by Alex Reeve
‘Sir?’ It was Pallett.
I almost fled. Up ahead, the alleyway formed a tunnel between the houses, an oblong of pale light and the outline of a broken-down gate: the servants’ entrance to heaven.
‘You have to come with us, Mr Stanhope.’ Pallett was half a foot taller than me even without his helmet, and broad enough to fill the alleyway. ‘You must’ve got lost, sir. Sometimes folk see a policeman and they get confused.’
‘Yes, that must be it.’
‘Never mind, eh? We won’t mention it to Sergeant Cloake. He’s not very understanding about such things. Probably best not to let it happen again, though.’
And I’d always assumed he had the brains of a billy club.
He stood aside for me to squeeze past him, and followed me back to the shop. Constance was still on her stool, wide-eyed, and Alfie was standing with my coat over his arm, his mouth set grimly. ‘It’ll be all right, Leo.’
I walked out between the two policemen. I wasn’t handcuffed, but there was an unmistakeable sense of being guarded. I ducked to get into the carriage.
6
Pallett guided me through the heavy wooden doors of the police headquarters on Whitehall, his hand firmly on my shoulder. I felt myself trembling. I followed him into the guts of the place, a long corridor of smoke-stained windows lined with policemen behind desks, writing on forms or typing on machines; the deafening racket of a thousand tiny hammers. We went down a flight of stairs to another corridor, underground now, lamp-lit and stinking of mould, finally stopping at a plain office dominated by a hulking desk, with empty shelves and a discoloured square on the back wall where a picture had once hung. I put a hand on the chair and it was damp. The whole room was damp, probably the whole basement. Condensation was rusting the shelves and the pipes overhead, glistening on the metal like the brow of a guilty man. I gathered my coat around me and fumbled in my pocket for a cigarette, just to feel the warmth and dryness of the smoke in my throat.
‘Why am I here?’
‘Someone’ll come soon,’ Pallett said, as if I was an imbecile. ‘Detective Ripley. I don’t know him well, but I hear he’s a good man. Don’t worry, Mr Stanhope.’
The degradation of pity from Pallett. I reasserted myself. ‘So how goes it with that nurse of yours? What’s her name?’
He reddened. ‘Miss Rasmussen. I’m meeting her for tea with her parents on Sunday.’
‘That’s very promising. Good for you!’
‘Thank you, sir. Very kind.’
He left me alone, but didn’t lock the door.
Minutes passed as I tried to piece everything together, pacing around the little room, circling the chair and rapping my knuckles on the desk with every pass. They had already discovered I knew Maria, or why else would I be here? Most likely they had talked to Mrs Brafton. I wondered what she had told them. She was normally so protective of her customers’ privacy – discretion above all else, she always said – but this was not a normal situation. And I was not a normal customer.
I folded my arms, reaching to the sore spots where my cilice rubbed against my skin, and dug my nails in on both sides. It didn’t help.
My cigarette was no more than an ember by the time he came in. He was a big man in an ill-fitting suit that looked as if he wore it every day and possibly every night, with the glossy albumen of his breakfast smeared down his waistcoat. He didn’t shake my hand but pulled out a folder, licked his finger and started leafing through the papers. I sat down, feeling dainty and dandified by comparison, perching upright in my chair while he sprawled opposite me.
He had a paper bag with him, and he opened it and unwrapped a pasty. I suddenly felt hungry.
Eventually he looked up and fixed me with faded blue eyes, one lazy lid giving him a half-asleep expression. There was something calculated about his slow manner, and it made me uncomfortable.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Ripley,’ he said, and I recognised a northern accent, reminding me of my sister making me snigger with her voicing of poor Jane Eyre’s travails. ‘You seem anxious, Mr Stanhope.’
Mister Stanhope. So no one had told him what I was, at least not yet. Still, he would probably find out soon enough. I am the Cockless Man, the only one of my kind. Put me in a zoo with the panda bears and giant tortoises. I’ll wear my bowler hat and growl at passers-by.
