The Hourglass Factory (24 page)

‘I’d get the fright of my life if I bumped into you in a churchyard.’

‘Don’t.’ Milly fiddled with the covers. Her face grew grave. ‘I’m still thinking about that stone.’ They both jumped as the door handle turned.

The maid, Alice, brought in tea and toast and clucked her tongue quietly as she set the tray down, catching sight of the state of them. Doubtless, thought Frankie, she was used to a more
civilised madam. Twinkle’s rose-petal jam was so sweet it made her teeth sting but Milly didn’t seem to mind, bolting it down as though she had never seen food before.

When they had washed and dressed they stood by the front door. Twinkle had still not stirred from her bed. In her schoolteacher costume, pinned and bunched in to fit, Milly looked eerily like
the lay mistress at Frankie’s convent school, the one who kept the birch pickling in water to keep it smart.

‘Are you comfortable in that get-up?’ Frankie cast her eye over it, trying not to think of where and why its last airing might have taken place.

‘Do I have much choice?’ Milly’s face had a glimmer of stubbornness. ‘She offered me a leather strap too. I declined.’ She pinched down her collar and her eyes grew
serious. ‘If they wouldn’t tell Mrs B-E. about the arson plans, what makes you think they will tell me?’

‘Because you’ll make them trust you.’

‘Will I?’ The amusement picked back up in her face. She looked tired from the night before but there was a gloss in her pupils. ‘Might need that strap after all.’ She did
a final twirl.

Frankie looked at her, spinning in the woollen contraption, an ankle length skirt exposing the top of sturdy boots and a matching jacket, with cream blouse poking out at the collar and cuffs.
She looked so like the stereotype, the Mrs Ought-to-be-spanked-first who appeared on seaside postcards and propaganda, that she couldn’t help smile. Guiltily she thought of her cartoon.
‘Go on, you’ll fit right in.’

The air outside was damp but bright, the fog washed away by the rising sun and Frankie felt her head begin to clear. The streets were empty, except for the odd family scrambling along, late for
church. It had crossed their minds that there would be no one at suffragette headquarters on a Sunday, but Milly knew from the rhythms of Ebony’s disappearances over the past months that
Sundays were one of their busiest days. The working women could come along, fathers were free to take care of children and houses quiet enough to justify sneaking out for a few hours. Besides, the
growing numbers of Darwinists had left the churches emptier now than when Frankie was a child.

They chatted idly as they walked. A burning curiosity itched at Frankie about Milly’s family, but she didn’t dare ask. As they reached the corner onto Kingsway a few doors down from
Lincoln’s Inn, something occurred to her.

‘How many people knew she did that tiger trick before?’

Milly thought for a second. ‘It was well known in circus circles. She didn’t do it at Jojo’s because she didn’t have the space to keep a cat. But everyone who knew her
even vaguely knew she kept an eye on the tigers at the zoo whenever she could, watching the way they moved, keeping up her practice.’

‘Would anyone be able to mimic it?’

Milly laughed incredulously. ‘You think she might have been done in after all? There’s no one who could do what she did. Foucaud even looks like a buffoon. He only gets away with it
because the timeframe is so tight when he’s in the costume, no one has the chance to notice the tiger is moving like a pantomime cow.’

Frankie chewed this over. ‘So it can only have been her.’

Milly opened her plush lips slowly. ‘I wouldn’t stake my life on it . . . But I should say so.’

They both looked up at the huge columns of Lincoln’s Inn House emerging from the pavement like tree trunks. It had a high imposing façade, Greek lines and classical edges striking
an odd note with the houses on either side. It was a fine headquarters indeed. There must have been supporters with bottomless pockets.

Milly took a couple of breaths and fiddled with her cuffs. ‘I could murder a cigarette.’

Frankie raised an eyebrow at the phrase, then fumbled in her jacket catching the fruity whiff of herself. She would have to change her cotton shirt soon. She held out a pack of Matinees. Milly
waved a hand. ‘It’s all right. Best not in front of here anyway. Blow my cover.’

‘Smoking? It’s emancipation.’

Milly raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what you think?’ She brushed down her skirt. ‘Right.’ Her lips curled tentatively into a smile. ‘Where are you off to
anyway?’

‘The morgue.’

Her smile disappeared. ‘Why?’

Frankie stared at her. ‘That Turkish Delight jam rot your brain did it? The body of Mr Smythe, Inspector Millicent. Where d’you go when there’s a body?’

