Missing Susan

CHAPTER 15

LONDON

AS OXFORD IS only thirty miles from London, the last day’s coach journey was a brief one. Before Rowan had finished elaborating on the gruesome details of Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club in the caves at West Wycombe, Bernard announced that they were coming into the city. “You think Cornwall’s country lanes are bad,” he added. “Wait till you see the asphalt bridle paths they call streets in Bloomsbury. We may have to orbit the hotel for an hour, before I figure out a way to get the coach in there. Thank God it’s not rush hour.”

“No hurry, Bernard,” Rowan assured him. “It’s just on eleven now.”

The coach had one less passenger for the trip to London. An Oxford physician recommended that Martha Tabram stay on a few days to rest her injured ankle. After that, she would be meeting her daughter in London. The group had signed a get-well card and sent it up to her room before they left. Undaunted by this latest patch of misfortune, the remaining tour members spent the ride to London making plans to see shows and discussing the London phase of the tour. Only Elizabeth MacPherson was quieter than usual. She kept looking over at the sleeping Susan Cohen, with a thoughtful expression on her face.

That afternoon, armed with daily passes to the Underground, the tour members assembled in the Baker Street station for their visit to Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum. After Charles Warren posed them for photographs with the wax effigies of the royal family in the Grand Hall (Elizabeth, Kate, and Nancy Warren), and with Agatha Christie in the Conservatory (Alice and Frances), Rowan led them hurriedly past the rock stars and the politicians, down the stairs to the Chamber of Horrors.

While everyone else maintained a polite interest in the realistic atmosphere of the Victorian street scene and the sinister wax images lurking about the dimly lit tableaux, Elizabeth and Rowan rushed from one display to another, greeting the killers like old friends.

“People from home!” giggled Elizabeth, pointing to two men carrying a body in a wooden tea chest.

Rowan nodded. “Ay, yes, Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh bodysnatchers. The gallows over there is authentic, by the way. The museum got it from the Hertford Gaol in 1878.”

“Why don’t they label these things?” gmmbled Alice MacKenzie. “Some of these people could be politicians, for all I know.” She pointed to a prosperous-looking wax gentleman in a vintage brown suit.

“That fellow is John George Haigh,” Rowan told her. “He’s famous for luring a wealthy old lady to his so-called factory in Sussex, where he murdered her and dissolved the body in an acid bath. He’s wearing his own suit, by the way. He donated it to Madame Tussaud’s on the eve of his execution. Over here is John Christie, of Ten Rillington Place, who entombed his victims behind the walls of his house. Imagine the surprise of the next tenant when he began to redecorate!”

“I don’t think we have any weird killers in Minnesota,” said Susan. “They’re all from Wisconsin.”

“Who is the couple in the dock?” asked Maud Marsh, pointing to a small bespectacled man and the pretty dark-haired girl beside him. “She looks rather sweet.”

Rowan motioned the group over to the exhibit. “That charming couple is Harvey Hawley Crippen and the lovely Ethel LeNeve,” he told them. “Poor old sod. He killed his shrew of a wife and buried her in the basement. If he’d done it today, the case would barely have made the papers and he’d have been out in ten years. But in 1910 people called him a monster, and he was hanged for it.”

“That’s his girlfriend, I suppose?” said Alice, pointing to the young girl’s statue.

“Yes, that’s his motive for murdering his wife, who was much less charming. Ethel may not have known about the murder. She was acquitted at the trial anyhow. Although I think she might have suspected something when he asked her to dress as a boy and flee the country with him on a steamship. Over there is the actual telegram that was dispatched by the ship’s captain to alert Scotland Yard to their presence on his ship.”

“The False Inspector Dew!” cried Susan, at last able to make a connection between the exhibit and her addiction to crime novels.

Rowan ignored the interruption. “The captain spotted them immediately. Apparently our Ethel wasn’t a very convincing boy. Crippen loved her, though. He pleaded guilty at once and insisted that she knew nothing about the crime. At his execution, he asked that a photograph of her be buried with him.”

“I take a very dim view of burying wives in the basement,” said Alice.

“So did I a couple of marriages ago,” said Rowan. “But I’ve mellowed.”

