The Mangle Street Murders Read online

  ‘Dead,’ the manager said, ‘and buried for all I care. Though there’s a lot of people would like to find him. I never knew a man so fond of gambling and so expert at losing. He owed money to every bookie this side of the English Channel, not counting the shopkeepers and publicans he had talked into opening a slate. Then he got involved with the moneylenders. That was when things turned nasty.’

  ‘You have not heard anything from or about him since he went missing?’ I asked.

  ‘Not a cat’s whisper.’ The manager clicked his fingers. ‘He could have gone back to Italy, for all I know.’

  ‘But you told us he was not Italian,’ Sidney Grice said.

  ‘So I did and so he is not’ – the manager whisked his handkerchief out again – ‘but he trained in Italy and always said he might return.’

  ‘Do you know where he lived?’ Sidney Grice asked. ‘Or the names of any of his friends?’

  ‘No and no.’ The manager tucked the handkerchief back into the same pocket.

  ‘Do you know of any reason other than money why he might have disappeared?’ Sidney Grice asked and the manager flapped his arms.

  ‘What other reason could he need?’

  ‘The possibilities are manifold,’ my guardian said. ‘I myself have written a paper entitled Twenty-six Causes of Voluntary Concealment.’

  The manager pursed his lips. ‘Don’t think much of the title.’

  ‘In what way would he not learn his lines like anybody else?’ I asked, and Sidney Grice sighed and said, ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I am interested,’ I said, and there was a tap at the door.

  ‘He always insisted that somebody read his lines out to him’ – the manager found a pencil on the booking-office countertop – ‘whilst he lay on his sofa with his eyes closed. He said he had to hear the words rather than see them. Broken Wings, you say?’ He wrote the name on his shirt cuff.

  ‘What did he look like?’ Sidney Grice asked.

  ‘Why, just like anybody else.’ The manager pulled his sleeve down. ‘He had a very big head and a very big nose, and when he wore his wig he had very big curly red hair indeed. Without his wig he did not. It was ratty like yours, miss.’

  There was another tap at the door and the manager opened the panel, and a small woman came in with a cow’s head under her arm.

  ‘I know that face,’ she said to my guardian. ‘You play the hurdy-gurdy at King’s Cross with a child dressed as an ape.’

  ‘I would have thought you were sufficiently bovine without the need of a costume,’ Sidney Grice said, stepping outside.

  ‘Are you his new monkey?’ she asked me.

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  33

  The Old Canal

  Just as Albert had predicted, the glue factory was easy to find and the smell was truly appalling. We clamped our handkerchiefs over our noses and I wished I had had the foresight to perfume mine.

  ‘Allow me.’ Inspector Pound sprinkled a few drops from a dark blue bottle on to a white cloth for me.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Camphor.’ He showed me the handwritten label. ‘I always keep some with me. You come across some horrible things in my job.’

  ‘But few more horrible than boiling bones,’ Sidney Grice said. ‘Do you have any of that to spare, Inspector?’

  ‘I am afraid not, Mr Grice.’ Inspector Pound slipped the bottle back into his brown coat pocket.

  There were two constables with us as we made our way along the towpath. They carried coils of rope and grappling hooks.

  ‘Not much of a place for soppy girls,’ one of them said.

  ‘Just as well there are no soppy girls here then,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t get the better of her, Perkins.’ Inspector Pound laughed. ‘Do you really think this is worth pursuing, Mr Grice?’ He hopped over a puddle. ‘I’ve got a couple of very nasty murders and an attempted arson that need my urgent attention.’

  ‘I am sure of it.’ Sidney Grice flicked a maggot-ridden cat with his stick into the slimy black water where it came up to the surface and pitched on its back, grinning up at us. ‘And this must be the barge.’

  We made our way to the back of a rotten hulk, half-sunk in sludge, with a tawny tangle-haired mongrel standing on the broken prow.

  ‘There were two families living in that last winter,’ Inspector Pound told us, ‘and they were being charged rent for it. The week before Christmas the collector came and found all twenty-four of them dead from the river fever. The owner tried to rent it out again, but the bottom caved in when the parish cleared their bodies and two men drowned.’

