A Spider in the Cup (Joe Sandilands Investigation) (16 page)

The outer layers removed and the lid lifted, the two policemen stared in fascination and disgust at the contents.

Remembering the pathologist’s phrase, Joe murmured: “
Digitus primus pedis
. I think that’s what we have here.” Even to his ears it sounded pompous but the Latin term was all he could summon up to cloak in dignity the sorry little piece of flesh and bone. Nestling inside the chocolate box, it looked as pathetic as a scrap of offal from a pet-food bin under a butcher’s counter. “You saw this, Kingstone?”

“It’s
her
toe, isn’t it? Natty’s? What lunatic bastard would cut off her toe and send it to me? They took her and held her and … Did they kill her first? What kind of an operation are you running, Sandilands, where such a thing could happen? Look—I want Armiger here to deal with this. Should have insisted right from the start.” Kingstone was beside himself with rage and pain. “They snatched her, tortured her and sent part of her back here in evidence right under your nose! And it’s not as if it’s her little finger! Oh, no! You know what this is saying? It’s saying she’ll never
dance again … which means she’ll never truly live again … even supposing they’ve left the rest of her alive.”

Julia shook herself free from his grasp. “Toe? Natalia’s? No! Can’t be!” For a moment Joe thought she would collapse but, recovering a little, she stood upright and breathed deeply. “I see now why you asked me to come up, Cornelius. You’re going to ask me to identify it? Yes?”

He nodded dumbly.

“I can see why you’d need help. It’s hardly the part of her anatomy you took most notice of.”

Joe flinched at the barbed comment, though Kingstone, in his numbed state, appeared not to notice the rudeness or the familiarity.

“But her toes—I’d know them. I’ve been bandaging and massaging them for her since we were eight years old. Not promising anything, mind, but if you two will shove over a bit and let me take a look …”

She bent over the grotesque offering displayed on the gold tray, thankfully emptied of its original contents. To Joe’s horror, without warning, Julia picked up the object between her thumb and forefinger and stared at it, turning it this way and that.

“I don’t know. I honestly can’t say. She doesn’t have her initials tattooed on it, you know. Have you smelled it? Formalin, would that be? You can just make it out over the turkish delight. My God! I’ll never eat chocolate again!” On the point of gagging, she recovered herself sufficiently to go on: “It’s been in a jar somewhere. This thing could have been amputated from anyone, any time ago. A hospital involved? They get rid of dozens of corpses every day. That looks like a very clean cut to me. It’s probably shrunk and it’s definitely started to decay. I wouldn’t recognise it if were my own. Impossible to identify it.” She turned to the senator. “I’d ignore it, Mr. Kingstone. Some loony’s having you on. Trying to give you the screaming willies. Who’ve you been annoying?”

“I’m afraid he can’t ignore it,” Joe said. “Look, the sender’s put a little note in underneath.” He took out a small greetings card bearing two lines of calligraphed writing in a dense black ink and looked towards Kingstone. “Arrogant toad!” he commented. “Where are the letters carefully cut from the
Daily Mirror
headlines? The disguised faux-left-handed scrawl? No attempt at a concealment here. I’m only surprised he didn’t sign it.”

“You’ll need to catch him before you can make a match,” Armitage confirmed. “He clearly expects not to be caught.”

The senator shuddered and waved a hand, indicating that Joe should read it out.

“That’s from ‘Julius Caesar.’ Mark Antony’s rabble-rousing speech about treachery,” Kingstone muttered, deep in thought.

“It seems we’re dealing with a joker with literary pretensions,” Joe said.

“An English joker,” Kingstone concluded. “An American would have corrected the Bard’s grammar.” He gave a barking laugh that unnerved the others. “And he goes on, in that speech, to say:

Disturbed by his words and the haunted look in the senator’s eye, Joe picked up his thought and carried it further. “Treason. Ah, yes. He has much to say on the subject in that play. An old-fashioned word, treason.” He let the idea dangle between them.

“No. It’s never out of fashion. Just rarely used, thank God. But it’s ever present, lurking in the shadows, dagger in hand and apologia in mouth.”

