The Secrets of Gaslight Lane Page 4

‘You may be however maudlin you choose,’ Mr G told him. ‘I have no loved ones and am confident that I never shall.’

  The air was perfumed with a haze from the silver incense burner suspended from the ceiling.

  ‘Then the loss is yours.’ Mr Snushall addressed me.

  ‘I have already buried all my loved ones,’ I told him and he nodded wisely.

  ‘Then you have come to discuss Mr Grice’s funeral arrangements?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’ I smiled but Mr Snushall did not.

  ‘It is always advisable to plan ahead.’ He fondled his left hand. ‘We have a selection of caskets ranging from the splendid to the magnificent.’

  ‘That is as may be,’ Mr G said. ‘But I shall be laid in the Grice vault in a Purbeck stone sarcophagus carved by craftsmen whose families have been in the service of my family for generations.’

  Mr Snushall reeled. ‘And you, miss?’

  ‘I shall be buried in Lancashire between my parents,’ I told him, ‘and the Middletons always have simple pine coffins.’

  ‘Pine?’ Mr Snushall parroted as if I had told him we were slung on to dust heaps.

  ‘And donate the difference in price to the quarry workers’ welfare fund,’ I concluded.

  ‘Welfare?’ Mr Snushall turned plum. ‘A funeral is no time for charity, miss.’ His voice soared tremulously. ‘A funeral is a time for ostentatious extravagance on a ruinous scale. Why, some of the greatest families in England have been brought to their knees by the duty to express their dynastic griefs, and I am proud to say that Snushall and Sons has been instrumental in ravaging the estates of many an incumbent of both Houses of Parliament.’ He pointed at me accusingly like one of the Christmas ghosts. ‘A man of substance is not to be carted away like...’ he fought for a word fit to express his disgust, ‘night soil.’ His nostrils retreated from the stench of his own words. ‘What will show the world how deeply you are missed unless huge sums are expended? Who, for instance, will mourn you?’

  ‘My friends, I expect,’ I told him, ‘and I may have family by then.’

  ‘Friends and family?’ He spluttered in disbelief. ‘Friends and family? What use is that?’ His ears wagged furiously. ‘They will be dignified and fight to contain their emotions. Why, when Squire Whitethorn was interred we had fifty paid Cornishmen following his hearse, and they set up such a howl that the rats ran out of Bedford Square, not to return for a fortnight.’

  ‘My family retainers shall mourn my passing,’ Mr G said, ‘for when I die without issue they shall all be cast out of their homes.’

  ‘I would prefer one genuine tear to a thousand fake,’ I said.

  ‘But that is exactly what I am offering.’ Mr Snushall held out his hands as if welcoming a favourite daughter. ‘Allow me to demonstrate.’ He reached up and gripped a thin cord between his thumb and forefinger, and a small bell tinkled far away.

  ‘I do not—’ I began, but he put a digit to his desiccated lips and, after a few seconds, the curtains on the back wall parted and a small black boy entered, dressed in black velvet and trailing an enormous matching handkerchief in his right hand.

  ‘Permit me to introduce Master Dorolius Lacrissimus,’ Mr Crepolius Snushall said and the boy bowed gravely. ‘This lady and gentleman,’ his employer informed him, ‘have suffered a loss.’

  Dorolius looked at us sadly. His lower lip quivered and a fat tear trickled from each of his wide eyes.

  ‘It is a serious loss,’ Mr Snushall added, and Dorolius moaned. The tears fell freely now.

  ‘An inconsolable loss,’ Mr Snushall avowed, and Dorolius gasped. His whole body shook and his face streamed as he fought for breath. He wrung the handkerchief and water dripped from something inside it.

  ‘Oh woe, alas, alack,’ he sobbed. ‘Ohh ohhh ohhhhhh.’ And Mr Snushall stood by, for all the world a proud parent whose son has just been awarded a great prize.

  ‘Enough,’ Sidney Grice rapped. At once the boy quietened and resumed his decorous melancholia.

  ‘Go.’ Mr Snushall clicked his fingers and Dorolius bowed again before reversing from our presence.

  ‘We have come to inspect the body of Mr Nathan Mortlock,’ I disclosed.

  ‘I am afraid Mr Mortlock has not been prepared to receive visitors yet.’ He crossed his arms over his waistcoat.

