The Murder of Patience Brooke (3 page)

The half hour struck. And in the silent distance she heard the sound of hooves. It must be them. A desire to rush out and fling herself into the safety of Mr Dickens’s arms almost overmastered her. She almost smiled at the incongruity of the picture. A foolish thought. Mrs Morson knew what Mr Dickens would want of her – common sense and calm. She could hear the wheels of a trap. It was turning into the lane, rolling towards the stable. It stopped. They were coming across the garden and she could make out the reassuring figure of the superintendent next to the slighter Mr Dickens in his greatcoat. Davey would stable the horse before he came in. The shadows fled; there was warmth in the light which the superintendent carried.

She opened the door. They stood at the top looking down at the figure on the steps.

‘Let the boy come in first – before we see her.’ The superintendent looked down at Mrs Morson’s face, white and strained in the light of his lamp. ‘He hasn’t seen?’

‘I do not think so.’ They came down the steps and into the room. ‘Some tea?’

Mrs Morson put the kettle on the range – how odd that she had not thought of making herself anything. She arranged cups, milk and sugar while Mr Dickens and the superintendent stood before the range to warm themselves. Putting the cups on the table, she spoke. ‘I am very glad to see you both – I hoped …’

Dickens responded, ‘I was where you hoped I would be and so, thankfully, was Superintendent Jones. I was very glad to see him. The boy did well. We will wait until he has had his tea and then we will send him to bed. How long do we have?’

Mrs Morson understood. ‘There should be no one down until six at least. If I do not call them we may have longer.’

‘Four hours should give us time to take her away after I have looked at the evidence. We might have to send Davey for a constable –’

The superintendent broke off as Davey came in. The kettle boiled and Mrs Morson made the tea, giving Davey his first. He looked exhausted and cold. Dickens and the superintendent took theirs and drank.

‘Now to bed, Davey,’ said Mrs Morson as he drained his cup. ‘We will come for you when we need you. Thank you, my dear. You cannot know how much I depended on you tonight.’ The boy attempted a smile and she took him away.

‘Take your time,’ said the superintendent.

Mrs Morson nodded in understanding and shepherded the boy into the little room.

The superintendent put down his cup. ‘Best have a look.’ Dickens nodded. He was, as always, torn. His pity for the dead girl was matched by his writer’s desire to see what was under the cloak. He had written about death; he had written about violent death. He had shuddered himself at the murder of Nancy; he had imagined the terrible death of Carker in
Dombey and Son
, but he had not seen murder at first hand nor had he known the victim. The superintendent was careful. Dickens almost expected, even wanted him to remove the cloak with the flourish of a magician, but the superintendent took the cloak in two hands from the top and gently pulled it away from the figure and stepped back to see what Mrs Morson had seen: Patience Brooke with her hair about her face and shoulders and the white bosom stained with red. Dickens, holding the lamp, saw, too, and could hardly understand the transformation from the modest girl he had known. She looked curiously voluptuous, even in death.

‘Look there,’ said the superintendent, ‘someone has rouged her cheeks.’

Dickens saw the crude colouring, a horrible parody of beauty, ghastly against the white face. Pity twisted in him.

‘And the dress has been torn open,’ the superintendent observed.

Superintendent Jones stepped back and lowered his head, crossing himself. Dickens saw how his lips moved in silent prayer and bent his head, too. He was, as always, impressed by the superintendent’s sensitivity. The burly man at his side could frighten the toughs and rogues with whom he came into contact; he could be ruthless, sure of hand and eye in pursuit of criminals. Dickens had once seen him in a den of thieves, Sultan of the place, every thief cowering before him like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster, all watching him and answering when addressed. That night the cellar company alone had been strong enough to murder them all, Dickens and the constables included, and willing enough to do it, yet if Superintendent Jones had been of a mind to pick out one thief in the cellar, if he had produced that ghastly truncheon and said, with his business air, ‘My lad, I want you!’, all Rats’ Castle would have been stricken with paralysis, not a finger moved against him as he fitted the handcuffs on. Yet, here, before the death of this one girl, he prayed for her before taking her down and beginning the grisly search for evidence. Dickens felt, not for the first time, a little humbled and a little ashamed of his failure to think of a prayer. He knew the large, solid man by his side to be an admirable man and felt his own smallness.

