‘Are you well?’ she asked me.
‘Quite well,’ I replied. ‘Tell me, how long have you noticed the deaths in that bed?’
‘There haven’t been that many,’ she said. ‘Statistically, it’s not that high a discrepancy. It was more of a feeling than actual numbers. I was foolish to be disturbed by them.’
‘You weren’t foolish,’ Mary insisted.
‘Well then, there have been about five in the last year, before Emma Fordyce’s death. That number is not high on a ward like this . . .’
‘But high for one bed,’ Mary finished for her.
‘How long has Florence Bryson been a patient here?’ I asked.
‘Flo?’ Nora questioned, frowning. ‘Well, she’s in and out, so about a couple of years, all told. The same as Eleanor Langham.’
‘What about Sister Bey?’ Mary asked. ‘She’s not a nice woman. She wouldn’t let me anywhere near that logbook of hers.’
‘A few years,’ Nora said. ‘But she’s not the one who hit me.’
‘No, it was probably a boy,’ I said. ‘I’ll explain later.’
Nora left, puzzled.
‘We can’t discount Miranda Logan,’ I said. ‘She was here yesterday. She could quite easily sneak in and out of hospital.’
‘I suppose so, but why would she?’ Mary asked, but I wasn’t listening. I was staring through the open door of the ward. The lights were on, shining full on everyone’s faces. Flo was bent over the newspaper in her hand. In front of her, Ruth Bey was bent over the logbook on her desk. I had seen what Ruth wrote, all night, every night. Not notes, or thoughts. Gibberish. Not even words, but just shapes and lines and circles. Utterly meaningless. Her logbook was full of nonsensical shapes.
‘Look,’ I said to Mary. I hadn’t seen it before. Their colouring was different – but perhaps Flo too had once had black hair. But now, in the same attitude, highlighted by the gaslight, I could see they had exactly the same nose and mouth and throat and ears. Exactly the same profile. Mary looked back at me.
Not one, but two. Two could do this together. Two bound together by blood. By family.
‘I think I could swear,’ she said, ‘that Florence Bryson and Ruth Bey are mother and daughter.’
AN OLD STORY
‘Why are we going to Fleet Street?’ I asked, as the cab hurried along, as fast as it could. It was dark now, and damp, and it seemed very late at night, though it could only be seven, at the latest. London nights drop fast in the winter. I looked through the window at the gas lamps, and saw the first of the Christmas lights were beginning to appear in shop windows. Christmas: I’d have to start planning for that soon. I should have started earlier, it wasn’t long to go now.
‘Lillian Rose said something about the combination of the names Florence and Ruth,’ Mary said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Vaguely,’ I said. I was quite tired now, but unable to stop just yet. ‘You think it was something in Patrick West’s archives?’
‘I think she’s been through the whole thing, learning the master’s style,’ Mary said. ‘I know the names are probably different, but if we mention Florence, and a daughter Ruth, and a dead son . . .’
‘About twenty years ago,’ I said. ‘Making Ruth about thirteen or fourteen.’
‘Then maybe that’s enough to trigger a memory for Mr West,’ Mary said eagerly. ‘I bet it’s one of his crime reports.’
I sat back. There was no stopping Mary when she was like this. I had tried before and she had merely thrown herself into deeper danger. We’d have to go on; I had no choice. I couldn’t stop Mary now, or let her go on alone.
Which was a blatant excuse. I was as eager to find out the facts as Mary was. I looked out of the window and started to hum Christmas carols under my breath.
We pulled up outside the alley that led to the court where Patrick West lived. As we did, I felt rather than saw someone brush by us.
‘Miranda?’ I said quickly, but the figure had disappeared into the crowds.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mary asked.
‘I think Miranda Logan is following us,’ I said to her, as we walked into the court. It was pitch-dark, lit by a single fading lamp, and we felt our way as much as saw it.
‘Good, she may be useful later on,’ Mary said. ‘Which door was it?’
‘The blue one. Look, Mary,’ I insisted, ‘if we discover the truth, we go straight to the police with it. Inspector Gregson, at the Yard.’
