The Anatomy of Death (8 page)

He took his watch from his pocket and let out a low sigh. “I’m afraid I’m running out of time, ladies. I have an engagement to attend. But before you go, I’d like to hear your personal opinions of Lady Catherine. Did she have any enemies that you are aware of? Anyone else who might benefit from her death other than Mr. Hugo Cartwright?”

“She was loved by everyone who knew her. Her only enemies were in the government and the police force,” Florence said darkly.

“Perhaps not so surprising, Miss McCleland; she was imprisoned for spitting at one police officer and physically assaulting another, and while in prison engaged in a hunger strike. The police and prison authorities have better things to do with their time than force-feeding recalcitrant prisoners, I assure you. But of course you know this. You yourself were incarcerated for throwing rocks at the prime minister’s motorcar.” Florence stiffened in her chair, but said nothing. Dody realised that while Pike might have seen her side of the autopsy argument, he showed no sympathy to the plight of the suffragettes.

“And you, Dr. McCleland,” Pike went on, fixing his eyes upon Dody. “Did you have an opinion of Lady Catherine?”

“I did not know her well enough to form an opinion.”

Dody’s opinion was that Lady Catherine was similar to the Pankhursts: domineering, controlling, and completely inflexible in her views, antagonising militants and nonmilitants alike. But this was hardly something she could say in front of her sister.

A
little while later Dody and Florence stepped from the building into the swirling river mist. To hear Dody and that policeman talk so matter-of-factly about Catherine’s death had been almost unbearable to Florence. The anguish and frustration that had been building up in her since they’d first entered the policeman’s office finally burst its banks.

“He made it all sound like a childish game!” she sobbed. “I know you never cared much for Catherine and I appreciate that you said nothing negative about her to that unprepossessing little man. But Catherine was one of the best friends I had, devoted to the end. You might not remember this, but she put me up when I ran away from home, never telling Mother and Poppa where I was.”

At seventeen she had fallen in love with a literary acquaintance of their mother’s, taking it for granted that her liberal parents would agree to the marriage. But when they discovered the liberties the thirty-two-year-old poet had been taking with her, they refused to give their consent and banished him from their house. Florence had run away to London then, expecting her beloved to join her there. He never did. It was discovered later that he had a wife and two children secreted away in Blackpool. She still cringed with shame whenever she thought about it. Bloody men, she thought, shame they were
necessary at all. With the exception of Poppa, the world would be a better place without them.

“And it was Catherine who convinced me to go back to Mother and Poppa,” she went on, “telling me I needed to focus on other people more and less on myself; basically that I was a spoilt little brat. She encouraged me to help in the soup kitchen and with other charitable works, and it was through her that I joined the WSPU.”

Dody pulled Florence to a stop under a lamplight, brushed a tear from her cheek, and put her arm around her shoulders. “There, there,” she said.

Dear Dody. Florence did not know what she would do without her big sister. She kept on talking through her sobs. “But, Dody, how on earth are we to get justice for Catherine when no one on the police force will take us seriously? I had staked my hopes on that man Pike, but now I see he is as sarcastic and corrupt as the rest of them.”

“I’m not of quite the same opinion, Florence,” Dody said as they made their way arm in arm to their waiting carriage. “I think Pike would have been happy to let me reexamine Catherine if not for Shepherd. I’m thinking he might have doubts about the autopsy himself.”

“Well, his doubts don’t help us, do they? What are we going to do?”

Dody gazed around the foggy street as if making sure they were not being observed. “Don’t worry; I have something up my sleeve. Literally.”

Under the gaslight near their carriage, she revealed a police truncheon within the sleeve of her coat. “It was lying on the sergeant’s desk in the waiting room. I took it when he was helping you on with your cape.”

Florence felt her face break into a smile, marvelling at her sister’s cleverness. “You’ve stolen it!”

“Borrowed. You see, Florence, even I will bend the law sometimes, if I think the cause is just.”

