The Murderer's Apprentice

by The Murderer's Apprentice (retail) (epub)

  ‘I didn’t see a hat. It must have fallen off.’

  ‘Then you will need to find it. If it fell off when she was attacked, that could give you the exact spot, couldn’t it? I mean,’ Lizzie added. ‘They all wear hats, don’t they? All those girls?’

  It was true. Dressing up to look one’s best was part of attracting trade. I had seen prostitutes, soliciting the wealthier clientele, dressed like fashion plates. Even poor little drabs loitering round the docks and tavern doors wore some sort of headwear pinned to their curls, real or false. Remembering the crowd that had already gathered in the alley by the time Morris and I had arrived, I thought our chances of finding anything, let alone such a desirable lost object as a hat, were slim.

  ‘Someone will have found it and made off with it,’ I said. ‘To have searched for it last night in such poor visibility would have been useless.’

  ‘How about a shawl?’

  ‘No, no shawl that I saw.’ Her quizzing was beginning to unsettle me. ‘Where are you going with this, Lizzie?’

  ‘Oh,’ said my wife vaguely, ‘nowhere in particular. Only, you see, I wondered if perhaps she was inside a house when she died.’

  Now, that did give me something to think about. I wondered if Morris and I would find ourselves trawling the brothels.

  Chapter Four

  My first task the next morning was to call in at the Yard to ask if anyone had reported a missing young woman. No one had and I was not particularly surprised. I had decided that the Bellinis were probably right, and the unidentified body in their refuse bin was that of a prostitute, one of the many girls working in the area. The pimps and brothel madams who control the trade seldom report the death or disappearance of one of their girls. All too often the girl has died either at their hands or at the hands of a client. In either instance, questions from the police are not welcome. Disposal of the body would be the priority for those responsible. But why in the Bellinis’ yard? Why not carry the body, under cover of the fog, to the river? Young women were fished from the Thames with depressing regularity.

  I next made my way to the undertaker’s establishment to which the body had been taken, to meet there with Dr Mackay. I would have preferred Mr Carmichael at St Thomas’ to carry out any post-mortem examination, especially as there was the complication of the body having been so long at a cold temperature, and the time of death likely to be difficult to fix. But every medical man in the capital was rushed off his feet. In any event, Mackay had made a good impression on me at our brief meeting.

  The fog had lifted very slightly but the day was young. As it progressed it would worsen. The funeral parlour, as might be expected from its Piccadilly location, proved to be an impressive place. Marble pillars framed the door. A plate-glass window, draped in purple velvet, displayed an arrangement of wax flowers beneath a glass dome and a pair of sorrowful stone cherubs.

  The undertaker was a prosperous-looking fellow, matching his establishment. He had muttonchop whiskers and wore a good quality frock coat and a figured silk waistcoat, both of deepest black. The sombre colour of the waistcoat was relieved by the splendour of the heavy gold ‘Albert’ chain draped across it. However, he looked depressed, and not just professionally so. Mr Protheroe felt that his business reputation had just been dealt a blow. In this, he was at one with the Bellinis.

  ‘You must understand, Inspector Ross,’ he declared, standing before me with one palm pressed on his waistcoat like the popular image of Napoleon, and using the other to make large gestures. ‘You must surely appreciate the embarrassment to us here at having a – a woman of the streets lying on the slab in the preparation room.’

  He made a wide sweep of the hand towards the rear of the premises to indicate the location of the slab. ‘It is best Carrara marble,’ he added, apparently forgetting for the moment that I hadn’t come to ‘make arrangements’. ‘I’ve had some very distinguished deceased lying on it.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have troubled you, Mr Protheroe, but there is something of a shortage of space in the public and hospital morgues at the moment.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the fog.’ Protheroe nodded sagely. ‘It’s taken off a fair number of people. Of course, we wish to oblige the police. But only last week we made the final arrangements for Sir Hubert—’

  I decided to cut short further details of the distinguished dead he’d buried and asked if Dr Mackay had arrived.

