The Murder of Patience Brooke (13 page)

‘Goodbye, then.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Dickens, and thank you.’

Dickens left the shop. He had time to go to the offices of
The Examiner
and see John Forster on whom he had neglected to call the previous day. As he walked, he wondered. Perhaps his crooked man and Davey’s were not the same at all – there were plenty of odd-looking people about. Yet, there had been something about the face, something darting, something which suggested a man with something to hide – an impression, certainly, but a powerful one. It was worth Scrap looking at Gray’s Inn. He had assumed that his crooked man was going to Lincoln’s Inn, but he could be a clerk at Gray’s where Dickens had started his career as a lawyer’s clerk. He thought, too, about Eleanor and Tom and the bad-tempered man in the shop, and Eleanor’s wordless communication with Scrap. Something was not quite right there. He would have to find an opportunity to ask about the absent father. After seeing John, he would go home and change for the early supper with Sam and his wife. He remembered Sam’s words about Posy – it was time to put on the coat with the brass buttons, the bright waistcoat – and the diamond pin.

Dickens knocked at the door of number
20
, Norfolk Street. It opened suddenly as if someone had been waiting just inside, which Posy had. She took Dickens’s greatcoat and his hat, laying them reverently on the hall table. She looked at him approvingly. Here was company indeed. Opening the parlour door, she announced, ‘Mr Charles Dickens.’ Elizabeth came forward to meet him, smiling at the child’s gravity.

‘Good evening, Mr Dickens,’ she said with the right amount of formality, ‘and thank you, Posy.’ Posy bobbed a curtsey to both and went out.

The room was small and neat in the firelight which glowed on the glasses and silverware arranged on a small table. It was obviously a quiet and well-loved home. There were candles on the mantel over which a gilt mirror shone reflecting the dark-haired Elizabeth in her deep red dress, and Dickens whose diamond pin caught the light. She smiled again at him.

‘How do you like our parlourmaid? She is changed is she not?’

‘She is. You have looked after her well. When I think what she was. She is a credit to you.’

‘And to herself. She looks forward, she is eager to learn and has much potential, I think.’

‘Indeed. What she might have been does not bear thinking about. I have written about that shocking place at Tooting where she started out. It was brutally conducted and vilely kept, a hateful pace and a stain on a civilised land.’ Dickens was fierce. He had fulminated in
The Examiner
against the orphanage run by Benjamin Drouet who had been brought to trial for manslaughter then acquitted in the teeth of the evidence that the cholera victims in his care had been left starving and without medical care. Posy, who had no idea of her age or birthday, had started life at the orphanage after which she had been apprenticed to an artificial flower maker whose business had collapsed. Posy’s discoloured teeth had been created by the poison used to dye the artificial leaves, arsenite of copper, probably. Posy had lived on the streets until Dickens found her, like Davey, hunched in a doorway where she was offering a pitiful bunch of dilapidated flowers for sale.

Elizabeth saw how the passion of his indignation glowed in his luminous eyes. She had read his articles in
The Examiner
and she had read his books. He was extraordinary, yet oddly vulnerable in his slightness. She was nearly as tall as he. She could understand Sam’s liking for him and the almost protectiveness of her husband towards Charles Dickens, a man whose fame should give him all the confidence in the world, and yet who looked at Sam sometimes as if he envied him.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Jones, to go on so but this is a matter close to my heart.’

‘Elizabeth, please.’ She smiled at him and he admired her rich, glossy brown hair, dark eyes and dark rose complexion. Sam Jones was a fortunate man in having this lovely, bright woman as his wife. ‘I share your feelings,’ she said, ‘and so does Sam who sees so much misery in his work.’

‘He is a good man,’ said Dickens. ‘I admire him for his good heart and his toughness. He has been so careful in this matter we are investigating.’

‘Yes, he has told me of Patience Brooke and your determination to find out who killed her.’

Sam Jones came in. ‘I am sorry, my love, to be so late. I have been delayed at Bow Street. Charles, I am glad to see you here. Let us eat now.’