“But what use is it to us?” Florence said, dashing away her remaining tears.

“I’ll tell you as we go, but first we must find a chemist’s shop that is still open.”

P
ike rarely turned down a request from the landlord at the Three Bells to entertain his guests, and tonight was a particularly special occasion—the wedding reception of the landlord’s daughter. Pike’s knee never seemed to pain him at the piano, and he manipulated the pedals with a jaunty spring that had long been missing from his walking gait. As his fingers melted into the piano keys, he left the unsettling scene in his office behind. How the superintendent was going to get away with a shoddy autopsy on a high-profile society figure wasn’t his problem.

He had started the evening with a selection of traditional ballads and romances, joined by a quartet of young women from the Southwark workhouse. He’d first heard them sing in his local church, and whenever an appropriate opportunity arose, he asked them to join him when he played.

“But you’re not staying for the whole night,” he’d warned.
“Functions like this tend to get a bit out of hand, bawdy even. I don’t want your innocent young minds corrupted.” To which the girls had responded with a mixture of disappointment and mirth: “That’s right, Captain—pure as the driven slush is what we are!”

The last song of the first bracket was a round, “Summer Is A-Comin’ In,” and his spirits soared with the melody as he accompanied the pure voices that cut clean through to the heart.

The song ended to a roar of applause. The girls responded to the whistles and catcalls with mock curtsies, flinging lip back as good-naturedly as it was hurled at them. Pike decided the audience was ready for a change of pace. He would skip the Gilbert and Sullivan he’d planned and get straight into the rollicking music hall numbers everyone could sing along to.

But first, he escorted the girls to the pub door and handed each of them their sixpence, warning them not to dawdle lest they should find the workhouse door locked. Winnie Whistle threw her spindly arms around his neck and thanked him for the chance of escaping the workhouse for the evening.

“And I didn’t cough once and spoil it, did I, Captain?”

“You did marvellously, Winnie.”

Delighted with the praise, she offered her rouged cheek, pressing it to his lips before he could back away. “Better get
that stuff off your face, Winnie,” he said, holding her by the wrists at arm’s length, “or they’ll have you out the workhouse in a flash.”

“Oh, give over, Captain.” She laughed.

“She wouldn’t be laughing like that if she knew you was the Old Bill,” Brockman, the landlord, said as he joined Pike at the door. The clatter of the women’s footsteps and a bout of coughing from Winnie continued for some moments after the mud-coloured fog swallowed them up.

Pike wiped the grease from his lips and tapped his nose. “Our secret, Mr. Brockman.”

“Winnie’s a lunger, is she?”

“I think she might be. Though the workhouse authorities assure me she’s clear of TB.” Pike would have liked to do more for her; the girl had a child and did her best for it. But he could hardly send her a hamper—the workhouse staff would surely keep it for themselves. He was glad he could slip her a sixpence every now and then.

He accepted a mug of ale from Brockman and took a long swallow, feeling more at ease in the dockland pub than he ever had in polite society or the stuffy confines of the officers’ mess.

Brockman had been his regimental sergeant major and served with Pike in India, Afghanistan, and South Africa. He and his wife were the only people in the pub who knew Pike was a high-ranking Scotland Yard detective. To everyone else he was just the captain, an old army chum of the landlord—a gentleman who had fallen upon hard times and who kept to himself when not playing the piano.

“Are you sure I can’t tempt you with a small stipend, Captain?” Brockman asked not for the first time.

“Against the law, I’m afraid. Police officers aren’t supposed
to take other forms of employment.” Though with the appalling pay and working conditions of the lower ranks, they often did, and found themselves compromised because of it. For the first time since he’d started playing, his mind drifted back to Lady Catherine’s autopsy. If accurate, the report ruled out bludgeoning by a uniformed officer’s truncheon, but it did not eliminate plainclothes members of the force. Although better paid than the uniformed division, any member of the detective force might have been willing to stir up trouble for the sake of a few bob. So far he had not recognised any in the surveillance photographs behaving with impropriety, but he had yet to see the last batch of pictures. The death of Lady Catherine might have been unintentional; but in the heat of the moment boundaries are blurred, mistakes made, a brick or club impulsively grabbed.

