Inspector of the Dead (14 page)
Read Inspector of the Dead Online
Authors: David Morrell
“And sentenced to be hanged until he was dead,” De Quincey said. “Because the offense was high treason, the further details of the punishment harkened back to the days of Henry VIII. Francis’s head was ordered to be cut off and his body divided into four quarters.”
“Emily, I’m sorry if this conversation upsets you,” Ryan said.
“I’ve read worse in Father’s writings, Sean, but thank you for your concern.”
Commissioner Mayne seemed taken aback by the familiarity with which they addressed each other. Then he returned his attention to what was being said.
“There were some who believed that Francis felt in such despair over his debts that he hoped to be judged insane and confined to Bedlam,” De Quincey told Emily. “After all, Edward Oxford was rumored to have a comfortable existence there. Perhaps Francis wished for a life without the need to worry about lodging or his next meal. If that was indeed his motive, he was sorely disappointed.”
“Was Francis executed?” Becker asked.
“No,” De Quincey replied. “At the last moment his sentence was changed to a life of hard labor in Van Diemen’s Land. When Francis heard where he was going, perhaps execution might have seemed a better fate.”
“All because of poverty.” Emily’s voice dropped, her tone revealing how well she understood the desperation of being poor.
“For years I had championed the idea of a detective unit that would use plain clothes and have jurisdiction throughout all of London’s police districts,” Commissioner Mayne said. “This second attack on the queen hastened my resolve. Thirteen years earlier, it had taken twelve weeks to create the Metropolitan Police Service. Now the detective unit—with its two inspectors and six sergeants—was established in a mere six days.”
“Just in time,” Ryan said. “Two months later, someone else tried to shoot the queen.”
“W
here’s Newgate Prison?”
Colin’s father begged as they struggled to find their way through London’s chaos.
Carriages, coaches, carts, cabs, and overflowing omnibuses rattled past them, passengers perched on top of the buses, servants clinging to the backs of coaches. The din was overwhelming. Newsboys yelled about the latest crimes. Costermongers shouted the virtues of the fruits and vegetables in their carts. Beggars pleaded for pennies.
Some streets were so congested that Colin and his father were constantly bumped and jostled.
“Tell me how to get to Newgate Prison!” his father implored.
“Strike someone on the head and steal his purse,” a man said and laughed.
“If I was you with that Irish accent,” another man said, “I’d run in the opposite direction.”
“Please! Tell me where Newgate Prison is!”
“In the City of London.”
“But I’m already
in
London.
Where
in London?”
“I told you—in the City of London.”
“Don’t joke with me!”
“Raise your fist like that, and I’ll call a constable. Then you’ll find out for certain where Newgate is. You’re in London, but you’re not in the
City
of London.”
“I don’t have time for games!”
“The City of London is the business district. A city within the city. Newgate Prison is where one of the original gates used to be. It’s across from the Old Bailey, where the criminal courts are.”
Again Colin and his father raced through the streets, asking for more directions. “Where’s the Old Bailey? Where’s Newgate Prison?”
“Over there,” someone finally said.
But all Colin noticed was a huge dome on what appeared to be a massive church, and
that
surely couldn’t be the prison, which indeed it was not, for he soon learned that the dome belonged to St. Paul’s Cathedral.
He turned a corner, and this time he had no doubt that what he saw was the prison. It stretched forever along a street, brutal looking, made of huge, soot-covered stones that reeked of gloom and despair.
They ran to a guard at the studded iron door.
The guard grasped the truncheon on his equipment belt as if he feared he was being attacked.
“My wife was brought here,” Colin’s father said, trying to catch his breath.
“Too bad for her.”
“She didn’t do what they say she did.”
“Of course not. Nobody in there ever did what the law says they did.”
“They claim she stole, but I know she didn’t. I need to get inside and talk to her!”
“Visiting hours were this morning. Come back tomorrow. Bring a lawyer.”
“Where do I find a lawyer?”
“The Inns of Court. Do you want the Inner Temple or the Middle Temple?”
“Temple? You told me to go to the Inns of Court!”
