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  ‘Because the husband is six feet three and built like a brick shithouse, apparently. I doubt this fella’s more than five feet seven and he’s built more like a whippet than a bull.’

  Johnstone got to his feet. Whip thin himself, all sinew and lean muscle, he knew he looked built more for speed than fight. Unlike Hitchens, who was shorter and solid and looked like the boxer that he was. The truth was that Johnstone was more than capable of standing his ground when the need arose and Hitchens equally fleet of foot, though he lacked the stamina of his boss.

  ‘Have them lifted,’ he told the workmen. ‘Make sure that anything in the graves is kept with the bodies. Wrap the whole lot in sheets and then in tarpaulins and take them to the hospital. They’re expecting you.’

  ‘Hospital,’ one of the men muttered uncertainly. ‘Crowtree?’

  ‘High Holme, I was told,’ Johnstone corrected him.

  ‘You means the workhouse infirmary. Not the hospital.’

  ‘Workhouse?’ Hitchens asked. ‘Thought they went out with Dickens.’

  ‘Not here, apparently,’ Johnstone said coldly. He turned and headed out through what was left of the broken wall and turned his attention to the house. This cottage at the end of a terrace had been due to be knocked down. The shop next door had stood empty for the past year but the grocer down the street had bought it a month before and the land next door too. The plan had been to knock down the little house and extend his premises.

  One of the workmen had followed Johnstone out.

  ‘The sheets,’ he said. ‘Where should we get them from, sir?’

  Johnstone stared at him. ‘You know what sheets are? Where do you usually get them from?’

  The man looked disturbed and Hitchens coughed then intervened. ‘You go ahead, boss. I’ll sort this and catch you up.’

  Johnstone frowned but walked slowly on. Hitchens caught him a few minutes later. ‘You need to think,’ he said gently. ‘I doubt any of those men own more than a couple of sheets between them. My dear old mother—’

  ‘Oh, spare me—’

  ‘No, you have to learn. My dear old mother was proud of her linens. When she passed over there were three pairs of unpatched sheets in her linen cupboard and she’d itemized them in her will.’

  ‘Very Shakespearean,’ Johnstone said.

  ‘Shakespearean?’

  ‘He left his wife his second-best bed.’

  ‘A rich man then. Having two beds.’

  Johnstone looked closely at his companion and realized that Hitchens was laughing. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘A joke.’

  ‘That was but the sheets were not. I’ve sent a boy with a note to the Beaumont Hotel. They’ll have old linen, I expect.’

  ‘Good. So we talk to the houseowner and the old landlord. The neighbours and anyone that might have anything to say in the local pub. I’ll leave that to you,’ he added.

  ‘I could take offence at that.’

  ‘But you won’t.’ Johnstone managed something that might have been a smile.

  ‘I’ve been told this town has about fifty pubs in it,’ Mickey added thoughtfully. ‘Doesn’t seem like a big enough place, does it?’

  ‘We’ve not seen all of it yet. I suppose you could make it your mission to count them up. And we’d better go and placate Inspector Carrington first. See what he’s got to say and assure him that we want to help, not take over,’ Johnstone told him.

  ‘Even if that’s not the truth.’

  ‘Even if that’s not strictly the truth. Then we arrange for the autopsies to be done. Carrington can advise us on that. He knows the local doctors and it doesn’t sound as though the so-called hospital will be anything more than basic, not if it was the workhouse infirmary.’

  ‘We might be lucky.’

  ‘We might, but I’d as soon assume not. Then we have some late breakfast. Carrington can advise us about that too. I suppose we should invite him to join us?’

  ‘Might go some way on the placating front if we do. I’d rather have him on side. You know what it’s like when the locals really take against us. Can’t get bugger all done.’

  ‘True,’ Henry Johnstone agreed.

  They turned and walked back towards the police station on Eastgate, towards the railway station. It was a pretty place, Johnstone thought, now he had a chance to look at it. Georgian and medieval buildings sat side by side and he glimpsed tiny, still-cobbled streets branching off the main thoroughfare lined with narrow houses and small shops.

