by Alex Reeve
‘Go on, Micky, have him,’ said one of them, mimicking a punch with his fist, full of acts of violence another man should commit. ‘Look at him! He’s a weakling. Have him, Micky.’
Micky didn’t need any encouragement. He lunged at me with his left hand and punched me in the mouth with his right, a short jab, almost a flick, and I staggered backwards, the pain welling up. I could taste blood. Before I could respond he punched me in the stomach and I doubled over. I managed to take a short gasping breath and force my eyes open, but all I could see were his shoes, too small for his feet, toes poking out where he’d cut off the ends. I thought, well, at least he won’t kick me, but then he brought up his knee into my cheek and I heard a crack. There was something hard in my mouth and I spat it into my hand. When I opened my palm, it was my tooth, wet with blood and saliva.
He pulled me upright, his fist gripping my shirt, reaching for the wallet inside my jacket pocket. I heard a ripping sound as my shirt seam tore. Instinctively I covered myself and twisted away.
Footsteps were coming down the road – here to watch the fun.
‘What are you doing?’ Madame Moreau was standing in the street holding a metal poker, pointing it at Micky. ‘You know better than to harass people who come to my door.’
She raised the poker, but he quickly put up his hands and almost wailed: ‘Didn’t know he was one of yours, Madame. It’s always ladies, ain’t it?’
‘It don’t matter who it is. No guest at my house is to be interfered with. Do you understand? Do you understand?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry, Madame.’
‘I pulled you out your mother’s cunny, and don’t you forget it. Now get home.’ His friends sniggered, but she wasn’t finished. ‘And take these vermin with you.’
They nodded dumbly and hurried down the hill, just slowly enough to tell themselves they weren’t fleeing.
‘Thank you,’ I said, thickly, my lip starting to swell. Rescued by a woman. I was truly the feeblest man alive.
She indicated my shirt where I was holding it closed across the rip.
‘Do up your coat, you fool. And get home.’
‘I will.’
She took a deep breath. ‘There was one gentleman Maria mentioned a couple of times. A soldier, she said. An officer. They used to go for walks in the park. I don’t know his name.’
‘A soldier?’ I couldn’t remember many soldiers visiting the brothel. It wasn’t all that near the barracks. ‘Are you sure?’
She stalked back to her house without replying, or even a backward glance.
‘What happened to your face?’ Greatorex was peering at me with a disgusted expression. I knew I must look a sight, and I felt silly too, and craven. A weakling was about right. I’d been shaking all the way home, and had jumped like a rabbit when a beggar stood up suddenly from a bench in Holborn.
‘I’m all right.’
‘Have you been fighting?’
Not really. ‘Don’t you ever go home?’
His wife had died soon after I came to the hospital and he hadn’t missed a day; I wondered if anyone was looking after him now.
‘I have to keep an eye on things.’
I smiled lopsidedly. ‘I don’t need supervision.’
‘Really? Turning up looking like that? Maybe I should join you on this shift.’
‘I’ll be fine, thank you.’
I set off on my round. I should have started with the offices, collecting the letters and parcels from their trays, but I had another destination in mind. Once I was sure Greatorex wasn’t following me – which wouldn’t have surprised me in the least – I made a beeline for the records office.
It was, of course, locked. Welsh Morgan ran the place and knocked off at six o’clock sharp even if there was a queue of people waiting. But I’d been down here at least daily for two years, and I knew their routine. I knew Welsh Morgan drank too much most lunchtimes and his assistant had to do the afternoons on his own, and I knew his assistant fed the stray cats that came to the back window. He said it was to keep down the rats, but that was no reason to stroke them and give them names. And I knew Welsh Morgan and his assistant possessed only one key between them, and at night it was tucked under the door with just a sliver of blue ribbon poking out.
It took me ten seconds to get in and shut the door behind me.
