The Solitary House (25 page)

Sam should look shamefaced, but doesn’t. “Well you found ’er didn’t you? Remember what Inspector Field always says—he who ’appens on it, ’appen done it. And I mean—look at you.”

Charles glances down and realises, for the first time, that there’s blood on his hands, which means there’s probably some on his face too. It must have come from the door, or the wall, because he can’t remember touching anything else. He looks up at Sam. “I’ve been here half an hour—no more. Ask the girl, she’ll tell you. And you know as well as I do that this must have happened hours ago—probably sometime last night. Get your lads to start questioning the neighbours.”

The constable doesn’t seem to be listening. “But you knew ’er, didn’t you—that woman in there—it’s that Lizzie Miller, ain’t it? Hard to tell under all that blood, but I thought she was lodgin’ round ’ere last I ’eard.”

“Yes it’s her, and yes I knew her. I was bringing that girl here to see if she could cadge a bed for a few days. That’s all.”

“So ’ow come you ’ad a key? That’s what the girl said.”

“I didn’t
have
the key, I just knew where she kept the spare. I’ve only been here once or twice—three times at the most.”

“So when did you last see her—Lizzie?”

Charles hesitates, aware that the truth sits awkwardly with what he’s just said, but that lying is probably worse. “A few days ago. And no,” he continues firmly, seeing Sam’s face, “it wasn’t here, and it wasn’t for that. I met her in Haymarket. She had some information for me.”

Sam frowns. “What sort of information?”

“I can’t say. It’s to do with a case.”

“Come on, Chas! You wouldn’t take that for an answer if you was in my shoes! Here you are, up to your elbows in blood and gore and nothin’ but a twelve-year-old whore to back you up! I need more than that—you know I do.”

“Jesus, Sam—do you seriously think that if I’d been responsible for that—that—
butchery
—in there, I’d have walked away with just a few piffling splashes on my damn hands? The man who did that must have been absolutely saturated with blood by the time he’d finished with her.”

Sam is shaking his head. “There’s no proof you didn’t kill ’er hours ago. You could have burned what you were wearin’ by now and come back ’ere all washed and brushed with a witness in tow, just to throw us off the scent.”

They stare at each other and there’s a moment when Sam wonders if his old colleague is about to hit him, but then Charles shakes his head and sighs. “In that case, you’d better get your bracelets out and take me in. But in the meantime you can send a constable to Buckingham Street. Abel Stornaway will happily confirm I was nowhere near this place last night.”

Sam opens his mouth to say something, but we’ll never know what it was, because they’re interrupted at that moment by the arrival of the doctor—a very respectable fat gentleman with grey hair and spectacles, carrying a large black bag. He is surprisingly composed in the face of the savagery inside, and betrays nothing more than a certain pallor about the jowls when he re-emerges to inform them—somewhat superfluously—that all life is extinct.

“The victim has been dead a good few hours, I should say. Difficult to tell exactly which of the blows killed her, but I suspect it was the incision to the carotid artery.” He wipes his hands on a large white handkerchief. “As I’m sure you are aware, there are remnants of viscera all over the room. Someone will have to gather them up and ensure they accompany the corpse to the mortuary. I will forward my own report to Inspector Field in due course. Good morning to you.”

As soon as he’s gone, Charles gets to his feet, brushes down his coat, and holds out his wrists. Whereupon Sarah starts shouting, “Leave ’im alone—he didn’t do it—’e was wiv me!”

It takes two constables to constrain her, and she’s only finally persuaded to calm down when Charles warns her she risks joining him
in the cells if she doesn’t. Another half hour later and we find her in a back room of the Bow Street station-house, giving a statement to one of Sam’s fellow constables and by the look of her, thoroughly enjoying the attention. Charles, by contrast, is in neither an interview room nor the cells. He’s sitting, thanks to Sam, in an arm-chair by the fire in the front office. All the same, he hasn’t yet been allowed to dispense with the cuffs, and in any other circumstances that fact alone would have seen him pacing and raging like an infuriated animal. But he has no energy left for exasperation. To all appearances he is—unusually for him—doing absolutely nothing, beyond gazing idly at the yellowing police notices pinned to the walls.

