Four Thousand Days, page 7
Edmund Reid had not made Inspector at Scotland Yard by shilly-shallying, as he told his subordinates on a regular basis. He pushed the mangled Battenberg aside and marched across the hall on his way to his room on the first floor, turn left at the top of the stairs and then left again; he had a room with a view of the sea, one of the honoured few. Mrs Mulvahey the landlady liked to treat her single gentlemen well; as she told her friends at tea in her private sitting room, as a widow, one never knew where it might lead. He slung his Ulster over his shoulders, crammed the wideawake down on his head and clattered down the stairs and out through the revolving door into the sharp sting of an easterly. The sun on the waves had been a bit of a joke by the weather; it was bitter out and he did up every button, right to the chin, before bending his head into the wind and setting off, retracing the steps he and Dr Murray had already taken, out to the exposed site of Helen Richardson’s abandoned dig. He didn’t know why; but it was certainly better than sitting in the bay window crumbling cake.
Once upon a time, Edmund Reid had been more at home in the dark than in the light. He had had eyes like a cat and could see every nuanced shadow. He was pleased to discover that he hadn’t lost the knack, at least not completely. He told himself to listen to his feet, to feel the ground beneath him, not to hurry because rushing got you nothing but grazed knees and, at the worst, a bloody nose. Despite the wind, he made good time and was soon at the site of the dig. Without an archaeologist at his elbow, it made even less sense now than it had before. Margaret Murray had pointed out various elements which meant something to her, but now, by the light of the rising moon, it looked like a few lines of stone which could almost be naturally occurring, so encrusted were they with lichen and impacted sand.
Reid had always been more involved in the here and now than the there and then, but he could see the draw of the past as he looked out at the site. The sea had engulfed this part of the coast many times, covering the remains deep in sand and shingle, only to uncover it all again. To his right, as he stood with his back to the sea, which had turned as he walked along the Esplanade and was going out, was a stand of dune, sculpted so that it almost looked like a wave frozen in flight. The under-edge was scooped out as though by a giant spoon and the surface was so smooth it looked like stone. Like a man drawn to walk under a ladder, Reid walked towards the dune and stopped under its lee, out of the wind. Without the whistle in his ears, the place was as silent as the grave. He fancied he could hear the tramp of sandalled feet, the cries of the parade ground, the slap of leather and metal as the ghostly Romans banked and wheeled on the square beyond the dune. He chuckled to himself; what would people think if they knew that Edmund Reid, Detective Dier, was so fanciful? He shrugged his Ulster back on to his shoulders and pressed down his hat as he turned back into the wind. Why he had come, he now scarcely knew. But whether it was the fresh sea air or the thought of getting back out and detecting, he felt ten years younger and twenty years healthier. He could almost hear his beloved wife chuckle with him, to see him so chipper.
It happened almost before he could draw another breath. With a soft whisper, the dune, hanging as it was through good luck and the compacted sand, salt and marram, collapsed over his head, knocking him on to his hands and knees. He braced his back against the weight of it, feeling his thighs and arms tremble with the effort. The fall seemed to go on for ever but finally, with a last susurration, the sand stopped moving and all was still.
Reid stayed still for a moment, waiting, as all policemen probably do, for the cosh on the back of the head, the knife between the ribs, the bullet through the skull. But nothing followed, just more silence and the whine of the wind. He had kept his head down and his eyes shut and as he clambered to his feet, he stayed that way. Being careful not to use his sandy fingers, he wiped his face on the cuff of his shirt, and blew through his moustache, cursing the wax which kept the sand thickly around his mouth. His beard was full of it too, but his eyes were clear and he looked around. There wasn’t a soul to be seen and, with the moon full and high, anyone would be obvious running along either the beach or the ridge above.
He shook himself all over to dislodge as much sand as he could. He knew that he was not going to be popular at Mrs Mulvahey’s establishment – the strictures against bringing sand into the premises were clearly written in very large capitals in the lobby. But he could cross that bridge when he came to it. He had stuck his head over this particular parapet and lived to tell the tale. And for now, that was enough.