Elizabeth went out to return with Posy and the food: almond soup followed by beef à la mode, and then baked apple dumplings. They talked of Patience Brooke, and Dickens told of the disappointment that Scrap had not yet found the man he had seen in Whetstone Place, of Dickens’s certainty that the man he had seen was Davey’s man with the crooked face, and of his idea for Scrap to extend his search to Gray’s Inn. He told them about Eleanor Brim, Tom and Poll, and his anxieties about who was looking after them. Elizabeth thought she might visit the shop – she might befriend them and find out more. Sam told them of Rogers’s idea about the missing persons notice, and he reported their discussion of Patience having perhaps been married and had a child.

‘Then it might be as you thought, Sam, that our man with the crooked face is not necessarily the murderer – he may be acting for someone. It would be hard to imagine Patience married to such a man. Think of Davey’s fear of him, and the glimpse I had made me shudder – I know, Sam, it was only a glimpse – but I had an impression of something unwholesome.’

‘We need to do two things – find our unwholesome pedlar and find your Alice Drown. Either one might be able to point us in the direction of Patience’s earlier life – and family, if she had one.’

‘I wonder about the possibility of a child,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Perhaps he or she died. That may be why Patience left her husband.’ Sam shot a concerned glance at her but she only said, ‘It is all right, my dear. There are secrets here that throw light on the murder. I am sure of it. Someone hated her – think of what he did to her. Someone who felt she had betrayed him –’

‘Or someone who had something to gain from her death – who wanted something that her death might gain him,’ said Dickens.

‘Money?’ asked Sam.

‘Or,’ said Elizabeth slowly, ‘another, new wife?’

‘An excellent point, Elizabeth,’ said Dickens.

‘It is. But now we must go and seek out Edward Drown.’

Dickens and Jones went out into the dark streets to make their way to Wapping Old Stairs where they would meet the two constables and their police boat. Their cab took them along busy Oxford Street, to Fleet Street, south towards the river down Farringdon Street and along Thames Street into the dark purlieus of Wapping High Street and the Stairs. The night was raw and they could smell the river as they descended from the cab. They shivered in the mean wind blowing off the brown water as they went down the twenty-two stairs slimed with green and mud to stand and wait for the police boat. The water slapped against the various boats and hulks moored there. The muddy shore was strewn with washed-up objects waiting to be gathered next morning by the mudlarks, mostly children, but some women known as tide-waitresses who made their living by selling on the bits and pieces they found: part of an old cask, old rope, pieces of coal, bits of old iron, and whitened bones, whether human or animal Dickens did not care to think.

The rusty creaking of the inn sign above The Town of Ramsgate
sounded eerily like the gibbet of nearby Executioner's Dock to where the notorious pirates had been brought from the Marshalsea or Newgate to swing in their dance of death on the short, terrible rope; the bones he saw might well be those of some hanged man bound in chains, left in the water until three cold tides washed over him, eroding him to a swollen lump of decay for the fishes to eat. The thought made Dickens shudder. The silence was broken from time to time by some hoarse cry, the sound of glass breaking and running feet. Superintendent Jones stood impassive in the faded lamplight. He had heard it all before. He knew, as Dickens did, what went on in the maze of passages and tunnels behind them. This was a terrible place; in the alleys dreadful lives were suddenly stopped; children grubbed for a living in filthy gutters; women and girls were bought and sold; boys were abused, beaten and sodomised; young men were stabbed for the price of a tot of rum. Many tongues were spoken here; sailors came from China and lay insensible in rotten opium dens; there were Danes, Finns, Malays, Lascar seamen, exiles from Poland, Germany and Italy, all crammed in the narrow threads of alleys woven round the docks. And all Jones could do, and Dickens could do, was to save whom they could and bring justice to the dead whom they knew about, which was why they stood with this darkness clinging about them like a filthy cloak.

