The Five Bells and Bladebone (27 page)

Mrs. Mulholland was talking about the days before Sadie “went to the bad.”

“How do you mean, ma’am?” asked Wiggins.

“Wild, too clever by half, just like her mother. That’d be Bessie Mulholland.
My
maiden name was Case.” She tapped Wiggins’s notebook, and inclined her head toward her husband. “
His
sister,” making sure the sergeant understood the Cases were quite another kettle of fish.

Mulholland had turned from the window to challenge this: “She weren’t like the rest of us. A black sheep, was Bessie. And what about that brother of yours —?”

Wiggins interrupted by saying smoothly, “I know what you mean. I’ve a sister myself.” He went on: “But exactly how ‘bad’ was ‘bad’ in the case of your Sadie?”

“Sarah,” said the aunt. “Named after her in the Bible —”

“Was it drugs, then? Men?”

Mulholland apparently felt he had kept out of it long enough. “She was getting up to all sorts of things, even when she wasn’t as old as Tom. I think she had all the conscience of a cat. And I’ve never known anyone who could put it over on you like Sarah could. Stand there and lie through her teeth and look innocent as anything —”

“She must have done. Looked innocent, I mean. After all, she got into the Little Sisters of Charity. A Mother Superior is usually nobody’s fool.”

There was an extended, embarrassed silence. The Mulhollands did not look at one another — he turned back to the window; she studied her interlaced fingers.

“It’s odd, your niece’s choosing the convent, especially given the sort of young girl she was.”

Mulholland turned his big square face on Jury. “That was the agreement, that she’d stay for a year at least. It was either that or she needn’t come home.”

His wife twisted in her chair. “Sorts of things we Cases never got up to.”

“A course not,” said her husband. “Who the hell ever fancied
the Case women enough to drag their knickers —”

Thereupon came a weepy cry from Gladys, who dropped her head in her hands and sobbed her small hankie into a tiny ball. Wiggins offered her his handkerchief.

“What you’re saying is that Sadie — pardon, Sarah — was given the choice of sorting herself out with the Little Sisters or sorting herself out on the road,” said Jury.

“Damned right. And what’s wrong with that?” A bull pawing dust couldn’t have looked more belligerent.

Jury felt sorry for him, in a way. Having the care of a sister’s child and having the child turn out to be a bad lot. It must have been hard for him to take, a reflection on his own abilities to raise children properly.

“Nothing at all. I don’t blame you. Probably do the same myself in your position.” Jury ignored Wiggins’s stare.

Neither of them responded; both of them seemed relieved he’d have done the same.

 • • • 

He was definitely one of Hamlet’s gravediggers, thought Jury. Willie Cooper always struck Jury as a doctor who could barely suppress his glee at the sight of a corpse, particularly when Scotland Yard was in on the cutting-up, even more especially when it was Jury. Or “R.J.,” as Cooper chose to call him. Jury had been watching as Cooper made his careful measurements, described every bruise, scratch, mark, the chief of which were the abrasions on the victim’s back. There were two superficial knife wounds; the one that killed her was the penetration of the lung in the upper apex. Blood, a good two pints of it, had seeped into the chest cavity.

“Single-edged,” said Cooper.

To Jury it sounded all too familiar.

Cooper continued talking: “She could have slipped on the wet stairs, slipped or been pushed, to make those marks on the back. The clothes were torn.”

“Meaning someone made a grab for her?”

Cooper looked up at him. Cheerful as he was in other ways, the eyes had a dead look as if they mirrored the eyes of all of the dead he’d seen. “I was talking.” He folded two sticks of gum in his mouth, then collected a hair specimen, which he bagged. He was in clinical white, a rubber cap imprisoning his hair, surgical gloves on his hands. He stood with his arms akimbo, hands against his waist. “Not bad, R.J. In pretty good repair, considering the cadaver spent some thirty hours in combat with the cruel sea, as it were.”

