‘Do you want to join us, my dear? Have a look through Dody’s microscope?’ Pike asked.
What was he thinking? Dody thought. He must have been very sure of Violet’s answer to dare ask that question.
‘No, thank you, Father. I think I’ll keep working on this. It’s wonderful to have access to such a beautiful piano. Thank you for letting me practise on it, Dody.’
‘My family had it shipped from Moscow. It’s wonderful to hear it being played so well.’ She smiled, hiding her relief.
They climbed the final staircase to Dody’s third-floor rooms and entered her bedroom. A scratching sound reached them through the adjoining door to her study cum laboratory.
‘Good God, Dody, what’s that noise? Is someone there?’ Pike asked with alarm.
‘Don’t worry,’ she replied casually. ‘It’s only Edward.’
‘Edward?’ Pike sounded aghast.
‘My rat. You must remember Edward, the Wistar rat I used for one of my experiments. I didn’t have the heart to euthanase him.’
Pike looked around the room nervously. ‘You’re not letting him run around free, are you?’
‘Of course not.’ Dody laughed. ‘Not today anyway.’
Pike smiled at her and shook his head. ‘You’re incorrigible.’
Neither of them moved towards the study. Pike turned off the ceiling light and Dody switched on the Tiffany lamp beside her bed, bathing the room in a soft rosy glow. She raised her eyebrow and caught the spark in his antique-blue eyes. He turned the key in the lock.
Dody’s head rested in the hollow of Pike’s neck, palms idling across his bare chest, tugging and teasing at the smattering of hairs there. Strange to think that only three years ago she had been quite resigned to the notion that celibacy was as necessary to her career as formal qualifications — how falling in love with Pike had changed all that! She’d soon discovered that it was possible for a woman to have a career and a personal life after all, provided she remained discreet — and unmarried.
Pike kissed her forehead, her cheek, trailing a line of kisses down her neck to the base of her throat. Her desire began to build once more.
And then he sighed. ‘We must get up, lest Violet start pounding on the door.’ He threw back the bedclothes and began to dress.
Dody sank back into her pillow and closed her eyes for a moment. Tease. What she wouldn’t give for them to have remained in each other’s arms for the rest of the night. Sometimes she thought that he had adapted to their arrangements more easily than she had. And he was the one who was initially so keen on marriage. Would he ever ask her again? she wondered. She was as unsure of that as she was of her answer. And what would Violet think? The girl was at a difficult age and could react either way.
‘I’m worried about her,’ she said, her voice husky in the aftermath.
‘We’re all worried about Florence.’
‘Violet, I mean.’
He paused, one leg in his trousers. ‘Violet? Why?’
‘She’s hardly eating and she looks too thin.’
‘That? Oh, it’s just a whim, some strange diet she’s keen on.’ He reached for the crisp evening shirt he’d left hanging on the back of the bedroom chair, slipped it over his head and buttoned it up. The stiffened shirt bib was more of a challenge. He turned on the overhead light and struggled with the studs and ties, guiding himself in the dressing-table mirror.
Dody left the bed and slipped into her underwear. Dressing was so much simpler since she had stopped wearing a corset, so liberating. It was arousing too, to know how much Pike relished her more natural figure. She pulled up her stockings and attached them to her garters and smoothed her petticoat into place.
Pike muttered about his cufflinks. Dody came to his side and adjusted the small gold disks for him. ‘Have you given cancelling the finishing school any more thought, Matthew?’
‘It’s only for a year. She’ll cope. Once she settles down and makes friends she’ll be glad she went. I only hope she shows her grandparents some appreciation.’
‘She told me once that she feels like a cork bobbing about in the sea, forced to go wherever the current takes her.’
‘Violet can do whatever she likes when she reaches her majority,’ Pike said as he helped Dody into her dress and fastened the hooks of her bodice. ‘There we go. Never let it be said that we are not independent souls. Who needs a valet or a ladies’ maid?’