  The dog barked and crouched and snarled and jack-in-the-boxed in our direction, but did not attempt to follow us.

  ‘There’s the jetty.’ Inspector Pound pointed. ‘So, if young Albert was telling the truth, he found the wig somewhere around here, and if there is a body it would not drift far in this stagnation.’

  The canal widened into a circle about thirty feet across, where the narrow boats would have turned when the stretch was in use.

  ‘What is that?’ I pointed to a slight mound in the thick algae and weeds a yard or so from the far bank.

  ‘Could be a log or a dead donkey,’ Sidney Grice said, ‘but I would not wager on it being either of those.’

  Inspector Pound called one of his constables over. ‘Think you can reach that, Perkins?’

  ‘My granny could reach that,’ the constable said, ‘and she’s not been out of bed these last three years. Excuse me, miss.’

  I stood back and Perkins began to swing the grappling iron, four arrow-headed hooks on a thick rope. Faster and faster it windmilled at his side until with a faint grunt he let it go, sailing high in the air to splash into a patch of reeds just short of the target.

  ‘Should have brought your granny,’ the second constable said.

  ‘I was just getting the measure of it,’ Perkins said, hauling his iron back, clogged with soggy debris.

  ‘Let me show you how it’s done.’ The second constable let his iron fly across the basin, over the mound and into a willow tree, jutting out of a tumbled-down shed on the opposite bank. He muttered under his breath and pulled, but the hooks were tangled in the branches and the tree shook and bent towards him but would not let it go.

  Perkins laughed and said, ‘My granny wouldn’t have done that. Stand back, Maybury, and let the expert show you how it’s done.’

  Perkins swung again, higher but even shorter this time. He wound back in, his rope soaked with stinking water, while Maybury pulled harder but with no better results.

  ‘The manager of the New Gloucester could use these two comedians,’ Sidney Grice murmured to me and Inspector Pound looked at him sharply.

  ‘Get on with it, Perkins.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Perkins swung his hook a third time and got the distance, but was over to the right of his target.

  ‘You throw like a girl,’ Maybury jeered.

  ‘Would you like me to show you how a real girl can throw?’ I asked and the inspector grimaced.

  ‘Just do it, Perkins.’ He was red with frustration. ‘And, if you do not retrieve your equipment, Maybury, the cost of replacing it will be docked from your wages.’

  Perkins fell short again and hauled in, while Maybury went down the bank to wrench at his rope from a different angle.

  ‘Perhaps we could hire a rowing boat,’ I said as, with another grunt, Perkins let his missile go and this time it landed perfectly, plunging into the water about two feet beyond the mound.

  ‘At last.’ Inspector Pound exhaled. ‘Reel it in, Perkins.’

  Perkins pulled the rope and the end of the hook rose above the mound, but the barbs engaged and it began to float towards us.

  ‘It’s heavy.’ Perkins adjusted his grip and Maybury took hold of the rope too.

  The green surface broke, leaving a trail of muddy water in its wake as the mound ploughed steadily along now.

  ‘It
is about the right size,’ Inspector Pound said and Perkins slipped, his foot going over the edge, letting go of the rope as he snatched at his colleague to save himself, and the two men tumbled backwards, falling into the nettles behind them. Inspector Pound put his foot on the rope as it snaked back into the canal.

  ‘Imbeciles,’ he said under his breath, but Sidney Grice was not even looking at them. His attention was fixed on the mound which had rotated a quarter turn with the sudden release of tension, and something reared out of the slime, grey and pocked with decay, unreal and yet unmistakeable, a mud-clogged nose and an eaten lip bobbing in the filth five yards away.

  Sidney Grice’s face was triumphant.

  ‘Not a bad morning’s fishing,’ he said. ‘Inspector, allow me to introduce you to the eponymous hero of Rigoletto, otherwise known as the late Mr James Hoggart.’

  34

  Buckets and Sacks

  ‘And I thought the canal smelled bad,’ Sidney Grice said, clamping his handkerchief firmly over his nose and mouth as the body was heaved up out of the water and deposited supine on the weed-choked towpath.

