Langton relayed his initial impressions. After hesitating a moment, he mentioned the Boer connection.
Purcell leaned forward. “You’re sure?”
“The crossed plow and sword on his left arm confirm him as Boer, sir. The windmill designs on his right arm mean a soldier from the southern battalions, if I remember correctly, perhaps one of the Graaffe-Reinert or Uitenhage companies. I’d be surprised if the examining physician doesn’t find more tattoos on the body.”
Purcell ground out his cigar. “So. A Boer on the Span. Could there be an innocent explanation?”
Langton considered for a few moments. “It’s possible but I doubt it, sir. After the truce, some of the surviving Transvaal platoons promised revenge, and the Span is our greatest engineering achievement. It would be a great coup for them.”
“If they disrupt the inauguration?”
“Or worse.”
“Indeed.” Purcell sighed and reached for the telephone. “I don’t relish asking for help, but this is too delicate a matter. I’ll inform the Home Office that there may be a Boer plot afoot.”
“Must we, sir? The investigation has only just begun.”
“We’ve no choice, Langton, not with Her Majesty’s safety at risk. Keep me informed.”
Langton made for the door, then hesitated. “Sir, may I ask a question?”
Purcell kept one hand on the telephone’s cradle. “What is it?”
“How did you find out about the death this morning? And why send me?”
Purcell frowned. “I have to explain myself to you now, Langton?”
“Of course not, sir.” Langton opened the door and was almost through it when Purcell called him back.
“My secretary prepares a summary of the night’s events in all our stations,” Purcell said, “and I believed you would welcome the opportunity to prove your…recovery. I hope I was not mistaken.”
“Sir.” As he closed the door and walked through the secretary’s office, Langton almost stopped and asked him. It would make little difference; even if the man’s death had appeared on the nightly summary report, why would Chief Inspector Purcell focus on that particular one? Unfortunately, fatalities were not uncommon: Liverpool Exchange and Central districts averaged four or five a week, sometimes more when thousands of sailors poured into the docks, flush with money and ripe for thieves.
Langton told himself to concentrate on the case. He ignored the rickety iron lift and made for the stairs down to the basement. By now, the police physician should have started his examination of the body.
He couldn’t fault Purcell for informing the Home Office, since the Chief Inspector was simply protecting himself in case, God forbid, anything did happen while the Queen and the various dignitaries attended the Span’s inauguration. No, Purcell had done what any other official with an eye to his future would do. Even if it disrupted Langton’s investigation.
Halfway down the final set of steps, Langton staggered against the tiled wall and almost fell. He clutched the banister and struggled to stay upright as the sudden blindness made him reel.
Darkness, colloidal and greasy, choked his face and mouth, engulfed his tongue, and gushed down his throat. His chest struggled against bonds that tightened with each faltering breath. No sounds save his own gagging and a discordant ringing like the grave bells of Everton cemetery. He flailed and sank deeper, deeper.
Then he returned. On his knees on the stairs, clutching the banister like a falling man grasping a rope, Langton blinked and tried to focus his gaze. He hauled himself upright and then doubled over, retching but bringing up only acid bile. He gulped in deep breaths tainted with disinfectant and stood there, ashen, until the taste of the cloying darkness left his mouth.
He looked around, grateful that nobody had seen this latest attack,
one of the worst so far. He took the last few steps clinging to the banister like an old man or an infant.
In the light of the basement’s flickering gas lamp, he took out the card that gatekeeper Howard had presented. A simple pasteboard square with curled edges and copperplate printing:
Mrs. Eugenie Grizedale, 33 Hamlet Street, Everton 512. Interview by appointment only.
Langton slipped the card back into his pocket, wiped a handkerchief across his mouth, and smoothed the front of his uniform jacket before he followed the sign and peeling black letters painted onto the white tiles:
Examination Room and Mortuary.
A
S
L
ANGTON PUSHED
through the outer doors, the basement’s odors struck him: disinfectant, tobacco smoke, and some acrid chemical like bitter almonds. On the left lay Doctor Fry’s office: an empty chair, a desk cluttered with papers and laboratory glassware, a full ashtray. On the walls, charts and illustrations of the human body fought for space with cartoons cut from
Punch Illustrated
magazine.
