The Formula for Murder (4 page)

Down the wharf is a forest of tall masts and smokestacks black from the coal burned in their steam engines. I see bales of tobacco from Virginia coming off a Yankee clipper ship, beef from Argentina being unloaded from a freighter whose name should be
Bucket of Rust,
blocks of ice from a Norwegian ship moving down a long slide, disappearing into an icehouse.

The slide is several stories high, leading out to a wharf where the ice blocks are coming out the hole of the ship. As the cargo net with a single large block sits down on the slide, a man on each side uses hooks on long poles to pull the block free of the thick rope netting and send it skidding down the ramp.

Convenient—an icehouse next to the mortuary.

On my way back I realize that on the other side of the mortuary is a meatpacking plant where, according to the sign in front, Argentine beef is processed. I find it distasteful that the mortuary is so close to a slaughterhouse.

Putting a morgue between a meatpacking house and an icehouse on a busy dock offends my sense of order in the world and respect for the dead. The Chinese would say the morgue’s position is not an auspicious setting for a place of the dead, that it’s not feng shui correct because it isn’t in harmony with the hustle and bustle of its surroundings.

The workers on the docks also strike me as a rather depressing lot, not unlike how they are on the docks in New York. There is a horrible exploitation of cheap labor for handling cargo, with immigrants from Ireland and other countries brought in to keep a constant force of backbreaking labor. To add insult to injury, they are housed in terrible conditions and work for long hours for starvation wages.

Seeing how truly ragged some of the dockworkers are, and having passed, en route to the docks, poor neighborhoods with shoeless children looking dirty and malnourished, adds to my sense of how unjust the world is in distributing wealth.

Some of the workers wear the tattered uniforms of workhouses, those poorhouses where paupers are taken in and sent out to work for their board and stay in dormitories where husbands, wives, and even their children are housed in separate buildings. The atmosphere is grim and intimidating, with workhouse “inmates” treated not unlike prisoners—men and women on admission are stripped, searched, washed, and have their hair cut. Work is tedious and laborious, living conditions disgusting, reminding me of the small boy in Charles Dickens’s novel
Oliver Twist
who lived in a workhouse—poor, miserable, and always hungry.

Thinking about the haves and have nots and my own miserable years as a factory girl, but fortunate as a woman to even have gotten a job where I was paid far less than the men doing the same tasks, I am lost in a brown study when I hear a shrill cry and look up to a raven on a lamppost.

“Wonderful,” I tell him, “how appropriate. Did you come by to taunt me with ‘nevermore’?”

“It appears he did,” Inspector Abberline says behind me. A Victoria carriage bearing a door insignia of the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly called “Scotland Yard,” has arrived. As the inspector approaches me, he looks up from reading a missive apparently delivered by the police-uniformed driver.

“‘And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor shall be lifted nevermore,’” he continues. “My favorite poem.” He waves one of the messages he’s holding. “My commissioner needs to communicate with the New York City Police Department regarding Miss McGuire’s passing. We received a query concerning whether she had mentioned anything about her actions in the New York matter in her suicide note. She hadn’t.”

“Has her, uh, letter been examined by a handwriting expert?” I couldn’t bring myself to say “suicide note.”

“I examined it. I’ve had a bit of experience looking over such things. By comparing it to her handwriting, it’s quite easy to see that it was done by her own hand. She wrote with something of an excited flourish that would not be easy to duplicate. Had the note been very short, say just a sentence, I would have had an expert examine it. But it would be very difficult and time consuming for even a clever forger to get close to a person’s handwriting style when dealing with that much writing.”

I know he’s right; he’s a good policeman who wouldn’t be fooled by a forgery. But before I return to New York, I’ll sweet talk him into letting me see the note anyway. Still, I need to ask him about fingerprinting.

“I just wish you could check for fingerprints.”

“Really … so you know about Dr. Henry Faulds’s awkward concept for identifying criminals?”

“Yes.”