‘All right,’ Mary said, as she pulled at the doorbell, but she didn’t look at me.
‘No, Mary, I mean it,’ I said, turning her to face me. ‘This can’t be like last time.’
‘It wasn’t so bad . . .’ she started to say.
‘Really! Have you actually forgotten what happened?’ I snapped, just as the door opened.
Lillian Rose stood there, and she had obviously heard what I said. I waited for her to pass a remark, but she smiled an odd smile and stood aside to let us up the stairs.
‘I promise,’ Mary whispered. ‘Straight down the Strand to the Yard, I promise.’
Patrick West sat in his chair, hand on his stick, waiting for us to enter. The room was lit by a flickering fire. It seemed unreal, a room from a ghost story, waiting for the horror to start. Lillian came in behind us and closed the door.
‘Mrs Hudson. Mrs Watson,’ Patrick West said. ‘More information?’
Mary stepped forward eagerly.
‘This could save a life,’ she said, ‘many lives. And solve a mystery.’
Mr West merely waved his hand.
‘You know my price,’ he said. ‘Information for information. What have you to give me?’
Nothing. I had nothing that I wished to tell him. No secret would be safe with him. It would be told, sooner or later, with that dark little twist of his that made every action suspect.
‘I owe them,’ Lillian said from behind me. She didn’t say anything else, but Mr West moved his hand towards her.
‘Then we must pay our debts,’ he said. ‘Ask.’
‘About twenty years ago,’ Mary said, looking at me for confirmation that she was right, ‘I think there was a case where a boy died. He would have been between ten and sixteen.’
This was the age of the boys that were being taken.
‘I’m not sure of the names, but I think the mother was called Florence, and there was a daughter, Ruth.’
I still wasn’t sure either was guilty, but it was that combination of names that had triggered Lillian’s memory last time.
‘That’s it?’ Mr West asked.
‘I remember something,’ Lillian said slowly. ‘Florence, and Ruth, and a boy. There was something, when I was going through your crime archives.’
Mr West waved his stick.
‘Your memory is quite exceptional,’ he said. ‘How very useful. Very well, take them to it.’
There was a dark panelled room, uncarpeted and dusty, groaning with the weight of newspaper, the air thick and choking and sharp with the scent of ink. For a moment I hesitated, remembering the room full of secrets at the blackmailer’s house, but Lillian swept in. She was dressed in dark red now, and she looked prosperous and confident. Not a trace of the Whitechapel prostitute was left, not even in her voice. She had reinvented herself utterly in such a short while. It was an enviable skill.
‘Down here,’ she said, sinking to her knees in front of a pile of yellowed newspapers. ‘Help me look.’
There were hundreds of papers, every article Patrick West had ever written, in chronological order, but with no index. That was apparently one of Lillian’s tasks, to catalogue his articles, crime and gossip and whatever else he’d written. Mr West appeared to have spent most of his life as a Grub Street hack, being paid by the word, and so turning out thousands of them.
We read of long-ago scandals of people, some dead, some alive and respectable, the past forgotten. Sir Richard’s name was there, in passing, and I could see the clues to his true nature. Lord Howe was
there, too, angry and determined, striding across the pages of the past. And here was Emma, flittering in the papers, tempting and delicious, the only woman (or man) that Patrick West treated kindly.
But that was just gossip. We needed the crime. Patrick West had an eye for a secret, and he seemed to find them when the police failed. Murders were his speciality, especially poison. The quiet, secretive deaths, suspected but never proved. He found them all, and side-stepped the laws of libel neatly, always hinting, never saying for certain. There were other deaths, too: dramatic trials, courtroom revelations, deathbed confessions. He wrote well, I had to admit, and I wanted to sit for hours and just read. We were lost in that dim little room, surrounded by the stories of decades of murder and death and lies and secrets. How would we ever find our one case?
But Lillian had a good memory. The blackmailer had relied on her to go into people’s houses and sift through their papers and read and remember what she saw, very quickly. It was a skill she had honed to perfection. And luckily for us, the paper we needed was one she had already read. It only took us an hour to find it.
