The Dead Woman of Deptford: Inspector Ben Ross mystery 6 Read online

  ‘I fell over her!’ His voice rose indignantly to a squawk. ‘I told the rozzer that, an’ all! It’s not my fault, is it? I never went looking for her, did I? I come in here – ’ he waved a hand to indicate the yard – ‘I came in here on account of a call of nature.’ He spoke the euphemism with a ludicrous dignity and pointed towards the wooden sheds at the back of the yard. I doubted he’d been making for them. No one in his right mind would willingly enter one of them after nightfall and risk tumbling head first into a stinking pit.

  ‘I never saw her in the dark!’ Parker went on. ‘There’s no light here except what comes in from the street or shines down from up there, if someone pulls back a curtain.’ He jabbed a finger upward. ‘It give me an ’orrible shock. I ran out back into the street and there was a—’ He checked himself, perhaps realising, from Barrett’s scowl, that he would not like being described as a ‘rozzer’ for a third time. Parker amended his closing words. ‘I told this here constable. Ask ’im!’

  ‘That’s correct, sir!’ said Barrett. ‘I was on my regular beat. The witness came rushing out into the street and nearly knocked me over. He was gibbering with fright and making no sense at all. “In there!” he kept saying. So I pushed him back in front of me, into this yard, making sure to keep my hand on his collar. Sure enough, there we found the poor woman.’

  I wondered, if the constable had not happened to be on the spot, whether Parker would have gone in search of him. More likely, he’d have run home and left the grim discovery to someone else.

  Parker snuffled into his cap. ‘I’m a decent working man . . .’ he concluded in tones of self-pity as if even he believed the fiction.

  I glanced upwards. There was no knowing how much light had fallen into the yard from above earlier. Now that word had got round, and that word was ‘murder’, every window overlooking the yard was open and had one or more figures leaning out, eager to watch the show below. A theatre in the round, I thought, and we are the players. A babble of excited voices floated down.

  ‘Can yer see the body?’ demanded a shrill female voice.

  ‘Nah . . . they got it covered over. Over there by the wall, see, there’s something there.’

  ‘I can’t see nuffin’,’ grumbled the first voice.

  ‘We shall have to send officers into those buildings, asking if anyone saw or heard anything,’ I said to Sergeant Morris. ‘They’re showing enough interest now! I wish Phipps had sent men in there already.’

  Barrett, anxious to defend his own colleagues and his senior officer, said, ‘There’s no one to send, sir. There is a Russian cargo ship docked, and it’s been very lively around here this evening.’

  ‘So I understood from Inspector Phipps’s message,’ I said. ‘Though things seem quiet enough at the moment – apart from this unfortunate dead woman, of course.’

  ‘We’ve had every man we can spare out on the streets, sir,’ said Barrett. ‘To make sure things don’t get out of hand. You should’ve been here yesterday, sir. It was like the bloomin’ battle of Waterloo.’

  ‘I’ll drum up a number of constables to go round knocking on doors first thing tomorrow, sir,’ said Morris. ‘It’s too late to get hold of anyone extra now. The delay won’t make a difference, because I reckon no one will have heard a thing. It’s too dark here to have seen much, either. If anyone did, they won’t admit to it. But, let’s face it, who would take any notice of a few shouts or a scuffle? There’s generally some kind of a hullabaloo somewhere around here, as that lad Evans says.’

  Well, after all, that was true enough; even though I still suspected Phipps had exaggerated the latest outbreak of fisticuffs. We were attracting a lot of interest now, but my guess was that Morris was right. No one would admit to having seen anything earlier; or to having heard a call for help or a woman’s scream.

  As for suspects, we would have more than we could wish. Around us were countless drinking dens and bawdy houses; and squalid rooming establishments providing cheap shelter for seamen of all nations. So yes, there was often violence, and tonight there was murder.

  The body lay a short distance off, decently covered with a tarpaulin. I signalled to Evans to pull back the covering so that I could view it as well as was possible by the lantern light. He obeyed and scuttled back, gulping. I hoped he was not going to be sick.

