The Thames River Murders (10 page)

“Gautier would agree, dear lady. Lacey, once we are presentable, I propose a visit to the man your surgeon suggested—Coombs was his name?”

I knew Grenville remembered the man’s name precisely—Jonas Coombs—but it would hardly do for a dandy of the
ton
to betray he had much interest in anything beyond clothes, horses, and women.

“I believe Gabriel is avid to go immediately,” Donata said. “Once Bartholomew decides that he is fit to be seen, Gabriel will return and rush off with you.”

Grenville took a languid sip of coffee. “Lacey, I believe your wife is poking fun at us.”

“As ever,” I replied.

I reflected, as we continued to eat, and Donata and Grenville exchanged witticisms—many at my expense—how much my life had changed.

I’d returned to London in the throes of melancholia, some days barely able to leave my bed. I’d known no one, had very little to my name.

Less than four years later, I was seated at the dining table of the most famous man in London, married to a beautiful woman, all of us thoroughly casual.
 

Donata was breakfasting in finery from the previous night, I in whatever clothes I’d thrown upon my person before dashing out, Marianne with very little under her silken peignoir, Grenville in a state of undress he’d never in his wildest moments let anyone see him in.
 

Donata and I had celebrated marital bliss in rundown rooms in Covent Garden, and I suspected Marianne and Grenville had been engaged in similar activities before they’d emerged for their
petite déjeuner
.
 

Yet, here we all were, earlier in the day than anyone but me would rise, Grenville and Donata utterly comfortable, Marianne and I wondering how we’d landed there.

If I’d known four years ago that such a morning awaited me, I’d have been disbelieving.

But one never anticipates where life will lead. I knew that tragedy could follow hard upon happiness, and so I treasured the moment in that sunny dining room. I hugged it to me, and let it go only with the greatest reluctance.

***

Grenville and I paid our visit to Mr. Coombs of Tottenham Court Road after Matthias and Bartholomew had ascertained that the man, in fact, still dwelled there.

Mr. Coombs had retired a few years ago, but lived in his modest house, hiring out his front room to a younger surgeon he’d trained. Coombs’s rooms were upstairs and in the back, where he lived alone, having been widowed two decades before.

Coombs was nothing like the surgeon who’d sent us to him. He was a soft man with thinning hair combed across his bald head, and wide brown eyes. He looked like a gentle cow who might amble inquisitively up to one and lower its head to be scratched.

“Captain Lacey and … Mr.
Grenville
does this say?” Coombs asked in amazement, blinking at Grenville’s card. “Not
the
Mr. Grenville from all the newspapers?”

“I am afraid so,” Grenville said. He bowed, apologetic.

Grenville had dressed after his morning bath in subdued clothes—a somber coat, plain ivory waistcoat, straight trousers over ankle-high boots, a fashion he was bringing into style. Plain gloves and a high beaver hat completed his ensemble.

I’d considered leaving Grenville in the coach while I questioned Coombs, simply because having such a well-known man visit this corner of the city would be a sensation. Those who saw him would speculate.

On the other hand, Grenville had so much cordiality in him that he could put anyone, from princes to scullery maids, at their ease. He could charm and flatter, and every word would be sincere. I tended, in my impatience, to ask abrupt questions and put others’ noses out of joint.

“Come in, come in, gentlemen.” Coombs ushered us into a small sitting room that held two chairs near a fireplace, a table with another straight chair, and a bookshelf.

Only a few books reposed on the shelves, while the others were taken up by tools of his trade. A saw, a large knife, what looked like a long-handled chisel, forceps in several sizes, and other instruments I could not identify. Having watched army surgeons on the Peninsula cut off limbs, force bones straight, and hack open men to extract shot, seeing the instruments gave me a shudder.
 

A surgeon had picked rocks and pieces of bone out of my knee, talking to me cheerfully while he set my leg and sewed me up. I hated him at the time, cursing and swearing and vowing to kill him. He’d only grinned and kept working, and afterward, I’d apologized. The man had saved my life, saved my leg, and allowed me to continue walking about, if painfully. I’d been luckier than many. The surgeon had taken my apology with a breezy, “Happy to help, Captain.”

