner. Unimpressed by Joe’s uniform or Bacchus’s expression, he asked cheerily how he might help them.

  “We’re here to help you, Mr. Kent.” Joe gave him a dark smile. “We’re here to make sure you keep this business a going concern. Were you aware that your building is sited on the boundary line between Wapping and Whitechapel? It was redrawn after the bombings and there’s been some dispute. Upshot is—it’s been discovered that you’ve been paying local business taxes to one council when it should have been going to the other.”

  “Naw! We’re in Wapping here. Always have been.”

  “The Mayor’s office thinks otherwise. And Whitechapel is about to claim back ten years of unpaid rates. If you aren’t able to come up with the sum in question, I’m instructed to close you down until it can be sorted out. That could take six months. Plenty of time to become an ex-business.”

  Kent’s hatchet features sharpened further. His eyes narrowed in understanding and disdain. “Aw! I get it! What’s your price? It’s the upper ranks running the protection rings now is it? Don’t you know the Fuzz have tried already? The Bow Street Boys? My boss saw them off right sharp. What the hell are you after?”

  “Cooperation. First of all, a little information. Describe your business to me will you?”

  They listened to a deliberately dull account of the world of pharmacological supplying, its successes and pitfalls, delivered in a high-pitched voice trying for a classy accent. An effort to impress? No. Joe decided: to belittle and annoy.

  “And when I send a crew in to the rear part of these very large premises, they’ll find no substances I couldn’t with safety prescribe to my aunty?” Joe asked with mock innocence.

  “Oh! That’s it! Now we’ve got there! That’s drug squad business. They turned us over last month. Don’t you talk to each other? Clean as a whistle. The kind of people we work with have no truck with that sort of nonsense.”

  Joe improvised. “It’s the other sort of nonsense I’m interested in.”

  “Not that again! The animals are perfectly happy. Until their moment comes, of course. But it’s in a good cause, I reckon. People see that.”

  “What kind of animals?”

  “Rabbits mainly. Used to be rats. No shortage of those round here.” He grinned. “But our clients are very picky—they require something more delicate, fluffier, less … rodent-like.” Into the astonished silence that greeted this, he went on, enjoying his moment: “The kind of ladies we deal with would run a mile at the thought that Thames rats were involved in the process. Though with supplies the way they are, when push comes to shove …”

  “What is the time lag these days?” Joe broke in feeling his way through to the light that was dawning for him.

  “That’s the thing! Everybody wants it instant. Used to be four, five days to develop an A-Z sample but these German blokes at St. Catherine’s have got it down to two days. They know their stuff! It’s all in the ears—the veins in the ears. Much easier to process. Our staff were never keen on doing the entrails. You ever looked inside a rat?”

  “More times than you’ve had hot dinners, mate!” Joe tapped the ugly scar on his forehead, his memento of the trenches. “Sometimes they were our hot dinners. Now then—if you had a request for such a procedure on, say, this last Friday evening …?”

  “Results
Sunday night. We’re open all hours.”

  “The request from St. Catherine’s last Friday. The one you picked’ up at nine o’clock. Do you have the results?”

  “ ’Course. We phoned it through as instructed last night.”

  “Result?”

  Kent looked at him with truculence and suspicion. “Oh, no! Sorry. No can do. Can’t risk it. More than my job’s worth.”

  Joe pushed a pile of papers from the desk onto the floor and dumped his briefcase in the space he’d created. He began to unbuckle the fastenings. “Then I must ask you to sign a few papers for the Mayor’s office and prepare to close down by … tomorrow. That’ll give you time to make arrangements for the livestock and we’ll be round with the blue and white tapes at midday. Pen, please, Superintendent?”

  Bacchus offered his Mont Blanc with a flourish and began to dust down a square foot of desk top with his sleeve.

