Anatomy of Murder

3

Jocasta, Sam and Boyo made a breakfast from the strips of bacon the boy found in the crock, and it did Jocasta some good to watch him cooking the meat with such a tender care, humming to himself over the fire. When the first knock at the door came and a thin man in a tatty overcoat arrived to have his cards read, Sam skipped out to clean their cuttles at the pump, and when there was a gap in the flow of people coming to be told what they already knew and bite their thumbnails over it, he set the kettle to boil over the fire and brewed a dish of tea for her. She sat back in her seat to drink it, and nodded to him to get some into himself too. It had been an ordinary morning. Three girls coming to ask if they should marry, an older woman wanting to know if her husband was getting too friendly with their neighbor’s wife, and the thin man who’d been told if he handed ten pounds to a friend of his to hold he’d have fifteen before the end of the year. The girls would marry, though two were tying themselves to lazy fools if the cards were right, the woman was unjust, and the man would have less trouble if he just threw his money into the Thames today and have done. But while the cards had told stories to each of them in their usual way, they had not ceased teasing at Jocasta. At the center of every spread she laid out, she saw that house in Salisbury Street. Now she set down her tea and sniffed, pulling the box toward her. Sam sat up with interest and watched her lay out the cards cross-fashion.

“All right, all right,” she said under her tongue as she slapped them down. “Have your way and talk if you will. Stop you interrupting stories other people have paid for, at any rate.”

Here it all was again. This time with The Tower high and present. She could almost hear the little people diving from it, screeching as they fell. She thought of Kate’s heart-shaped face, and weak little chin.

Sam leaned over and tapped it all careful, careful.

“I do not like this card,” he said. Jocasta glanced across at him, all serious but with the sweets of childhood about him still. He looked to her like a box unopened, a roll of fabric still wound tight, a pack uncut, dice rattling across a playing board before they are still and the number is fixed for counting and paying.

“Where are your people, Sam?”

He did not look at her. “I haven’t got any people. Ripley, maybe. He used to let me sleep round the back of the chophouse and drop me ends and leavings when he could, but the bastard who runs the place found out and threatened us both with a stealing charge if I came back.”

There were so many homeless children in London, and so few made it even as far into the game as this little scrap.

“And previous to that?”

“Workhouse, with my dad. Southwark. Drink killed him a while back and I ran.”

Jocasta swept up the cards, straightened and shuffled them and offered the pack to him. He cut it and lifted his half to show the picture at the bottom. Page of Cups.

Jocasta considered it, then shifted on her seat and rubbed her nose. “Do me a job now and fast, and I’ll let you have the chair here tonight.”

Sam was all attention. “What’s to be done, Mrs. Bligh?”

“Go to Salisbury Street again. See what that family are about, then go get Ripley to read that note. Then come back here. That fair?”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bligh. I’ll be right back here.” He stood up and almost fell over his feet in his eagerness to be of help. Then he turned back with a wide grin. “Bye, Boyo!” The terrier got to his feet and wagged his tail hard.

“Dog, you are a tramping thing,” Jocasta muttered as the door closed. “It was my bacon you breakfasted on.” Boyo snuffled and tucked his nose under Jocasta’s hand, his tail still going like the clapper in a fire bell.

Great Swallow Street was respectable enough, and many of the houses there would begin to fill as the season progressed with people of middling gentility. Some of the buildings, however, had been split and resplit into ever-smaller apartments, and though the lodgings there were palatial in comparison with the piled-up, patched-up hovels and garrets into which most of London’s populace was crammed, they suggested nevertheless struggle and compromise. The road itself was a thoroughfare to the farms that fed the great city, and as Harriet and Crowther walked along the pavement, the road was jammed with families making their way out into the fresh air in Sunday clothes and bad temper.

They found the house where Mr. Fitzraven had been lodging without great difficulty and summoned his landlady to the door. Behind them, the laughter and calls of the crowd mingled with the sound of horses and cartwheels churning the mud and mess of the city. One cart had become lodged in a rut, and the owner was trying, red-faced and sweating, to force his horse into movement under the heavy stare of his passenger-a large woman in a drooping bonnet and skirts of ferocious rigidity. She held one child in her lap while two others, who had the alarmed look of the recently scrubbed, hopped about in the cart behind her, more fully driving the wheel into its wedged position. A rather pale-looking young man with a good-looking wife on his arm walked by. The girl seemed bright enough, her blond curls bouncing out from under her neat little bonnet, but her husband looked tense and unhappy. Behind them, a woman of middle age followed, her mouth a thin line and her spine straight as steel. She had her eyes on the back of the young woman’s head and there was no fondness in them.

Fitzraven’s landlady gave her name as Mrs. Girdle when she finally made her appearance at the street door, then led them into her own parlor, a narrow room at the front of the house where the business of the street and the comings and going in her own home could be easily observed. The room suited her, being somewhat pinched, cramped and pretentious without elegance. The furniture was too large and dark for the space, and gave the impression of a room filled with fat and uncongenial relatives forced into a joint vigil around a miser’s deathbed. She herself was a narrow woman, thin and straight, with iron-gray curls showing under her cap and a strangely high collar. It seemed when she spoke that her chin was constantly lifting and worrying from side to side, as if it feared it was about to be drowned by the starched lace below it. Harriet suspected that trying to maintain her gaze would lead to sea-sickness.