“I’m impressed.”

I hold my chin an inch higher. I revel in it when I surprise people, especially men, with knowledge they don’t think a woman would have.

“Then you know the method of identification was dismissed by our Metropolitan Police five years ago.”

“Yes and I think it’s a shame. It’s quite a clever idea, taking a person’s fingerprints with printing ink and using them for identification. Do you know how Dr. Faulds discovered this?”

“No, do tell.”

“While accompanying a friend to an archaeological dig he noticed in some ancient clay fragments that the delicate impressions left by workers could be detected with the human eye. He decided to examine his own fingertips and then compared them to those of his friends. Each pattern of ridges was uniquely different.”

“Interesting,” Abberline says, “however, when he presented his theory to the commissioner, his evidence didn’t show that prints are always unique to a person or that they can be practically classified, and that’s just naming a few holes in his notion.” He eyes me gravely. “You must accept that your friend killed herself.”

“It’s doesn’t even look like her.”

“Nellie, she was in the water for at least a week. I hate to bring this up, but you saw her face. It’s awful what water does to a body and then you have the fish and…”

“
Stop.
Please, I understand.”

“I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.”

“No, you’re correct.”

I look down at the ground. I wish I could erase that moment when I saw Hailey’s bloated face.

He takes my arm and leads me toward the carriages. “My job as a policeman would often be simpler if we were able to identify criminals and their victims with fingerprints.”

He has changed the subject deliberately and I welcome it. I ask him, “Did you know that while Dr. Faulds was living in Japan his hospital was broken into and the police arrested a staff member?”

He shakes his head. “I know very little about the man’s background.”

“Dr. Faulds thought the man was innocent and he compared the fingerprints left behind at the crime scene to the man they arrested and they were completely different. He was released.”

“Very good.”

“It puzzles me that police agencies are still dismissing his fingerprinting method.”

“Because we would have to have
everyone
in the world’s fingerprints to make his method useable. And that is impracticable and impossible.” He pauses and gives me another look of concern. “Don’t think of the situation as the loss of a friend. She is gone and that is her choice, and she is no longer suffering the mental maladies that caused her sorrow. She’s at peace now.”

I give Inspector Abberline a peck on the cheek. “You’re right.”

He turns beet red and clears his throat with a guttural rumble. “Now, Nellie dear, please let me drop you off at your hotel. We have the commissioner’s own fancy carriage.” He indicates the Victoria, a four-wheeled carriage with a calash top, a seat for two passengers, and a perch in front for the bobby driver.

“Thanks, but I need to drop by Hailey’s old office on Fleet Street to see what needs tending to.”

“I’ll drop you off. And on the way you can look at Hailey’s suicide note.”

“I thought it was at your office.”

“I knew you would want to see it, so I requested it be brought here.”

I do want to see it, but I know in my heart it will throw out the possibility that Hailey’s death was not by her own hand. I don’t know if I’m ready for that.

“Shall we go?”

“Of course.”

Before we pull away, a man comes out of the slaughterhouse next to the morgue and goes inside. He has a bloody apron on and a saw in his hand.

Now I remember what the morgue attendants and their aprons reminded me of—the Pittsburgh meatpacking house I had done a story on.

“Change of shift?” I ask the inspector.

6

My hands are shaking as I hold Hailey’s suicide note. Inspector Abberline is gracious enough to turn his head and look out the window.

If anyone can recognize Hailey’s handwriting it’s me. I’ve seen enough of it. I believe that Inspector Abberline has alternative motives for getting the suicide note to me. He also wants to make sure it’s Hailey’s because of my reluctance. Like he said to me at the morgue, “Just an added point of confirmation that confirms her identity…”

I take a deep breath and look down. “
Oh no.
”

“It’s not Hailey’s handwriting?”

“No … it’s hers.”

He nods his head and looks back out the window.

