Lawless and the House of Electricity

by William Sutton

  The excitement of her first arrival we noted with relief. Despite the brevity of Molly’s encoded reports to me, Ruth deemed her letters suitable for my perusal, mostly. We chuckled over her hotchpotch of self-doubt, showing off and scandalmongering. As you may judge for yourself, Molly is a compulsively honest narrator, mostly, if overenthusiastic. Of this gallimaufry, however, how was I to know what was relevant, what was distraction? For instance, in the revised letter that follows, Molly recounts a series of faux pas on her part. This put the wind up me: if my spy in the north was dismissed as a fraud, it would be a personal embarrassment and a professional disaster.

  “Don’t be an oaf,” Miss Villiers reassured me. “She’s establishing herself.”

  I looked at her doubtfully.

  “I’ll drop Roxbury a line, if you wish.” Ruth brandished the letter at me in scorn. The earl had been a friend of her father, and he’d listen to her. “She’s just trying to amuse me, as usual, by belittling her considerable abilities.”

  ROXBURY HOUSE, REVISED [MOLLY]

  I saw movement at the window in the east wing. As the carriage swept around the meander of Burnfoot Gorge and up past the main steps, I saw it and I thought nothing of it.

  A heavy floral curtain, pulled tentatively aside, to look down at the Walled Garden, and beyond, toward the botanical greenhouses, where scientists bustled over the advances that underpinned Roxbury Industries.

  * * *

  I found myself stood alone at a middling sort of door set in the corner tower. Jem vanished round the back. I fought back the urge to run after my bags. (In London, I wouldn’t let them out of my grasp.)

  I studied the door. I decided it wasn’t the door for me. Jem, hastening back to work, must have overlooked my station. I took myself down the steps and strode across the gravel— tricky terrain in these boots you’ve foisted on me in place of my trusty old muckers.

  Up the main steps, I lost no time in ringing the bell. I gazed up at the doorway, feeling like a sprite in a cathedral. Etiquette, I told myself, etiquette. I know the way of such places: follow the etiquette.

  I heard a cough behind me.

  I kept my eyes intent on the door. Nothing so important as first impressions, you said. I smoothed down my skirt. I checked my bonnet on my noggin. I reached for the bell again.

  I hesitated. In a great house, as we discussed, the butler may have a distance to cover before reaching the door, and there’s no insult in that.

  Again, the cough, and a face peering round the corner, stage right, from the door where Jem had dropped me. I extemporised a little ditty to myself.

  Lo, upon the steps I spy

  A lordly figure standing spry.

  His pigging cough suggests: “Clear off!”

  His stare would make you cry.

  “If you please, miss?” One of them questions that ain’t a question. I made a point of holding my tongue.

  Again, the cough. My resolve wavered. Could this be the lord of the manor? The fellow descended in chagrin. A tall, solid type, his jacket cuffs as weary as his frown, he approached, with the deliberate plod of the manservant. The butler, for sure.

  “Miss, if you will please to step this way, I may show Miss…?” He waited for me to fill in the gap in his sentence, eager to shoo me off his front steps before I sullied them.

  “You may show Miss what?” Which sounds pert but wasn’t meant thus. Seeing as you’d cabled ahead, I wouldn’t brook disrespect for my station.

  “I am asking your name.”

  “None of your sentences has ended with a question mark, rightly.”

  His lips whitened. “What, pray, is your name, miss?”

  “That’s a question, I grant you. My name is Molly.”

  “Miss Molly…?”

  “That’s right.” I revised my posture to a more ladylike stance. “Miss Molly.”

  “Begging your pardon.” He gritted his teeth. “That, I do believe, is your Christian name.”

  “Not much Christian about it, so help me God.” From his look of horror, I judged I’d better create some further nomenclature; we never discussed names in our lessons. “That is, the children are to call me Miss Molly.”

  Again the cough. “But your family name, for the servants’ purposes?”

  “Oddbody,” I burst out.

  His face struggled between disbelief and disdain.

  “Terrible name. Miss Oddbody will just not do. Not for children, not for servants. I insist on being Miss Molly.” I restrained myself from cursing the pigging door, and smiled, recalling your guidelines on how to treat servants. “Open the door, won’t you?”

