The Insanity of Murder (8 page)

Before Pike left Dody’s the previous evening she had pressed a photograph into his hands. It was a head and shoulders shot of a female corpse. It seemed that the woman had swallowed bleach and the coroner had requested an investigation into the suicide. Dody suspected that the unidentified woman was of unbalanced mind, and possibly also the victim of an operation performed without her consent — what kind of an operation, she had not said. As most of the men in Pike’s department were still busy with the aftermath of the Necropolis bombing, he had volunteered for the job. This errand, normally beneath an officer of his ranking, was also an effective way of putting more distance between himself and Florence’s case.

The closest asylum to Waterloo Station, where the indigent woman’s body had been found, was Bethlem. Pike would begin his enquiries there.

He took an omnibus from Whitehall to Lambeth, disembarking on the busy Lambeth Road, which was crowded with lorries and carts and street vendors calling out their wares in cheerful cockney voices. The asylum’s distinctive pumpkin dome rose from lush lawns and flowerbeds like a colourful mirage amid the grey landscape of the surrounding streets. Hardly a picture of mental agony, he mused, as he viewed the scene. But all too aware of the reputation of the place and of how deceiving outwards appearances could be, it was with some trepidation that he pushed open the railed gate and mounted the steps.

Inside, directly opposite the front door, he saw an open door marked ‘Administration’. The office was reassuring in its ordinariness: high clerk’s desk, ledgers, filing cabinets and crammed pigeonholes. He introduced himself to the inky-fingered clerk and explained his assignment, producing the photograph of Dody’s unidentified suicide.

The clerk flinched at the grisly sight. ‘Lord ’elp us,’ he muttered.

The man’s eyes, Pike noticed, were focused only on the horrific injuries to the woman’s lower face. He placed his thumb over the seared mouth.

‘Look again, please, sir, look at the top part of her face and the eyes. Is this woman familiar now?’

The clerk shook his head. ‘But I ’aven’t been ’ere long. Try the women’s section in the east side of the building. I’ll point you in the right direction.’

The clerk led Pike out of the office to a gate at the start of a long passage. Taking a set of keys from his pocket he unlocked the gate and showed Pike through. ‘’ead down the corridor and follow the signs to reception.’

The gate clanged shut and Pike found himself looking at the clerk from the other side of the bars. The young man laughed. ‘It’s all right, no one’s going to ’urt you ’ere – this lot are ’armless. The bars are to protect them, not us. The criminally insane are usually sent to Broadmoor these days.’

‘How reassuring,’ Pike muttered.

‘Just give me a yell when you’re finished and I’ll let you out.’

Pike thanked the clerk and made his way down a long corridor of waxed floorboards. The echoing tap of his cane sounded as if he were wending his way through a tunnel or mausoleum. Engravings of Queen Victoria adorned the walls between rows and rows of doors. Some of the doors had peepholes, like prison cells, while others bore signs indicating they were treatment rooms. One such door was open and a cleaner was mopping under a chair-like contraption suspended from the ceiling with multiple straps dangling from it. The draft from the cleaner’s motion made the chair gently spin. A lever and some electrical equipment nearby suggested the contraption could spin at a much faster rate if necessary. The cleaner straightened over her mop when she saw him. When Pike lifted his hat to her, she slammed the door shut with her foot.

Pike continued along the passageway, a cold wind sliding down his back. Hiding his disquiet he casually nodded to a man in a white coat who passed him pushing a trolley of what might have been force-feeding equipment. Pike wondered if Parliament had authorised the implementation of the Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Ill Health Act yet. If not, Florence might be enduring the same fate as one of the unfortunates here. His gut clenched.

At the reception desk he met a woman dressed like a hospital matron in a black dress, white apron, starched cuffs and headdress. The middle-aged woman looked up from her desk and asked with a pleasant smile how she might help. He introduced himself and showed her the photograph of the unidentified corpse. Unlike the clerk in the administration office, the medically trained woman did not flinch.

‘Burns,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Heat or chemical?’

‘It is believed she drank bleach. She was found in the ladies lavatories at Waterloo Station. Given the vicinity I thought she might have been a former p—’

Pike’s words were cut off by a high-pitched shriek. He turned to find two white-coated male attendants pushing and pulling at a woman in a straitjacket who refused to get up from the floor.

‘Excuse me a minute, Chief Inspector. George! I told you before to secure Mrs Walton to a trolley for transportation. It is not at all seemly that she be dragged to hydrotherapy along the floor — especially in front of a visitor.’

‘Sorry, Matron,’ George said. ‘Stay on ’er Bill, while I fetch the trolley.’

Bill sat on the woman’s upper body and pinned her to the ground. The woman continued to scream and thrash her legs.

The matron must have read the shock in Pike’s face. ‘Come with me, sir, where it’s less noisy.’

She led him to the patients’ dayroom. It was furnished like a parlour, with comfortable chairs arranged around an oriental carpet. The contents of the room suggested all kinds of creative endeavours: a sewing machine, someone’s knitting basket, a piano, an easel, and a gramophone. One of the few things that marked it as different from any other middle-class parlour were the tiny windows, barely providing any view of the outside. Too small, Pike noted, to facilitate a patient’s escape, let alone a view of the lavish gardens.

