A Sunless Sea Read online

  “But it isn’t miles away,” Orme said softly. He was leaning a little against a stanchion, gazing far away into the distance. Monk had no idea what he saw in it. There were startling moments when he felt he knew Orme intimately because of the bitter and terrible experiences they had shared, things that were understood but could never be put into words. But there were far more days like this when they worked together with mutual respect, something bordering on a kind of friendship, but the difference between them was never forgotten, at least not by Orme. “It’s right here. Unless she came here by boat. Either way, she was killed there on the pier, and then cut open like that.” His mouth tightened. His face was very pale under his windburn. “Or I suppose they could’ve killed her somewhere else, and then cut her here?” he suggested, his voice grating in his throat.

  “She wouldn’t have bled like that if she’d been dead awhile,” Monk replied. “Overstone said that from the way the blood was, and the bruising, he reckoned she was just recently dead.”

  Orme swore under his breath, then apologized.

  Monk waved his hand, dismissing it.

  They both stood on the cold stones of the street, saying nothing for several moments. Other people were coming for the tea, their footsteps loud on the cobbles. Somewhere a dog was barking.

  “Do you think they could’ve cut her up like that in the dark?” Orme finally broke the silence. “Not seeing what they were doing?”

  Monk looked at him. “There were no streetlamps where we found her. Either they did it in the dark, or while there was still some daylight left.”

  “Why there, anyway?” Orme asked. He tightened his hunched shoulders as if his jacket were not enough to keep him warm. “It’s not a place a prostitute would take a man. The riding lights of a barge would illuminate you long enough to be seen.”

  “Maybe they were seen,” Monk thought aloud. “From the distance, a man struggling with a woman could look like an embrace. Lightermen would just laugh at his boldness doing it out in the open, a kind of bravado. They would think he was taking his pleasure, not killing her.”

  “Not much point looking for anyone who saw,” Orme said unhappily. “They could be anywhere by now, from Henley to Gravesend.”

  “Wouldn’t help us much anyway,” Monk replied. “They’d have no way of knowing if it was her they saw, or any other couple.” The thought depressed him. A woman could be murdered and gutted like a fish, out in the open, in full view of the ships going past, on the most populous river in the world, and no one notice or understand what was happening.

  He straightened up, eating the last of his sandwich. He had to choke it down. There was nothing wrong with it, but his mouth was dry. The bread tasted like sawdust.

  “We’d best see if we can find out who she was,” he said. “Not that it will necessarily help us much. She was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “There’ll still be people to tell,” Orme responded. “Friends, even a husband.”

  Monk did not answer. He knew it. It was the worst part of the beginning in any murder case: telling those who had cared about the victim. In the end, the worst was finding the person who had done it, and those who cared about them.

  Together they walked back up Narrow Street to the corner of Ropemakers Fields and then along it slowly. On the north side there were alleys every few dozen yards. Some led up to Triangle Place, and then on to the workhouse.

  They asked there, giving as good a description of the dead woman as they could, but no one was missing. In any case, the dead woman’s hands had not looked like those of a woman used to physical labor: red from long hours wet or submerged in caustic soap, scrubbing floors or laundering, or calloused from the constant prick of the needle while sewing canvas.

  Was she a prostitute, well past her prime, perhaps desperate for a few shillings and easily persuaded to go anywhere, even the open space of a pier as darkness fell? With the money at least she could eat, or buy a few pieces of coal to keep herself warm.

  In spite of himself Monk imagined it: the offer, the need on both their parts, the brief struggle, which she easily mistook for fumbling, clumsy desire, perhaps a man angry with himself for needing such a release, angry with her because she had the power to give it to him, and was demanding money. Then the crushing blow and the consuming darkness.

  Why had he then mutilated her? Had he known her, and this was some uncontrollable personal hatred? Or was he a madman, and any victim would have done just as well? If that were so, then this would be only the beginning.