  ‘We are here to investigate his death,’ I continued, and the light dawned.

  ‘Of course.’ The undertaker put a silk-gloved thumb to his concave temple. ‘Mr Sidney Grice. I have heard of you – the man responsible for all those death-club murders.’

  ‘I am not answerable for any of those fatalities,’ my guardian growled, and Mr Snushall hugged himself.

  ‘I quite understand if you are sensitive about the matter, sir, especially after you had your other client executed.’

  Mr G emitted a guttural snarl. ‘Show me the body.’

  ‘And you must be his deranged assistant,’ Mr Snushall declared excitedly.

  ‘I often think so,’ I conceded.

  Sidney Grice raised his cane to point just under Mr Snushall’s chin and said icily, ‘The body.’

  ‘Make it worth my while,’ the undertaker invited him.

  Mr G reached into his trouser pocket.

  ‘We are not talking about coins, I trust.’ Mr Snushall snuffled, and my guardian brought a wallet from inside his coat. Mr Snushall slipped the note inside his buttoned glove. ‘This way, please.’ He held open the curtain and we found ourselves in a long carpeted corridor lit by a series of oil lamps, the wicks trimmed low. ‘We call this the Hallowed Hall,’ he whispered as we made our way along it. ‘This door leads to the Room of Repose and this the Salon of Sleep.’ He drifted to a halt. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I begged. ‘The Hall of Hypocrisy? No, we have already had hall.’ I tried again. ‘The Foyer of Fakery?’

  ‘Room six,’ Mr Snushall informed me coldly. ‘Shall we go in?’

  He pitter-pattered with his fingertips on the woodwork before twisting the handle.

  ‘Why do you knock?’ Mr G enquired and the undertaker suspired.

  ‘One should never take the departed by surprise,’ Mr Snushall said.

  ‘But the departed have departed,’ I pointed out as my guardian and I entered the room.

  The undertaker made to join us.

  ‘You have some of my money.’ Mr G waved him off. ‘But none of my integrity. Go away.’

  Mr Snushall opened his mouth.

  ‘You had better do as he says,’ I told him, ‘or Miss Mortlock might discover that you allowed strangers to bribe you to let them ogle her father’s body.’

  The undertaker stiffened. ‘How do I know that you are not body snatchers or migrant auto-photography mailerists?’

  ‘What are they?’ I tried to pretend I had not slithered on a pool of condensation and was merely examining the doorpost that I was clinging to.

  ‘People who take photographs of themselves in different settings and send them to their equally infantile friends.’ Mr G pushed me in and took hold of the door. ‘Goodbye, Crepolius Jimmy Snushall.’ He closed it firmly.

  It was a square, windowless room and unadorned. The floor was tiled and the walls and ceiling whitewashed. In one corner was a sink and in another a tall wooden cabinet. In the centre was a granite table with an unmistakeable shape beneath a heavy cotton drape saturated in formaldehyde, its vapours stinging my eyes and catching the back of my throat.

  ‘Take the other corner,’ my guardian instructed, and we uncovered the body to its waist.

  Nathan Mortlock was laid out on his back. He was a small man, short with skinny arms crossed piously over his sunken chest. His hair was sparse and grey and his skin was blotched. His eyes were closed and his lips had been stitched together.

  ‘Cherry Mortlock was telling the truth about the wounds,’ I observed.

  The dead man’s throat had been slashed so deeply that I could see the open pipe of his trachea above the collapsed
tube of his oesophagus, and the bundles of muscles to either side had been sliced through like raw beef, though the wound did not extend, as Cherry had been told, quite so far as his spine.

  ‘The main laceration sweeps from right to left.’ Sidney Grice traced the line with a finger just over the wound.

  ‘So we are looking for a right-handed man,’ I surmised.

  ‘Or an ambidextrous male or female,’ he corrected me. ‘As in most cases, whether murder or suicide, the incision runs just under the jaw.’ He clipped his pince-nez on the bridge of his nose and leaned over the body, unconcerned by the vapours of embalming fluid rising from it. ‘There are five other cuts, four of them quite shallow, but what do you make of this one?’

  He straightened up for me to see a neat hole in the middle of the neck.

  ‘It goes through his larynx,’ I said. ‘The thyroid and cricoid cartilages have been separated and you can see his epiglottis just above the wound. That would be painful if he were still alive, but there are no major blood vessels in that area so it would not have killed him.’