The cabinets were arranged around the edge of the room, with the patient records along the back wall in alphabetical order. ‘F’ was for Flowers. There was a whole garden full of Flowers in there and I had to hold each file under the window to make out the writing. The ones supplied by Mr Hurst – supplied by me – were pale blue instead of manila, with a small black cross at the top left to indicate that the person had not left the hospital alive.
I could feel something soft against my leg: a cat. He was a big fellow, bulkily muscular with thick, golden fur and a flat, doleful face. I stroked him, feeling ridges of scar tissue around his ears and neck. He mewed and put his front legs up on the filing cabinet as if he meant to scale it. On the top there was a jar full of meat bones, and I dropped one on to the floor. The bruiser set upon it hungrily.
‘Did you get locked in?’ I said to him, and then heard another noise.
It was a snuffle, half a snore in the back of the throat, the sound of a man sleeping. Or waking. I could just make out a figure curled up under a table, wrapped in some kind of blanket. I couldn’t tell whether it was Welsh Morgan, sleeping off another session at the pub, or his assistant, so attached to the cats he couldn’t face being parted from them. Whoever it was snored again and stirred, but then settled, and was silent.
I dropped another bone for the cat; he wouldn’t mew while he was eating. I pulled out the next Flowers file, and thanked goodness it was the right one. I held the paper up to the dim light and tried to make out my own handwriting.
God, I was good: neat, legible and to the point, not a word wasted.
Jack Flowers. 26 years of age. Deceased 19th of January 1880. Drowned in the river. Water found in both lungs, weighing 30 oz (right) and 26 oz (left). Bloating. No signs of a struggle. No other markings. Death by misadventure, not considered suspicious.
The last thing I saw in the room was the cat’s shining eyes reflecting the light from the corridor – the only waking witness to my crime.
But I had found what I was looking for: the widow’s address.
10
Except Mrs Flowers wasn’t at home.
Late the next morning, after spending three and a half hours cursing the transparency of my curtain and a further half hour trying to hang up a blanket to block the light, I set out eastwards.
Ludgate Hill was a dull thoroughfare leading from Fleet Street towards St Paul’s. There was a small shop on one corner, little more than a narrow window and a door painted with the legend Dolan and Son, Butcher. A woman I didn’t recognise was unlocking it. She looked as if she’d spent her entire life facing a gale at sea, and could have been aged anywhere from forty to sixty, such was her leathern face and sparse hair.
‘Good morning.’
She jumped and turned with her back to the door.
‘What do you want?’
‘Is this the right address for Mrs Flowers?’
‘She ain’t here. Who are you?’ She seemed suspicious, and was fumbling for something in her apron pocket.
‘My name’s Leo Stanhope. I met Mrs Flowers at the hospital after her husband’s death. I gave her the police report.’
‘Oh Lord, no.’ She put her hand across her mouth and seemed about to sink down on to the step. ‘You’re from the infirmary. Is she … is it bad news?’
‘I’m not from the infirmary.’ She was on the very brink of tears. ‘Is that where Mrs Flowers is?’
Finally, she found what she was searching for: a folding pocket knife. But she didn’t threaten me with it, she just turned it over in her hands. ‘Blasted hooligans took her away right in front of her little ones. They was terrified. Not safe in our ow
n beds any more, are we? I thought you was one of ’em before I got a proper look at you.’
‘You mean she was kidnapped? Is she all right?’
‘No. They bludged her on the head, the cowards. She’s lucky to be alive.’
It was raining heavily when the cabbie left me on Cleveland Street, just south of the Euston Road, standing outside a building four storeys high, set among a hotchpotch of factories and commercial premises. Above the door a single word had been carved into the lintel: Workhouse.
I knocked and waited. Eventually a face poked out, a woman of perhaps thirty-five, slim and earnest with her hair tied back.
‘Yes?’
‘Is this the workhouse infirmary?’
‘The workhouse has closed, now it’s just the infirmary. I’m the matron here.’ She wiped her hands down her cotton pinny, for the thousandth time that day by the look of it.