“River. And the cadaver was washed over by the tide, that’s all. So is that your best guess, thirty hours?”

Willie Cooper selected a saw from the tray, shook his head, put it back. He was chewing gum furiously, smiling all the while. “When did you ever know me to guess, R.J.?” He paused, angling his head like a carpenter taking measurements. “I don’t feel like the skull-work right now. Let’s just slit her for openers.” When Jury didn’t smile, Cooper said, “Not a bad pun; so what’s with you tonight? Have dinner with a sword-swallower, or something? Would you get the fucking tape over here, you bloody idiot? This one’s run out.”

The request was not directed at Jury but at a Pakistani attendant. Despite the words, the tone was perfectly good-natured. The attendant was at the table in two steps with a fresh tape.

Cooper took an instrument from his tray and drew a smart line from sternum to pubis. He then lay back the folds of flesh and looked over the organs with all the enthusiasm of a shopper who can’t make up his mind given so much on the sale table. He removed them one by one — liver, pancreas, kidneys — telling the tape about the condition of each. “Heavy smoker. Lung looks emphysematous, just the bare beginnings. Liver: slightly jaundiced, no scars.” Each of the organs was bagged separately and carefully labeled by the attendant. That was one reason Jury
liked Cooper’s work; he didn’t send a slop-bucket of organs to headquarters. Some doctors did just that.

The further he got into his work, the more momentum the gum-chewing picked up. “Get me that report, Ivor.” That’s what he called all of his assistants. The Pakistani was off and back again with a sheet of paper. “Okay, an elliptical puncture wound half an inch long. You said the victim in Northants was killed with a sword stick?”

“Dagger-cane.”

Willie Cooper was dumping entrails and what he liked to call “trash organs” back into the corpse. “Well, these wounds weren’t made by one. Though it’s possible more than one knife was involved.” He pointed to an elliptical wound. “Could even be double-edged, that one. This other’s cleaner, slightly narrower.” He stopped, lit a cigarette. “Flick-knife, I’d say. Maybe a knife-fight.” He smoked as intensely as he chewed, in quick little jabs. “Amazing, isn’t it. This is supposed to be such an exact science. The things we can’t tell for sure. Like rigor. Everything depends on knowing the conditions. In her case” — he looked down at the corpse — “we pretty much know them, that’s why I said thirty hours, give an hour, take an hour.”

Jury smiled. “Pathologists do guess.”

“Just like you, R.J.” He had put out his cigarette and picked up a small saw. “It’s the sound I don’t like. No matter how many I’ve sawed, I just can’t seem to get used to the grating.” To the mortuary attendant he said, “Sew her up in a few minutes. I need a rest.”

Willie Cooper hoisted himself up onto the table beside the corpse, half-sitting, half-standing. Jury marveled at the little scene. Smoothing her hand, Cooper might have been the abstracted lover, lost in a brown study that the girl on the bed asleep couldn’t share. “See this?” He spread the fingers. “The slashes on the index finger and thumb tell you she was fending off an attack. So what about this Northants stiff?”

“He was murdered, according to the medical examiner there, between nine and midnight. What I’m wondering is this: could it be give an hour, take an hour either way?”

“That depends
entirely
on conditions, Jury, as you effing well know. Give me the details.”

Jury told him about the
secrétaire,
the delivery to the antiques shop, the discovery.

Willie Cooper looked down at the body on the table, laughed slightly, shook his head, as if they shared a joke to which the superintendent was not privy. “What you’re getting at is could the same person have stiffed the Northants chap and my girl here? Sure.”

“You don’t get what I mean: could she have been killed
before
him?”

He looked doubtfully at the frozen face on the table, turned his head this way and that, as if adjusting the light for a camera angle, and said, “That would put Sadie’s death earlier, your chap’s later. Hm. You’re working against the evidence, R.J., for what it’s worth. The flow of air in that desk-thing would have speeded up the rigor; the cold river water would have slowed hers down.” He nodded toward the body. “But that makes no odds, since we can allow for that.” His eyes had a sheen to them like glassy splinters when he squinted up at Jury. Willie Cooper didn’t balk at going against the evidence, since he often found evidence inconclusive. “It’s as much an art as a science, isn’t it.” He held up the saw. “This is still all we have to get to the brain. What theory are you playing round with, R.J.? Do you think someone killed Sadie here and
then
killed him?”

