When the Devil Drives (14 page)

‘No sir, no reticule or anything, unless it's lying underneath her. No jewellery, apart from her wedding ring.'

‘She was married then?'

‘Looks like it, sir. Quite bright and new looking, the ring is.'

I must have made some sound, because the sergeant turned towards me and frowned. ‘This lady knows another young lady who's gone missing,' the constable explained. ‘Only she's been gone two weeks.'

‘My acquaintance is nineteen years old, fair-haired and a little below average height,' I said. ‘Her name's Dora Tilbury.'

The two men looked at each other then at me.

‘Do you feel able to look at this lady?' the sergeant asked. ‘If it's not her, at least you can feel easy in your mind.'

I nodded. It was not the time to admit that I'd never actually set eyes on Dora Tilbury. The constable stepped aside and the two men formed a screen behind me as I stepped up to the body.

My first thought was simple and terrified:
He's destroyed her.
I'd never been so close to the Achilles statue before. The monstrous size of the black metal god towering on his plinth twenty feet above us, the upraised sword and the shield blotting out the rising sun, made it seem as if the statue had slaughtered the creature lying far beneath its feet and was celebrating a triumph over his victim, out of all proportion to its size or the small force needed to take its life. For a heartbeat, I hardly thought of the woman and stood frozen by a terror out of myth. If the two policemen noticed, they probably thought I was reluctant to look at the woman. That too. The smell of blood was in my nostrils. I looked down. Her neck was wrapped in a cotton scarf or tucker so deeply encrusted in dark blood that only a few patches showed it had once been blue. Her eyes were closed, head flopped at an angle. More blood had soaked into her grey jacket and the plain white bodice beneath it. Some had pooled on the stone beside her upper body. Her arms lay neatly at her side, gloveless with palms facing upwards. The left wrist had a diagonal slit across it, encrusted with more blood. It looked as if she might have raised her arm to try to fight off her attacker. Her hair . . .

‘Her hair's wet,' I said.

It was scraped neatly back from her face, so presumably coiled in a chignon at the back, a dark straw colour that would probably have been fair when dry. It wasn't wringing wet, but thoroughly damp as if she'd washed it an hour or so before. Whatever the two police officers had expected from me, it wasn't that.

‘Is she your friend?' the sergeant asked, doing his best to sound gentle.

‘I . . . I'm not sure. Dora Tilbury had a pale brown birthmark on the inside of her left wrist.'

The sergeant nodded to the constable, who walked round her head and kneeled down by the left hand.

‘Can't tell, sir. Too much blood on it.'

‘Then go and get some water.'

The sergeant nodded towards the pool in the Dell. The constable took a handkerchief out of his pocket and pushed his way round the growing crowd.

‘So you're not sure?' the sergeant said.

‘I didn't know her well. She was a friend of a friend.'

It was too complicated to explain then about being a private investigator. We stood in silence with our backs to the body until the constable came back with his wet handkerchief. In his hurry, he skidded on the stone pavement surrounding the statue and almost pitched over onto the body. The sergeant told him to be careful, took the handkerchief from him, kneeled down and sponged.

‘Slippery here,' mumbled the constable, shamefaced.

I thought he might have skidded on the blood, but there was none where he'd stepped. I supposed even a police officer's nerves weren't cast iron.

‘If you could come and look, ma'am,' the sergeant said.

It was only a small mark, no more than an inch long. The horizontal gash in the slim white wrist had just missed it.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘She must be Dora Tilbury.'

With her hand palm-up, we could only see the back of the gold ring on her wedding finger. It looked new and rather loose.

‘I'd be grateful if you'd wait over there, ma'am,' the sergeant said.

The sergeant and the other constable kept the crowd back while the beadle and constable lifted the body into the shell and then onto the coffin cart. It was trundled away, with some of the crowd following.

‘Nothing to see now. Go about your business,' the sergeant said to the rest of them.

Slowly, they drifted away. At some point, Tabby had arrived at my side.

‘Is it her, then?'

‘Yes, I'm afraid so.'

She stayed with me until the sergeant came back then she disappeared. By then, I'd had a chance to do some thinking. Unless I told the police more about my strange, even non-existent, connection with Dora Tilbury, I'd be building up serious complications for myself and others.

The sergeant suggested we should go and sit on a nearby bench. When we were settled more or less, he said there were things he needed to know for the coroner's officer and took a notebook out of his pocket.

‘Can you please tell me where she lived and the name of her next of kin.'

‘I know she lived at a village called Boreham in Essex, with her guardian. I suppose he'd be her next of kin. I don't know his name.'

He raised his eyebrows. I took a deep breath and explained about being an investigator who tried to trace lost people, and how Jeremy James had come to me out of the blue, a week ago, claiming to be her unofficial fiancé.

‘Where does Mr James live?'

‘Near her, in Essex. I haven't an address for him there, but he's staying with a friend in Islington.' I gave him the address of the friend from memory.

‘How did you come to be here so early this morning?'

‘I live nearby. It's part of my investigation to check sudden deaths if there's any possibility it might be my missing person. My maid told me there was a lady dead in the park.'

He looked at me, not entirely convinced by my story. I could hardly blame him.

‘And you had no knowledge of Miss Tilbury's whereabouts?'

‘None whatsoever. In fact, I wrote a note to Mr James just two days ago reporting my lack of success.'

He asked for my name and address and wrote them down.

‘There's something the coroner's officer might want to know,' I said.

This had been the hardest decision, whether to draw the attention of the authorities to things that might be meaningless. I'd concluded that I should tell them and let them make of it what they liked.

‘There seems to be a similarity with a Miss Janet Priest who went off the Monument last week,' I said.

‘Oh? Were you looking for her as well?'