‘I’ve come to visit a patient of yours. Mrs Flowers.’
‘Visiting day is Tuesday.’
‘My name’s Stanhope. I’m with the police.’ It was a lie, but an easy one. ‘It’s an urgent matter, relating to a crime, a serious crime. I have to speak with her today.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘You should get some ice on that.’
I’d forgotten how I must look. ‘It’s just a bruise. I got it in the course of my duties.’ I stood up a little straighter, feeling genuinely proud for an instant, before I remembered it was a complete fabrication.
‘You’d better come with me.’
I followed her through a gloomy atrium and onwards to a hall full of boys in beds shoved together so tightly that for most there was no way out without clambering over other boys. Some of them were lying on top of their blankets and others underneath, dozing or cataleptic. Just a few were engaged in games of cards or pebbles, resting on their elbows or sitting cross-legged on the floor. Even so, there was no laughter, no clamour or commotion from so large a group of boys. They barely looked at us as we passed.
Beyond that was a further hall, similar to the first, full of men and stinking of vomit. I could feel the density of it in the back of my throat like a lump, and had to swallow hard to avoid gagging. Most of them were old, or looked old. The wretch nearest the door was writhing to and fro in his bed, twisting his jacket around himself. The next was lying with his mouth open, his skin the colour of dishwater. Both his sleeves were empty.
Westminster Hospital was a palace by comparison, but it was for those who could pay. This was for everyone else.
The matron led me to a nurses’ room containing a table, four mismatched chairs and a cupboard covered with piles of paper.
‘You’d better take a seat. I’ll fetch her.’
Five minutes later, she returned. I’d quite forgotten what Jack Flowers’s widow looked like, and would never have recognised her with that huge bandage around her head. But then she scowled at me, and the memory came flooding back.
‘You again?’ she said.
We sat face to face across the table. The matron left us to speak alone, interrupted only by the clattering of a moth trapped in one of the lamps, its wings beating against the glass.
‘How have you been?’ I asked.
She sipped a glass of water and wiped her mouth. ‘Dandy.’
‘A lady at the butcher’s shop told me you were here. She said you’d been attacked.’
‘So have you from the look of you.’
I essayed a smile, conscious of its malformed quality. ‘I wanted to ask you about your husband.’
A flicker crossed her face. It didn’t seem quite like grief. More like fear. ‘Why? What’s he to you?’
‘Someone else has died. I’m wondering if there’s a connection between the two deaths.’
‘What connection?’
I found myself leaning forward across the table. ‘Her name was Maria Milanes. Or Mills. Does that mean anything to you?’
‘How could there be a connection if Jack died by accident?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘That was what you said, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Did this woman drown?’
‘No.’
‘And you think it was Jack that did for her?’
‘Certainly not. Your husband died before she did.’
She looked away, out of the window, at the rain and the backs of other buildings. ‘You’re not making any sense.’
The matron returned carrying a dripping-wet muslin bag. ‘Put this against your face.’ When I hesitated she pursed her lips. ‘We don’t have much ice left and I’ve taken the trouble.’
I did as she instructed, though it was barely ice any longer, even in this cold, and the water trickled down my neck, making me shiver.
The matron turned to Mrs Flowers. ‘You can go home now, Rosie, if this gentleman will see you back safely. It’s all right, he’s with the police.’
‘I’ll be quite well on my own,’ she said. ‘It’s broad daylight.’
‘Better to travel with someone,’ insisted the matron. ‘You’ve suffered a serious injury.’
‘I’m happy to accompany you,’ I said. ‘You can trust me completely.’ I was thinking she might be afraid of me, after her recent injury, but she just sniggered in response.
The matron turned to me. ‘Promise you’ll take her all the way home.’
And so we found ourselves side by side outside the infirmary, her with a bandage around her head and me with an ice pack held to my chin. At least the rain was easing.
‘You can clear off now,’ she said. ‘You’ve no need to stay.’
‘I made a promise. We can walk up to the Euston Road and get a cab.’