£100 REWARD—WANTED FOR MURDER
DEAD BODY FOUND
MISSING CHILD

He stares at the words, reads them again, consciously and deliberately, but however hard he tries—however earnestly he tells himself Lizzie was in all likelihood long dead before she was disfigured—he cannot take his mind’s eye from that room—cannot change the hacked flesh on the bed for the Lizzie he knew—the Lizzie he cared about as much as he’s ever cared about anyone, and who needed someone in her life to do that, for all her hard-boiled confidence and self-sufficiency. All the while two police officers are calmly filling in forms at the front desk (though they do eye him surreptitiously every now and again), and other than the occasional muffled thumps and shouts from the cells below, the station is as quiet as he has ever known it.

Wheeler is not back until nearly five, whereupon he slumps into the chair opposite Charles’s and runs a hand through his wiry red hair.

“Bloody ’ell, Chas, I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that before, and I ’ope I never do again. She weren’t just disembowelled you know—’alf ’er insides were missin’ and the rest was all over the floor, includin’ the
fish and potatoes she’d ’ad for dinner. Quite put me off me lunch, that did. What in God’s name ’ad the poor bitch done to deserve that?”

“Did you talk to Abel?”

Wheeler nods. “Confirmed you was at home all night. As did that boy of yours. Billy, was it? Seems ’e had cause to look in on you in the early hours, though ’e was pretty vague as to why.”

Charles nods, his face grim; he has his own theories as to what—or who—Billy was expecting to find.

“Did you question Lizzie’s neighbours?”

Wheeler nods again, and pulls his ring of keys from his pocket to release Charles’s cuffs.

“No-one saw ’er between eight and eleven last night, but one person thought they spotted ’er in the pub after that. She was obviously ’avin’ a good night—she kept half the courtyard awake when she got back ’ome, singin’.” He shakes his head. “Poor little cow. Never ’ad much to sing about at the best of times.”

“So when was the last time anyone saw her alive?”

“Chap called Bert ’itchins saw ’er on Oxford Street around two. She tried to cadge money off ’im, but ’e told ’er she’d cleaned ’im out after three days in Brighton, so she homed in on another mark. Luckily for us they stopped for a bit of a fondle under a gas-lamp and ’itchins got a good look at ’im. Youngish bloke with a pale face, hat pulled down over his eyes, and a long dark coat. Quite well-spoken but no toff, ’itchins says.”

Charles rubs his wrists where the cuffs have scratched his skin.

“There was one weird thing, though,” continues Wheeler, rubbing the back of his neck. “When we looked through the room we found the fire was so ’ot last night the spout of the kettle had ’alf melted off. Some of ’er clothes ’ad been burnt too. Does that make any sense to you? Do you remember it being particularly ’ot in there?”

Charles shakes his head numbly, all the while wondering how he could have missed that—the door was locked, the curtains drawn—after what had gone on in that room surely a wave of stinking heat
should have assailed him the moment he opened the door, but he can’t remember that at all—can remember nothing but what he
saw
, as if his body could only deal with so much, and all his other senses had shut down.

“Your case don’t involve a bloke in a long dark coat, by any wondrous chance?” asks Wheeler, looking at him sideways, his face thoughtful.

Charles forces himself to concentrate. “No,” he says eventually, “I’m sorry, Sam. And the man I’m investigating is much older and most definitely a toff. But if I come across anything, I’ll let you know. Can I go now?”

Wheeler sighs. “On your way. And try to stay out of trouble this time.”

Charles nods, but when he’s half-way to the door, Sam calls after him, “You know what the bosses are like round ’ere—they don’t like coincidences.”

Charles stops and looks back at him. Coincidence? It hadn’t even occurred to him that Lizzie’s death might be anything but a coincidence.

