CHAPTER 10
A line of sleepy fishmongers queued up at the coffee stall at sunrise, waiting for Billingsgate Market to open. On a freezing March morning, the brazier’s coals and the dark brew warmed and wakened the drowsy market men.
A thick mist blanketed the warehouse district.
The Thames was only steps away, but the river was invisible behind a curtain of fog.
Only the river’s slapping at the waterline, creaking oak timbers, and the distant clang of a lonely bell reminded the fishmongers it was there.
Wagons lined the street. Horses stamped, drivers hunched shoulders against the cold as men and beasts streamed steamy breath into the chill.
A speeding carriage with its shades drawn careened around the corner. As it passed the coffee stall, its door opened, and something tumbled from the cabin. Then the carriage flew down Lower Thames Street and made a sharp left turn. The incident was over in twenty seconds.
Two men with coffee mugs left the warmth of the stall to investigate the bundle. “Oy, mate, it looks like a . . .” The man handed his cup to his partner and dropped to one knee. When he tugged at the bundle, it opened.
“Bloody hell.” The man leaped to his feet and shouted to the men on the coffee line, “Christ sake—somebody find the fecking rozzer on this beat!”
* * *
Sergeant O’Malley handed Inspector Tennant the police report from Billingsgate.
“Someone dumped a woman’s body near the fish market. They’re wanting to turn it over to the detective squad, and the chief has a mind to give us this one.”
“Why? Any connection to our cases?”
“Someone tossed her from a moving carriage. Tied up in a sack, poor lass, just like Franny Riley and . . .”
“Something else, Paddy?”
“They’re describing her as an Asian lady. Strange for these parts, I’m thinking.”
“All right, Sergeant. Have a note delivered to Doctor Lewis at Finsbury Circus. Where are they holding the body?”
“At Tower Street Station.”
“Send the doctor my compliments and ask her to meet us there.”
* * *
Julia had begun her postmortem preparations in a narrow back room of the Billingsgate station house by the time Tennant arrived. Sergeant Smithson, the local officer who’d taken charge of the body, was there to observe as well.
Julia cut away the rope and removed the torn canvas sack that covered the corpse. “I doubt her heart was beating when they threw her from the carriage,” she said. “One side of her face and upper body is severely abraded, but there should have been more blood.”
Julia heaved aside a second sack that held four heavy stones.
Tennant said, “Probably heading for the Thames, intending to throw her in, but changed their minds.”
Sergeant Smithson nodded. “You couldn’t see an inch past your nose by the river’s edge, so they dumped the girl and scarpered.”
“It’s similar to an earlier case of ours,” Tennant said. “Someone dumped a girl in a sack near Lambeth Bridge.”
Smithson wasn’t listening closely. Instead, the young sergeant watched Julia work.
She must have seemed as exotic to him as the Asian victim on the table.
Tennant had grown used to working with a female medical examiner.
What he’d never adjusted to was tight spaces, a legacy of his military service and the bombardment he’d survived during the Crimean War.
Tennant’s eyes prickled, and droplets spread across his forehead. The gaslight seemed to shrink into a small circle and slowly expand, returning the room to its original brightness. He struggled to regulate his breathing and concentrate on the postmortem.
Julia held up the undergarment she’d cut away. “The chemise is lace-trimmed silk. Quite expensive, I’d say. French or Belgian, most likely. No corset.”
Congealed blood covered one side of the girl’s face. Before Julia sponged it away, she wiped the victim’s other cheek and lips with a dry white cloth. Faint, reddish marks stained the fabric.
“Rouge and lip paint.” The doctor picked up a scalpel and made a Y-shaped incision extending from her shoulders and down to the pubic bone.
Sergeant O’Malley rapped on the window and held something up. Tennant wasn’t the only one relieved to leave the room. A pale, swaying Sergeant Smithers followed him out the door and headed for the loo.
“A cracked bottle rolled out of the bag when the coppers moved her.” O’Malley handed it to Tennant. “The name and markings look the same as the laudanum we found in Miller’s stash.”
“S. Cooper, London,” Tennant read. “Yes, it looks identical to me.”
O’Malley cocked his thumb. “The divisional inspector upstairs is telling me she’s not the first foreign lass to turn up on his turf. Himself is asking to see you when the medical examination is done.”
An hour later, Julia sat across from Tennant and O’Malley in a borrowed interrogation room.
