Dark Dawn Over Steep House

by M. R. C. Kasasian

  ‘He was bent over his desk,’ I announced as my guardian appeared.

  ‘Have you even heard of the word “circumspect”, Miss Middleton?’ Mr G took a constitutional round me, then swayed and dropped to the floor. He could not have tripped and it was not a faint. People who swoon crumble at the knees but my godfather crashed like a statue being toppled from its plinth on to his shoulder. His eyes were still open. Was he having some kind of a fit? I was about to kneel and check when he rolled on to his back, sat up and sprang acrobatically to his feet. ‘Indeed,’ he told himself, scooped out his gloves in his left hand, whipped up his hat with his right and went to the exit, apparently none the worse for his experience.

  ‘I think it comes from the Latin, circum and specere,’ I told his back, determined not to be as nonplussed as I felt.

  ‘I am elated to find evidence of you thinking at all.’ Sidney Grice opened the door in a disconcertingly normal manner.

  ‘Oh,’ I said lamely as he marched straight out. ‘Goodbye, Mr Jones.’ My godfather was five yards away by the time I got outside. ‘Wait for me, Mr Glice,’ I called after him.

  *

  There was a message on the hall table when we got back to 125 Gower Street, a letter with the familiar blue eight-pointed Brunswick star crest on the envelope.

  ‘You open it.’ My guardian was preoccupied in rearranging his canes.

  ‘A body had been found which might be of interest,’ I read out and Sidney Grice jabbed his finger at the missive.

  ‘Why was it not in my tray?’ he demanded of Molly and she chewed her lower lip.

  ‘I dontn’t not think a body would fit in there, sir,’ she decided. ‘Ohhhhh.’ Molly clutched her stomach.

  ‘Whatever is the matter?’ I asked.

  Her face was pale and clammy. ‘Oh, miss,’ she moaned, seeming to think that was sufficient explanation.

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Of course she is ill.’ Mr G opened another letter. ‘If a servant is healthy, he or she – or, in this wretched creature’s case, it - is not working hard enough.’

  ‘I think it might be the poising I drank.’ Molly staggered towards me but, mercifully, did not collapse into my arms. ‘To kill the mouse a bit.’

  ‘You took mouse poison?’

  ‘Only all of it.’ Molly flopped her arms weakly.

  Her employer headed towards his study.

  ‘But where did you get it?’ I considered whether to summon a cab or try to get her up the road to the hospital by foot.

  ‘From that cupboard what Mr Grice told me never to touch what got accidently unlocked.’

  ‘Oh, Molly,’ I cried. ‘He keeps acids and all sorts of things in there.’

  ‘Not all sorts.’ Molly flapped a hand weakly. ‘He dontn’t not keep no chocolates or beer ’cause I’ve looked.’

  ‘But what did you take?’

  There were beads of sweat on her downy upper lip.

  ‘Look at the lumpen wench’s tongue,’ came out from the study.

  ‘This.’ Molly delved in her apron pocket and handed me a brown bottle.

  ‘Vermilion,’ I read from the label.

  ‘Verminions is rats and mice and liberals,’ she explained, leaning heavily on the hall table. ‘Mr Grice told me that.’

  ‘Dye,’ I continued.

  ‘I’m trying,’ she retorted irritably.

  ‘It is a stain,’ I explained and saw, too late, that her tongue was bright red.

  ‘Oh, bless.’ Molly clamped her paws together. ‘Mrs Mouse will look ever so pretty now.’

  ‘You have not swallowed a mouse,’ I assured her wearily. ‘Oh no?’ Molly plonked her fists on her substantial hips. ‘Well, how come I’ve stained her red then?’

  ‘Tea,’ Sidney Grice barked, and she scurried off, her logic irrefutable.

  22

  The Body in the Mud

  SERGEANT HEWITT WAS a sturdy, weather-beaten man with a slight roll to his gait, as one might expect from a seafaring man, but, though he spent much of his time on the water, Hewitt’s duties in the Thames River Police never took him further than the coast.

  ‘Not a pretty sight,’ he warned as he came along the quay from where his launch was moored.

  ‘She does her best.’ Sidney Grice defended me and the sergeant guffawed, under the impression that my guardian had made what he never made, a joke.