‘No. I didn't know she existed until she was dead. I happened to be in the City that day. Miss Priest's hair was wet. I didn't see her body myself, but the police knew about it. It hadn't rained that night and it didn't rain here in the park last night. The grass is quite dry.'

The sergeant looked wearier than ever. He wasn't writing this down. I guessed that part of the problem was that the two deaths came under two different police forces. The City force was quite distinct from the Metropolitan that looked after the rest of London, with no love lost between them. Since he seemed to have no more questions for me I asked if I might go. The sergeant said yes, but I might be hearing from the coroner's officer.

Tabby appeared at my side as I was walking towards Hyde Park Corner.

‘Where are you going now?'

‘Islington, to look for Mr James.'

Since there was bad news to be told, I hoped I might manage it more gently than the coroner's officer. If I moved quickly, I should get there before him. But there was more to it than that. The links between the two deaths seemed to me stronger than I'd described to the sergeant. Both young women had led lives that were apparently respectable to the point of being dull. Both had been inexplicably missing before their deaths – a week in the case of Miss Priest, thirteen days for Miss Tilbury. As far as I could calculate, that meant that they'd disappeared at much the same time. Perhaps Mr James could tell me something that made sense of it.

‘Can I come?' Tabby said.

‘I'd prefer you to stay here around the park and talk to people you know, like the street boys. Find out if anybody saw a person of her description last night or at any time yesterday, or if anybody heard cries for help or saw a struggle. It might not have been near the statue, it could have been anywhere in the park.'

Or outside it, come to that. From the comparative lack of blood where she was lying, I was almost certain that Dora Tilbury had been killed elsewhere and her body carried to the base of the statue.

‘And you might ask if anybody saw a person carrying anything near the statue late last night or very early this morning,' I said. ‘Also, did anybody notice a cart or carriage stopping near it?'

Tabby would have slept out in the park many nights. Its inhabitants after dark were her people. Then I thought of what had happened to Amos, and was scared for her.

‘But only ask people you know, at least by sight. If anybody seems suspicious of you or threatening in any way, go home at once and stay there until I come.'

We parted at Hyde Park Corner and I went to find the stop for the Islington omnibus.

The address Jeremy James had given me for his law student friend was in the Canonbury area of Islington. It turned out to be a terrace of brick-built houses of the last century in a muddy street with piles of rubbish strewn round. I found the number, picked my way to the faded front door, knocked and waited. No reply. Peering through a gap in sagging curtains, I saw nothing but bare floor boards and a stone fireplace from grander days. I was beginning to think I'd mistaken the address until a sash window creaked up above me and a man's voice came from the first floor.

‘Tell him to stop bothering me. I said I'd have it by tomorrow.'

The face looking down on me was a young man's, but with a bad complexion and greasy-looking hair.

‘I thought you were the landlord's wife,' he said.

‘Is Mr James staying with you?'

‘Who wants to know?'

‘I'm sorry to trouble you, but I have some bad news for him. If he's there, would you kindly ask him to come down.'

A moment's hesitation. ‘He's not here.'

He was about to close the window.

‘Then I'd appreciate it very much if you'd come down,' I said. ‘I really do need to find him at once.'

The head withdrew and the window shut. A minute or so later, the young man opened the door just enough to let himself onto the step. His bleary-eyed look might have come from too much poring over law books, but more likely he'd just got out of bed.

‘Do you know when Mr James might be back?' I said.

‘I don't know if he is coming back. He didn't say anything about it.'

‘When did he leave?'

‘Day before yesterday.'

‘Where did he go?'

‘Back home, I suppose.'

‘I sent him a letter here. Did he get it?'

‘Some letter came yesterday. He'd gone by then.'

‘Did he tell you about his fiancée being missing?'

‘Yes. Did they find her?'

He sounded only slightly curious. I didn't answer, apart from telling him to ask Mr James to get in touch with me urgently if he should reappear.

Something was wrong. I puzzled over it all the way home. Why should the desperate young man who'd so much needed my help have left London, with the woman he loved still not found? One possibility was that he knew very well what had happened to Miss Tilbury and that was why he'd gone. Suppose that he'd been more successful than I had in tracing her? Suppose too that my hypothesis had been right and she'd come to London to meet some other man? Two possible scenarios sprang from that. The woman is seduced, betrayed and cuts her own throat. (Having, perhaps, first tested the sharpness of the blade on her wrist.) Her true love discovers her too late. Carries her dead body to the base of the statue, with Achilles standing in for the cruel betrayer. Given the poetic nature I'd suspected in Mr James, that was just possible, though it seemed to me it would do better as an opera plot for Donizetti than a likely explanation. So suppose he finds Miss Tilbury alive, discovers she's been faithless and takes revenge? Possible, just. But would a poetic man in a jealous frenzy be cool enough to transport her to the park? Wouldn't he have murdered her and stood over her like Othello, soliloquizing and waiting to be discovered by the authorities?

It was a relief to get back to Abel Yard and find Tabby waiting there. I could tell from her face that she had news.

‘Well?'

‘The devil's chariot. It was driving all round here last night.'

An overreaction, probably, but I felt suddenly furious. ‘Who says so?'

‘Everybody. Barnabas with one leg that sleeps out in the hollow tree, Betsy the apple seller, the boy that walks the greyhounds, Simon I think his name is, and the old soldier with the hat with gold lace that begs by the barracks.'

‘A great cloud of witness,' I said sarcastically, forgetting, unfairly, that I'd told her to keep to people she knew. ‘And what exactly did they see?'

‘Barnabas said it was going hell for leather up Park Lane at midnight. Betsy says she saw it on the Knightsbridge side, later than that but she doesn't know when. The old soldier . . . well, you can't believe everything he says . . .'