by Alex Grecian
A blanket was draped over the crumpled body against the wall so that nothing of the man beneath was visible. The blanket moved up and down, up and down, as the homeless man breathed. Day knelt and spoke softly.
“Sir?”
There was no answer, and Day wasn’t sure how to proceed. Although they were on a public thoroughfare, the street was this man’s home, and Day was intruding. Cautiously, he reached out and poked a spot on the dirty blanket. The dancing man came to life, erupting from the pavement as the blanket went flying off to the side. The man was filthy but fully alert. He held a knife in one hand, pointed at Day. The knife undulated, back and forth, much the way the man himself did every day in front of the police station.
“Mine,” the man said.
Day held his hands out in front of him and took a step back. He wasn’t worried about the knife. The man holding it clearly didn’t know how to use it, and Day didn’t think he would even try. The dancing man was only defending himself, not trying to harm the detective. Still, Day’s errand seemed foolish to him now. He had disturbed someone who clearly didn’t need any more trouble.
“Of course it’s yours. Of course it is. I’m a detective with the Yard, sir. I’d like to ask a favor of you.”
“A favor?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll dance for you.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“I know you. You’re the one gives me money. You’re the only bluebottle gives me money there.”
“Am I?”
“The only one.”
Day kept one hand up in front of him and reached into his pocket with the other. He pulled out a penny and held it out to the dancing man.
“I’d like to borrow your milk crate, if I may.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. He was clearly confused, accustomed to having people pay him to go away, not ask for anything more than to be allowed to ignore him.
“My…?”
“Your platform? The crate you dance on? I’d like to borrow it for the night.”
The dancing man looked down at his meager pile of belongings, partially covered by the cast-off blanket.
“You want my stage?”
“It’s just for the evening, and I’ll return it. And tomorrow I’ll give you another penny for doing nothing at all but trusting me for a few hours.”
“That’s the rub, ain’t it? Don’t trust no bluebottles nohow.”
“Not even the one who gives you money?”
The dancing man stared at Day for a long moment and then nodded, dropping his knife hand to his side. His other hand came up, palm out, thrust in Day’s direction.
“You gimme that coin first.”
Day held the penny up so that the beggar could see it clearly in the gaslight and then placed it in the man’s hand.
The dancing man sidled over to his belongings without taking his eyes off Day. He moved behind the crate and scooted it to the inspector with his foot. Day bent and picked up the crate. He straightened up, holding the wooden box in front of him like a shield.
“You’ll give it back?” the dancing man said.
“I’ll leave it outside the door when I leave tonight, and it will be there in the morning when you arrive to … well, when you arrive at your post tomorrow.”
“It’s too short for the bodies. The long dead ones won’t fit on there. Not with their legs on.”
The dancing man stared at Day, waiting for a response. Day nodded as if he understood and took a step backward.
“Ain’t crazy, you know.”
“I’m sorry?” Day said.
“I ain’t touched in the head like some folk out here is.” The dancing man nodded in the direction of the street behind Day, in the direction of all London. “Don’t got nothin’ else, is all. Don’t wanna go to the workhouse.”
Day nodded and turned to leave.
“I was there already. The workhouse. I was there and they sent me to work for you lot.”
Day turned back. “For the Yard, you mean?”
“For the long dead. I worked for the long dead. Like you.”
Day felt suddenly tired. Only a week into the job and the amount of crazy was already swamping him. He felt a momentary twinge of homesickness for the narrow lanes of Devon, for whitewashed storefronts and bicycles and birds.
“They brung the bodies to the place, the place where the long dead wait.”
“The morgue?”
“That’s what they called it, but weren’t nothing but tables on tables rowed up through the place, and all too short for them long, long bodies. Their legs all hung down over the edge. Hung down to the floor, but they didn’t walk out of there and they didn’t dance no more. They never did dance for me.”
“I can’t imagine Dr Kingsley would allow you anywhere near his work.”
“Weren’t no doctor there. Just us as was rounded up from the workhouse, and we cut on them bodies and they was still.”
Day looked at the man. The knife hung at his side, as if forgotten. The energy Day saw in the dancing man every morning was absent. The man’s effort to find a connection to his life and memories had drained his spirit.
“Rest,” Day said. “In the morning you’ll dance and this fever dream will be forgotten.”
“I’ll dance for you, bluebottle. I dance for ’em all, all the dead. Just like you do. Just like you. You and me.”
“You’re nothing like me. Go to sleep.”
“I got a choice, is all. Keep me out of that workhouse and I’ll show you how to dance. You watch me and you’ll learn. See if you don’t. Dancing’s good. And you gotta do it now ’cause the dead don’t remember how.”
Day turned and trotted back up the street as quickly as he could, but he could still hear the dancing man behind him long after he returned to the Yard.
“Dance, bluebottle, dance.”