  Perkins and Maybury turned away and Inspector Pound took a few steps backwards, but I had smelled death before many times, fresh on my father’s table and old in the dysenteric field hospitals of Natal, and I would not let it overcome me. I swallowed hard but stayed my ground. If Sidney Grice could stand with the rotting man at his feet, so could and so would I. If only it had not been the face.

  His face was half-eaten by rats and decay. The eyes and their lids had gone as had the upper lip and half the lower and most of the nose, the cavity in its place bubbling with a brown froth, and the left ear was missing and something slug-like oozed out of the crater in its place.

  I could probably have coped with that face but it was the vapours of corruption that really unbalanced me. They hissed out of him in a last lost word.

  I stumbled back. ‘I did not know.’ But nobody was listening to me.

  ‘Send into the factory for some buckets of water,’ Sidney Grice called to the inspector, who jerked his head towards his men, who ran back the way we had come and across a wooden bridge over a bricked drainage ditch.

  The body wore tails and a high-collared shirt with a black tie, sagging but still in an extravagant bow. His boots were still on his feet.

  ‘Looks like he was going to the opera.’ Inspector Pound leaned forwards but stayed well back.

  ‘He was.’ Sidney Grice suppressed a choke.

  The inspector produced his bottle of camphor oil and emptied it on to his handkerchief.

  ‘You said you had none left,’ my guardian said.

  ‘Not so.’ Inspector Pound’s voice was muffled. ‘I said I had none to spare.’

  The constables returned with two metal pails and dowsed the face and hands and upper body carefully, under Sidney Grice’s instruction. Several of the dead man’s fingers had been chewed off, and he was wearing a canary yellow waistcoat, badly shredded.

  Sidney Grice walked clockwise slowly round the body, stopped, and then walked counter-clockwise.

  ‘No obvious frontal wounds.’ He turned to Inspector Pound. ‘You might as well take him to the morgue, but please make sure that the clothes are not thrown away this time and that the pockets are searched.’

  The inspector’s mouth tensed.

  ‘All right, men, get this body moved.’

  ‘What?’ Perkins asked in horror.

  ‘How?’ Maybury asked.

  ‘Take the buckets back to the factory,’ Inspector Pound said patiently, ‘and ask for some spare sacks to roll it on to.’

  ‘I think we will leave them to it,’ Sidney Grice said to me. ‘I expect you could do with a cup of tea.’

  Back at Gower Street I rushed to my room to get out of my boots and dress. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands and face and blew my nose, and went back to my room and smoked a cigarette out of the window and drank a large gin very quickly, then another more slowly with a second cigarette. I sprayed myself with Fougère, but the stench still filled my nostrils and a taste clung in my mouth. My living flesh was saturated with putrefaction.

  35

  Caligula

  Inspector Pound cleared his desk. He pushed everything on to the floor, instantly turning a mess into chaos. He sat behind the desk in a creaky swivel chair as we sat facing him on two old uprights.

  ‘Well, we have found out how he was killed.’ He put down a plain brown cardboard folder. ‘I was worried that the corpse would be too decayed for that but the surgeon tells me there is no doubt about it – a stab wound in the back of his neck. The skin and muscles were too rotted to tell him anything, but the bones of his spine had been separated from the base of the skull by a short sharp blade.’

  ‘A professional job then,’ Sidney Grice said and the inspector nodded.

  ‘It reminds me of a murder we had in seventy-eight. A Sicilian steamer captain found floating in the East India Docks with the same sort of wound. We never caught the culprit and the crew were very nervous about talking to us but, from what we could piece together, it was the work of a hired assassin. There is a lot of rivalry between the various family gangs there.’

  ‘Rivincita,’ I said, but my guardian brushed the word aside.

  ‘No other obvious injuries – broken bones, for example?’ he asked.

  ‘None that he could find.’ Inspector Pound brought out his meerschaum pipe. The bowl had been carved into a woman’s face, her hair flowing backwards. He blew experimentally down the stem.