The superintendent indicated to Dickens to lift the lamp, and as he did, lifted the hair to see the gash encircling the slender throat. Dickens’s hand shook and the light shuddered, casting shadows on the face of the hanging girl, and the blood seemed to ripple as if it were still flowing.

‘Murder,’ said the superintendent. ‘You see that the knife went in here on the left side of the neck, and the direction of the wound is from left to right – a right-handed killer. Not that it helps much since most folk are right-handed. But it is murder.’

Dickens saw what he meant. He imagined only too vividly the knife cutting deeply into the white flesh and its swift, wicked progress to the other side. Seconds it would have taken and then the waterfall of blood.

‘Now, you know, Mr Dickens, what must be done. Here is, we believe, if we are to trust our instincts and we do, an innocent girl done to death in this cruel way, and no one to stand for her except us. And yet, if we pursue this, we do not know into what danger we put her nor, indeed, into what danger we put Mrs Morson, Davey and this good home of yours and all in it. Yet, we must act, must we not?’

Dickens had thought already of the significance of a violent death to the Home. He knew it would be possible to allow the murder of Patience Brooke to be investigated in a cursory way. Who would miss her? She was a mystery; she came out of nowhere. They did not even know if her name were her true one. She would be forgotten, an unsolved case. He looked again at the blackening wound and the violation of her modesty.

‘We must, Superintendent, we must,’ he said determinedly.

The superintendent nodded. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘this must all be done properly. If it comes, in the end, to a trial, we must have our evidence documented. Before we take her down, you must sketch what you see here and you must sign your drawing. I must fetch the constable who must take down Mrs Morson’s evidence and ours. We will not trouble him with Davey – what the boy knows is for us alone. Mrs Morson must go for the doctor and he will write his evidence. Now, to work. There’s pencil and paper in the kitchen. When you have done we will take her in – I do not want her hanging here. Mrs Morson will make her right again, and we’ll have your sketch and our testimony to prove what we have seen out here. While you sketch, I will go in and speak to Mrs Morson.’

They went down the steps, Dickens to get his pencil and paper and the superintendent to knock gently on Davey’s door to bring Mrs Morson. Dickens went back outside. It was a grim task. Dickens, who had sketched meadows and trees and essayed the odd likeness with not much success, knew his limited skill but, as the superintendent had assured him, what was needed was the position of the body, the rope that held her, an indication of the bloodied dress. There was no need to look again at the wound – the doctor would give evidence on that. Dickens set the lamp on the step, forced himself to look and not to shudder, and made a beginning. Imagine you are writing it, he told himself. You have written of horrors – now you must draw what you see for the girl’s sake. It did not take long and when he was done, he took it inside to the superintendent.

‘That’ll do well enough. Now, we will bring her in. She will be put in her own room next to Mrs Morson’s.’

In the superintendent’s arms, Patience Brooke was light as a bird. Dickens watched as he came in. Suddenly, he said, ‘Stop – look there.’

He had seen what had been hidden before: the matted hair at the base of the skull and the blood congealed there. The superintendent carried her easily up the stairs and laid her gently on the bed. Then he looked carefully at the wound.

‘He must have hit her. She was stunned, which is how he managed to tie her up. Then he drew his knife. You did not see anything left there?’ he asked Mrs Morson. She shook her head. ‘He would not have left anything – too clever for that. Still we will have a look in the light tomorrow.’

‘What terror she must have felt,’ said Dickens. He had written it. He remembered how he had imagined the terror of poor Nancy as she saw the pistol descend and felt the first horrible blow, and the second as Bill Sikes killed her.

Mrs Morson covered Patience with the cloak. They locked the door. It was agreed that Mrs Morson should go for the doctor.

‘I’ll hunt up that constable and you, Mr Dickens, must keep watch. Listen for any sound above. If anyone comes down, you may say that Mrs Morson has gone to fetch the doctor, that Patience is unwell and she is sleeping – there is no need to disturb her. Send whoever it is back to bed. They will know soon enough about Patience and we will question them about her later.’

