Death in Hyde Park scs-10

by Robin Paige

  Savidge sat down to copy the letter into his pocket notebook. Charles watched as Collins dusted the four bottles with charcoal powder. A few prints showed quite clearly on the glazed surface, and these the sergeant photographed. Then he began to study the bottles, comparing the fingerprints on them to the inked prints of the jailed men, obtained from Holloway Prison.

  “Any matches?” Charles asked, peering over the sergeant’s shoulder. He had worked with Collins before, and had a great deal of respect for him. The man was, by now, the Yard’s resident fingerprint expert.

  “With your boys’ prints?” Collins asked, putting down his magnifying glass. “No, I don’t see any matches,” he said slowly, then added, “But that doesn’t mean they haven’t handled these items, of course. The police who picked ’em up obviously didn’t give a thought to preserving possible fingerprint evidence.” He sighed heavily. “They never do, y’know. It’ll take a couple of convictions and a great deal of training before anybody pays attention. The prints on the bottles probably belong to the officers who brought them in.”

  Savidge stood. “This means, of course,” he said into Charles’s ear, “that we’ll ask for a continuance until after the Jackson trial.” To Collins, he said, “I should like to fingerprint all the officers who have handled the bottles. Can that be arranged?”

  “No need, sir,” Collins said cheerfully. “When Assistant Commissioner Henry took charge of CID, he ordered that every policeman’s fingerprints be taken, for the purpose of exclusion. They’re all on file. You and Lord Sheridan are welcome to come in and have a look.”

  “Splendid,” Savidge said, “although it won’t do much good for me to examine them. That’s Lord Sheridan’s bailiwick.”

  Charles, also wearing gloves, was taking another look at the four bottles, carefully turning them as they sat on the table, inspecting them from every angle to be sure that Collins had photographed all the prints. On the bottle that had been collected from Gould’s room, he noticed half of a black-dusted print at the left edge of the label.

  “This partial print here,” he said. “Is the rest of it on, or under, the label, do you think?”

  “On top, I’d guess,” Collins said, glancing at it. “But the label has a matte surface. Doubt if it would take a print.”

  Charles took out his penknife, raised the left edge of the label and said, “Whiff a little of that dust here.”

  It took only a moment to see that the print extended under the label. Collins was about to remove the label to photograph the print when a fourth man walked in, thickset and wearing brown tweeds and a brown derby. Collins looked up. “Good afternoon, Inspector Ashcraft,” he said.

  Charles gave the man an appraising look. Charlotte Conway had said he was out to make a name for himself, Wells had called him a “rather obsessive fellow,” and Rasnokov had suggested that he did not play straight. These were qualities that might well make him a valuable man to Special Branch.

  “What’s this?” the man demanded angrily. He threw his hat on the table and glared at Collins. “Why are you removing that label, Collins? That’s police property you’re tampering with! It should have stayed in the evidence locker.”

  “But, sir,” Collins protested, “I was only going to-”

  “I don’t care what you were going to do. Those bottles are evidence in the Hyde Park case. They are not to be meddled with.”

  “Sir,” Collins said quietly, “I very much need to-”

  “Who gave you leave?” Ashcraft demanded, obviously in a foul temper. He looked at Savidge and Charles. “And who the blazes are these men? No one’s applied to me for-”

  “Assistant Commissioner Henry gave leave, sir,” Collins replied, with the air of a man who knows when he’s defeated. “This is Lord Charles Sheridan, who had the management of the fingerprint project at Dartmoor. And Edward Savidge, the barrister for the defendants-”

  “I don’t care who the devil they are,” Ashcraft snapped, “they’ve no business messing about with evidence.”

  “We are hardly ‘messing about,’ Inspector,” Savidge retorted. “As barrister for the defense, I have the right at any time to examine the evidence against my clients, and to submit it to expert analysis. Lord Sheridan, whose expertise in fingerprint analysis has already been recognized by the Home Office, is serving in that capacity.”

