think the ones in Wimbledon or Kensington shall feel safe just because the blighter has so far confined himself to Bethnal Green. Every West End mother shall want a bobby on her doorstep, and if they don’t get it, the MP will put whatever pressure he has upon the commissioner.”
“Then it is in the Yard’s interest not to let this get out,” Barker said.
Swanson smoothed his mustache. “It may be too late for that. Stead is sniffing about, and you know how he is. This is just the sort of thing for him to smear across the front page of his rag and set off a panic London would never forget.”
“So what brought you to the C.O.S.?” Barker asked.
“I was letting them know the sad news. Oh, haven’t you gentlemen heard? Mrs. DeVere killed herself last night. Woke up from her laudanum dreams just long enough to swallow the rest of a new bottle.”
“Oh, no!” I cried.
“Aye, and your client has gone mad with grief. His servants say after he found her, he threw on his coat and ran out the door. He hasn’t been heard from since. I sent word ’round to your house this morning. Apparently, you were out.”
13
I wondered if swanson was trying to bait Barker or merely to shock him. My employer put his head down and shook it. As for me, I felt some guilt over Hypatia DeVere, as if I myself had treated her badly. Had she appeared calm and graceful as Miss Hill the first time I met her, I would have accused her in my mind of being cold, and yet I had thought uncharitably of her for being puffy eyed. She was doing what she should have been doing, which was agonizing over the welfare of her daughter.
So there it was, I thought. Gwendolyn DeVere was dead. Hypatia DeVere was dead. Our client had run off in grief. At least six other girls had also been killed and all because of a monster who called himself a name out of a fairy tale.
My employer turned to me after Swanson left. “Come, lad, let us see about the postmortem.”
“Do you think it will be finished?” I asked as I followed Barker down Globe Road.
“Dr. Vandeleur runs a tight ship,” he said. “If it is not finished, it shall be soon.”
There was a big difference in my mind between finished and almost finished. Finished meant I could look at it all on paper, with drawings. Almost finished was “Look here, while I lift up the liver, at the discoloration of the stomach.” I’d had the misfortune to have been there several times and viewed close to a dozen bodies at least, but they all had been adult males.
I knew the girl was dead and all sentient thought had left her body. I would even agree with Barker that at one point her soul had departed, as well. But I could not help but think that Gwendolyn DeVere would have objected to lying naked on a slab while men sliced her up like a Billingsgate haddock. I had no desire to see the body.
Vandeleur, it turned out, was at a conference in Glasgow and we were passed on to Dr. Trent, his resident, who had done the postmortem himself. He was a stocky young chap with a round head and a Vandyke who looked as if he didn’t allow the nature of his work to interfere with his digestion.
“Have you finished your report on the DeVere child, doctor?” Barker asked.
“Finished an hour ago. How are you connected with it?”
“I am Cyrus Barker, a private enquiry agent. I work for Major DeVere. I saw the corpse where it was found.”
“Were you aware it was connected to several other cases?” Trent asked.
“Aye, I was. Did you find anything out of the ordinary in the postmortem?”
“It was the most remarkable I’ve ever seen.”
He reached for the clipboard and began looking through the papers while I gave a sigh of relief. Perhaps papers were all I would be forced to look at.
“You noted the traces of rouge and the kohl about her eyes?”
“Yes. She was painted like a Parisian tart.”
“When I wiped them off her face, I found burns under her nose and around her lips.”
“Chloroform,” Barker stated. “It burns the skin.”
“Indeed. There was no facial burning in the other cases according to our records, but I still believe chloroform was used, though not directly on the skin. It might have been in a folded handkerchief. I assume the killer had either changed his method of capturing his victims or perhaps the girl struggled and came in contact with the chloroform itself. But then, as I continued the postmortem, another theory occurred to me. Perhaps Miss DeVere was sensitive. I believe she had a reaction to the chemical used.”
“Why do you think that?” Barker asked.
“Because she had a reaction to something else. It’s all here.” He began rustling through the papers. “No, I think it would be best if you saw it on the corpse itself.”
Oh, no, I thought, as we were taken to another room and directed to a still form on a table. The resident lifted back the sheet, exposing the girl’s face. It truly was a girl’s face now, not a child painted to look like an adult. Her skin was clear and pale, and there was a purpling of the upper lip, a smudge like a thumbprint. Then, like a stage magician doing a trick, Dr. Trent whisked away the sheet.
There was a purpling across her entire torso. It formed lines across her body from the right hip to the throat, down to the left hip, from there across to the right shoulder, back to the left shoulder, and down to the right hip again, lines forming the shape of a star. The first thing I thought when I saw the marks was that she had been used in some sort of witchcraft or unholy ritual.
“Do you know what might have left these lines?” Barker prodded.
“It had washed off in the tide, but I found traces of it. It was common whitewash. I believe she had a reaction to the lime. Her skin was so sensitive it left the marks behind, you see.”
“What are these random marks on the stomach?” I asked.
“Those are very interesting. They are burns also, but not like the others. They left a residue. Wax. Candle wax, to be precise. And this thin mark just under the breastbone is a bruise. She was struck by something small there, no more than a few centimeters long. It can’t have hurt her much. Death was due to manual strangulation, like the other girls.”
“May I?” Barker asked. He reached forward and placed his thumbs on the bruises where her killer’s thumbs had been, then slid his fingers around. Whoever the killer was, he had hands smaller than my employer.
“He took a souvenir, like the others,” I noted.
“Yes, the index finger on the right hand at the first knuckle. It was a clean cut, shears of some sort, I would say. The wound was not ragged.”
The slight pressure of Barker’s fingers on the corpse’s neck was enough to force a small sigh from the corpse’s cold lips. The three of us sprang back, but it proved to be a normal reaction. All the same, Dr. Trent settled the sheet around her, unconsciously tucking it in as if she had been merely asleep. Barker continued to regard her while I copied notes from the file into my notebook.
“Has Inspector Swanson read your report?” Barker asked.
“No, sir, not yet.”
“That’s a mercy, at least.”
“Might we borrow that report?” I asked.
Trent shook his head, and Barker looked at me. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought it might give us something to bargain with.”
Signing out at the morgue desk, we walked several streets to the Basin Docks and counted seagulls. I bought a penny loaf from a street vendor, and we spent the next half hour breaking it into bits and tossing it into the water while the gulls cartwheeled and dived after them.
“Ho’s?” he asked, clapping the crumbs from his fingers.
We weren’t more than a few streets from the tearoom where Barker’s Chinese friend conducted business and collected information.