Meanwhile Kate Conway had found the Whitechapel setting dedicated to Jack the Ripper. She was staring in horror at the blood-caked body of a woman in Victorian dress, sprawled behind an iron railing. “She looks familiar somehow,” Kate murmured. “They never caught the Ripper, did they?”

“No,” said Elizabeth. “But he’d be about a hundred and thirty by now, so I shouldn’t worry. It’s only wax, you know.”

“Who is this?” asked Frances Coles, tapping Elizabeth on the shoulder. “Over here in this little alcove decorated like a bedroom. I wish they’d label these things.”

“I’ll see if I can figure it out,” said Elizabeth. “Show me.”

Frances led her to a dark doorway opening into a tiny candlelit bedroom. There in the shadows, a small child in a white nightshirt sat up in bed, staring wide-eyed at the doorway where the viewers stood. The simple furnishings of the room seemed to date from the previous century. The child was alone in the tableau.

“There aren’t any clues,” murmured Kate, who had followed them over. “I suppose that’s the victim, poor kid. We can’t see the killer, and we don’t even know how it’s going to be killed.”

Elizabeth stood for a long time, as motionless as the wax statue, staring into the eyes of the frightened, dark-haired child. “Smothered,” she whispered, turning away.

“You recognize it?” asked Frances.

She nodded. “Yes. Oh, yes. I see him in my nightmares. It’s Francis Savile Kent of Road Hill House, looking up at Daddy.”

The tour ended a little before five and Rowan sent them off for tea, after making sure that everyone knew when and where they would meet again: seven-thirty that evening, outside the Whitechapel tube station. Tonight they would be given their own private Jack the Ripper walk.

“There wasn’t anything about the Charles Bravo case in Madame Tussaud’s,” Elizabeth complained as they went back into the Underground.

“That’s because the lovely but lethal Florence was acquitted of poisoning him,” Rowan reminded her. “There’ll be no slander in the waxworks, madam. But if you want to pass up half a day of capitalism, I’ll take you out to Balham and show you the Priory, where it happened. You don’t want to run out there now, do you?”

Elizabeth hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “I think there’s something else I’d better attend to.”

“Off you go, then. I’m going back to my boat just now, but I’ll see you all at half past seven.”

Once they boarded the train for the ride back to the hotel, Elizabeth sat down next to Susan Cohen, who had fished a paperback out of her purse and was reading with an intensity that suggested she might orbit the city for hours if no one made her get off at the right stop.

“What made you decide to take this tour?” Elizabeth asked, with a certain satisfaction at interrupting Susan for a change.

“Crime. England. Sounded good,” said Susan, turning a page.

“So you didn’t know Rowan before we started?” She gave a deprecating little laugh. “You’re not his ex-wife or anything?”

When Susan looked up from her book, her face was a study in astonishment. “I’m not anybody’s ex-wife. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason.” She tried a new tack. “Isn’t it a shame that Martha was unable to continue the tour? It must have been a bad fall. I saw her when you helped her into the hotel. Were you with her when it happened?”

“Pretty close,” said Susan. “I spoke to her as we started off the curb-and she said something and went on. I didn’t see her fall, though. We were in a big crowd.”

“Hmm. Was anybody else from the tour there?”

“I didn’t see anybody. Why?”

Elizabeth smiled. “I just wondered. I was thinking about sending a get-well card to Emma Smith and telling her what we’ve been up to since she left. If she has food poisoning, it’s lucky that we all didn’t come down with it. You haven’t been feeling ill, have you?”

“I’m fine. I don’t see how it could have been food poisoning. I was sitting right next to her at the dinner in St. Ives-and we ordered the same thing.”

“Well,” said Elizabeth, “you never know.”

“Is anybody else sick?” She looked around the car for another seat to move to. “You aren’t, are you?”

“I’m fine,” Elizabeth assured her. “Except for that nasty shock I got from the light switch in my room.” Which should have been your room, she finished silently.

Susan went back to reading her book and Elizabeth left her alone. As the train clattered on in the darkness, she stared up at the map of the Underground, lost in thought.