  Even in the gloom, and with the horror of her injuries, it was clear to me this was not one of London’s countless street women. Perhaps it was that which had alarmed Phipps. She was sturdily built and respectably dressed, though I could see no hat or bonnet, nor any shawl or coat. She appeared simply to have walked out of some nearby house into the cold night air, just for a moment, on some trivial errand. Even at this late hour, as I’d remarked earlier, many of the little shops were open to catch the very last of the day’s trade. Together with all the rogues and ruffians lurking in the neighbourhood of any port, there were still citizens of the more decent sort to be seen: home-going working men, or housewives scurrying to buy something needed to make the evening meal, or a child sent out with twopence to buy a pinch of tea. If you are poor, you don’t buy tea by the packet. You buy as needed to make a brew, a tiny amount in a twist of paper. The dead woman, had she been on such an errand? Was her family, even now, waiting for her at home?

  I stooped and fingered the hem of her skirt. In the inadequate light, it appeared dark in colour. It was of quality cloth, the hem trimmed with braid but otherwise unadorned. She had not been a very poor woman and my first idea, that she might have been paying a last-minute visit to a grocer, seemed less likely. She was the sort to keep her larder well stocked. A respectable woman, at first view, and that could be enough to worry Phipps.

  It was hard to judge her age, as one side of her head had been viciously battered. I thought her probably in her fifties. She wore no earrings and no wedding ring. Her killer may have made off with those. Or the wretched Parker might even have robbed the body before he raised the alarm. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

  I drew Barrett aside. Parker, though clearly relieved to be free of the constable’s surveillance, watched with apprehension.

  ‘Has that fellow blood on him?’ I asked Barrett.

  ‘Some,’ replied the constable in a low voice. ‘On his right sleeve, sir, and on his hands. He says he stooped down and shook her shoulder, when he first stumbled over her. He thought she might be drunk. But then he struck a match, saw her injuries and the blood, and knew she must be dead.’

  ‘Well, we mustn’t lose him,’ I warned. ‘Take him back to the station and make him turn out his pockets. Then get a statement and his details. Make sure he gives an address that’s genuine. Either go yourself, or if need be send a colleague with him to his house. If any of his clothing is bloodstained, get him to change into something else and bring the stained clothes away for further examination. I am not prepared to take anything said by Mr Harry Parker as gospel.’

  A rumble of wheels came from the street; a closed van had arrived to take the victim to the morgue. The chattering voices about our heads fell silent in a moment of respect.

  ‘I leave you in charge here, Morris,’ I said to him. ‘Secure the area so that we can come back and search by daylight. Report to me in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector Ross,’ said Morris resignedly.

  I was sorry to abandon him there, but there was nothing more I could do for the moment. I set off home to my wife.

  Chapter Two

  MY LITTLE house is near the great rail terminus of Waterloo, so I was on the necessary south bank of the Thames but still a tidy distance away and unlikely to find any cab plying for hire here. I directed my steps towards the Thames, hoping to find a ferry able to take me upriver to a spot near Waterloo Bridge.

  To find the river was straightforward enough. I had only to follow my nose. The docks and wharves were just a few streets away. They began building ships for the Royal Navy at Deptford in good old (or bad old, depending on your point of view) King Henry
VIII’s time. With such patronage, what area could fail to thrive? And so Deptford did, for a time. Open countryside had lain between it and London’s plague-ridden hovels; so fashionable people raised fine houses here. Good Queen Bess had visited in person to greet Francis Drake on his return from his adventures. In Deptford she had created him a knight, right there on board his own ship at anchor. It was over a Deptford puddle, they claimed locally, that Sir Walter Raleigh had spread his cloak to save his monarch from soiling her shoes. Even such an exotic visitor as the Russian Tsar Peter had come here to watch the shipwrights at their work, amid the hammering and sawing and overpowering fug of boiling tar.

  London’s sprawl has since eaten up the fields and smallholdings, sucking everything into its capacious brick maw. Now almost permanently enveloped in the pall of London smoke, Deptford has lost favour with the well-to-do. Worse, its great dockyard has recently also fallen from favour with the Royal Navy. Modern ships are iron-clad. The work will go to private yards.