  ‘March Middleton.’ I shook his hand, hardened and scarred by a tough outdoor life.

  His left thumb was missing. ‘Caught on a capstan,’ he told me in response to my glance down.

  Mr G whipped out his journal to make a note. ‘Do you still have it?’

  Sergeant Hewitt looked puzzled. ‘My thumb? No, why?’

  ‘It might be evidence,’ Sidney Grice pondered.

  ‘What of?’ the sergeant asked, striding past us and up a ramp towards a tarred wooden shed.

  ‘Of what?’ Mr G corrected him.

  ‘Where was the body found?’ I asked as the two men stared at each other.

  Hewitt shook his head like a swimmer trying to clear his ear. ‘Down in the estuary, washed up in the marshes near the Isle of Sheppey.’

  ‘That must be about forty miles away,’ I estimated.

  ‘Nearer fifty,’ the policeman calculated. ‘Miss that and, unless you ground at Margate, you’re bobbing about feeding dogfish in the North Sea.’

  ‘By whom and under what circumstances was it rescued?’

  Sidney Grice whipped out his magnifying glass to examine a curtain of dried seaweed hanging down a wooden post.

  ‘A Squire Boweley from Basingstoke.’ Sergeant Hewitt inserted and turned a key in a chunky padlock. ‘’E was ’untin’

  lugworms – one of those daft beggars what writes books on ’em – when ’e spotted ’er stickin’ out of the mud. Thought it was just an old sack until ’e got close. The eels ’ad taken a few dinners off ’er by then. We only identified ’er by the report of ’er bein’ missin’ and ’er locket.’

  ‘Do you have the locket?’ I asked and the sergeant brought it out of an inside pocket of his cape.

  The locket was gold on a gold chain, and it was fortunate that the body had not been found by mudlarks, for they would have been unlikely to have handed in such a treasure. The front was embossed with a rosebud design and the back engraved with the words To our darling Albertoria with love from Mummy and Daddy. I pressed the catch and the two halves sprang apart like a clamshell to reveal Mr Wright’s face in the left section and his wife’s in the other.

  Sidney Grice took it from me and handed it back without comment.

  ‘Can I keep it?’ I asked. ‘I shall be visiting them later.’

  Sergeant Hewitt took told of his mutton chops. ‘I suppose I can trust you.’

  ‘I wish I had your faith,’ my guardian muttered.

  ‘What’s that you say?’ The sergeant tugged his whiskers.

  ‘Mr Grice wishes he had your face,’ I lied.

  ‘Oh.’ Sergeant Hewitt simpered. ‘Thanks very much.’

  I slipped the locket into my handbag. ‘Shall we?’ I tipped my furled parasol towards our destination.

  ‘Right.’ Hewitt opened the lock and hesitated. ‘Sure you’re up to this, miss?’

  ‘I have seen bodies before,’ I assured the sergeant and he puffed.

  ‘Not like this, you ain’t.’ He heaved the right hand of the double doors open and stood back. ‘I’ll wait out ’ere unless you need me.’

  Sidney Grice brought out a black cloth, crumpled it into a ball, sprinkled it with camphor from a dark blue bottle and clamped it over his thin and elegant nose. It was not like my godfather to be squeamish – usually he relished the gruesome – but, as soon as I stepped into the shed after him, I understood why he had done it. The air was thick with decay. I snatched the bottle from his outstretched hand and hastily followed suit.

  It was a good-sized shed, perhaps forty feet long and half as wide, and fifteen high at the apex of roof
. It must have been a boathouse once, but there was a jig-saw powered by a small steam engine in a far corner and some other machinery covered in sacking against the wall, so it must have been used as a workshop since then, which was why two long skylights had been put into the ceiling for light and ventilation, though they were locked now.

  A trestle table had been set up in the middle of the concrete floor and on it was what I could only describe as a thing. What we had been told might be the mortal remains of Albertoria Wright was scarcely recognizable as human. A long dark mound bound in rags had been placed upon those boards. At the far end was a tangle of what I took to be hair, but there was nothing resembling a face framed in it. The whole head was a ball of matted brown slush. Most of the mud had been hosed from the body but it still clogged the cavities which would have recently housed the eyes, nose and mouth of a pretty young girl.

  Sidney Grice stood at her feet, peering over the top of his cloth, his cane held vertically like a guard shouldering arms, and I edged along the side of the boards, forcing myself to look and to breathe as normally as I could, for the stench of rottenness seeped even through the penetrating mothball vapour. A bare arm jutted over the side but it was so slimy that I could not touch it. The fingers were blackened and fanned out and the whole limb was caked in something like flour.

  ‘What is that powder?’ I managed.

  ‘Salt,’ came the muffled response, ‘to kill the leeches.’

  The torso was bloated and bulging through the ripped remnants of a striped dress. I found an intact patch near the hem and cut out a square of it with my nail scissors, dropping it into a pouch that Sidney Grice held out for me.

  My guardian set off up the other side of the table, stopping at where her waist might have been to face me over the muck that was once a woman.

  ‘The cadaver is too decomposed to lift, let alone turn,’ he stated. ‘And corruption is far too advanced to give us any hope of verifying or dismissing her claim of having been despoiled.’

  We continued counterclockwise until he was at the head and me at the foot. Her right leg ended at the ankle, the sheared-off ends of the oval tibia and more slender fibula clearly exposed.

  ‘From the cleanness of the de-pedification, the stretching and rips in her clothes, it seems likely that she was caught at some stage on a propeller,’ he proposed, his voice more distant than the covering of his mouth seemed to warrant.

  ‘I cannot see any other jewellery on her,’ I said. ‘No rings or bracelets or earrings.’

  ‘I know what jewellery is,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Stop it,’ I cried and, to my surprise, he mumbled, ‘Very well.’

  I turned back to the business in hand and gingerly took a loose strand of hair hanging over the end, wiped a tarry coating off with my spare handkerchief and raised the tress towards the light.

  ‘I suppose she could have been described as auburn,’ I said.

  ‘I would say so,’ Mr G concurred.

  ‘Unfortunately, there is no nose for us to find a freckle.’

  ‘Quite.’ Mr G puffed his cheeks. It always annoyed him when I observed the obvious but equally when I failed to do so. ‘Which leaves us with?’ He nodded towards me.

  ‘The wisdom tooth,’ I recalled. ‘Shall I fetch some water to wash the mud out?’

  I surprised myself by the matter-of-fact way I made that suggestion. I might have been offering sugar to a guest.

  ‘Who knows what we might accidentally wash away?’ Sidney Grice reached into his satchel and brought out a silver spoon, dipping it into the deposit as a man might sample his dessert. He tapped out his first spoonful on to the table and raked through it with the rim of the bowl. There was nothing recognizable as lips in front of the still-white teeth nor gums around their necks. ‘And what is your opinion?’

  ‘It is an adult dentition,’ I observed.

  He dug a few times more.

  ‘Quite a young adult, I would think,’ I continued. ‘The crests of bone between the teeth are still quite high and sharp and there is not much sign of abrasion.’

  ‘Good.’ He ladled out something like old liver and I realized with horror that it was putrefied portions of tongue. I retched and my guardian looked at me before asking, ‘Do you want to go outside for a while?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then neither do I.’ I fought my churning stomach. Nothing would induce me to admit that I was more squeamish than he, not even the dizzy swirling in my head. ‘Kindly clean the back teeth.’

  Sidney Grice grunted. ‘Very well.’ And he scraped away what he could before wrapping his spoon in a cloth and delving about deep in the cavity. He pulled the soiled cloth out and I peered in. My eyes did not want to focus but I made them.

  ‘The lower right wisdom tooth is tipped forwards and impacted against the second molar.’

  ‘Would that cause pain?’

  ‘Probably. It is half-erupted and that could have made the gum very inflamed, especially as the upper tooth is over-erupted and would have bitten down on it.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  I twisted down, trying not to cast my shadow over the cavity and not to focus on that scooped-out root of tongue nestling in the entrance to the throat like a giant slug.

  ‘The left wisdom teeth are completely buried under bone so I doubt they would have hurt her.’