‘It’s therapy time, Chief Inspector,’ the matron said, explaining the empty room, ‘so we have this place to ourselves for the moment.’

‘Indeed, Matron.’ Pike paused. ‘Would you mind telling me what kinds of therapies are undertaken here?’

‘Of course not, Chief Inspector. In the main we rely on the spinning chair — to restore equilibrium, hot and cold baths to calm nervous agitation, purging, massage, and sometimes isolation.’

‘Are surgical operations ever performed here?’ he enquired.

‘No, sir, not at this hospital.’

‘But you do force-feed the prisoners — I mean, the patients,’ he quickly corrected himself.

‘Unfortunately, yes. Anorexia nervosa — refusing to eat — is becoming more and more prevalent, especially amongst the younger women.’

Pike kept his face devoid of emotion, despite his mind turning to his daughter. ‘Why would that be, do you think?’

‘Too much education and too much reading … Too much time on their hands, I suppose.’

The sooner Violet went off to that finishing school, the better, Pike thought to himself.

‘Sexual frustration can also be a cause, according to Doctor Reeves, whose practices we largely adhere to here in Bethlem,’ the matron added.

Pike felt himself flush and returned to safer ground. ‘Yes, well, about the woman in the photograph, Matron.’

‘I do recognise her, Inspector. I remember all our cures. That was Cynthia Hislop. We discharged her to her family about three years ago.’

It pleased Pike to have discovered a name so quickly.

‘You would never have recognised her as the miserable wretch we first admitted,’ the matron continued. ‘I’m sorry that she is dead. She must have had a terrible relapse to have done that to herself.’

‘I am told this kind of suicide is fairly common in those of unsound mind.’

‘The mad still feel pain, Chief Inspector. And besides, there are many different forms of lunacy. Even at her worst, I would not have imagined Cynthia doing this to herself.’

Pike dwelled on this, knitting his brows. ‘What was her diagnosis, Matron?’

‘Extreme melancholia. She refused to leave her bed, to eat or to bathe. That is what I mean when I say even at her worst I cannot imagine herself taking her life like this. When a melancholic is this severe they cannot bring themselves to do anything, let alone get the motivation up to travel away from home and deliberately swallow bleach.’

Was there a chance that Dody and Spilsbury were wrong about the woman taking her own life? Was there a more sinister reason behind her death? Pike did not look forward to challenging his medical colleagues about this.

‘May I have her last known address, please?’ he asked the matron.

‘I’ll have a look in the file for you, dear.’

They headed back to the reception area in the passageway. The attendants were now struggling to strap the screaming woman onto a trolley. Ignoring the commotion, the matron began flicking through cards in a filing cabinet.

‘Married to a solicitor, if I remember rightly.’ She frowned with annoyance and looked up from the filing cabinet. ‘Skip the hydrotherapy today, George, and put her in isolation. A few days alone in the padded cell and she’ll be in that cold bath in a flash.’

She turned back to Pike and handed him an address card. ‘There you are, Chief Inspector,’ she said, smiling sweetly.

Pacing the cell floor had been a therapeutic release for Florence’s nervous energy. But since the hunger pangs had been replaced by a hollow feeling of weakness, she had been forced to take to the bed lest she succumb to dizziness and collapse to the flagstones. Strange, she thought, that while her body weakened the mechanisms of her mind grew, sometimes ballooning into a force that threatened to knock her over the edge. Despite it all, she was determined to persist with her hunger strike, whatever the cost. Hadn’t she gone through it before and survived, body and soul intact? Of course she had.

Hunger striking was the most effective strategy yet devised by the sisters to draw attention to the cause of female suffrage. It didn’t even matter that the press refused to report on it these days. The suffragettes made such a huge celebration out of their colleagues’ release from prison that no one within a radius of five miles could fail to hear the hullaballoo or deduce what it was about. You’d think the women had been canonised. Celebratory teas were organised, speeches made, brass bands played and medals presented. The divine Miss Christabel Pankhurst had presented Florence with her medal. It was one of the most thrilling occasions of Florence’s life — how she and her companions had been lauded! She screwed her eyes tight and balled her fists. She prayed that the memory of that magical moment would get her through the agonising days ahead.

Florence sneezed and pulled the thin blanket tighter across her shoulders. The head cold was a worry. She must have picked it up from the spluttering shop girl she’d shared a cell with at the magistrate’s court. How could they insert the feeding tube if her nose was blocked with mucous? Her panic ballooned again, ready to suffocate her. Probably shove it down my mouth, she thought. And if I am especially unlucky, like Emily Davison, the force-feeders will take a few teeth with them. Emily had false teeth now and they clicked whenever she spoke. Florence’s brow popped with perspiration. She wiped it off with the sleeve of her dress. Oh God, I must stop getting myself so carried away. What will be will be. Having one’s teeth knocked out, she attempted to console herself, would certainly be a war wound worth boasting about.