“The Inner Temple and the Middle Temple are two Inns of Court near Temple Church.”
“I shall go insane with these riddles. Where is Temple Church?”
“Between Fleet Street and the Thames.” The guard tightened his grip on his truncheon. “I’d keep my voice down if I was you, or it’ll go harsh for you.”
It turned out that the Inns of Court near Temple Church weren’t inns at all, but huge clusters of buildings with chapels, libraries, dining areas, and lodgings for lawyers as well as offices.
Colin and his father ran into office after office.
“I need a lawyer for my wife!” Colin’s father blurted.
Clerks frowned at the pair’s dusty, sweat-streaked faces.
“If it’s a barrister you want, you need a solicitor,” a clerk told them.
“What are you talking about? I need a
lawyer!
”
“You go to a solicitor first. He chooses a barrister, the only kind of lawyer who can speak in court.”
“This is madness. My wife needs help. Where do I find a solicitor?”
The clerk reluctantly gave them directions.
Colin and his father raced into another office, where clerks sat on high stools, leaning dutifully over desks discolored by age, dipping their pens into inkwells and writing furiously.
A clerk surveyed their rumpled, patched clothing and asked what they wanted.
“We need a solicitor!”
Obviously lying, the clerk said, “He went home.”
In the next office, the solicitor couldn’t be disturbed. The solicitor in the office after that was leaving and told them to come back the next morning.
“But that’s when the prison allows visitors. I need to be there to see my wife.”
“Come back with three pounds. I’ll see what I can manage.”
“Three pounds? I don’t have any money.”
“Better not come back at all.”
Desperation dwindled into weariness. They ate the scraps of bread that Colin had been told to bring. They drank water from a neighborhood pump. They watched shadows lengthen.
“Emma’s a big girl,” Colin’s father said, trying to reassure himself. “She can take care of Ruth for one night. They have bread and leftover potatoes. They have the coins I gave them.”
Colin’s father was sturdy and broad shouldered, with solid, steady features. He’d seen his family through the poverty that had driven them from Ireland, and Colin had never doubted that his father would protect them in whatever other hardships came their way. But now he noticed that his father’s chest seemed to be shrinking, that his shoulders seemed less broad, that his face looked sunken.
They slept in an alley. In the morning, they drank more water from the neighborhood pump and did their best to wash their hands and faces. Using their fingers to comb back their wet hair, they hurried to Newgate, where hundreds of people waited in front of the ominous iron door.
“Old Harry’s chilblains won’t stand the cold walls,” a woman told another woman. “I don’t know how he’ll bear bein’ kept in there much longer.”
“When’s his trial?”
“Nobody can tell me.”
The door opened. The crowd surged ahead.
“How do I visit my wife?” Colin’s father asked a guard.
“Through there.”
It took an hour for the hundreds of people to speak to the single clerk, who gave notes to guards who in turn summoned prisoners.
“Caitlin O’Brien. Yes, a shoplifter. Not good.”
By the time Colin’s mother arrived, a guard was announcing that only a half hour of visiting time remained. The dank, shadowy, stone-walled room was filled with the reverberating din of desperate conversations. Prisoners and visitors stood apart, forbidden to touch.
Colin’s mother was pale. “I didn’t steal anything. Burbridge looked at my knitting. He told me he didn’t want the jumpers and put them back in my basket. When I stepped outside, he shouted that I’d stolen a shirt from him. A constable searched my basket. He found a shirt under the knitting. I don’t know how it got there!”
“I’ll find out,” Colin’s father said. “I’ll get you out of here, I swear.”
“The walls are cold. Four women and I share a cell. Three of them are sick. I try to stay away from them in a corner.”
“Do the guards feed you?”
“Broth and stale bread. What about Emma and Ruth?”
“They—”
“Visiting hours are finished!” a guard announced.
Of my many experiences with Father, I shall never forget our dinner with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Father would have preferred to go to the judge’s house and examine the corpses there, but I pointed out that it had been twelve hours since we’d eaten. Without the benefit of Lord Palmerston’s hospitality, we needed to find our meals as luck handed them to us, and a dinner with the queen and the prince was lucky indeed. Not only would it be sumptuous, but also it would not cost us anything.
