Inspector of the Dead Read online

  “Hurry!” the footman shouted. “If you miss the train, Lord Palmerston will blame us!”

  “Tell His Lordship that the fault was mine,” Father said. “Tell him I refused to climb back into the coach.”

  “What are you talking about?” the footman blurted.

  “My deepest apologies. Kindly return our bags to Lord Palmerston’s house. I shall decide what to do with them later.”

  “No!” the driver protested.

  Father marched along Oxford Street, heading west now instead of east.

  “Father,” I insisted, hurrying after him. “Did you consume too much laudanum in the coach? Tell me what you’re doing.”

  We passed Regent Street, continuing west. Even with Father’s short legs, his determined pace was such that many people could not have matched him. Only the freedom of my bloomer skirt enabled me to keep up with him.

  “Death,” Father said.

  “You frighten me, Father.”

  “Until seven weeks ago, I wakened at noon after opium nightmares of regret. If we hadn’t come to London, I would probably now have been waking at sunset instead of noon. Or perhaps an excess of opium would have prevented me from ever waking at all. Then I too would have joined the majority. At last I’d have been able to forget the pain that I caused you and your brothers and sisters and above all your mother…the debt collectors that I forced all of you to flee…the poverty that I made you endure.”

  “Father, truly you are frightening me.”

  “Edward Oxford?” Becker stared at the note he’d found in the book the corpse held. “What do you mean, ‘God help all of us’?”

  “Fifteen years ago—how old would you have been?” Ryan asked.

  “Only ten.”

  “You told me that you were raised on a tenant farm in a remote part of Lincolnshire. Did your father read newspapers?”

  “He couldn’t read at all. He was ashamed of not being able to,” Becker said. “When I wasn’t doing chores, he made me go to school.”

  “Then maybe you couldn’t have known about it.”

  “Known about what? Is this related to the message you found at the church and you wouldn’t tell me about?”

  “There’s no time,” Ryan told him. “We need to search the rest of the house.”

  “Stop being evasive. What does the name Edward Oxford mean? Tell me what was in the note at the church,” Becker demanded.

  “I can’t.”

  “It’s that difficult to talk about?”

  “I’m not allowed to. Only Commissioner Mayne has the authority to do that.”

  “The look on your face. Is this going to get worse?”

  “It did fifteen years ago. Please stop asking questions that I can’t answer. We need to search the house. Where are the other servants?”

  The odor of spoiling food—and worse—directed them downstairs toward the kitchen.

  Becker paused on the stairs.

  “Are you all right?” Ryan asked.

  “How long will it take before I can be like you?”

  “Like me?”

  “This doesn’t bother you,” Becker said.

  “It always bothers me,” Ryan told him.

  “But you don’t show any emotion.”

  “Because I distract myself. Concentrate on the details. Commissioner Mayne taught me that. Focus on finding evidence and on making certain that the killer never has a chance to do it again.”

  Becker nodded and forced himself to descend.

  At the bottom, he concealed his reaction when he saw the corpses of a cook and a scullery maid on the kitchen floor. Like the servants upstairs, each had been killed by a blow to the head. Dried blood stained their aprons.

  Struggling to follow Ryan’s advice, Becker mastered his emotions by noting details. The ashes in the stove were cold. Soup congealed in bowls. Meat pies sagged in baking dishes, next to flat meringue desserts.

  They mounted the gloomy servants’ staircase, passed the entrance level, and reached a higher floor that was dominated by an immense dining area capable of seating forty people.

  “When I patrolled the East End, I never dreamed that people could enjoy such luxury,” Becker said.

  They climbed to the third level, where they found three open doors and one that was closed.

  An odor seeped from beneath the closed one.

  Ryan shoved it all the way open with such force that it banged loudly.

  “Any trouble up there, Inspector?” the constable yelled from downstairs.

  “We’ll let you know!” Ryan answered.

  Ready with their knives, he and Becker entered. The room was dark. They made their way toward curtains, pulling them open.

  When Becker saw what was under his boots and all over the bed and in fact everywhere, he stumbled back.

  The walls, the dressing table, the curtains, the rug, everything was covered with dried blood.

  “What in the name of hell happened here?”

  The revenger never forgot the last happy moment in his life. He and his sisters, Emma and Ruth, were boiling potatoes in a pot hanging over the fireplace. The potatoes were all that their family could afford for supper. The wood that they burned would have been hard to come by also, if it hadn’t consisted of worthless scraps their father salvaged from his carpentry work. They had little, but they loved one another. They laughed often.

  Not that day, however. Near sunset, when their father returned home, he set down his tool belt and looked puzzled.

  “Colin, where’s your mother?” he asked. Sawdust flecked his canvas apron.

  Emma answered for him. “Mama didn’t come back from her errand yet.” Emma was thirteen. Her eyes were blue, and each day since then, Colin had never failed to recall how they illuminated a room.

  “But she’s been gone all day.” Rubbing a calloused hand against the back of his sunburned neck, their father crossed the kitchen to the front door of their tiny cottage.

  Colin, Emma, and Ruth followed. Ruth was the little one. Somehow, the gap where one of her front teeth had fallen out brightened her smile. They watched their father step outside and peer down the dusty lane in the direction that their mother had taken in the morning. Their village had existed for only a short time. Most of the cottages were still being built, stacks of bricks and lumber standing next to skeletal frames. The village’s owner, a property developer, had bought this parcel of land four miles from St. John’s Wood, the northwestern extremity of London, in anticipation of London’s expansion.

