Untitled (40 page)

   "Well." Mrs. Johnson lifts her head, though her cheeks have turned a deep pink. "You've put by more than a bit, haven't you, love? Can't turn a blind eye to that."

   Cartwright moves forward, edging behind Sarah in case she makes a dash for it. "Might as well admit it," he says, and she starts.

   "What am I supposed to admit to?" She gets to her feet and leans her fists on the table. "Why don't you tell me what this is all about?"

   "Think we wouldn't notice?" says Cartwright. "Mrs. Robert disappeared off somewhere and the widow fled, and everything all topsyturvy. When I went to look for you, what did I find? Mrs. Robert's jewelry box, empty as an orphan's pocket."

   The news seems to catch her off guard, for she stammers, "What? Well then." She looks about her. "The widow—it was her, must have been."

        
O
f course, the police are called in so they can decide the matter.

   They arrive, a detective and the same young constable who came after the burglary. The detective sucks at his teeth and listens to the story, says, "So your mistress has gone and run off ? Maybe she took 'em herself."

   Cartwright has to point out that she had the key; why go to the bother of breaking open the box? Yet though the detective and his constable find it all bizarre—that's the word the two of them use again and again,
bizarre
—they decide to take Sarah with them, despite her protests. After all, of the possible culprits, she's the one they have to hand.

   Mrs. Johnson follows them to the door. They're already in the street before she calls out, "How about the widow—it could have been her, couldn't it?"

   The policemen don't hear her: she hasn't shouted loudly enough for that. The only one who turns around is Sarah, then she bends her head and lets herself be taken away. As for Mrs. Johnson, she sighs and closes the door. A shame that this should happen, a crying shame. Yet as she busies herself at the stove she whistles a delicate tune that was a favorite of hers when she was a girl and that hasn't come to mind in years.

* * *

Such is the chaos of the day that it is not until after dark that Mrs. Johnson thinks to send Elsie upstairs to Price with a bowl of broth and some tea. The girl comes back five minutes later.

   "Gone, in't she?" she announces, and slides the tray back on the table.

   Mrs. Johnson is preparing a roast chicken—for whom it is uncertain, since Mr. Robert has only come back for long enough to change his clothes and drink a few glasses of wine. Then, his face haggard, he took off again with no word as to when they might expect him.

   "What?" says Mrs. Johnson.

   "Price—gone. Bed's empty, clothes all gone too."

   "Blimey," says Mrs. Johnson, and shoves the chicken back into the oven.

Chapter 38

S
unday afternoon, and the gloom of a heavy sky has settled over the city. A man in a ragged jacket is maneuvering a boat under a bridge, for he has noticed something breaking the flow of the water. The current is strong enough to make this a tricky task, especially here between the pillars where the twisting water can capsize a small boat and whisk it off in a matter of seconds.

   Now that he's pushed the boat far enough over, he lets the current move it and readies his hook. He'll only have one chance, so he crouches like a harpooner coming up on a whale. As the boat swoops under the bridge he stabs with his hook. It catches and the sudden wrench nearly pulls him into the water. The boat takes off down the river and he staggers, his catch floating along behind him. Only when he's regained his balance can he look back and see exactly what it is. A woman's body, bobbing along on his hook with the water curving up around it.

   He smiles—a good catch—and sets about securing it so he can row to shore.

   Robert steels himself; it's going to be her, but he won't break down, not in front of these men. He must control himself, no matter how bad it is, and it seems it will be bad. Still, he feels weak, as though every ounce of strength he ever had has been drained away in the last three days—has it only been three days?—since she went. In a carriage, when she'd given him no word that she'd be leaving the house, and told the servants only that she was going on an urgent errand and would be back late.

   Every time he's arrived home after his frantic search for her, after his alerting the police that she was gone and having to impress on them that she wouldn't run off—why would she?—even after falling asleep in his armchair in front of the fire, he's imagined that she would be back: dozing in their bed, perhaps, with a story about getting lost, or kidnapped, or hurt in some terrible accident. The trouble is that she is nowhere to be found. He has checked. Even the police, after he insisted, have checked. This is the best they could come up with, this body found by one of the men who trawl the waters of the Thames.