“Fry?”
“In here, Langton.”
Another set of wooden doors opened into the examination room and mortuary, where three marble slabs faced wood-and-steel drawers as wide as a man’s shoulders. A cluster of gas lamps illuminated the center of the chill, tiled room and made it resemble a Rembrandt painting. Doctor Fry’s bald head glistened with sweat and yellow light as he bent over the murder victim on the first slab. Fry’s assistant stood behind him, taking notes and sliding red samples onto white enamel dishes.
Langton crossed the echoing chamber until he stood at the dead man’s feet. Fry, intent on exploration, did not look up but said, “Your man McBride said this was important.”
“It could be.” Langton shivered as he glanced at the eviscerated body now so similar to the anatomical drawings in the adjacent office.
“I hope so; I don’t usually devote this much attention to a victim.”
“He’s an unusual victim.”
“He is that.” Fry raised bloody forceps up to the gaslight and examined the glistening exhibit for a moment before depositing it in a bowl. “He was a drinker. Liver’s in a terrible state, distended and scarred. Surprised he made it this far.”
Langton looked away.
Fry continued, “Around forty-five years old, although hard living might have aged him prematurely. Callused hands suggesting manual labor. False teeth made by a good dentist, German if I’m not mistaken.”
“And the broken bones?”
“Done before death, I think.” Fry pointed with the forceps. “There’s bruising around the fracture points. I could be wrong, but they remind me of boot prints.”
So they’d beaten him before stripping his face. “And his identity?”
Fry said, “He was a Boer, of course.”
“You saw the tattoos?”
“And these.” Fry peeled back the flap of skin he’d unfurled from the man’s chest and stomach. “You can’t see too well in this light. I’ve asked Lord knows how many times for some decent electroliers down here, but we never hear a thing.”
The yellow gaslight made the man’s naked body look like grained wood. Langton followed the trail of Fry’s forceps down the abdomen and saw a network of fine silver lines. “Scars.”
“Look at the shape,” Fry said, and then, to his chief assistant, “Johnson, pull that mantle closer.”
Langton thought he could make out a triangle, a circle, and the numbers eight and six, or zero, carved into the skin.
Fry said, “One of my old Edinburgh lecturers made a study of the South African battalions’ initiation rites; they were vicious enough to their own men, never mind ours.”
“I know. But this…I don’t recognize it.”
“The Orange Free State Irregulars of eighty-six,” Fry said, “one of the mercenary outfits brought in by the Boers and given free rein. I believe the militia were very effective.”
“Oh, they were: The mercenaries learned their craft from the British officers who first created them,” Langton said, anger boiling up inside him. “No wonder the Boers hated us.”
Fry glanced at his assistant. “Fetch me the Kodak, Johnson.”
Then, to Langton, “Take care in what you say; some in the police might misconstrue your words. Remember, the Boers did the same to us, and sometimes worse. War draws out men’s evil like water from a deep spring.”
Langton had to agree with Fry. Both sides had committed atrocities in the name of war, of territory, and of nationalism. No hand had remained free of blood.
As Johnson returned with the bulky camera on its tripod, Fry moved up to the dead man’s head. Langton joined him beside the fixed rictus grin of the mutilated face. The blood had darkened with the passing hours, and the edges of the skin had hardened. “Why do this? Why erase his features?”
“Obviously to remove his identity,” Fry said.
Langton shook his head. “We know he worked for the Span Company unless he stole the clothes from a worker. Someone there will surely recognize the body from the tattoos and build alone. Have you his fingerprints?”
Fry pointed to the man’s inked fingers. “Johnson dispatched copies to Scotland Yard. I don’t hold out much hope.”
“Nor do I.” Langton had attended a lecture in London on the use of Magistrate Herschel’s fingerprinting; he recognized their value, even their eventual necessity, but a system was only as good as the
information put into it. And Scotland Yard had no more than two thousand or so records on file so far. “Did you find anything to help his identification? Other than the tattoos.”
Still gazing down, Fry said, “He had nothing in his pockets, no papers or letters. Money, though: eleven pounds, five shillings and sixpence.”