  Another piece of government trade has disappeared now that the notorious convict transports to Australia have finally ceased. ‘Pity about that,’ lament the ship owners and sea captains of Deptford. ‘It was regular cargo.’

  I turned into a narrow and deserted lane. There were gas lamps positioned at either end, but their glow only cast an eerie sheen on the nearer walls and did not reach the middle where a pit of black uncertainty awaited me. I wondered if I had been wise to leave behind bustle and crowds and whether I was indeed really alone. The loudest sound was that of my own footsteps; yet there was something more. My ear caught the creak of unoiled wheels behind me, and a rumble and rattle as they bounced unevenly over the cobbles. I stopped and spun round.

  I was not surprised to see a handcart had turned into the lane and was being propelled laboriously towards me. It was piled high with some load partly covered with a tarpaulin. An extraordinary creature was in charge of it.

  I say ‘creature’ – for at first sight it hardly appeared human. With the corner gas lamp behind it, I could at first only distinguish a broad shapeless form, entirely black and with flapping wings to either side, like a gigantic bat. It crouched forward with the effort of pushing the load. Then the cart trundled into the dim circle of light cast by an oil lamp fixed above a storehouse door. I saw better who propelled it: a rag-picker.

  It was a common enough trade and nothing to be surprised at. Under the tarpaulin I could glimpse a jumbled heap of old clothing and other junk. A wave of relief swept over me. I chided myself for giving way moments earlier to my imagination. What on earth could I have expected? The moon then chose to come to my aid and cast its pale light upon my companion.

  The ragman appeared to be wearing a selection of the tattered garments he’d gathered over the years: baggy trousers, some sort of coat of Prince of Wales check, and a grubby neckerchief. Over all this, he wore a big black opera cloak that must once have been worn by some theatre-goer in a more wealthy area of the city. I could see it had what looked like a velvet collar. It was this cloak that had given the wing-like effect. His hair, long, grey and uncombed, fell to his shoulders from beneath a battered high hat, such as might also have been worn by a dandy, some forty or so years earlier. His face was gaunt and marked with deep creases. He looked incredibly old and I wondered he had the strength to push the cart over the cobbles. Seeing my eyes on him, his withered lips parted in a grotesque grimace revealing a row of rotten teeth that reminded me of the buildings I had just left behind me. There were even a few gaps, such as the one leading into the yard where the murdered woman had been discovered.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ he croaked and tilted his head sideways at the same time. The wrinkled skin on his cheeks folded into deeper crevasses. His gaze seemed to be looking at me, around me, and even through me, all at once. It was like being surveyed by some sort of wild animal. He was certainly elderly but not, perhaps, quite as old as I’d first judged him.

  ‘Good evening,’ I replied.

  He made to push his load on down the street, but I put out a hand to stop him and he did as I wished, setting down the wooden feet at one end of the barrow and releasing his grip on the handles. He did not, however, straighten up, but remained in the semi-crouched stance. Perhaps he had some deformity of the spine or perhaps he had spent so many years pushing this barrow that he’d just forgotten how to stand up straight. His elusive gaze still played over me. I felt uncomfortable under it.

  ‘You work this area regularly?’ I asked him. To encourage a reply, I took a shilling from my pocket and held it out.

  A hand, more a talon than human, shot out and grabbed the coin. Cold scaly fingertips brushed mine and I recoiled from the touch.

  ‘P’lice officer . . .’ he said hoarsely. ‘Plain-clothes sort, ain’tcha?’

  I wasn’t surprised he identified me so easily. The poor, whether gainfully employed or not, easily recognise the law.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘I collect rags everywhere,’ he told me, ‘not just round here. Where there’s people, there’s what they throws out. I even go over the river, up west. I get good pickings there.’

  That must be where he’d obtained the opera cloak and tall hat. But I wondered he had the strength to push the barrow so far.

  ‘Were you in this area a little earlier this evening?’

  He squinted at me. ‘I was, after I come back from Greenwich. I was at the Seamen’s Hospital.’

  I recalled the Seaman’s Hospital was anchored there. It was housed not in a building but a ship, and one with a fine history as a ship of the line. No longer needed by the navy, she had been purchased by a philanthropic society and set up as a hospital for merchant seamen, the river providing a cordon sanitaire between their diseases and the shore.