They heard the working of oars in their rowlocks and the police boat appeared with its cargo of three constables including Constable Rogers, his eager face alight. Dickens and Jones climbed in, and the two river police manoeuvred the boat away from the shore. They had to cross the river against the tide, avoiding the traffic bearing down on them, the long lines of barges bringing goods to the docks. Looking back, Dickens could see Shadwell dock with its massive warehouses stocked with tobacco, wines, brandy, port, coffee and spices carried across the wide seas by sailing ships to be bought by wealthy men in their spacious houses and comfortable clubs not two miles from here but a world away. The boat rocked on the rolling water as the rowers pulled hard. Dickens held on tight as the slanting rain drove into their faces and the cold seeped into their bones. On the other side they passed the ironically named Cherry Garden Pier and Fountain Stairs, and worked their way up to St Saviour's dock, the inlet which led to Jacob's Island.

Jacob's Island, the haunt where Dickens's own Bill Sikes had met his maker, was dreadful enough in the day, but at dark it was grim indeed. It seemed colder here with the sleety stinging rain borne on the bleak wind. Now further up into the creek, the water was still. It was black, almost solid. Above it were grimy warehouses lining the water, looming tall like enormous gravestones, and cracked and blistered barges were moored at the warehouse quays. Deeper into the darkness and the smell of the graveyard drifted along the scummy water; it was a smell of decay, of corruption, a smell of sulphur gas created by the once-white lead paint, peeling and black now from the doorposts and window sills. It was a stench of rotting fish and decayed carcases; whether human or animal, it was not bearable to think about. It was sickening; Dickens held his handkerchief to his mouth. The boat crept along in the half-light; a greenish, misty vapour hovered over the water like cobwebs. Sometimes the water seemed clogged with red where the leather works poured out their noxious liquids, as though blood had congealed in it. Lights bobbed in occasional barges and boats, peering through the vapour like bleared eyes. Dickens thought of the quiet, old abbey of Bermondsey whose monks had built St Saviour's dock when the sweet tributary of the River Neckinger had flowed into the Thames. He thought of Elizabeth Woodville, Queen to Edward IV, sequestered in the abbey five hundred years ago, praying for the deliverance of her two boys, Edward and Richard, from the hands of the crookback, Richard III. Crookback, Crookface, he thought again of the man who haunted their dreams, half expecting the twisted face to emerge from the miasma of smell and mist to sing its ghastly song.

The place was a jumble of rickety houses and bridges leading into grimy courts and impossible alleys which twisted and turned and came back on one another so that you could never find anywhere nor ever get out. There were innumerable secret doors and passages linking attics and roofs, the lairs of thieves and murderers. The houses, some dating as far back as the reign of Charles II, held each other up like drunken wretches – if one falls the others do. Some had wooden balconies accessed by crazy staircases with gaps where the stairs and railings should be, some of which stopped suddenly in mid-air as if they had forgotten what they were doing. Some had galleries precariously hung over the stinking ditch. It was impossible to tell what held them up. There was a woman hanging out a quantity of yellowing linen on a cracked balustrade. They could make out a white face in the mist. The constable steered the boat closer so that he could shout to her, ‘Edward Drown – you know him?'

‘Down there,' she called, ‘three or four houses along.' Her voice echoed across the water, then the mist closed round her, and she vanished like a ghost.

They crawled along the water, past the ancient inn, so aptly named, The Ship Aground, whose denizens were no doubt drinking themselves to death within – better than death by cholera, thought Dickens cynically. Something slipped into the water, a rat perhaps. A drunken man – or woman – lay insensible, the head inches from the stinking water. They slid along the oily water and saw a man in a boat at the next landing. He was stowing away some baskets, a few miserable household articles, a couple of cane chairs, a trunk and some threadbare blankets. A woman came out of the house carrying a child in her arms.

‘Edward Drown?' shouted the constable.

The man looked up and stared at them suspiciously. ‘Who wants to know?' he asked belligerently.

‘Superintendent Jones of Bow Street,' Sam called out. ‘I need information – about your sister. We'll come on to your landing.'

The constable manoeuvred their boat so that they could step on to the landing where Edward Drown waited sullenly, and his wife shushed the child in her arms.

‘Are you leaving here?' asked Dickens looking at the possessions on the landing.

‘Gettin' out,' said Drown tersely, ‘before we die 'ere. Lost one child to the sickness already.' He was thin but strong-looking, with the same flashing dark eyes that Dickens remembered in his sister. There was determination in him; the urge to survive was alive in those eyes.