The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (2 page)

CHAPTER

2

CRIBB’S GUIDE LED AT A STEP BRISK ENOUGH TO BE ALMOST unseemly for one so elderly. They cut behind the few derelict buildings that fringed on the no man’s land of the river edge. Their arrival had already caused a stir in the neighbourhood. A hansom in Barge House Street was as rare as a porpoise upriver. Once it was established that the visitor was neither magistrate nor schoolmaster, a small train of curious boys hitched onto Cribb, with three or four muttering women at a discreet distance behind.

The object of their visit lay as the tide had deposited it, toes upwards in a small irregularity in the bank. Cribb turned abruptly on the children and ordered them back to the houses.

“You found this yourself?” he asked the old man.

“Yes. Not two hours back. Tide must have washed ’im up.”

“You didn’t touch him?”

“Nah. I wouldn’t do that. What’d I want to do that for? If ’e ’ad any money on ’im, I reckon the cove what lopped ’is head off ’ad that.”

Cribb admitted the shrewdness of this with a nod. Even so, he bent to turn out the sodden pockets. All were empty.

“Big fellow, I reckon,” observed the old man. “Take more than one to fell ’im, if you ask me.”

“Strong physique,” admitted Cribb, unbuttoning the shirt to look for tattooing. “No great height, though, even when he was complete. Five-eight, I’d say.”

“The ’ead shouldn’t be difficult to match up when you find it. There’s a good ginger thatch on ’is chest. My, that’s a fine show of muscle on them shoulders.”

Cribb stood up, nodding. “Unusual development. Firm deltoids. A workingman’s trade shows through his physique. Did you know that? Look at this now. A line like a tight-drawn cord between deltoids and biceps. Chances are that he’s one of three—tanner, puddler or brickie.” He bent down again. “Straight back, though. Puddling’s not this one’s trade. You recognize a puddler by the hump on his back, and that’s muscle not deformity. Newcastle’s full of ’em.”

The old man professed interest in the anatomy lesson with a grunt. In fact, his stomach was beginning to lurch.

“Equal development of both arms cuts out smith’s work or sawing,” continued Cribb. “But when a man spends his day scraping hides or moving them around in the pits, he might grow like this. Could be a brickmaker, though. Let’s look at the wrists. Moulding clay develops a brickie’s forearm beautifully. Ah. Now this looks conclusive. Scars on the palms—probably from brick edges, you see.” He turned the limb that he was examining and whistled in surprise. “Lord! Now this really is a symptom!”

Turning, he discovered his audience had abandoned him.

¦ Edward Thackeray, Detective Constable, was not squeamish. He knew the London mortuaries as intimately as the pubs. If any reluctance was betrayed in his stride along Stamford Street towards Blackfriars mortuary on Tuesday, it was not at the prospect of encountering the dead, but the quick, in the person of Sergeant Cribb. The order from the Yard to report to M Division headquarters had caught him unprepared the evening before. The news when he got there in the morning that he was to rendezvous with Cribb at Blackfriars confirmed his worst intimations. Barely eight months had elapsed since his transfer. Eight months of civilized service advising Hampstead stockbrokers how to secure their windows against burglars. The most taxing investigation of the period an inquiry into an abducted heiress. Regular eight to six and no night duties. An inspector who was often out of the station for a week.

Now he was returning to Cribb. And a dismembered corpse in Blackfriars. Cribb, who ignored a man’s age and susceptibility to irregular hours; who liked to account for every second of a constable’s working day and then claim his sleeping time as well.

Cribb had good points, of course. He might give you the treadmill treatment for days or weeks on end, but he let you know what part your work played in a case. If he was dour at times, he also had spells—strange bouts of zest—when he gleefully shared his pleasure at some small development. But at present it was not Cribb’s better side that Thackeray was thinking about.

He mounted the freshly scrubbed steps of the Hatfields workhouse and passed through the building to the mortuary, a converted coach house at the rear. His knock was answered by footsteps inside and the sounds of an elaborate unlocking procedure. A mild-looking attendant—why one always expected something more sinister, Thackeray was not sure—finally admitted the constable with a toss of the head. Sergeant Cribb was standing by his prize at a postmortem table. From his expression he might have just gained a first prize at the local flower show.

“On time, Thackeray. Well done.”

“Morning, Sarge.”

“Good to have you with me again. There’s a glum look about you, though. Depressing work in S Division, I suppose. Well, that’s over for a spell, I’m glad to tell you.”