Or, perhaps not. As he turned to walk away, there was another sigh from the remains of the dune and he turned to watch it under the moon. As he had got to know this coast, where he intended to make his home, he had watched the dunes and the beach change almost daily. Buildings tumbling to the power of the waves were not even newsworthy; as Ethelfleda Charlton knew only too well, it happened all the time. And yet, there was still something hypnotic about it, the sigh as the sand began to lose its adhesion, the inevitability of its slow descent to a lower level. He had never watched a collapse by moonlight and something about Margaret Murray had made him fanciful, so he stepped back to get the best effect. He also didn’t fancy being engulfed again, not only because of what Mrs Mulvahey would have to say about it.
It was disappointing. He had expected a smooth slide of silvered sand but it seemed to be impeded by something. A branch of a tree appeared to be sticking out of the hanging dune, a bunch of twigs on the end pointing to the sky. Filaments of moss hung from the branch and swayed in the wind, whipping and flicking sand in small gobbets into the air. Then, the whole thing collapsed, not slowly as he had expected, but with a rush, the tree rolling and careening down the slope. Reid found that he was worrying about the Roman camp above. It would be a shame, after it had survived so much and for so long, for it all to tumble down on to the beach to be eaten by the tide. He took another step back, just in case.
And then, holding his breath and narrowing his eyes against the salt-laden, stinging wind and his natural short sight, he stepped forward and stared at the horror on the beach. Because there, one arm to the sky, the other clasped across her breast, her skirts kirtled up against the mud and the wet, lay the body of a woman. Young. Stocky. Dark-haired. And very, very dead.
FIVE
The first of the boys came home from Cape Town that Sunday. There were brass bands and fluttering bunting and cheering crowds. All the tunes of glory rang out over the city and the Fusiliers came back to their Tower barracks. Their ranks were thinner, it was true, but most of the tears shed that day were those of joy. The war was not yet over, but it was surely won, unless of course that idiot Kitchener buggered it up.
Constable Crawford was working a double shift as a result. All day, he had held back crowds, lifted little children on to his broad shoulders so that they could get a better view of their daddies. He helped old ladies cross roads without being run over by scorchers on their Chater-Lea Whippets, reconnected sobbing toddlers with their distraught mothers and now and then failed to act as a ‘preventative police’ by arresting pickpockets.
As night fell and drunks still wandered Westminster, toasting ‘Bobs’ with their porter and gin and kicking effigies of Cronjé around the gutters, Crawford found himself in Storey’s Yard again, where he had found the dead body of a woman only days ago.
‘Constable.’ A female voice made him turn. A woman stood there, a stole around her shoulders and her bodice open at the top. He hadn’t seen her before, but he knew her calling.
‘If you’re going to ask me if I’m “good-natured”,’ he warned her, ‘don’t. Because I’m not.’
The woman laughed. ‘I’m a bit long in the tooth to try it on with a copper,’ she said. ‘Is this your beat?’
Crawford couldn’t pinpoint the accent. The East, certainly, but Spitalfields? Stepney? Shoreditch, at a pinch? It was difficult. One of the sergeants at the nick was so good with accents, he made almost as much as his salary taking bets in the pub when he was off duty that he could guess anyone’s accent to within a street. He was rarely wrong, but it seemed to Crawford to be a pretty useless skill. You would need to have already arrested the criminal to be able to use it. But everyone needs a hobby.
‘It is,’ he told her, shining his bull’s-eye into her face. ‘What of it?’
She held up her hand to avoid the glare of the flame. ‘Did you know Roman Alice?’
Crawford blinked and lowered the lantern. ‘Who?’ he asked.
‘Alice Groves. She lived hereabouts. Over there, if I remember right. Number fourteen.’
‘Yes,’ Crawford said. ‘I knew her. Why do you ask?’
‘She was a friend of mine,’ the woman said, ‘and she was done in.’
‘The coroner said suicide,’ Crawford told her.
‘That coroner don’t know his arse from a hole in the ground,’ she said flatly and proceeded to light up a briar pipe she carried in her apron front.
‘How did you know her?’ Crawford asked.