Mrs Morson went out followed by the superintendent with his lamp. Dickens felt suddenly alone. Restless, he prowled round the kitchen, opening cupboard doors and peering at the shelves. He shovelled coal into the range and lit the candles – the darkness and cold were beginning to oppress him. He looked out of the window at the night and, driven by an impulse he could not control, he looked out again at the place on the steps where the body had hung.
The sleeping and the dead are as but pictures
, he told himself, but he still pictured that crimson gash and the blood-soaked, torn dress.

He thought about Patience Brooke and what he would have to tell Miss Coutts who had financed the Home and to whom he reported about the girls and their conduct. She had disapproved of Mrs Morson’s engagement of Patience Brooke on the grounds that nothing was known of her, but Dickens, as he most often did, prevailed, expressing his confidence that he would be able to probe her secrets. The rules of the Home were that only Dickens should know the backgrounds of the girls who came there. It was to him that they told their stories and these he wrote up in his casebook – the details were never shared with the matron nor with Miss Coutts though she dealt regularly with the matron, knew each of the girls by name and, from time to time, visited the Home. Dickens was proud of his skill in questioning the girls; he eschewed leading questions and any kind of persuasion, believing that the interviewee would be driven on to the truth and in most cases would tell it. Most cases, he thought, but not the case of Patience Brooke. For all her gentleness, there was a steely core to her, and he had wondered what experience had forged that toughness. She assured him that she had no criminal history, that she was not nor ever had been a prostitute, and that her secret history was hers alone – and now she was dead, and Dickens felt that her secret had killed her.

There could, of course, he admitted to himself, be some other cause. It might be that the murderer’s intention was to discredit the Home; it might be that the murderer wanted to discredit him, or even Miss Coutts. He thought about the boy in the blacking factory – the secrets he had thought buried until Forster had told him of what Charles Dilke had said. But, then, what was Patience Brooke doing on the steps late at night? The only conclusion was that she was meeting someone, yet Mrs Morson had told him that Patience Brooke had no letters, no contact with anyone outside the Home. But she did accompany the girls to church and on shopping expeditions. Someone could have given her a message, someone, perhaps, from her past – if only he could have penetrated that past, they might now be able to find some clue to her murder. But she was a mystery. His thoughts went round in a coil.

Practical as well as imaginative, Dickens made tea and found bread and cheese. Food and drink for the superintendent and Mrs Morson when they came back. Putting the kettle on the range, he was startled to hear a door opening. For a moment he felt terror but, on turning, saw that it was Davey’s door and the boy was coming out.

‘Are you hungry, Davey, thirsty?’ he asked gently. ‘Sit here where it is warmer.’

Dickens gave him bread and cheese which he ate though, Dickens thought, more to please than for hunger. Davey looked at him with what Dickens thought of as his speaking eyes; the intensity of his gaze showed that Davey wanted to tell him something. Dickens silently offered him paper and pencil. His own eyes could be speaking, too, and the boy seeing the question in them, nodded.

‘Did you see something, Davey?’

A nod.

‘Did you see Patience going out?’

A nod.

‘Did she have anything with her?’

A shake of the head.

‘Did you see anyone else?’

A shake of the head.

Where to go now? What Davey seemed to know was not more than they knew themselves, yet his eyes told that there was more. What to ask now?

‘Did you hear anything?’

A nod.

Keep that perfectly imperturbable face you are so proud of using with the girls.

‘Write down what you heard, Davey, please.’

A song
.

Baffled, Dickens asked again, ‘You heard someone singing?’

A nod.

‘Was it Patience?’

A shake of the head and then the words written in the childish hand:
A man
.

‘Do you remember the words? Can you write any down?’

More words written on the paper:
rome, home, joy, boy.

Dickens shivered. It was uncanny and horrible in a way for the words were familiar to him. By
rome
, he was sure that Davey meant
roam.
The words came back to him from down the
years, and he saw not Davey but, for a moment, his ten-year-old self at Ordnance Terrace, singing with his sister, Fanny. Unwittingly, he sang the plaintive words from his happy childhood days in Chatham: