The Insanity of Murder Read online

  The sergeant glanced at it and nodded his head. ‘That’ll do. Come with me then, ma’am, and watch your step.’

  Dody told Fletcher not to wait, that she would find a telephone and call when she needed a lift home. She followed the sergeant, picking her way across rippled tarmacadam that could have been shaped by the sea. A fire engine chugged past, heading away from the Necropolis Station, firemen clinging to its sides. Dull light reflected through the soot on the men’s once dazzling brass helmets. Another engine near a cluster of police vans broke away, also heading for home. Perhaps the fire is under control now, Dody thought. She could see no flames from the ruined station and only the occasional thin plume of smoke.

  She had never seen the aftermath of an explosion before and the first thing that assaulted her senses was the appalling smell. A projectile must have penetrated a sewerage pipe near a public convenience and raw sewage flooded the area, motorcar headlamps dancing upon pools of effluent. After carefully stepping around one such evil-smelling mire, she found herself confronted by a miasma of other odours: brick dust, industrial-smelling smoke, and a metallic tang she guessed might be gunpowder. No odour of recent death, thank goodness. Now that was a smell to which she was accustomed.

  Before her, the Necropolis Station building revealed itself like an opened dolls’ house. A teetering desk hung over the edge of one of the exposed rooms, sheets of paper blowing about in a whirl and fluttering. One landed at Dody’s feet. She stooped to pick it up and found it to be an advertisement for a cherrywood coffin for the special price of twenty-one guineas — enough to feed several poor families for a year. She balled the paper and tossed it to the ground.

  ‘Wait there, please, ma’am, and I’ll see if the superintendent is ready for you,’ the sergeant said, as he walked off towards three non-uniformed men engrossed in conversation to the left of the ruined station entrance.

  Dody continued her examination of the station building. Below the exposed offices yawned a deep dark hole. A group of cursing firemen struggled with wedging one of several props already rammed into place to stop the upper stories from collapsing into the chasm. The men dropped the prop and jumped back just as a ceiling beam gave way and crashed to the ground. Plaster rained down but the floor held. Dody stepped back further from the danger, unaware, until it was too late, of a spear of wood sticking out of a pile of rubble behind her. As she attempted to yank the wood free from her clothing it dug further into the fabric of her skirt and split the grey linen to her knee.

  ‘So much for practical work clothes,’ she grumbled aloud. Her coat was not long enough to hide the lower part of the tear and the white bloom of her petticoat drew the eye like bunting.

  Tired of waiting for permission to speak, she approached the men. One was Superintendent Shepherd, the flapping bulk of his rubber Mackintosh making him unmistakable. Next to him — just as tall, though with a much prouder, upright frame — stood Pike’s turbaned assistant, Constable Singh. The slightly smaller man with the cane beside Singh was Pike himself, oblivious as always to the handsome figure he cut. Dody’s heart gave a jolt. Conflicting schedules prevented regular liaisons with her lover, so even these circumstances were better than nothing. The men had not noticed her so she took the opportunity to gather her composure. In public, Pike was just another policeman, and she was Doctor Dorothy McCleland, senior assistant — sole assistant, actually — to chief pathologist Bernard Spilsbury. Their paths occasionally crossed at the mortuary or at a crime scene, but their relationship had never been anything but professional. In this fictional world, she had no idea if he snored (he didn’t), whether he played the piano, (he did, beautifully) or where he was born (Yorkshire), or even that he was ex-military. He could be expected to know more about her, however. Her Fabian parents and suffragette sister meant that her family history was common knowledge to the police. But only Pike knew how much she hated Brussels sprouts. Or how the way he put his lips to her ear after he had pulled off her earrings, made her skin tingle …

  While Dody paused in the shadows of the ruined building, she caught snatches of the men’s conversation.

  ‘Unions, y’think, Pike? I’m thinking about that American union, the one that recently blew up the Los Angeles Times building.’

  ‘Perhaps, sir,’ Pike answered neutrally.

  ‘Irish? Anarchists? Those mad bloody women? God knows our country has enough enemies these days. Could even be the Germans, what?’