But the hand-wringing wait for the force-feeding seemed so much worse this time around. Before, she had been imprisoned with other suffragettes and they had been able to jolly each other along, reinforcing their belief in the cause with poetry and stirring songs. How naïve they had been. No one had any idea what was in store for them then.

A sound outside her cell door caused her heart to jolt, her body to tense. Was it the warden come to collect the night soil? Or was it the breakfast trolley? They’d taken her watch away with her clothes and she was having trouble keeping track of time. All she wore now was a sack-like prison dress covered in arrows; last time she had been allowed to keep her own clothes. But it was probably best that they had taken them away, she supposed. They’d probably be ruined by blood and vomit anyway.

Her eyes traversed the small cell and came to rest upon the waste bucket. With great effort she moved towards it, leaning on the bolted-down table for support. She lifted the lid and quickly replaced it. The night soil trolley must have been and gone. Although the bucket was empty, the smell continued to linger through the small cell. She gagged and allowed herself a small sip of water from the tin cup on the table. The lip of the cup was uneven and crusty with dirt, as if it had never been washed.

A cockroach peeped from underneath the tin plate containing last night’s supper of greasy mutton and floury potato. When the warden — a fresh-faced young woman with plump arms — had plonked the meal on the table, she’d said, ‘I’ll leave it for you then, miss. Maybe you’ll be tempted for a peck in the middle of the night.’

Not likely. Florence picked up the plate and slotted it with difficulty through the ‘letter box’ of her cell door. When the breakfast trolley passed the plate would be replaced with a bowl of watery porridge and a crust of bread.
Funny that I’m such an expert on prison food without ever having sampled a morsel of it
.

The sound of the rattling trolley grew closer. Florence returned to her bed — not much more than a suspended bench with a horsehair mattress — and curled herself up like a shrimp with her back to the door. With the clunk of a heavy key in the lock, the cell door groaned open. She heard the rattle of a trolley being nosed through. Florence curled further and tightened her arms across her chest.

It wasn’t the breakfast trolley.

Strong hands grabbed her. She refused to uncurl and it took three female prison wardens to manoeuvre her onto the only chair in the cell. They prised her limbs apart and tied her to the chair.

A doctor stepped into her line of sight. His eyes were dark and bottomless and she could not help but notice their devilish glint. When he spoke, his voice was black velvet. ‘This is for your own good, Miss McCleland.’

‘I’ve brought you some lovely porridge, Miss McCleland,’ the warden with the plump arms from last night enticed her, somewhat desperately. ‘I’ve even put some sugar on it.’

‘I don’t want it, get it away from me!’ Florence screamed.

Like a mirage in the desert, the scene before her shimmered through her tears. Surely, what she saw could not be real; surely she was misreading the doctor’s expression, the way he handled the tube. He smiled as he lifted it from a jug on the trolley, regarded it tenderly for a moment and then smothered it with lubricant, sliding it back and forth between his fingers.

‘I’ll get you for this, you sadistic bastard!’ Florence shouted at him. ‘They’ll let me go eventually, and when they do I’ll —’

‘Tut tut, language my dear. Tip her up,’ the doctor ordered the wardens. ‘If this hurts, Miss McCleland, it will be your
own
fault.’

The chair was pulled almost backwards. The doctor leaned over her, dangling the tube in front of her face, continuing to regard her with that unnerving look in his eye. She jerked her head around, making it impossible for him to penetrate her nostril. A coarse hand clamped itself across her forehead; another steadied her chin. Florence was pinned and paralysed. The doctor moved closer with the tube. She could feel the warmth of his breath against her cheek, smell his breakfast coffee, see a vein pulsing at his temple — it was all so horribly intimate.

He smoothed the hair from her eyes.

‘Your skin is so fine, my dear. I will do my best not to damage it. You are as beautiful as you are stubborn.’

Florence fell silent. She stared at him for a moment, mesmerised.

The plump young warden broke the eerie silence. ‘Doctor, I think we should get on with it.’

The doctor shook his head like one emerging from a trance. ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

He steadied the hand holding the tube against the side of her face and moved the tip of the tube towards her nostril. The fatty odour of the goose grease made her gag.

‘None of that, now.’ The doctor exaggerated a flinch. One of the other wardens, not the sympathetic plump one, giggled at his theatrics. ‘We haven’t even started yet.’

I’ll give you something to giggle about
, Florence thought as she hoiked at the phlegm in the back of her throat. She would use this cold of hers to her advantage. She’d show them that she had not yet lost her control. And this is what it was about, after all. Control.

The doctor put his face towards hers once more. Florence spat. The bolus of phlegm caught him on the end of his hooked nose and dripped onto his lips. He bellowed, pulled away for just a moment and then struck back, landing a stunning blow across the side of Florence’s head.

‘You filthy little bitch!’ he cried, dabbing at his nose and mouth with a handkerchief.

The inside of Florence’s mouth welled and she spat again, this time engulfing those around her in a fine red mist. Her captors leapt back with screams of disgust. The sudden loss of restraint caused the chair to pitch forward, taking Florence with it, headfirst to the flagged floor.

Through the fog in her mind she thought she heard the cell door open followed by a cacophony of panicking voices. And then she heard nothing more at all.