Armitage was growing impatient. “Oh, come on! I wouldn’t
read too much into this bit of mischief. Everyone knows that line and our bird couldn’t resist the idea of the ‘unkindest cut’—her being a dancer an’ all. But it’s more likely a case of ‘all sound and fury, signifying nothing’ if you ask me.”

Julia replaced the object in the box. “Well if you fellers are just going to stand about slapping each other in the chops with quotations, I’ll ask to be excused. I’ll just pop next door and do what ladies do when they’ve been handling a dead digitus.” They listened in silence while she went through to Natalia’s rooms and water pipes began to gurgle. Joe guessed that the duration and frequency of the gurgles betrayed a reaction more fundamental than a need to wash hands.

Before he divulged the whole of his knowledge of this sorry affair, Joe knew he had to exploit this moment of unbalance, to press the distressed but devious Kingstone as far as he could. “You are being threatened in some way, sir. Blackmailed? Coerced? The words: ‘But not the last?’ imply that further mutilation might occur—perhaps in an incremental manner? The question mark suggests that the decision to allow more unkind cuts may lie with you. I’m wondering what you have to do or say to stop the butchery. I don’t think you were aware of any threat to Natalia’s well-being this morning when we spoke. When I trailed the possibility of Natalia’s being treated as a missing person, you dismissed it. Rather emphatically. I concluded that you had a good idea where she was and were not concerned. That I had blundered, unwanted, into a lovers’ tiff. Do you now deny this?”

Kingstone shook his head.

“Then I must conclude that someone in the last ten hours has contacted you and transmitted a dire message to the contrary.”

“There are things you don’t need to know—shouldn’t know, Sandilands.” His expression was fleetingly apologetic. He turned aside. And then, aggressively: “This is your backyard she’s gone
missing in. Why don’t you just take off and do your job? I want her found.”

“If you seriously want her found, you’ll give me the information you’re holding back. I’m not in the habit of sending good men off on a wild goose chase when the goose in question is known to be nesting a couple of yards away.”

“I’ve nothing more to say.” Kingstone’s face showed unflinching resolution.

“Then there’s little more I can do.”

The shutters had closed over Armitage’s lively features on hearing the stand-off and it was Joe’s eye he refused to meet. The two Americans exchanged a glance Joe could not interpret, a glance of collusion that reminded him that he was dealing with two of the players of Nine Men’s Morris. Two influential men who—Joe was convinced—were up to no good and operating on his patch.

Joe fought down a rush of anger as he remembered that this dubious pair had spent their afternoon banqueting, toasting themselves with champagne, drinking the best of claret and brandy, playing a child’s chequer game and plotting God knew what mischief while less than half a mile away, the body fluids of an unidentified young dancer had been flowing away down the channels of the pathologist’s marble slab. She was still calling out to Joe and now a connection with the senator was more than just the uneasy suspicion his copper’s mind had entertained from the moment he’d set eyes on her corpse. He held the physical connection in his hand and he was going to play it for all it was worth.

“Your obduracy is noted,” he said, coldly official. “I have to tell you something that will shock you even further. Miss Ivanova doesn’t have it quite right—there
is
one infallible way of identifying the toe. That is by matching it with the rest of the foot. The characteristics of the cut itself will establish ownership. We have the remainder of this young lady, thought to be a ballet dancer,
and sadly dead these two or three days, in our keeping at the police laboratory at Scotland Yard. Her body was dug up on the north bank of the Thames this morning.”

“No! You’ve found her? Natalia? Dead? Why the hell didn’t you—”

“Stop right there! Earlier today I attended the autopsy of a young woman whose name is still unknown to us. The cause of death, likewise, has not been ascertained. She could be any one of about five hundred dark-haired dancers in London. My men are checking with ballet companies, dance schools, music halls and travelling circuses for missing women. What would you have had me do? Storm into and drag you out of your Pilgrims’ luncheon on the off-chance that the body was that of a lady-friend of yours who had chosen to avoid your company for a couple of days? In view of these later developments, I see now that I must ask you, sir, to come along to the Yard to view the body and attempt an identification.” Joe hated sounding like a bobby in a witness box but perhaps a touch of cooling formality was called for at this stage. He judged that Kingstone was coming to the boil and already under more pressure than they had knowledge of.