  “If ‘Miss Molly’ would kindly come around the mid entrance.”

  “I amn’t a servant, you know.” Not to make a scene, mind, but I was anxious to get off on the right footing.

  He stared. “I know. I employ the servants, and I should never employ you.”

  I stared back. “Why invite me round the servants’ entrance, then?”

  “The low entrance is at the rear arch, miss, facing the Pump House. This mid entrance welcomes artisans and unexpected callers. The grand door is only opened for functions, for aristocracy and for royalty. The housekeeper will show you your quarters, where you shall, I’m sure, be wanting to recover from your journey.” He gave me a look up and down, as if to suggest my clothes were flecked with rainwater and my hair soaked in mud.

  That was me told.

  TRAINING THE URCHIN [RUTH VILLIERS]

  Could Molly inspire in her countryside retreat the same devotion Sergeant Lawless and I felt for her?

  She is a quick learner. But to make this street Arab into a young lady—a young woman, at least—seemed as tall an order as converting a jack-in-the-box into a person. Molly’s bulletins to Campbell suggested I’d succeeded; her letters to me, however, described gaffes and improprieties to make me cringe. Which were true? We could not be sure until I paid her a visit.

  That she believed she was continually bungling was a measure of the high standards I had set her. When finally I did visit, it was clear she had made a decent impression after all; she was already part of the fabric of the house.

  To reassure Campbell, I described the stringent lessons I had given Molly to prepare her for country house life.

  * * *

  I chose, for Molly’s mnemonic acronym, the word CHAOS.

  “C for Clothes.”

  “Nothing wrong with my clothes,” Molly had said.

  I jabbed at her blotchy waistcoat. “If you’re going to protest every step of the way—”

  “Gravy, that’ll be.” Molly rubbed at it with her thumb, then licked the thumb clean. “Meat pie. Spitalfields.”

  “It’s not the foodstuffs in your clothing that worry me, Molly. It’s the style.”

  “Latest styles, Miss V. I picks ’em up for a song off a chap down Covent Garden.”

  “A chap?” I sighed. “There’s the rub. There comes an age when every tomboy’s innate charms can no longer be repressed. Her youthful vigour irradiates through her frumpish disguise. Her head may be turned. Or she may notice nothing, and encourage admirers and suitors, willy-nilly. Try these.”

  Her disgust redoubled. “What’s these when they’re at home?”

  “Drawers.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “They’re the fashion. Else, servants will think you common and maltreat you.”

  * * *

  Our lessons proceeded.

  “H is for Holding,” said I. “How one comports oneself.”

  “Do you mean not putting my feet on an armchair?”

  “Never decorous.” I laughed. “Especially with those boots.”

  * * *

  A was for Accent. Knowing thespians aplenty, Molly responded to this challenge. She squeezed her lowly London tones towards more refined elocution, though her diction will always be injudicious.

  O for Obeisance. Women are obedient. Women are faithful, moral, and passive. If they shoul
d hazard any show of defiance, faithlessness, or aggression (palpably masculine traits), they are shunned, ruined, or incarcerated.

  Finally, S for Servants.

  “Everyone,” I said, “must develop their own style with servants. Overfamiliarity is never wise. Lack of acknowledgement is equally risky. Be kind, but be entitled. And, Molly, never carry your own bags.”

  BODY OVERBOARD [LAWLESS]

  “Who’s been and moved this body?” I growled.

  The harbour master stood in his office, staring at a length of tarpaulin, rolled up and crumpled at one end. Bodies at the docks are no surprise, as I said. There is a world of difference, however, between a sailor drowned after a dust-up with his wife’s other husband, sad as that may be, and a passenger on a luxury liner despatched en route between Indonesia and the Isle of Dogs.

  “I said, who brought this body in?”

  The harbour master did not bother to muster an excuse. A short, sweaty man in a jacket of indeterminate colour, he walked past me to survey his domain, the East India Docks. Scotland Yard had jurisdiction only over Her Majesty’s Naval Dockyards, not over the merchant fleet arriving at the Thames. He knew it. I knew it. To these commercial monsters, questions of evidence mattered nothing. Get the ships out to sea, get the profits rolling in. Engravings of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company’s vessels lined the wall. Beneath lay this bizarre exhibit, like equipment to be rolled out for a marquee.