“Let’s say it’s a possibility.”

“But why?”

“Because she might not be Sadie.”

 • • • 

Across the little park in Islington where he was locking up the car, Jury looked at the house converted into flats.
The other houses in the terrace were dark, except for the flickering bluish light of tellies here and there, casting shadows on walls like Plato’s cave.

But not his house; no, it was carnival time, apparently, there. Everyone’s flat was lit (including his own, even though he was out here). And the everyone included only three people. However, since Carole-anne was one of them, Jury added on another dozen. Which would have accounted for the music, the singing, the stomping.

It was when he let himself into his own flat — no key necessary; Carole-anne had already been there and collected his stereo — that he realized the Hippodrome was right above him, in the empty flat.

One of the neighbors must have been watching for his return, for the phone rang before he could toss his keys on the desk. Yes, it was Mrs. Burgess from the house next door. Since he was a policeman, he was the neighborhood ear. When it came down to noises in his own house, his ear got a truly good workout. He merely listened and murmured while he fixed himself a sturdy drink of whiskey, put down the receiver and shut his eyes, while the distant cricket-chirp of Mrs. Burgess’s voice went on. Occasionally, he plucked the receiver from the sofa cushion and sympathized. After fifteen minutes of the Burgess voice threading through the blast upstairs, Jury told her (for the dozenth time) how difficult it was for her, but the place was swarming with cops, which accounted for the noise. They were making a drug bust, only they’d got the wrong house and it was as well she’d be up because they’d be over —

Click
went the receiver on her end. He shoved his own telephone under the couch as if it were a bad dog, and stretched out on the sofa, mercifully long. Was there a piano up there? Someone was certainly playing hell-for-leather. It was a rugless hardwood floor, and he could hear voices raised in a surge of patriotism seldom heard. If it
was up to that bunch, England would definitely be saved.

Mrs. Wassermann, Carole-anne, and Tommy. Three people sounding like three dozen.

He lay there perfectly relaxed, his drink balanced on his stomach, and, unlike his neighbor, enjoying every minute of it. Sleep, by comparison, seemed drab, almost unwholesome. He kept trying to get up, to go upstairs and join them, but his mind was too weighted down with thoughts of Watermeadows.

The death of Hannah Lean would take Sadie Diver straight out of this poor Limehouse world and into a garden paradise, where the only thing that stood between her and enough money to buy half the county was Lady Summerston.

When he felt himself tighten up again, he took a large slug of his drink and tried to empty his mind.

It was helped by the slacking of ragtime upstairs. There was a silence, and into that silence poured the mournful harmonica. Feet scraped across the floor, slow dancing to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda.”

Jury slept.

S
TREAKS
was a hairdressing salon just off the Tottenham Court Road, a glass door with a big chrome handle located under a mock-chrome awning with the name trailing wisps of silver behind it, making Jury wonder if it was absolutely de rigueur that one leave the emporium with a multicolored hairdo.

“ ’Ello, love,” said the young woman behind the kidney-shaped chrome counter. Her hennaed hair licked upward, bluey strands interspersing the brassy orange, in a caricature of hell-fire. Looking Jury up and down, she said they might be able to fit him in before their next customer, who was due in at ten but was always late. Indeed, she could do him herself.

Jury smiled, said he hadn’t come to be “done,” and showed her his identification. “I’d like some information about one of your employees. Her name’s Sarah, or Sadie, Diver.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know her, do I?” She smiled as if that settled the point, her heart-shaped face cupped in her two hands. “You’d look absolutely smashing with just a bit of Firebrand, just a rinse, you know.”