Before Kingstone could answer, the telephone on his bureau rang.

The senator glowered, composed his features and picked up the receiver. “I’m right here. Yes, I’ll hold.”

He turned an expressionless face to Joe and Armitage. “Gentlemen. Would you be so kind as to pick up Miss Ivanova and skedaddle? Weather permitting, I am about to speak on the radiotelephone to the President of the United States.” He gave them a sudden, bitter grin. “He’ll want to know if I’m settling in and making friends. I wouldn’t care to have you overhear my answer.”

T
en o’clock. Inspector Orford cast a calculating look at the skies over the Thames and his agitation increased. He muttered to the river policeman standing quietly by his side in the shadows: “Clouds moving in, Eddie. It’ll be dark in a minute or two. Can’t wait any longer. Something’s gone wrong.”

They were sharing, in some discomfort, the confined space of a workman’s shelter put up at the inspector’s request by the City of London maintenance department, keeping watch on the Chelsea foreshore.

River Officer Eddie Evans shrugged. He was a tough-looking young man with the weathered features and muscular build of a sailor. The peak of his képi, pulled squarely down over his forehead, accentuated the mischievous glitter of his eyes, the black slicker cape about his shoulders turned him into an element of the grey and umber palette that was the riverbank in this under-lit part of Chelsea Reach. He was at home here in the shadows. “Well, there goes your tide,” he murmured, “more than half way out, I’d say. Next low in twelve hours’ time—broad daylight.”

Orford hoped this wasn’t going to turn technical. He knew as much about the tides as most Londoners: they came and went twice a day. If asked, he would have hazarded a guess that the water rose by the height of a London double-decker bus. But,
truth to say, he only noticed it when it disgorged something unpleasant into his lap.

“There’s a slippage of course—a drag of an hour and a bit each day—so what you’re seeing at this minute is not exactly the scene as it was three days ago.” His River Rat associate never consulted a Thames tides table, Orford noted. These men, technically a part of the metropolitan police, spiritually an independent outfit, lived their lives on a crime-infested fast-flowing sewer that carved its way through the busiest city in the world. They were an unlikely blend of law enforcer and sailor and they’d take on anyone—drugs gangs, smugglers, Lascar pirates and other low life—armed with no more than a stout baton held in a gnarled hand. The same hand that, the next minute, would be extended to save a drowning soul from the water or haul in a corpse caught in the nets they kept aboard their motor launch. The Thames was the last resort of the desperate—and occasionally the first resort of the murderous.

“You’d have got more or less the same conditions as we have now. Perhaps a bit less light in the sky,” said Officer Evans. Keeping it simple for his land-lubber colleague, thank God, Orford thought. “If your villains really knew what they were doing, they’d have made their play before the moon got any higher. Now—tonight’s moon? You’ll find she’ll be waxing gibbous. That’s three quarters to you, Governor. It’ll be too bright in half an hour. Time to pull your finger out!… Sir,” he remembered to add.

Oh, Lord! Moon timetables to consider now as well as tides. Orford felt suddenly old, wrong-footed and crotchety. “You’ll find
I’ll
be waxing gibbous, my lad, if you dish out any more of your advice when you ought to be keeping quiet.”

“S’what I’m here for!” the young man said, unabashed. “On-the-spot fluvial, riparian and meterological information and support.” The words tripped off his tongue with relish. “And here’s a bit more you can have for nothing: if I were planting a body
right there,” Eddie pointed to the foreshore where the dowsers had been at work, “I’d have stuck it in at midnight. On Wednesday. Perfect conditions. Wouldn’t have taken long. Easy digging and the water washes your tracks away. Wouldn’t be the first time some smart aleck had the same thought. You’d be surprised what we’ve found a foot or so under! You hide your stuff and clear off sharpish. Even if the next tide dislodges it, you’re long gone. And, once it’s afloat—well it could have come from a hundred miles upstream as far as anybody can tell. Chances are it’ll be rotted away beyond ID-ing by the time it ends up in our nets.”

He peered back over his shoulder at the embankment. “No gas lights to speak of? Did you think to …?”

“Someone’s removed the gas mantle. And no one’s reported it yet. Not very socially responsible, the residents. Very convenient for our burial party, are we thinking?”