Death on Blackheath Read online

  “Are you saying that this woman’s death could have been a traffic accident, and not a crime at all, Dr. Whistler?”

  “It could have been any number of things!” Whistler’s answer rose to all but a shout. “But if it was a traffic accident, why in God’s name was it not reported to the police?” He waved his arms wide, only just missing the bookcase. “Where the devil was the body for the weeks before he disposed of her? And why put her out in one of the Shooters Hill gravel pits for that poor soul walking his dog to find?” He drew in a deep breath. “And why the terrible mutilations so long after her death?”

  This time it was Pitt who was silent.

  Whistler gave a shuddering sigh and fought to regain control of himself. He looked slightly embarrassed by his emotion and avoided meeting Pitt’s eyes. Perhaps he thought himself unprofessional, but Pitt liked him the more for it.

  “Anything further about who she was?” Pitt asked at last. “Something not obliterated by this … lunatic?”

  “Probably in good health, as far as I could tell at this stage,” Whistler answered. “No apparent disease. Organs all fine, apart from beginning to decay. If you find whoever did this to her, I hope you hang him! If you don’t, don’t come back to me for any help!” His glare swiveled to Pitt, then away again. There was a faint flush in his cheeks. “She was probably a domestic servant. There are signs, little things, you know? Good teeth. Well nourished. Clean nails, good hands, but several small scars from burning, the sort you see on a woman who does a lot of ironing. Difficult things not to burn yourself with now and again, flatirons. Especially if you’re ironing something fiddly, like lace, or gathered sleeves, delicate collars, that kind of thing.”

  “A lady’s maid …” Pitt said the inevitable.

  “Yes … or a laundry maid of a more general sort. Children’s clothes are fiddly, too.”

  “So you still have no idea whether it is Kitty Ryder or not?”

  “No, I haven’t. Sorry. But I can tell you this victim wasn’t a lady. Ladies don’t do their own ironing. And she wasn’t a prostitute—much too clean and healthy for that. She must have been in her mid- to late twenties. On the streets, by that age she’d have looked a lot worse. A servant. Or maybe a young married woman, taking in laundry, though that’s less likely. Everyone around here has their own servants for that sort of thing. And she’d had no children. With the injuries and the rot I don’t know if she was still a virgin.”

  “Thank you,” Pitt said grimly, as a matter of courtesy; it was the last thing he actually meant. He did not want the case, and he knew that Whistler would rather not have found the evidence, or have had to tell him about it. It was all inevitable now: the slow, sad unraveling of whoever’s tragedy it was. “Have you told the local police?” he added, almost as an afterthought.

  A bitter amusement flashed in Whistler’s eyes. “Yes.” He did not add their reaction, but Pitt could guess it. They would be delighted if they could claim this was a problem they would have to give up to Special Branch, just in case it should end up involving Dudley Kynaston.

  Pitt took his damp overcoat and hat off the coatrack and put them on. He said good-bye to Whistler and went out into the passage, and then the cold street again. He could have got a hansom here and ridden all the way back to Lisson Grove, but he preferred to walk down to the river and sit in a ferry on the choppy gray water, alone with the wind and the rain, and think what he was going to do next, and how he was going to do it. He could get a cab on the far side.

  There were too many questions unanswered. If this were the body of Kitty Ryder, had it also been her blood and hair on the steps of the Kynaston house? Had she been taken by force, struggled against whoever attacked her? If so, the only suspect so far seemed to be her suitor, but why would he have done such a thing? If he had killed her there, it had been an extraordinarily violent quarrel to conduct so close to an inhabited house. Why had no one heard anything? In fact, why had she not screamed, and brought the whole household out?

  And if he had killed her why had he not left her there and escaped as fast as he could? She was a big woman for someone to have carried anywhere. If he had run off into the night, leaving her dead in the alleyway, he had an excellent chance of never being found. London was a large city to lose yourself in, and there was the whole of the countryside beyond that! Or, if you were desperate enough, ships sailed every day from the Pool of London for every part of the world.