‘I’m just a little unsettled by this place, Detective.’
‘It can have that effect.’ He tore his pasty in two and handed me half. ‘Chicken and potato. My treat.’
‘Thank you.’ Politeness is never wasted.
‘Good teeth you have. Not like mine.’ He showed me his, grimacing, and they were black and chipped. ‘Too much drink and football. Too many fights. I grew out of it, one way or another. You’re not the fighting type, are you, with those teeth?’
‘No.’
‘Well-bred. Educated.’ He pulled out a piece of paper, and I recognised Mr Hurst’s report from the hospital. ‘Do you understand why you’re here?’
‘Not really.’
He spoke through a mouthful of food. ‘You knew the murdered girl, didn’t you? Don’t bother, I know you did. You were a customer of the brothel on …’ He checked his notes. ‘On Half Moon Street. When did you last see her?’ When I didn’t respond he sat back in his chair and sniffed. ‘This’ll be easier if you’re straight with me. I don’t care about your morals, I’m not your vicar. Your name was in the appointment book. You were a regular customer, weren’t you?’
‘I suppose so. I last saw Maria a week ago today, in the evening.’
‘Good. The first answer’s always the hardest. You were with the same girl every week for more than two years. You must have got to know her.’
‘Yes. We were close.’
‘I see.’ He was expressionless but for his half-closed eye, which made him seem as if he was about to wink at me. ‘So it was more than just the usual. You cared about her.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
He smiled. It was disconcerting. ‘You’d be surprised how common it is.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Maybe you saw her with some other johnny and couldn’t bear it. Next thing you know, you’re stood over her with blood on your hands, wondering what you did. You wouldn’t be the first.’
I stared at him. What he was saying was ridiculous. ‘You don’t understand … I would never harm her.’
‘Not intentionally. You just lost your temper and before you knew it –’
‘No! We were always kind to each other.’ Once, she had winced when I touched a graze on the nape of her neck, and I had insisted we stop and put ointment on the spot. I had rubbed it in myself while she held her hair to one side and told me over and over again how gentle I was.
‘Do you own a weapon, Mr Stanhope? A club or a cudgel?’
‘No! You can’t think I would hurt Maria.’
‘Can’t I? Why not?’
‘Because …’ There were so many reasons that I couldn’t single one out: because I loved her, because I wanted to spend my life with her, because she was the only person I’d ever met who knew what I was and didn’t care. In the end, I came up with the stupidest possible answer. ‘I would never do something like that.’
‘Well someone did. If it wasn’t you, then who was it?’
I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been killed by someone she knew, someone I might know. People were stabbed, bottled and throttled all the time. I saw them almost daily in the hospital, and most were victims of petty thievery for a wallet or a ring. They were a tithe the city demanded. Men had turned up on the slab minus nothing but a pair of shoes. I hadn’t considered for a second that Maria was murdered by an actual person. I felt as if I’d betrayed her by not wondering before. I’d just lain in bed, thinking of myself.
‘I don’t know. I can’t believe it, truly I can’t. Everyone adored her.’ I heard my own u
se of the past tense and reached for the sore at my right armpit, giving it a brief, fierce pinch.
‘Yes, I’m sure she was sweet as treacle,’ said Ripley. ‘But I need facts.’
Facts? How could facts sum up everything she was? But if that’s what he wanted, I’d done it dozens of times before for policemen too lazy or illiterate to read my reports.
‘Very well. Occupation, prostitute. Aged twenty. Father unknown, mother deceased. Port-wine stain on face, left side.’ I could hear my voice trembling, and took a breath. ‘Blunt instrument to the head. Minor lividity on back, bruising that is, ante-mortem by a few days. Conjunctiva inflamed …’
‘What?’
‘The surface of the eye,’ I said, pointing to my own. ‘Is that enough facts? It’s all in there, I’m sure, if you can make sense of Mr Hurst’s grammar and handwriting. Plus the lengths of her fingernails, the weight of her lungs, the contents of her stomach.’
He looked at the front of the report, frowning, and then turned it over. ‘Nothing about her innards in here.’
