by Alex Reeve
‘I won’t confess. I’d never hurt anyone.’ She held up her rosary. ‘And I won’t hang myself neither, whatever they’re hoping. It’s only strung with cotton. You can tell ’em that.’
‘I’m not supposed to be here. The police don’t know. It’s just you and me.’
‘Please go away.’
She went back to her praying, though I doubted God was listening. It occurred to me how rash I was being, talking to a woman who knew what I was and had an excellent motive to direct attention away from herself. She could easily betray me. But somehow, I didn’t believe she would.
‘Madame,’ I said. ‘If I uncover the truth, you could be freed. Assuming you’re innocent, of course.’
‘But I’m not innocent.’ She toyed with her rosary, tugging on it, testing its strength. ‘They know what I do. They say I’ve killed loads. All those little ones never born who’d have grown up and made more babies, and so on and so on, thousands and thousands, never living because of me. They say I deserve this whether I did for Maria or not.’
‘And do you believe that?’
‘Sometimes. But where else can they go? Girls of twelve whose fathers would’ve thrown them out of the house, even if it was him that did it to her. Women not married, and rich ladies whose husbands never touch ’em, and girls like Maria, who’d lose their livelihoods and maybe more. Will it balance, do you think, the babies never born and the ladies I’ve saved?’ She raised her chin, braced for the answer, and in the light from the high window her face took on a sickly, viridian sheen.
‘I just want to know about Maria.’
‘I keep telling them, I’m not a murderer.’ She looked me in the eyes for the first time, with a spark of her old self. ‘Though if I get my hands on the copper who did this to me, I might have a change of heart.’
‘If it wasn’t you, Madame Moreau, it must have been someone else. Maybe the soldier you mentioned before? You said they used to go for walks in the park together.’
‘It makes no difference. I already told the police about him, and they weren’t interested. Didn’t even write it down.’ She almost smiled, though the attempt looked painful. ‘It’s too late now. They’ll hang me for this even though I would never hurt her. I knew Maria when she could shin up a drainpipe and be in and out in a trice, her pockets full of whatever she could grab. And even before that, when she was just a babe, she used to play in the straw beneath my table, more than once, more than a few times. Her old lady had a taste for gin and didn’t mix in nice company, though those days are behind her now, of course, poor thing.’ She looked at me solemnly, brushing her hair back under her bonnet, mustering some of her previous hauteur. ‘That’s the truth, but it isn’t what they want to hear, nor you neither, I daresay. I mean, you’re not the truth yourself, are you? You’re a falsehood, a walking, talking lie. Was it you that told them I did it?’
‘No. The detective said it was Elizabeth Brafton who accused you.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Elizabeth? Well, ain’t that something. She was nothing but a washerwoman in the brothel when I first met her. She has those airs and graces, but back then her job was cleaning men’s seed off the sheets and girls’ blood off their smalls. Hard to believe, isn’t it, a person of her type, educated, much like yourself, but she was widowed and fallen on hard times and I suppose it was better than starving. She and I were friendly back then. I told her that place was a goldmine, being where it is. We was going to be partners, you know, and make it into something. She took the idea to Mr Bentinck for the both of us, and they cut me out. He put her in charge. We haven’t been friendly since then.’
There was a noise from outside, the scraping of a chair against the floor, and I remembered I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had to be quick.
‘Do you own a boat, Madame Moreau? Or have access to one?’
‘A boat? Like on the river?’
‘About thirty feet long, moored for a while at Puddle Dock.’
‘What would I want with a boat? I don’t have that kind of money. I’ve only been on a boat twice and I was sick both times, over to France and back again. I even married one of ’em, but he was weak in the chest. Bullet wound. He was very poorly.’
‘You were a nurse.’
‘A wife, a nurse and a widow. A woman’s life in a nutshell.’