  The medical gentleman had been about his business for the last hour, confirmed Protheroe gloomily. He then called upon a whey-faced youth to conduct me to the rear of the premises.

  Mackay’s stocky form was bending over the body. He was in his shirtsleeves; his stretched arms and fists resting on the Carrara marble. His ulster coat hung from a hook on the wall. He looked up as I came in and the frown on his face faded as he stretched his hand across the corpse to shake mine briefly. In better light and more at leisure to study him, I put his age at no more than thirty. He had blunt features and a freckled skin, and even when he wasn’t frowning he still looked truculent. Then we both looked down at the corpse. Rigor had almost entirely passed off, as Mackay had suggested it would do, and she lay flat. It was an even more pathetic sight, now that she was stripped.

  ‘How old, would you say, Dr Mackay?’ I asked him.

  ‘Seventeen, possibly eighteen.’

  ‘No older?’

  ‘Not in my view.’ Mackay spoke crisply.

  There was a brief silence. The gas mantles hissed. Even so early in the day artificial light was needed in this gloomy place. I wondered if Mackay was a man of few words. If so, that wasn’t helpful to me. I wanted information.

  ‘Any suggestion as to the cause of death?’

  ‘She received a sharp blow to the back of the head. There is clotted blood, beneath the hair…’ Mackay indicated the spot. ‘Also, she has suffered a broken neck.’

  ‘Could a fall on to cobbles have caused both injuries?’ I asked.

  ‘The blow to the head could be due to a fall. If so, she fell backwards. That alone might not have been sufficient to kill her, though it is not impossible. The broken neck would certainly have done it. I shall put that in my report as the cause of death.’

  Mackay hesitated then admitted, ‘I attended the usual number of autopsies when I was a medical student and I’ve done a couple since then, in my time as a police surgeon. But they don’t give us the interesting ones. They send those off to St Thomas’ or somewhere like that.’

  ‘For Mr Carmichael’s attention?’

  ‘He is the expert,’ Mackay agreed, a touch wistfully. Then in a burst of confidence, he confessed, ‘My own particular interest is in blood – above all, bloodstains.’

  ‘Bloodstains!’ I exclaimed.

  For the first time Mackay grew enthusiastic. ‘Oh, yes, bloodstains make a fascinating subject for study. We still know so little. There are murderers walking free out there in the streets of London because we cannot confidently identify a stain as blood, particularly if it is old, dry and perhaps degraded. Such methods as are used, you will know about the guaiacum test, are unreliable. Research is being done, particularly on the continent, also in America. I am reasonably sure, from my own work, that I shall soon be able to declare with confidence whether or not a dried stain is blood, even if it has deteriorated.’

  Mackay slapped his hands together. ‘Now then, this is what I can tell you. After she was killed she, that is to say her dead body, was propped in a seated position on a flat surface. I suggest on the floor. Her knees were drawn up under her chin, and her hands rested on the floor to either side of her.’

  Perhaps I looked startled by this sudden burst of graphic detail. Mackay took my surprise for doubt. He walked to the nearest wall, dropped down and sat with his back against it, his knees drawn up beneath his chin and his hands trailing on the floor to either side, as he had just described. ‘Like this, you see?’

  He scrambled to his feet and returned to the body on the slab and gently rolled it on to one si
de. ‘Now then, look here, Mr Ross, if you will! Obvious pressure points on the lower buttocks, showing white against the purple. There are similar marks on the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, particularly in the toes of the feet. That is due to her wearing boots with stacked heels.’ He gestured towards a table against the far wall. ‘They’re over there.

  ‘The purple discoloration tells us how the blood drained and settled following death, the white the position in which the body lay or was propped,’ he continued. ‘Most importantly, the body remained in that seated position for, oh, seven or eight hours. If it were not so, the pattern of lividity would have been disturbed. Also, during that time, rigor began to spread throughout the body. All the time the body was in a very cold place. After that time it was moved and finally deposited where it was found in that refuse bin.’