  “Oh, bugger you! Positive. It was positive!” Struck by a sudden thought, Kent leered. “ ’Ere—are you the father? Is that what this is all about? It’s personal, innit? Well, sod you—you’ve no right coming down here bothering us. We never do personal. We’d get shut down. I’m going to report this to your superior!”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Kent at last began to count Joe’s stripes. He took a long assessing look at his gold braid, his war wound and his barely contained amusement, and shrugged. “Gawn! I’ll see you out, Guv.” And with an evil grin: “If I had a bleedin’ cigar, I’d treat you.”

  “WELL, ARE YOU …?” Bacchus asked as they climbed back into the car.

  “The father? Lord no!”

  “Glad to hear it. I was going to say: are you ever going to tell me what the hell’s going on? What do the veins in the ears of some rabbit in the hands of that ghastly little tick have to do with affairs of state?”

  “I begin to think—less and less. I wonder if there’s a personal aspect to all this that we’re missing, so blinded are we by the limelight of international conspiracy. Julia pregnant? That’s a thought to conjure with! But, according to Mr. Kent, the nine o’clock sample collected on Friday night gave a positive result thanks to their advanced testing procedures and that result has been duly reported. She knows.”

  “I don’t believe it! That sweet little thing?” Bacchus was stunned.

  “Have we been watching the same girl?”

  THE TELEPHONE ON Joe’s desk rang at exactly eleven o’clock. Professor Reginald Stone declared himself and gave Joe five minutes to say his piece. He was not pleased to be caught between lectures. He listened to Joe’s request to recall once again the sequence of events between the finding of the gold coin and the stowing away in the colonel’s handkerchief, sighed and tutted in irritation.

  “Thank you, sir. Commendably succinct,” Joe said, when he’d finished.

  “Brevis esse laboro,” came the predictable reply.

  “Indeed. I will try to be equally brief. I’ve got two minutes left,” Joe said. “To set your mind at rest—I’m sure you’ve been worrying—the coin in the girl’s mouth was, as you warned us it might be, a copy. A very good one and one with a high gold content but—a facsimile. So convincing a specimen must have been moulded from an original, according to our expert with a microscope. I’d like you to give me the names of the London owners of such a coin. Including such as have sold them on or reported them stolen.”

  The professor listed five names.

  “Thank you for that. You’ve been a considerable help, Professor.”

  Five names. One recurring.

  He’d got him.

  The man he’d begun to think of as the mad choreographer. The identity of the person behind these unpleasant crimes: the mistreatment of a body, the murder of a seaman, the terrorising and threat to the life of a good-hearted American senator for reasons Joe did not yet understand, was clear. Joe’s only problem was that he simply did not accept it. All he could do was arrange an interview and see how far he could push the evidence. He picked up the telephone again and made a careful call.

  A knock on the door announced Inspector Orford.

  “Orford! Come in and have a cup of coffee. You look as though you need one. Tell me how it went.”

  Joe listened to the no-frills, professional account, guessing only from the occasional pause and use of a telling adjective that the announcement of death had been its usual gruelling experience.

  “Well done. Good decision to let the story finish at the hospital. No need to burden the old girl with all those muddy riverbank theatricals and the disfigurement. That generation has a certain reverence for the dead which we are losing. We’re not in the business of piling pain on pain. Speaking of which … Orford, I know now who is responsible for that pain. The toe-chopping, the neck-breaking, the alarming notes and all the rest of the terrors. I’m not clear as to the motive that’s behind all the brutality and the madness and I doubt I ever shall be. But I have the identity. I’ve traced it back to a directorship of that clinic you charmed your way into: St. Catherine’s Clinic.”

  Orford opened his eyes wide and whistled. “No! Sir, you’ll never get near! Untouchable, I’d say.”

  “On the contrary,” Joe said with more cheerfulness than he felt. “I’ve issued an invitation to come up and see us. We have an appointment here in my office in half an hour. In preparation for which—pass me that envelope of prints from the lab, will you? I must study it again. And remind me … how many matches do we require these days to establish an absolute identity? Is it still twelve?”

  “That’s right—twelve. Between eight and twelve, the judge will listen but take it only in conjunction with other elements of the evidence. Whatever that means! Fewer than eight—forget it.”