‘Here,’ Lillian said, handing over a paper to Mary. Mary was covered in dust, and sneezed as she took it. Lillian had somehow remained spotless.
Mary tipped the article towards the faint light and began to read.
‘This is a different name,’ she said. ‘Nabour, not Bryson.’
Lillian shrugged.
‘Names change,’ she said carelessly. ‘Do you think I was born Lillian Rose?’
Mary nodded, and turned back to the paper, reading through for other clues.
‘Look at the address, and the ages, and the physical description,’ I said to her. ‘Well?’ I demanded, as she read. ‘Is it them?’
Mary’s eyes grew wide as she read, and she looked up at me.
‘Florence’s son . . .’ she said.
‘Is he not dead?’ I asked, reaching out for the paper.
‘No, he’s dead,’ she said. ‘He died in prison. He was a murderer.’
THE PALE BOY
No wonder Lillian remembered the case. Over the next hour, we pieced together the story from various articles and court reports, and it was a twisted, disturbing story.
Florence Nabour had two children, Ruth and Edward. Her husband had died soon after Edward was born, and Florence had devoted all her energies into raising her children – or rather, raising Edward. Ruth was neglected and left to run wild, as Edward grew into his mother’s darling. They were very close, and barely left each other’s side. She kept him indoors, fearful of the dangers of the outside world, and dressed him in perpetual mourning for his father. He was always in black, which looked well on him. She was his pole star, and he hers. She taught him, and nursed him, and cosseted him, and there were even stories that he slept in her bed long past the age he should have had his own.
But of course, such rumours could not be ignored. The local vicar visited, and tried to point out the error of her ways. He took the family under his wing, seeing it as his parish duty, not out of any sense of friendship. By all accounts, he disliked both mother and son heartily, but felt it incumbent upon him to see they lived a ‘proper’ life. He tried to force her to send Edward to school, to ‘make a man of him’, in his phrase. He often called, and stayed the night, as their house was remote. One night he argued with her, and brought up the allegations of Florence and Edward’s unnatural closeness. He even hinted at incest, and said that he would contact Edward’s father’s family. He clearly meant it, and he threatened to split them up. But he saw only fear and disobedience in the family. He didn’t see the anger. He wasn’t afraid. He slept under their roof that night, feeling as safe as he would in his own home.
In the morning, he was dead. The doctor was called, and Florence said the vicar had just had a seizure in his sleep. But the doctor was suspicious, and sent the body for a postmortem. The verdict was murder by suffocation.
Florence was under suspicion at first, but the boy had been seen sneaking out of his room by a housemaid late at night, and had scratches on his face. He was arrested, and tried.
Florence was devastated, but Edward didn’t seem to understand what he had done was wrong. Separated from his mother, he confessed easily. The vicar had been trying to split them up, and so he had killed the vicar. He could see no wrong in what he had done. It was the natural outcome, as he saw it, of someone trying to take him away from his mother.
The case went to trial, where Ruth caused a scene by trying to take the blame. Her own mother had mocked her in court, saying that Ruth would never have had the strength and courage to kill anyone for her sake, and that Ruth had never really loved her.
That was enough. The boy was found guilty. No one wanted to hang a sixteen-year-old boy, though, so he was sent to prison. There were whispers that Florence had talked him into it, and the boy himself, bewildered by the world, inspired some pity. But in that environment, and alone, he soon died.
For a while, Florence and Ruth stayed in the house. But Ruth left, presumably to become a nurse, and Florence was alone. She was known to visit homes where boys had died recently, and tell the grieving mother her own sad story. She saw no guilt in what her son had done. It was only what any boy would do for his mother, she asserted. Eventually, after being chased away from another funeral, she left the area and changed her name, and disappeared into London.
‘Quite a story,’ I said, once we had worked all this out.
‘I bet she never stopped visiting bereaved mothers,’ Mary said. ‘Suppose she visited Eleanor Langham after she read about the death of her son in the papers, maybe doing nothing more than standing outside the house?’