When they told her of Fitzraven, Mrs. Girdle at once burst into tears, collapsing back into her armchair like a snapped plank and lifting her apron to her face. Then, after a few moments of sobbing, her back straightened and her words came forth in a torrent. Her voice had a high-pitched whine to it as if the words were being forced out of her pursed mouth under considerable pressure. Much of what she said at first neither of them entirely understood, but it seemed Fitzraven had been a man of talents and civility without parallel, a man who would lay down his life for the right, and shared every opinion of hers she had ever thought to form, displaying a judgment so sound even her father, a man of rigor in these matters, would have been happy to praise, and his loss would never be appreciated by anyone as keenly as herself. She had, it seemed, been on the point of an introduction to Manzerotti himself, who was Mr. Fitzraven’s great friend, she assured them, and she had sent her particular compliments to that gentleman through Mr. Fitzraven, and been told they were received most graciously. And now who was to pay the rent on his rooms? He’d taken them through the season and she’d turned down a dozen other gentlemen. Not that she blamed Mr. Fitzraven himself, of course.

She was beginning to plot through her tears a series of letters both to the opera house itself and all the newspapers, when Harriet felt compelled to stop her, partly to save her own sanity, and partly because she could see Crowther was starting to enjoy the display of a certain sort of feminine stupidity, and she found his amusement intensely irritating.

“Mrs. Girdle, may we see Mr. Fitzraven’s rooms?” The torrent of words stopped abruptly and Mrs. Girdle examined her suspiciously with red-rimmed eyes.

“If there is anything of value there, it is mine by rights. If I can’t get another lodger into those rooms straightaway, I’ll have troubles.”

“We wish to find who killed him, madam,” said Crowther mildly. “We have no interest in robbing his estate.”

“Some jealous musician! I know it! Oh, he was modest, and a circumspect man, but I could tell he’d been betrayed and disappointed in his trusts.” She blinked at Harriet. “I could tell, madam, having been so often myself disappointed by my fellow creatures. Oh, the stories he could tell of that place, of His Majesty’s! The rivalries! The intrigues!” Her voice had taken on a conspiratorial hush.

“What manner of stories, Mrs. Girdle?” Crowther adopted a slightly skeptical smile. “You would be acting as an agent of justice, you know, if you were to tell us them now.”

The landlady flushed a little and lifted her chin so high it seemed it might escape being swallowed in her collar, after all.

“Oh, dear Mr. Fitzraven was far too discreet a gentleman to say anything very specific, even to me, sir. But it was the tone in which he spoke of the opera, Harwood and Manzerotti and the pretty French girl and them all. The disgraceful behavior he saw there, again and again! I am sure there came a point when he could take no more, made his stand and was cut down for it. I said to him once-he was sitting just where you are now, madam-‘You know things, don’t you, dear Fitz’-that was my name for him-and he nodded and said, ‘Dear Mrs. G., things that would turn your hair white!’

“However,” the lady continued, drawing herself upright and cocking her head to see the effect her revelations were having on her guests, “if you wish to see the room I have no objection. I hold the key to every door. It is a condition of tenancy. This is a respectable house.” Standing up, she went to a bureau squeezed awkwardly into a corner next to the wall and opened a drawer. She moved like a bad actress playing Queen Elizabeth; she was too self-conscious to manage the rather grand effect she attempted. Her guests also stood and she passed them a small sparkling brass key with studied condescension. It appeared that having experimented with horror, and found no echo, she would now attempt dignity. “There. First door on the top of the second flight. You can find your own way.”

Crowther bowed, and was rewarded with a faint wave of her hand.

Harriet had paused on the first landing to glance at the length of the passageway and count the doors that led off it, then moved aside for a flat-faced serving girl to pass her on the stairs, so Crowther had already opened the door to Fitzraven’s room before she joined him at the top of the second flight. He had pushed the door ajar to give a full view of the apartment, but not yet entered it. She was about to pass by him when he stopped her.

“Wait, Mrs. Westerman.” She frowned, then, following the direction of his eyes, gave the room her full attention from their current vantage point.

The room was orderly enough and had little in it that was not plain, functional or both. It seemed the apartment was made up of two chambers. In the original conception of the architect it had been designed as a single space, but wooden shutters now divided it into this parlor room and, presumably, a bedchamber beyond. The ceiling was low, but there was a window looking out to the back of the house that provided some light, and under it sat a writing desk that seemed rather messier than the rest of the room. It did not take Harriet long to see why Crowther had stopped her. The chair that served the writing table had been overturned and lay on its side, a number of newspaper pages scattered around it.

“A sign of an altercation, you think, Crowther?” she said.

“It appears so.”

“May we conclude that Mr. Fitzraven was murdered here?”

“Conclusions of any sort are a little previous at this point,” he replied, “but possibly. Is there not something unusual about the way the armchairs are arranged?”