   The doctor is a Scot with a red moustache and a military bearing. He leans over the figure on the table, then says, "Brace yourself, Mr. Bentley," and lifts away the sheet.

   It is worse than he could ever have imagined.

   The head is a broken egg with no face, the torso sliced open and the entrails hanging loose, purple and red, as though snakes have invaded the cavity. One arm is missing—the left—but the other is surprisingly undamaged, as are the feet. He stares at them, but it is hard to find anything to recognize. The flesh has turned white and waxy from being in the water, and the fingers and toes are swollen.

   "Perhaps," says Dr. McPhee, "if you concentrated on looking for those little marks that we know so well on those we love. The moles, the scars."

   Mina had three moles in a line on her left arm, but that arm is gone. Robert shifts his gaze, finds it resting on the mass of hair. This, a voice from inside tells him, used to be a woman. Perhaps his wife. The breast hanging by a flap of skin may be hers, the thighs that are swollen and white, those that he has run his tongue against so many times. His head is tight. The room shifts. He reaches out, but the only thing to hold on to is the table with the corpse. There's a whistling in his ears like a storm wind, blackness rising up.

   Then a chair underneath him, his head thrust down onto his knees, and the doctor's voice breaking through the noise in his ears. "Steady there, Mr. Bentley. Now, breathe deeply, come on."

   When finally he is able to stand, the doctor helps him into his office, then arranges for a cup of tea to be brought. It takes a few minutes, and they sit in silence, Robert with his head down until the doctor tells him, "Drink this, man, it'll make you feel more like yourself."

   The tea's too sweet, but he takes a long gulp, then sets down the saucer and holds the cup between his hands.

   McPhee leans onto his elbows. "Did you recognize anything?"

   The cup is hot, too hot, but then he is colder than he has ever felt before. He shakes his head.

   "Well then, are you sure it is
not
Mrs. Bentley?"

   "No."

   The doctor comes around the desk. "Wait here, then. We can do this without putting you through that ordeal a second time."

   He lays a hand on Robert's shoulder in a friendly manner, but it makes him jump.

   It cannot be her, he tells himself. It must be her. With his mind he feels out into the world, trying to sense which is right—whether he is a widower, or a deserted husband, or merely a man whose wife has met with some misfortune from which she cannot free herself. Recently she was distracted and her temper easily sparked. Was she worried by something? Did she know trouble was coming for her?

   She'd never said much about her first husband, as though she wanted to wipe away every last memory of him. Not a happy marriage, of that he was sure. To an older man, a man who loved her with a passion but kept her too close. What woman would want such a marriage? But then, she's told him, she was a respectable but poor girl, brought up by an aunt in the country who died suddenly, and there he was—Mr. Fleet—with the means of giving her an easier life.

   Strange, he thinks, how her life was so much like the widow's. Or at least, the story the widow invented.

   She's gone too. Cartwright told him so when he got home last night, worn out and filthy from another day of searching. He hadn't cared. Let her go. Let her take what she likes and be gone. Price too. What did any of it matter if Mina was lost? Here in the doctor's office he feels as though he's sitting on the highest point of the earth and might fall. The brown linoleum is distant beyond his feet, the desk out of reach. Farther away, out of sight, the world is running along strange paths, all out of kilter.

   With a squeal the door opens. The doctor is carrying something in a metal dish. "Here, now," he says. "This should be easier on you."

   He looks at what the doctor sets in front of him. A dish of hair. He must have made some effort to dry it, because it no longer has the slick look of the mass tangled under the corpse. Dark hair. Dark brown. It could be hers. It could be. He rests his face in his hands.

   "Mr. Bentley? Mr. Bentley? Is it hers?"

   "I don't know," he says, letting his hands drop. "I can't be sure."

