Birdcage Walk (22 page)

Though the light was hard and bright on his face, it took George some time to fully wake. He felt as though he was swimming through heavy treacle towards consciousness and for a time kept half-dreaming, believing that he was opening his eyes and seeing the room around him only to realise they were still tightly shut. When he did finally disentangle himself from the last coils of sleep’s ropes he knew it by the sudden ache in his skull and the realisation that his heart was suddenly thumping too hard. When enough of the previous night’s events had come back to him in disjointed fragments, he sat up and gingerly felt his face, wincing as his fingers explored the grazed skin there.

As he did, his father pulled back the curtain and came to stand at the foot of the bed. When at first he remained quiet, George fell into his usual role and spoke into the silence, wondering what his father could want.

“Happy Christmas, dad. I’m sorry I woke you coming in so late last night.”

“And to you, son. I said I’d tell you as soon as you were awake. Annie Matthews come round earlier, looking for Charlotte. I said I wouldn’t wake you though Cissy wanted to.”

“Looking for Charlotte?” George’s heart sped up again and he could taste the stale beer on his tongue.

“She didn’t come in last night. Annie’s fretting about her. Wanted to know if you’d been with her, seemed to think you had.”

George’s mind raced over the possibilities and what he might say, his father waiting patiently while he did.

“I did see her but we had a disagreement so I didn’t see her home. She must have met someone else, gone off with them instead.”

George could hear the bitterness in his own voice and was ashamed of it in front of his father, who had been told almost nothing of his attachment to Charlotte, and who had never asked. He searched his memories of the evening for an image of her and immediately saw again the very last picture he had of her, captured at the moment he had left her on the marshes to catch the bus. Her face had been as pale as a wraith’s under the cold moon and against the deep blackness of the empty land behind her. The green of her jacket had been turned to mud by the strange light.

“Did Annie say anything else?”

“No, but she wants you to go and see her. As soon as you’ve woke up, she said, if you could.”

Cissy scurried in then, unable to stay listening behind the curtain a moment longer.

“George, what can have happened to her? Did you two have another row? Why didn’t you see her home? Were you at the Rosemary Branch?”

“That’s enough questions from you, girl. Let him get dressed in peace.”

George and Cissy both looked up at their father in astonishment at the intervention and then she, both anxious and annoyed, pulled back the curtain and disappeared once more. Mr. Woolfe followed, but not before looking over at George and briefly nodding.

George pulled on some clothes and splashed his face with water. He took a handful of it then and, not minding that it was brackish, drank it down thirstily. His head was still too sluggish to think clearly about Charlotte and where she might have gone, and with whom, and he was grateful for it.

By the time he reached the street, he was beginning to feel less dazed and more anxious. Jealousy and fury that she had managed to charm someone else after he left her warred with his fear that something had happened to her. The weather seemed inappropriately fine, both for the season and George’s mood, the blue of the sky callous in its crisp uniformity above him. Any lingering fog had now lifted.

Annie seemed to answer the door while he was still knocking, her normally rosy face haggard with worry. He wasn’t sure he’d seen her not smiling before and it made the day feel stranger still. He had to keep reminding himself it was Christmas.

She ushered him in and he nodded awkwardly in the direction of Ted, who remained in his chair.

“I’m worried sick about her, George. Ted thinks I’m making a terrible fuss but I can’t think straight for worry. Something feels wrong in this. I know she likes a drink but she always comes back.”

“Like a little homing pigeon, eh, Ann?’ Ted laughed and it turned into a phlegmy splutter. Annie gave him a look and then turned back to George.

“What’s going on between you two? She was ever so excited last night before she went out. I gave her your message and she flew up those stairs like I don’t know what.”

“We had a bit of a do, Annie, but she was right enough when I left her.”

“Where did you leave her? You weren’t at the local pubs, Ted says he didn’t see either of you all night. She might have got lost if she didn’t know her way around.”

“You know Lottie can always find her way around. I’ve never known anyone for knowing all those alleys and back lanes down by the river, she’d know them blind.”