‘What about the soldier, the one Maria knew? Can you tell me anything about him?’ She looked away and started fiddling with her rosary again, and I banged the bars in frustration. The noise rang around the room. ‘Surely you would rather tell me than be hanged!’
She climbed to her feet and steadied herself, holding on to the bars, our hands almost touching. ‘I saw her before she died.’
‘What day was that?’
She thought for a few seconds. ‘Friday afternoon. I was at home, knitting with Berthe from up the road and I thought it might’ve been one of her girls at the door. But it was Maria.’
Friday was two days after I’d last seen her.
‘Why did she come to you?’
‘I’d helped her in the past. She’d left it a little late this time, and it wasn’t so straightforward. I told she could doss down if she wanted, which I don’t normally, but like I say, I knew her mother when she still had all her marbles.’
‘So she stayed at your house? When did she leave?’
‘In the morning. Early. She said she was coming back at lunchtime. I got us some fried fish and carrots, but she never came. Then I found out that … well, you know what happened.’
‘And you’re sure she intended to return?’
‘Oh yes. She had plans, she said, and had some nice clothes with her in a bag.’
‘Like for the theatre?’
‘She never said. I thought she was going to meet her soldier, which is why I mentioned him. Those girls, they can’t live that life for ever, you know. They’re like apples, lovely when they’re ripe, but before you know it they get wrinkly and then go off altogether. No one wants a mouldy apple. So the clever ones find some nice gentleman to fall in love with them.’ She was sounding uncomfortably like Jacob. ‘He writ her a letter. She kept looking at it, sort of sad. Girls keep letters, they’re sentimental that way.’
‘Do you know what it said?’
‘No, she didn’t show it to me. But I knew something wasn’t right.’
I was aware I was gripping the bars tightly. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I get a feeling sometimes, an ache in my bones. And I had that feeling. I had it and I didn’t take any notice. If I’d stopped her from leaving that morning, she’d still be alive.’ She paused and put her fists to her mouth. I realised she was weeping. ‘I was busy with another lady who’d just come in, and Maria was gone off before I could say anything. I never thought … I should’ve run after her. Next thing I knew, she was dead.’
‘And the letter from the soldier? Where is it now?’
‘Still in the house, I suppose, in her bag. I told the police the same thing. That’s all I know, truly.’
I had to read that letter.
There were voices outside the door, and someone’s hand on the handle. I looked around, but there was no other way out and nowhere to hide. I’ll just push past them as they come in, I thought. I’ll be gone before they can stop me. But Madame Moreau reached out through the bars of the cell and grabbed hold of my sleeve.
‘Promise me, if you find anything, you’ll tell the truth, the real truth. I don’t want to hang.’
‘Of course. If I find anything to exonerate you, I’ll make it known, but if I find you are guilty of this, I’ll watch your execution with a smile.’
She let go, and I was almost at the door when Sergeant Cloake came in.
As soon as she saw him, Madame Moreau backed away from the bars and sat down in the corner of her cell, as small as she could make herself.
Cloake ran his hand pointlessly across his short-cropped ginger hair. His eyes were pale and blue, like the sky on a cloudless winter
morning. I felt a shiver run up my spine.
‘What are you doing?’ he barked at me. ‘Who said you could be in here?’
‘Detective Ripley,’ I lied, moving smoothly past him towards the door.
I felt his hand on my arm, and the slightest of squeezes that could so easily become a clench. ‘Ripley didn’t say anything to me about that.’
I turned, and decided to go on the offensive. ‘Why is her face bruised like that, Sergeant? Who did it to her?’
‘She resisted.’
‘You’re supposed to uphold justice.’
He sneered. ‘She’ll get justice all right.’
‘But what if she didn’t do the murder? It would mean you’d beaten her for no reason, and the real culprit is still at large.’
He interlaced his fingers and cracked his knuckles with a sound like pencils snapping in two. ‘The same thing could still happen to you, if you get my meaning.’
