Ben Ross
ADAMS was not dragged from the river but discovered beside it, sprawled on the evil-smelling greenish mud. He had been washed up with all the other flotsam and jetsam and found by the mudlarks who scavenged along the river’s edge at low tide.
Though there was no immediate sign of foul play and such drownings were not so uncommon, Adams had been sought by the police as possibly having information in the matter of a murder inquiry and a postmortem was requested of the coroner with some urgency.
Morris and I made our way towards the river and Wapping Station in this connection on Monday morning.
‘Why,’ said Morris. ‘Who’d believe it will soon be June? Look there, you mark my words, sir, we shall have fog before the day is out.’
The air around was indeed already thickening and we put our best foot forward, hoping to have finished our business and be back home before it got worse. There was no telling how much time we had before it closed in as a dense yellow veil. The London fog is like that. It lurks about the place, showing itself as a mist above the river or a swirl of vapour across parkland, and then, before you realise it, it has oozed from its lair and is everywhere like a hunting octopus stretching out its many arms.
We were greeted by a sergeant of the river police, a real grizzled, mahogany-tanned, weather-beaten waterman who looked as if he had been built of ship’s timbers. The atmosphere here was an unpleasant mixture of odorous vapour rising from the river’s surface to mingle with the smoky city sky, the ingredients of a London pea-souper. The return of the chilly weather had led to more householders lighting fires the previous evening. The air carried on it an odour of tar and bilge water and a hint of salt spray, telling us the open sea was not so very far away and asking why we landlubbers were loitering ashore when we could be heading out to distant lands. Seagulls circled overhead, some seen and some already invisible. They added their cries to the message of the wind. I wondered what had driven them so far up the estuary. Rough weather out at sea, perhaps.
‘A poor morning, gentlemen!’ said our guide, rubbing his hands together. He did not appear too put out and was probably used to being out and about on the river in all weathers. His cheerful humour was in no way impaired by the fact that he led us to the mortuary maintained by the river police for reception of those unfortunates dragged from a watery grave. It was here where the examination had already been carried out.
I wished it had been conducted by good reliable Carmichael, but it had been done by a surgeon new to me. At least we were spared the presence of Carmichael’s unpleasant assistant. The surgeon was a short, stout, irascible fellow who gave the impression of perpetual anger with the world about him and punctuated his conversation with belligerent cries of ‘Hey? Hey?’ as if someone had offended him.
‘Drowned!’ he announced tersely in reply to my question as to cause of death.
‘No doubt about that?’ I asked unwisely.
‘Doubt? Doubt?’ he barked. ‘Lungs full of river water. How can there be any doubt?’
‘I meant,’ I said hastily, ‘that perhaps there were other injuries?’
‘None inconsistent with having fallen in the water and the body bumping up against moored craft or flotsam.’
‘Ah, so none inflicted before death? He hadn’t been in a fight, say?’
‘Hey? Hey?’ cried the surgeon, his eyes popping from his head in rage. ‘No, sir, none!’
I refused to be faced down and persisted, ‘No bruises to the face? No damage to the knuckles?’
‘Are you deaf, sir?’ shouted the surgeon. ‘I said none and there are none. The fellow had been drinking heavily, a mixture of spirits and ale. He was weaving his way home and fell in the river. It happens all the time, is that not so, Sergeant?’
This appeal was to the river man beside me who nodded and said, ‘Aye, it does. No sign he was a jumper, sir. No note upon the body. Doesn’t look the type, anyway. In my experience most jumpers are poor women who can face no more, or girls who’ve been seduced and abandoned, and ruined businessmen or unlucky gamblers.’
‘Quite!’ snapped the surgeon. ‘A labouring man, honest fellow no doubt in his way, but given to drink as they all are. As for his knuckles, look for yourself!’ He held up one of the corpse’s hands for my inspection. ‘Skin like leather but unbroken over the knuckles. No fist fight. Nails bitten,’ he added casually. With that he let the dead man’s hand drop.