If the autopsy report was accurate.
His doubts over Mangini’s competency took on more weight when combined with the woman doctor’s concerns. Her reservations had made sense to him. The wisest course of action, he decided, would be to continue with his enquiries as if there had been no autopsy at all. He would begin by following up Mr. Hugo Cartwright’s allegations and pay the gentleman a visit first thing in the morning.

“Have another on me, mate,” Brockman broke into his thoughts. “And try one of the missus’s fancy pies for your supper; she’d be mighty offended if you turned one down.”

“Indeed I will, thank you, Mr. Brockman.”

Brockman bellowed towards the bar for the servant girl to fetch over a pie, quick smart. Pike sank his teeth into the flaky pastry and savoured the succulent filling. He waved his
appreciation to Mrs. Brockman, busy thumping slopping glasses onto a table in the far corner of the room.

He squinted through the smoky gloom. There was something familiar about one of the men she served: the rakish insouciance of the cap, the defiantly long hair tied back and snaking down his spine. The man raised his head. Dark brows knitted as he returned Pike’s stare. Did he recognise Pike for what he was? Pike doubted it. Dressed in collarless shirtsleeves and with his cane out of sight, Pike doubted even Sergeant Fisher would recognise him from this distance.

He cocked his head towards the table and said to Brockman, “Those three men over there, are they wedding guests?”

Brockman squinted through the smoke. “Never seen them before, must be from off the street. This isn’t a private function; I can’t afford to turn people away. Maybe the missus knows—I’ll call her over.”

Mrs. Brockman joined them at the pub door. “Irish by the sound of their voices, and not regulars, neither,” she said. “Say, Captain, what did you think of my pheasant pie?”

Pike tore his gaze from the strangers and dusted pastry crumbs from his shirtfront. “Best I’ve ever had.”

“Then I’ll get you another. You’re looking a bit peaky, if it’s not too presumptive of me to say so. I reckon you need fattening up. I’ll put another by the pianner for you. That landlady of yours certainly ain’t doing the job proper.”

Pike sat down at the piano and began the next bracket, the bawdy drinking songs the dockland crowd could not get enough of. His mother would turn in her grave if she knew how he employed his talents now. From the far table, he could feel the black eyes of the Irishman burning into his back.

His subconscious took over. Against his bidding, his fingers picked out “Whiskey in the Jar.” It was like a prompt. Now he knew the identity of the shadowy face. It belonged to a onetime Fenian, Derwent O’Neill. He’d seen it that very morning in a book of old mug shots he’d been flicking through on Shepherd’s insistence—the superintendent remained adamant the Irish were behind the trouble at the women’s march.

And he remembered the biography that went with the photograph. How could he not? Derwent O’Neill had been arrested on suspicion of being involved with a string of bombings in London—including that of the Queen Anne Hotel—ten years back. The cases against him had been thrown out of court owing to lack of evidence, though others had gone down. O’Neill had returned to Ireland and, as far as Pike knew, had not been seen on these shores since.

The crowd joined in with the lyrics. Pike felt the hair standing up on the back of his neck as the words took on a new meaning.

The song ended. Someone called out through the roars and stamping feet, requesting the popular music hall song “Brave Dublin Fusiliers!” In the present company, Pike knew the Loyalist song would cause nothing but trouble. The last thing he
wanted was for the wedding celebrations to end in a donnybrook. He paid no heed to the request, ending the bracket with “Roll Out the Barrel,” then took his drink and pressed his way through the crowd to where O’Neill and his friends sat. He pulled up a chair and joined them.

“Good evening, Chief Inspector Pike,” O’Neill said. “Doing a bit of moonlighting, I see?”

“A favour for a friend. I’ve never met you, O’Neill. How do you know my name?”