But what if he’s wrong?

FIFTEEN

A Struggle

T
HE
G
RAHAM
A
RMS
has ceilings as low as the company it keeps. Even at a time when pubs make little effort to be appealing, this one seems extraordinarily unconcerned to offer the potential customer anything other than the sport he’s come for: Drinking is most definitely second-best to spectacle here. Charles eyes the blackened spirits tubs with distaste and opts for the beer, which proves to be only marginally more palatable. It’s nearly nine now and the parlour is filling up; so much so that the proprietor is moving people along the bar and calling regularly to “Place your orders, gentlemen, before the entertainment begins.” Charles looks about the room, compiling his mental inventory, just as he always does. There’s an old white bull-dog with swollen pink eyes snoring on one of the chairs before the fire, and on the opposite side, a wiry brown terrier with a patch over one eye and a tendency to growl whenever anyone but its owner gets too close. Above the bar there’s a cluster of leashes hanging on hooks, with pride of place going to a silver collar, which a notice proclaims will be awarded to the winner of a major rat-match in a few days’ time. Rather more disconcertingly, the parlour walls are hung with
stuffed champions in cases, labelled with lists of their most infamous kills. A number of aficionados are inspecting these specimens with some interest, and Charles’s first thought is that it’s like some gross lampoon of the Mammalia Saloon, but another minute’s reflection suggests that perhaps it’s not so very different, after all. Two of the spectators are talking at the bar just along from Charles, one obviously a regular, with a bright red-and-green ‘Kings-man’ neckerchief knotted about his throat, the other a stout balding gentleman in black, with a double chin and a perspiring forehead. The sort of man you cannot imagine at twenty—or with a full head of hair. The only thing he seems to be drinking is lemonade, and he’s making lengthy and detailed annotations in a large black notebook. Charles thinks—suddenly—that he’s seen him before. And in fact he has—at the
Morning Chronicle
. Mayhew, that’s his name. Henry Mayhew.

“Now, that
there
is a dog,” proclaims the man with the neckerchief, pointing to a stuffed grey terrier posed with a large black rat in its mouth. “It was as good as any in England, though it’s so small. I’ve seen ’er kill a dozen rats almost as big as ’erself, though they killed ’er at last.”

“So how was that?” asks the bald gentleman eagerly, pencil at the ready.

The man sucks his teeth. “Sewer-rats like that are dreadful for giving dogs canker in the mouth, and she wore ’erself out with continually killing ’em, though we always rinsed ’er mouth out well with peppermint and water while she were at work. When rats bite they’re poisonous, and an ulcer is formed, which we ’ave to lance; that’s what killed ’er.”

Charles loses interest and turns away. The room is now filling up, and it’s as fine a cross-section of lowish London life as you could hope to encounter—coster-mongers, soldiers, tradesmen, servants—as well as here and there a couple of foreign gentlemen looking, it must be said, a little apprehensive, and no doubt wondering what they’ve let themselves in for. The four-legged company is almost as diverse—and as numerous. Some dogs are twitching on laps, some stand with
their back legs quivering and tails bent between their legs, and others (the more aggressive, these) are tied for precaution’s sake to the legs of chairs, growling through gritted teeth. The favourites among them are being examined for form as minutely as racehorses, their limbs palpated and their teeth examined, and on the far side of the room there’s a man boasting loudly that his dog once killed “five hundred rats in five minutes and a half—I kid you not.”

Charles has been watching all this while for Milloy, and is surprised to find that the small commotion at the street door is down to his arrival. He’s as far now from the liveried little man of Curzon Street as it’s possible to get, draped in a great-coat with a fur collar, with a cane in one hand and a pair of white gloves in the other. His hair—what there is of it—is smooth upon his head, and wiped down every other minute with a large silk handkerchief. From the quality of his reception he is clearly not merely a regular, but extremely well-respected in this neck of London. Waiters snap to it and a glass of milk punch appears on a tray at his elbow before he’s three paces into the room.