by Carol Hedges
Frye staggers back, all the bluster and bravado leaked away.
“Alright, so maybe I may have ... only the once, mind ... but she wanted it as much as I did, and I never killed her. Never. You have to believe me.”
Stride gives him a long hard stare that goes slightly beyond the comfort zone.
“Actually, sir, I don’t have to believe you. But we shall leave it for now. We will be checking up on your alibi. And we may wish to question you further upon this matter.”
“Sadly, Miss Manning has no family, so her friend will have to take up a subscription to pay for the funeral,” Cully remarks, to nobody in particular.
A couple of meaningful seconds slink by.
Then Frye digs in his waistcoat pocket and produces a half-sovereign. He thrusts it at him.
“Here,” he mutters, “take it. Be damned with the whole rotten business. I wish I’d never set eyes on the girl.”
Stride and Cully make their way back onto the street.
“Charming man,” Stride remarks. “Makes me even less keen to patronise his store.”
Cully pats his pocket.
“At least Miss Benet will be able to bury her friend decently now,” he says.
Stride gives him an amused glance.
“Taken a shine to young Miss Benet, Jack?”
Cully shakes his head.
“Certainly not. I’m just sorry for her situation. It seems hard for a young woman of decent class to have to make her own way in the world.”
“She isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last,” Stride remarks. “And from what you’ve told me, she appears to be a young lady who is very well able to take care of herself.”
Cully says nothing in reply. But as he threads his way through the crowded shopping thoroughfare, he cannot help recalling a pair of dark brown eyes with gold flecks, the colour of Autumn leaves, fringed by thick black lashes. And the gentle pressure of a small hand upon his arm.
****
The detective division of London’s Metropolitan Police was set up to provide a dedicated team of professional men to investigate crimes committed in the Metropolitan area.
Now, four days after the gruesome murder of Violet Manning, two of the division’s finest are cudgelling their brains to make sense of this particular crime.
They are reluctant to admit, even in the privacy of Stride’s office, that they do not have a thing to go on. Mr Francis Frye’s bad-tempered shrew of a wife has been visited, has been closely questioned, and has agreed that her husband was at home on the night of the murder, why do you need to know, officer?
Both men are fervently hoping Frye’s life will be a little less pleasant as a result of their visit and the information they had ‘accidentally’ let slip. They have also been round to the tiny attic room where Violet Manning eked out her last days, and picked over her few possessions in search of anything that might link her to her killer.
It had not been a happy occasion. Emily Benet had stood in the doorway, white-faced and silent, watching their every move intently, as if the room needed chaperoning. The only time her face had broken into a wan smile was when Cully handed over the half-sovereign, telling her it had come from a special police fund kept for occasions such as this.
Since then, nothing.
“All the lurid stories in the newspapers, and still nobody has come forward with any evidence,” Stride complains.
“I’m not sure the sort of people who would know anything about it read the newspapers,” Cully says. “Or read, full stop,” he adds in an undertone.
“You hardly have to read the trash,” Stride counters, “the newspaper sellers have been full of it. Everywhere I go, small boys bawl at me about Ghastly Murder and Dreadful Strangling and Baffled Detectives. It’s as much as I can do not to throttle them.”
Stride taps the desk with the blunt end of a pencil. He has seen many murders in his time at the Yard, each horrific in its own way, but there is something about this particular one that disquiets him. It seems both random and ritualistic at the same time. Disquiets, he thinks, that is the word.
“Was it just a case of mistaken identity?” he wonders aloud. “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
Cully shakes his head.
“Impossible to tell on such little evidence.”
“Motive, then,” Stride says. “Can we determine a motive at this stage? Because after we’ve eliminated robbery and rape as possible motives, we’ve got very little to go on.”
Again, Cully shakes his head.
“Perhaps we just have to bide our time and hope something will happen,” he remarks.
“Yes,” Stride says grimly. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
****
London at night. A strange entrancing place, a parallel existence to the daylight world. A city of gaslight, redrawn in lines of artificial light. It bewitches and seduces, bestowing a different temporality of light and blind shadow. A place given over to the imagination. A place to dread, and a place to dream.
And here, a few days later, is Mrs Witchard’s lodger. His coat collar is turned up, his hat pulled well down over his face. He stands in the shadows of a shop doorway, out of the gaze of the lamplight’s searching eye, studying the late- night shoppers, the revellers and flâneurs, that saunter up and down Regent Street without a care in the world.
Suddenly he starts. He feels a shock like an electric current shoot through his body. She is there. Right in front of him. Parading bold as brass with the rest of the idle crowd. She passes by without noticing him. It is her. He recognises that face, all passion and virtue. Her hair which seems to absorb all the light, yet radiates it back like gold.
He squeezes his eyes shut, remembering it all. Her voice, her soft skin, the way her eyes darkened as he entered her, her false declarations of love. Followed by broken promises, threadbare excuses, missed meetings, until finally the unanswered letters and the closed door.
The monstrousness of rejection.
It was hundreds of years ago. It was yesterday. Everything about her was impossible – except for his love, which was so great, so overpowering, that it could never have been satisfied.
A voice in his head tells him what will happen, how it will happen. He breathes in. Nobody will find me, he thinks, nobody will ever know my secret. He feels the adrenaline circulating through him, bright as mercury. The sense of being invincible. He walks faster. Losing your life is not the worst thing. The worse thing is to lose your reason for living.
****
Emily Benet opens her eyes. It is early morning. Primrose-pale spring sunshine filters through the thin curtains. For a moment she lies still, warm and cosy. Then her eyes well up. It is always like this. First thing in the morning and last thing at night she thinks about her friend, and the heartache returns and the tears flow.
It had been high summer when she and Violet arrived in London. Hot day followed by hot day. Or so it seems, looking back. They were always outside, walking arm in arm, gawping at the marvellous sights and sounds of the great city. They’d visit the bazaars, examining the dresses, turning them inside out to criticise the stitching, commenting on the poor-quality lace. “One day, we shall be famous for our beautiful dresses,” Violet had said. “We shall have great lords and ladies waiting in their carriages outside our shop door. You’ll see, Em.”
She and Violet. Sharing a cake, dipping their fingers into a paper cone, licking off the cream as they told each other stories of the great future that lay ahead of them. She and Violet running through the park, hats blowing off, ignoring the scandalised glances of the portly matrons and snooty servant girls. She and Violet waltzing along the pavement in the summer rain, blinking the drops out of their eyes. A time to laugh, and a time to dance. She cannot understand how it is possible to feel this much pain and still go on living.
Emily gets up. She pours water from a jug into a basin and washes her face. One day, perhaps there will be a time to laugh and a ti
me to dance again. Now it is a time to weep and a time to mourn. She takes down the plain black dress hanging from the curtain rail, and prepares for the ordeal ahead of her.
****
There is precious little laughter taking place at the headquarters of the detective division either. A second young woman’s body has been found in an alleyway off Regent Street in the early hours of the morning. News of this arrives in the form of a night constable’s report, placed on Detective Inspector Stride’s desk first thing.
Now Stride is hastening towards the scene of the crime. This is precisely what he hoped would not happen. A one-off murder is bad enough. Two murders in almost the same vicinity can’t be so easily dismissed.
He enters the alleyway, encountering familiar smells of bad drains and poverty and damp. A young woman’s body is propped against the wall. She could have been asleep, but for the telltale gaping throat, the dark spilling stain on the front of her clothes.
Two constables lean against the wall opposite, smoking. Their faces are chalk-white.
“Put them out,” Stride commands abruptly.
He stares at the slumped body, remembering what he was told by his boss when he first joined the detective division from the rank and file. What separates a good detective from a mediocre one is his ability to see and deduce from what is in front of him, and not make assumptions based on what isn’t.
So, he thinks. What do we have here?
Young woman, possibly early twenties. Fair hair. Plainly dressed, which eliminates one group of young women. Worn shoes. No gloves, no wedding ring. She must have been placed against the wall: her bonnet is still on her head. If she’d fallen, it would have come off. So, what does that say about the bastard who did it?
He turns to the constables, “Who found the body?”
“Local drunk. On his way home. Turned in to have a piss. Frightened him stone cold sober.”
Stride runs his eyes along the high brickworked sides of the alleyway.
“And this alley leads where?”
“Angel Court. Row of tenements, mainly rented. Families and home-workers. We’re making enquiries. So far, nobody heard anything or saw anybody.”
Stride is not surprised. In his experience, when something like this happens, people keep their heads down and their mouths shut. The police are still not trusted or liked. Co-operate and you could be cold-shouldered. Or worse.
“Keep asking,” he says. “Get a constable on each entry point. Stop everybody who uses this as a cut-through. If she’s local, someone might know who she is and where she lived.”
He takes another long look round, committing as much as he can to visual memory. Then he makes a series of detailed notes. He intends to compare the notes with Jack Cully’s notes from the previous murder, although he has a sinking feeling in his gut that they will say exactly the same thing. As will the police surgeon.
They have a replicate murder. He had hoped, prayed it would not happen. Sadly, that ship has sailed. A headache like an iron hoop is tightening around his forehead as he makes his way back to Scotland Yard.
A few hours later Stride and Cully hurry over to the mortuary. The body has recently been brought in and lies on the mortuary table, covered by a sheet.
“Ah gentlemen, there you are. Interesting ...” the police surgeon says happily, glancing up as they enter.
Stride wonders yet again why police surgeons always derive such lugubrious pleasure in their work. It seems as if the more grisly their task, the more delighted they are.
“Of course, I have only made a very preliminary examination of the body,” the surgeon continues.
He lifts the lid of a rosewood case, revealing a fearsome set of medical instruments resting on a bed of red velvet.
“The superficial marks of death are remarkably similar to those of the young Manning woman.”
He glances up at Stride.
“Same modus operandi.”
Stride nods grimly. Another thing about police surgeons that gets his goat is their inclination to sprinkle any conversation with medical or Latin words. Stride’s education involved a lot of pavement pounding. It was a classical education, but not in the same sense.
“Would you care to take a look?” the surgeon asks, bending down to peel back the sheet.
“It’s fine; I believe you,” Stride says abruptly, turning his face away.
The police surgeon regards him with an expression of wry amusement.
“Dear me. Too near your luncheon is it, detective inspector?”
Too near many things, Stride thinks.
The police surgeon lifts an ebony-handled knife from its velvet bed.
“I think you will find the murder weapon will resemble one of these. Which is again interesting, as these are specialist surgeon’s instruments. Not, I would have thought, readily available to the hoi-polloi for purchase from their local cutler’s.
“I may be wrong, of course,” he continues, in a tone of voice that suggests he is pretty sure that he isn’t, “but I venture to suggest that the perpetrator of these crimes is not a member of the low criminal classes. He has access to medical equipment and a detailed knowledge of anatomy.”
Stride and Cully stare silently at the knife, as if willing it to speak.
“Well, if I can’t interest you both in a little lesson in dissection, I may as well get on,” the police surgeon’s eyes swivel back to the box on the table.
“Yes, why don’t you do that,” Stride nods, tearing his fascinated gaze away from the shiny curved steel blade.
“You will receive my full report when I have finished. But I think it is safe to say that we are looking at the same perpetrator.”
They return to Stride’s office.
“I feared it the moment I saw her,” Stride says gloomily. “So, you know what this’ll mean? The vultures from the popular press will be gathering at our door once again.”
Cully glances into the street where a small crowd is assembling outside the main entrance.
“I fear they are already gathering,” he says. “I can spot Dandy Dick’s waistcoat from here.”
Stride grimaces.
“Well, they will have a long wait. The day I talk to the press is the day you can stew my boots and serve them up to me on a plate, with gravy,” he says, reaching for his notebook. “Let’s go out the back way. We need to find somebody to identify the poor young woman. That, at this precise moment, is slightly more important than dealing with Mr Richard Dandy, chief reporter on The Inquirer. Or his friends. Or his waistcoat.”
****
London is changing. A constant shifting of register from old to new, from demolition to construction. There are attempts to make the city a rational place, building the new upon the chaos of the past. But the city is not predictable. Holes and corners remain that defy rationality, where the raw underside of a place that is old and familiar still exists, like a slippage between real and unreal.
Nowhere is that slippage more in evidence than in a dark and dusty shop just a stone’s throw from Tottenham Court Road. It is hard to tell what exactly the shop specialises in, for the dusty windows are crammed with so many items, all jumbled together higgledy-piggledy.
Here are broken watches, brass candle-holders, a pair of lace gloves with a hole in one thumb, soiled buff boots, and a set of carpenter’s tools. A tailcoat keeps company with some fire-irons, a battered straw bonnet consorts wantonly with some nankeen trousers.
However, a black-faced doll hanging in the window indicates to the passer-by the nature of the establishment. It is a dolly shop, an unlicensed pawnbroker, specialising in the sort of goods that the more regular pawnbrokers wouldn’t touch.
This is the empire of Morbid Crevice, beloved spouse of Mrs Crevice and every bit as hard-faced and stony-hearted as she is. And here is the shop owner himself, emerging from the dimly-lit back room, wearing a rust-coloured suit and a sour expression.
He carries a wooden pole to lift down the shutters before ope
ning up for business. Here too is Tonkin the shop boy, whose job it is to run errands, tidy the stock, and generally act as the recipient of Morbid Crevice’s ill-temper.
Like the Foundling, Tonkin owes his former existence to the kindness of a charitable Hospital, upon whose steps he was discovered at a very early age. After a half-starved and frequently cuffed infancy, he moved on to the kindness of his current employer, to whom he was ’prenticed at ten years old. He has been with him for six years.
From Morbid Crevice, he also derives other fringe benefits: his accommodation (a bundle of rags under the counter), his clothing (which is made up of items that have been pawned but never redeemed), and whatever scraps of food are casually thrown his way.
Thus, on this particular day, Tonkin faces the vibrant world of business and commerce without breakfast, and wearing a rust-coloured jacket (several sizes too big and rather deficient in the button department). and a pair of trousers slightly too short in the leg.
He also wears boots that once saw better days and had matching laces. Tonkin has lost count of how many times he’s been told how lucky he is and how grateful he ought to be. The telling is usually accompanied by a box on the ears to make sure he understands.
By mid-morning the steady stream of customers coming in to pawn their goods and chattels in order to buy enough food to survive the weekend, has trickled to a halt. Tonkin is dispatched on an errand. Clapping a battered top hat on his head, he ventures out into the teeming, bellowing, traffic-filled streets.
The noise is deafening. Hoofs and wheels strike granite slabs, drivers curse and shout as they force their way through, and the street vendors cry their wares in a mixture of sounds that seem to Tonkin to rise up above the blackened chimneys like strange music, backgrounded by an accompaniment of church bells chiming the half hour.
Glancing around for something interesting to stare at, Tonkin spies an undertaker’s hearse pulled by two shiny horses. It is making slow but steady progress through the traffic, heading in the direction of St Pancras. The hearse is followed by a lone mourner: a young woman dressed in black.