  They walked the length of Narrow Street again, and Ropemakers Fields, and up and down the alleys, but no one had seen anything that helped, no man and woman together going toward the pier at dusk or shortly before, or if they had, they had barely noticed, or preferred not to remember. No amount of questioning elicited anything helpful.

  They needed to find out who she was, who she had been before this.

  “We’ll get a drawing of her,” Monk said as they walked back toward the local police station and the sky darkened into late afternoon. “There’s a constable there who’s good with a pencil to catch a likeness. We’ll get him to make at least a couple of pictures. Try again in the morning.”

  MONK WAS TIRED ENOUGH to sleep well that night. He told Hester nothing about the woman on the pier, not wanting to shatter the brief peace of the evening. If she knew there was any worry, she was too wise or too gentle to say so.

  He woke early the next morning and went out before breakfast to get at least a couple of the daily newspapers from the stand on the corner of Paradise Place and Church Street. By the time he had walked the hundred yards or so back home, he knew the worst. WOMAN HORRIBLY MURDERED ON LIMEHOUSE PIER, read one headline. WOMAN GUTTED AND LEFT TO DIE LIKE AN ANIMAL, said another.

  He had them folded, headlines concealed under his arm, when he reached his own kitchen door. He smelled bacon and toast, and heard the kettle whistling on the hob.

  Hester was standing with the toasting fork in her hand, taking the fresh piece off and putting it into the rack with the others, so it would stay crisp. She closed the oven door and smiled at him. She was dressed in her favorite deep blue. For a moment, looking at her, Monk could put off a little longer the thoughts of violence and loss, the chill on the constantly moving water and the smell of death.

  Perhaps he should have told her last night about the woman, but he had been tired and cold, and aching to put the horror of it out of his mind. He had needed to get warm and dry, to lie close to her and hear her talk about something else—anything at all that had to do with sanity and the small, healing details of life.

  She was looking at him now and reading in his face that something was badly wrong. She knew him far too well for him to dissemble—not that he ever had. She had been an army nurse in the Crimean War, a dozen years ago, before they had met. There were few horrors or griefs he could tell her that she did not already know at least as well as he.

  “What is it?” she asked quietly, perhaps hoping that he could tell her before twelve-year-old Scuff came down for his breakfast, eager for the new day, and everything he could eat. About a year ago they and Scuff had mutually adopted each other, Hester and Monk because Scuff was homeless, living precariously on the river, mostly by his wits. It was not that he was an orphan, but that his mother had too many younger children to have time for him, or maybe his mother’s new husband did not want him. Scuff had adopted Monk because he thought Monk lacked adequate knowledge of dockside life to do his job and needed someone like Scuff to look after him. Hester he had grown close to more reluctantly, in small steps, both of them being careful, afraid of hurt. The whole arrangement had begun tentatively on all sides, but over the year it had become comfortable.

  “What is it?” Hester repeated more urgently.

  “We found the body of a woman on Limehouse Pier at dawn yesterday,” Monk replied, putting his folded papers on his chair and then sitting on them. “Badly mutilated. Ho
ped we’d keep the worst of it out of the papers, but we haven’t. They’re making a meal of it.”

  Her face tightened a little with only a tiny movement of muscles. “Who is she? Do you know?”

  “Not yet. From what I could tell, she looked ordinary enough, poor but respectable. Middle forties, at a guess.” An image of the woman’s body came back to his mind. Suddenly he felt tired and chilled again, as if the lights had gone out, although the kitchen was bright and warm and full of clean, homey smells.

  “The surgeon said the mutilation was done after she was dead,” he went on. “The papers didn’t say that.”

  Hester looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, as if she was going to ask him something. Then she changed her mind and served his breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast, carrying the hot plate with a tea towel and setting it down in front of him. The butter and marmalade were already on the table. She made the tea and brought it over, steam coming gently from the spout of the pot.