  Pitt looked across the rough water at them now: masts jostling against the sky in the distance; steamers heavier, and more solid; barges and lighters threading between them. A man could lose himself here in a day, never mind three weeks. None of this made sense. What was he missing?

  The silent ferryman at the oars and the rhythmic slap of the water on the sides of the boat helped him to concentrate.

  If it was Kitty, where had she been from the time she left Kynaston’s house until she was placed in the gravel pit? Was she killed straight away, or later? Why put her in the gravel pit anyway? Why not bury her? That made no sense. It was almost as if someone had intended her to be found.

  The longer he considered it, the uglier and more senseless it appeared. He still hoped it was not Kitty at all, but he knew he must proceed as if it were.

  WITHIN TEN MINUTES OF his return to Lisson Grove, Stoker materialized in Pitt’s office. Pitt felt a touch of amusement at his prompt appearance. Stoker would have heard that Pitt had been summoned by Whistler, and must have been watching for Pitt to return. He entered the office and closed the door behind him and stood expectantly, waiting to be told.

  Pitt did so, briefly.

  Stoker listened in silence. His strong, bony face was unreadable, except for the increased pallor. He looked down at the floor, his shoulders hunched a little, hands in his pockets.

  “No choice, have we?” he stated. “This doesn’t make any sense. There’s a major part of it we don’t know anything about.” He looked up, his blue-gray eyes brilliant. “Maybe it has nothing to do with the young man she was courting, sir. It could all be in the Kynaston household. According to what I learned about her from the other servants, she was smart and didn’t miss much. A lady’s maid gets to know a lot of things, that’s why they stay in places a long time. You can’t afford to let them go, ’specially not to a position with anyone in your own circle.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Pitt faced the inevitable. “That she was blackmailing someone in the house, and they refused to pay? Or that they killed her simply because she knew?”

  Stoker winced. “Either one, sir. Maybe she knew what they’d do and she tried to run away, an’ that’s where they caught her?”

  “And she didn’t cry out?”

  “Couldn’t you kill a woman without letting her scream, sir? I could.”

  Pitt imagined it: Kitty terrified because she knew what she had seen, or heard, running out of the house, even in the dark in the winter. She would have gone through the dimly lit kitchen and scullery to the back door, struggling with the bolts on the doors, flinging them open and going outside into the bitter air, scrambling up the steps. Had she known her killer was only yards behind her? Or had he come silently, his footsteps masked in her ears by her own pounding heart? There had been a brief, terrible fight on the steps, a blow—fatal sooner than the killer had realized. He had gone on pounding, beating, until the hysteria had died down inside him and he saw what he had done.

  Then what?

  He had moved the body quickly. Where to? A cellar? Somewhere bitterly cold, until he could move it again. And some mischance had delayed that.

  Pitt looked at Stoker’s face and saw a trace of the same thought in his eyes.

  “If it was someone in the house, it was most likely Kynaston,” Stoker said aloud. “We’d better find out.”

  There was no argument to be made, only careful plans, and perhaps something of Dudley Kynaston himself to be learned before they began. “Yes …” Pitt agreed. “I’ll start with Kynast
on tomorrow. You start with Kitty Ryder.”

  STOKER DID NOT WAIT until the morning.

  He knew he had already learned all he could about Kitty Ryder from where she had lived and worked.

  He and Pitt had naturally checked with police all over the area to see if there had been similar attacks, and found nothing.

  Stoker himself had spoken to the institutions that kept the criminally insane. No one had escaped. There was no record of such mutilations anywhere else.

  No matter where else they looked, they were turned back to Kitty herself, and her connections with the Kynaston house.

  Stoker lived alone in rented rooms. He had no family in this part of London. In fact only he and his sister Gwen were left anyway, and she lived in King’s Langley, a short train journey away. Their two brothers had died in childhood, and his other sister in giving birth. His work filled his life. He realized how much, with an awareness of suddenly being anonymous as he walked along the wet pavement from the island of light beneath one streetlamp through the mist and shadows to the island beneath the next.