The Constable nodded philosophically, and Cribb continued his breezy small talk. “You’ve put on an inch or two about the waist, I see. Sure indication of reduced activity. Office work, eh?”

Typical of Cribb. Always ready with the personal slur.

“Not really, Sergeant. I’ve been busy enough with the work I’ve had. Old age, I suppose.” He studied Cribb’s gaunt frame, wishing he could honestly detect some flaw that was developing, if it were only a receding hairline or a stoop of the shoulders. The Sergeant was in his forties and exasperatingly well-turned-out—neatly pressed suit, white wing collar, red spotted necktie. Cleanly trimmed Piccadilly weepers, but no beard or moustache.

“The drape, if you please,” Cribb instructed the attendant, and the body on the table was uncovered. “What do you make of that, Thackeray?”

The Constable moved to the table with interest, unaffected by the mutilation. Deep in concentration, he spent three silent minutes over his examination.

“I would put death about four or five days ago, Sarge. Putrefaction ain’t far advanced. He’s obviously been hooked out of the river. Did Thames Division ask you to investigate?”

“Never mind that. What about the build?”

“Well, they’re powerful arms and shoulders, all right. He’s a labouring man, around forty years of age, I’d say. From the state of his palms, he was probably a brickie.”

“Good. Injuries, apart from the obvious?”

“That was done with a cross-cut saw, I’m certain. But this bruising around the ribs is baffling, Sarge. And on the forearms. Must have been inflicted before death. I’d like to look at his back. Can we have him turned?” The attendant came forward. “Thank you. Not much marking on this side. The grazing here looks as though it was done after death. Body likely struck something in the water.”

“What’s your theory, then?” inquired Cribb.

Thackeray bent to the table again and examined the right hand minutely, even sniffing at it for its secrets. He straightened and shook his head.

“It makes no sense, Sarge.”

“What d’you mean?”

“These hands. Not the palms. The knuckle side. There’s a pattern of old scars, and it ain’t from brickmaking, I’m sure. No brickie’s that careless with the backs of his hands.

He’s a well-built man, and his work’s thickened his wrists, but that don’t account for the size of his fist nor its coarseness. If it made any sense, Sarge, I’d say that hand’s been pickled—soaked in vinegar, though you can’t smell it any more. And scarred from knuckle fighting.”

It was ridiculous, of course. Prize fighting had been penalized out of existence twelve years before. But Cribb seemed satisfied with the diagnosis.

“Tidy thinking, Constable. Let’s get outside, now. We’ll walk back to the station.”

As they strolled, bowler-hatted, in the sunshine down Hatfields towards The Cut, Cribb talked with enthusiasm.

“He must be a pug. Everything’s consistent. Body-bruising, scars, swollen hands. Even spike marks around the shins. And his trade. Brickmaking and scrapping have always gone together. Our man had a fight with the raw ’uns before he died, Thackeray. I’m sure of it.”

Thackeray was less convinced. “It don’t seem credible, Sarge. Prize fighting’s dead in England. The magistrates finished it in the sixties. Monstrous fines some of them promoters paid. When the railway excursions were banned, that stopped it. They couldn’t make it pay if no one went.It’s all done with the gloves now. Endurance contests or Queensberry’s Rules.”

“Possibly it is, out Finchley way,” Cribb retorted, “but you don’t just stop a sport that’s been established a century and a half. It’s always been illegal under Common Law— Unlawful Assembly. But the fights went on, didn’t they? Anyone that wanted could find out the venue—and get taken there in a special train.”

“I know that,” said Thackeray with a trace of petulance. “And the magistrates would sometimes wait till the fight was over before they broke it up. I’ve stopped a few prize fights myself in Essex when I was quite new to the force. ‘The blues!’ they’d shout and before you got close, the whole bloody scene would change in front of your eyes. All the paraphernalia—stakes, ropes, buckets, four-wheelers—just got moved a few fields away to another area, outside the authority of the local magistrates. Most fights came to a finish at some point even if they got interrupted. But I’m sure it don’t go on now, Sergeant.
Bell’s
hasn’t reported a prize fight for years, except in France or America, that is.”

“There’s a rare amount going on that never reaches the press,” commented Cribb. “Prize fighting might not offer the rewards it once did, when a promoter could wing at a magistrate, and pugs like Sayers and Heenan and Mace were known to every cove that opened a newspaper. But there’s still plenty who’ll pay well to see a set-to with bare knuckles. Mittens haven’t the same appeal.”

