The Mourning Bells (25 page)

M
r. Ambrose answered the door personally, and his face registered genuine surprise to see Violet again.

“Mrs. Harper, what a surprise. Do you have news to report about the bodies at Brookwood?”

Violet held out a hand, and he shook it in a firm grip, then invited her inside. His office, despite being loaded with shelves of medical books and instruments, was once again spotlessly neat. Violet couldn’t help but feel admiration for someone who kept his working place so tidy, even to the point of having his cousin help him.

A disastrous home was perfectly fine as long as someone who dealt with the dead—or the seriously ill, as Mr. Ambrose did—was immaculate at work.

Violet shook her head at such ridiculous approval. She was here to ferret out a killer.

A closed door at the rear of his office led to another room, presumably his anatomical examination room. Was it as tidy as this one?

“I was wondering if I might ask you a few questions, sir,” she said, once again playing a demure and retiring lady.

“Of course.” Ambrose didn’t sit behind his desk this time but instead stood in front of it with Violet. Was he eager to go somewhere ? Violet would have preferred to have the expanse of the desktop between them.

“You already recall that there were two bodies who were shockingly alive at Brookwood. I have been looking into some peculiarities around them, and my investigation led me to Royal Surrey County Hospital.”

“Yes, I have had many bodies delivered there and have taught the occasional seminars in anatomy and diseases. I understand Nathan Blackwell is a most competent superintendent.” Ambrose smiled as if to encourage her to go on.

“I just left there a short while ago. The bodies of an elderly man and woman were dropped off yesterday. Was this your doing?”

“Indeed it was,” Ambrose said. “As I told you, I occasionally purchase bodies for my own experimentation, but I also periodically handle them on behalf of undertakers who cannot accompany them down here and handle the transfer to the hospital. They telegraph me, and I come to Brookwood to meet the necropolis train and transport the coffins in a wagon I keep at the mews a few blocks away.”

So that was why Ambrose was poking about the coffins at Brookwood, as an agent for undertakers shipping bodies there. Violet thought the undertakers should accompany the bodies themselves as a sign of respect for the dead, but it certainly wasn’t illegal for them to pay Ambrose to do so.

“Mr. Blackwell said you were there with another man,” she said, remembering that the superintendent referred to a second man who was short and slight.

“There are several young men in the neighborhood I hire to help me. Most of them have little ambition but are willing to do a night’s work for a few coins.”

“Who, then, was the undertaker for the elderly couple?” Violet was almost afraid of what the answer might be.

“Let me see . . .” Ambrose went behind the desk, opened a drawer, and shuffled through some papers, eventually nodding and pulling one out. “It was for Augustus Upton.”

Violet blanched. How had she gone so completely off the train rails as to forget about the puffed-up, greasy undertaker? Trying to recover, she said, “But Mr. Blackwell said that two men from Crugg Undertaking were the ones who brought in the bodies.”

Ambrose shook his head. “Mr. Blackwell was mistaken. There have been no body transports from Julian Crugg since he was, ahem, carried off last week. Actually, a funny thing happened with yesterday’s transport. Upton sent me a telegram asking me to pick up the bodies, and later, when I returned from doing so, I had another telegram from him, attempting to cancel my involvement, saying he was planning to come on the next morning’s train to take care of them. Of course, it was too late by then, and I telegraphed him to say so.”

Violet blinked rapidly, digesting what the physician had told her. Upton must have wished to cancel Ambrose’s involvement so that he could come to Surrey himself, accompany the body, and mutilate Mr. Wesley. But that meant . . . that someone had sent him word that Violet was poking around. Who was it? Mr. Blackwell? Who else could it have been but the hospital superintendent?

Violet couldn’t believe that she had been so blind about the conceited Mr. Upton. What she couldn’t understand, though, was why he had chosen such an unsavory sideline. She had many more questions, too. Had he attacked Susanna in the park? Was there any connection between him and the banker, Mr. Hayes, or was Violet’s theory that he or other bankers were murdering their debtors a completely ridiculous idea?

