City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (22 page)

“I heard your voice and now I see
you.  I didn’t hear the voices of two.”

“This is Officer Davy Mabrey,” Trevor
said, although he felt ridiculous shouting into a crack.  “We are both from
Scotland Yard and we need a little of your time.  May we come in?”

Finally, the door swung all the way
open and there stood before them a huge woman several inches taller than Trevor
and towering as much as a foot over Davy.  Her head was flat and as round as a
wooden bucket and her thin gray hair was cropped short.  Nor had John Harrowman
exaggerated about the amount of facial hair she sported.  Her hands and arms
looked strong and powerful, the fingers stubby, and her voice was deep.

“Come in if you must, but the likes
of you I do not trust.”

“Thank you, Miss Minford,” said
Trevor, as he and Davy entered.  The house smelled, if possible, worse than the
waterfront.  Maud went back to her fireplace and stirred something cooking in a
pot.  A broken loaf of bread lay on the table.

“Tis time you two removed your
masks.  What are these questions you must ask?”

“Miss Minford, I understand you are
midwife to some of the local women?  Is that true?” asked Trevor, a bit
unnerved by the woman’s damned rhyming.

“That be my trade for which I am
paid.”

“I understand you perform another
service for these ladies, if needed.”

Maud jerked her shoulders, but made
no comment.

“I’m not here to pass judgment on
you, Miss Minford,” Trevor went on.  “And I don’t particularly care what you do
for a living.  We have come to ask questions about your whereabouts on a
certain evening.”

“It’s evil deeds that plant bad
seeds.”

“Why must you continue to speak in
these silly poems?” Davy muttered.

“Is it a crime that I speak in
rhyme?”

“Let her be, Davy.  Where were you on
the evening of September thirtieth?”

“In my home.  I did not roam.”

“Can anyone attest to that?” She gave
him a scathing look and shook her head.  “How do you feel about your clients,
Maud?”

“I’m just a gardener with a hoe.  I
have no friend and have no foe.”

“These women that come to you for
your special services.  Do you wish them pain and feel they deserve it?  Trying
to teach them a lesson, are you?”

“They all come crying, help me Maudy,
get me back to being naughty.”

“We’ve heard, Maud, that some of
these women die after being in your care.”

“Some of them bleed, when I pluck their
weed.  Some of them never recover, when they take too soon a lover.  I do them
all the same.  I take no blame.”

Davy abruptly leaned across the
sloping wooden table, surprising Trevor with his forcefulness.  “I have trouble
believing you don’t recall where you were on September 30,” he said.  “It’s a
famous night, isn’t it?  Every paper in London screaming the next day about the
double murders, and it’s all anyone in any bar in London has talked about
since.  Yet you tell us you don’t remember the evening.”

This direct assault seemed to rattle
the woman a bit.  She walked over to her stove and poked a long bent spoon into
her stew, stirring awkwardly.  “You ask me fast, now let me think.  I probably
sat somewhere to drink.”

“Your stew smells very good, Maud,”
Trevor said smoothly.   “I bet you bake your own bread, too.  May I try a
piece?”

Davy all but rolled his eyes. He knew
Trevor was just checking to see the creature’s dominant hand, but he could
hardly believe his boss was willing to eat anything in this filthy room.

“Could you cut me a piece, Maud?”
Trevor repeated.

“Cut your own, or do you now sit on
the throne?”

“I do not wish to remove my gloves,
dear lady.  Could you please cut me a slice?”

Maudy jabbed the spoon back down in
the stew and sternly walked to the table.  She grabbed a long knife, sliced off
a piece of bread with her right hand, and slammed it down in front of him.

“Are you here for a crime or just
here to waste my time?”

“We’re finished.” 

Trevor pushed away from the table
with Maudy still giving him a miserable stare.  Davy opened the door and both
of the men thanked her, in the automatic manner of the Yard, before heading
back up the alley to Atlantic Street.  Once out of sight of the shack, Trevor
began spitting out the bread.

