Murder as a Fine Art Read online

  “Hey, what’s the trouble there?” an authoritative voice asked.

  “Constable, I’m glad to see you. “

  “Tell me what you’re doing.”

  “This is my brother’s shop. He asked me to bring an extra blanket for his baby girl. She has a cold.”

  “But why are you pounding?”

  “He won’t open the door. He expects me, but he doesn’t open the door.”

  “Knock louder.”

  The door shook.

  “How many people live here?” the policeman’s voice asked.

  “My brother, his wife, a servant girl, and two daughters.”

  “Surely one of them would hear you knocking. Is there a back entrance?”

  “Down that alley. Over the wall.”

  “Wait here while I look.”

  After grabbing his bag, the artist opened the door to the hallway, stepped through, and remembered to close the door. The risk made his heart pound. He hurried past the bodies of the mother and child, almost lost his balance on the slippery floor, and unlocked a back door. Stepping into a small outside area, he again took the precious time to close the door.

  The fog smelled of chimney ashes. In the gloom, he glimpsed the shadow of what he assumed was a privy and ducked behind it, just before a grunting man pulled himself over a wall and scanned his lantern.

  “Hello?” The man’s voice was gruff. He approached the back door and knocked. “I’m a policeman! Constable Becker! Is everything all right in there?”

  The constable opened the door and stepped inside. As the artist heard a gasp, he turned toward a murky wall behind the privy.

  “God in heaven,” the constable murmured, evidently seeing the bodies of the mother and the girl in the hallway. The floor creaked as the constable stepped toward them.

  The artist took advantage of the distraction, set his bag on top of the wall, squirmed up, grabbed his bag, and dropped over. He landed on a muddy slope and slid to the bottom, nearly falling in slop. The noise when he hit seemed so loud that he worried the constable must have heard him. The legs of his pants were soaked. Turning to the right, he groped along the wall in the foggy darkness. Rats skittered.

  Behind him, he heard a distinctive alarm. Every patrolman carried a wooden clacker, which had a handle and a weighted blade that made a rapid snapping sound when it was spun. The constable now used his, its noise so loud that it couldn’t fail to be heard by other patrolmen on their nearby routes.

  The artist reached a fog-bound alley, guided by a dim streetlamp at the far end.

  “Help! Murder!” the policeman shouted.

  “Murder? Where?” a voice yelled.

  “My brother’s shop!” another voice answered. “Here! For heaven’s sake, help!”

  Windows slid up. Doors banged open. Footsteps rushed through the darkness.

  Nearing the light at the end of the alley, the artist could see enough to hide the razor behind a pile of garbage. A crowd rushed past in the fog, attracted by the din of the patrolman’s clacker.

  When the crowd was gone, the artist stepped from the alley and went in the opposite direction, staying close to the obscured buildings, prepared to vanish into an alcove if he heard anyone running toward him. The babble of the mob became a faint echo behind him.

  He found a public privy, pulled off the yellow wig, and dropped it down the hole, then did the same with the beard. Five minutes later, in an alley near the edge of a better district, he removed his sailor’s clothes and put on the theater clothes that he’d folded into the bag. He tossed the sailor’s clothes, including the cap, into a corner, where someone would gladly take them in the morning. The mud-smeared leather bag he dropped among garbage a little farther on. It too would readily find a new owner.

  In the better district, he followed the noise of hooves through the fog until he arrived at a main street. An empty cab waited at a stand near a restaurant. The driver looked down from his perch and assessed the artist’s evening clothes, deciding that he was a safe passenger at this late hour.

  As the driver took him to a music hall in the West End, the artist used a handkerchief to wipe mud from his shoes. He established a presence at the music hall, pretending to be just another theatergoer who wanted mellower entertainment after the bloody climax of The Corsican Brothers. Then he hired a final cab and went home, wondering if Titian, Rubens, and Van Dyke had ever felt as satisfied by their fine art as he did.