‘Good idea,’ she said, but as I set off up the road she went the other way, south, and I had to run to catch her up again.
‘I thought you were getting a cab,’ she said, adjusting her bandage. It was discoloured, with a brownish blotch where she’d bled into the fabric, or someone had, perhaps its previous incumbent. My scalp itched just looking at it.
‘We’ll walk if you prefer,’ I said, as she quickened her pace. ‘So, did your husband know anyone named Maria?’
‘His aunt’s named Maria. Or it might be Marion. She lives in Norwich and has six children and two grandchildren. All boys, more’s the pity.’
I sighed. ‘This Maria was young. She lived locally.’
Mrs Flowers looked up at me. In fact, she looked up at almost everyone; she was less than five feet tall and seemed to be built wholly of cushions, aside from her face, which was narrow, with no softness at all, and predisposed to asperity. ‘You men,’ she sneered, apparently summing up her life’s wisdom in two words.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Pretty girl was she, this Maria? Seems to me you’re more willing to chase around asking questions about her than you were about my Jack. Didn’t want to know about him, did you? Just told me he fell in the river and that was that. Seems to me you’re choosy about who you help and who you don’t.’
She was taking a zigzag route through the side streets, practically running as we turned the corner past the Princess Louise. I wondered how much more time I’d be forced to spend with her, surely the most recalcitrant woman on earth.
‘Mrs Flowers,’ I said. ‘Or, it’s Rosie, isn’t it? May I call you Rosie?’ Rosie Flowers? Good grief. As if her life wasn’t hard enough.
‘You can call me Mrs Flowers, or better still nothing at all, which is what I shall be calling you.’
‘Mrs Flowers, when we last met I told you in all good faith what the surgeon had told me, which was that there were no suspicious circumstances. Now I’m not so sure.’
She walked on in fierce silence and crossed over Oxford Street between two stationary carts. The rain had backed up the traffic, and the toll man had left his booth and was walking up the line with his hat pulled over his ears, collecting coins and abuse from the drivers.
Finally, she shook her head. ‘I don’t know any Maria. That doesn’t mean he didn’t, tho
ugh.’
There was a whole tome in that one sentence. I let it go.
‘How were you hurt, Mrs Flowers? The lady at the shop said you were accosted. Was it something to do with Jack, do you think?’
‘She says things she shouldn’t.’
‘Did you go to the police?’
She just snorted.
By the time we reached her address on Ludgate Hill, my feet were aching.
She turned to me. ‘This is my home, so you’ve kept your promise. Goodbye.’
I looked at the name: Dolan and Son, Butcher. ‘Is this your shop?’
She nodded, and swelled with pride so she came almost up to my chin. Her eyes were apple green. ‘I was Rosie Dolan and my father’s the son in the name. Should be called Dolan and Daughter now, but he’s given up mostly and I’ll not be naming it Flowers the Butcher. Anyway it’s not a butcher’s any more.’
She pushed open the door and I was assailed by a great whoosh of heat and the most delicious smell. It was like Sunday lunch in the vicarage, a leg of lamb or topside of beef with apple tart to follow, and Bridget, our maid, bustling from hob to oven and smacking our fingers with a spoon whenever we stole a knuckle of dough.
I followed Mrs Flowers inside, eyes wide with admiration. She had three children and her own shop, and yet she was only about my age, maybe even younger.
The leather-faced woman rushed out from behind the counter and swamped her in a bear hug. ‘Thank goodness! I was so worried.’
The room was stuffy, dimly lit by a wall lamp and the orange glow from an oven against the back wall. Arrayed along the counter were tray after tray of pies, golden brown, each the size of a boxer’s fist. It was heavenly.
Mrs Flowers went around the counter into the back and I heard the sounds of joyous, childish yelling. Their mother was home again.
The leather-faced woman blew out her cheeks and smiled at me. ‘Thank you for bringing her back, sir. We was so worried, me and my Bert.’