  ‘And did the neighbours suggest who our male might be?’

  ‘No, they didn’t speculate about that. When I asked them why the woman and kiddie had not been missed they said she occasionally stayed with relatives down in Newark.’

  ‘Was it usual for her to go away suddenly?’

  ‘That I don’t know. One woman suggested on the quiet that she’d been having trouble with the rent. When she didn’t see them for a day or two she supposed they might have done a flit. She said the landlord was on the verge of evicting them – the deal with the grocer had been signed and he wanted rid of his tenants anyway. Another said she’d taken on the house with the understanding it would be a short let. That she was getting ready to move on.

  ‘So far the husband is top of my list. A woman takes lovers – paying or not – and my money’s always going to be on the husband.’

  TEN

  Acting Chief Inspector Carrington had still not been available when Henry and his sergeant returned to the police station. They were told that he was still not in, that he lived some distance away and that he was just covering until the usual incumbent returned.

  ‘And the usual incumbent is where?’ Henry Johnstone asked.

  ‘Kent, sir. His dad passed on. He’s gone to see to the funeral and suchlike.’

  ‘I see.’ Inspector Johnstone frowned at the unfortunate man and Sergeant Hitchens, fearing a storm, decided to intervene.

  ‘I’ll take myself back to the scene after we’ve had a bite to eat,’ he said. ‘Most likely he’ll have got here by then. Constable, is there somewhere we can get breakfast?’

  The constable, relieved to be asked something he could give an answer to, directed them to a cafe down on the market square. ‘It ain’t smart,’ he warned. ‘Mostly services the local farmers when they come in for market day but it’s good, solid fare. Sticks to your ribs.’ He eyed Chief Inspector Johnstone, clearly of the opinion that he definitely needed something sticking to his ribs.

  Mickey Hitchens nodded his thanks and led his inspector away.

  ‘He has a murder enquiry on his hands and he’s still not in?’

  ‘This isn’t London, guv. It isn’t the Met. He’s not ruled over by our Mr Wensley.’

  ‘But he’s still a serving detective.’

  ‘And the case isn’t in his hands, is it? He’s shifted responsibility over to me and thee. It all goes pear shaped he can tell the world he called in the experts. It goes well he can tell everyone how right he was to call in the experts. Fella can’t lose, can he?’

  Henry grimaced. ‘And it’s only a working woman and her child,’ he said. ‘Not anyone of importance, it would seem.’

  ‘And whoever the lad might be. But yes. Henry,’ he said softly, ‘that’s what we signed up for. It don’t make no difference for us if it’s a prostitute or a princess, it’s still a dead body that needs speaking for, but it isn’t like that for most – you know that. There’s not many levellers, not even war and death.’

  Henry Johnstone nodded but it was clear he wasn’t happy. This Chief Inspector Carrington had well and truly blotted his copybook, Mickey thought. His boss wouldn’t give him an easy time of it when they did eventually get to meet.

  An hour later and Mickey was back at the crime scene, Inspector Johnstone having returned to the police station.

  The constable had been right, Mickey thought. The food had been good. Fresh eggs and thick slices of fatty bacon and Lincolnshire sausages, heavily flavoured with spice and sag
e. It did all stick to his ribs and, if he was honest, sat a little heavy on the stomach – though that could have been down to the extra slice or two of bread that Mickey had used to mop his plate and then his boss’s plate. Inspector Johnstone hadn’t grown up in a house where you ate bread with every meal, including Sunday dinner, but Mickey had never lost the habit. It makes the meat go further, his mum had always said. Mickey smiled to himself, hearing in his head Henry’s usual retort about being sick of hearing about Mickey’s ‘sainted’ mother – a woman Henry had actually been very fond of, despite what he might growl in public.

  Two young constables stood outside the crime-scene house. One was chatting to the grocer whose building plans had been so dramatically interrupted and from what Mickey could observe was in full ‘placating the public mode’, so Mickey gestured to the other one.

  ‘Upstairs with me, lad,’ Sergeant Hitchens instructed the young constable standing by the front door. ‘You can give me a hand.’