I settled his hesitation by telling him distinctly, “I’m hungry, Father.”
As a police van transported us to the palace, he peered mournfully out toward the falling snow. He fingered his laudanum bottle as though it were a talisman, but the sadness of his expression made clear that the talisman had long ago lost its magic.
“Sergeant Becker said that the judge wore ice skates,” Father said.
“Yes, making his death all the more disturbing,” I replied. “To be cruelly killed unaware while enjoying himself as a child might.”
Father turned from the window and stared down at the laudanum bottle, as if the skull-and-crossbones symbol on its label were a hieroglyphic to be deciphered, revealing a truth about the universe.
“The judge was not killed unaware. It isn’t coincidental that his wife was murdered at the same time. The events were coordinated. The killer forced his way into the judge’s home in the same way that he entered Lord Cosgrove’s home. He then admitted his companions, for none of this could have been done without help from the Young England of the notes that were left with the victims.”
Continuing to focus on his laudanum bottle, Father gave the impression of repeating a voice that only he could hear, the drug seeming to shift him into a half-world between the living and the dead.
“Perhaps they persuaded the judge to go with them by threatening to kill his wife if he didn’t comply. His wife, of course, was doomed, but the judge desperately hoped that wasn’t the case. When he was taken to the frozen lake at St. James’s Park, he pretended to engage in the skating frolic, fearing that something would happen to his wife otherwise. His terror increased as the seeming pointlessness of the activity persisted. There were numerous people skating around him, their laughter contrasting with his panic, but for love of his wife, the judge didn’t dare beg anyone for help.”
Father paused, then nodded in somber agreement with the voice he seemed to hear. “At an appropriate moment, he was made to fall onto the ice. Under the pretense of helping him, his abductors slit his throat and left their message in his pocket. They also left an unstated message that no one is safe in a crowded park any more than among a congregation at a Sunday church service.”
“You make it sound as if you were there, Father.”
“Tonight I shall dream that I’m the man who slit the judge’s throat. How I wish that, fifty years ago, I had not succumbed to opium’s charms.”
The guards at the palace did not look favorably at us when Father and I stepped down from the police van. Seeing our common overcoats, perhaps they thought that we were clerks or else criminals inexplicably being set free at the palace.
I followed Lord Palmerston’s earlier example and told the gatekeeper, “My name is Emily De Quincey. This is my father. The queen expects us for dinner.”
The gatekeeper’s dubious look immediately left him. Indeed the queen must have been expecting us, for the man snapped to attention. He briskly escorted us to a guardian of the main entrance, who in turn escorted us to someone else. This time, we weren’t taken through lesser-used passages and remote staircases. On the contrary, our route went through the main part of the palace, along corridors that were even more extravagant than those we had seen earlier. Father gazed around with increasing wonder, seeming to marvel at an opium mirage.
Our escort led us from a corridor toward what he called the Grand Staircase. The adjective was no exaggeration. Beneath a gleaming chandelier in a brilliantly lit hall, I gazed in awe at two curving staircases that were separated by another luxurious corridor. The balustrades on each of the staircases were made of wondrously cast bronze, depicting intricate clusters of various kinds of leaves. Colorful friezes of the four seasons and portraits of royalty lined the magnificent walls. The rose-colored carpeting on the Grand Staircase was the softest that I ever walked upon. Overwhelmed by the grandeur, I could only shiver when I remembered the numerous hovels in which Father and I had lived.
We followed our escort to a room from which several voices drifted out.
“May I have your coats?” an attendant asked. When we handed them over, he looked confused about why we’d worn bereavement clothes to a royal dinner. I imagined his greater confusion had we arrived in our usual threadbare garments, with Father’s elbows shiny and a button missing.
The attendant took us into the room, where a group of splendidly dressed men and women stopped speaking and studied us with greater puzzlement than the attendant had displayed.