‘We used to work the same stretch,’ the woman told him. ‘Along the Wall, near the Tower.’
‘The Roman wall?’ Crawford wanted to be sure. There were an awful lot of walls in London.
The woman nodded, her hard face lit momentarily by the flare of the vesta. ‘That’s how we come to call her Roman Alice. I’m Roman Lil, by the way.’
‘And what’s your last name, Roman Lil?’ Crawford asked.
Lil shook her head. ‘You don’t need to know that,’ she said. ‘I come here looking for answers. What’s the song say? “If you want to know the time, ask a p’liceman”?’ It took Crawford a moment to realize she was singing; the briar had turned her voice to gravel. ‘Well, I was hoping for an answer to a different problem.’
‘When did you see Alice last?’ Crawford checked the street. He knew all too well the old ruse of being worked over while in conversation. Most of these street girls had a bully somewhere, handy with a cosh and mean with it.
‘Couple of weeks ago, I s’pose,’ Lil said. ‘Alice, she’d come on since the old Wall days. Had a brain in her head, did Alice. Had her own place up West, right here.’
She looked in awe at the respectable houses along Storey’s Yard. Not for Alice the rough kiss of open brickwork grazing her arse. ‘She said she’d show me her place more than once, but she never did.’
‘What makes you think Alice was murdered, Lil?’ Crawford asked.
‘Goes with the territory,’ the woman shrugged, drawing on her pipe. The red glow softened her features and for a moment, Crawford could see the girl who thought she would try it, just the once, just for the price of a bed. She could always stop it later, if it didn’t suit. ‘I was new to the trade when Jackie boy struck in Whitechapel. And he’s still out there, you know; you boys never caught him, did you?’
‘No,’ Crawford had to admit. ‘We didn’t.’
‘Alice and I’d meet up every month,’ Lil said. ‘Regular as clockwork. Talk over old times, new times. She’d come into money.’
‘Really?’ Crawford was all ears. He realized anew that he knew nothing about the dead woman at all. ‘How? From whom?’
‘She didn’t say,’ Lil told him. ‘She just said – and it sounded strange coming from her – “Miracles do happen.”’
‘What do you think she meant by that?’ Crawford asked.
‘Don’t know.’ Lil’s attention drifted suddenly to two soldiers loitering under the gas light at the end of the street. ‘Got to go,’ she said. ‘Couple of lads over there who deserve a bit of a welcome, I shouldn’t wonder. If Alice died on your beat, Mr Policeman, you see to it, all right?’ Lil was staring Crawford in the face, albeit a head below him, but her eyes were burning and her mouth was set. ‘You find the bastard who killed her.’ She broke away, snuffing out her pipe and stuffing a violet cachou into her mouth.
‘Hello, boys,’ Crawford heard her call as she sauntered away, swinging her hips. ‘Either of you feeling good-natured?’
Margaret Murray had many skills; some she shared widely, others she kept more or less to herself. One of her favourites and one which incidentally had got her into hot water more times than she could count as a child, was being able to retreat into a world of her own, where the here and now faded and disappeared and the past rose up to envelop her in a cloud of her own making. She couldn’t feel the chair she was sitting on in her inner sanctum, she could no longer hear the sounds around her, smell the scents which wafted past her nose. On this particular Monday afternoon, she was no longer in a foggy London, where the sounds were muffled by the thickened air and the smell of burning coal and humanity tickled the nose. She was in the heat and dust of the Lower Nile, feeling the pull of the rope over her shoulder as she strained with her fellows to raise a pyramid to a man she would never even see, but who had ruled her life since birth. She could smell the dung of the labouring camels, feel the exhausted sun beat down on her shaved head. She could hear—
‘Dr Murray?’
That made no sense. Who would be saying that to a slave?
‘Dr Murray? If it’s not too much trouble …’
The small bubble of Egypt popped with an audible sigh and Margaret turned round to see who had interrupted her train of thought. She had her scowl all ready.
‘Inspector Reid!’ She stood up, her hand out. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here.’ She looked into his face. ‘Has something happened?’
‘Yes, indeed it has. I found a body.’
