Funeral in Blue Page 12

  “I’ve told you all I know,” Allardyce said uneasily, all the anger draining from his face and leaving only sadness. “I gave all that to your man: where she was born, where she grew up, as far as she told me. She didn’t talk about herself.”

  “I know . . . I know.” Runcorn was irritated. It woke a mixture of feelings in him—pity because the woman was dead, duty because it was his task to find out who had killed her and see that the guilty person faced the law to answer for it. At the same time he despised her morality. It offended every desire for decency in him, the love of rules to live by and order he could understand. He turned to Monk. “We’d better get on with it, then.” His eyes widened. “If you’re interested, that is?”

  “I’m interested,” Monk accepted.

  They bade Allardyce good-bye and went back down the stairs into the street, where Runcorn pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I’m going to start with Mrs. Ethel Roberts, who used to employ her as a milliner’s assistant. You can go to see Mrs. Clark, who took her in now and then. I’ll leave you to find out for what.” His expression conveyed his opinion of the possibilities. “We’ll meet up at that pub on the corner of North Street and the Caledonian Road, can’t remember what it’s called. Be there at one!” And with that he thrust the piece of paper into Monk’s hand and turned abruptly to cross the street, leaving Monk standing on the curb in the sun and noise, the increasing rattle of traffic, street vendors’ cries for their shellfish, cheeses, razors, shirt buttons, rat poison.

  He found Mrs. Clark in a boardinghouse in Risinghill Street, north of the Pentonville Road, just beyond a tobacconist’s shop with a Highlander on the sign to denote to the illiterate what it was he sold. Inside the boardinghouse, the air in the hall smelled of stale polish and yesterday’s cooking, but the house was cleaner than some he had seen, and there was a cheerful clatter of dishes, and a voice singing, coming from somewhere towards the back.

  He followed the sound of it and knocked on the open kitchen door. It was a large room with a scrubbed stone floor, a wooden table in the middle and on the stove a pan was boiling briskly, the steam jiggling the lid. In the stone scullery beyond he could see three huge wooden sinks filled with linen soaking, and on a shelf above them big jars of lye, fat, potash and blue. A washboard was balanced in one sink, and in the other was a laundry dolly, used to push the clothes up and down within the copper when they needed to be boiled. He appeared to have interrupted Mrs. Clark on her wash day.

  She was a rotund woman, ample-bosomed and broad-hipped, with short, plump arms. Her blue sleeves were pushed up untidily. An apron which had seen very much better days was tied around her waist and slipping to one side. She pushed her hair back off her face and turned from the bowl where she was peeling potatoes, the knife still in her hand.

  “Can’t do nuthin’ for yer, luv,” she said amiably. “Ain’t got room ter ’ouse a cat! Could try Mrs. Last down the street. Number fifty-six. In’t as comfy as me, but what can yer do?” She smiled at him, showing several gaps in her teeth. “My, aren’t yer the swell, then? Got all yer money on yer back, ’ave yer?”

  Monk smiled in spite of himself. There was a time when that would have been true. Even now there was a stronger element in it than perhaps for most men.

  “You read people pretty well, Mrs. Clark,” he replied.

  “Gotter,” she acknowledged. “It’s me business.” She looked him up and down appreciatively. “Sorry as I can’t ’elp yer. I like a man wot knows ’ow ter look ’is best. Like I said, try Mrs. Last.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t looking for lodgings.” He had already decided to be candid with her. “I’m told you used to give Sarah Mackeson a room now and then, when times were rough.”

  Her face hardened. “So what’s that ter you, then? Yer got ideas about her, yer can forget ’em. She’s an artists’ model now, and good at it she is, too.” She stopped abruptly, defiance in her stare.

  “Very good,” Monk agreed, seeing in his mind the pictures Allardyce had painted of Sarah. “But she was killed, and I want to know who did it.”

  It was brutal, and Mrs. Clark swayed a little before leaning against the table heavily, the color draining from her face.

  “I’m sorry,” Monk apologized. It had not occurred to him that she might not know and that she had cared about Sarah, and suddenly he realized how much he had concentrated on the reality of Elissa Beck and forgotten the other woman and those who might have known her and would be wounded by her death. On the other hand, if Mrs. Clark knew her well enough to feel her loss deeply, then perhaps she could give him some better information about her.