Tears roll down my cheek as I read her letter.
I am so sorry for what I am about to do, but my life is no longer worth living. He’s left me and I have nothing to live for. I feel so lost, alone, I don’t know what to do. There is no way I can go back to America. I can’t bear the thought of prison. No, I can’t and I won’t go back. I have no place to go and no one to live for. There is only one thing I can do. Whoever finds this note please make sure my cat is given a loving home. Hailey McGuire.

7

Archer stands near the corner of Fleet Street and Hood Court as he watches the entrance to the International News Building halfway down the street. He is waiting for a woman he has never seen in person before.

A cautious man, he occasionally opens up a newspaper to look at a sketch of the woman he is on the lookout for. The story about the woman in the paper is not current news, but a report months earlier on the progress American reporter Nellie Bly was making in her race around the world.

Archer stamps his feet, trying to keep the blood flowing. It is a cool, damp day with the overcast acting as a ceiling to trap the cold, wet air.

He would not have noticed the chill in the air if he had been walking instead of standing around, waiting and watching. He can feel middle age creeping up on him, with arthritic pain starting at the bottom of his often aching feet now that he went everywhere by shank’s mare, no longer able to afford cabs thanks to his dear ex-wife who not only put him in this situation, but once the money stopped coming in, she upped and left. Some gratitude.

For years he lavished her with expensive clothing, even those silly fancy hats she wore like she was going to a garden party or something; a big apartment; dinners out in better restaurants than either of them had ever been in before; even going to plays like they were real gentry … then when he’s ratted out by his fellow policemen at the Metropolitan Police Service for having his hand out too often, she leaves.

Women … trouble, that’s what they are, nothing but trouble.

A street vendor is selling roasted chestnuts on the corner. The chestnuts are roasting on a rack over a bed of hot coals in a half-metal barrow set atop a rollaway cart.

The warm smell of the chestnuts breezes over to Archer and he steps to the vendor and holds out his hand with a piece of newspaper on it.

The peddler gives a look at Archer’s worn suit that needs sponging off and a hot iron, at his soiled collar; the slightly turned rim on his bowler hat, and his scuffed shoes. He puts two chestnuts on it.

“Four,” Archer says.

The man puts two more on. “Four pence.”

“Police,” Archer says, stepping away.

“You’re not a copper anymore. I know who you are.” The vendor grabs the poker he uses to stir the coals with and takes a step toward Archer.

“Back off,” Archer hisses, pulling back his coat, exposing a knife in a sheath hanging from his belt, the only good thing he acquired as a dockworker after he was ousted from being a cop. “A pity job” is what his wife called it just before she left him. And she was right. His cousin, a lead man on the docks, got it for him. Archer hated it, but handling cargo gave him eating money.

The vendor returns to his chestnuts, muttering curses. “Your kind spits in the soup to spoil it for everyone else.”

Archer ignores the man as his attention is drawn to a woman getting out of a carriage in front of the building. He glances back at the newspaper sketch of Nellie Bly and then at the woman as she disappears through the entrance.

Certain it is her and that she will be in the building for a time, he moseys away, toward a tea shop where he will muscle a cup of tea and biscuits much like he did the chestnuts.

Old habits are hard to stop; besides, he enjoys exerting the privileges he had when he carried a detective’s badge. It had made up for the lousy pay.

He’s elated that he’s been hired to do something easier and better paying than carrying cargo like a mule. Following the American woman since she got off the boat from America has gotten him enough for a good bit of beef and gin and his instincts are telling him that there is a lot more to be made.

He’ll be back watching the entrance when she comes out. His work with her is just beginning. If he plays it right, he will be back on top again.

8

As the carriage pulls away, I stand on Fleet Street, the hub of London’s newspaper world.

In New York, the major papers have similarly gathered along Park Row, which is nicknamed “Newspaper Row.” Mr. Pulitzer and other publishers claim they put their papers there to be close to City Hall, but it also proves convenient for their reporters to spy on what the other papers are drumming up. As with thieves, there is no honor among reporters when it comes to gathering news.