Valentine Pierce rubbed the back of his neck and cocked his head from side to side releasing the pressure. It had been another long day with little accomplished. He had pored over the same records, the same reports, the same interviews, the same pictures, learning nothing new. The pictures were not something he liked to look at often, but he forced himself to look at them to remind him of the three women who had been murdered, with three families left behind to mourn them.
Detective Chief Inspector Val Pierce was in charge of the investigation into the death of three women who had been murdered in the span of nine months.
He had been working on the case since the beginning and only recently been able to see a slight pattern. It was not much to go on, but it was something. The three women were not of the poorer class. The victims were all from good families who did not lack for money, and yet had been killed all the same. The first woman was Effie Whitson, whose father owned a small bank, and the second victim was named Bessie Turner, the daughter of a successful green grocer who had several stores in and around London.
Finally, the third victim, Aida Harris, was the daughter of a prominent judge who had been engaged to Pierce. Though he was extremely attached to the case, and it was personal, he had not been pulled off of it. Superintendent Osgood had allowed him to stay, declaring that if he thought it became too much, he would remove him.
Val glanced back down at the pictures. Physically, the women looked nothing alike. He pulled the pictures closer and studied them. The photographs were in stark black and white, but Val remembered each woman in vivid detail. Effie had hair the color of straw and a slender body, while Bessie’s strawberry tresses had been long and tangled and her body voluptuous.
Then there was Aida. His finger caressed the curve of her face and he traced her figure until he could stand it no longer. He abruptly turned it over and away from his view. She had been a slender woman with dark hair and eyes.
The women had all been strangled and in each of the three cases, the bodies had not been disturbed in any way. Effie had been placed in a sleeping position with her hands crossed over her chest, and Bessie’s long hair had been combed. Aida had been placed in a similar final resting pose, but unlike the other victims, her nails had been broken and bleeding. He knew that Aida had most likely fought her killer until the very end, and left him with a final memento of a small scar or wound on his hands or face. But even that was no help as the wounds would heal in little time.
And time was something that was never on the side of the detective, he mused. With little to go on, it was only a matter of time before the killer struck again, and another woman was dead and another family torn apart. He sighed heavily.
A knock on his office door sounded and Val looked up. His sergeant Felix Grant was standing in the doorway. Felix and Val had been working together for two years and he liked him well enough. Felix had an easy way about him although he was sometimes flippant. He dressed simply every day to work with a jacket, trousers and vest. He was unmarried, though Val knew he frequented the music halls with certain ladies who admired his perpetually sloppy brown hair and smiling brown eyes.
He didn’t begrudge Felix’s off-hour enjoyments and they never spoke much about their personal lives. He liked working with the man because he was young and optimistic, dedicated to the job with a quick mind. More than anything, Val respected those who wanted to learn and were curious by nature. Detective work was mostly research, interviews and hard work, no matter what Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins wrote.
“Sir,” Felix addressed him.
“Felix. Have a seat.” He addressed his sergeant by his last name.
Felix took the chair opposite Val and waited.
Val placed the three photographs of the murdered women in front of him so that Felix could view them as well. His gaze flickered over them and then he looked at Felix.
“What do you see, Sergeant?” Val asked.
Felix gazed at each of the photographs and then shrugged. “All three of the victims were women. All three were strangled. They were all posed in a way to make them look pleasant, or at least a detraction from the violent death they suffered,” Felix surmised.
Val nodded. “What else?”
Felix looked them over and then saw them. “The primrose.”
Val said nothing but nodded. In each picture, which had immortalized the three dead women, there had been one thing left with them. A small white primrose with a yellow center was placed in each of the dead woman’s hands, and it could only have been left by the killer. There was no other explanation but that the killer had left it at the scene of his crime.
“What do you make of it, Sir?” Felix asked.
Val pulled a worn copy of The Sentiment of Flowers by Robert Tyas from a small shelf behind his desk and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for.
“Primrose blossoms can mean many different things,” he read. “It’s a symbol for bashfulness. It’s a symbol for inconstancy. It can also refer to young love as well as neglected merit. However, the most popular meaning for primrose is ‘I can’t live without you’.”
Val closed the book and looked over at his sergeant. “Perhaps what ties these women together is a lover that they angered or spurned. Someone that didn’t take the rejection well. And in return for their snub, they paid for it with their life.”
“Three women all with the same man? Sounds implausible.” Felix shook his head. “They weren’t streetwalkers. These were women from good families and good homes.”
“Perhaps one of the women was murdered by one man and the others by someone else,” Val threw out. “We could have a copycat on our hands.”
“The newspapers have been covering the murders quite heavily since the second woman was found and a pattern was established,” Felix nodded. “It’s possible.”
“Anything is possible,” Val nodded as he skimmed through the pages of the Tyas book, passing through the many illustrations of the flowers.
He looked up and saw Felix staring at him. He closed the cover of the book.
“But if you don’t mind me saying, Sir, we aren’t much better off since the first murder.”
Val sighed softly. “I don’t mind you saying so because unfortunately it’s true. We aren’t.”
Among the Darkness Stirs Page 30