“I was beginning to think your
stomach was made of iron,” Davy laughed as he watched him shuddering and
wiping. 

Trevor laughed too, finally removing
the last few crumbs from his lips.  “She was certainly large enough to be the
Ripper and perhaps even had a motive.  It’s clear she hates her patients or
clients or whatever you care to call them.  But her skill with cutlery was
quite sloppy, don’t you think?”

“Her riddles had me almost insane.”

“Did they rattle your brain?  Gad,
she has me doing it.  The rhyming business is interesting, especially when you
consider that the message slipped beneath my office door was set out like a
poem.  But could such an outlandish creature have strolled into Scotland Yard
unnoticed?”

“Dressed as a man she could.”

“Perhaps.  But there’s still the fact
she appears to be right handed and lacks basic medical skill.  I don’t feel
she’s our Jack, but we’ll still keep an eye on her, repellant as that task
might be.”

The dock front was jammed with activity,
for apparently several boats had just come into the harbor and the men were
streaming onto land. Itching for fresh food, fresh women, or just the chance to
stretch their legs.  They stumbled unevenly down the sidewalks, as if the land
beneath their feet was swaying, and hooted back and forth to each other.  You
can feel their wild energy, Trevor thought, what it’s like for them to walk
free after being cooped up on their ships.  They’ll be back at sea within days
or sometimes even hours, so whatever pleasures they manage to soak up in the
moment will have to last them for weeks.  It was easy to see how such explosive
energy could very quickly come to violence. 

They had only gone a few strides up
the street when they passed a sailor wearing a dark pea coat, a felt hat, and a
red neckerchief tied around his neck which reminded Trevor of the red fiber he
still carried in his journal.  He casually mentioned this to Davy and they
followed the man to the breakfront where they passed another man with the same
type of red scarf.  And then another.  Soon, he and Davy had passed dozens of
sailors, all in the same dress.

“It’s like a bloody nightmare, isn’t
it, Sir?  There must be a hundred of those scarves right here.”

“Yes,” said Trevor, laughing despite
himself.  “No wonder the doctor thought I was daft.  Trevor and his fibers. So
this is what we come down to.  Mad Maudy claims to have no memory of the
evening in question, but in this part of town, where alcohol runs in the street
like rainwater, hardly anyone seems to have memories.  Most of them have
alibis, yes, more than you can shake a stick at, but considering the alibis
were provided by people just as memory-deficient and alcohol-saturated as
themselves, what good are they?”

“So all these interviews, all three
hundred of them, all these days….it all was useless?”

”Nothing’s useless. But the
interviews are the old way, Eatwell’s method, and the deeper we go into this
mess the more I see that my first impulse was the right one.  This case won’t
be solved through interviews, through trying to trick someone into using their
left hand or their right hand, and it sure as hell won’t be solved by going up
and down a row of barstools, listening to a group of drunken sailors swear
their mate was right beside them on the night in question.  This case will be
solved by forensics.  I always knew it.  I just didn’t have the faith to push
it through in the beginning.  We need hard physical evidence.”

“But not the neck scarves, eh Sir?”

Trevor laughed.  “Not the bloody neck
scarves.  Come on, boy, let’s head back for the Yard.  I’ve got a better plan
now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1:20  PM

“So we can have use of the mortuary?”

“Certainly,” Phillips said.  “Take
the front table, but I don’t understand precisely what you plan to do with the
space.”

“It’s the beginning of my forensics
laboratory,” Trevor said.  “Davy’s off sending a wire to Paris requesting
copies of their latest procedure papers and I intend to try to reproduce their
experiments here.  Eatwell doesn’t have to know –“

Phillips waved his hand.  “And he
shan’t.  Would you like to take a final look at Stride?  She’s going in the
ground tomorrow.”

Just part of the job, Trevor thought,
walking resolutely toward the small room at the back of the mortuary where the
coroner’s assistants were beginning the embalming process.  The body lay on the
table, wrapped in its muslin shroud, but Trevor noted that burial clothes were
draped over the camera tripod.  Presumably after her blood was drained and the embalming
fluid was pumped into the woman’s veins she would be dressed, lowered into her
coffin, and photographed. 