  “Fingerprints,” Ashcraft said in a disdainful tone. He gave a loud snort. “See that those bottles are handled carefully, Sergeant. The contents must not be spilled on any account.”

  Savidge took out a notebook. In a measured voice, he said, “Please be so good, Inspector, as to give me the names of the officers who collected the bottles. They will testify for the Crown, I assume.”

  “Finney was in charge,” Ashcraft replied sulkily. “He was assisted by Perry and Cummings.”

  “And yourself, I suppose,” Charles said.

  “Not I,” Ashcraft replied.

  Charles looked at him. “You’ve not handled the bottles, then?”

  Ashcraft shook his head. “Nothing to do with them. Finney brought them in, along with the Anarchist literature. The glycerine was found in the newspaper office, and one of the Anarchists-Mouffetard, it was-was carrying the bomb-making instructions in his pocket.” He looked at the stoneware bottles, which bore smudges of the black dust used to make the fingerprints visible, then scowled at Collins. “Those damned fingerprints of yours, Sergeant, are causing us no end of trouble, and to no purpose, none at all. When will you understand that they are not reliable evidence? They may be useful as a means of identifying certain criminals- may, I say-but they have never been used to achieve a conviction in a court of law. No jury will ever be persuaded by such scientific hocus-pocus.”

  “You are correct on the one point, Inspector,” Savidge said, closing his notebook with a snap. “Fingerprints have not yet been used to obtain a conviction. In a fortnight, however, the case may have altered.” He nodded at Collins. “Isn’t that so, Sergeant?”

  Ashcraft fixed the sergeant with a black look. “What’s happening in a fortnight, Collins?”

  “Why, the Jackson burglary case, of course, sir,” Collins replied, as if he were amazed that Ashcraft did not know of it. “Haven’t you heard talk of it? Jackson’s to be tried at Old Bailey a fortnight hence. I’m to testify, since I made the fingerprint match. And there’s a very good man-Richard Muir-standing for the Crown. Assistant Commissioner Henry chose him himself.”

  “Yes, Muir,” Savidge said, in a tone of great satisfaction. “I don’t know who’s up for the defense, but in this case, my money is on the Crown. Muir is a workhorse, I’ll tell you. Keeps all the facts and notes for a case on colored cards, one color for direct, another for cross, and so on. ‘There’s Muir at his card game,’ people say. He-”

  “The devil himself couldn’t persuade a jury to convict a man on fingerprint evidence alone,” Ashcraft said derisively. “Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do. I haven’t got the whole bloody day to stand around.”

  Charles watched the man depart, reflecting that there seemed to be some truth to what Miss Conway, Steven Wells, and the Russian had said. He turned to Collins.

  “Could I have a look at that partial print, Sergeant?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Jack felt increasingly frustrated with [his marriage to Bess]. During her pregnancy he had told Anna: “just when freedom seems opening up for me I feel the bands tightening and the riveting of the gyves. I remember when I was free and there was no restraint and I did as the heart willed.” Jack told male friends Bess was a gossip, mean-spirited, as cold as the Klondike.

  Alex Kershaw, Jack London: A Life

  Lottie picked up the newspaper- Freedom, the only remaining Anarchist newspaper in London-and scrunched the pillow behind her back so she could sit more comfortably on the narrow bed, one of two in the chilly room. It was Thursday morning, and Jack was sitting at the table beside the window, typing away at his book, his b
ack turned toward her, a cup of coffee at his elbow. That was how he spent most mornings, hunched obsessively over his typewriter, smoking and drinking coffee. He had to produce a thousand words a day, he said, or he would fall behind in the schedule he had set himself.