An imbecile would have got his meaning. Subtlety wasn’t a feature of his otherwise delightful nature. But I was angry and reckless, and the portcullis had lowered on my wiser thoughts.
‘You should be ashamed.’
He turned towards Madame Moreau and rapped his knuckles on the bars. ‘Look at me, woman. You’ll get a fair trial all right. Shouldn’t take long. Then it’s the noose.’
12
On Sunday, my day off, I slept through the afternoon and only awoke when Constance called me down for dinner at six, which was breakfast for me. She claimed it was mutton pie, but the soggy pastry and stringy meat bore little resemblance to one of Mrs Flowers’s masterpieces.
My mouth was still bruised and I was having trouble eating. Judging from Constance’s frown, I wasn’t a pleasant sight. She dissolved some salicin in a cup of water and handed it to me. ‘Drink this,’ she said, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Someday, I thought, she will make someone a truly terrifying wife.
Afterwards, I set out into the dark-brown evening with a flat cap on my head and my coat pulled around me. I missed my bowler, but I needed the anonymity. Tonight I would commit my first crime – or, more accurately, my first crime since leaving the house wearing trousers.
Burglary was not something I’d ever contemplated before. How did one even go about such a thing? Burglars in plays were always the rogues; slothful and vicious, bested by the hero in the final scene. Should I wear a scarf around my face and carry a crowbar under my jacket? It didn’t seem a good idea. Surely the art of being a good burglar was not to be noticed, and I could think of few things more conspicuous than blundering about with a crowbar jammed into my armpit. And where would I even get one?
In the end I settled for a candle, some matches and a foot-long poker from the fireplace. I wrapped it up in a towel for reasons I couldn’t really explain – it just felt peculiar to walk around London carrying a metal stick. I realised I wasn’t cut out for a life of crime.
I walked briskly from Moorgate Street Station, shying at every alleyway and open door, keeping my face lowered. At Finsbury Street, the only people in sight were a gaggle of children playing in the dried mud. A girl was hopping and jumping along the pebble squares, her hair bouncing as she counted out the steps: hop, hop, jump, hop, hop, turn. That was me, I thought, fifteen years ago. I was so good at those games. No one could ever beat me.
Madame Moreau’s windows were dark and empty. Three doors up, there was an alleyway between the houses, dimly lit by the glow from the city. I took a deep breath and a tight hold on the poker, and went inside.
As I reached a T-junction at the end, where the alleyway met the path along the back of the houses, there was a bovine sound from the yard on my left: a groan. I froze, and silently extracted my poker from the towel, just in case. There was another groan, and a plop of release, a fart and a stream of liquid, followed by more releases, erratic and aerated like the output of a faulty bilge-pump. The instigator of the noise sighed loudly and blew his or her nose, and then there was some rustling and the sound of clothing being reassembled. The privy door banged open and in a few seconds I was alone again.
Madame Moreau’s fence was high and the gate was bolted from the inside. I reached over as far as my arm would allow, but the bolt was out of reach. I put my eye to a knot-hole in the wood, and could see a dingy yard no bigger than Alfie’s back room. There was a pile of logs propped against a lean-to, and a brick privy with a wooden slat roof.
I put my hands on the top of the fence and tried to pull myself up, but couldn’t even get my nose level with my knuckles. My arms weren’t strong enough. They should’ve had that piston power that men born men find so easy to call upon, the way I can call upon a memory or the next move in a game of chess. They should’ve been thick and dark, and covered with hair. But they were feeble things, and would never hoist me over that fence without more leverage.
I searched along the alley until I found an unlocked gate. Inside the yard was an old bath, upside down, perished with holes. I dragged it back with me, wincing as it scraped and clattered along the ground, and climbed on top of it, heaving to get my weight as far over the fence as I could. My feet dangled briefly in the air and I fell head first, landing in a heap on the other side.
I picked myself up gingerly, checking for anything broken. My clothes were covered in dirt and my palms were grazed, but I was in one piece.