13
Day was only a quarter of the way through the enormous pile of papers on his desk when Inspector Michael Blacker swung open the gate and entered the detectives’ warren of the common room. Blacker had his topcoat draped over an arm, and he stopped at Day’s desk on his way to the coat hooks at the back wall.
“Still here or returning?” Blacker said.
“What time is it?”
“Coming up midnight. I’d have been back here sooner if there were any police wagons to spare tonight. Always a shortage of those, it seems. What about you? Thought you had a pretty young wife to go home to.”
“I do. I mean…” Day sat back and tossed a sheaf of papers at the larger stack on the desk. The impact made a few of the topmost pages slide off the desk onto the floor. “There’s so much here.”
“Little’s files?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I came back. Couldn’t sleep knowing someone’s out there killing detectives.”
“I had no intention of being here this late. I thought I’d move Little’s papers over here and perhaps organize them so that I could start in on it all tomorrow morning, but I had no expectation that there would be so much to deal with.”
“No shortage of crime around here, Day. And no extra time in the day to deal with it all. Never any extra time in the day.” Blacker waved a finger at Day and grinned. “Your name is a blessing, Day. I’ve made a crack without even realizing it.”
Day sighed and bent down to pick up the fallen papers while Blacker finally hung up his coat and hat. Blacker came back to Day’s desk and pulled a chair up to the other side of it.
“You want some help with this?”
“Well, I wouldn’t turn it down.”
Blacker sat and pulled a folder from the stack.
“You’re still assuming Little came upon something in an investigation and that it led to his death, then?”
“I have no idea. This is a place to start. I thought I’d give his family the day to mourn before I call on them tomorrow.”
“Good of you.”
“They may know something, but i
t would be indecent to intrude upon them today.”
“Of course. What about the scene?”
“The train station? Kingsley seemed quite certain that he wasn’t killed there. I doubt very much I’d find anything more than the doctor already did.”
“If we could determine where he was killed…”
“Yes. Or who did it.”
Blacker smiled and nodded. “Point taken. This is a place to start,” he said.
He opened the folder and began to read. Day rummaged through the papers until he found the sheaf he’d been looking at and resumed where he’d left off. Little’s filing system seemed to be completely random. His case files had been shuffled together in no particular order. Day skimmed through case after case, trying to impose order on them, trying to find some possible connection between Little’s job and his death.
“What is that stench?”
Blacker was sniffing the air in the closed room.
“I didn’t want to sit at his desk, so I moved the files over here.”
“Right.”
“But I couldn’t find a box to do it. There’s so much here, I didn’t want to spend the night going back and forth. There are no boxes anywhere in this building.”
“Sir Edward likes to keep a clean workplace.”
“Clearly. I had to borrow a box.”
He pointed to the milk crate on the floor.
“How can a box stink up the entire room?” Blacker said.
“Its origins are dubious.”
“Well, we don’t need it now.”
“I promised the owner I’d leave it outside for him.”
“Outside is a good place for it.”
Blacker stood and picked up the crate. He left the room by the back hall and returned a minute later, wiping his hands on his vest.
“We need a window,” he said. “It’ll take all night for this odor to leave us.”
“In hindsight, I should have left the box where I found it. Once I was committed to getting it, I felt I had to follow through.”
“Good trait in a detective. Shall we get back to the business at hand?”
“There’s just … How could any one man possibly hope to solve so many cases?” Day said. He waved his hand over the stacks.
“How many do you have? How many cases have collected on your own desk in the week you’ve been here?”
“Including Little’s cases?”
“Just your own.”
“More than a dozen. I’ll never solve them all.”
“No, you won’t,” Blacker said. “So which case is most important? Of course, that’s been decided for you: The murder of another detective has to come first. But when you’ve solved that one, you’ll have to choose the next most important case from the stacks.”
“But how? How do you decide that?”
Blacker shrugged. “You just do. Give it time and you’ll get a feel for it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll go back to wherever you came from and probably live a much happier life.”
Day stared at the papers in front of him without seeing them. He looked up when Blacker began talking again and realized that the other detective had been watching him.
“Being an inspector with the Yard is a responsibility and an honor,” Blacker said. “You keep that front and center in your mind and it all tends to seem a bit more manageable.”
Blacker grinned his lopsided grin and bent his head to read. Day sighed and did the same.
Judging by Day’s preliminary count before moving the files over to his own desk, Little had been working on at least a hundred cases at once and had made almost no headway on any of them. Day tried to organize the files as he went along, creating three separate stacks on his desk.
In the first stack, he put Little’s notes on cases that seemed to Day to be solvable, things he could follow up on once Little’s own unfortunate case was resolved. That first stack was the largest of the three by far, but as the night wore on, fewer case files made their way there. Day became jaded as he worked. There was too much crime for any one man to care about it all.