  2

  The Man Who Concealed His Red Hair

  LONDON’S POLICE DEPARTMENT was established in 1829, the first organized law enforcement in England. Earlier, the city’s security had depended on elderly night watchmen who were given a clacker along with a dusky lantern and told to call out each half hour as they made their rounds. Frequently, however, the old men passed the night sleeping in tiny watch-boxes. As London’s population swelled to one and a half million, the city authorized Sir Robert Peel to create the Metropolitan Police, whose initial thirty-five hundred members were known as “bobbies” or “peelers,” in allusions to his name.

  By 1854, London had a population of almost three million, making it the largest city on the planet. Meanwhile, the police force had merely doubled, to seven thousand, with hardly enough personnel to control the city’s seven hundred square miles. To supplement the regular force, a detective bureau had been created—eight plainclothes officers who roamed the city in disguise. Their anonymous existence unnerved many Victorians whose obsession with privacy gave them a morbid suspicion of being spied upon.

  These detectives were chosen from the ranks of regular police officers. They already knew the streets, but what distinguished them was an extraordinary attention to detail, the ability to scan a busy hotel lobby or a crowded railway station and identify behavior that didn’t fit: a possible robbery lookout who stood still while everyone else was moving, a possible pickpocket who surveyed the crowd before focusing on an individual within it, a possible pimp whose features were calculating while everyone else was merry.

  The Metropolitan Police and its detective bureau were headquartered in London’s Whitehall district, the site of numerous government buildings. Because the entrance was on a street called Great Scotland Yard, newspaper reporters referred to the police department by an abbreviated version of that street’s name. Unmarried detectives and constables could live in a dormitory near headquarters, and it was there, at twenty-five minutes past midnight on Sunday, 10 December 1854, that Detective Inspector Sean Ryan, forty years old, was wakened by a patrolman who informed him that a multiple murder had occurred in the East End’s Wapping district. While violence in the East End was common, murders themselves were rare. That year, only five murderers had been hanged in London, and those crimes had each involved a single victim. Even in the largest city in the world, a multiple murder was shocking.

  Ryan, who had eaten a dinner of boiled beef and dumplings and slept poorly as a consequence, took only five minutes to dress, making sure that his gloves were in his shapeless jacket. Along with ten constables with whom he roomed, he stepped outside, noted that the cold air frosted his breath, and climbed onto a police wagon that he had ordered to be waiting for them. The chill, fog-laden streets had almost no traffic, allowing the group to reach the murder scene within forty minutes.

  A crowd had gathered, as if at a public hanging, forcing the driver to stop the horses a distance away. Ryan and the constables stepped onto grimy cobblestones and followed the din of voices until a wall of bystanders prevented them from proceeding farther.

  “It’s Spring-Heeled Jack what did it, I tell you!” someone shouted, referring to a fire-breathing man with claws and springs attached to his boots, who had allegedly attacked a handful of Londoners seventeen years earlier and became a figure of local folklore.

  “Naw, it’s the Irish! Everywhere I turn there’s a damned mick beggin’ money! That famine was a crock! There weren’t no famine!”

  “Damned straight! The micks just lied to come
here and steal our jobs! Ship ’em back home!”

  “Hell, no. They’re all thieves. Hang ’em!”

  Ryan, whose parents had emigrated from Ireland when he was a child, had tried hard to replace his Irish accent with a London one. His clothes were equally anonymous. Accustomed to working undercover, he wore a newspaperboy’s cap that was pulled down so that his red hair wouldn’t be noticed.

  “Constable,” he told a man who accompanied him, “make a path.”

  “Right, Inspector.”

  The so-called bull’s-eye lantern that each policeman carried had an interior reflector and a magnifying lens over the single aperture. The numerous harsh beams emphasized their gruff voices as the ten policemen pushed through, bellowing, “Step aside! Police! Clear the street!”