Milly’s lips sulked down. ‘I was only asking.’

‘Besides, I got my contacts,’ Frankie said smartly, watching Milly’s slim back weave a few paces away from her. Just before Milly reached the door, she turned. ‘Frankie,
where shall I meet you next?’

‘Lyon’s tea room, Piccadilly, six o’clock?’

‘I’ll be there,’ she paused. ‘Have fun with your cadavers, Constable Frankie.’ Moving like a roe deer, she hopped up onto the doorstep and had her hand brandishing
the knocker in an instant.

Frankie watched a motor bus puff past the building then turned back up Kingsway towards Covent Garden. She reflected that it had not been twenty-four hours since she had first
learned Millicent’s real name, and yet she was trusting her in a way she wouldn’t have trusted any of the staffers from Stonecutter Street. Before last night she had just been one of
the exotic West End figures Frankie would pass from time to time on shady streets, dolled up in curious costume. Artists’ models, mannequins, girls whose jobs you didn’t know, but who
insisted on making their own living. How had her fleet, fragile, perfectly crafted feet ended up on Jojo’s doorstep? ‘I wasn’t born a showgirl,’ she had said. So did Milly,
unlike Ebony, have a safety net she could escape into if someone was on her heels?

Frankie walked on carefully, feeling the burden of what she had set out to do creeping up onto her shoulders. She had wanted this. She had pictured herself time and again in sharp tweeds working
her way through London on an investigative piece, had scoffed at Teddy Hawkins’s shoddy reporting, known she could do better. She convinced herself when there was a murder in the papers that
she could slot the facts together silky and quick, not like the lead-headed coppers and dozy reporters covering it, if only she was given the chance. But the flip side of that was that undeniably,
most things Frankie had done up until now hadn’t turned out quite the way she’d expected them to. Being a society columnist wasn’t champagne and sparkling ideas, it was gin and
Twinkle’s bizarre whims. Being a cartoonist wasn’t coffee houses and satire, it was sketching to please others without thinking about the consequences.

She tried to shake off her fermenting self-doubt as she stopped outside the Endell Street Hospital, and looked up and down the street. There was a back entrance where the undertakers’
carts pulled up out of sight of the main road. She hopped the fence and passed down an alleyway alongside a high wall. From a couple of the open windows the sounds of the hospital drifted outside;
quiet feet padding on wood floors, the scraping of gurneys being moved. Someone inside moaned, low and guttural.

The entrance to the morgue was discreetly screened from view by a patch of shrubs, but she didn’t get that far before she felt the hands: one slapped straight across her eyes, the other
smothering her mouth and nose with the thick taste of something chemical.

She bit down on a set of fat fingers. The voice behind her let out a shrill cry. ‘Ow! You’ve got teeth like a bleedin’ wolf.’

She jabbed her elbow behind her and wrenched herself free. ‘You think I don’t know the stink of your fingers, John Bridewell? You should be locked up, creeping around hospitals,
frightening young women.’ Though she was scowling, her voice was shaky. He had caught her off guard.

The fat boy in the white apron shook his hand up and down furiously, a sheepish smile pushing into his heavy cheeks. He hadn’t changed a bit, not in the two years since she had seen him
last, except for putting on even more weight around his hips and belly. He’d always been one for sinister pranks, whenever she’d been sent to him by the
Tottenham Evening News
editor, to sniff out dirt on a gruesome death or suicide. It seemed he was still a crafty little bastard. He extended a hand. Frankie took it reluctantly. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t
bite it off.’ She spat the nasty taste onto the ground. ‘Formaldehyde. You’re a sick boy.’

‘That’s what they all say.’ He chuckled, loud and ribald.

They stood for a few seconds eyeing one another up like cats not knowing whether they were about to fight. ‘You’ve grown taller I think,’ he said after a while. ‘Must be
the Fleet Street ale.’

‘It’s perspective. Maybe you’ve shrunk.’ She forced a grin.

‘I never thought I’d see you again. Aren’t you too busy writing about the colour of the Queen’s knickers?’ He laughed again but there was a note of nervousness in
it. ‘What’s the matter? You told them she didn’t wear none so they kicked you off back to the morgues to write about people who can’t sue?’

‘I need a bit of help, John. You got much work on just now?’

‘Few waiting to be picked up.’

‘It’s someone important.’