A rash of burglaries in Highgate had stumped Little for some time. The intruder had entered through half-open windows, often two or three stories up, only to take small trinkets and baubles. The circumstances seemed to rule out all but an extremely agile child, but a smudged handprint on one window frame had led Little to conclude that a trained monkey was involved. The task of rounding up every organ grinder in the vicinity had apparently been too daunting for Little and, after forming the idea, he had abandoned it. Day made a note to follow up on the case to see if any organ grinders had been contacted and filed the case in his “probably solvable” stack. But it seemed to have no bearing on Little’s death.
The second stack of papers on Day’s desk was for cases that seemed on the surface to be dead ends. Either there were no witnesses or the injured parties were criminals themselves or, in many cases, Little had hit upon a false trail and Day could not see from his scant notes where to go from there. At first, few case notes went into this pile, but it grew disproportionately larger as Day grew more tired and disillusioned.
The remains of a newborn baby had been found behind an apartment wall, again in Highgate. It wasn’t uncommon for a couple to hide the miscarried evidence of a tryst, but Kingsley’s preliminary examination had led him to believe that the baby was buried after it was born, which made it murder. The couple currently living in the flat didn’t seem suspicious, and there was no evidence that they’d ever had a child. Moreover, they’d brought the matter to police after discovering the tiny body, which would seem to point to their innocence. According to the landlady, there had been a young woman living in the apartment some years before, but Little had found no leads on her current whereabouts. Day initially put the file in the stack of cases to be looked into, but as the evening went on, he withdrew it and moved it to the “dead end” pile.
Many other cases joined it there…
A boy named Fenn had been stolen from his front yard while playing. There were no witnesses, and Little had made a notation indicating that he might make inquiries among local chimney sweeps to see if the boy had been nabbed as a climber. Day couldn’t see that Little had ever followed up on his own suggestion, and the case seemed hopeless considering how many children disappeared every year.
A prostitute had been cut and strangled to death in the East End, and Little had made an alarming one-word notation: Ripper? But there was nothing to indicate that Jack the Ripper had returned to haunt the city, and the modus operandi was entirely different. The woman’s purse had been stolen, never a motivation for Saucy Jack. The case was clearly unsolvable unless Day wanted to devote all his energy to it.
A third pile was for cases that might have some bearing on Little’s death. This was the hardest criterion to judge for, but it was the reason he and Blacker were there.
“I might have something,” Blacker said.
“Little’s killer?”
“I don’t know. Listen: This man, John Robinson, was found in his bathtub with his hands and ankles bound and his beard shaved off. The razor was also used to slit his throat and was then left in the washbasin, covered in blood.”
“Good Lord.”
“Indeed. The man’s whiskers floated all about him in the bathwater.”
“Was he shaved before or after he was killed?”
“I think that would be impossible to say except that … wait.”
Blacker paused to continue reading the notes Little had left behind.
“Kingsley cut the victim up and determined that Robinson was already dead when his throat was slashed.”
“How was he killed?”
“His lungs were full of water. He drowned.”
“So the killer slashed the throat of a corpse.”
“And here, your question is answered. Bits of his whiskers were found in his lungs as well. So he was shaved before he was drowned.”
“And he was drowned before his throat was cut.”
“Someone bound him, shaved him, pushed him under the water, and then cut him open from ear to ear with the same razor used to shave him.”
The two men looked at each other across the cluttered desk. Blacker’s eyes were wide with excitement.
“Did Little have a clue?” Day said. “Was he on the trail of the killer?”
Blacker went back to reading, moving quickly through the file, flipping pages over as he read. Day waited patiently. It didn’t take long. Little had left them only six pages of notes on the case.
“There isn’t a lot here. A bloody handprint on the bathroom tile and a smashed pocket watch that was stopped at midnight.”
“Bizarre.”
“And attention-seeking, don’t you think?”
Day nodded. “Quite. So if Little was close to finding this killer—”
“Even if he wasn’t. Whoever did this might have been watching Little, rather than the other way around.”
“And killed him.”
“Both bodies were ill-treated.”
“In different ways.”
“But strange ways.”
Day tapped on a stack of case files. “Let’s keep looking.”
“This is it, Day. Don’t you think so?”
“It could very well be. But we should sift through the rest of this just in case.”
Blacker pursed his lips and returned to the files in front of him, but he appeared reluctant, and Day could tell that he wasn’t really reading anymore. Finally Blacker stopped and leaned forward.
“I want to talk to Kingsley about this,” he said.
“As do I, but Kingsley is most likely home in bed.”
“True.”
“And if we can sort out the rest of these files, we can both go home to our own beds.”
“Point taken.”
The two detectives read in silence for a few more minutes.
“The killer may have changed his methods because he wasn’t able to lure Little near enough to a bathtub,” Blacker said.