‘And saw the boy in the garden next door?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps she reminded him of her own boy. She can’t have been sane by then.’
‘If she ever was,’ Mary added.
‘I read up on that case,’ Lillian said. ‘He was seen walking away with a woman all in black. He was wearing black too, out of respect for Mrs Langham’s son.’
‘So she takes him,’ I said, working it out, ‘on the spur of the moment. A son all in black to replace her own. But he has a mother he loves, and he wants to go home.’
‘He’s disloyal,’ Mary said. ‘He doesn’t love Flo. At least, she sees it as disloyalty.’
‘And he dies,’ I said softly. ‘Perhaps it’s an accident. Perhaps she was just trying to stop him crying.’
‘Perhaps she murdered him, because she’s plainly mad,’ Lillian said, standing up and smoothing down her skirt. ‘But she wants a replacement boy, and one who no one will notice is gone.’
‘Street boys,’ Mary said. ‘Boys from the workhouse. Boys with no parents – or at least, she thinks they have no parents.’
‘So she collects her replacements, and makes them her sons,’ I said. ‘She gives them a home and warmth and food and love, and in turn all they have to do is love her.’
‘Prove they love her,’ Mary corrected. ‘Just like her son did.’
‘Perhaps it started with animals,’ I said, remembering the blood in the house. ‘A sacrifice, just like in the Bible. Abraham and his son, and so on. But then she moved on from the animals. She needed real proof they loved her. Always in front of her, so she could see their love.’
‘No one noticed?’ Mary asked.
‘Of course not,’ Lillian said scornfully. ‘How many people do you think die on those streets? And if all she’s doing is suffocating them, who’s going to look closely at that? They’ll just think someone died in their sleep, that’s all, sell the body to the surgeons and the clothes to the pawn shop and that’s done with. No one cares if someone poor and ugly dies. There were always stories about the Pale Boys, don’t get caught on the street with them, they’ll suck your blood, they’ll steal your soul, but not about them being ordinary murderers. No one noticed. It’s just another death on the street, and another gang.’
‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘No one noticed until Flo was in hos
pital, and her victims had to be in that bed next to her, where she could see them. Only when it was middle-class women dying did anyone notice.’
‘Do you think Ruth knew?’ Mary asked.
‘I think Ruth has been protecting her mother for years. I think she’s even given up on her career to look after her mother. I think maybe she’s even been the one arranging for her mother to be housed in her own hospital ward.’
‘Why?’ Lillian asked. ‘Her mother abandoned her and mocked her.’
‘Mother’s love,’ Mary said gently. Mary’s mother had died when she was very young. ‘It makes people desperate. They’ll do anything to earn it.’
‘It’s supposed to be given, not earned,’ I said, as I stood up. ‘Do you think it’s too late to go to the Yard?’
‘Wait – why kill the boys?’ Mary asked. ‘She killed them with love, so she wasn’t angry, but why?’
‘How old were the boys who died?’ Lillian asked.
‘Fifteen, sixteen, roughly around that age’ Mary replied.
Lillian smiled, a crooked half-smile. ‘Well, there’s a good reason,’ she said. ‘What do boys do at that age?’
We shrugged.
‘Notice girls,’ Lillian said, as if we were idiots. ‘She stopped being the centre of their world the minute a pretty girl smiled at them. That’s why she killed them. They loved someone else.’
A MOTHER’S GLORY
Lillian let us out, reminding us that we were now even. Mr West called after us that if we ever had an interesting story to tell, we should come to him.
We were still dizzy with discovery when we reached the street. Fleet Street was crowded and noisy. The street was packed with cabs and carriages, head to tail, none moving more than a few inches. An omnibus was halted in front of us, the windows steamed up, a pile of dung steaming gently behind the horse. It had obviously been there for a while. Dogs nipped between the exhausted horses, snatching at bits of dropped food. Men hurried down the street, too busy to step round Mary and me, knocking us aside. It was a cacophony of noise and smells and people, but that was London for you.
The Women of Baker Street Page 23