So, as Langton had already concluded, robbery was not the motive. “Any tailors’ labels in his clothes?”
“Only those of the Company.” Fry angled the gaslights, then froze. “This is something I’ve never encountered before.”
Fry tilted the man’s head on the marble block and said, “What do you make of that?”
Langton couldn’t see any interruption to the tanned skin until he made out a small, square red mark high on the neck, practically in the hairline. “A bruise?”
“It reminds me more of a burn.” Fry tilted the man’s head again. “There’s a corresponding mark on the other side in the same position.”
Langton tried to imagine the sequence of events: Two quick blows to the back of the neck would take most men down. Would sandbags or blackjacks leave such a perfectly square imprint?
As his assistant set up the camera near the man’s head, Fry pulled Langton back into the shadows. “With your permission, I’d like to suggest gaining a second opinion on all this. There’s a professor who specializes in reconstructive surgery; you might remember him from the broadsheets, that accident with the ship’s boiler in Gladstone Dock.”
“When all those passengers were burned?”
“That’s the one. Professor Caldwell Chivers gave most of them their own faces back. I think he can help with our friend here.”
Langton glanced at the ruined features. “By all means, if you think it will help.”
“I do. And I hope he might have an idea as to those bruises, or burns.”
“Such as?”
Fry looked at the slab again, then said, “Leave it with me, Langton. When I’ve finished here I’ll send the body over to Caldwell Chivers at the Infirmary, if he’s amenable.”
The mention of the Infirmary took Langton back three months. He forced his voice to remain calm. “May I use your telephone?”
“Of course.”
Automatically, he went to shake Fry’s hand, then saw the bloodied rubber gloves. Langton made for the doors, then turned and said, “You forgot to tell me one thing.”
“Which is?”
“The cause of death.”
“I want to study the stomach contents and blood separations before I’m sure, but I think he was poisoned. The pinhole pupils certainly suggest it.”
Langton stared at him. “But those injuries—”
“Agonizing, I know, but not necessarily life-threatening. I’ve seen men survive worse.”
So have I,
Langton thought.
In Fry’s office, Langton sat behind the cluttered desk and reached for the upright telephone. He took the card from his pocket, read it, returned it. He pushed the chair back. Then he remembered the episode on the stairs; if that had happened in front of his sergeant, or fellow inspectors…
He could see his own physician, Doctor Redfers, but what would he recommend? Drugs? Rest? No, work was the best medicine—being busy distracted him. All God’s creatures needed sleep, and Langton knew he couldn’t keep going without some rest, some relief from the nightmares. Howard, the cemetery gatekeeper, had sworn that Mrs. Grizedale had helped him. Langton had little to lose apart from his skepticism.
He read the number off the card and dialed for the operator. “Everton five-twelve, please.”
* * *
W
HEN HE RETURNED
to his office after a late lunch, Langton found McBride waiting. “News, Sergeant?”
McBride stood at ease with his hands behind his back. “Sir. I took it on myself to do a little sniffing around the docks, see if anyone had spotted our man. Hope I did right, sir.”
Langton nodded as he reached for the sealed telegram Harry had obviously left on his desk. “You did well. What did you discover?”
“Well, sir, not as much as I’d hoped; the dockers are a closemouthed lot, not keen on giving out answers, though it seems I wasn’t the first one to go around asking questions.”
Langton looked up from the telegram.
McBride leaned toward the desk like a conspirator. “A couple of fellas hung around the docks and the pubs, asking about the Span and the people working on it. They’d buy a man a pint and ask a few questions, sort of casual like, then move on to the next pub. The dockers are always on the lookout for Dock Company spies and suchlike, so they passed word to each other, kind of warning.”
Langton nodded. “And one of the men asking questions was about six feet tall, with tanned skin and probably the trace of a foreign accent.”
McBride looked vaguely disappointed. “So they say, sir, yes. They thought he was German.”
Langton wondered why the dead man had been trawling the pubs and docks for information. A Boer would want to melt into the background; he wouldn’t want to publicize his presence, especially if he had some scheme planned, some attack on the Span. It didn’t make sense yet.