   Dr. McPhee sits down behind his desk. "Yes," he says, "I understand the difficulty." He nods to himself, then stares past Robert. "Do you feel up to another look?"

   Robert shakes his head. "Not right now. Besides, what good would it do? There isn't much . . . there isn't much left to recognize."

   He realizes the irony of this situation, even if Dr. McPhee doesn't say a word. An expert on the Bertillonage techniques of identification, unable to identify a body that could be his own wife's. He never measured her—why would he have? He's measured convicts and servants, but to use those callipers on Mina, what reason could there have been for that?

   How to keep searching when this might be her? Wouldn't it be better to know, by whatever means?

   "There is a way," he says at last, and the doctor looks over at him. "We'll have to call in Danforth, the fingerprint expert."

Chapter 39

D
espite the awfulness of the circumstances, Robert detects a certain smugness about Danforth. He strides about the bedroom with his magnifying glass as though he is Sherlock Holmes, looking at a hairbrush, looking at the small pot used for hair taken from the brush.

   "Just as well," he says, "that your servants have been less than assiduous." He bends to peer at the edge of the dressing table. "Generally, the greatest obstacle to my work is a housemaid trained to remove every last trace of dirt. In my business, polishing is the enemy."

   Robert sits on the edge of the bed. "The household has been in an uproar. My wife missing, the jewelry taken, the police—" He waves his hand in the air.

   "Understandable. Very understandable." Danforth points at the jewelry box, raises his eyebrows in question, though how could there be any doubt that this was the box broken into when it sits on the dressing table with its wood splintered?

   "It was the maid," Robert says flatly. "The police have taken her away."

   "Ah, the maid," says Danforth. "Possibly so." He huffs as he bends down for a better look. "Promising. Certainly the culprit did not expect the box to be examined for fingerprints. There seems to have been no attempt to wipe them away."

   He straightens up, then gives his waistcoat a tug to smooth it. "I'm hoping that if I identify the thief, it will lead us to your wife. After all, there is every chance that the theft and your wife's disappearance are related."

   Robert looks away to the window. He has hardly slept in days, has drunk too much brandy when the house was quiet. This room seems starkly bright. Not with sunshine, thanks to the low clouds hanging over the city, but too bright nonetheless. Light glares off the pillow where she laid her head until a few days ago, the polished arms of the chair where she sat to brush her hair. Now it all looks a little shabby.

   "I don't see how that could be so." He gets to his feet, crosses to the window and looks out. Two horses pulling a carriage that gleams darkly, a maid across the road coming up from the area in a hat that, he notices even from here, is bright with dyed feathers.

   "Well." Danforth clears his throat. "There are lots of possibilities. But for now—"

   Mina arranging the theft herself ? Is that what he means? Robert leans against the window frame. "Look here," he says, "my wife had absolutely no reason—"

   "Yes, yes. I didn't mean to offend you." Danforth takes a breath. "I am here to help you get to the bottom of this affair."

   "Thank you." Yet he cannot stay in this room with this man for a moment longer. "I have other business to attend to," he tells him. "If you cannot find my wife's fingerprints here and need to examine other rooms, Cartwright will be able to assist you."

   Danforth frowns. "I see. Well." He pulls at his ear. He looks about him, at the dressing table, at the bed. "Yes," he says more quietly, "perhaps that would be better."

   Robert makes his way downstairs. The house is cold—he is cold, having eaten a breakfast that was nothing more than toast and a kipper, for with so much else to do this was all that Mrs. Johnson could manage. Even the doorknob of the study is cold to the touch—not surprising, given that the room is as he left it the night before when he sat here with a decanter of brandy and his feet propped close to the fire. The decanter is still on the table, empty, and the glass is clouded with his fingerprints. As for the fire, it is dead, the hearth choked with ashes. He pulls back the curtains and the room looks more miserable. He could ring for the maid—or rather, Elsie, for it is she who has been suddenly elevated to housemaid for the time being, clattering up and down the stairs with buckets of coal and the housemaid's box.