Death On Blackheath (Thomas Pitt 29) Read online

  ‘Well?’ Pitt prompted him.

  Whistler was also standing, but closer to the fire. He pushed his hands hard into his trouser pockets. ‘Rather a lot of things, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘On more detailed examination of the body, it became apparent that she had died considerably earlier than I had thought from the degree of decay …’

  Pitt was confused. ‘Don’t you tell the time a person has been dead from the degree of decay?’

  ‘Will you let me finish?’ Whistler snapped, his temper fraying at the first touch.

  Pitt realised with a jolt that the man was more than merely annoyed with himself for having to alter his diagnosis. Something was disturbing him more deeply, even brushing him with a kind of dread.

  Whistler cleared his throat. ‘Bitterly cold temperatures, below freezing, can delay the process greatly, even put it off altogether, if they persist without break. This is why people keep ice houses for meat storage.’ He hesitated, but Pitt did not interrupt again.

  ‘This body was kept at or below freezing for some time, and the decay was slight. But she was not kept at the place where we found her. In fact she was not in the open at all, or scavenging animals would have got to her – at the very least, insects would have. Therefore she was in a very cold and completely enclosed place. Do you follow me so far?’

  ‘You mean such as in somebody’s ice house?’ Pitt prompted.

  ‘Precisely. We already know from witnesses that she was not where we found her, because it is close to a public footpath, used very infrequently, particularly at this time of year, but all the same, still used, and by people with dogs. I had assumed she had been placed there during that night – moved from wherever she was killed perhaps a day or two before, even a week.’ Whistler was watching Pitt closely. ‘It seemed to make sense that possibly someone killed her, in an unplanned attack, and then had to consider how to dispose of her body. It took him a few days to find a way of getting her up to the gravel pit unseen, and considering the circumstances, without anyone else’s assistance.’

  ‘A reasonable assumption,’ Pitt agreed. ‘No longer tenable?’

  Whistler grunted and let his breath out between his teeth. ‘I examined the body very closely for the cause of death. While doing so I realised that the decay was much further advanced than I had supposed from the exterior. She had been kept somewhere extremely cold and …’ he took a deep breath before continuing, ‘… and she had been cleaned up quite a lot after the injuries that caused her death …’

  ‘What?’

  Whistler glared at him. ‘You heard me correctly, Commander. Someone made an attempt to clean her up, then instead of disposing of her, kept her body somewhere very cold, but thoroughly sealed so no scavengers found her. Therefore it was not in an ordinary outhouse, even in this weather. Most of the damage we saw, particularly to her face, was indeed done with a very sharp blade of some sort, including the removal of the eyes … and the lips. It was not animal depredation occurring during the one night she lay exposed in the gravel pit. And don’t waste your time asking me for an explanation. I can only tell you the facts. Understanding them is your business, thank God!’

  ‘And the cause of death?’ Pitt felt cold again, in spite of the bright fire.

  ‘Extreme violence,’ Whistler replied. ‘Blows hard enough to break her bones, specifically her shoulder blade, four ribs, the humerus in her left arm, and her pelvis in three places. But that was some time before the mutilations to her face. That is my point!’ He glared at Pitt, his outrage aching for any other answer. ‘Ten days at the absolute minimum.’

  Pitt was appalled. It was one of the most savage beatings he could imagine. Whoever did it must have been completely insane. No wonder Whistler looked so wretched. If she were a prostitute it was no ordinary quarrel she had fallen victim to, it was an attack by a raving madman. If he could do that once, how long would it be before he did it again?

  Suddenly the room seemed not warm and comfortably protected from the elements. It was more like a suffocating, airless imprisonment from the clean, driving sleet outside, and he longed to escape into it.

  ‘What with?’ he asked, his voice wavering a little. ‘What did he use?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Whistler shook his head. ‘This side of a lunatic asylum, I would say he ran her down with a coach and four. Hard to tell after the passage of time, and I’d say it’s been three weeks or so by now. Some of the injuries could have been caused by horses’ hoofs or carriage wheels. Considerable impact, from several directions and it could have happened all at once, like horses panicking.’

  A momentary fury welled up inside Pitt. The man could have told him that in the first place. Hideous accidents happened. The damage and the pain were the same, but the horror was nothing like that of imagining a homicidal human being doing such a thing deliberately. He longed to actually hit Whistler, which was childish and he was ashamed of himself. Nevertheless it was true. He clenched his fists and kept his voice level, even if it was tight and grated between his teeth.

  ‘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 she for two or three weeks? Why put her out in one of the Shooters Hill gravel pits for the foxes and badgers to eat her and maul her about, and that poor soul walking his dog to find?’ He drew in a deep breath. ‘And why the terrible mutilations so long afterwards? To tear her face, so she was unrecognisable?’

  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 swivelled to Pitt, then away again. There was a faint flush in his cheeks. ‘She was probably a domestic servant. 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, flat irons. 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 she 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 a young married woman, taking in laundry. Not 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 unravelling 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 it 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 coat rack and put them on. He said goodbye 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 grey 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? Was it a quarrel, but she had still eventually gone willingly? Or had she been taken by force? Why would her suitor 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?

  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.

  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.

  At Lisson Grove, Stoker would have heard that Pitt had been summoned by Whistler, and must have been watching for Pitt to return. Within ten minutes he appeared in Pitt’s office. He 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-grey 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 realised. He had gone on pounding, beating, until the hysteria had died down inside him and he had 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.

  ‘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 Kynaston tomorrow. You start with Kitty Ryder.’

  Stoker did not wait until the morning. 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 there were only himself and his sister Gwen left anyway, and she lived in King’s Langley, a short train journey away. Their two brothers had died in childhood, and a sister in giving birth to her own child. His work filled his life. He realised 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 recognised 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 realisation, he did not want Pitt to change. It saddened him that perhaps that was inevitable. He might even be driven to take a lead in that himself one day.

  Kitty Ryder troubled him also. 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 Ryder. 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 a man?

  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, 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, mentioned 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.