When Elizabeth returned to her hotel, the desk clerk hailed her and informed her that she had a letter. She seized it eagerly, hoping for a message from Cameron, but the stamps were British and the address an unfamiliar one in Yorkshire. When she reached her room, she read the message, at once remembering Rowan’s promise that his friend would answer her question. It said:

Dear Madam:

An old reprobate of my acquaintance, Rowan Rover, has asked me to reply to your question on the fate of Constance Kent, not because he respects my superior skills in scholarship, but because he is too lazy to attend to it personally. However, a small matter of a burned cushion in his aquatic residence impels me to be generous, and I shall now set your mind at rest concerning the matter of the tragic young lady from Rode. I assume that if you have studied the case in enough detail to be concerned about her fate, you have surmised her innocence.

At her trial Constance Kent was condemned to death for her crime, but popular sympathy (perhaps people were not without their suspicions) persuaded Her Majesty’s Government to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. Constance served twenty years of this sentence, which would still leave her just under forty, and by all accounts she was a model prisoner, serving first in the prison laundry and later in the infirmary. Interestingly enough, her father died in 1872 while she was still in prison, but still she did not recant her confession. In for a penny, in for a pound, I suppose. Or perhaps she doubted that anyone would believe her. Of course, he left no deathbed confession to free her, the selfish old trout!

For news of her whereabouts after her release from Fulham Prison in 1885, I rely on Bernard Taylor’s account in his 1979 book Cruelly Murdered. He maintains that Constance changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye (Emilie was her middle name) and emigrated to Australia. She served as a nurse from 1890 until 1932, later founding a nurses’ home. When she died in 1944, she was one hundred years old. I believe she is the only convicted murderer ever to receive the congratulatory birthday telegram from the monarch.

I hope this has set your mind at rest. Please give my regards to R.R. and tell him that I am always happy to be of service in his little schemes, in return for a berth on his Love Boat. It is less painful than agreeing with his Ripper theories.

Yours sincerely,

Kenneth O’Connor

At twenty minutes past seven that evening, Rowan Rover was slouched in the doorway of a news agent’s shop near the Whitechapel tube station, smoking his fifth cigarette. Any moment now the mystery tour members-what was left of them-would emerge from the tube station, jovial and ready for an evening of nostalgic mayhem.

“I am following in the footsteps of a man who killed five women and was never caught,” he muttered. “Surely I can manage one!”

It was the perfect setting: a series of dark, somewhat dangerous streets in an area that he knew perfectly well, while none of the others had ever been there. Every advantage was his. Except for the fact that his heart was pounding like a ten-shilling pocket watch and his skin crawled with cold sweat. For the first time he wondered what it had felt like to be Jack the Ripper. He had always imagined the mad killer bristling with excitement, breathing heavily at the prospect of his evening’s sport, sliding through the dark streets of Whitechapel with a song in his throat. Somehow Rowan had neglected to think of the victims in any way at all except as costumed clay pigeons, necessary to the game. Suddenly he was forced to picture them as real people, with personalities and families, and with a pathetic innocence of the evil that stalked them, denying their humanity. Perhaps the Ripper’s indifference toward his victims came from the fact that they were strangers. Susan Cohen, as irritating as she was, had become all too real to her intended assassin. He even knew the names of her cats, for God’s sake! He should have killed her early on, he thought, when she was just a face in the crowd. He fingered the metal cosh in his pocket, a gift from an old burglar acquaintance. Now he would probably need months of counseling or gallons of good Scotch to recover from the horrors of this evening’s ordeal. Fortunately, he reflected, he would be able to afford them.

When the first members of the group emerged from the tube station, chattering and laughing, as unaware as lambs to the slaughter, he went to meet them with a heavy heart and a plaster smile.

“Good evening, ladies and Charles. Welcome to the Jack the Ripper tour. Shall we proceed?”

Alice MacKenzie was wearing her new wool shawl from Wales. Frances Coles was sticking to her side as if Alice could protect her from any spectral Ripper who might descend on them. Maud Marsh and Kate Conway looked brightly inquisitive about the evening walk, not quite belying their boredom with historical crime. The Warrens were fiddling with camera attachments and Elizabeth MacPherson was looking about her with narrowed eyes as if she thought there was a chance of catching the killer this evening. Susan Cohen, in her blasted navy coat, made her way to the front of the group, nattering about some bookshop she’d found in Bloomsbury. No one was listening. He wondered whether to keep her near him at the front of the group or let her fall back in order to divert suspicion when the accident occurred.