  Scuff arrived at the door, boots in his hands. He put them down in the hall and came in, looking first at Monk, then at Hester. In spite of almost a year here he was still thin, small for his age, his shoulders narrow. But now his hair was thick and shiny, and there were no blemishes on his fair skin.

  “Are you hungry?” Hester inquired, as if it were a question.

  He grinned and sat down in what he now regarded as his chair.

  “Yeah. Please.”

  She smiled and served him the same as she had Monk. He would eat it all, then look hopefully around for more. It was a comfortable pattern, repeated every morning.

  “Wo’s wrong?” Scuff regarded Monk with a frown. “Can I ’elp?”

  “Not yet, thank you,” Monk assured him, looking up and meeting his eyes so Scuff would know he was serious. “Nasty case, but not mine, at least not yet.” He knew that since it was in the newspapers, Scuff would unquestionably hear about it, but for now they could still have a few hours’ peace. Since living here in Paradise Place, Scuff’s ability to read had increased dramatically. He was not fluent—there were some longer or more complex words he still had difficulty with—but the plain language of a newspaper was well within his ability.

  Scuff accepted his breakfast from Hester, but it did not distract his attention from Monk. “Why’s it not yours?” he asked. “You’re ’ead o’ the River Police. ’Oo’s would it be, then?”

  “Depends on who she was,” Monk replied. “We found her body on the pier, but she might have lived inland, so this case would belong to the local Limehouse police.” Even as he said it he made up his mind. Lately the papers had been rife with criticism of the police for the violence and prostitution going on in the area close to the river. There had been several knife fights, one of which had degenerated into a full-scale street battle leaving half a dozen people wounded and two dead.

  The newspapers had said the police were incompetent to handle it and had lost control. Uglier suggestions still were that they had deliberately allowed it to happen, in order to infiltrate it and get rid of a few troublemakers they could not handle legally, because the whole waterfront was slipping out of their control.

  The only thing that might stop further destructive speculation after this crime was a quick solution.

  “No, it don’t belong ter them,” Scuff argued. “They need yer ter ’elp ’em. If they killed ’er by the river, yer gotta do it.”

  Monk smiled, in spite of himself. “I’ll offer to,” he conceded. “It’s not something I really want.”

  “Why?” Scuff asked, his face puzzled, fair eyebrows drawn into a frown. “Don’t you care ’oo did it?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Monk corrected himself quickly. “It’s just that we don’t know who she was yet, so we don’t know where she lived. If it’s inland, the regular police would know the people better.”

  “They in’t better’n you,” Scuff said with absolute certainty. “Yer gotta do it.” He was watching Monk’s face closely, trying to read what he felt, so he could figure out how to help. “It were a daft thing ter do,” he went on. “If yer don’t want something found, you ’ide it. Yer don’t leave it out in the open so’s any ferry or lighterman can see it. That’s daft!”

  Monk did not try to explain homicidal lunacy to Scuff over breakfast, or what kind of rage gets hold of a man that causes him to rip a woman’s body open, even after she’s dead.

  Scuff rolled his eyes, then set the matter aside and started to eat his breakfast with intense pleasure. It would be years before he lost his excitement at a whole plate of eggs and bacon that was solely for him.

  “Can you give it to Orme, or one of the other men?” Hester asked when Scuff had finished and left the kitchen.

  “No,” Monk said with a brief smile at her. “If she was on or near the river, it’s ours. And it’s going to be very bad. The newspapers are already calling for questions to be asked in Parliament about the vice in the port areas: Limehouse, Shadwell, Bermondsey, Deptford—in fact both sides of the river all the way down to Greenwich.” He hesitated a moment. “Perhaps we can solve it soon.”

  She smiled at him without answer. There was a world of things between them that did not require words.

  MONK WENT DOWN TO the water’s edge to take a ferry across the river to the Wapping Station. It was a gray morning with a hard wind making the water choppy. He pulled his coat collar up around his ears as he climbed into the boat and they moved out into the open stretch of the river where the slight lee of the buildings no longer protected them.

