The Anatomy of Death (31 page)

“No, no, I never thought to,” Florence lied automatically. She attempted to swallow, but failed; her mouth was too dry. “If this wasn’t our truncheon, then whose …” She broke off
and backed away to stand once more at the top of the stone steps leading from the embankment to the river.

“Come, come, Flo, you’re usually quicker than this.”

“I’m cold, I just want to go home,” Florence said. “I don’t understand why you’re here.” With shaking fingers, she attempted to loosen the drawstring of her reticule. At the bottom of the steps, river mud, the consistency of thickened cream, gleamed under the embankment lights and reflected their shadowy movements above.

“I followed you. Once you told me you’d seen the truncheon, there was nothing else I could do. It was I who killed Catherine. You know it. I can see it in your face. I’ve had the uniform and truncheon for years, bought them from a dodgy market stall. I knew they’d come in handy one day; the police are our constant opponents. I took them with me to the demonstration, and when things started getting out of hand, I changed in the alley, out of everyone’s sight.” Olivia slapped the truncheon in her hand and took a step closer.

“That’s ridiculous, I don’t believe it,” Florence said, believing every word. They had been separated during the riot, and not reunited again until the evening. “You can’t have killed her. It makes no sense at all. Oh, Olivia, please stop this nonsense and come home.” Her fingers closed around the bottleneck.

“Think of the publicity, think how bad it would have looked—a policeman murdering a suffragette! It’s unfortunate that things have not yet eventuated as I had hoped, but there’s still time.”

“You could never be so hard and callous. Why would you choose Catherine? She was our friend, she loved you.”

“Nonsense, Catherine loved nothing but her cause. Catherine found Daisy and me in
flagrante delicto
at my house when we
were supposed to be folding leaflets. She threatened to expose us, to tell you. You always said you never wanted
those
kinds of women in the group, don’t you remember?” Her voice rose. “We should have the right to live as we choose.” She paused, poked Florence’s reticule with the tip of the truncheon. “What have you got in there? Let me see.”

Florence held up her hands, praying that Olivia would not see the glinting glass. “Rules are made to be broken,” she stuttered. “I wouldn’t have minded. I know what Catherine was like …”

“She said I was corrupting an innocent young girl,” Olivia said, now with a hysterical edge to her voice.

“Not if Daisy was consenting. She was old enough. Love between women is not illegal, no one cares.”

Olivia raised the truncheon.

“Olivia, don’t do this! I’m your friend. You are feeling unbalanced by the terrible treatment you suffered in Holloway. Come home with—”

With a splintering snap, the truncheon slammed down on Florence’s arm. The bottleneck fell from her grasp and she collapsed onto the stone steps, dizzy with pain and fear. “Please, Olivia, no,” Florence sobbed, clutching her shattered arm, desperately searching for a means of escape.

But with Olivia above her and the mud below, there was no way out. When Olivia descended the steps, Florence began to scream.

T
he cab slithered to a stop on the macadam just outside the Tower. Terrible screams reached them before they had stepped from the carriage. “That’s Florence!” Dody cried,
scrambling over Pike and onto the street, hitching up her skirts as she ran across the cobbles towards Queen’s Steps. She was soon overtaken by Derwent and Patrick, pelting towards the figures she could now see, grappling at the river’s edge.

At the sound of the men’s shouts, Olivia looked up briefly. The police buttons on her uniform glinted under the lamplight. Florence took advantage of Olivia’s distraction and lashed out with her elbow, knocking Olivia to her own level at the bottom of the steps. When Dody arrived, breathless at the top, it was hard to distinguish who was who as one shape pushed and the other grabbed. Then, in an instant, both figures rolled from the steps and plunged several feet down, into the river mud.

Dody moved to follow, but found herself struggling against Derwent’s strong grip. “Where are they? I can’t see them!” she cried.

“Stay put, woman. There’s no point any of us leaping in until we can see where they are.”

“Down there.” She pointed into the sucking murk. “There’s movement over there, can’t you see it?” The mud bubbled some distance from the steps. Dody saw Olivia, struggling to hold Florence under the mud.

By now, Pike had caught up with the group at the top of the steps. “Patrick,” he panted, ripping off his coat and jacket. “Run to the docks and get help.”