He narrowed his puffy eyes.

‘Olivier Smythe.’ She watched him but his face gave nothing away. ‘I think he was murdered.’

‘Your paper went with “accident” on that.’

‘So you do read it then?’ she smiled.

He stiffened. ‘If it’s lying around.’

Frankie ran her fingers through her hair, taking a few seconds to let his surprise attack wash off her. In his apron, stained with thin smears of yellow fat and brownish red there was something
singularly unsettling about him. His nose had a proud little turn up and his skin was always ruddy and mottled, the way dead flesh looked. It was a pity; he was a nice boy who had been unlucky
enough to be in the wrong place when there was a job going spare as a mortician’s assistant. Even after all the times he had bailed her out, broken the rules to let her have a glimpse of a
corpse, or gone through with her the exact mechanisms of the body of a person who had drowned or suffered a heart attack, she still felt her skin recoiling slightly at the sight of him. It was his
soft round belly more than anything. How could a man who did his job have such an appetite?

‘He was collected this morning, there’s nothing to see.’

‘Who by?’

‘Solicitor’s arrangements.’ He looked around at the small yard. From the street came the sound of a cab passing. ‘Look, if you’re coming in you’d better do it
now. Master’s had to nip up to the office for a minute. But,’ he held up a chubby finger. ‘It’s going to cost you, Frankie.’

‘I don’t have any money.’

He smiled. ‘I don’t mean money.’

A quick wave of nausea passed over her. She wasn’t swift enough to hide it and she saw John Bridewell’s cheeks stiffen and felt ashamed.

‘Come on, Frankie, I don’t mean that and you know it,’ he said quietly. An awkward livid blush spread over his face and she felt even worse. ‘I’m applying for the
university. He said he’ll cover the costs for me to study anatomy. Don’t want to be a trolley boy all my life and I know the organs, I’ve got good cutting skills.’ She
stifled a shiver. ‘Can you read over my letter?’ There was a note of defence in his voice, hurt pride.

‘Of course, John,’ Frankie said too quickly.

‘You was always good with letters.’ He nodded softly, then inclined his head to the green painted door. ‘Come on.’

It was startling how quickly the smell came back to her, and with it waves of memories, a different life, handwriting by paraffin lamp, stories of the dead people who lay like soapstone on the
morgue shelves. She thought of the man who was savaged by a pig, the woman who bleached her stomach.
Tottenham Evening News
had gone to town on that one. Page two with an illustration. She
had felt proud at first, until one of the leader writers told her that the reason they asked her was that no one else wanted to do it. Then she had felt ashamed, like she was only one step up from
the body snatchers of the last century. Wait until I’m on Fleet Street, she had thought. I’ll show you. And now she was back at the morgue, fighting Teddy Hawkins for the privilege. It
flashed across her mind how strangely the world worked.

There was a dripping sound coming from somewhere and the air was cold but sweet. John Bridewell moved efficiently through the cluttered space, clearing one empty trolley out of the way, moving
instruments onto a wooden table scattered with an assortment of knives and hooks. Two naked bodies lay in the far corner, wizened at the necks, swollen at the wrists. Frankie tried not to look but
it was hard not to and her gaze ended up falling on a row of pickled body parts, ears, fingers and tumours in large jars.

‘What’s this for, Frankie?’ His question caught her off guard. ‘Is this personal? Because I know your paper’s covered it already, I spoke to Teddy
Hawkins.’

‘You spoke to Teddy Hawkins?’ She could barely conceal the jealousy in her voice.

‘Yes.’

‘And it was you that told him it was an accident?’

‘I said nothing of the sort. I said you get all kinds of corset-related deaths. Typically when they say accident, they mean over a period of time.’ He shifted his hand on the corner
of a trolley.

Frankie looked around and her eyes fell on a pile of clothes soaking up the damp around a drain in one corner. ‘You worked on him?’

He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I thought I was going to be sick. Haven’t felt that way since I took my first turn with a scalpel.’

‘So what really happened? Was it progressive? Or had he just laced himself in too tight?’

‘Tight? When we took the corset off him, you could see his shape, the ribs went in, right in, like they’d been stunted, dug up to his lungs. His arse was an upside-down heart. His
liver was dented. Boss says he must have been wearing one since before his bones hardened. Call himself a man.’ He looked away. ‘I don’t know what happened. You can guess what
happened, I don’t need to know.’