  Ryan followed, hoping that the sight of so many police officers would distract the crowd’s attention from him and preserve his anonymity. They came to one of many small shops in the area that catered to merchant sailors from the nearby London docks. This close to the Thames, the smell of excrement was strong. Without a sewage system, all the city’s body wastes seeped into the river or were dumped there.

  A constable stood guard outside the shop, the windows of which were shuttered, concealing the interior.

  Like all uniformed officers, the constable was tall, with a hefty physical presence intended to discourage criminals from forcing him to pull out his truncheon. His helmet and wide belt displayed his police badge and the gold initials VR, which stood for Victoria Regina.

  Ryan recognized the constable, particularly a scar on his broad chin that he’d acquired while subduing a lookout during a burglary case that he and Ryan had worked on a month earlier. “Is it you, Becker?”

  “Yes, Inspector. Good to see you again, although I wish it was under better circumstances.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Five bodies.”

  “Five? The constable who woke me said there were four.”

  “That’s what I thought at first. Three adults and a young daughter. The neighbors say she was seven years old.”

  Seven years old? With effort, Ryan didn’t show a reaction.

  “But then I looked closer,” Becker said. “In the bedroom, there was a lot of clutter from something that had been smashed. I didn’t recognize at first that the pieces belonged to a cradle. A baby was under a chunk of the wicker hood.”

  “A baby,” Ryan murmured. Concealing his emotions, he turned toward the constables who’d come with him. “Ask the neighbors about anything that seemed unusual. Strangers. Anybody who didn’t look right.”

  Although it seems an obvious thing to do, the procedure that Ryan set in motion had existed for only a few decades. The science of what became known as criminology originated in France, where a professional criminal, Eugène François Vidocq, went to work for the Paris police and in 1811 organized a plainclothes detective unit. His operatives pretended to be beggars and drunkards, infiltrating taverns that criminals favored. Vidocq eventually resigned from the Paris police and formed the world’s first private detective agency. In 1843, one year after London’s own detective bureau was created, a team of those detectives—Ryan among them—journeyed to Paris, where Vidocq taught them his methods. For the first time, an organized investigation of a crime scene became standard policy.

  “Make sure the neighbors understand that even the slightest detail that seemed out of place can be important. One of you needs to guard the door while Constable Becker and I go inside. I don’t want anyone else to enter. Ready?” he asked Becker.

  “It’s strong,” Becker warned, opening the door.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  RYAN ENTERED FIRST.

  Behind him, he heard someone in the crowd yelling, “Let us in! Give us a look!”

  “Yeah,” someone else shouted, “it’s cold out here!”

  Ryan shut the door after Becker joined him. The coppery odor of blood hung in the air.

  Gathering his thoughts, Ryan studied the shop. An overhead lantern, grimed with soot. A drab counter. Shelves upon which lay garments and socks of laborer quality. A closed door to the left of the counter.

  “Was that door shut when you came in?” he asked Becker.

  “I entered through the back, but yes, the door was shut. After I searched, I left everything how I’d found it, the way you wanted things done three months ago.”

  “Good. You came in through the back? That door wasn’t locked?”

  “I opened it easily.”

  “So the killer escaped through the back before you entered.”

  “That was my suspicion.”

  Ryan didn’t say what he was thinking. Becker was perhaps fortunate that the killer had no longer been inside when the constable entered. He might have been taken by surprise and become another victim.

  Noticing a splotch of blood on the counter, Ryan steadied himself, proceeded to the entrance behind the counter, and found the first body. Its throat gaped, almost a second mouth. Its battered skull was misshapen. It sprawled in an enormous amount of blood, some of which had spurted onto clothing on the shelves.

  Ryan had seen only a few bodies in a more mutilated condition, the result of countless rat bites or a long time in the river. His training helped to control his emotions.

  Five pairs of socks lay in the blood.

  “The shopkeeper must have been reaching for them. Where’s the cash box?”

  “Under the counter.”

  Ryan reached for the box and opened it, studying a mixture of gold, silver, and copper coins. “One pound, eight shillings, and two pennies.”