  ‘No one has yet claimed responsibility,’ Pike said. ‘As for the “bloody mad women”, they pride themselves on not allowing their antics to endanger human life.’

  Dody nodded in silent agreement. Still, she was relieved to know that Florence had been tucked up in bed at home all night.

  ‘Whoever did it is probably too ashamed to own up. I mean there’s destruction and destruction. This was certainly overkill,’ Shepherd said.

  ‘The firemen think the bomb was planted directly above a gas line.’ Pike paused. ‘It’s quite possible that this level of destruction was unintentional; it blew all the way to the viaduct and the station tracks. Even roused the lunatics at Bedlam, apparently.’

  Bethlem Hospital for the Insane. Dody silently chided Pike for referring to the asylum by its former, much maligned name.

  ‘And Waterloo Station proper?’ Shepherd asked.

  ‘Unscathed, thank God, but nearby shops have suffered some damage, broken windows mostly.’

  Dody stepped out of the shadows and revealed herself to the policemen. ‘You sent for me, Superintendent.’

  The sergeant who had escorted her onto the site gave her a black look — obviously she should have waited for him to announce her. He slapped his hands against his sides and left her to it, heading back to his roadblock on the main road.

  Shepherd nodded absently. ‘Good evening, Doctor McCleland.’ He spotted the tear in her skirt and suddenly gave her his full attention. ‘Good God,’ she heard him mutter under his breath, ‘can’t you even dress like a decent woman?’

  Dody ignored him.

  ‘Doctor.’ Pike and Singh spoke simultaneously, Pike lifting his bowler hat, Singh bowing so low he almost touched his knees with the tip of his bushy black beard.

  Shepherd’s rubber-clad arm flapped in the direction of a cluster of ambulances. ‘Remains. Ambulance. If you would be so kind.’

  ‘Are there any survivors?’ Dody asked Pike.

  ‘Only one person has been found alive, the night watchman. He was flung away from the explosion and landed over there.’ Pike used his cane to point towards the public convenience on the other side of the station road. The building was missing several of its lamps and there were jagged gaps in its tiled roof. ‘He was taken to hospital but is not expected to survive. I plan on seeing him myself later today if he is still alive. If not …’ Pike shrugged, ‘it’ll be up to you to get some answers from the body parts. I have yet to contact the management of the surrounding offices to ascertain how many people had been working late. Several shopkeepers and their families were woken by the blast, but the damage south of the station, where it is more populous, is minimal, with only a few residences affected, thank God.’

  A young policeman marched up to them and held out a large paper bag to Pike. ‘Excuse me, sir, the sergeant wanted you to have a look at this.’

  Shepherd reached out for it.

  ‘Gloves, sir,’ Pike courteously reminded him.

  Shepherd made a useless show of patting down his mac.

  Pike removed some leather gloves from his coat pocket, slipped them on and took the bag. The young policeman shone his lamp into it as Pike removed the top quarter of a small attaché case, a leather handle and clasp barely clinging to some tattered shreds of charred leather.

  ‘Where was this found, officer?’ Pike asked as he carefully examined the object. ‘Shine the light on the handle, please.’

  ‘Just outside the big ’ole, sir. The firemen think it was blown clear from the ignition point.’
r />   Pike pointed to some blackened threads of material tied around the handle of the case. Placing the remains of the case on the ground he squatted next to it and carefully untied what appeared to be the remnants of three ribbons. The constable shone his lamp on them. Underneath the charred knot the colours were clear. ‘Purple for dignity, green for hope, and white for purity,’ he murmured.

  Dody drew a breath — the suffragette colours.

  ‘Those bloody women, I knew it!’ Shepherd bellowed. ‘Someone’s got to pay this time. Someone will hang!’

  ‘Not necessarily a suffragette, sir,’ Pike said calmly as he climbed to his feet. ‘Until we have all the facts, we cannot regard the ribbons as irrefutable evidence.’

  Dody was well aware how much Pike hated jumping to conclusions. A scientific rationale vital to their respective specialties was one of the many things they had in common.