As he led them into the fetid alley where Bucks Row had once been, he issued his usual warning to refrain from touching the walls, but he felt a flicker of satisfaction when he saw Susan run her forefinger along the brickwork.

“Winos pee there!” he belatedly explained.

Her scowl held him personally responsible. “Not in Minneapolis they don’t!”

When they emerged from the alley, where progress had been single file, Elizabeth MacPherson appeared at his side. “So this was Bucks Row,” she remarked. “Polly Nicholls, right?”

Rowan gave her a fishy stare. He’d be damned if he was going through the Ripper walk with a Greek chorus, even if she did know her facts. With the barest of nods, he recited his piece about the discovery of Polly Nicholls’ body, verbally sketching in the geography of the site at the time of her death.

“It doesn’t look too scary now,” said Susan Cohen, yawning.

“Thank the Luftwaffe,” snapped Rowan. “A lot of London geography changed during the Blitz. Some of it for the better. They got Crippen’s house up in Islington, too, by the way.”

He led them down Durward Street, across Vallance Road, and along Hanbury, toward the site of the Annie Chapman murder. Susan, whose interest in Jack the Ripper seemed confined to his influence on crime fiction, was nattering on about The Lodger and The Threepenny Opera, with complete disregard for Rowan’s scheduled lecture. “Actually,” she was saying, “I thought the guy in Psycho was a lot scarier than Jack the Ripper. And has anybody read Silence of-” They were about to cross Brick Lane at this point and Susan, with her usual self-absorption, was not paying attention to the guide or to her surroundings. Blithely wittering about her reading list, she stepped off the curb and into the path of an approaching car.

Rowan Rover was not sure what prompted his spontaneous reaction. Perhaps it was instinctive, or perhaps some part of him made an inevitable decision in that split second. He was never sure. He only knew that as the silly woman blundered out into the street, looking as usual in the wrong direction for English traffic, he lunged forward in an attempt to drag her back out of the path of the oncoming car. His fingers actually touched her coat. He nearly got a grip on it when he felt himself being shoved out of the way, back toward the curb, nearly falling with the force of the blow.

The speeding black car, which seemed to come in slow motion, looming ever larger in their path, like a locomotive in a Saturday matinee film, missed the guide and the rest of the party by inches, but Susan, who had stood squarely in its path while she looked the wrong way, was struck with a chilling thud. She went down in mid-sentence without so much as a whimper.

As he struggled to regain his balance, Rowan looked around to see who had prevented him from saving Susan Cohen. Standing nearest to him was Elizabeth MacPherson, regarding him with a frown of lofty disapproval. Her expression explained it all: she had been watching him, expecting an attempt on Susan’s life, and she had-she thought-prevented him from pushing her in front of the car. The silly girl! Another second and he would have saved her! (So much for his aptitude as a murderer.)

By the time they reached Susan’s crumpled body, some yards away near the other curb of Brick Lane, the driver had stopped his car and had joined the throng hovering over the victim. “I never meant to!” the man kept saying. “She walked straight in my path, she did!”

Charles Warren had run to the nearby pub to telephone for an ambulance. Kate Conway was kneeling over Susan, examining the body with medical precision. After a few minutes she looked up at the group of tourists and shook her head.

Rowan fumbled for his cigarettes, feeling at once appalled and frightened but also relieved that her death was not on his conscience. He had not done it. He gave a deep sigh of relief and uttered a silent prayer of thanks to whatever saint looks out for criminals. He was standing a few feet away from the group, watching the scene with a detachment born of shock.

A few moments later Elizabeth MacPherson appeared at his side. “I couldn’t save her,” she murmured.

No, you bloody fool, and you kept me from doing so as well, thought Rowan, but his numbness prevented him from venting his exasperation.

“By the time I figured out what was going on, it was too late to speak to you privately, but I thought that if I could just protect her tonight, you wouldn’t get another chance.” Elizabeth sighed. “Why did you do it, Rowan?”

“I didn’t!” said the guide with perfect sincerity. Even to himself it sounded hollow.