  ‘You are sure of this, Doctor? You are very precise.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ returned Mackay confidently. ‘Because lividity had time to become fixed. Moreover, she had stiffened in that seated position. Whoever disposed of her body could not straighten her first. So, when she was dropped into the refuse bin, she was already in that curled position as you and I both saw her.’ He paused. ‘It would have made her body difficult to dispose of, her being huddled as she was. The refuse bin must have appeared the ideal repository.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Mackay,’ I said at last after some moments of silence. ‘You have painted a very clear scenario. When I first saw the deceased she lay in that rubbish bin and appeared to be curled up on her side. I thought she had been thrown down in a way that caused that position. Now you tell me that is not so, but she was already stiff with her legs bent both at the knees and hips. If the body had been moved earlier, say, only a couple of hours after death—’

  ‘She might not yet have stiffened; and lividity wouldn’t have had time to become fixed. Thus I am satisfied the position in which the dead girl’s body was stored, prior to being moved to that bin, was as I described to you. She was propped in that position almost at once following death, and so she sat, or the body did, for the period of time I mentioned, or even less. Lividity can become fixed within six hours, so can rigor.’

  Mackay drew breath. ‘But it’s seldom possible to be as precise as the police always like a medical man to be! And, as I have already remarked to you, the very low temperature confuses the issue. She was found on Monday morning. She had presumably been moved overnight beforehand. She died on Sunday, therefore. Much more I can’t say, well, not for certain. So, don’t ask me to look at my watch and tell the hour at which the murderer struck.’

  I had been given a lot to think about, even so. I decided to explore a new line of inquiry. ‘She appears well nourished,’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh, yes, she is,’ he agreed. In another burst of loquacity he added, ‘And has been since childhood.’

  I pushed for more detail. ‘The girls who work the streets are normally stunted in growth, from impoverished backgrounds or the workhouse.’

  ‘This girl wasn’t working as a prostitute!’ Mackay retorted. He looked up and met my gaze directly. His chin had a pugnacious thrust to it. He expected me to argue.

  I was startled and must have looked it because Mackay relaxed and gave a wry grin. ‘You assumed she was,’ he said. ‘Well, seeing she was lying dead in a back alley, as I understand it, it’s not surprising.’

  ‘In a backyard, with a gate into an alley,’ I corrected him automatically and he accepted it with a nod. In my own mind I was bitterly regretting having made a facile assumption, and accepting the opinion of the Bellinis that the dead girl worked on the streets. ‘You are sure, Dr Mackay?’

  ‘She was a virgin,’ he said simply.

  I had a far more complicated case on my hands than first thought; that, to say the least of it. Now the absence of outdoor clothing, that so worried Lizzie, seemed more than odd. It could be deeply significant. Now we must rule out the possibility that the victim had been carried to that cramped backyard from some brothel. Now, much more alarmingly, it was possible she been carried there from some outwardly respectable house in the neighbourhood. This was turning out to be an investigation with far-reaching ramifications.

  I walked to the nearby table on which her clothing had been neatly laid out. The dress, which had looked grey in the light from Morris’s lantern, could now be seen to be mauve. Did that, I wondered, mean she was in ‘half-mourning’? The period etiquette decreed for deepest black was over, but it was not yet acceptable for her to wear bright colours. I felt the quality of the cloth: good woollen weave. If she, or her family, could afford the extensive wardrobe needed for the time of bereavement, and buy the best, well, they weren’t poor. They might, of course, have taken out the ‘mourning garments insurance’ popular among the less well-off. But the tiny contributions to such a fund would result in a limited payout.

  Her underthings were also of good quality and her stockings of silk. She’d worn little black button boots, with the high heels remarked on by Mackay, and rounded toes. They held a charm all of their own, and I picked one up. The leather was very soft, again of good quality, and when I peered into it I saw a maker’s stamp just below the ankle rim. The boots came from the workbench of Tobias Fitchett and Son of Salisbury. They appeared quite new. I was getting steadily more worried. I knew now from Mackay that these were not the boots of a streetwalker, but clearly neither were they those of a factory worker or a housemaid. These were the boots of a young lady. When such a young female is found bludgeoned in a refuse bin, alarm bells begin to ring very loudly indeed. The newspapers! I thought in dismay. This is exactly the sort of case the gentlemen of the press like. That, in turn, meant it was exactly the sort of case Superintendent Dunn, my immediate superior, did not like.