“Stride is coming along smoothly
enough, but Eddowes took us half the morning,” Phillips said, coming up behind
him, a cup in his shaky hand.  “Even after we stitched her up tight, her wounds
were so numerous and profound that the embalming fluid continued to leak.  She
went into the box rather wet, I’m afraid.  Would you like tea?”

Any number of graceless jokes sprang
to Trevor’s lips, but he bit them back.  Detectives thrived on dark humor, and he
considered their sarcasm and perversity a defense against the horrors of the
street, and thus necessary to their calling.  Upstairs, the Yard was a bit of a
boy’s club, and, if unchecked, the boisterous spirit among the bobbies could
lead to disrespect bordering on the edge of desecration.  Trevor made it a
point not to think of what had happened to one girl, by the looks of her likely
no more than fifteen, whose naked and violated body had been found on the
outskirts of London last Christmas morning - and who then had the additional misfortune
of traveling to the morgue by means of a paddy wagon full of coppers angry over
having drawn a holiday shift.  Inspectors turned a blind eye to certain
matters.  The policy of releasing minor offenders “at the discretion of the
arresting officer” had led to thieves bribing their way out of jail with the
very goods they had just stolen, or prostitutes who, with a few minutes on
their knees before a bobby, found their way back to the streets almost
immediately.

And so it was an imperfect system,
one created and maintained by imperfect men.  Trevor did not consider the
police force especially corrupt or particularly blameworthy and instead viewed
this myriad of small lapses as the natural resort of a group of men left entirely
too much on their own.  Men deprived of female company quickly became fearsome
creatures, and Trevor believed you could argue that civilization was in fact
the invention of women, or at least the invention of the men who wanted to
please them.   If it were not for the ladies, Trevor often proclaimed, especially
after a few beers, humanity would doubtlessly still be roaming the forests in
animal skins.

But here, here in this small brightly
lit room far below the surface of Scotland Yard, things were different.   The
atmosphere was as hushed and decorous as a classroom – no, Trevor decided, as
he seated himself in the lone wooden chair in the corner.  No, it was more like
a chapel.  The young assistant named Severin treated the long thin body of the
woman beneath the shroud with a palpable dignity, careful to cover the parts
not necessary to his work, lifting and lowering each limb with a gentle touch. 
He had slipped needles into various veins at her ankles, throat, wrists, and
somewhere between the strips of cloth draped about her torso while the even-younger
lad, whose name Trevor could not recall, was moving from one spot to another,
checking the tubes.  The blood was flowing out of her, flowing fast, and since
this was the one that the Ripper didn’t have his fair time with, there was
plenty left to give.  Severin and the lesser assistant circled around the table
in a ritualistic manner that reminded Trevor of a priest and altar boy. 

Could he work in this room?  Or would
the very solemnity drive him mad?  He would have to remember to tell Davy there
could be no laughing down here, deep in this inner sanctum, no tobacco or belching
or scratching, no whistling or passing of gas.  The tubes running from the
woman’s body were changing from red to pink and her slender white feet, poking
from beneath the shroud, glowed like marble.  Severin removed the needle from
her ankle and pulled the sheet over that part of her body too, hiding her soles
from the insolent eyes of men.  Something in his manner made Trevor ashamed of
himself. 

The insertion of the embalming fluid
seemed to go well enough, although it did require a towel to be tightly tied
around the woman’s throat to make sure that everything that was flowing in did
not just as swiftly flow back out.  Severin asked if they needed photographs
and Phillips said “Not now.  When she’s dressed.”  Glancing back at Trevor he
added, “I thought it would be prudent to record the full extent of the wounds
exhibited by Eddowes.”  Trevor nodded automatically, although it took him a
moment to understand the doctor’s meaning.   They must have photographed the Eddowes
woman’s naked form.  Trevor guessed she lay in the other coffin in the room,
the one that had already been nailed shut.