  Other people seemed to be moving more rapidly, heads bent, as if hurrying towards some purpose. Were they eager for what was ahead of them? Or only weary of what was behind?

  Stoker had begun in the navy as a boy, and the hard life on a ship had taught him the worth of discipline. One might argue with men, trick or deceive them, even bribe them, but no one argued with the sea. The bones of those who had tried littered the ocean’s floor. He had learned both obedience and command, at least to a moderate level, and had expected his life to follow that path.

  Then an incident while in port had involved investigation by Special Branch, and he had been recruited by Victor Narraway, at that time its commander. It was a different life; more interesting; in its own way more demanding, certainly of his imagination and intelligence. He found to his surprise that he had a considerable skill for it.

  Then Narraway had been forced out. It was only Pitt who had been loyal to Narraway and eventually saved his reputation, perhaps his life, but not his position. Pitt had inherited that himself, much to his embarrassment and dismay. He did not wish to profit from Narraway’s loss. Nor did he, frankly, think that he had the necessary skills or experience to succeed.

  Of course he had not said so to Stoker, possibly not to anyone at all. But Stoker was a good judge of men, and he saw it in a dozen tiny details. Less so now, perhaps, after a year, but still there, to one who had recognized them before.

  Stoker liked Pitt. There was an innate decency in him it was impossible to disregard. However, occasionally he worried that some quality in Pitt would stay his hand when he should strike. The position he now held demanded ruthlessness, and therefore an ability to live with mistakes, to forgive himself and move on, not allowing the memory of them to debilitate him.

  And yet even with that realization, he did not want Pitt to change. It saddened him that perhaps such change was inevitable. He might even be driven to take a lead in that himself one day.

  Kitty Ryder troubled him also, though he had never even met the woman or seen a likeness of her. He pictured her in his mind: something like his sister Gwen, who had thick, soft hair and a quick smile, nice teeth, one a little crooked.

  Even though he did not see her more than perhaps once a month, the closeness between them was always in his mind. Gwen would have been a good lady’s maid, if she had not married young and started a family. She was lucky; her husband was a decent man, even if he was away at sea too much of the time.

  He came to the pub where he ate frequently and went inside to the noise and the warmth. He ordered a steak and kidney pie, but even while he ate, his mind was on Kitty. What had she been like? What made her laugh, or cry? Why had she apparently loved a man that everyone else thought was unworthy of her? Why did any woman love such a man?

  He had to laugh at himself—here he was, sitting alone in the pub, angry over the fate of a woman he had never met and who was probably nothing like Gwen at all!

  He paid for his ale and walked out into the cold, wet night. She was the victim, at the very least, of a hideous mutilation and abandonment. He was a detective, so he should find out about her. He took a hansom back up to the Shooters Hill area and went into the café near the Pig and Whistle on Silver Street. He was not naturally convivial but it was part of his job to mix with people, start casual conversations and ask questions without seeming to.

  It was growing late, and he was all but ready to give up when the waiter, refilling his tankard, responded to his casual mention of Kitty.

  “ ’Aven’t seen ’er lately,” he said with a shrug. “Pity. We’d music sometimes. She used ter sing real sweet. Don’t like them ’igh, tinkly sort o’ voices, but ’ers were low and gentle. No edge to it, if yer know what I mean? Not as she couldn’t carry a jolly good tune, an’ make us laugh, an’ all.”

  “She came in here often?” Stoker tried to keep the eagerness out of his face, avoiding looking at the man’s eyes.

  “Yer know ’er, then?” the waiter asked curiously.

  “No.” Stoker forced himself to drink some of the fresh cider before he went on. “Friend o’ mine liked her quite a lot. He hasn’t seen her in a month or so either. Maybe she got a new place …” He let the suggestion hang in the air.