  They were in between the long strings of barges going up and down the waterway, laden with cargo. Close to the docks ships were moored, waiting to unload. The quays were busy, men beginning the hard labor of lifting, wheeling, guiding cranes and winches, always watching the wind and the tide. Even out on the water, in spite of the slap of the current against the sides of the ferry and the creaking of the oarlocks as the oars swept back and forth, he could hear the cry of gulls and the shouts of men onshore.

  At the far side he paid the ferryman and thanked him. He was familiar with the ferrymen; he saw the same few almost every day and knew them by name. Then he went up the steep stone steps to the dockside and across the open space in the sharper wind to the Wapping Police Station.

  Inside was warm and there was tea brewing. He had a cup while he checked the news of the night and gave the few instructions that were necessary. Then he took a hansom to Limehouse Police Station and looked at the drawings the young constable had made of the dead woman. They were good. He had a talent. He had given her features life, parting the lips a little to show the slightly crossed front tooth, making her an individual.

  The constable saw Monk looking at it, and perhaps misunderstood the sudden moment of pain in his face.

  “Isn’t it any good?” he said anxiously.

  “It’s too good,” Monk replied honestly. “It’s like seeing her alive. It makes her death more real.” He looked up at the man and saw the slight flush on his face. “You did very well. Thank you.”

  “Sir.”

  Orme came in a few moments afterward and Monk gave him one of the two drawings. They agreed where each of them would go: Orme to the north, Monk south, to the Isle of Dogs.

  The wind funneled down the narrow streets, carrying the smell of the river and the dank odor of rubbish and wet stones, overrunning drains. Monk questioned everyone he passed. Though the news clearly had reached them, many affected to be too busy to answer him and he had to insist. Then they were angry, wishing to do anything to stop the horror and the fear from touching their own lives.

  He was still down near the docks when he stepped in at a small tobacconist who also sold a few groceries and the local newspaper.

  “I dunno anything about it,” the man denied vigorously as soon as Monk told him who he was. He refused to look at the picture, brushing it away with his hand.

  “It’s not when she was dead!” Monk said testily. “That’s what she looked like before
. She could be a local married woman.”

  “Fine, ’ere,” the old man held out his hand to take the picture again. Monk gave it to him and he studied it more carefully, before passing it back. “She could, an’ all,” he agreed. “But I still don’ know ’er. Sorry. She din’ work around ’ere, married or not.”

  Monk thanked him and left.

  For the rest of the morning he walked miles through the gray streets, narrow and busy, all within the sight and sounds of the river. He spoke to several prostitutes but they all denied knowing the woman in the drawing. He had not expected them to admit it. They would want to avoid all contact with the police, whatever the reason, but he had hoped to see a flicker of recognition in someone’s face. All he saw, though, was resentment—and always fear.

  He was inclined to believe that the dead woman was not one of their number; she was too different from them. She was at least fifteen years older than they were, perhaps more, and there was a gentleness in her face. It looked more aged by illness than coarsened by drink or life on the streets. He thought her more likely to be a married woman ill-used.

  He had asked the police surgeon if she had had children, but Overstone had told him that the mutilations had been so violent he could not tell.

  It was Orme who stumbled on the answer, farther inland. At a small general store just over Britannia Bridge he had found a shopkeeper who stared hard at his version of the drawing, then blinked and looked up, sad and puzzled.

  “Said she looked like Zenia Gadney, from up Copenhagen Place,” Orme told Monk when they met up at one o’clock for a quick lunch at a public house.

  “Was he certain?” Monk asked. Learning her name and where she lived made her death sharper, more real somehow.

  “Seemed it,” Orme answered ruefully, meeting Monk’s eyes, understanding the same dread. “It’s a good picture.”

  An hour later he and Monk were knocking on the doors at Copenhagen Place, which was just over a quarter of a mile from the river.