CHAPTER 7
Julia’s annoyance with Tennant lingered two weeks after the maze misadventure, but other pressing problems vied for attention.
For one thing, Julia’s private practice continued to languish, disappointing after her grandfather’s retirement.
Most of his patients had transferred to her Uncle Max rather than sign on with her.
Too many recalled the girl who played in her grandfather’s back garden.
They couldn’t fathom the woman who’d placed first in her medical school class.
The police had called her in twice to examine women held under the Contagious Diseases Acts.
Julia diagnosed one woman with a case of secondary-stage syphilis and left her with a tube of mercury ointment.
The other was a widow and mother of three who showed no signs of the disease.
Desperate and deprived of her male breadwinner, the woman had little choice but to take to the streets.
Julia believed that most readers of The Times or The Telegraph would be surprised by the number of women who worked as occasional prostitutes.
They sold themselves on weeks when taking in washing or doing piecework sewing didn’t cover the rent.
Women who would be “respectable” if they could afford it.
Women who’d stay home at night with their children if their day jobs put food on the table, clothed their children, and kept a roof over their heads; women whose husbands had bought it, scarpered, or had been thrown in the nick.
Women like the widow Julia had examined.
She rolled a pencil between her forefinger and thumb. What do people see? That desperate widow she’d examined . . . she was a hopeful bride and mother, once upon a time.
It had been two weeks since Julia had spoken to Tennant. Perhaps she’d overstepped, but she still questioned his decision to send Mary to the maze. He’d criticized Julia’s recklessness on their last case. Why has he thrown caution away now?
She wondered about Tennant and Louisa Allingham. How close had their relationship been? Had his eagerness to serve her interests clouded his judgment? And what business is it of mine anyway? He could do what he liked; console the helpless widow for all she cared.
Julia felt restless and distracted. And she was curious about the Franny Riley investigation.
For all her annoyance, she missed their .
. . What? Partnership? Friendship? She sighed and returned to the clinic’s night report.
Concentrate. She started again at the top of the page and read until a knock interrupted her.
Julia smiled when she saw O’Malley filling her doorway.
“Sorry to be disturbing you, Doctor.”
“Not at all, Sergeant.” She put the report down. “Will you sit?”
He shook his head. “I’m behind my time after coming from your place in Finsbury Circus. The inspector sends his compliments, and can you come at once?”
“Where?”
“To Kensington and the gardens with the maze.”
“Again? Now, look here.” Julia pushed back her chair. “If the inspector is using Miss Allingham a second time to—”
“A parkkeeper found Margot Miller dead in the shrubbery. Someone slashed her throat.”
* * *
The curious had lined up four deep at the Queen’s Gate entrance to the horticultural gardens, kept back by a cordon of constables.
“Stand aside, now,” Sergeant O’Malley said. “Make way for the doctor.” He signaled a pair of coppers to clear a path for Julia.
“Doctor?” Someone laughed. “Makes a change, doesn’t it, mate?”
Julia edged through the crowd, murmuring, “Excuse me.”
Inside the gardens, Inspector Tennant and a police sergeant holding his helmet stood at the entrance to the maze.
“Doctor Lewis, this is Sergeant Armstrong from Kensington Police Station.”
“Sergeant.” She nodded to the pale, sandy-haired officer.
“Margot Miller’s body is just inside the maze,” Tennant said.
Armstrong and the inspector followed Julia into the green corridor.
Margot’s body lay ten feet inside the hedges.
She was crumpled on her left side, her face in profile, with one arm extended above her head.
Her bonnet had come off, spilling auburn hair into a pool of blood.
A wound, dark with congealed gore, had sliced into the side of her neck.
Margot’s facial muscles had frozen into the stiff grimace of death; little of the beautiful woman Julia had glimpsed was visible.
The doctor removed a black, vulcanized glove from her bag and pulled it on, covering the sleeve of her coat to just below the elbow. She knelt, raised the bottom of the victim’s skirts, and felt her calf muscles.
“Rigor mortis is just easing off.”
“Time of death?” Tennant said.
“In this cold weather, it’s difficult to pinpoint, but eighteen hours. Possibly longer.”
“So, yesterday, late in the afternoon. Roughly?” Sergeant Armstrong asked.
She nodded. “I’ll know more when I complete my examination.”
Gently, Julia pushed Margot’s hair away to get a better look at the wound. Then her eyes dropped to the victim’s waist. She rested her hand on Margot’s mounded stomach and winced.