  Shepherd’s jowly face reddened at Pike’s contradiction, even his fluffy mutton chop whiskers seemed to stiffen. But at least he had the presence of mind to bite back his words. Arguing with his chief inspector in front of the inferior ranks would be poor form indeed. Dody could not fathom how Pike put up with the idiot of a man. She could never have suffered such a fool.

  Pike asked the constable to fetch the sergeant so they could put their investigation strategy into place. Dody left them to it and picked her way over the rubble to the ambulances. The lights from the headlamps were hazy with dust and lingering smoke. Several wooden barrels stood alongside a row of canvas body bags. Men milled around, getting on with their gruesome harvest. Behind an ambulance, someone gagged and retched.

  ‘Some of the bodies are more or less complete, Doctor,’ an ambulance attendant explained, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. ‘We’ve put those straight under the blankets.’

  Dody unbuttoned the top half of one of the canvas bags and found the body of a woman, her decapitated head resting on her breast. She asked the attendant if she could borrow his lantern and shone it into the bag.

  ‘Very little blood on the body or in the bag — a good sign.’

  ‘Why so, Doctor?’ the attendant asked.

  ‘It means this woman was already dead when she was decapitated.’ Dody gently removed the head from the bag, pulled back the cascade of grey hair and showed the man the almost bloodless neck wound.

  The man turned away. ‘I wish I hadn’t asked,’ he muttered.

  Dody replaced the head and closed the staring blue eyes. It was likely that the corpse had been waiting in one of the undertakers’ premises for transportation by rail to the cemetery. She climbed to her feet, moved over to one of the barrels and glimpsed a tangle of charred limbs. A severed hand reached out as if in supplication. Red nail varnish, the latest fashion foible, shone dully under the ambulance’s headlamps.

  Chapter Three

  Pike dismissed the uniformed sergeant he had been instructing and stood silently for a moment next to Constable Singh. The creeping dawn illuminated the extent of the destruction in a way a thousand light bulbs could not. Pike wondered if Singh felt the same sense of foreboding as he too gazed about the blast site. Singh’s shoulders were rounded, his long black beard ruffling in the fresh morning breeze. The man had been a London resident for several years now and Pike knew he still yearned for the warmer climes of his homeland. In a rare moment of intimacy, Singh, a widower like himself, had once confided that he was sending most of his wage home to his mother who looked after his three growing children in Bombay. What he could spare from the remainder he was saving for his own passage home. On a constable’s wage, Pike speculated, his assistant must still have years of saving to go. His children would be adults by the time he saw them again.

  They were used to one another’s silences and rarely exchanged dialogue that wasn’t work related, sharing a peculiar sense of understanding born from common military experience. Singh had been an NCO, a non-commissioned officer, in the Bengal Lancers and Pike had been in the Seventh Lancers. They’d experienced similar postings during their careers, from the mountainous terrain of the North West Frontier and Afghanistan to the South African veldt.

  Pike had never seen the effect of a massive explosion in an urban area before, and it chilled him. Since the start of the Balkan problems the destruction of cities was becoming more and more commonplace. There was talk that Britain and her rival in the arms race, Germany, might also become entangled. Was this wanton act of violence at the Necropolis Station a taste of what was to come for the city he loved?

  A high-pitched scream shattered Pike’s thoughts. Both men swivelled towards the source. An elderly woman was either resisting arrest, or just unable to keep up with the brisk strides of the two policemen propelling her in Pike’s direction, a hand on each elbow.

  ‘Let me go, let me go, I can walk myself!’ the woman shrieked.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Pike asked the higher ranked officer, a thick-necked sergeant with a magnificent handlebar moustache.

  ‘A witness, sir. Said she saw something, but it’s a bit hard to make head or tail of what she’s saying.’

  ‘Let her go.’

  The men released their grip. The sergeant drew circles with his finger at his temple. ‘Barmy,’ he mouthed to Pike, one hand still hovering, ready to grab the woman should she attempt to bolt.

  Pike introduced himself, tipped his hat and offered his hand.