  She fumbled behind her for the chair, and he stepped forward quickly and placed it so she could sit down.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I didn’t know you were close to her.”

  She sniffed fiercely and glared at him, ignoring her brimming eyes and daring him to comment. “I liked ’er, poor little cow,” she said tartly. “ ’Oo wouldn’t? Did ’er best. So wot yer want ’ere, then? I don’t know ’oo killed ’er!”

  He fetched the other chair and sat down opposite her. “You might be able to tell me something about her which would help.”

  “Why? Wot der you care?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “ ’Oo are yer, any’ow? Yer never said. Yer just came bargin’ in ’ere like the rent collector, only I don’t owe no rent. This place is me own. So explain yerself. I don’t care ’ow swell yer look, I in’t tellin’ yer nothin’ as I don’t want ter.”

  He tried to put it in terms she would grasp. “I’m a kind of private policeman. I work for people who want to know the truth of something and pay me to find out.”

  “An’ ’oo cares ’oo killed a poor little cow like Sarah Mackeson, then?” she said derisively. “She in’t got nobody. ’Er pa were a navvy wot got killed diggin’ the railways an’ ’er ma died years ago. She’s got a couple o’ brothers someplace, but she never knew where.”

  “The wife of a friend of mine was murdered with her,” he replied. There was a kind of dignity in this woman, with her crooked apron and straggling hair, that demanded the truth from him, or at least no lies.

  “There were two of ’em done?” she said with horror. “Geez! ’Oo’d do a thing like that? Poor Sarah!”

  He smiled at her very slightly, an acknowledgment.

  She sniffed and stood up, turning her back to him. Without explaining, she filled the kettle and put it on the hob, then fetched a china teapot and two mugs.

  “I’ll tell yer wot I know,” she remarked while she waited for the water to boil. “Wot in’t much. She used ter do quite well sometimes, and bad others. If she were in an ’ard patch she’d come ’ere an’ I’d find ’er a bed for a spell. She’d always turn ’er ’and ter cookin’ an’ cleanin’ as return. Din’t expec’ summink fer nuffink. Honest, she were, in ’er own fashion. An’ generous.” She kept her back to him as the steam started to whistle in the spout.

  He did not press her in what way; he understood it from her turned back. She was not willing to put words to it.

  “Anyone in particular?” he asked, quite casually.

  “Arthur Cutter,” she said, bringing the teapot over to the table and putting it down. “ ’E’s a right waster, but ’e wouldn’t ’ave ’urt ’er. It would ’a bin some o’ them daft artist people. I always told ’er they was no good.” She sniffed again and reached for a piece of cloth in her apron pocket. She blew her nose savagely and then poured the tea for both of them, not bothering to ask if he wanted milk or sugar, but assuming both. Monk disliked sugar intensely, but he made no comment, simply thanking her.

  “How did she get in with the artists?” he asked.

  Now she seemed willing to talk. She rambled on, telling and retelling, but a vivid picture of Sarah Mackeson emerged from a mixture of memory, opinion and anger. Fourteen years ago, aged eighteen, she had arrived in Risinghill Street without a penny but willing to work. Within weeks her handsome figure and truly bea
utiful hair and eyes had attracted attention, some of it welcome, much of it beyond her skill to deal with.

  Mrs. Clark had taken her in and taught her a good deal about caring for herself and learning to play one admirer off against another in order to survive. Within a few months she had found a protector prepared to take her as his mistress and give her a very pleasant standard of living.

  It lasted four years, until he grew bored and found another eighteen-year-old and began again. Sarah had come back to Risinghill Street, wiser and a good deal more careful. She found work in a public house, the Hare and Billet, about half a mile away, and it was there that a young artist had seen her and hired her to sit for him.

  Over a space of a couple of years she had improved her skill as a model, and finally Argo Allardyce had persuaded her to leave Risinghill Street and go to Acton Street to be at his disposal any time he should wish. She kept a room nearby, when she could afford it, but more often than not she had to let it go.