  Lottie had been here only since Tuesday, but it had been long enough to know that Jack had been right about this place; in many respects, it was a perfect hideaway. No one would ever think to look for her in an upstairs room let to the American adventure writer Jack London, in the house of a policeman! What was more, Officer Palmer went out on his beat every morning and Mrs. Palmer and her two daughters were employed as seamstresses in a dress shop in New Bond Street, so the house was empty all day. And the Palmers lived on the first floor and Jack’s room was on the second, at the rear; as long as they kept their voices down, there was little danger of discovery even when the family was at home. Jack’s room even had its own private stair, so when Lottie needed to use the backyard privy, all she had to do was check to see that the coast was clear and make a dash for it. Even if she were seen, it would only be assumed that Jack was entertaining a female visitor, as he certainly had every right to do.

  Of course, there were drawbacks, too, and one was so serious that it had almost prompted her to leave that very first day. Lottie had always held the unconventional belief that a woman’s first responsibility was to herself, and that she had the moral obligation to be her very own person. To her, marriage seemed to compromise a woman’s independence, without which she was nothing. She believed that love should be free, without constraint, and if one could not love freely, one should not love.

  Lottie might be quite a few years ahead of her era in this belief, but she was certainly not alone, for several important women of her day also advocated free love. In England, more than a century before, Mary Wollstonecraft had attacked marriage as “legal prostitution.” In the United States, the writer and self-trained physician Mary Gove Nichols spoke and wrote about the need for women’s sexual emancipation, while Victoria Woodhull, a leader of both the free love and woman suffrage movements, led a determined campaign against marriage. As Lottie considered her position vis-a-vis relationships with men outside of the bounds of marriage, she was in the company of a substantial number of forward-looking feminist thinkers of her day.

  So if Lottie had considered Jack London as a potential lover, she was making a choice that she herself would consider perfectly moral. He was quite the handsomest, manliest, most virile man she had ever seen, and she was enormously attracted to him, so much so that almost all thought of Adam Gould had flown from her mind. What’s more, from the moment they met, Jack had made it abundantly, emphatically clear that he was attracted to her, as well. Considering that the two of them had been thrown together by fate (or so it seemed), Lottie saw no reason why she should not give herself to him eagerly, joyfully, without reservation. In fact, when he invited her to hide out in his room, she had assumed that they would become lovers. It all seemed very natural and, given her feelings against the restrictions of marriage and the prerogatives that women should claim outside of it, very right.

  But that was before Lottie had found the photograph of Jack’s wife and little girl, hidden under a pile of manuscript pages next to his typewriter, on the little table beside the window. Jack had gone out to get them some supper, and Lottie, curious to see what sort of writer he was and what he had written about the East End, had picked up the manuscript to take it to her bed and read it. The photograph-the picture of a smiling, voluptuous, raven-haired woman with a baby girl in her arms-fluttered to the floor, and when she picked it up, she read the inscription on the back: To dearest Jack, from his devoted wife Bess and darling Joan.

  Lottie had stared at the photograph until the images blurred, then put the manuscript, unread, back on the table, the photograph safely concealed beneath it. Having seen it, though, she knew that she was in a corner. She was free to love, but Jack was not, and to give herself to him would be morally wrong. It would be to betray a woman she had never met-a woman who had given birth to Jack’s child and to whom he had pledged his life-and Lottie could not in conscience bring herself to do this. In conscience, too, she had to condemn Jack for attempting to entice her into an adulterous relationship, and this new knowledge entirely changed her feelings toward him.

  But what was she to do when he-as she knew he would-began to make love to her? Should she tell him she had found the photograph, and that it had changed the way she felt about him? Or push him away, letting him think what he might? Or simply leave, without explanation?

  She’d told him, of course, that very first evening, when he’d come back with fish and chips and tea for their supper. She was too forthright, too honest and candid, to do anything else. For a moment he’d stared at her, his eyes dark, his lower lip thrusting sulkily, and then he’d laughed, a short, hard laugh that felt almost like a slap.

  “Well, you’re a straight-shooter,” he said. “I’ll give you that, damn it.” He turned away from her and flung himself on his bed. “I don’t love her, you know,” he said gruffly. “She understood that when we got married.”

