A Spider in the Cup (Joe Sandilands Investigation) (9 page)

Joe felt obliged to apologise to the pathologist who was standing at the ready in the middle of the postmortem room. “Dr. Rippon! Sorry to find you still working in this rathole. Would you believe me if I told you the gleaming new forensic medicine facilities at Hendon College are even as we speak being dusted off ready for use?”

“No. I wouldn’t. And I didn’t believe you when you fed me the same line on ten previous occasions. Sandilands! How d’ye do?”

The handsome young man was managing to smile politely while conveying his disapproval. Though he could admire the facial contortions, Joe read the warning signs and hurried on with
his business. He drew forward to the inspector. “And I believe you’ve met our Detective Inspector Orford in whose hands the case has been placed. He remains your contact—your Scene of Crime bloke. I’m here to hover about smoothing feathers and offering a reassuring flash of gold braid to a demanding public if I read it aright.”

The pathologist smiled more broadly. “Ah, yes. The modern policing. Like justice, it has to be seen to be done. You’re going to have your work cut out to get to the bottom of this one, I think,” he warned. “I’ll say straight away that this is, as the inspector concluded, a case of murder. I am discounting suicide or mischance for a very spectacular reason which I will reveal as we go along.”

Joe watched as, greetings over, the men plunged straight into their task. He was content to stand back and observe.

Dr. Rippon was a tall man with a pink and white complexion, sharp grey eyes and immaculately cut fair hair. He had a pair of stout rubber boots on his feet and rubber gloves on his hands. A pure white starched pinafore reached down to his ankles. Well-muscled arms were bare below the short-sleeves of his cotton shirt. He glowed with health and cleanliness, lighting up his dilapidated surroundings.

Rippon leapt straight into a professional briefing with the inspector, giving assurances that he had not started on the autopsy but had used his time to perform an eyes-only inspection of the corpse. With a gesture, he invited Joe to move forward and join them at the table on which the remains were lying and tactfully allowed the two policemen a moment to take in the pitiful sight.

They looked silently at the spotlit offering laid out on the marble table. Joe could only imagine the effect this small creature would have had on what, oddly, he was ready to think of as her rescuers as she emerged from the Thames mud. Her well-shaped body was outlined by the clinging folds of a still-damp garment,
which looked very like an ancient Greek chiton. Joe had seen her brothers and sisters in the British Museum on carvings taken from the Parthenon by the enterprising Lord Elgin in the last century. The short pleated skirt reached to her knees, revealing muscled calves and a pair of sturdy bare feet which seemed to have slipped out of their sandals no more than a moment ago.

Even in death, the face was lovely, the profile so pure that Joe again recalled the carved features of the young men and maidens of Athens walking and riding in triumphant procession, marble noses tilted at an angle of challenge to the world, worthy images of their gods. Her hair reinforced his theory that the girl was foreign. It was beginning to dry out into a thick curling mop that reached her shoulders. Very dark, in shade. Almost black. The eyes were closed.

Following his gaze, the doctor murmured, “Eyes dark brown. That strange chestnut colour you only seem to encounter in the south of France. Come and take a look. There, don’t you agree? I’d say she’s probably not English. Like most Londoners these days,” he added with a smile. “She could be French or Italian.”

Joe was too preoccupied with his own turbulent thoughts to give an answer. He was feeling sick with foreboding.

“Any identification yet?” The doctor broke the silence.

They shook their heads.

“I’ve requested a list of missing girls from records and asked for it to be delivered to me here,” Orford supplied.

“Then you’ll have to listen to what the girl herself is telling us,” said Rippon. “It’s not much. In fact, I’ve never had to deal with a subject that was so successfully cleaned of any clues as to her death—or life. Here she is, exactly as she was brought in. Female. Mid-twenties? No jewellery, no wristwatch, no laundry marks on her clothing as far as I can see. Well nourished, no broken bones in evidence. Good teeth. Her limbs are graceful but well developed. She has the body of a circus performer or an
athlete. What else can I tell you? She’s wearing something—not much—but it’s rather distinctive. A tennis dress? Wimbledon on yet, is it? Whatever it is it must be very nearly new. And the matching undergarments are, equally, of good quality. They bear the label of an Italian manufacturer.”