‘Nails bitten?’ I asked, startled.
‘Must I say everything twice?’ howled the surgeon. ‘Hey? Hey? Some people bite ’em. Nerves. Bad habit. Should be corrected of it as children.’
I opened my mouth to comment but thought better of it in this company. I turned to the Thames Division man. ‘Who identified the body?’
‘A gentleman by the name of Fletcher, sir, from his employers, I gather. He took it very bad. We had to take him into the other room and give him a drop of brandy to steady his nerves.’
‘Fellow was a fool!’ snapped the surgeon. ‘“Come, come,” I said to him, “this is only a labourer you employed and not a close relative. Have you never seen a dead body before? Hey?”’
‘He said he had,’ put in the river man, ‘but not one that had been in the river.’
‘So it was in the river!’ said the surgeon, determined to show the miserable Fletcher no sympathy. ‘It had not been there very long, as I pointed out to him. “It’s in good condition, hardly deteriorated at all. Why,” I said and I took the trouble to show him, “the crabs have not yet had a chance to nibble at it much, only part of the left eyeball gone.” At that the fellow turned quite green.’
‘We had to give him another shot of brandy,’ said the river sergeant.
‘So,’ I asked the surgeon, ‘how long do you calculate he was in the water? He was missed on Saturday morning last when he failed to appear at work and, according to his landlady, he had gone out the night before, Friday, and not returned.’
‘The body was found at low tide, early this morning,’ said the river man. ‘The rats hadn’t got to it so I reckon it had not been ashore above an hour. Beached, by a bit of luck, or you would have had to wait until the gases brought it to the surface. That can take time especially if a body gets wedged up against some underwater obstacle.’
‘He went in during Friday night, by my reckoning,’ said the surgeon. ‘On his way home, as I said.’
‘How was the weather over the river on Friday night?’ I asked the river man. ‘I seem to remember it rained in the early hours.’
‘So it did, sir. But before that we had heavy mist then too. It was lying across the river like a blanket until the rain came down and dispersed it. You had to be careful walking along the wharves. Step to one side and you step into nothing until splash, down into old Father Thames waiting for you. Fall into his embrace and he don’t let you go easy.’
‘You see?’ said the surgeon. ‘That satisfy you? Hey, hey?’
‘Well,’ I said to Morris as we wended our way back to our base.
‘That does not satisfy
me
. What do you make of it, hey? Hey?’ I added sourly.
Morris chuckled. ‘It was what we expected, sir. Lucky the body washed up so soon. Sometimes it takes a while, as the sergeant back there said. Then it’s sometimes a problem identifying it.’
‘Do you bite your nails, Morris?’
‘No, sir. I did when I was a little child. But the school I went to was run by an elderly widowed lady, what they used to call a dame school. She was a holy terror when it came to nail-biting. If she caught you at it, boy or girl, you had to hold out your hand and crack! Down came the ruler good and hard across the palm. That cured it.’
A large and unfriendly looking seagull landed to perch on a post nearby and fix us with a malevolent eye. Morris appeared not to care for its company.
‘Don’t seamen believe those things to carry the souls of seafarers?’ he asked, indicating it. ‘Or is that some other bird?’
‘I fancy it is the storm petrel which they believe does that,’ I replied, ‘although I am no great authority. Certainly if a bird as humdrum as that one harbours any dead soul,’ and I pointed at our wicked-eyed observer, ‘it’s that of a pirate, and one who was hanged. Mind your hat when it takes flight. It probably has a crack aim.’
The gull opened its vicious beak and uttered a discordant croak.
‘Tell me, Sergeant,’ I asked Morris, ‘Would you describe our late friend, Jem Adams, as a nervous man?’
‘I should say not, sir. All the sensitivity of an ox, I’d say.’
‘Exactly. Yet he had been biting his nails. That suggests to me that he was recently under some particular and unusual stress which caused him to return to a childhood habit. Not something
he normally encountered and could manage. Something quite new and beyond his scope.’