He went to the bedroom door and unlocked it. They straightened the bed, slipped into their shoes and made their way through to Dody’s study, Pike adjusting his bow-tie as they walked. Dody took the specimen jar from him, sat at her dissecting table, and extracted the small portion of flesh from the formalin with some long-handled forceps.
From his inside jacket pocket Pike took out his silver cigarette case.
‘Not in here, please, Matthew, it might affect the tests.’
‘Very well, I suppose I’ll have to make do with this.’ He picked out a sunflower seed from an open box near the rat’s cage, peeled it and popped it into his mouth, eyeing the scampering rat. ‘Would you like some too, Edward, old boy?’
While Pike shared the sunflower seeds with the rat, Dody prepared a slide on her dissecting table. Holding the lump of tissue carefully with the forceps, she teased out a small portion of tissue with a microtome knife and smeared it onto a glass slide. She added a drop of water from a pipette, dropped a covering slip over the slide and gently pressed it down to expel the trapped air. Transferring to her desk, she put the slide under the microscope to examine it.
‘There. I think you’ve had enough now, old chap,’ Pike said to the rat before joining Dody at her desk. ‘Any luck?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’
‘Just a minute.’ Dody said as she turned the microscope’s objective to increase the magnification. ‘Hmm, as I thought.’ She looked up at Pike. ‘It’s glandular, meaning it’s some kind of organ, but impossible to tell what in its present state.’
‘Is it from a human being?’
‘I can’t tell, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to slice it into wafer-thin pieces and run some histological tests. Whatever it is, it’s very friable, which means I’ll have to embed the tissue in paraffin wax to stop it from falling apart when I slice it with the microtome. This will all take time.’
‘Can you start now?’
‘It will still take a couple of days.’
Pike looked at her pleadingly.
‘Oh, all right then. It needs to sit in alcohol for several hours before I can do anything with it anyway, so I may as well do that now — so long as you make it worth my while,’ she said, mischievously.
‘Don’t I always,’ he said, bending over to nuzzle her neck.
There was a sudden tap on the door.
‘Violet.’ Pike straightened up.
He called to his daughter to come in. Thank God they’d had the foresight to straighten the bed and dress properly.
‘I think I’ve got the middle movement now, Daddy,’ Violet said as she joined them in the study. ‘Would you mind having another listen?’
‘Of course not,’ Pike replied. ‘When we’ve finished here.’
‘Have you found out what that thing is yet, Dody?’ Violet asked. Then, without waiting for an answer she pointed to Dody’s ears. ‘Hullo, you seem to have lost your earrings.’
Dody quickly glanced at Pike. ‘I took them off. They annoy me when I’m at the microscope.’
His sigh of relief was audible.
Chapter Eleven
Before Pike left Dody’s the previous evening she had pressed a photograph into his hands. It was a head and shoulders shot of a female corpse. It seemed that the woman had swallowed bleach and the coroner had requested an investigation into the suicide. Dody suspected that the unidentified woman was of unbalanced mind, and possibly also the victim of an operation performed without her consent — what kind of an operation, she had not said. As most of the men in Pike’s department were still busy with
the aftermath of the Necropolis bombing, he had volunteered for the job. This errand, normally beneath an officer of his ranking, was also an effective way of putting more distance between himself and Florence’s case.
The closest asylum to Waterloo Station, where the indigent woman’s body had been found, was Bethlem. Pike would begin his enquiries there.
He took an omnibus from Whitehall to Lambeth, disembarking on the busy Lambeth Road, which was crowded with lorries and carts and street vendors calling out their wares in cheerful cockney voices. The asylum’s distinctive pumpkin dome rose from lush lawns and flowerbeds like a colourful mirage amid the grey landscape of the surrounding streets. Hardly a picture of mental agony, he mused, as he viewed the scene. But all too aware of the reputation of the place and of how deceiving outwards appearances could be, it was with some trepidation that he pushed open the railed gate and mounted the steps.
Inside, directly opposite the front door, he saw an open door marked ‘Administration’. The office was reassuring in its ordinariness: high clerk’s desk, ledgers, filing cabinets and crammed pigeonholes. He introduced himself to the inky-fingered clerk and explained his assignment, producing the photograph of Dody’s unidentified suicide.