“Miss Emily De Quincey,” he announced, “and her father, Mister Thomas De Quincey.”
The “miss” and “mister” made clear that we had no claim to any titles whatsoever. In theory, since we were obviously commoners, we had no business being there. But titles were the last things that the group was concerned about, so fixated were they on Father’s grim suit.
My own garment at least had the benefit of being less dour. I’d gone to the Mitigated Affliction department of Jay’s Mourning Warehouse, in which clothes of various gradations of sorrow were available—from black, to dark gray, to light gray—depending on how many months had passed since a loved one’s death.
I had chosen light gray, but on principle I refused to wear a fashionable hoop under the dress, preferring the freedom of my bloomer trousers. Fortunately I was so accustomed to judgmental reactions that I paid no attention. Even the queen and Prince Albert could not compel me to wear clothes that made me uncomfortable. Besides, I had the strong impression that one of the reasons Her Majesty had invited us was the novelty of displaying someone in a bloomer skirt.
The silence—I might even say the shock—of the group persisted until the most conspicuously dressed and most handsome of the men stepped forward to greet us. His scarlet uniform and immaculate white arm sling were familiar from the morning’s horrors at St. James’s Church.
“Mister and Miss De Quincey, I didn’t expect to see you again,” Colonel Trask said.
I remembered the troubled look he had given me at the church, as if we’d met before but he couldn’t recall when. Now the warmth in his eyes replaced his earlier confusion. He kindly failed to direct even a casual glance toward our unusual clothing.
“What a delightful surprise. May I introduce you?”
Colonel Trask led us to the uncommonly beautiful woman whom he had escorted into the church that morning, an event that seemed days in the past, so much having happened in the meantime. Her hair was resplendently straw colored.
“Allow me to present Miss Catherine Grantwood. These are her parents, Lord and Lady Grantwood.”
Catherine made a pretense of smiling, but it was obvious that something untoward had happened in the past few hours. Even in the midst of the horror at the church, she had gazed with undisguised admiration at Colonel Trask as he helped the police maintain order. Now her admiration had been replaced by what I interpreted as grave disappointment or worse.
Her parents did not look happy, either, but they hadn’t looked happy when they’d entered the church that morning, and I couldn’t tell whether solemnity was their natural aspect. Some lords and ladies seem to allow themselves to smile only when among their own kind.
“And this is a friend of Lord and Lady Cosgrove,” Colonel Trask added without enthusiasm. “Sir Walter Cumberland.”
Sir Walter appeared to be the same age as Colonel Trask, around twenty-five. He was almost as handsome as the colonel, but in a dark way that contrasted with the colonel’s fair-haired demeanor. While the colonel’s eyes were appealingly warm, Sir Walter’s had a dusky fire that suggested muted anger.
Sir Walter merely nodded, as did Lord and Lady Grantwood. It became even more obvious that prior to their arrival at the palace, something besides Lady Cosgrove’s death had upset the group.
“And may I also present you to”—Colonel Trask was pleased to get away from Catherine’s parents and Sir Walter—“the queen’s cousin, with whom I had the honor of serving in the Crimea. The Duke of Cambridge.”
Somewhat overweight, the duke seemed to be in his midthirties, but already he had lost most of his hair and compensated with a full dark beard. He turned his head aside and coughed, a deep sound that suggested he had been ill for some time.
“Forgive me. That’s my souvenir from the war,” the duke said. “It is I who feel honored to have served with Colonel Trask. He saved my life on the heights above Sevastopol.”
“I did what anyone else would have done, helping a fellow officer,” Colonel Trask said.
“The enemy turned out to be uncomfortably close in the fog.” The duke looked at Father and me. “This young man came out of nowhere, leading a group of soldiers who helped my Grenadiers repel a Russian attack. The gun smoke was thicker than the fog. He and I stood next to each other, striking with…”
Aware that the others in the room had become silent, Lord Cambridge told them, “My apologies. I was merely complimenting the colonel. I hope I didn’t excite you.” He nodded toward Colonel Trask’s sling, his tone becoming confidential. “Is your wound healing?”