Patrick dashed away in the direction of the lights, some two hundred yards in the distance, and Pike made for the steps. Derwent was quicker. He pulled Pike back by the collar and shoved him to the ground, Pike’s cane clattering on the cobbles.

“Don’t be a fool,” Derwent said. “That muck’s like quicksand, you haven’t a chance.”

Then Derwent was on the bottom step, launching himself
as far as his long legs could take him, landing waist deep in the viscous, stinking mud.

“Where is she, where’s Florence?” Dody heard him cry as he waded towards Olivia, his arms outstretched. He reached out to grab her, but she slipped from his grasp.

Then a gunshot rang out in the fog.

Dody covered her mouth with her hand. “My God, she has a pistol!”

“O’Neill’s still standing. She must have missed,” Pike said.

The two slippery forms came together and it was unclear who had the advantage until another shot cracked the air, followed almost immediately by a high-pitched scream. Then Olivia was gone and the only sound was the gentle slap of the tide.

Derwent disappeared, too.

“It’s all right,” Pike said to Dody, “he’s looking for Florence.”

“She’s been under too long, let me go, I have to try—”

“You need to stay dry and ready to attend to her when he brings her out,” Pike said, holding fast to her arm.

“Please let—”

“Wait! I see her. He’s got her—look.”

Dody saw Derwent heaving to lift Florence, her clothes weighted down by the mud. Dody’s heart leapt.

“He’s struggling—he needs a hand.” Pike let go of his hold on Dody and started down the steps. He lowered himself into the mud and waded laboriously out towards Derwent. He was still yards away when Derwent stumbled and dropped to his knees, holding only Florence’s head above the mud.

Pike edged closer. He was agonisingly slow. If he slipped like Derwent had just done, Dody knew he would not have the strength in his knee to push himself back up.

When he was close enough, Pike thrust out his cane. “Grab this!” he called.

Derwent closed one slippery hand around the cane and hauled himself to his feet, while with the other he struggled to lift Florence further out of the mud. Dody saw no signs of life. Florence’s head was flopped against her chest. Pike approached her other side and took some of the burden, and they began to make their slow way back to the steps.

Dody dropped onto the bottom step and lay on her stomach with her chest extending out over the steps and her feet towards the embankment. As soon as the sodden trio came close enough, she reached out to Pike and entwined her hand with his.

The clatter of running footsteps reached her and she knew it must be Patrick returning with help from the docks. Firm hands grabbed her ankles; someone helped her with Pike’s hand. The human chain tugged and pulled until, with a sucking squelch, the pressure suddenly eased. To the sound of cheers from the men who had just arrived, Florence was dragged to the embankment and up onto the steps.

“Put her down. On her back,” Dody instructed. She knelt at the side of the still form of her sister. “Please God, please God.” She prayed as she had never prayed before. Pushing away clumps of mud-caked hair, she placed two fingers on the side of Florence’s neck, desperate to feel the pulse of her sister’s life.

Nothing.

She prised open Florence’s mouth and forced her hand into her throat, scooping out gobbets of mud with her fingers. There was still more lodged in the pharynx, she could feel it but not reach it. She withdrew her hand and slammed her
flattened palm onto Florence’s chest. A spray of mud burst from Florence’s lungs and the paroxysms of coughing that followed were the most joyous sounds Dody had ever heard.

“Get us a cab from the bridge,” Dody heard Pike say to one of the onlookers. He knelt by Dody’s side and tucked his coat around Florence’s shuddering form, as tenderly as if she were his own daughter.

“Is she going to be all right?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so.” Dody looked around at the sea of anxious faces. “Thanks to all of you. Thank you.”

Pike got up and went over to where Derwent O’Neill was standing. Both men were shivering and dripping mud as they huddled together in earnest conversation. Dody wrapped her body around her sister’s to infuse warmth into her and stroked her muddy face with the edge of her skirt.

After a minute or two Florence’s eyes opened. She tried to speak.

“Hush, now,” Dody said. “There will be plenty of time for talking.”

“Olivia, where’s Olivia?”

“She’s dead—you don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

“She killed Catherine. Tried to kill me.”

“She was deranged, my love.”

“I think she broke my arm.” Florence tried to shift her position and gasped with pain. “It hurts terribly.”

“I know, darling, but I will soon have you feeling like new again.”