  “Hmm …” Joe traced the photographs of smudgy prints with the end of his pencil, frowning. “We’re on thin ice here then. We have five. Decidedly dodgy. I’ll see what I can do. I shall just have to make a little go a long way. It convinces me but then—that’s why we have judges and juries. Look, Orford, I want you to be present to back me up. Don’t worry—I shan’t tell any whoppers but I may make an odd emphasis or two. All deniable. If I’ve got the wrong man it will soon be evident. I shall make a grovelling apology and off he’ll go, cursing me for a time-waster and ringing up his uncle in the Home Office. But I don’t think that’s how it’s going to turn out. You were in on this right from the beginning. It’s still your case. I’d like you to make the arrest. Can you buzz off and organise two uniformed coppers to stand by and … yes … a Black Maria, I think would be a fitting conveyance to the local nick. Vine Street, I suggest.”

  CHAPTER 26

  “I’m glad that Sam and Joel are not present to hear this, Commissioner.”

  Colonel Swinton spoke more in sorrow than in anger. “They had formed a considerable regard for you, were you aware? They’d never met a senior policeman before and, far from being an ogre of the type they’d heard stories of, they found you to be ‘a real gentleman and sharp with it.’ I fear they would now have to revise their judgement on the official who, pompously and with not a jot of evidence, sits before me ranting of murder, despoliation of corpses, suppression of evidence and what was the other thing …? Oh, yes. High treason.”

  His grin was disarming. He stirred in his seat on the other side of Joe’s desk and leaned closer. “I say—would you like to send your inspector out to get some tea or something? Wouldn’t want to embarrass the top brass in front of the minions, would we? I’ll wait.”

  Seeing that Orford, having got over his initial astonishment, was now beginning to flush with righteous rage, Joe decided it would be politic to send him out. And the colonel might well, in the absence of any witness, be more freely indiscreet.

  “Tea? I expect you’re gasping for one, Colonel. Thank you, Orford.”

  Joe looked across at the bland broad face with its slight sneer and wondered why he hadn’t seen the unpleasant features below the mask of respectability the last time he’d sat
in that chair. On that occasion he’d been flanked by his gardeners. Sam and Joel with their Suffolk grace and good manners had lent him cover, two angels hauling him up to heaven, Joe reckoned. Impossible to think badly of a man who employed men like that. Their shining innocence implied a reciprocal blameless goodwill, a kindly fatherliness on the part of the employer.

  “Orford is nobody’s minion and nobody’s fool,” Joe heard himself snap back when the door had closed behind the inspector. He began patiently to re-evaluate the evidence Swinton had just dismissed with derision.

  “The body of the dancer. She was not the nameless, unclaimed derelict you and your friends had assumed. She has a name, you know. Marie Destaines. A talented young ballerina and beloved of her grandmother. Marie died—not by any malice, I’m sure—at the clinic of which you are a director and major shareholder. Whilst her body lay in storage pending enquiry into her identity and next of kin, neither of which she had declared, an emergency arose. In collaboration with Miss Kirilovna, whom we believe to have been your associate in things other than management of the clinic, you evolved a scheme in which the apparently unwanted body might be put to use as part of a political plan to unsteady, unseat, send mad, or otherwise discommode an American senator, guest of this country.

  “You knew well ahead of Marie’s death of the scheme to dowse the riverbank. It occurred to you that if the body were unearthed in the dramatic way it was, it would turn the screw on the senator further. Nothing left to chance. You’d already prospected the area, you had the table of Thames tides to hand. If the body were washed away in spite of your careful calculations as to depth—well, no matter. One problem would have ebbed away with the tide. A slight hiccup in confidence perhaps when it came to preparing the body for ‘burial’ and amputation of toe? Or merely a theatrical gesture? You put a copy of a gold coin—you have, I’m told, three genuine examples at least in your possession, and several copies—under the girl’s tongue. You may well have accompanied this hocus-pocus with a funeral oration in Latin. Some dark flourish from the Aeneid? An impressive gesture.” On an impulse he added, “Matron must have been charmed by it.”