I remembered that Mr Hurst had been in a hurry, and even though he coveted the parts, loved to measure them and cut off little pieces to study under his microscope, he hated sewing up the corpses afterwards. When he had first discovered I had nimble fingers – almost like a woman’s, he said – he started delegating the task to me, considering it a rudimentary exercise beneath his attention: ‘I’m not a bloody undertaker.’
Ripley started writing scratchily in his notebook, but his pencil lead snapped off and he cursed, tugging open the desk drawer and searching through it. I sat in silence listening to the pipes overhead bumping and gurgling as air pockets formed and broke. Eventually he found a sharpener and solemnly sharpened his pencil, dropping little curls of wood on to the floor. When he was finished he held it up to check the point.
‘We spoke to your Mr Hurst. He said you fell ill and didn’t go in for two days. You seem well enough to me.’
‘It was unexpected to see her like that. I was upset, naturally.’
‘Naturally,’ he repeated, mocking my use of the word. ‘He’s a sack of wind if you want my opinion, but he was keen to be of assistance. He said you were a good employee, very thorough. Never normally late to work.’
‘So?’
‘He said you know a lot about bodies. Causes of death and the like.’
‘She was clubbed on the head. You don’t need to know much about causes of death to do that.’
The words were out before I’d truly considered them. How callous I was. This wasn’t chess, this was Maria’s last minute of life.
Ripley surveyed me, rubbing his chin. He didn’t have a beard, just an untidy moustache in the manner of almost every policeman in London. ‘Crime of passion, then. Spur of the moment. Where were you on Saturday?’
I thought back, and realised, with a cramping not unlike stomach ache, exactly where I’d been. ‘I was at the theatre. The Opera Comique.’
‘Who with?’
‘Alone. A woman in the next seat might remember me. And I spoke with the doorman as well.’
‘What was the play?’
‘HMS Pinafore.’ I didn’t mention that I’d only seen the first half.
Ripley rolled his eyes. ‘You went to that bunk on your own? What on earth for?’
‘I bought two tickets, one for me and one for Maria. She didn’t arrive. Now I know why.’ And I’d been so resentful, so self-absorbed. I hadn’t considered that she might have been injured, let alone this.
‘And you didn’t think it was a bit odd? You didn’t wonder where she was.’
‘Yes, but, well, I was never certain she’d come. I hoped she would, but I’d only ever met her at Mrs Brafton’s before.’ I felt my cheeks go guiltily red. From his viewpoint, I must have seemed pitiful.
He pulled out a metal case from his pocket, and removed a cigarette and a match from it. He didn’t offer me one, but lit his own and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply and then blowing a smoke ring. It floated between us. ‘Not cheap, the theatre, is it? Five bob at least. What did you think would come of it, eh? Did you plan to rescue her and take her off to a cottage in the countryside? Is that what you wanted?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
I had never actually hoped for a house of our own with an arch of wisteria over the porch and a square of garden where Maria could tend the roses. That was my father’s dream, not mine. I knew ours would be a life of hard graft, with no collection plate or, for that matter, willow-pattern bowl to support us. In the minutes before I went to sleep each night I pictured us in a shop together in some little town far from here, and one day opening a place of our own, perhaps a bookshop, and living in the rooms above it. And we would be happy. Or, we would have been.
‘Then how was it? Why didn’t you court a normal girl?’
Because no normal girl would have me. ‘She didn’t choose that life. Her mother was a dancer on the stage – you know the kind, a drunk. She sold Maria when she was eleven years old. Can you imagine that? I wanted to give her a better life. Are you married, Detective?’
‘Aye, I am, and if any bastard laid a hand on my missus I’d kill him, I make no bones about it. But you fell for a girl anyone could have, anyone at all, for a few pennies. Must’ve bothered you, didn’t it?’
I knew he was trying to make me angry. He was an ignorant man, lacking imagination.
‘When I met her she was eighteen. She’d already been living that life for four years. If you assume three customers a day for three hundred days a year, that’s almost four thousand times before I even met her. Possibly more.’