  Mr G clicked his tongue. ‘So why would anyone cut a throat there? It does not look like a wild hack.’

  ‘I once met an army surgeon who said he had performed an incision like that on a major whose windpipe had been crushed in an accident when pig-sticking. It was to enable him to breathe, but I have never seen it done.’

  Mr G hummed three B flats. ‘And it is unlikely that our murderer would be trying life-saving procedures.’ He rooted about in his satchel for a thin steel spatula, flattened at both ends, and I shivered involuntarily. The first time I had seen him use that instrument was when he inserted it into Sarah Ashby’s ruptured heart, as clinically as he now poked one end into the lower cut. ‘No blockages.’ He turned his attention to the main wound, peering through a magnifying glass and humming contentedly as he prodded about. ‘Would you say this corpse has been cleaned?’

  ‘Wiped but not washed,’ I decided. ‘There would be more blood if he had not been wiped but less if he had been washed.’

  My guardian paused and rewarded me with the fleeting lift of an eyebrow.

  ‘Quite so.’ He shuffled round the top of the table, scanning Nathan Mortlock’s face through the lens as he did so. ‘Interesting.’ He pushed his spatula up the right nostril, held it up to the light and repeated the procedure with the left. ‘Just as I thought.’ He wiped the spatula on a cloth from his bag. ‘There is no blood in the nasal cavities.’

  ‘And this,’ I pointed to two deep ruts running round the neck just under the chin, ‘looks like the marks of a rope.’

  ‘Very likely,’ Sidney Grice agreed. ‘The plaited pattern is clear even to your ill-trained eyes. Turn away, March.’

  ‘Why?’

  My guardian coloured. ‘Because I am about to uncover him.’ He grasped the top of the sheet.

  ‘I have seen naked men before,’ I told him, ‘alive and dead.’

  ‘Dear lord,’ he muttered as I helped pull the sheet down over the dead man’s feet. He inhaled protractedly through his long thin nose. ‘Have a look at those haematomas.’

  Nathan Mortlock’s upper arms were marked by large purple bruises.

  ‘Do you think he was beaten first to stop him struggling?’ I suggested, but Mr G demurred.

  ‘Who administers such symmetrical injuries in the course of a fight? Mortlock was in his bed and – judging by the wounds – on his back. What easier way to restrain a man than to kneel astride his chest pinioning his arms with your knees?’

  ‘So he was not killed in his sleep?’

  ‘He was alive for quite some time after the attack began,’ Sidney Grice said grimly. ‘Haematomas like that do not appear instantly, nor do they form post-mortem.’ He went to the top of the table and placed his hands over the vault of Nathan Mortlock’s head, working his fingers around and massaging the scalp. ‘No bumps or depressions, so he was not knocked unconscious first.’

  I shrank back. ‘So he lay helpless in his bed while somebody hacked at his throat.’

  ‘It would appear so,’ Mr G concurred. ‘It is a pity they have wiped the body, but the world is ever intent on destroying any trace that a criminal might have left.’ He scrutinized the hands with his glass. ‘The nails are slightly grubby, indicating that they have not been cleaned. But there are no scrapings of skin, hair or fibres under them, therefore…?’ He glanced up at me.

  ‘His arms were under the sheets,’ I reasoned.

  ‘Most likely,’ he agreed, and went down to the feet again. ‘Help me with this.’

  I took the opposite corner of the sheet and we walked up, re-covering the body to the armpits. Sidney Grice produced a pair of curved nail scissors and snipped through the sutures, and Nathan Mortlock’s lips crept apart in a mockery of the grin of a man who does not quite understand a joke. Sidney Grice ran a finger under the lips and humphed. He pulled Mortlock’s jaw down and it hung agape in an unformed scream.

  ‘What sad travesties we become of ourselves,’ I mused.

  My guardian clucked. ‘No facial contusions or damage to the teeth.’

  I peered over. ‘His tongue has been badly bitten. Why were you so interested in his nose?’ I felt a bit queasy but nothing would induce me to show it.

  ‘Because,’ he straightened his back, ‘if any air had passed through the upper respiratory tract while the throat was being cut, the nose would have been flooded. See where the line crosses over itself just near the left angle of the jaw.’

  ‘So the cord was wrapped twice round his throat and tied,’ I surmised. ‘But that would not be enough to stop the blood getting to his respiratory tract.’