George felt his face colour as he spoke, remembering Charlotte stumbling along behind him while they walked to the Park Hotel. She might know the river like the back of her hand but Tottenham and the marshes were alien to her, alien to anyone on a dark night. He knew he should tell Annie everything now and that she would be cross but it would help Charlotte be found. But even as he thought it, the shape of another explanation, part truth but part lie, formed in his mind, so much simpler than the whole truth. He inhaled deeply.

“We tried to go to the Britannia last night, after we met on the bridge. But when we got there she didn’t want to go in. We had to push through the crowd to get out the way and she wouldn’t tell me why, just said she couldn’t be cooped up in there all night. I lost my temper at that, we’d walked all the way there when we might have just gone for a drink, so I told her. She didn’t like it and so I left her there.”

Annie looked deep in thought but Ted suddenly raised his head.

“Thought your dad told Annie you was out till all hours. Needed your sleep and that.”

“I didn’t say I went home, did I?” George looked down, wondering at his ability to lie. It must have come from the weeks of keeping quiet about his Highbury visits.

“After I left Charlotte, it was still early and I didn’t fancy going home so I went to the World’s Fair.”

Ted was still looking at him with a keen expression on his face.

“Bit of a walk that from the Britannia, ain’t it? World’s Fair’s on in Islington, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s still on at the town hall there.” George could see the large advertisements for the fair in the Hackney Gazette as though they were in front of him. He had wanted to go but hadn’t got round to it. Now it almost seemed to him as though he had.

“It was only three bob to get in and there was all sorts there. Acrobats from America, the Danzig family they were called, and a lion tamer from India.”

Ted looked disappointed and George felt oddly uplifted at the success of his deception.

“After that I fancied some company and so I went to find the fellows I work with at Carlisle and Clegg’s. They’d wanted me to join them after our shift but I said I was meeting Charlotte. In the end I found Alf Jones at the Robert Peel and we saw in midnight together there.”

Annie stared down at her hands, where she was twirling a tiny gold hatpin between her fingers. She suddenly straightened, her face set with determination.

“I’m going to the police, Ted. I don’t care if you don’t like it. At least before I thought George had been with her till late. As it stands, none of us has seen hide nor hair of her since early on last night. If she didn’t want to go to the theatre and you’d gone off, George . . . “

She paused to look at him then, and he reddened once more.

“Well, I can’t see why she wouldn’t have come home then, seen in Christmas with her family.”

“Maybe she bumped into her old sweetheart. Joe Bruce, isn’t it? He’ll be home by now, won’t he?”

Even as he said it, even though he knew it was a total fabrication, George could picture her outside the theatre as clear as day. She would spot Joe across the throng and he would see her and smile and they’d go off together, arm in arm, both of them pink in the face with the excitement of being reunited. He’d have brought her a present from South Africa and Charlotte’s eyes would have glittered with pleasure as she unwrapped it. George massaged his brow, trying to dispel the image that seemed more believable in his head than the jumble of real events.

“She don’t think of Joe like that, George. You should know that by now. But he’s worth trying and I’ve got to do something or I’ll go mad sitting here.”

“What about our dinner?” asked Ted. ‘I’ll kill her when she finally rolls in and we’ve gone without because she’s been out gallivanting.”

“Do you ever think of anything but your own stomach?’ Annie bellowed, taking Ted entirely by surprise. ‘She is my sister, my only family apart from the baby.”

She shoved her arms back into the coat she’d let fall to the floor earlier and then pinned on her hat with the gold hat pin, dropping the old one on the mantelpiece.

“What’s that you’ve got there, then? What you been buying now?” Ted had recovered from his scolding.

Annie didn’t answer but stared back at her reflection in the glass, pulling her hat this way and that until it was perfectly straight, the pin bright against the dark felt. She would go to Mrs. Bruce’s house and talk to Joe if he was there. If he hadn’t seen Charlotte, she was going straight to the police. Ted took her for a fool, but the police would listen to her, she would make them.

George spent the rest of the day uneasily. Cissy had resisted asking him too many questions when he returned to Wiltshire Row but was unable to keep quiet for long. She had done her best with the food they had and felt it was her due to get a couple of answers once the three of them were sitting around the table together. She thought that George, who was hungry and grateful she had created an edible meal from the meat he had bought in such a rush, might be a captive audience once he had started chewing.