Margaret looked round wildly. ‘Where?’
He chuckled. ‘Not here, Dr Murray. Back in Hampton. On the beach. Well, I suppose more accurately …’
Before he could continue, her need for total accuracy in all things took precedence. ‘Sit down, Inspector, please. And take things in strict chronological order and don’t spare me the details. I have seen more dead bodies than you have had hot dinners.’
He raised a dubious eyebrow.
‘No, I have,’ she insisted. ‘Deader than the ones you usually have … er … consorted with, if that is the word I am looking for …’ She frowned. She wasn’t at all sure it was.
Reid knew it wasn’t. He had banged up several people for doing just that, and it wasn’t pretty. But he knew what she meant and nodded for her to carry on.
‘What happened? And when?’
Reid told her of his rather exciting Saturday night. He glossed over his less than satisfactory brush with the Kent Constabulary, except to say that had they been under him, back in the day, horse troughs would have been the apogee of their careers. Beyond the fact that it was the woman he had seen on the beach, judging by the clothes and the place of burial—
‘Burial? You dug her up?’ Margaret’s eyes were wide. He had clearly caught more than a whiff of the call of archaeology.
‘No, Dr Murray. She fell on me. Out of the dune. Someone else had buried her and nature had exhumed her. She had no papers on her and, as you know, her house has fallen into the sea taking everything with it. So as far as that goes, we are not much further forward.’
Margaret held up a finger and he stopped.
‘Yes?’ Many was the old lag whose blood would freeze at the sound of that gravelly voice, but archaeologists are made of sterner stuff than the average burglar.
‘I think I may know where she was studying,’ she said. ‘Ethefleda Charlton had a letterheaded piece of paper from her. She went to King’s College.’
‘You didn’t say.’ Reid was huffy.
‘You didn’t ask. And I wasn’t sure of the significance. I couldn’t just go into King’s and ask to speak to all their female students, could I?’
‘There can’t be many, surely?’ Reid didn’t see the trap until he had sprung it.
‘Indeed there are not many, Inspector,’ she said, drawing herself up to her full height, such as it was. ‘There should be very many more. But even the small number can’t be called to account by someone such as myself, with little reason given. Now, though, we can easily do it.’
‘How can it be easier now she’s dead?’ Reid said and answered himself at once. ‘Because now she’s missing, so she is just one, rather than one of many.’
Margaret beamed on him as if her favourite student had just solved the riddle of the sands. ‘Correct! I know that students can be a little … louche, these days. But even King’s can surely only have one missing student!’
Reid picked up his hat, which he had deposited on a plaster head purporting to be a likeness of Alfred the Great. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Now? Don’t we need to know a little more about your body first? Such as, how did she die?’
‘The inquest was adjourned this morning. They called it with commendable speed, but I was expecting that. They just need to be able to investigate more, though from what I saw when I went to the police station to report finding the body, I don’t expect them to get very far.’
Margaret was contrite. ‘I should have asked … you weren’t injured, were you, when the body fell on you?’ She looked at him, her head cocked inquisitively. ‘How did that happen, by the way? I can imagine falling into a grave. Indeed, I have done it several times myself. But having a grave fall on you …?’
‘It’s all to do with the lie of the land,’ Reid dismissed it. ‘The dune gave way. I hailed a passing fisherman on his way to the headland. There was a mackerel run and he was after sardines.’
‘I suppose that makes sense to someone,’ Margaret said.
‘Ask anyone in your Biology department,’ Reid suggested. ‘He wasn’t keen, but he stood by the body until I could come back with some of the local men. They brought the drunk cart – all they had to hand, apparently, at short notice – and loaded it up, and to be fair to them, they left a constable on watch overnight. I went back in the morning to make sure nothing was missed, and they were thorough. They sieved the sand and found nothing. Except a few stray finger bones.’ He coughed gently to warn what he still tended to think of as a member of the weaker sex that something unpleasant was afoot. ‘The … er … the crabs had been busy, you see.’ He waggled his own fingers by way of illustration and Margaret almost expected a bunch of flowers or an ace of spades to spring forth.