Well, she might not understand the
why
of what was happening, but apparently Violet had learned the
who
. The most pressing problem now was how to stop Upton before he stopped her.

 

Violet was worried that Augustus Upton’s shop would be closed for the day by the time she arrived, but as she approached it, she could see through the door’s paned window inset that Upton was still there. In fact, he was comforting a woman dressed in black silk with expensive ebony lacing around the hem. How odd. Violet would expect a society lady to command the undertaker’s presence at her home. Only the middle and lower classes would take themselves to the undertaker’s shop.

“What am I to do? How could my sister do this to me?” The woman’s wailing cut clearly through the glass and probably down to the next block. “Clemmie, how I hate you.”

Upton patted the woman’s back with one tentac—
hand
and offered her a handkerchief with the other. “There, there, Mrs. Harrison. You’ve had a terrible shock is all. You will forget what your sister did in time.”

The woman dabbed daintily at her nose with it, as if all of a sudden remembering her position in life.

The undertaker looked up as the door’s bells jangled upon Violet’s entry, his expression changing from curiosity to one of relish as he realized who had just entered. He held up a hand to Violet, a signal for her to wait while he tended to his customer.

Violet walked to the other side of the shop, pretending to examine a portrait on the wall. The photograph employed a technique that exploited grieving family members who were also interested in spiritualism. In the picture, a photograph of the mourner sitting in a chair was superimposed with an image of the deceased, artfully arranged to appear to be looking down upon the mourner, almost like an angel watching over his charge.

Sometimes photographers superimposed a picture of the deceased such that the body appeared to be ascending upward, into the arms of an angel welcoming the new soul into eternity. Photographers charged nearly double for these sly but enthralling pictures, which were frequently hand-tinted. Violet wholeheartedly approved of postmortem photography, but not these . . . these . . . hoaxes, which probably convinced people that every death entailed a direct entry into heaven, when many probably resulted in the complete opposite.

Still ostensibly concentrating on the framed photograph, Violet turned slightly to see that Upton had escorted Mrs. Harrison to a plush chair of sea-green velvet. Mrs. Harrison twisted the handkerchief through her fingers while Upton retrieved a tray of mourning jewelry for her to look through. The woman’s tears ceased as she was instantly distracted by the baubles. The handkerchief fluttered to the floor as she picked out a locket and tried it against her shirtwaist.

Upton now crossed the room to Violet, smoothing down his hair and straightening his jacket. “More questions today, Mrs. Harper? I am obviously quite busy, but am more than happy to assist you shortly. In fact, I have remembered a story about a man I once buried in the most unusual coffin—” he said in a low tone.

Violet was still concentrating on Mrs. Harrison and nodded toward the woman. “She is mercurial in her grief.”

He shrugged, making him look like a penguin in his tightly corseted frame. “Her younger sister was a bit wild. Still unmarried at twenty-four, she decided to explore the streets of St. Giles on her own one evening, which was bad enough as it is. But a gent mistook her for a prostitute, and when she refused his advances, well, she ended up like many a fallen woman. The family is mortified. In times like this, I wish I had some laudanum to give them to calm their nerves.”

That explained why Mrs. Harrison didn’t want Upton coming to her home, which would only serve to pique the neighbors’ interest and thus make public the news of her sister’s indiscretion.

“I can only imagine how distraught she is,” Violet said. She was having a difficult time concentrating on anything but the tormented woman in the chair, who had just bent over to retrieve the handkerchief and now held it to one eye even as she continued pawing through the jewelry tray with her other hand.

“Indeed, but she will recover. I know how to use charm to soothe them in their grief,” Upton said with great confidence.

“I suspect she needs sympathy, not charm.” Violet doubted, though, that he had a genuinely sympathetic suction cup on his tentacles.

As usual, though, Violet was not approaching her subject in a winsome or tactful manner, although Upton was too self-absorbed to notice. “You may one day serve the likes of Mrs. Harrison. I can show you some clever approaches for attracting society to your shop.”

