The Anatomy of Death (22 page)

“My family, Chief Inspector, has passions. Passions that you could probably not begin to understand.”

Pike did not flinch. He continued on his intended course. “There’s more. There is a weighty intelligence file on Derwent O’Neill, and among the many items sent over by the Dublin police, there are several reports of his taking uninvited liberties with young ladies—he has never been prosecuted on this count, mind. His victims have not been willing to face public attention in the courts.”

Victims? So her instincts about O’Neill had been more than correct. She sat back down and covered her eyes with her hands. Despite the warmth of the fire, she felt herself shudder.
She looked up to see Pike hobbling towards her. “Stay where you are—your knee,” she ordered, though her voice had lost its command.

“Damn and blast it, do you never cease playing the doctor?” Pike leaned over and clutched the arm of her chair. “Well then, let me play the policeman. Let me put it to you that you know your sister has been keeping company with O’Neill, and that the two of you fought over this, and that is the reason she is currently staying with friends and why your eyes showed signs of weeping when you arrived home this evening.”

She closed her eyes, fearing what else he might read in them. Tears caught in her throat but she would not allow them to spill. “You notice too much, Pike,” she said.

He remained where he was for a moment, looking down at her. Then he reached out and touched her arm. His hand lingered for a moment. The warmth of his touch brought unexpected comfort, and then something more. Deep blue eyes studied her face with concern and she found she could not meet them. “There now, I’m sorry for upsetting you,” he said. “I’m sure your sister is perfectly safe; she is, after all, a formidable young woman.”

Dody nodded, her energy for an altercation gone, like sparks up the chimney. “No, you were right to tell me. And it is true, you have merely confirmed my own suspicions about the man, and for that I am grateful,” she said, glad that her voice did not betray the internal tremor his touch had triggered. She patted his hand. “Now please, return to the chaise, I am quite all right now.”

Once he was settled again and her thoughts restored, she said, “The trouble is, Florence is not amenable to advice from
me at the best of times, and right now we are barely talking. I don’t know what I can do.”

“Then perhaps she will work him out for herself.”

Dody shook her head. “For all her brashness, she is quite the innocent. She has had little experience with that type of man. She’s also impulsive and blinkered. All she seems capable of thinking about these days is her wretched cause.”

Pike took a small silver case from his briefcase and offered Dody a cigarette, which she leaned over to take. She would have preferred her pipe but didn’t have the will to get up and fetch it from her bag in the hall.

He held up his matchbox. “I’d light it for you only …” Dody shook her head and indicated for him to throw the box, which she deftly caught with one hand. Pike looked impressed.

“Can you have O’Neill arrested?” she asked after lighting up and inhaling deeply.

“On what charge?”

“Oh, come now, since when have the police needed a reason to arrest someone?”

Pike furrowed his brows as if to say,
Please, not this jousting session again.
She knew she had overstepped the mark and immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that; not all policemen are tarred with the same brush.” She wanted to tell him that she feared the suffragettes and O’Neill were planning something dangerous together, but stopped herself. She had no proof as to what they were up to, and more important, she knew where her loyalties lay—not with the militants, but with her sister.

He made a good show of forgetting her flippant remark. “O’Neill is already being watched,” he said. “I can alert
Special Branch to be more vigilant, but other than that, there is little I can do.”

“I will send Florence a note warning her about O’Neill. I won’t say how I found out about him, just that it has come to my attention.” Dody left her cigarette in the ashtray and moved to the writing desk by the window. “I imagine she will take little notice of it, but it might at least open her mind to the possible dangers of the association.”
Not to mention the dangers of the bombs
, she added silently to herself.

“D
o you wish to reply to the note I delivered earlier, Miss Florence? Miss Dody was most particular I ask.” Fletcher carried a bulging sack of tools from the porch of Olivia’s flat and deposited it on the floor of the carriage.

Florence caught Olivia’s eye and looked briefly to the inky sky. “What, right now?” Eight o’clock at night outside Olivia’s flat was hardly the time or place to be entering into a correspondence with her sister. “I’ll see her tomorrow when this is all over,” she said. “Does she know you’ve brought me the carriage?”