The clerk flinched at the grisly sight. ‘Lord ’elp us,’ he muttered.
The man’s eyes, Pike noticed, were focused only on the horrific injuries to the woman’s lower face. He placed his thumb over the seared mouth.
‘Look again, please, sir, look at the top part of her face and the eyes. Is this woman familiar now?’
The clerk shook his head. ‘But I ’aven’t been ’ere long. Try the women’s section in the east side of the building. I’ll point you in the right direction.’
The clerk led Pike out of the office to a gate at the start of a long passage. Taking a set of keys from his pocket he unlocked the gate and showed Pike through. ‘’ead down the corridor and follow the signs to reception.’
The gate clanged shut and Pike found himself looking at the clerk from the other side of the bars. The young man laughed. ‘It’s all right, no one’s going to ’urt you ’ere – this lot are ’armless. The bars are to protect them, not us. The criminally insane are usually sent to Broadmoor these days.’
‘How reassuring,’ Pike muttered.
‘Just give me a yell when you’re finished and I’ll let you out.’
Pike thanked the clerk and made his way down a long corridor of waxed floorboards. The echoing tap of his cane sounded as if he were wending his way through a tunnel or mausoleum. Engravings of Queen Victoria adorned the walls between rows and rows of doors. Some of the doors had peepholes, like prison cells, while others bore signs indicating they were treatment rooms. One such door was open and a cleaner was mopping under a chair-like contraption suspended from the ceiling with multiple straps dangling from it. The draft from the cleaner’s motion made the chair gently spin. A lever and some electrical equipment nearby suggested the contraption could spin at a much faster rate if necessary. The cleaner straightened over her mop when she saw him. When Pike lifted his hat to her, she slammed the door shut with her foot.
Pike continued along the passageway, a cold wind sliding down his back. Hiding his disquiet he casually nodded to a man in a white coat who passed him pushing a trolley of what might have been force-feeding equipment. Pike wondered if Parliament had authorised the implementation of the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act yet. If not, Florence might be enduring the same fate as one of the unfortunates here. His gut clenched.
At the reception desk he met a woman dressed like a hospital matron in a black dress, white apron, starched cuffs and headdress. The middle-aged woman looked up from her desk and asked with a pleasant smile how she might help. He introduced himself and showed her the photograph of the unidentified corpse. Unlike the clerk in the administration office, the medically trained woman did not flinch.
‘Burns,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Heat or chemical?’
‘It is believed she drank bleach. She was found in the ladies lavatories at Waterloo Station. Given the vicinity I thought she might have been a former p—’
Pike’s words were cut off by a high-pitched shriek. He turned to find two white-coated male attendants pushing and pulling at a woman in a straitjacket who refused to get up from the floor.
‘Excuse me a minute, Chief Inspector. George! I told you before to secure Mrs Walton to a trolley for transportation. It is not at all seemly that she be dragged to hydrotherapy along the floor — especially in front of a visitor.’
‘Sorry, Matron,’ George said. ‘Stay on ’er Bill, while I fetch the trolley.’
Bill sat on the woman’s upper body and pinned her to the ground. The woman continued to scream and thrash her legs.
The matron must have read the shock in Pike’s face. ‘Come with me, sir, where it’s less noisy.’
She led him to the patients’ dayroom. It was furnished like a parlour, with comfortable chairs arranged around an oriental carpet. The contents of the room suggested all kinds of creative endeavours: a sewing machine, someone’s knitting basket, a piano, an easel, and a gramophone. One of the few things that marked it as different from any other middle-class parlour were the tiny windows, barely providing any view of the outside. Too small, Pike noted, to facilitate a patient’s escape, let alone a view of the lavish gardens.
‘It’s therapy time, Chief Inspector,’ the matron said, explaining the empty room, ‘so we have this place to ourselves for the moment.’
‘Indeed, Matron.’ Pike paused. ‘Would you mind telling me what kinds of therapies are undertaken here?’