Violet didn’t have the heart to tell him she had served the queen herself. Besides, she was here for answers, not to enter a mourner-handling contest. She decided to be direct right now rather than wait for him to finish with his client.

“You may be interested to know that I am well aware of the two elderly bodies you asked Mr. Byron Ambrose to accompany to Brookwood, later telegraphing him and stating that you would go down yourself to take the bodies on to Royal Surrey County Hospital.”

Upton’s eyes goggled, as though he had transformed from an octopus into a frog. “Mrs. Harper, you are truly daft. I have no idea what you speak of. What elderly bodies? What do they have to do with me? As you know, I am a well-respected businessman who—”

“Plenty, sir. You were eager to take Mr. Ambrose’s place in delivering the bodies to the hospital, for you needed to visit another body there, Mr. Raymond Wesley. He had survived being installed in a coffin by you, rising alive from it not two weeks ago. You were panicked, were you not, to realize that I had discovered him lying in the storage room. You had murdered him and needed to return to cover up your method of murder. Accompanying two new bodies to the hospital provided you with that opportunity, did it not?”

Upton’s normally jovial expression went blank. “Madam, I believe you may have lost your senses. Why did I need to murder anyone, much less this Mr. Wesley you’re making such a fuss about?”

“I believe that after this man rose from his coffin, he realized that he had been there due to your incompetence. You told me yourself that you can have a body buried in no time.” Violet snapped her fingers as Upton had once done. “Someone who buries hastily is bound to make serious errors about his customers. Mr. Wesley came back to you, perhaps you argued, perhaps he demanded a bribe to remain quiet about your ineptitude. You became enraged and murdered him. His body was largely unmarked, so I suspect you somehow choked him, perhaps by stuffing something in his throat. I didn’t think to check there on my initial examination of him.”

“These are the ravings of a Bedlamite. How could you imagine that a revered man of undertaking such as myself could be involved in such a villainous scheme? It is complete nonsense.” Upton was glancing nervously over at Mrs. Harrison, who seemed to be taking an interest in the raised whispers across the room.

Violet continued. “Somehow, you discovered that I had taken an interest in Wesley’s body. Perhaps you and Mr. Blackwell are in league with one another. You were desperate to return to mutilate the body to cover up what you had originally done to him. After all, desecration is a far lesser crime than murder, isn’t it? You already had plans to ship a couple of bodies through Mr. Ambrose to Royal Surrey County Hospital, hence your ill-fated plan to take Mr. Ambrose’s place. Undaunted, you simply went later and did your heinous work.”

“Mrs. Harper, clearly you are more hysterical than Mrs. Harrison. That is the most preposterous, ridiculous story I’ve ever heard, and I have been an undertaker for nearly twenty years.”

Violet refused to be mocked. “You should know that Inspectors Magnus Pompey Hurst and Langley Pratt, of Scotland Yard, are very interested in this case.”

Upton shook his hands out as if ridding himself of Violet’s accusation. It was a disturbing sight. “Dear lady, what case? Is London so devoid of thieves and murderers that Scotland Yard is concerned with two decrepits who have ended up at a teaching hospital for dissection? Or another body that some inebriated medical student ravaged?”

Violet hadn’t thought of that possibility. Surely Wesley’s destruction was not the result of a medical student having experimented on it overnight. Upton was attempting to distract her. “No, they are concerned with a case of possibly three murders, most likely caused by an undertaker who is being careless with the bodies in his charge.”

Upton glanced back at Mrs. Harrison once more. “I am not careless, merely efficient. Now if you will excuse me . . .” He started to return to his client, then turned back to Violet, his expression contrite.

“See here, Mrs. Harper, I’ll admit that I sell bell coffins and other safety devices for a large profit, but there’s no crime in that. A man of my stature has to offer whatever it is the public wants and is willing to pay for. And perhaps I drop hints to customers that Brookwood Cemetery requires that safety coffins be used for any burials there so that they feel obligated to purchase them.”

This was a surprise. Violet held her expression steady, as if she already had known this piece of information.