‘Well, now,’ said Morris. ‘There had been the finding of the body at the demolition site and the delay to the work there.’
The seagull rose from its post with a sudden flap of wings and instinctively both Morris and I ducked as it soared over our heads. Afterwards we both attempted to look as if we hadn’t.
‘The delay to the work there was not his to worry over,’ I said, ‘unless it was caused by any of the workforce in his charge. It wasn’t. It was caused by a matter outside his responsibility. Fletcher is clerk of the works and while it may cause him sleepless nights, from the point of view of Adams it would be an excuse for any other failing. He could blame any problem among the navvies on the finding of that body. Nor did he seem very upset on that first morning we went there. No, he had been mulling over something since, or something had occurred since, which bothered him and caused him to start to chew at his fingernails, a long-abandoned habit.
‘There is another thing. That surgeon spoke of a mixture of spirits and ale drunk by the deceased. We know Adams frequented the alehouses of an evening because Mrs Riley told us so. But she also said he never returned to his lodgings drunk. That suggests to me he did not normally drink spirits. But, if we are asked to believe what we have just been told at Wapping, he had drunk so freely of both ale and spirits on Friday evening that he was rolling drunk, so drunk he couldn’t find his way home safely and fell into the Thames. Does that sound like Adams’s normal habit?’
‘No.’ Morris shook his head. ‘Think he was drinking with someone, sir, who was paying the bill? It was Friday night and the end of the working week. I dare say he hadn’t much money left and was waiting for pay day, the next day. He wouldn’t say no if anyone was offering to buy. So someone plies him with spirits which he didn’t normally take, and gets him drunk.’
‘Offers to escort him home and, at a quiet spot hidden by the fog, pushes him into the water,’ I continued.
‘Grabs a spar or anything handy and pushes him back in if he tries to climb out,’ suggested Morris, growing enthusiastic as the picture was painted. ‘Kneels down and grabs him by the hair and holds his head under? The man’s rolling drunk. It wouldn’t take much effort.’ Morris was now performing a pantomime of one man drowning another.
‘But why? Why?’
‘He lied to us, sir, or let’s say he didn’t come forward with any information he had. But he did have some. Whatever it was, he thought about it, chewed his nails over it, before he decided what to do.’
‘And then,’ I said softly, ‘like a fool he went to the murderer with it in the hope of some financial gain. It may have been no more, as you remarked, than that it was the end of the week and he had spent up all his pay and hadn’t the money for a pint. But our murderer has already killed once and you can only be hanged once. There is nothing to stop him killing again. Blackmail, Morris. There’s our motive, I’ll swear to it, although we can prove none of this. I wish I had cause enough to request a second postmortem, conducted by Carmichael. But I don’t, confound it.’
The seagull, or one exactly like it, had returned and flapped down to settle a short distance off. I thought there was something familiar about its surly expression and wondered briefly, if it sheltered any soul in its fishy-smelling breast, whether it were that of Adams.
I returned to Scotland Yard and knocked on Dunn’s door.
‘Ah, Ross,’ he said, shuffling papers on his desk. ‘You may wish to speak with – er -’ He picked up a scribbled note. ‘Inspector Watkins at St James’s Division. He has some information about your Dr Tibbett which may be of interest.’
‘Tibbett?’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ll go at once. Only first I should tell
you that I’ve just come from Wapping and I’m afraid the witness Adams is finally lost completely to us.’
‘Recovered the body?’ Dunn knew exactly what I meant.
‘Yes, sir, the surgeon says he drowned. He was found on the shore at low tide. He was apparently drunk when he went in. No other injuries.’
‘Pity,’ said Dunn. ‘Still, couldn’t be helped, I suppose.’
‘With respect, sir, I think it could – be helped, I mean, or rather, he was helped. I am sure someone was drinking with him, picking up the tab, began to walk home with him and caused him to fall into the river. I have no evidence at all.’