Coombs noted my look and my walking stick. “Ah, Captain, I see one of my brethren has practiced our trade upon you. Never fear, I am retired, and not apt to pick up my hacksaw and go at you, unless of course, in dire emergency, you turned to me. Hardly likely, is it?”

“And yet,” Grenville interjected smoothly, “I have been told there was none better at setting a bone than you, that it heals cleanly and seamlessly.”

Coombs looked surprised. “Then you’ve come for my services after all. I have taught my apprentice well—I can have him examine whomever’s broken limbs you need mended. You two gentlemen look whole, so I conclude you are petitioning me on another’s behalf?”

Grenville continued. “I’m afraid the poor soul we’ve come to ask you about is already deceased.”

Coombs’s brows climbed. “Dear me.” He turned from us, but only to open a door near the fireplace and call out to a person named Humphries to bring tea. He then removed a flask from his coat and took a quick drink. “Forgive me, gentlemen. I believe I will need some fortification.” He held the flask out to Grenville in offering. “An indifferent liquor, but it coats the palate.”

Grenville politely declined, but I accepted the flask, knowing that a shared drink of spirits could soften relations between men a long way.
 

The whisky was cheap and awful, and I kept myself from coughing when I handed the flask back to Coombs.

“Have another,” I said. “I imagine you will need more fortification when I explain that we brought the deceased with us.”

Chapter Ten

Coombs was more interested than shocked. He took another nip from the flask. “Indeed? And where is this deceased person? If you are not having a joke with me. I have heard that you young fellows of the
ton
make jests of odd things.”

Grenville shrugged. “There are those who might find such a thing amusing, but we are in earnest, I assure you. All that were found were the woman’s bones. If we show you the break, can you tell us if you mended it?”

Coombs scratched his head, disheveling his thin hair. “Perhaps. I’ve never been asked such a thing before, but I will make an attempt.”

“Thank you.” Grenville moved out to the hall and the stairs to signal Matthias and Bartholomew to bring up the crate.

I reflected that whoever the poor young woman was, she had been having more of an outing in the last few days than she’d had in the ten years she slept under the magistrate’s house in Wapping.
 

Matthias pried open the crate and gently and respectfully lifted out a piece of canvas which cradled the arm bone that had been broken and mended.

Coombs took another pull from his flask and directed Matthias to lay the limb on the table. He pulled back the canvas and peered at the bone with professional interest.

“The body had deteriorated this much?” he asked, directing the question at Grenville. “She might have died long before my time.”

Grenville gestured to me. “Lacey?”

I recalled what the surgeon had speculated as he’d examined her. “The guess is that she’d been underwater about three years before she was found. Possibly five. She was discovered ten years ago, which puts her death fifteen years back at most.”

Coombs touched the arm bone, turning it to look at the break. “She mended cleanly, that is certain. Very straight, well-done. If I did not set this bone, then someone quite skilled did. It is a trick, you see, to hold the limb steady so that the break lines up perfectly. Bones fuse together again, as this one has, but if the limb is set badly, a person might lose use of it altogether.” He glanced down at my knee, as though thinking that if
he’d
had charge of my leg, it would hang straighter.

“Did you set this one?” I asked. “She was a young woman, from a middle-class family, but likely one of decent means. That is all we know.”

Coombs went silent. He brushed the bone as it lay on the canvas, then turned to me abruptly. “I would like to see the rest of her.”

And so, once more, our lady was laid out upon a table, bare and friendless, pathetic and forgotten. Coombs helped Matthias and Bartholomew place her bones appropriately, his good-natured expression deserting him as he studied the wound on the skull.

“Terrible,” he said, shaking his head. “Diabolical. The blow killed her, did it not?”

“That is what Thompson of the Thames River Police believes.”

Coombs took a step back from the table, chewing on the knuckle of his forefinger. “The River Police? They found her?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Caught under a mooring in Wapping Docks. She might have gone in there, or from a ship, or been carried there by the current. We have no idea.”