  “Then why in the world did you marry her?” Lottie asked wonderingly. It was a very real question. She could barely imagine marrying someone she thought she loved and accepting the restriction of her freedom that came with it. To marry someone she did not love was unthinkable.

  “Because I wanted the restraint laid on me,” Jack said sourly. “I was drifting, and when I’m drifting, it’s hard to write. Bess was solid, solid as a rock. I thought she’d be a weight, holding me down, giving me a rule to live by, imposing some order on my life. And she does,” he added bitterly, half to himself. “Entirely too much.”

  His answer almost dumbfounded Lottie. He married because he needed restraint, when marriage seemed to her to be entirely too restraining? Could the man not see that it was his obligation as a human being to restrain himself? And if he felt he was drifting, could he not find some anchor within himself to lay hold of, without looking for it in his wife, whose anchoring, restraining qualities he was bound, sooner or later, to bitterly resent?

  But Lottie doubted that he was capable of answering these questions, so she merely shrugged and said, “Well, then, you got what you wanted, didn’t you? A rule to live by. Order in your life.” She could not quite keep the sarcasm out of her tone. “You should be happy.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Jack said sulkily. “I want you, Lottie. We’re meant for each other.”

  Ignoring the last sentence, with which she reluctantly had to agree, she rose and unfolded the newspaper wrappings from the fish and chips, sniffing appreciatively. “Smells good.” She held out the package. “Here. Have some supper.”

  Jack regarded her sullenly. “Bess has a peasant’s mind. She talks of nothing but the baby and the household. No imagination, none at all. She stifles me.”

  “No doubt,” Lottie said, putting the package on the table and helping herself to a piece of fish. “But you’re not being very consistent, are you? You want her to be an anchor, but you complain that she holds you down. Right?” In Lottie’s view, it was dishonorable for a man to marry a woman to suit his own purposes and then condemn his wife when she fulfilled the role for which he had chosen her. Adam Gould would never think of doing such a thing.

  “You don’t need to be cruel about it,” Jack said. He held out his hand with a seductive smile. “We can be friends, can’t we? Come have a nice cuddle, Lottie.”

  “Not that kind of friends,” Lottie said firmly. “And I’ll only stay in this room on your guarantee that there will be no talk of cuddling or love. One word, and I’m out the door. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Jack said in a resigned tone. Then he flashed her a boyish grin. “But I’ll bet a quid you’ll change your mind.”

  “Don’t have a quid,” Lottie said.

  “I’ll loan it to you.”

  “Never a borrower nor a lender be,” Lottie repli
ed smartly, and ignoring his dark look, carried her feast of fish and chips to her own bed, where she made herself comfortable and ate hungrily until every crumb was gone.

  In a way that she could not quite describe, Lottie felt relieved, as if the fates had kept her from mistakenly choosing the wrong path, which, once taken, might have led to enormous complications. And so she was able to sleep without difficulty in the same room with this very attractive man, and was easily able to ignore his glance, dark and passionate, which followed her as she moved around. Jack might be as sulky as a scolded child, but Lottie felt easy in herself. She had done what she felt right, without regret, and she was pragmatist enough to put aside what she couldn’t or shouldn’t do and focus instead on what she could.

  So when Lottie saw the article on the front page of Freedom on Thursday morning, she began to get a glimmering idea of how she could help Adam, who was now much on her mind. After all, if he had not been at the Clarion to take her to lunch, the police would not have arrested him, so it was up to her to see that, somehow or another, he was rescued.

  The article reported that at the request of counsel, the three Anarchists accused of bomb-making had been granted a continuance to the fourth of September, which was a fortnight away. They would be transported from Holloway Prison, where they were being held, to the Old Bailey, where they would stand trial. The article urged all London Anarchists to attend the trial and show, by their presence, their support for their comrades, who, whatever they had done, had done it out of their belief that all governments were oppressive, and that the only path toward freedom was to end the rule of tyranny.