“I’ve said nothing about it to Miss Dody or to Annie, miss. They think I’m just running errands. And anyhow, I really did need to see the coach maker about the new upholstery—”

“Good man,” Florence cut him off, no keener to enter a discussion about upholstery than she was to write a note to her sister. “And that policeman has gone?”

“Left this morning, took him to the station myself.”

“And good riddance,” Olivia said. “I’m afraid your sister has sunk considerably in my estimation, Flo. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that she would go harbour the enemy.”

Florence sighed. The news had upset her, too, though she was damned if she would let it distract her from the mission ahead.

“What was in the note anyway?” Olivia asked.

“Just Dody being a worrywart. Derwent O’Neill apparently has a reputation with the ladies. Probably some tosh told to her by that policeman.”

Olivia snorted. “I’d like to see O’Neill try something with me.”

Florence rubbed her arms to warm them, her eyes on the doorway of Olivia’s building. “Daisy and Jane. What’s keeping them?”

“Calm down, old girl, they’ll be moving as fast as they can.”

“I know, I know. I just can’t bear all this horrid waiting. Fletcher, go and fetch the trunk, please. They must have finished packing it by now.”

“Are you sure you can trust your man?” Olivia said as they watched him lumber towards the door.

“Fletcher’s a good egg; he told us about the policeman, didn’t he? Still, the less he knows about this operation, the better. He’ll go straight home after he’s dropped us off. We’ll make our own way back, even if it means walking—it’ll be easier without the equipment anyway.”

“I’m not piggybacking Jane.”

Florence laughed. Olivia always managed to lift her mood. “It’s a shame Molly Jenkins can’t make it; we could have used her muscle.”

“Probably locked in the house by her brute of a husband.”

Fletcher came out of the building, his back stooped under a large trunk. Jane and Daisy followed, Daisy giggling in high spirits. Olivia moved towards her and put an arm around her thin shoulder. “Try to keep calm now, Daisy dear.”

“But it’s all such a lark, ain’t it?”

Olivia did up the buttons on Daisy’s coat. “Now, you must tie your scarf around your face when we get there. That way, even if we are seen, no one will recognise you.”

Daisy responded with an angelic smile. “Yes, you, too, Olivia.”

Florence had been reluctant to allow Daisy along. She felt it was unfair to endanger the girl. Devoted to the cause though she was, Daisy was inclined not to think and she could easily, albeit unintentionally, betray them. But Daisy had begged and pleaded, and Florence had been outvoted. She turned to Jane Lithgow. “You packed the wires and the blasting caps?”

Jane Lithgow lifted her chin and said, “Of course. And the acid and the dynamite—they’re all in the trunk.”

Florence had her doubts about Jane, too. The regal Jane had never so much as pulled a weed from a window box, let alone survived a Fabian hockey match. How on earth, she wondered, did she think she could destroy a golf course?

T
he night was clear and cold. As the sound of clopping hooves faded into the distance, Florence and Jane carried the trunk to the grassy velvet of the eighteenth hole, where Daisy and Olivia, each illuminated by a shrouded lantern, had begun their work. Daisy was slicing through the turf next to the sandbunker with her shovel as if she were digging a
vegetable patch. Olivia stood at the pole that marked the hole, struggling to undo the strings of the club flag.

Florence blew into the scarf covering her nose and mouth, her breath unnaturally loud to her muffled ears. Every now and then the silence was broken by a whisper, the clank of metal, the hoot of an owl from the nearby copse. Daisy giggled. Florence hissed her silent, then saw what had set her off. Olivia had replaced the club flag with their suffragette pennant of purple, green, and white and was standing to attention before it. She made a caricature of a military salute, prompting another fit of giggles from Daisy. Florence hissed for silence again. The golf course had no watchman, but the police occasionally patrolled the neighbouring common and it was important that they remain as quiet as possible.

From the trunk Florence took a bucket and a small drum of water while Jane unwound the last of the padding around a wicker-covered bottle. She stood up, carefully holding it reverently in her arms as if it were a newborn babe. “Acid to water, acid to water …” Jane chanted.