After an initial silence, during which Cissy was aware of each scrape across the china and every clash of fork tines on teeth, she could wait no longer and gabbled her first questions.

“What’s happened to her, George. Where can she have gone?”

George shrugged, failing to meet Cissy’s eyes, keeping his own trained on his plate. She rushed on.

“Is Annie going to tell the police that she’s missing?”

“She said she would, once she’d been to check with Joe Bruce that she wasn’t with him all night.”

Cissy desperately wanted to ask who Joe Bruce was, but bit down on her lip and managed to hold the question in. They ate on, Cissy pushing her food around distractedly. Eventually she spoke out again, softer this time, afraid George would shout at her.

“Do you think, do you think that something might have happened to her?”

He didn’t shout but he set his cutlery down hard enough to make them dance noisily on the china.

“She’ll be fine. She’s probably back at Annie’s now, being fussed over. I think I’ll go round and check. Thanks for the dinner.”

“You’ll come and let us know, George? When you see her and see she’s alright?”

He nodded and then opened the door, letting in a rush of cold air and the smell of someone else’s boiled cabbage as he did. He forgot his cap, which remained limp on its hook.

He was glad to be alone again, although the pictures of Charlotte came much more frequently now he was, and with far greater clarity. He was amazed and disconcerted by how much he could remember; catching fleeting glimpses of her sparring and larking about with Annie, walking ahead of him by the river, smiling at him when he ate an eel to please her, not seeing his face twist in revulsion as the slippery, oily flesh filled his mouth.

Now that the light was draining from the sky, the temperature had plummeted and it was bitterly cold. George thought about going back for his cap but kept walking anyway. He didn’t want to go to Annie’s yet. Some vague superstition made him want to put the visit off; that if he left it for longer than was comfortable then she was more likely to be there when he did knock, and armed with a good explanation to boot. After some minutes of wandering, he found that his feet were automatically treading the familiar path to Highbury. He stopped dead as he realised it and deliberately turned in the opposite direction. That part of his life was over and he would have to bear it. It would be easier not to think of it at all.

Further north, beyond Highbury’s villas, he knew the marsh lay, its flat, featureless ground making it easy for the east wind to turn everything in its path to ice. As hard as he tried to envisage Charlotte at Annie’s, propped up in front of the fire with a cup of broth while Annie bustled about, ticking her off with relief, a greater part of him believed that Lottie was still up there, lost. If the buses had been running he thought he might have gone directly up there and found the spot where he had left her, searched for clues of where she might have gone. He couldn’t rid himself of the feeling, a strange prickling sensation at his temples, that he had come upon the truth of the matter. She was not at Annie’s and nor would she be, however long he delayed calling round. He felt to his marrow that she was five miles to the north; she had never left Tottenham.

When he finally arrived at Annie’s, having paced around Hoxton for more than an hour, it was dark. Christmas felt as though it was over before it had begun. As he knocked on the door, he felt that he was calling in out of politeness over anything else, so sure was he that Charlotte wouldn’t be there. When Annie wrenched back the door, he saw the hope extinguish in her eyes and knew he was right. Neither said a word, Annie simply shaking her head and turning away, closing the door quietly.

Dr. Wainwright laid down his scalpel, its sharp, metallic clink on porcelain the only sound in the room. He sighed deeply, forgetting for a moment that Inspector Hart was behind him.

“You think you have grown accustomed to it, but then something gets through and makes you see it as anyone else would. My wife doesn’t know how I bear it at all.”

Dr. Wainwright turned to him and smiled gently.

“Yes, you’re quite right. It is the same for me. If I have to see a dead body, I want to find it of advanced years and in its own bed.”

“So, what can you tell us about her?”

“She is around eight stone, perhaps slightly more. Early twenties.”

The inspector cleared his throat.

“Is she . . . intact? There was no wedding ring. Are there signs of violation? Or mutilation of the organs?”

“No mutilation, no. This is not the work of any Ripper or his imitator, Inspector. And no violation that I can tell. There is no bruising there but she is not a virgin. She is not with child either, so that is a small mercy.”

The inspector paced the cold room, deep in thought. After a time he spoke again.