  “Ugh.” Raising the tarpaulin, I flinched away. The aroma was not so strong, but vile, the remnants of putridity mixed with rancid brine. I forced myself to peer beneath. Only the head had been unwound; the rest was still wrapped. I glimpsed the face, or should I say the skull? A gossamer residue of skin clung across one cheek, like a blister soaked in soda: no fresh corpse. “Where’s Sergeant Jeffcoat?”

  The harbour master gestured to the lifeboat, raised on blocks by the warehouse wall, not far from the water. If he gave me an adieu, it was drowned out by the strident machinery.

  The lifeboat sat askew against the warehouses. Behind it loomed the vast bulk of the SS Great Eastern, being refitted to rescue the transatlantic cable. Wonderful venture: we’d soon catch up on the latest news of Lincoln’s cats over our morning coffee.

  Jeffcoat popped his head out, in response to my halloa. There was always something sublime in the diabolical machinations of the dockside: he seemed etched in miniature against the leviathan, like a bible story illustrating man’s puny stature before the godhead.

  “Trouble boiling your porridge, Watchman, you good-for- nothing haggis-muncher?”

  “I’ve been at it since cockcrow, Sergeant Lazybones.” I would leave it till later to explain Molly’s evacuation, our plans having come to a sudden head—indeed, two heads. “While you were clutching your hot water bottle.”

  Jeffcoat ignored my jibes. He was examining the boat up and down, gunwales to rowlocks, or whatever. I watched intently: why pay such attention to the boat, while the corpse lay still wrapped? If it were a simple drowning, he would not have called me, nor if the fellow had perished from cold or drink. That he had, abruptly, meant a mystery.

  Jeffcoat pressed his knifeblade nose to the flaking paint of the aft seat. “Dints,” he muttered.

  “Why have you called me?” I frowned. “Just another unfortunate stowaway.”

  “What, on this lifeboat?” He ducked under the seats, checking every recess. “Never afloat.”

  “So he snuck on to the liner. Came in on its coat-tails. Didn’t survive the trip.”

  “He was only found when the ship was being refitted. Not even then. They said the old lifeboats stank. Swapped them for newer models, and sailed off.”

  “Sailed off?” I blinked up at the Great Eastern. “The ship’s right behind you, dunderhead.”

  “Our body is two months old, at least. Dunderpate.” Emerging from his searches, he tapped on the lifeboat’s prow, the liner’s name emblazoned in white on the red edging: SS GREAT BRITAIN. “The Great Britain came in from Australia, via the Cape, two months back. In and out in a fortnight. Other lifeboats were sold off. Nobody wanted this one. It’s sat here ever since, with him in it.” Jeffcoat jumped down. “They thought it was oars wrapped in the tarpaulin.”

  “Two months? He’s been dead longer, I’d say. Haven’t you looked?”

  We headed back to the office, past towering cranes and clanging repair shops. Jeffcoat brushed off his hands on his police trousers. “How did nobody smell him?”

  I hadn’t smelt him until I moved the tarpaulin. “He was wrapped so tightly, I suppose.”

  “Wrapped? So he didn’t climb in himself.”

  “I’d say the body was put there, already dead.”

  Jeffcoat narrowed his eyes. “Or did it fall in?”

  “Fall?” I glanced back at the Great Eastern. The lifeboats were visible, lined up, midway atop the great upper deck. “Slap bang in the middle of the first-class deck?”

  We strolled into the office, ignoring the harbour master’s glare. The smell was permeating the room now, like the recollection of decay. Jeffcoat turned away from the body to study the engravings.

  “I can think of smarter places,” I said, “to hide a body.”

  Jeffcoat tapped at a picture: a liner at sea. “Look.” The lifeboats were slung from the sides of the upper deck. He glanced at the tarpaulin and took a pencil stub from his pocket. Grinning, he rolled it over the engraving, as if it were rolling off the deck, and made a whistling sound to signify it tumbling into the lifeboat hanging there. “Where are the lifeboats kept, when they’re at sea?”