  “More fool ’er,” the waiter said drily. “Got a good position, it don’t do to change it. She never spoke like she meant ter. But then she kept ’er own counsel, that one. Never talked loose, like.” He shook his head. “ ’Er and ’er ships … real dreamer, she was. ’Ope she landed on ’er feet.” He turned to the room. “Drink up, gents. I ain’t stayin’ open all night.”

  “Ships?” Stoker said quietly. “What kind of ships?”

  The waiter grinned. “Paper ones, mate. Pictures of all kinds o’ ships: big ones, little ones, foreign ones what sail out east, like up an’ down the Nile. She kept ’em an’ stuck ’em in a book. Learned all about ’em, she did. Could tell yer where they went an’ ’oo sailed ’em. Will yer be wantin’ another pint, then?”

  “No, thank you,” Stoker declined, but he pulled a sixpence out of his pocket and put it on the table. “But here’s for the last one, and have one yourself.”

  The waiter snatched it up instantly and smiled. “Thank you, sir. You’re a gent.”

  Stoker went outside into the rising wind, walking down towards the river to catch a ferry across. He would have a better chance of finding a cab on the other side for the long ride home.

  By the time he reached the north bank and climbed the steep stairs up to the road, the night was clear. The moon lit the water so he could see the real ships riding on the tide, dark hulls on the silver-black spars against a paler sky.

  PITT WAS AT THE Kynaston house on Shooters Hill by half past eight the next morning. Any later and he might have missed Kynaston himself, and Rosalind would almost certainly refuse to see him without her husband present.

  This time, at Pitt’s request they met in Kynaston’s study. Pitt had no time alone in the room, which he would have preferred. However, even as they spoke he looked more closely at what he was able to see without obviously staring.

  Kynaston sat behind his desk. It was a large, comfortable piece of furniture with a patina of age, and suitably untidy. The sand tray, sealing wax, pens, and inkwells were easily to hand, not set straight since last used. The books on the shelf behind were there for reference, not ornament. The sizes were odd, the subjects aligned rather than the appearance. There were several paintings on the walls, some of ships or seascapes, one of a striking snowscape with trees, and mountains of some height in the distance, like the ones pictured in the morning room.

  Certainly it was not a depiction of any part of Britain.

  Kynaston saw Pitt looking at it.

  “Beautiful,” Pitt said quickly, scanning his memory to find some suitable comment to make about the piece from his earlier days in the police when he had dealt with theft, frequently of work
s of art. “The clarity of the light is extraordinary.”

  Kynaston looked at him with a spark of sudden interest. “It is, isn’t it!” he agreed. “You get it in the far north, almost luminous like that.”

  Pitt frowned. “But it’s not Scotland, surely? The scale is more than artistic license …”

  Kynaston smiled. “Oh, no, it’s pretty accurate. It’s Sweden. I’ve been there, very briefly. My brother, Bennett, bought that one. He …” A shadow of pain crossed his face as if the sharpness of loss suddenly revisited him. He took a breath and started again. “He spent some time there and grew to love the landscape, especially the light. As you observed, it is quite extraordinary.” A pleasure came back into his voice, the timbre completely different. “He always used to say that great art is distinguished by a universality, some passion in it that speaks to all kinds of people; combined with something unique to the artist that makes it totally personal, the sensitivity of one man, an individual eye.” He stopped as if a memory had transported him and the present time and place were forgotten.

  Pitt waited, not because he expected to deduce anything of value either from what Kynaston had said, or the way in which he had said it, but because to have interrupted with some trivial comment would have broken the possibility of any understanding between them.

  Instead he let his eye wander a little towards the other pictures in the room. The pride of place above the mantelpiece was taken by a head-and-shoulders portrait of a man of about thirty, bearing so strong a resemblance to Kynaston that for a moment Pitt thought that it was he, and the artist had taken too much of a liberty, perhaps for dramatic effect. Kynaston was striking-looking, but this man was handsome, an idealized version with thicker hair and bolder eyes, a face of almost visionary intensity, and dark-eyed, where Kynaston’s eyes were blue.