  “Was she in love with Allardyce?” Monk asked.

  Mrs. Clark poured more tea. “ ’Course she was, poor creature,” she said tartly. “Wot do you think? Told ’er she were beautiful, an’ ’e meant it. So she was, too. But she were no lady, an’ she never imagined she were. Knew ’er limits. That were part of ’er trouble. Never thought she were more’n pretty. Never thought no one’d care for ’er once ’er skin and ’er figure went.”

  In spite of himself, Monk was struck with a stab of sorrow for a woman who thought her only worth was her beauty. Had she really no sense of her value for her laughter or her courage, her ideas, just her gift to love? Was that what life had taught her? That no man could simply like her, rather than want to look at her, touch her, use her?

  A vision of fear opened up in front of him. He saw her constant anxiety each time she looked in the mirror, saw a line or a blemish on her skin, an extra pound or two on the rich lines of her body, a slackness real or imagined, that signaled the decline at the end of which lay hunger, loneliness and eventually despair.

  Mrs. Clark went on talking, describing a life in which beauty was caught on canvas and made immortal for the pleasure of artists and viewers, yet was strangely disconnected from the woman, as if her face, her hair, her body, were not really her. She could walk away unnoticed, leaving the image of herself, the part they valued, still in their possession.

  The loneliness of it appalled him. He pressed her for more stories, more details, names, places, times.

  He felt subdued and deeply thoughtful when he arrived to meet Runcorn nearly an hour late. Runcorn was sitting in the corner of a tavern nursing a mug of ale and getting steadily angrier as the minutes passed.

  “Mislaid your watch, have you?” he said from between his clenched teeth.

  Monk sat down. He had drunk so much tea he had no desire for ale or cider, and the good-natured babble of the crowd around him made it impossible to speak quietly. “Do you want to know about her or not?” he replied, ignoring the remark. He refused to explain himself. He already knew Runcorn’s views on the virtues of women, which consisted mostly of being hardworking, obedient and chaste, the last being the necessity which framed all else. He had been too long away from the streets and the reality of most women’s lives, perhaps too afraid of his own frailties to look at other people’s.

  Runcorn glared at him. “So what did you find, then?” he demanded.

  Monk relayed the facts of Sarah’s parentage and career up to the point of Allardyce’s seeing her and then shortly afterwards employing her exclusively. He also gave him the name of her onetime lover, Arthur Cutter.

  Runcorn listened in silence, his face heavy with conflicting emotions. “Better see him, I suppose,” he said at the end. “Could be him, if he thought she’d betrayed him somehow, but doesn’t seem likely. Women like that move from one man to another and nobody cares all that much. No doubt he expected it, and has had half a dozen different women since then.”

  “Somebody cared enough to kill her,” Monk responded angrily. What Runcorn had said was probably true; it was not the fact that cut Monk raw, it was the contempt with which Runcorn said it, or perhaps even the fact that he said it at all. There were some truths that compassion covered over, like hiding the faces of the dead, a small decency when nothing greater was possible. He looked at Runcorn with intense dislike, and all his old memories returned with their ugliness, the narrowness of mind, the judgment, the willingness to hurt. “She’s just as dead as Elissa Beck,” he added.

  Runcorn stood up. “Go and see Bella Holden,” he ordered. “You’ll probably find her at her lodgings, 23 Pentonville Road. She’s another artists’ model, and I daresay it’s a bawdy house. Unless you want to give up? But looks like you’re as keen to find out who killed Sarah Mackeson as you are about Beck’s wife.” He walked between the other drinkers without looking back or bothering to tell Monk where to meet him again. Monk watched Runcorn’s high, tight shoulders as he pushed his way out and lost sight of him just before the door.

  The house at 23 Pentonville Road was indeed a brothel of sorts, and he found Bella Holden only after considerable argument and the payment of two shillings and sixpence, which he could ill afford. Callandra would willingly have replaced it, but both pride and the awareness of her vulnerability would prevent him from asking. This was friendship, not business.