  The constable, who looked no more than about eighteen, exchanged a worried look with his colleague.

  ‘I haven’t got all day,’ Mickey Hitchens told him. ‘Let’s be having you.’

  Mickey had already done a brief survey of the house and decided that most of his attention should be focused on the bedroom. That was obviously where the killing had taken place. The rest of the house could be looked at later but it was important to get a sequence of events in his head.

  He paused at the bedroom door and waited for the young constable to catch him up. ‘Now, lad,’ he said, ‘the first thing you do is take a good long look.’

  The constable looked puzzled. ‘What are we looking for, sir?’ he said.

  ‘What do you see?’ Mickey asked him. ‘Go on, take a good look but don’t go inside yet.’

  Mickey bent down to take the camera out of his bag while the constable made a first survey of the room. ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, there’s blood on the floor. A lot of it over by the bed. And there’s blood on the wall on the opposite side of the room.’

  ‘That’s a start,’ Mickey told him. ‘What else do you notice?’

  ‘The bed’s untidy, like someone’s been … Sleeping … Or something.’

  ‘Probably more of the something,’ Mickey told him. ‘Right now we start to look properly. The first thing we do is take a few pictures of the room, just from where we’re standing. So we can see the whole scene. Then when we’re talking about what might have happened the person we’re talking to can see it as well. You got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The young man was looking at the camera. ‘Is that yours, sir?’

  ‘No, my lad, this is a rather wonderful specimen of a Kodak vest pocket camera series three. And it is the property of Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone. I just get to use it when there isn’t a photographer available.’

  ‘There’s Mr Clare down on Eastgate, next to the chapel. Our Elsie had her wedding photo done by him.’ The constable was evidently trying to impress, Mickey thought.

  ‘Well, I expect we’ll be asking our Mr Clare for the use of his darkroom later on,’ Mickey Hitchens told him.

  The bedroom curtains were still closed and although a narrow shaft of light filtered in from where they didn’t quite join and another from where they didn’t quite reach the sill, the room was still dimly lit. Mickey decided he would have to use his small stock of flashbulbs to take the first images.

  ‘We could have opened the curtains,’ the constable suggested, blinking hard at his eyes try to readjust after the sudden blasts of light from the flashbulbs.

  ‘And then we would have changed the scene before we photographed it. We don’t want to go doing that. You look at the scene as it was and you record it as it was. First rule.’

  Mickey Hitchens set the camera down and opened up his bag. ‘This here,’ he said, ‘is what is commonly called the murder bag. We take one with us whenever we go on a murder investigation. It was put together by Bernard Spilsbury and Detective Superintendent Brown after Mr Spilsbury had to go to the Bexhill-on-Sea murder of a woman by the name of Emily Beilby Kaye. It has been a hot month, you see, and there he found Chief Inspector Savage and his men, scooping up lumps of putrefying flesh and dumping them into buckets without a pair of rubber gloves between them.’ He glanced up at the younger man’s face, noting the pallor and look of shock. Mickey grinned at him. ‘Don’t you get sick, lad, or you’ll be clearing it up yourself. So Mr Spilsbury, he decided something should be done, and so they put this bag together for us to take with rubber gloves and envelopes and jars for storing samples and the fingerprint kit just in case we can’t get Mr Cherrill up here.’

  ‘Mr Cherrill?’

  ‘Looks after all the fingerprint records does Mr Cherrill. Keeps tabs on the dabs.’ Mickey laughed at his own joke and the constable, obviously trying to please, laughed too.

  ‘So, what now, sir?’

  ‘Now we look more closely. Anything missing, anything that shouldn’t be here or might be out of place.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Mickey smiled at the younger man. ‘Well, son, we won’t know until we see it, will we?’

  Constable Parkin followed Mickey’s close inspection of the room. Mickey could sense the young man’s eagerness to discover something that might help the investigation or, at the very least, impress the sergeant. Mickey started at the door and moved slowly towards the window. He drew the curtains back and took a small torch from his pocket. ‘Now, let’s take a closer look at that bloodstain,’ he said.