“I can’t prove it,” said Elizabeth in a low voice. “And perhaps what you said was right: really clever killers usually get away with their first murder. Frankly, I think you’re a rather good fellow, and for all I know you might get acquitted anyhow.”

“I didn’t do it,” Rowan said plaintively.

She fixed him with a meaningful stare. “But this must not happen again, do you hear? I shall say nothing to anyone, but if I ever hear of anyone else on your tours meeting with an accident, I shall go to the police at once. Do you understand?”

He sighed. “Yes. It shan’t happen again. You have my word.” There was no use arguing with her, he thought. Her mind had seized up like a frozen motor, holding this one thought against all suggestions to the contrary. There was nothing for it but to play the humble felon, and vow to sin no more. Then she would feel noble. He supposed it was better than telling her the truth: that if anyone had killed Susan Cohen, it was she.

Sometime later, after the police had investigated the incident and had sensibly deemed the matter a case of accidental death, Rowan had led the quiet gaggle of tourists to the Ten Bells, where he’d insisted on standing them drinks to counteract the shock. They had talked for some time in sorrowful tones about poor Susan and what a sad ending to the tour this was. No one wanted to finish the Ripper tour: they had seen death enough that evening.

As they left the pub to summon taxis to Bloomsbury, they each shook hands with Rowan Rover and wished him well. Elizabeth, the last to leave, regarded him more in sorrow than in anger. “It was like Leopold and Loeb, wasn’t it? You thought you were smarter than the police. You had to prove you could get away with it just once?”

“I’ve often thought of that,” Rowan admitted truthfully. He did not add that he had never been tempted to try it.

“It stops now,” she said firmly, and walked away.

Rowan stayed in the Ten Bells for another hour, smoking a pack of cigarettes and thinking about murder. It was an art for which he was grateful to have no talent whatsoever.

Several days after the end of the tour, Rowan Rover had reflected farther on the unfortunate matters of the past few weeks and he decided that greater penance was required. After much thought and even more Scotch, he wrote a carefully worded letter to Aaron Kosminski, telling him that his niece Susan had been killed in an unfortunate traffic mishap in Whitechapel. It was an accident, he wrote, underlining the phrase twice. He was not daft enough to spell out the murder-for-hire agreement in a letter, but he hoped that his explanation of his own innocence would be clear and that Kosminski would read between the lines and realize that his orders had not been carried out The sacrifice of the money was a small price to pay for a clear conscience, Rowan decided. Well, not a small price, but he wasn’t used to having any money anyway. With his lectures and his crime writing, he could continue to scrape by as he always had, living mouth to hand.

He had not expected to receive a reply to his ostensible letter of condolence, but in mid-October an airmail letter bearing American astronaut stamps arrived at his London postal address. It was postmarked Minneapolis. With shaking hands, not entirely attributable to a hangover, Rowan Rover tore open the envelope and read the terse reply:

Dear Mr, Rover:

I remember with pleasure our meeting at your lecture in Whitechapel.

I know that my niece Susan enjoyed her travels on your mystery tour, and we are grateful for your expression of sympathy to the family. We want you to know that we do not blame you in any way for her death, which the London police assure us was a tragic accident.

Please accept the enclosed donation from her estate for the Ripper project that we spoke of at our dinner together. I wonder if you remember how I like my steak.

Yours sincerely,

Aaron Kosminski

Enclosed in the letter was a check for fifteen thousand pounds, the remainder of the agreed-upon sum for the killing. For almost thirty seconds Rowan toyed with the idea of destroying the check, but a recent spate of financial ultimatums dissuaded him. After all, he reasoned, Kosminski is guiltier than I am. Why should he receive all the ill-gotten loot? He decided to send a present to Emma Smith, who was recovering nicely in Colorado, and to give some of the money to charity in Cornwall. The rest would be distributed among his needy creditors. The wages of sin, he decided, were minimal, all things considered.

The final paragraph of the letter puzzled Rowan Rover for quite some time, since he clearly remembered that he and Kosminski had not dined together. Their only meeting had been over drinks in the Aldgate pub. Finally the reference to the steak enlightened him, and he was able to decipher Kos-minski’s own encoded comment: well done.