“Did she die of her injuries or was it the cold that took her in the end?”

“The cold will certainly have weakened her further but the ultimate cause of death was syncope, a blockage to the heart. This was caused in turn by the blows she received to her head and the subsequent haemorrhage that formed in her brain. I removed the skullcap and found the clot there, about the size of a bantam’s egg, a flattened bantam’s egg. The blood loss from her wounds was not enough to kill her. If you remember there was only enough on the ground beneath her head to redden the grass, not soak it. We will never be sure if the injury to the eye also caused her brain further damage but it is likely. The outer orbit has been shattered, the same blow would also have ruptured the eyeball itself.”

Inspector Hart covered his mouth unconsciously as the doctor spoke on in measured tones.

“The cheekbone is also broken. It is very difficult to break a cheekbone, it is very thick.”

The doctor carefully turned the head, his hand cupping the sharp chin, so that the inspector could see for himself.

“You can also see the missing piece of ear lobe here, the upper part of the auricle has been nicked too.”

“Can you tell what time she died?”

“Of course it’s difficult to be precise, but I would say it was around midnight. She had been dead for many hours by the time we reached her.”

The inspector looked grim, his eyes focused on the bone coloured tiles of the mortuary floor.

“There must have been a weapon involved, can you say what it might have been?”

“Though there are some abrasions that might have been caused by kicking, most of the injuries to the head were made using an instrument of some sort, not a fist.”

“A rock or a piece of wood, perhaps?”

“Instinctively I think not. No, something smaller and uniform in shape. There are wounds that would have required something very sharp to make them. Another thing: she must have struggled for some time, fought off whoever did this as hard as she could. I would guess that some of the blood and tiny fragments of skin caked under her fingernails are that of our perpetrator. If one could only trace him by his blood and tissue, if there was something unique in them that could be pinpointed to a single person, then you would have the man.”

The doctor went over to the deep sink in the corner of the room and began to methodically scrub his hands. The stark electric lights of the mortuary had appeared to grow stronger as the light outside had dimmed. Through the high window above him it looked as though the sky was now completely dark. Christmas had passed him by and Kathleen would be resentful when he got back, though she would try to hide it with a studied brightness, not quite looking him in the eye. He turned back to the inspector as he dried his hands off.

“I will write my full report tonight and you and Chief Inspector Pearn will have it tomorrow. I suppose there is no clue as to her identity yet?”

“Well, as you know there was nothing on her person to help us. Her hat was bought from a milliner’s in Islington but that is hardly significant. She might have bought it second-hand and, besides, it is not new. Our best chance is the press but it is Boxing Day tomorrow, of course. The first reports won’t be out until the later editions. Until then, we can only hope that she is missed and her disappearance is reported to the police.”

“Surely everyone has someone who will miss them, particularly at this time of year?”

“You’d be surprised, doctor. There are plenty who slip between the cracks, cut any ties they may once have had, and move through the world making no more impression on it than if they were thin air. In a city this size, it’s easy to remain anonymous if you wish to, or become invisible even when you don’t.”

“I can’t imagine it. Going through life entirely alone.”

“None of us starts that way, of course. Each of us has someone at the beginning but there are no guarantees it will end that way. I’ve investigated cases where I’ve spoken to people whose neighbour has died suspiciously. They’ve lived cheek by jowl with them for years but when I ask for a description—whether they were good or bad, whether they drank or went to church—they can’t tell you a thing. There’s thousands of them like that in London, it’s as if they were made out of some material more insubstantial than the rest of us.”

By now, the men had put on their coats and hats. The post mortem was complete; there was nothing more they could do for the time being. Inspector Hart gestured to the mortuary assistant waiting outside the door.

“You can close up now, thank you. We’re done for today.”

The doctor watched as the lights of the tiled room were put out and the door locked. The girl inside would be quite alone in the chilly darkness, only a sheet covering her battered and stitched body.

“I hope she isn’t one of them,” he said. “One of your insubstantials.”

The inspector shook his head.

“Not her. This is a crime of passion, as the newspapermen like to call it. As soon as we know who she is we’ll also establish who her sweetheart is. It’s unlikely we’ll have to look further than him to solve this murder.”