Joe was staring at the body in growing horror. Keeping his voice casual he asked: “Can you tell at this stage how long she’s been dead, doctor?”

Rippon reacted to his concern with a brisk reply: “Between two and three days. I can tell you more precisely when I’ve examined the stomach contents. Briefly: rigor had passed but putrefaction has not yet set in. The temperature of the Thames will have to be taken into calculation of course and I’ll give you my best estimate later. The cold water will have affected decomposition and washed away any tell-tale foam at the mouth and effluvia from all orifices.”

The inspector quivered with rage. “Those darned witnesses … the diggers … the dowsers … they were actually pouring buckets of river water over her!”

He was silenced at once by the grave tone of the doctor. “No one’s blaming them. Anything of use to us would have disappeared in the one, two, however many tides that had already swept over the spot before they found her. If it weren’t for their efforts this morning, the body would have been lost to us—possibly for eternity. Had it been subsequently scoured to the surface it would have been swept away miles down river and out to sea by any current strong enough to dislodge it in the first place. And we owe them thanks for their fast reactions in summoning your help and then digging up and transporting the body. The scene of crime—or
deposition
, rather; the assumed crime most probably did not occur on that spot—was rendered unusable but they took the only action they could to preserve the corpse. Stout chaps,” he concluded.

Joe was intrigued sufficiently by the unexpected warmth of the doctor’s accolade to ask, “You met them? The dowsers?”

“I had that privilege. We all arrived on the premises at the same moment.” He flinched. “Quite a circus! Couldn’t swat them away! They gave me my instructions.” He smiled at the well-meaning presumption. “They clearly saw themselves as responsible for the dead girl. Her guardians in death. Anyway, they weren’t about to surrender her to any uncaring or unqualified hands.”

Orford pulled a face. “They liked the doc’s credentials but didn’t reckon much to mine!”

“There was a military man there whom you should interview. He seemed to be their spokesman. Colonel something …”

“Swinton,” Orford supplied.

“He had made safe an important piece of evidence—our only piece of evidence—and he handed it to me wrapped in his pocket handkerchief. I’ll show you in a minute.”

He sighed. “But apart from that stroke of luck, what we have on our slab is
tabula rasa
, I’m afraid—at least on the outside. We’re going to have to rely on internal evidence, gentlemen. Will you be staying?” he asked, selecting a scalpel.

The two policemen nodded.

He used his knife to cut the skimpy tunic at the shoulders and slip it off the body. Orford was ready with a bag to receive the garment. “Beige silk and not a lot of it,” the inspector mumbled. “Now what do we make of that? And, as you say, a foreign label. Reminds me of those saucy things showgirls wear on stage … ‘fleshings,’ they call them. Meant to hide their attributes from the audience so as not to upset the censors.” He coloured and added quickly, “I did a stint with Victoria Vice, sir, some years ago. Checking the girls weren’t moving about on stage. This looks like the same clinging stuff they used to wear but it’s not for the same purpose I’d say. I mean—it’s hardly titillating is it? Bunched pleats like a Greek tunic.”

“Whoever she was, she wasn’t auditioning for Rudolpho’s Revue in Soho,” the doctor agreed, surprisingly.

“No. This is more like the strange outfits those keep-fit-and-healthy types dance around maypoles in. It’s June again. What’s that woman’s name? Isadora Duncan! She’s got a lot to answer for! Are we looking at one of her handmaidens?”

The remaining underwear was bagged likewise and Orford scribbled an identifying note.

“The foot, doctor? Have you taken a look?”

“I have. It would seem to be important. And the most distinctive piece of physical evidence we have so far. The
digitus primus pedis
on her right is missing. Severed at the time of death or immediately after by a sharp implement. Deliberately severed, I’d conclude. No sign that it was torn off or shot off or crushed in machinery, which is how most toes are lost. And the missing digit was not found at the site. Not much time to search, of course.”

“My men will be going in again when the tide’s gone down,” said the inspector. “But we aren’t hopeful.”

“It is the occasional habit of the murdering fraternity to hang on to personal items taken from the bodies of their victims,” the doctor suggested. “Usually it’s a lock of hair or a piece of underwear but none of us will ever forget Jack the Ripper’s little collection of memorabilia.”