  The harbour master gave us a dirty look. For Board of Trade inspections, he grumbled, they must be brought on deck; but at sea, they hung down port and starboard sides. He mopped his brow, warming to his theme, and began boasting of their promenade decks as broad as Piccadilly, incalculably strong, and buoyant as a life-preserver—

  “Didn’t preserve this fellow’s life.” I batted away a fly, as I gently stripped back the tarpaulin. I was pleased to see Jeffcoat grimace as much as I had.

  Remnant of a face, withered down to bone, sinews, vestiges of hair. Impossible to tell age, lineage, or even gender. These traces had been weathered to a skeletal pallor by his ensconcement under the flaking gunwales, as the lifeboat dangled in the rains of Cape Finisterre. Prominent teeth: put me in mind of a rabbit.

  The skeleton seemed restful. Clothes long disintegrated. Around the wrist, strips of leather: a kind of amulet. Broad leather belt, still in place, though the trousers were long gone. Leather sandals, of uncouth style. At his feet, a basket, woven of bark strips with a type of bamboo, and filled with stones.

  Of what he had died, I could not tell, but I would make damn sure Simpson told us.

  “You know what Wardle would say?” Jeffcoat elbowed me. He emulated our erstwhile inspector’s Yorkshire accents. “Eee, lad, leave well alone.”

  “He’s dead,” I continued in the same tones. “He’s unmourned. Why dig up t’past and ruin more lives on top of his?”

  I’d idolised old Wardle, in my first tender days at the Yard. Now I was grown cynical, his maxims sounded hollow. Jeffcoat had looked up to the old scoundrel too. His ignominious departure had left us both rudderless, until we overcame our differences: a touch of envy here, prejudice there. As a team, we were as good as any detectives in Scotland Yard; in the country, God damn it.

  “Aye,” he went on, unable to acknowledge the superiority of my impersonation. “Schoolchildren study history, and so they should, but not the finest minds on the force. Out on them streets. Catch me some lowlifes and ne’er-do-wells. Leave bygone crimes to lesser minds.”

  We looked at each other and laughed.

  “Inspector,” I addressed our absent inspector, “we think differently. History has come alive, and no more evidence of that is needed than our late orders from—”

  Jeffcoat touched my shoulder. His glance toward the harbour master shut me up. He was right: I should know bett
er than to spout in public of our briefing at the War Office.

  We knelt to examine the corpse, disturbing as little as possible.

  “Fair hair.” At my touch, the strand disintegrated. “Germanic, or Nordic.”

  “Maybe.” Jeffcoat never agreed with me. “Or bleached by time.”

  “The chin,” I mused. “That certain weakness common among the upper classes.”

  Jeffcoat shook his head, unconvinced. The strip of skin drawn against the skull was waxy and emaciated.

  “Prominent forehead speaks of ill health,” I hazarded. “Curvature of the neck. Bony shoulders. Looks ill nourished.”

  “Skeletons will look out of sorts.” He clicked his teeth. “Odd shoes, though.”

  I nodded. “From the colonies? Queensland? The Transvaal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But someone may. Casual-looking. But the stitching is rough. Not a working man’s shoes.”

  “Cultural differences, though.” Jeffcoat was a terrific one for his cultural differences, which can make mock of such surmises. Our continual disagreements he wrote off to our disparate heritage: my Caledonian artisan stock (father a watchmaker, mother from island weavers); he from rough Kentish Men mixed with unspeakable Men of Kent (a mongrel breed if ever there was one).

  As I touched the strange basket, its reeds friable, the waft of decay caught in my throat. Nothing inured you to that. Yet this was not the stench of fresh death, with its oozing juices and bloating flesh.

  “No obvious injury.” Jeffcoat was still examining the bones.

  I frowned. “Simpson is never going to give a date of death.”

  “Nor cause.” He cocked his head and pointed, squinting. True enough, one shoulder was out of kilter, as if from an impact. The left hip, beneath it, bore an indentation. Jeffcoat drew back, that look of connection in his eye. He drew his palm sideways, then sharply down to bang the floor. “Kadonk. He fell from the deck.”