“I can’t see what difference it makes,” Daisy said. “Take the kettle to the pot, or the pot to the kettle, it’s all the same tea.”

“If we do it wrong,” Jane said with relish, “we will blow ourselves up.”

Daisy took a hasty step back. “Really?” Olivia shot Jane a poisonous look before putting her arm around the terrified girl.

“That is what Mr. O’Neill said.”

“Oh, do try to get on, please,” Florence snapped, exasperated that Olivia, whom she could usually rely on, should choose this moment to become belligerent.

Florence poured the water from the small drum into the
bucket. Daisy gulped a breath as Jane removed the glass stopper from the bottle and slowly added the acid.

Florence looked at the rolling topography about her. “Where shall we put it?”

Olivia pointed to a gentle dip of smooth grass above the sandbunker.
As good a spot as any
, Florence thought as she carried the bucket over with the others following. Jane insisted that because she had such a fine copperplate, she should do the honours. She reached into her pocket and brandished a stiff bristle paintbrush.

“Hurry up then,” Florence said. “Before the bristles dissolve.”

They held the lanterns close as Jane etched out the letters with a steady hand onto the green. The air around them became filled with the sharp tang of smouldering grass.

Even Florence had to admit that Jane’s dedication to detail was worth the frustration—the words
VOTES FOR WOMEN
! were so meticulous, they could have been printed in
The Times.
Perhaps, she thought, one day those words really would make the headlines. She hoped she would be alive to see it.

Daisy clapped her hands. “Do you think the PM’s really going to see this?”

“Do you never listen? He’s playing golf here tomorrow morning, girl. He won’t be able to miss it,” Jane said.

Florence waved her hand for silence again. “All right, girls, well done—to the clubhouse now. Jane and Daisy, I want you to scout around the building to make sure there are no signs of life, within or without. Check the storage sheds around the back, too, if you can.”

The two women lifted their skirts and walked briskly towards the gravel parking area and clubhouse beyond.

“We’ll leave everything we don’t need behind,” Florence said to Olivia as they bent to lift the trunk, much lighter now without the bottle of acid, the water drum, and the bucket.

The clubhouse loomed magnificently out of the darkness, its Grecian-style front entrance glowing in the moonlight like a temple. How fitting, Florence thought, that one group of oppressors should pay homage in this way to another. She smiled to herself—this lot of oppressors were in for a surprise.

They placed the trunk carefully at the top of the steps and began to assemble the explosives according to Derwent O’Neill’s instructions. With purple, green, and white ribbons, they tied bundles of dynamite to each of the front pillars and embedded the blasting caps. Then came the tricky part of twisting the blasting caps to the detonator wires. Derwent had made them practise this at Olivia’s flat wearing gloves. At the time, it had gone quite smoothly, but the real thing proved far more of a challenge with nerves and the cold making their hands shake.

“I wish I could take my gloves off,” Olivia complained.

“Well, you can’t. Remember what Derwent said about fingerprints?”

“Sounds like a load of codswallop to me,” Olivia said, soldiering on.

At last the caps were connected and Olivia began to unravel the spools, trailing the wire first across the parking area, then the defiled eighteenth hole, and finally over the rough towards a small copse. Florence followed behind with the oak detonation box, the last of the objects from the discarded trunk. When studying the plans of the golf course earlier, she had estimated the distance from the front entrance to the copse to be about eighty yards. To her disappointment, she discovered it was closer to a hundred.

“Blast,” she said. “I’d hoped to use the copse for cover when we detonated the explosives. I should have come during the day and measured it for myself instead of relying on those silly plans.”

“In this bastion of male supremacy, that would have been harder than what we’re doing now,” Olivia said. “One whiff of woman on the wind and they’d probably have set the hounds on you.”

“I’m jolly glad they don’t have any hounds. Ah well, no harm done, the place seems deserted enough.”

They felt more confident now they were away from the clubhouse. With steadier hands, it took only a few seconds to wind the wires under the butterfly screws of the detonator box.