Ripley sat back in his chair and surveyed me. I’d clearly surprised him, but I didn’t know whether it was because I’d done that calculation or because the number was so high.
‘That’s a very … rational way to think about it.’
‘Factual. And yes, I did want to rescue her from that, of course I did. But I still admired her for surviving it. Any normal person would be hardened or destroyed, but she was gentle, kind and beautiful. Do you know, she wept over her mother’s death, even after everything she’d done to her?’
I was tired. I wanted to go back to bed for ever. But Ripley wasn’t finished. He scratched his head and started sorting through his papers again, though I sensed he wasn’t really reading them.
‘What aren’t you telling me, Mr Stanhope?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I could wring it out of you.’
‘Probably, if you wanted to, but it wouldn’t be the truth.’ My palms prickled at the sight of his fists on the desk, but I wasn’t afraid. Detached was more the word.
‘Again, very rational.’
‘Factual.’
‘Factual then. You’re a factual man.’ He took a long pull on his cigarette and then dropped it on to the floor without treading on it, so it lay there slowly smouldering, a thin wisp of smoke curling and dissipating in the air. ‘Fair enough, we’ll have to do this the hard way then. Come with me.’
‘Are you letting me go?’
He laughed, but there was no humour in it. ‘No, Mr Stanhope, I’m not. You’re my best suspect, and there’s something not right about all this. An educated young man like yourself, good job, nice manners, pretty teeth, falling for a girl like that. It doesn’t add up. But I’ll get to the bottom of it in the end, I usually do.’
I followed him up the stairs and into the light. He barged through the double doors and along the corridor without waiting, so I had to hurry to keep up. It was madness. I was running to my own incarceration while whoever had really killed her was walking around as free as a bird.
Ripley led me almost back to the entrance, but before we got there we turned away through a metal door guarded by a heavyset constable with a pistol in a holster. On the other side there was a shit-smelling room, cold as death, divided into a pair of cells with bars running from floor to ceiling and a single, high window. The right-hand cell had a group of men in
it, and I hoped he would put me in the other one. He didn’t.
‘Move back,’ he said to an older inmate who was holding on to the bars, staring at me as the door was unlocked. I didn’t meet his eyes. Another man was lying on the floor, unmoving, in some kind of stupor, and two others were seated on the bench, arms around their knees. The pail in the corner was the source of the foul odour, pervading everything.
Ripley pulled out another cigarette and stuck it between his lips, taking an age to light a match. He seemed never to hurry anything. ‘Any valuables on you?’ he asked. ‘Money, pocket watch, pen, anything? Best hand ’em over to me now or you’ll be handing them over to this lot later.’
I gave him my wallet. ‘I want it back afterwards.’
He hesitated, and I realised with a shiver he didn’t think there would be an afterwards. ‘All right. You’ll be here until you’re charged, and then the court cells. Then Newgate, more than likely, which’ll make this seem like paradise.’
The door swung shut behind him, and I was left alone with the prisoners, and that pail.
The older man went back to gazing at the wall through the bars and tugging hairs out of his nose between a thumb and forefinger. The two men on the bench, who seemed to be brothers, were muttering in low voices. One of them had a diagonal cut and bruises across his face. He was having trouble talking, and kept fingering the half-inch stitches that were keeping his wound from parting. The fellow on the floor just lay there. I sat on the floor next to him with my back to the wall, taking the lowest-status position in the cell.
I was afraid. I couldn’t stay here long with these men, let alone Newgate Prison. I would be discovered for certain. How could this have happened? It was only Wednesday, wasn’t it? Only four days since I’d been waiting for Maria outside the theatre, believing that my new life was about to start, and a week since I had last seen her.
I would never see her again. I knew it was true, and yet it seemed impossible. Somehow, I still believed that if I went to her room and knocked on her door, I would hear her footsteps as she rushed to throw it open. I would feel her arms around my neck and her hair against my cheek, and I would breathe her in. She smelled of ginger mint.