  ‘Who performed the post-mortem examination?’

  ‘Mr Rawlings.’

  ‘He is a thorough man.’ Sidney Grice leaned back. ‘Anything in the dead man’s pockets? Any identification, for example?’

  ‘All his pockets were empty save one,’ Inspector Pound said. ‘In fact most of them were sewn up.’

  ‘Now why would that be?’

  ‘I could not say.’ He opened his leather pouch and fed some tobacco into the pipe.

  ‘They were obviously his stage clothes,’ I said. ‘So he would not have any use for pockets and stitching them keeps the costume in better shape.’

  If either man heard me they gave no sign of it.

  ‘You said save one,’ Sidney Grice said, and Inspector Pound opened the folder grimly.

  ‘I think you need to see this,’ he said, and placed an oblong brown envelope on to the gouged wooden desktop. ‘Mr Rawlings found it in the inside jacket pocket.’

  ‘Left or right?’

  ‘Left.’

  Sidney Grice picked it up and shot one hand to his eye.

  ‘It is addressed to you,’ he said and read out, ‘For the urgent attention of Inspector Pound, Marylebone Police Station.’

  ‘Just as well it is in pencil,’ the inspector said. ‘Ink would have run and be completely unreadable.’

  ‘Was the envelope sealed?’

  ‘I believe so.’ He tamped the tobacco lightly with an oval disc on the end of his penknife.

  Sidney Grice folded back the flap and took out a single piece of paper and laid it out flat.

  ‘The handwriting and spelling are good,’ he said.

  ‘A man’s hand,’ Inspector Pound said, and Sidney Grice paled.

  ‘Some sort of trick,’ he said.

  ‘None that I can see.’ Inspector Pound pulled a straying strand of tobacco from the bowl and placed it back in the pouch.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked and Sidney Grice said quietly, ‘Read it out, Miss Middleton. I need to think.’

  I picked up the letter. It was stained and slightly torn but still clearly legible. The writing was small and neat, in strong square letters, and both sides of the paper were filled.

  ‘Dear Inspector Pound

  ‘I am writing to you because I know you to be a man of honour who will not hesitate to admit he has made a mistake if it will save an innocent man from the Gallows and, be in no doubt about it, WILLIAM ASHBEY IS INNOCENT.
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br />   ‘How do I know this? Because I AM THE MURDERER OF SARAH ASHBEY. I crept into her sitting room and killed her with a crinkle-bladed knife I bought in their shop. I put my hand over her mouth and stabbed her in the heart before she could make a sound, and then I stabbed her again and again, forty times in all. I counted every cut. She never did me any wrong except for one thing. I saw her walking down the street. She had beautiful full lips and I smiled at her, but she walked straight past without even giving me a glance and I do not take kindly to being ignored. So I decided to make sure she would remember me FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE.

  ‘The last person she ever saw was me, while her simpleton husband snored in the next room. I wanted to wake him up and tell him that he sold me the knife that killed his wife but he will know soon enough, when he reads this. I crept out of the front door. The stupid match girl was asleep outside. I stole a box of vespers from her tray.

  ‘My bloodlust was up after I did it. I went home but I could not sit down. I was so excited and I thought – why stop at one? – so I went out and did it again. This one was younger and I enjoyed the cutting of her all the more – the surprise when she saw me turning to terror when she saw the knife – the way she tried to fight me off and escape, the way she begged. Lord, how she squealed, but that only made it better. I did not have to worry about the noise this time.

  ‘And when it was over I thought I would play a little game. So I put her body in a box. Nobody has found her yet, though, so I had better tell you where she is. She lived and died in the basement of 37 Chandler Street. The number is on the front door. Even your lot should be able to find that.’

  The inspector struck a vesper and I carried on reading.

  ‘Why am I telling you this? Because I do not want that lumbering idiot of a shopkeeper to get the credit for my artistry. I shall kill a dozen women before you catch me, IF you ever catch me. Maybe I shall make it a hundred – all that hot blood on my hands – I have the taste for it now.

  ‘I started with those two whores on Slurry Street. Who knows where it might end?