Dody continued to stroke her hair. Florence frowned, little corrugations cracking through the drying mud on her face. “This is quite a setback to our group. But we will overcome. You know that, don’t you, Dody?”

“Of course, my dear.”

“The fight isn’t over yet,” Florence said with as much strength as she could muster.

Dody turned her head to Pike, wondering if he’d heard what her sister had said. His eyes met hers and he smiled.

N
inety-nine, one hundred. Dody placed her silver-backed hairbrush on the dressing table and steeled herself. “I’m ready now, Annie.”

The maid moved behind the chair and yanked the comb through Dody’s hair, indicating that Dody’s one hundred brush strokes were amateurish and insufficient.

Dody drew a breath; no mean feat in her restrictive corset. “Gentle now, please, Annie, I’m a cowardly creature.”

“You never used to mind, Miss Dody. It only hurts now because you’ve forgotten what it’s like for me to do your hair.” She took a “rat,” a small oval-shaped pad from the dressing table and pinned it to one side of Dody’s head.

And now I have been reminded
, Dody thought,
I will not be requesting the service again.

“Who would think that only two weeks ago you were
flinging yourself about in the mud with a madwoman—there’s nothing cowardly about that, I’m sure.”

“It wasn’t me in the mud, Annie. I was just one of the many heaving from the steps.”

Annie took some sections of hair and carefully smoothed them over the pad, pinning them into place. “Miss Florence is lucky to be alive, thank the Lord,” she said through a mouthful of hairpins. “The mud wasn’t so merciful to Miss Barndon-Brown, though, was it? Not that she didn’t deserve everything she got.”

Dody pictured Olivia as she had last seen her, a pathetic mud-caked figure on the mortuary slab. She had attended the postmortem conducted by Dr. Wilson, but not assisted; indeed she had scarcely spoken throughout the proceedings.

The cause of death was a gunshot wound to the abdomen, deemed to be self-inflicted, though whether by intention or accident, it was impossible to say. The O’Neill brothers had disappeared before the police arrived on the scene, and nobody had mentioned their involvement.

When Wilson cut through the skull to the brain, Dody had half expected to see a tumour, something organic to explain Olivia’s monstrous behaviour. But even at the cellular level under the microscope, the portions of brain she examined had appeared normal.

“Florence’s arm is healing nicely,” she said, watching with awe the transformation that was taking place in the mirror before her. Annie had repeated the procedure on the other side of Dody’s head and was now skillfully smoothing her long fringe into the two pads.

“Not long to go now, miss.” Annie gathered up a remaining length of hair at the back, twisting it into a bun and holding it in place with an enamelled comb, the same colour as the
gown she had earlier laid out on the bed. “Do you want feathers, too, miss? All the ladies are wearing feathers these days.”

“No, my hair looks wonderful as it is, thank you, Annie. I don’t want to block anyone’s view of the stage.”

“And you don’t want to look taller than the chief inspector, neither, I wouldn’t think.”

There was still an underlying sting to the maid’s tone whenever Pike’s name was mentioned. If Florence could forgive Pike, surely Annie could, too? In fact, Florence had forgiven Pike to such an extent that his daughter, Violet, had been invited to spend the night as a guest in their house. Florence was even lending the girl a gown for the opera.

She could hear girlish laughter coming from Florence’s room now. It was hardly surprising that they should be getting on so well, Dody reflected. Violet Pike was more of a suffragette than Dody would ever be.

“That will be all now, Annie. I can finish dressing myself. Go and see if Miss Pike needs a hand with her hair. Her father will be arriving shortly.”

“Very well, miss.” As Annie opened the door to leave, Dody heard giggling from Florence’s room, then a snatch of a verse she hadn’t heard since Florence was a schoolgirl.

The girls fell silent. Annie must have entered the room like a cold draught. Dody returned to her dressing. Her gown was by no means the latest from Paris, but she had worn it infrequently enough for it to still look and feel new to her. She stepped into the folds of rose chiffon and fastened the
close-fitting bodice, making sure the décolleté revealed plenty of the tantalising lace chemise beneath. She stared in amazement at the stranger in the full-length mirror: not a hair out of place in the mahogany pompadour, the perfect S-shaped posture, tiny waist, and she laughed at herself, the modern, freethinking career woman, secretly revelling in her own femininity.