  Sidney Grice clicked his tongue. ‘It might, if he were breathing through the incision in his neck.’

  ‘But he would not have been able to cry out,’ I realized. ‘His breath left his body before it reached his larynx.’ I thought about it. ‘So these were not frenzied slashings but a deliberate attempt to prolong the victim’s agony, while his killer cut deeper and deeper into him.’ I went to the sink to rinse my hands. ‘I shall never get used to cruelty.’

  ‘Nor I to kindness.’ My guardian wrapped his spatula in the cloth and put it away. ‘I see so much of one and so little of the other.’ He washed his hands thoroughly, dried them and washed them again.

  ‘What now?’ I took a last look at the mound that used to be a man.

  ‘Home,’ Sidney Grice announced. ‘To rinse the taste away with Molly’s attempts at a decent pot of tea.’

  On the way out I glimpsed Dorolius polishing the lid of an oak casket in a side room.

  ‘Is that your real name?’ I asked.

  He grinned. ‘It is now.’

  ‘How do you make yourself cry so easily?’

  ‘Simple.’ Dorolius Lacrissimus paused in his work. ‘First I finks of ’ow Rovers beat The Wednesday. Then I finks of ’ow it was 5–1. Then to get the fountains turned on full,’ he winked, ‘I recalls ’ow I ’ad a tanner on The Wednesday.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Mr G picked up a brass handle off a workbench. ‘He has a tack in his handkerchief and squeezes it in to bring tears to his eyes.’

  ‘Show me your hand.’ I looked at the boy’s palm. It was dotted with dozens of new and old punctures. ‘Oh, you poor child.’

  The fingertips had been burned recently, but Dorolius danced away before I could look further.

  ‘People cry all the time.’ He took the handle from my guardian. ‘But only me what gets paid for it.’

  10

  ✥

  Widows’ Weeds and Horses’ Brains

  A HORSE HAD collapsed at the junction of Gordon Street with Endsleigh Gardens and much to my guardian’s annoyance I got down to have a look. It was an ageing chestnut gelding with its legs folded under it in the gutter. It must have been a fine animal once, but now the skin sank between its ribs and its haunches were scarred by old and recent lashings.

  The driver gave it a kick in the loin. ‘Stupi
d animal – won’t get up no matter ’ow ’ard I whip it.’

  He was a short man, pocked and scantily moustached.

  The horse strained to lift itself, but its head flopped thuddingly on to the kerb.

  ‘You should have tried feeding it,’ I berated him.

  ‘’Orse what don’t work don’t eat,’ he told me. ‘And it ain’t worked proper for a munf now.’

  A hefty, ginger-haired man in a leather apron was pushing his way through the onlookers. ‘Don’t worry, mate. I’ll finish it off.’ He produced a long-bladed flaying knife.

  ‘No!’ I stepped between him and his intended victim.

  ‘What?’ the knacker’s man demanded. ‘You goin’ to carry it ’ome and put it to bed?’

  The crowd laughed and somebody shouted something about fevva pillas, but I ignored them and crouched over the creature, loosening the bridle to ease the rusty bit digging into its cheeks. It was chomping wildly, eyes straining, frothing from its mouth and nose, and its hooves slithered helplessly through the muck in a final hopeless effort to rise.

  ‘It would be kinder to end its suffering.’

  I looked up and saw Sidney Grice standing over us.

  ‘But they will cut its throat,’ I cried.

  ‘Too right I will,’ the knacker’s man agreed.

  Sidney Grice reached into his satchel.

  ‘Get up, you good-fer-nuffink.’ The driver unfurled his whip and his arm rose.

  ‘If you use that I shall report you to the police and have you banned,’ I vowed. But the contempt curdling his lips was enough for me to know that the driver had no licence to be revoked.

  ‘Stand back, March,’ my guardian said quietly, and I saw that he had his ivory-handled revolver.

  ‘But…’ I stroked the horse’s muzzle and it calmed a little before I did as I was told.

  Sidney Grice was always most particular about his appearance but he crouched, oblivious to his Ulster overcoat trailing through the filth of the thoroughfare.

  ‘It is all right.’ He patted the animal’s neck. It strained up again but he pressed its head down, placing the muzzle on its forehead about halfway between the ears and eyes. ‘Sleep now.’