‘Of course not, Chief Inspector. In the main we rely on the spinning chair — to restore equilibrium, hot and cold baths to calm nervous agitation, purging, massage, and sometimes isolation.’
‘Are surgical operations ever performed here?’ he enquired.
‘No, sir, not at this hospital.’
‘But you do force-feed the prisoners — I mean, the patients,’ he quickly corrected himself.
‘Unfortunately, yes. Anorexia nervosa — refusing to eat — is becoming more and more prevalent, especially amongst the younger women.’
Pike kept his face devoid of emotion, despite his mind turning to his daughter. ‘Why would that be, do you think?’
‘Too much education and too much reading … Too much time on their hands, I suppose.’
The sooner Violet went off to that finishing school, the better, Pike thought to himself.
‘Sexual frustration can also be a cause, according to Doctor Reeves, whose practices we largely adhere to here in Bethlem,’ the matron added.
Pike felt himself flush and returned to safer ground. ‘Yes, well, about the woman in the photograph, Matron.’
‘I do recognise her, Inspector. I remember all our cures. That was Cynthia Hislop. We discharged her to her family about three years ago.’
It pleased Pike to have discovered a name so quickly.
‘You would never have recognised her as the miserable wretch we first admitted,’ the matron continued. ‘I’m sorry that she is dead. She must have had a terrible relapse to have done that to herself.’
‘I am told this kind of suicide is fairly common in those of unsound mind.’
‘The mad still feel pain, Chief Inspector. And besides, there are many different forms of lunacy. Even at her worst, I would not have imagined Cynthia doing this to herself.’
Pike dwelled on this, knitting his brows. ‘What was her diagnosis, Matron?’
‘Extreme melancholia. She refused to leave her bed, to eat or to bathe. That is what I mean when I say even at her worst I cannot imagine herself taking her life like this. When a melancholic is this severe they cannot bring themselves to do anything, let alone get the motivation up to travel away from home and deliberately swallow bleach.’
Was there a chance that Dody and Spilsbury were wrong about the woman taking her own life? Was there a more siniste
r reason behind her death? Pike did not look forward to challenging his medical colleagues about this.
‘May I have her last known address, please?’ he asked the matron.
‘I’ll have a look in the file for you, dear.’
They headed back to the reception area in the passageway. The attendants were now struggling to strap the screaming woman onto a trolley. Ignoring the commotion, the matron began flicking through cards in a filing cabinet.
‘Married to a solicitor, if I remember rightly.’ She frowned with annoyance and looked up from the filing cabinet. ‘Skip the hydrotherapy today, George, and put her in isolation. A few days alone in the padded cell and she’ll be in that cold bath in a flash.’
She turned back to Pike and handed him an address card. ‘There you are, Chief Inspector,’ she said, smiling sweetly.
Chapter Twelve
Pacing the cell floor had been a therapeutic release for Florence’s nervous energy. But since the hunger pangs had been replaced by a hollow feeling of weakness, she had been forced to take to the bed lest she succumb to dizziness and collapse to the flagstones. Strange, she thought, that while her body weakened the mechanisms of her mind grew, sometimes ballooning into a force that threatened to knock her over the edge. Despite it all, she was determined to persist with her hunger strike, whatever the cost. Hadn’t she gone through it before and survived, body and soul intact? Of course she had.
Hunger striking was the most effective strategy yet devised by the sisters to draw attention to the cause of female suffrage. It didn’t even matter that the press refused to report on it these days. The suffragettes made such a huge celebration out of their colleagues’ release from prison that no one within a radius of five miles could fail to hear the hullaballoo or deduce what it was about. You’d think the women had been canonised. Celebratory teas were organised, speeches made, brass bands played and medals presented. The divine Miss Christabel Pankhurst had presented Florence with her medal. It was one of the most thrilling occasions of Florence’s life — how she and her companions had been lauded! She screwed her eyes tight and balled her fists. She prayed that the memory of that magical moment would get her through the agonising days ahead.
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