Harriet walked into the room, the full skirts of her dress washing over the bare floorboards. If she had had the business of arranging the furniture, the chairs would have been farther forward, and closer, so that two people taking their ease there could enjoy each other and the fire. Here, however, the armchairs stood either side of the fireplace, facing out into the room like the porcelain spaniels that framed the mantelpiece of Lady Susan’s modest bedroom in Berkeley Square. Behind the legs of the armchair nearest to the writing desk, a sheet of the Daily Advertiser had been curled and crumpled.

“They have been moved backward, I think,” Harriet said, then turned toward the prints on the mantelpiece above the fire.

Crowther went to the writing desk. A large leather volume sat open at its center, and whatever disturbance had turned the chair on its back and scattered the newsprint to the floor, it had been insufficient to move it. Crowther peered down. It was a book of cuttings. He noticed a little pair of scissors lying next to it, the sort most commonly found in a woman’s sewing basket, and a glue pot. The open page was filled with an advertisement similar to that which Crowther had seen outside His Majesty’s Theatre for the performance of the previous night, neatly glued and placed squarely in the middle of the sheet. He picked up the book in his arms and turned over the pages.

Most of the sections of newsprint Fitzraven had decided to preserve were of a similar nature; advertisements and reviews of the offerings of the opera house from winter 1778 to the current day. Crowther imagined that Fitzraven himself must have been the author of several of them, and having read a few words thought his literary style had little to recommend it but enthusiasm. Other paragraphs had been judged worthy for inclusion. Crowther found himself reading an announcement that Razini had arrived with his companions in the city on 25 October 1779, and that his performance in the opera seria Demofoonte was awaited with much delight. There was also a portrait of Miss Marin. It was perhaps a little idealized, but still very like her. Under it, a neat hand had written December 3rd 1780, and added an exclamation point.

Flicking over another page, Crowther found a series of letters from the pages of the Mercury Post that debated the arrangement of private boxes in the theater and the relative merits and demerits of the old and new systems. Crowther turned again to the last few pages that Fitzraven had reached. There was a paragraph on a private concert Manzerotti had given at the Duke of Cumberland’s house the previous week, and on the page before, an article detailing some entertainment of the upper classes in St. James’s. Crowther could see no obvious connection to the opera until he noticed Miss Marin’s name as an attendee in the final line. He noted with a sneer that Lord Carmichael’s name was also mentioned.

He looked up from his study and out into Mrs. Girdle’s yard, thinking of the man who had stared out of this window only two days before. It took him a moment to realize, as he saw the body and the marks made on it again in his mind’s eye, that he was in truth staring up and across the yard into the windows of the house opposite and into the moon face of a young woman. Seeing that she had been noticed in her observation of him, she started and disappeared into the depths of the house again. Crowther frowned. How could the citizens of London murder one another without being seen? This house itself was full of people, and when one enjoyed the daylight available from the windows, one must also expose oneself and one’s business to the citizenry. He thought of his collection of anatomical specimens in his house in Hartswood, each body part delicately prepared for public display so strangers such as himself could peer through the glass and conjecture on the form and play of muscles, on the variety, invention and cruelty of nature. Crowther himself was a private man, and the idea of being so constantly under the eyes of strangers made him shiver.

“Lord, Crowther! This place tells us as much as his poor corpse did. You must prepare another paper for the Royal Society.”

Crowther turned to her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Westerman. Yes, perhaps. Though unless the French Navy have a passionate interest in the Italian Opera in London, I cannot see how the information Mr. Fitzraven has gathered might be of use to them.” Harriet shrugged, and Crowther found himself smiling at the gesture.

“Do you see there is no candle on the desk there, but there is one in the fireplace?” she said.

“I see that. So what do you conclude, Mrs. Westerman?”

“I observe-I make no conclusions. You have warned me against them, repeatedly. Someone lit a candle and placed that candle unusually in the room. Now what shall we say to the chairs, Crowther? They were moved after the fight took place, the newspaper behind the chair leg shows us that.”

“I do not know. Fitzraven was probably killed here and left lying for some time, until darkness came and the body could be hidden. The patterns of pooling blood in his tissues tell us that much. But why create this space for a man to lie in the middle of the room, rather than leave him where he fell?”

He imagined the vigil of the killer. A figure seated in one of the armchairs, panting with the effort of having killed another man, waiting for darkness and keeping company with the cooling corpse, while all around them London continued to live as it liked best, in ignorance and noise.

“Thieves!”

Harriet and Crowther turned to the open door to find Mrs. Girdle standing there, one hand covering her mouth, the other pointing at the floorboards. Her gray curls quivered with indignation. “I have been robbed! Where is my hearth rug?”

There was a moment of silence before Harriet smiled, showing her neat white teeth. “I rather believe, Mrs. Girdle, that Fitzraven’s body was wrapped in it before being removed from your house.”

Mrs. Girdle paddled her hands around her face. “Oh, the horror!” She beat a swift retreat from the doorway.

Crowther raised his eyebrow at his companion. She folded her arms across her bodice. “Yes, perhaps that was a little cruel. But the woman is very wearing.” She crossed to the door to the bedchamber. “Now, shall we see what else we can learn?”