More gnawing on his bent finger. Then he removed the digit from his mouth. “I might not be able to help you, gentlemen. The set of the bone looks like my work, but who the young lady is, I cannot tell you. It has been too long … my memory is not …” Coombs’s eyes narrowed, as though his thoughts had taken him another direction, but he shook his head. “My apologies. I cannot recall.”

He was lying. He’d remembered something, but was reluctant to tell us what.

Grenville must have drawn the same conclusion, because he said in a patient tone, “I assure you, Mr. Coombs, what you tell us will go no further. We only wish to discover who this lady was and help Mr. Thompson bring her killer to justice.”

Coombs glanced at me, taking me in from my thick hair that refused to lie flat, to my boots, and the walking stick that so firmly propped me up. After a time, he sighed.

“You are a military man, sir. I have more respect for an army captain than I do for the Runners or thief-takers. I have thought of a young lady I treated perhaps fifteen years ago—I set her left ulna, as this one has been. I remember her, because it is unusual for a wellborn lady to break an arm, unless she is mad for riding. But this lady was not one for horses. I asked her.”

I curbed my impatience. “The lady’s name?”

Coombs chewed on his second finger this time, again taking me in from head to toe. “I hesitate to tell you, Captain, only because the young lady I am thinking of isn’t dead. She is very much alive. Her father keeps a shop in the Strand. But other than her, any broken bone I’ve set has belonged to men young and old, or older women who are becoming brittle. I am very sorry that I cannot help you.”

I frowned. My nameless surgeon had been very certain that Coombs had been the man to treat the injury. I trusted his assessment—I recognized intelligent competence when I met it.

“If you did not help this young woman, can you guess who did?” I asked. “A surgeon who would mend her this cleanly?”

“I am not acquainted with every surgeon in London,” Coombs said. “Perhaps she sustained the break in the country and was attended there. Farriers often set bones when no one else is available. Whoever did it has great skill, I will admit.”

I did not answer. I’d hoped our search would be as quick and simple as Denis’s surgeon had made it sound, but I was back to uncertainty.

Coombs’s apprentice banged his way in just then bearing a large tray with cups and pots. The man, already in his thirties, I’d judge, but with the gracelessness of a youth not grown into his body, jolted so much as he strode in that I feared the tea would slide off the tray and be lost.

The tray tilted precariously, and I saw Grenville poised to catch it. But the apprentice managed to set it down on the table near the bones.

Coombs gave his apprentice a stern look. “I hope you do not mind an indifferent repast, gentlemen. The lad is better at surgery than brewing.”
 

The apprentice, far from looking offended, grinned, made us a bow, and retreated.

Grenville and I partook in a polite cup of tea—which was weak and bitter. Coombs dosed his with large dollops from his flask.

Coombs had nothing to add about the body that Denis’s surgeon hadn’t already surmised, and we took our leave. Bartholomew and Matthias carried the crate down the stairs, Grenville following. All three looked disappointed with our errand.

As the others climbed into Grenville’s coach, a thought struck me. I told the coachman, Jackson, to wait, while I ascended to Coombs’s chambers again.

When I returned to the carriage, the others had settled in. Coombs’s apprentice cheerfully pushed me up inside and shut the door for me. Jackson started the horses, and we rolled into the mass of conveyances trying to push their way down the busy road.

“What did you ask him?” Grenville inquired. He held on to a strap above him as the carriage lurched, and looked as though he regretted sipping the bad tea. Grenville was prone to motion sickness.

“I asked him the name of the family of the woman he’d treated,” I said. “There may be no connection at all, but I am curious. Odd that Coombs should set the arm of a similar young woman near the same time this woman’s would have been done. How many young ladies of good middle-class families break their left arms and have them set by surgeons of equal skill?”

“I have no idea.” Grenville’s eyes began to sparkle, the carriage’s jolting forgotten. “Did he tell you who she was?”

“Her father’s name is Hartman, and he owns a watch shop in the Strand.”

“Excellent,” Grenville said. “As you speculate, it may lead to nothing, but we have so bloody little to go on.”

“A broken bone and a necklace.” I shrugged. “I believe we have had as much or less before. Shall we repair to the Strand?”