  ‘What took you there?’ I asked. It wasn’t a place many volunteered to visit.

  I caught a cunning glance from the corner of his bleary eyes. His upper body tilted towards me as if he would make some confidence; I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

  ‘They usually have scraps of stuff for me. The fever patients and such, the ’ospital burns the rags what they’re wearing when they come in. What they don’t burn, the dead don’t need no more, and no one else claims, they let me have.’

  Despite myself, I took a step back. He noticed it and grinned hideously at me.

  I could not but look again with horror at the stack of rags on his barrow, and tried not to imagine what diseases might infest them along with the fleas and lice. I hoped he was right and the hospital did burn the discarded clothing of the fever victims. Foreign sailors had been known to arrive carrying smallpox.

  ‘You have not . . .’ My voice sounded, to my own ears, strained. ‘You have not noticed a well-dressed woman, middle-aged, sturdily built, in the area earlier? Perhaps three hours ago? Perhaps alone or perhaps with a man?’

  ‘Drab?’ he croaked.

  I shook my head. ‘No, a respectable woman in appearance.’

  He shook his head. ‘Nah, not that I noticed. I only notice them if I think they might have something for me.’ Then he said suddenly, ‘There was a murder done earlier, wasn’t there? Just back there?’ And he pointed down the way I’d come.

  ‘Yes. How did you learn of it?’ I asked sharply.

  He snorted and rubbed his grimy claw across his face. ‘Murder? Everyone hears about it and they don’t talk about nothing else for days. I stopped to wet my whistle at the Clipper public house, and I heard it there.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘Raggy Jeb, they call me,’ he replied. ‘You can ask anyone round here for me. They all know me.’

  ‘You have a surname?’

  ‘Fisher,’ he said. ‘They give me that name at the workhouse; on account I was fished out of the river when I was a baby. Someone threw me in, like I was a bag o’ rubbish. My swaddling clothes got caught up on a spar and kept me afloat long enough for a lighterman to fish me out. Workhouse was
all my family.’

  A childhood in such a grim institution was no childhood at all. But he had survived it.

  ‘Well, Jeb Fisher, if you hear anything regarding this murder you might think would interest me, if you hear anyone say he thought he might have seen the woman earlier, you come and tell me, Inspector Ross, at Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Worth my while?’ he bargained.

  ‘Yes, if what you tell us proves true. Don’t come with fancy inventions.’

  He nodded and, without another word, seized the handles of his barrow to push it, and its load of festering rags, onward. Then, hardened by my experiences though I was, I received such a shock that I let out a cry of alarm.

  The tarpaulin covering the rags moved. The first thought to flash through my mind was that a rat had hitched a ride. But it was far worse. A small, very small, human hand emerged from the tarpaulin. Tiny fingers gripped the edge to pull it back into place. I reached out and snatched it back. There, before me, crouched amid the rags, was a child.

  It was a little girl, perhaps no more than four or five years of age, with long, tangled, fair hair and the bright eyes of something feral. She appeared to be wearing a crumpled and grimy velvet dress, much too big for her frail body, a crocheted shawl pinned over it. She stared up at me with something calculating and totally unchildlike in her expression.

  Appalled, I demanded of Fisher, ‘Who is this?’

  He responded with a hoarse chuckle. ‘She’s my granddaughter. She often comes with me when I do my rounds. Say “good evening” to the officer, Sukey.’

  The child, who appeared to have no fear of me, obediently said, ‘Good evening, gen’leman.’

  ‘What do you mean by putting a child on this barrow amongst all that filth?’ I almost shouted at him.

  ‘She’s learning the trade,’ he said complacently.

  ‘At her age? She is an infant!’

  ‘Never too young,’ he retorted. ‘She’s very good for business, is Sukey. If we go around respectable places, streets where people have a bit of money and good stuff, I send her to the door and wait by the barrow. They might refuse me, see, straight off. They say they got nothing, just to be rid of me. But they don’t like to refuse her. They tell her to wait. Then they dig out something or other for her, generally something a pretty colour. I’ve got some nice bits and pieces that way.’