  Sidney Grice bobbed briefly and rose slowly, and I reluctantly did another circuit. I did not expect to find anything but I felt I owed it to the dead girl and her parents to try, and I had nearly joined Sidney Grice when I slipped. The liquids of putrefaction had oozed from under the trestle into a greasy puddle on the floor. My godfather’s arm shot out and I grabbed it but, with the heaviness of my fall, it bent. My guardian grunted with the effort and stopped me, my face half an inch above hers.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ I choked on my involuntary inhalation.

  He rushed round and helped me to regain my balance without touching anything.

  ‘Thank you,’ I gasped and stepped carefully away over the slippery concrete to the door, the sunlight and a welcome river breeze.

  ‘Didn’t think you’d last that long,’ Sergeant Hewitt conceded, openly impressed, until I took the handkerchief from my mouth and saw that it had dipped into the sepia fluid that had bathed Albertoria Wright’s rotting flesh. I rushed away and, doubling over the low wall that separated the ramp from a drainage gulley, evacuated the contents of my stomach.

  ‘I did that,’ the policeman confessed. ‘So did my constables, and we’ve fished out many a carcass in our time.’

  I uncorked my blue bottle of sal volatile and let the ammonia fumes flood my nostrils and their sharpness jolt me out of my giddiness.

  ‘Come, March.’ My guardian took my arm and led me gently away and, when we were out of earshot, said, ‘If you have your father’s flask with you, I would not object to you using it.’

  I opened my handbag but no sooner had I found the flask amongst the numberless other essentials than I let it go again.

  ‘I cannot go to see the Wrights stinking of gin.’

  ‘I can go in your stead,’ he proposed. ‘At least I will not get emotional.’

  I took a parma violet and said, ‘Which is exactly why I shall do it.’

  ‘Very well.’ Mr G accepted my offer of a sweet. ‘Then we had better get you home to bathe and change and I shall arrange for the remains to be sealed in a lead coffin.’

  ‘That is a kind thought.’

  ‘I hope Mr Wright concurs with that opinion when I present him with my account.’

  Sidney Grice patted my hand and we walked on, clearing our lungs in silence, and we were still arm in arm when we found a cab ten minutes later.

  23

  The Old Man of Great Titchfield Street

  GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET ran long and straight from Greenwell Street in the north – with its excellent George and the Dragon pub – to Oxford Street, with its stalls, stores an
d bazaars, in the south.

  It never ceased to fascinate me how the character of London could change so rapidly, and rarely was this better demonstrated than along this road. Once a pleasant thoroughfare constructed by the Duke of Portland, the desirable houses were gradually broken into rented rooms or cheap clothing shops, driving property prices down and the original residents out.

  Now, however, the street was being reclaimed by the well-to-do. Crumbling dwellings were demolished and more salubrious properties built, starting at the Oxford Street end and steadily stretching northwards so that there was no indication, when one approached the smart, well-kept properties, that one only had to continue up the street to find oneself in the midst of appalling deprivation and degradation – malnourished mothers and children, unemployed men and habitual criminals jostling within a short stroll of luxury.

  The Wrights, needless to say, lived in the better area – for nobody in the worse could have afforded even a consultation with my guardian – and, twenty yards up the road, I made out a high barred gate and two uniformed watchmen whose sole purpose would be to keep the two worlds apart.

  An elderly maid answered the blue-painted front door and admitted me to a pretty hall – a sage oilcloth on the floor and lemon wallpaper with wispy swirls of green foliage.

  Are you Ann-Jane?’ I placed my card on a silver tray.

  ‘Yes, miss,’ she replied, a touch warily.

  She was even more petite than her employers.

  ‘So it was you who found that Miss Albertoria was missing?’

  I glanced round the narrow hallway. It had three doors, all painted in a fresh cream colour, two to the left and, just visible as a frame to the right behind a steep cantilevered staircase, the third, which must have led to the domestic quarters for there was no cellar beneath the house.

  ‘Yes, miss.’ Ann-Jane looked around nervously. ‘But I know nothing else about it.’

  Her accent was unusually well-cultivated for one in her employment and I wondered how she had fallen so far in position.

  ‘Did Miss Albertoria ever confide in you?’

  In one section of the cherry-wood umbrella stand was a nice Prussian blue parasol with a frilled border, and it occurred to me that it might have matched the muddy shreds barely clothing the remains we had viewed earlier, and that the owner would never set out with it again.