“I think she was with child.” Julia sat back on her heels and stripped off her rubber glove. “Many months into her pregnancy, I’d guess.”
“That’s consistent with our information.” Tennant slipped his hand under her elbow to help her rise.
“A possible motive,” Armstrong said. “A married lover, maybe?” He waved to a pair of constables to bring the stretcher forward.
Julia and Tennant stood aside to allow the policemen through. The officers shifted the remains of Margot Miller to the pallet, covered her body, and carried her out.
Julia asked Tennant, “Where are they taking her?”
“Kensington Police Station.”
“Will I conduct the postmortem there?”
“Yes.”
Julia recalled the many times she’d found the inspector hard to read. That morning wasn’t one of them.
“You sound angry.”
“I am. Witnesses have been lying to me. Or withholding evidence, which amounts to the same thing. Threats, vandalism, anonymous letters, disappearances, blackmail, a suicide . . .”
“And two murders,” Armstrong said.
“Sir?” O’Malley held up a black, blood-spattered, vulcanized glove by its cuff end. “A constable found it shoved into a laurel bush by the southwest entrance.”
Sergeant Armstrong looked at Julia’s glove. “Blimey.”
It was identical to the one O’Malley held.
* * *
Julia cut away Margot Miller’s fur-collared cape and her emerald dress. She laid her undergarments aside and thought, Good quality.
The doctor started the postmortem from the top. She combed through the victim’s hair, sponging away the dried blood and loosening leaves and twigs consistent with the debris on the maze pathway. She examined Margot’s scalp but found no evidence of a blow inflicted before the fatal wound.
Sergeant O’Malley’s description of the neck wound hadn’t been accurate.
It wasn’t a slash. It was a deep, penetrating jab to the neck that had severed her jugular.
The position suggested a right-handed assailant who stood behind the victim and plunged the weapon deep into her flesh.
The blood would have spurted away from the attacker.
And the gory, discarded gauntlet probably allowed the killer to walk away without much blood on him.
The cause of Margot’s death was a severed jugular that had led to exsanguination. Julia probed the deep, narrow gash. Then she glanced at the instruments on the table. A lancet? Some sort of stiletto?
Julia found no other wounds on the victim’s body. She finished her examination, drew a sheet over Margot Miller, and washed her hands at the sink. She looked up when Tennant came in carrying a parcel.
“Any surprises?”
“None relating to the cause of death.” Julia shook droplets from her hands and finished the job with a towel. “Whoever stabbed her used a thin, sharp instrument that cut clean and deep. Margot was pregnant, but you knew that. I’d estimate she was about six months gone. A boy.”
“Two lives taken swiftly and brutally,” Tennant said.
“One thing surprised me.” Julia held up the pieces of Margot’s clothing one by one. “These look new, and the quality is excellent.”
“More expensive than one would expect in a shopgirl.”
“Yes,” Julia said. “Even one who supplemented her income by modeling. Mary told me the going rate is a shilling or two an hour.”
“And you found nothing in her pockets? No key to her flat or a change purse?”
Julia shook her head.
Tennant sighed. “Old Josiah Miller may have disowned Margot, but he’s still her next of kin.”
“You’ll bring him in for the identification?”
“Sergeant O’Malley is on his way to Poplar to inform the Millers. Given her stepbrother’s habit of stalking, he’s someone at the top of our list. I’d like to know his whereabouts at the time of death.”
“What about male admirers? She was a beautiful woman.”
“There’s a disgruntled lover. A merchant seaman, Arnie Stackpole by name. But he’s not the father. The timing isn’t right.”
“So, two men, since the father is someone else. The plot thickens.” Julia eyed Tennant’s package. “What do you have there?”
Tennant unwrapped the rubber glove found at the scene and placed it on the instruments table. “What do you make of it?”
“Clever. It minimizes the gore. If the attack came from behind, only the gauntlet would be spattered with blood, sparing the killer’s arm and hand. Where did you say the officer found it?”
“In bushes by the southwest entrance. About fifty yards from where we discovered the body.”
Julia picked it up. “It was a risk to carry the thing unless the killer had some means of concealing it until it was safe to discard. But why not strip it off and leave it with the body?”
Tennant shrugged. “In a hurry to get away after he did the deed?”
“And he rid himself of the glove at a safe distance. Yes, that sounds right.”
“These gloves . . . who uses them?”
Julia pushed back her hair with the flat of her wrist and considered the question.