It occurred to Thackeray that his sergeant was displaying an unexpected working knowledge of pugilism. Almost, in fact, an affection for it. He decided not to comment.

“If our corpse does turn out to be a pug, Sarge, how do we find his identity? Who got him out of the river?”

“No help there. An old fishmonger. Showed me the body near Blackfriars Bridge. I questioned him and believe he really did find it there.”

Thackeray accepted Cribb’s judgment. Both knew that salvaging suicide victims from the Thames had become a minor industry. Once at safe anchorage, a body could wait until a sufficiently generous reward was advertised by relatives. A patient professional would watch the papers day by day and make his discovery only when the premium was right.

“How do we begin, then, Sergeant?”

Cribb was rarely at a loss. “You begin at once, Constable. Take a walk across the bridge to Fleet Street. See the boxing reporters.
Bell’s
will be the first. Then the
Referee
and
The Sporting
Life.
Extract anything you can about pugilism in London, on any scale at all. Make it quite plain you’re not implicating them. That clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant. Entirely clear.” Cribb, as usual, keeping his subordinate occupied.

“And Thackeray.”

“Sergeant?”

“You might try the
Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic
office as well.”

¦ For the second time in two days Cribb appeared that afternoon at Scotland Yard in the office of his inspector. As initiator of this interview, the sergeant was in a buoyant mood. Jowett was plainly ill at ease. He had consented to seeing Cribb when an urgent appointment was requested.

His subordinates rarely visited him voluntarily.

“Well, Sergeant. What’s your business? Have you had second thoughts?”

Cribb enjoyed a moment’s hesitation while the Inspector fumbled, lighting his pipe.

“Not really, sir. It does relate to our conversation yesterday.”

“It does? You challenge my figures, perhaps?”

“Oh, no,” Cribb reassured him. “All quite accurate.”

“What is the problem, then?”

In the cab between Waterloo Road and Great Scotland Yard, Cribb had rehearsed this conversation.

“No problem, sir. Merely seeking confirmation.”

“Are you, then? Confirmation of what?” The pipe was defying ignition.

“Something you told me yesterday. I want to put it into practical effect, sir.”

“Very good, Sergeant. I’m glad to hear that. But you need not refer everything to me, you know. My intention was to encourage initiative, not extinguish it.” Pleased at this pithy rejoinder, the Inspector relaxed a little and propped the pipe on its stand in front of him. “Since you’re here, though, you may as well explain what is bothering you.”

“Bothering isn’t quite the word, sir. You asked me to reexamine my methods of investigation.”

“Quite so. And you have?”

“In a manner of speaking, sir. Intuition, you said.”

“I most certainly did. And inspiration.”

“And flair, sir.”

“Good! And now you have a case, and you require guidance on the appropriate method of investigation.” Jowett intoned his words like a schoolmaster who has recognized a glimmer of intelligence in the class dunce.

“No, sir.”

The Inspector reached for his pipe.

“All I require from you, sir,” continued Cribb, “is your agreement to a novel method of investigating a murder.”

“Novel . . . ? What exactly have you in mind, Sergeant?”

“I’ve reason for thinking a corpse found in my division is that of a pugilist.”

“A boxer, you mean? That is the modern term, I believe.”

“No, sir. I mean a knuckle fighter.”

Jowett frowned. “But I don’t understand you—”

“London Prize-Ring rules,” explained Cribb. “No gloves. Supposed to have been stopped ten or more years ago. It goes on, though. Not in my division. Other parts of the city.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Can’t ignore the evidence of a headless pug, sir. Clear signs of having scrapped in the last week or so. Without the mittens.” Cribb put his hands on the edge of the Inspector’s desk and leaned forward confidentially. “I’m taking this corpse very seriously, sir; very seriously indeed.”

“What do you mean?”

Cribb straightened and walked nonchalantly to the window. “Passed an hour with the ‘Dead Persons Foul Play Suspected’ lists this morning, sir. My dinner hour. Thought I’d remembered another headless one last January. I found it, and one more last year for the set, if you’ll excuse a card-player’s term. Each of ’em hooked out of the Thames, and both said to be very well-muscled. Could be pure chance, of course. Might be a pretty little pattern of murder among the fist-fighting mob, though.”