  “Business must have been slow.” Becker’s voice had a trace of pity.

  “But to some people, this is a fortune. Why didn’t the killer take the coins?”

  Ryan proceeded toward the door to the left of the counter and opened it, confronted by the sight of the woman and the child on the floor. Their faces were bashed in and their throats slit.

  For a moment, Ryan couldn’t speak.

  Again, his training took charge. “Someone stepped in the blood and slid, moving toward the back door. Was that you, Becker?”

  “Absolutely not, Inspector.”

  “The slide mark makes the print indistinct, but it doesn’t look like the boot had hobnails in the sole.”

  “Suggesting that the killer isn’t a laborer?”

  “Very observant, Becker.”

  Ryan opened a door to the right and smelled boiled mutton in addition to the blood. Breathing shallowly in the sickening atmosphere, he stared down at the corpse of a servant girl on the kitchen floor. Despite the anguish on her battered face, he noticed freckles, making him think that she might have been Irish like himself.

  His revulsion made him turn away. He noticed a large mallet next to a plate on the kitchen table. His pulse intensified when he saw that the mallet’s striking surface was covered with gore.

  He’d never seen so much death together in one place. His voice became thick. “Did the shopkeeper’s wife interrupt the killer before he could open the cash box under the counter? Is that why he came back here and killed them all? So there wouldn’t be any witnesses? Then somebody knocked on the front door, and he fled before he had time to take the money?”

  Ryan considered what he had just said. “No, that doesn’t work. If he didn’t have time to steal the money, why would he waste precious seconds closing the door behind him before he ran down the hallway?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t know about the cash box,” Becker suggested.

  “Then why did he kill the owner?”

  Stepping into the hallway again, Ryan noted that a door farther along was closed as well. Inside, he found a small bedroom, the clutter of which suggested that many people slept in it. Jagged remnants of a cradle lay in several places. Becker had warned him that there was a dead baby. Even so, Ryan wasn’t prepared when he discovered the tiny corpse wrapped in a blanket and shoved under a portion of the wicker cradle’
s shattered hood.

  “Dear God.” Ryan had been a detective for twelve years. Before that, he’d been a patrolman for eight years. Walking the streets of the largest city in the world, he’d seen what until now he’d believed was the worst that one human being could do to another. Now he realized how innocent he’d been, a word that he had never expected to apply to himself.

  “A baby. The mallet blows would have…” Ryan paused in an effort to control his emotions. “A girl, you said?”

  “Yes,” Becker answered faintly.

  “The blows would have killed her, but he slit her throat anyhow.” A flash of anger escaped him. “Damn it, why? She couldn’t possibly have identified him. There wasn’t any reason to kill her. He didn’t take the money. He closed all the doors. He left the mallet. Why? I don’t understand.”

  Leaving the bedroom, Ryan walked angrily along the remainder of the hallway and opened the back door.

  A constable stood straighter. “You’re not allowed back here.”

  “It’s all right, Harry,” Becker assured him, coming out. “This is Detective Inspector Ryan.”

  “Sorry, Inspector. Just being careful.”

  “Careful is good.” Ryan stepped into the night. He’d hoped that the cold air would calm him, but the odor of the fog added to the nauseating smells that remained in his nostrils. “What’s back here?”

  The constable directed his lantern at a privy. He lowered the light toward compacted ground. “I looked, but the ground’s too hard for footprints.”

  “Did you come through the house to get here?”

  “No. Constable Becker said the fewer people inside, the better. He asked me to crawl over the wall where he did. Over there to the right.”

  “Use your lantern and show me.”

  London’s notoriously thick fogs, known as particulars because they were unique or particular to London, were composed of coal smoke from a half million chimneys to which mist from the Thames attached itself. The city’s walls had a permanent layer of soot. Now the lantern’s beam revealed streaks in the grime where the two constables had rubbed against the wall’s bricks as they squirmed over.