“It’s been slow, but my physician assures me there’s no need for concern.”
“That’s what my own physician says about my cough. Two invitations to the palace in less than a week, one of them to receive a knighthood. You’re becoming a favorite.”
“I doubt that I could ever get used to this magnificence. The dining room is no doubt equally splendid.” Colonel Trask pointed toward a closed door.
The duke chuckled. “That door leads to where the servants prepare to bring in the dishes. The entrance to the dining room is along that hall. It’s easy to get lost here.” The duke looked at Father. “De Quincey. I know that name.”
Father gave a little bow. I worried that he was about to announce that he came from a noble lineage.
Blessedly, Colonel Trask changed the subject. “Mr. De Quincey, you seem to be looking for something.”
Father’s forehead was sweaty. “I thought that there would be wine or…”
At that point, everyone straightened as Her Majesty and Prince Albert arrived. I and the other women curtsied while the men bowed.
“Mister and Miss De Quincey, we are pleased to see you again.” Queen Victoria turned toward the group. “Miss De Quincey introduced us to several new ideas this afternoon, including the freedom of her costume.”
This gave permission to the women—all with hoops beneath their dresses—to study my bloomers without pretending not to. The men continued to look away, lest they seem fixated on the outline of my legs.
“You’ll notice,” the queen told the group, “that I’m not wearing any garment that is green. Until I’m assured that arsenic is not in their dyes, I ordered all green clothes to be removed from my wardrobe. Lady Wheeler, I see that you are wearing green, however.”
“Your Majesty, I didn’t realize that green was no longer…”
“If I may, Lady Wheeler,” Prince Albert said.
He reached inside his uniform and withdrew the vial I had given him.
“Please unfurl your cuff,” Prince Albert told her.
Lady Wheeler nervously did so.
He removed the stopper from the vial and pressed it against the inside of the cuff.
“Aha!”
At the touch of the stopper, the green turned blue.
“You’re wearing a dye laced with rat poison. Lady Barrington, shall we determine if the green dye on your clothes is contaminated also?”
Five of the ladies in the room had green somewhere on their garments, and on all of them the stopper caused a spot of blue.
The women looked startled.
“Miss De Quincey drew our attention to a health crisis,” Queen Victoria said. “There’s no telling how many of us and our children have become sick because of poisonous adulterations in the dyes of our clothing.”
“And also in our food, Your Majesty,” I noted.
“Food?” the queen asked with a troubled expression.
“Yes, most prepared food that is green—pickles, for example—has arsenic in its dye, Your Majesty. A jar of brown ones might not look attractive, but the green ones—for all their better appearance—are harmful to you.”
“Pickles? I can guarantee that no one here shall encounter pickles—green, brown, or any other color—at our table tonight,” Queen Victoria said. “Ah, Lord and Lady Palmerston have arrived at last. Just in time to go in.”
“My apologies for being late, Your Majesty.” Lord Palmerston gave her a significant look. “I was attending to the various matters we discussed earlier.”
“We had begun to despair of your attendance,” the queen said.
I now witnessed a strange ritual. The order in which the guests entered the dining room depended on the position they occupied in society: duke, marquess, earl, and so forth. The order was so complex that I found it bewildering, but the dinner guests quickly made the intricate calculations to determine who stepped ahead of whom.
I mention this because something curious happened with regard to Sir Walter and Colonel Trask. Queen Victoria had knighted the colonel in gratitude for his having saved her cousin’s life. Thus, like Sir Walter, he too could be called “Sir.” But Sir Walter was emphatic in stepping forward to escort Catherine, as though his title outranked Colonel Trask’s. Sir Walter’s expression indicated that he considered this distinction to be significant. Catherine’s parents dourly seemed to think that Sir Walter’s “Sir” was more exalted also. For his part, Colonel Trask looked despondent. It became his duty to offer his arm to
me.
And what of Father? There was no woman of lower status whom he could accompany. In a surprising show of good nature, Lady Palmerston broke ranks and paired with him. Clearly our status as commoners caused disorder in the ritual.