“The girl had been ill, a well-established infection,” she said. “Yellow mucus filled her bronchia, and her nails were blue from lack of oxygen. She almost certainly had a high fever before she died.”
“So, not murder,” Tennant said.
“Not directly, at any rate.”
“A prostitute, do you think? The face paint and expensive undergarments point to a high end of the trade.”
“I found the telltale genital signs of the occupation’s risk—the ulcers of first-stage syphilis.”
“Poor lass,” O’Malley said. “They’d have no patience with a girl who’s rotten with the pox. Wanting her off their hands, the bastards, and dumping her like she was week-old fish.”
“Someone shackled her,” Julia said. “Her wrists showed marks of bondage, and . . .” Julia bit her lip and looked away. “And she’d made an unsuccessful attempt to end her life. The marks are on her wrist.”
Tennant heard the strain in her voice and observed Julia’s tightly gripped hands and white knuckles.
She reached for her medical bag and stood. “The report will be on your desk tomorrow.” Julia nodded and exited.
“Excuse me,” Tennant said to O’Malley, and followed her. He caught up to her outside the street door and took her elbow.
“Let me hail a cab for you.”
“Thank you.”
“This postmortem . . . I know it was painful for you. A young girl, desperate to end her life. Difficult after—”
“After Helen’s suicide.”
“Yes.” His heart twisted at her trembling attempt to smile.
“Thoughts of my old friend will intrude,” Julia said. “But you were kind the day you listened to me tell her story.”
A hansom slowed and stopped at Tennant’s signal, and he handed her into the cab and stepped back.
Julia settled in and looked at him. “It helps to share things that haunt you. To share one’s nightmares with a friend.” Her eyes flickered to his leg. “Perhaps one day you’ll honor me by confiding yours.”
He watched her cab roll away and thought of her word “friend.”
Layers of guilt and shame wrapped their experiences. For Julia, it was an unmarried friend’s pregnancy and the suicide she had failed to prevent. For Tennant, the Crimean War had left a shaming legacy of physical and mental weakness.
He still dreamed about the Russian bombardment and the dying sergeant entombed by his side.
A rescue party had pulled Tennant out alive, but he’d led battles that left many men in graves far from home.
Captain Tennant had followed orders to charge into withering fire, commands issued by aging generals using outdated tactics.
Yet Russian aggression and their appetite for neighboring lands had to be checked.
The irony wasn’t lost on him: that a soldier of the British Empire should criticize imperial ambition.
Tennant knew that war and empire were messy and imperfect. So was police work. Justice and right were elusive.
“Is everything all right with the doctor?” O’Malley had appeared at his elbow.
“Yes. I’ll find the divisional inspector and hear about this other girl. You head back to the Yard. See if any reports have come in from Limehouse or the docks about Rawlings.”
“The man is somewhere. ’Tis only a matter of time and boot leather.”
* * *
Divisional Inspector MacNair flicked a bony wrist from behind his scarred oak desk, inviting Tennant to sit.
MacNair wore the black garb and sober expression of a Kirk of Scotland preacher.
His brow’s pronounced ridge made dark pools of his eyes, and they regarded Tennant gravely.
MacNair began his story of a lost Chinese girl, speaking in a soft Scottish burr.
“Aye, it’s strange, but long before we discovered this body, we found another such girl on the streets.”
Tennant asked, “When was this, sir?”
“About ten months ago, and a frigid night it was for any of God’s creatures to be out. My constable spied the wee lass slumped at the walls of the Tower.”
“How was she dressed?”
“In knickers and underskirts,” McNair said. “With a long, hooded cape thrown over it all. Only slippers on her feet. Torn to shreds by the time we found her.”
“She must have come from someplace nearby. Were you able to track her movements?”
“First, we had to find someone who understood the lass. The folk at the London Missionary Society sent a parson who’d been ten years in Hong Kong. Mister Lloyd talked to her in Cantonese, he called it. Who’d have kenned there are dozens of tongues in China.”
“What did she tell him?”
“Brokers shipped her out on a promise of marriage. A Chinaman was waiting to wed her in California, they told her. Instead, she ended up in a London brothel, drugged much of the time. It was how they controlled her and the other lasses in the house.”
“How did she come to rest at the Tower of London?”
“They took her from the brothel to some grand house, a regular arrangement by her telling. On the drive back, her keeper fell asleep, drunk by the sound of it. She slipped out of the carriage and wandered along the riverfront.”
“What steps did you take to locate the brothel and the house?”