  The woman took one step towards him. ‘A gentleman at last,’ she said in a surprisingly refined accent, turning for a moment to glare at her captors. She pulled one hand from a fingerless woollen glove and shook Pike’s. Her skin was like silk, he noticed, not the hand of a street woman at all. Pike looked at her closely. Her creased skin placed her at any age between sixty and eighty; dark pouches hung beneath surprisingly bright eyes, delicate white strands of hair escaped from beneath her wilted straw hat. The hat was a startling contrast to the fine weave of her cape. Its bulk suggested it covered multiple layers of clothing, as on one used to sleeping on the streets.

  ‘Your name, madam?’ he enquired as he endeavoured to sum her up.

  Sergeant Handlebar spoke for her. ‘She says she’s Lady Mary Heathridge, widow of Justice Geoffrey Heathridge.’ The name was vaguely familiar. Must have come across the judge at the courts, Pike thought.

  The younger constable grinned.

  ‘And what is it, young man, that you find so amusing?’ the lady asked.

  The man straightened. ‘Nothing, ma’am.’

  ‘Tell the chief inspector what you saw please, m’lady,’ Handlebar all but sneered.

  Pike usually endeavoured to suspend judgement, but in this officer’s case he had formed an almost instant dislike.

  The woman folded her arms and creased her lips into a line, planting her feet firmly on the bomb-damaged pavement. Her boots, Pike noticed, were on the wrong feet.

  ‘Lady Heathridge,’ he said, ‘would you care to accompany me to Scotland Yard? We can talk more comfortably in my office there.’

  Her expression softened. ‘Oh, yes, please, dear. I could murder a cup of tea.’

  ‘See if you can trace her people,’ Pike murmured to Singh as he offered Lady Mary his arm. ‘And see if Bedlam is missing any patients.’

  So far, the summer had been unseasonably cool. Pike lit the fire in his office, hoping the warmth would dull the ache in his knee caused from standing around in the cold for most of the night. Before the fire had even got going though, Lady Mary declared that she was too hot. Pike helped her off with her cape and a moth-eaten woollen jacket. Following her instructions he undid the ties of a rough cotton apron and then the back buttons of a roomy black satin gown. She wriggled out of her clothes and handed them to him like one used to being assisted by servants. Beneath the gown she wore another black gown, equally fine and decorated with small jet beads. This, to Pike’s relief, she decided to keep on. His hat stand sagged with the weight of her clothing and he was forced to prop it up with his umbrella.

  Th
ere was no one in the waiting room outside his office other than the handle-barred policeman now known to him as Sergeant Hensman. Shepherd had insisted that Hensman be pressed into service as the detective division was so understaffed. Already there seemed to be tension brewing between Hensman and Singh. Although they were of unequal rank — Hensman, a sergeant and Singh, a constable — Singh was unofficially considered superior because he was a plain-clothed officer. He’d had to earn the right to the prestige and higher pay of the detective division. Resentment on Hensman’s part was understandable, and the fact that Singh was a foreigner did not help matters either. Pike wondered what Shepherd had been thinking when he had seconded Hensman to his division. He could have at least chosen someone of equal rank — talk about putting the cat among the pigeons.

  The pair had traced Lady Mary’s family to a large house in Saint James – for she was indeed who she claimed to be – and her son had informed them he would collect her from the station after he had breakfasted. The delay suited Pike. He had a feeling it might take him some time to untangle exactly what Lady Mary had seen outside the Necropolis Station.

  Singh knocked on Pike’s door and appeared with a tea tray and several currant buns purchased from a local street vendor. Pike’s stomach rumbled — he’d missed breakfast altogether. Good old Singh, he would have made a terrific batman.

  When Lady Mary saw Hensman trailing behind Singh, walking as if he had a barrel tucked beneath each arm, she turned her face away. ‘That man has a taurine aspect,’ Pike overheard her muttering. ‘One can’t help but think he has a taurine temperament to match.’

  She does not seem to have any problem recognising faces. Or assessing character, Pike thought, smiling to himself.