  Both men crouched down on the rough wooden floor and Constable Parkin stared hard at the marks on the wall and floor. ‘See,’ Mickey said, ‘where the poor little mite hit the wall, the blood streaks as she slid down on to the floor. She’d likely be unconscious or semi-conscious at that point and she was bleeding from maybe her mouth or face or even her ear – see the little pool, here?’

  Constable Parkin nodded. ‘So,’ he hazarded, ‘she fell sort of on her side with her face on the floor?’

  ‘That would be consistent with the injuries we saw, though of course until the post-mortem is done it’s hard to be sure of everything. There’s a partial hand print there, look.’

  ‘The killer?’ Parkin was excited now.

  ‘No, lad, look at the size of it. The kiddie came round, pushed herself up and her hand dragged in her own blood. You can see the marks of two fingers and that curve is likely to be the side of the hand. So, the likelihood is she pushed herself up, maybe even tried to get up, but by then the killer had finished with her mum and that young man and he came over and finished her off. What we think was the killing blow, on account of it being the deepest, was on the left-hand side of her head, so he struck from that side, maybe from close to where you are now, and she fell again. Look, there’s another big patch of blood here and just there,’ Mickey paused and pointed at the floor, ‘are a few little threads caught in the splinters of the floorboard. Maybe where our killer knelt down to make sure he’d finished the job.’

  Constable Parkin gazed at the tiny threads as though they were something magical. ‘Do we collect them, sir?’

  ‘Indeed we do. In the bag you’ll find a little leather case containing tweezers and beside that there’ll be a package of small manila envelopes.’

  Parkin scrambled to his feet. ‘Walk back the same way we came in. Don’t trample around like a bull elephant – you risk standing on potential evidence, my lad.’

  He stayed put until the constable had returned and then gently eased the threads free of the floorboard splinters and tucked them into the envelope.

  ‘Now,’ Mickey said when he had sealed it. ‘You write down what we’ve found and where we found it and number the envelope as one. Hopefully it will have some friends to join it soon.’

  They continued their slow perusal of the floor. Close beside the bed, caught up in a fold of the rug was a small button. Mickey plucked it out with the tweezers. ‘From a shirt, by the look of it,’ he sai
d. ‘It could have come from the husband’s shirt, I suppose, but as he’s been away at sea that seems less likely, don’t you think?’

  He dropped the button into another envelope, handed it to Constable Parkin for labelling then shone the torch beneath the bed. ‘Just a bit of dust under there,’ he said. ‘Have another look at that rug, make certain there’s nothing else caught up.’

  He stood then and looked at the bed itself.

  The sheets were stained with urine and the smell was sour and ammoniac. There was a tiny smear of blood on the pillow. The blankets had been kicked aside and Mickey could imagine Mary Fields fighting for her life, her feet scrabbling for purchase against the mattress, her hands scratching at her assailant. Was the blood hers or his? Mickey wondered. Taking a small pair of scissors from the leather case, he cut the bloodstain out of the pillowcase and dropped that into a third envelope.

  ‘It looks as though there’s something missing from the bedside table,’ Mickey said.

  Constable Parkin stood up. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Marks in the dust.’

  ‘Lucky for us Mary Fields was not the most house-proud of women. Something with a square base. A lamp, perhaps, or a candlestick.’ He glanced quickly around the room.

  ‘The murder weapon?’ Constable Parkin asked.

  ‘That is a definite possibility,’ Mickey told him. ‘We’ll check the rest of the house but if we don’t find anything that fits that space then the chances are our man took it away with him.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Fingerprints, most likely,’ Mickey said. ‘He maybe didn’t trust himself to wipe it clean enough. He was scared enough that he had to get the murder weapon out of here. So the question is where did he dump it?’

  ‘Canal, maybe. It’s close by and there’s empty buildings and waste ground.’

  Mickey nodded. ‘We’ll make sure we look for it. Meantime, you and I will see what else he might have left behind. Fingerprints, lad. We’ll see if we can find ourselves some nice, clear dabs.’