They stared at the feet until Orford, echoing all their thoughts remarked. “Can’t say I’m much of a lady’s man and perhaps I shouldn’t judge but … wouldn’t you say these feet were … um … remarkably unattractive? I mean, they could belong to a
man
’s body.”

“Indeed,” the doctor agreed. “More goat-herd than nymph. They are calloused and rough on the underside and the toes are thickened and deformed.”

Joe decided that he could keep the lid on his simmering suspicions no longer. “I think I can account for that,” he said
miserably. “And for the dress. You fellows clearly don’t have sisters or daughters, do you?”

They looked at him in surprise and shook their heads.

“I have. My sister had three of these tunic things when she was a girl. Lydia has feet very like these ones. She can still use them as blunt instruments. She was a keen ballet dancer. What we’re looking at is a practice tunic. Dancers don’t float about in tutus all the time. They put these garments on when they’re exercising or rehearsing.”

Orford sighed in satisfaction. “Then we’ve as good as got her! There’s a big ballet company in town at the moment and it’s jam-packed with foreign girls.”

“The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo,” Joe supplied. “At the Alhambra, Leicester Square. So that reduces our search to—in the region of—oh, about fifty girls? Counting soloists, corps de ballet, reserve troupe and hangers on. A large number but they all know each other well. Easy enough to get someone to come along and do an ID. If we have no luck there, we can try the rival company appearing at Covent Garden—Lydia Lopokova’s lot. Failing there, we’ll have to spread our net wider into the local ballet schools.”

“One of our ballerinas is missing,” muttered the inspector. “Three days? You’d have thought someone would have noticed swan number six in the lineup had gone AWOL, wouldn’t you?”

“Perhaps someone has,” Joe said quietly, in a voice heavy with premonition and chill with fear.

The two policemen could not repress a startled reaction to the peremptory knock on the door.

I
nspector Orford went to answer. “Ah! At last! Thanks, lad,” they heard him say. He turned to them, the envelope already torn open in his hand. “The list of girls reported missing. Oh … well, well. Only fourteen of them. I restricted the height, age and hair colour for the search and this is what we’re left with.”

He brought it over and held it out so that Joe could read at the same time.

Joe’s eyes skidded down the list, failed to find what he was looking for, and started again at the top.

“I don’t see much of interest there, do you, inspector? Each one a personal tragedy for some poor soul, no doubt about that, but nothing stands out in relation to this case. Nothing foreign sounding. No fancy ballerina names.”

“Ah, you can’t always judge a rose by its name,” the inspector commented shrewdly. “Look at little Alicia Marks from the East End. As soon as the Russians discovered her, they gave her another more glamorous name. She’s Alicia Markova now. I’ll have all these ladies investigated,” he said firmly, slipping the paper away into his file. “And I’ll keep them coming. Sometimes it takes a week before someone realises a dear one’s gone missing. Now, doctor, one last thing before you get busy with your scalpel. The
gold that set the hazel twig aquiver! Have you got it about the place?”

“I reinserted it,” said Rippon. “The professor of archaeology was full of information. Made a point of grabbing me by the arm and talking to me until he was sure I’d absorbed his account of the circumstances. Fascinating! Not the way we usually do things. But this whole case has been highly irregular from the beginning. Do let’s try now to keep things on the rails.”

“Gold? Reinserted?” Joe said faintly. “Hang on a minute! You two have skipped a page. Where on earth would you reinsert a piece of gold in a corpse, Rippon, if you had such a thing to hand?”

“Come and look. This is the clue the colonel took charge of and handed over directly to me.”

Joe didn’t need to ask why. After years of working to raise standards, the probity of the men of the Metropolitan police was still questioned by the public, but a medical man—that was a different matter. He could be trusted with your gold.

The doctor carefully opened the mouth with a spatula. “I’ve put it back exactly as it was when the professor noticed it. It’s rather large to go under the tongue—one and a half inches across—but there it is. It was held in place under the mud by the rigor.”

“Can you take it out?” Joe asked.

A pair of pincers extracted it neatly and placed it, shining brightly, on to a specimen dish.