  Mackay had joined me at the table. He’d noticed the bootmaker’s mark. ‘Trace her from that?’ he suggested.

  ‘We might get a lead. I hope so.’

  ‘Sad business,’ muttered Mackay, more to himself than to me. ‘At least, Protheroe out there will be cheered to learn his Carrara marble isn’t being defiled by a strumpet.’

  I was still studying the boots, turning them to study the soles. ‘It’s always a sad business,’ I said automatically.

  ‘Yes, of course, I hadn’t intended to sound…’ Mackay’s voice tailed away apologetically.

  ‘It’s easy to become hardened to such sights,’ I consoled him. ‘Police detectives and police surgeons both, we see too many like that. Oh, and Protheroe was anxious to tell me about the marble being from Carrara.’

  Mackay, perhaps hoping to redeem himself in my eyes, pointed at the soles of the boots. ‘Mostly worn indoors,’ he said. ‘Or just to walk a few steps down scrubbed front steps to a carriage, perhaps? I can see they are fairly new, but in this weather, if they had been worn more than half a dozen times outdoors, the soles would be much more discoloured: mud, water…’

  ‘You should join us at Scotland Yard, Dr Mackay!’ I put down the boots and turned my head to smile at him, to show I bore him no ill will for his earlier flippancy.

  ‘Oh, a doctor often has to be a detective, too,’ he said. Very gently he lifted one small dead hand. ‘For example, she has done no manual work,’ he said. He turned the hand so that it was palm uppermost. ‘The skin is soft. The fingernails are well cared for and intact.’

  In a way the sight of that hand was more disconcerting than the sight of the whole body. The way the doctor held it made it appear the girl was asking me for something. Help? It was too late for that. Justice? One could only hope. It would not be for want of trying on my part.

  ‘Cold in here,’ said Mackay, setting the hand down again in the same gentle way. ‘And cold as charity out there in the fog. She might just as well have been kept on ice the whole time.’ Mackay looked up at me and with more emotion than I would have expected from him, added fiercely, ‘This is a foul business.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Do you think you have a chance of
finding the wretch who did this? Or even if you’ll be able to put a name to the poor lassie?’ he asked.

  ‘We shall do our best. Mr Protheroe will make a fuss, but I must leave the body here until a photographer and his apparatus can be brought. If no one comes forward immediately to identify her, we’ll have need of an image of her.’

  Mackay looked startled. ‘Good grief!’ he said. Then he flushed and added quickly, ‘You know what’s necessary, of course. But, speaking personally, I have never managed to come to terms with this fashion for making photographic images of the dead. I have known bereaved parents who must have such an image made of a child. I suppose it is cheaper than engaging an artist to make a portrait as the wealthy do. But still, I would rather remember a child as the poor little soul was when alive.’

  ‘This will not be a sentimental image and her nakedness will be covered. It will have a practical purpose.’ I indicated the girl’s garments on the bench. ‘All the evidence tells us this girl was not from a poor background, or an institution, nor did she earn a living on the streets. Therefore, someone of consequence is missing her; and will insist on knowing what has become of her. I would expect her disappearance to be reported to the police soon. It may already have been done, somewhere, and the news not yet reached us at the Yard.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Mackay. ‘You know what needs to be done.’ He went to a basin in the corner and washed his hands briskly. Then he unhooked his ulster and began to struggle into it. He wanted to be gone from here. I didn’t blame him.

  I was confident my decision to send a photographer was correct. A voice in my head warned, Superintendent Dunn will not like the expense! Nor would he like the expense of my travelling to Salisbury the following day to track down the origin of the boots. But go I must, first sending a telegram to the police in Salisbury to let them know I was coming. The costs were rising and Dunn’s voice, in my head, was near-hysterical. Silently I told the voice that it was not in charge of this investigation: I was.