  Bella Holden was handsome, with a cloud of dark hair and remarkable pale blue eyes. She must have been a little over thirty, and he could see underneath the loose nightgown she wore that her body was losing its firmness and the shape an artist would admire. She was too lush, too overtly womanly. It would not be long before this house, and its like, were her main support, unless she learned a trade. No domestic employer would have her, even if she were capable of the tasks required. Without a character, a reference from a former employer, she would not be allowed over the step, let alone into the household.

  Looking at her now as she stared back at him, holding the money in her hand, he saw anger and the need to please struggling against each other in her face, and a certain heaviness about her eyelids, a lethargy as if he had woken her from a dream far more pleasant than any reality. It was three o’clock. He might be her first customer. The indifference in her face was a lifetime’s tragedy.

  He thought of Hester, and of how she would loathe having a stranger’s hand on her clothes, let alone on her naked skin. This woman had to endure intimacy from whoever chose to walk through the door with two shillings and sixpence to spend. Where did the ignorance and the desperation come from that she would not prefer to work, even in a sweatshop, rather than this?

  And the answer was there before the thought was whole. Sweatshops required a skill in sewing she might not possess, and paid less for a fourteen-hour day than she could make in her room in an hour. Both would probably break her health by the time she was forty.

  “I don’t want to lie with you, I want to ask you about Sarah Mackeson,” he said, sitting down on the one wooden chair. He was trying to place the faint smell in the room. It was not any of the usual body odors he would have expected, and not pleasing enough to have been a deliberate perfume, even if such a thing had been likely.

  “You a rozzer?” she asked. “Don’t look like one.” There was little expression in her voice. “Well, yer can’t get ’er fer nothin’ now, poor bitch. She’s dead. Some bastard did ’er in a few days ago, up Acton Street. Don’t yer swine never tell each other nothin’? Even the patterers is talkin’ about it. Yer should listen!”

  Monk ignored her resentment. He even saw the reason for it. She probably saw herself in Sarah Mackeson. It could as easily have been she, and she would expect as little protection before, or care afterwards.

  “I know,” he replied. “That’s why I want to learn what I can about her. I want to catch who did it.”

  It took a moment or two for her to grasp what he had said and consider whether she believed it. Then she began to talk.

  He asked questions and
she rambled on, a mixture of memories and observations, thoughts, all charged with so much emotion he was not certain when she was referring to Sarah and when to herself, but perhaps at times they were interchangeable. A painfully clear picture emerged of a woman who was careless, openhearted, loyal to her friends, feckless with money, and yet deeply frightened of a future in which she saw no safety. She was untidy, generous, quick to laugh—and to cry. If any man had loved her enough to feel jealousy, let alone to kill, she certainly had not known it. In her own eyes, her sole value was as an object of beauty for as long as it lasted. Both time and fashion were already eroding it, and she felt the cold breath of rejection.

  Bella Holden was walking the same path, and she could offer no clue as to who might have killed Sarah. Reluctantly, she named a few other people who had known her moderately well, but he doubted they could help. Bella would not compromise her own future for the sake of finding justice for Sarah. Sarah was dead, and past help. Bella had too little on her side to risk any of it.

  Monk thanked her and left. This time he returned to the police station, and found Runcorn in his office looking tired and unhappy, his brows drawn down.

  “Opium,” he said, almost as if he were challenging Monk.

  Suddenly, Monk placed the smell in Bella Holden’s room. He was annoyed with himself for not having known at the time. That was another gap in his memory. He hated Runcorn’s seeing it, especially now. “Sarah Mackeson was taking opium?” he asked with something close to a snarl.

  Runcorn misread his expression for contempt. His face flushed with anger almost beyond his control. His voice shook when he spoke. “So might you, if you had nothing to offer but your looks, and they were fading!” He gulped air. His knuckles shone white where his hands were pressed on the desk in front of him. “With nothing ahead of you but doss-houses and selling your body to strangers for less and less every year, you might not stand there in your handmade boots looking down your damn nose at someone who escaped into a dream every now and then, because reality was too hard to bear! It’s your job to find out who killed her, not decide whether she was right or wrong.” He stopped abruptly and sniffed hard, looking away from Monk now, as if his anger embarrassed him. “Did you go and see Bella What’s-her-name as I told you? Have you done anything useful at all?”