I cupped my hands against the window. At first it seemed completely dark inside, but gradually shapes started to emerge: a stove, some plates and a saucepan still covered with the remains of her meal. The police had taken her away before she’d had time to wash up. She was such a fastidious person in her own way, and seeing her room like that was almost more shocking than her battered face at the police station.
I prepared myself, poker in hand and towel wrapped around my arm to provide some measure of protection. I swung back, but then paused.
If she’d left in so much of a hurry, was it possible the back door was still unlocked?
I tried it, and it opened.
I was surprised at how much relief I felt. An unlocked door was almost an invitation, and meant I could leave her house just as I’d found it, minus only Maria’s bag. And if this soldier was, in fact, the killer, I was doing Madame Moreau a favour. She would thank me, if she ever got the chance.
The room smelled of old food and dead plants. The grate was white with ash. I lighted my candle, a fat, stubby thing, more smoke than light. It hissed and spat like a theatre audience when the villain creeps on to the stage.
The finch’s cage was on its side on the floor, and the little yellow bird was jumping and flapping furiously. I hung up the cage again, and pushed a couple of nuts through the bars. He set upon one immediately, pecking and scratching at it with the edges of his beak. I considered liberating him rather than letting him starve, but he would probably fall victim to the first cat he came across, so I gave him some water from the jug and four more nuts.
‘Don’t eat them all at once,’ I whispered. ‘And don’t tell anyone I was here.’
The front room was a mess. Ripley told me the police had searched the place thoroughly, and they certainly had, with no care or consideration. The drawers had been emptied out and tossed on to the floor, and the hulking treatment table was covered with old newspapers, strips of unfinished knitting, empty picture frames, a broken pot, rusted blades and other metal implements I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to, and a whole box of tallow candles burned down almost to nubs. Did the woman throw nothing away? I never kept anything, save my chess set, a few books and a silver rose brooch my mother had given me. What was the point of possessions when, at any moment, you might have to up sticks and leave them behind?
Maria must have lain on that table, looking up at the ceiling plaster, distracting herself from Madame Moreau’s attentions. I couldn’t imagine how invasive that must have felt. For all my times in bed with Maria and others, my own body remained unsullied. I was the most experienced virgin in history.
I
wondered if it had been painful. I wondered whether she’d wept, without me there to comfort her.
There was no sign of any bag. I was hopeless at finding things, and had once spent ten minutes searching my room for my bowler hat when it was on my head all along. What kind of bag would it be, anyway? In my mind’s eye it was like the beaded one I used to carry my books to school in, but it could be anything. Any colour. It was even possible the police had taken it, although that seemed unlikely; they’d been looking for the weapon Maria was killed with, not a bag of lady’s clothing.
The stairs rose steeply from a small hallway between the front and back rooms, and the view to the top was obscured in shadow. I felt my fingers prickle.
‘What’s up there?’ I whispered to the finch, but he was too busy with his nut to answer.
I took the steps one at a time, testing for creaks as I went, with no idea why I was being so cautious. It wasn’t as if there was anyone to hear me. At the very top, on the tiny landing, I stood, controlling my breathing, with a door on either side leading to the front and back bedrooms. I decided to try the front bedroom first.
It was like stepping into the chancel of a run-down church. The walls were red and blue, and Jesus was hanging on a cross, suffering for my sins just as I suffered for His. Faded velvet drapes shrouded the window, matching the coverlet on her four-posted bed, and an oak-framed painting of exotic fruit hung on the opposite wall. The dressing table in the corner was crammed with bottles and jars, but all the drawers had been emptied out on to the floor: her small-clothes and chemises, all exposed and inspected by the police. They hadn’t cared a jot about her privacy, but then, I reflected, neither did I.
Outside, the game was continuing. I could hear clapping: hop, hop, jump, hop, hop, turn, faster and faster, until you miss one or you stumble.