  “Maybe she stopped at a neighbor’s,” their father said.

  He walked to a nearby cottage.

  Colin and Emma held Ruth’s hand while they watched their father knock on a door and speak to someone. As the crimson sun touched the horizon, he walked farther along, reached another door, and spoke to someone else. They had lived in the village for only ten days and didn’t know anyone, but all the people were laborers the same as their father, and even though Colin’s family was Irish, they hadn’t encountered any hostility.

  Frowning harder, their father returned and hugged them, saying, “Let’s put supper on the table. She’ll be along any time now.”

  But Colin couldn’t help noticing that his father’s hands were unsteady when he picked at his few potatoes, then divided them among the children.

  “Colin, watch your sisters.” In the chill of evening, he put on a coat. “I’ll soon be back.”

  In fact, it was long after dark when he returned. But their mother wasn’t with him, and their father now looked afraid as he tucked them into the stacked cots that he had made for them, next to the narrow bed that he and their mother shared.

  “What do you think happened to her?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t know,” their father answered. “It got so dark that I had to stop looking. In the morning, I’ll try again.”

  “Let’s say a prayer for Mama,” little Ruth said.

  Their mother had set out for St. John’s Wood with a bas
ket of her knitting. What she was able to accomplish with needles and yarn was amazingly intricate, colorful patterns that created wonder. If not for their mother’s skills, Colin and his sisters wouldn’t have had warm gloves, caps, and scarves in winter. She had gone to St. John’s Wood to sell three jumpers. Someone had told her that there was a merchant who would buy them, and with the coins she was paid, she had hoped to purchase meat for several meals.

  But St. John’s Wood was only an hour’s walk away.

  In the morning, after their father made certain that Colin and his sisters had bread and cheese on the table, he opened the door to continue his search.

  He paused in surprise at what was before him.

  Colin, who followed, saw a constable approaching.

  “Are you Ross O’Brien?” the constable asked.

  “I am.”

  The Irish accent made the constable study him harder. “Is Caitlin O’Brien your wife?”

  “She is.” Colin’s father stepped forward. “Why? Has something happened to her?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She’s been arrested.”

  FOUR

  The Crystal Palace

  The cold breeze was welcome, clearing the odor of death from Ryan’s nostrils as he and Becker stepped from the house. They faced the clamor of what seemed a hundred people pushing against each other, jostling to get as close as they could, complaining when someone shoved ahead of them. Most of the crowd consisted of footmen in breeches and knee-length coats or else maids and kitchen staff in aprons. They couldn’t have left their places of employment without permission, so their lords and ladies had presumably sent them to determine the nature of the commotion. With so much of interest happening, and with the responsibility of reporting every detail, the onlookers seemed indifferent to the increasingly cold weather.

  Surveying them, Ryan felt a shock of recognition. “Can that be Emily?”

  “And good God, that’s her father!” Becker said.

  Somehow De Quincey had managed to squirm through the mass in front of the house. The force of so many people pressed the little man against the iron railing. Emily struggled next to him. Jostled, she begged a constable to allow them past the gate. The constable kept waving her away.

  “Go home!” another constable yelled to everyone. “There’s nothing to see!”

  “Then why are coppers goin’ around, askin’ if we noticed anythin’ strange?” a servant wanted to know.

  “Well, did you notice anything strange?” a constable demanded.

  Emily called to Ryan, but the din of the crowd absorbed her words.

  Ryan and Becker hurried down the steps.

  “Those two are with us!” Ryan told the constables.

  As Becker opened the gate, Ryan tugged at Emily, who tugged at her father.

  “Make room!” a constable ordered the crowd.

  “Tell us what’s going on!” a reporter yelled.

  “Emily, we’ll need to find a place to take you,” Ryan said, pleased to see her but fervently wishing it were under other circumstances. “Bad things happened inside.”

  “Worse than in the church?” De Quincey asked. His overcoat was askew. A button had been torn from it.

  “That depends on how you look at the matter.”

  “Immanuel Kant couldn’t have phrased it better.”

  The breeze intensified. Clouds lowered and darkened. Snow flurried, finally prompting some members of the crowd to hug themselves and disperse.

  “Sean, when we go inside, warn me when to look away,” Emily said.

  “When we go inside? But I just explained…” Ryan exhaled with resignation. “Yes, when we go inside.”

  “Emily, peer up at the ceiling. I’ll guide you,” Becker said.

  More snow blew past.

  They settled her into a plush chair in the sitting room.

  “I can’t start a fire to warm you,” Ryan told her, pointing toward the shadowy hearth. “There might be evidence in those ashes.”

  “I understand.”

  “What happened? You’re supposed to be on a train.”

  “Father refused to obey Lord Palmerston.”

  “Refused?” Becker asked in amazement.

  “At the church we overheard the vicar saying Lord Cosgrove’s address. Father insisted on coming here.”

  “I had no difficulty finding it,” the little man said proudly. Just outside the room, he crouched at the base of the staircase and peered at the injury to the dead servant’s skull. His right index finger almost touched the crater. “Fifty-three winters ago, I begged in Mayfair many times. I know it almost as well as I know Oxford Street and Soho.”

  “Lord Palmerston—” Ryan started to say.

  “Will be furious. I’m aware.” De Quincey drank from his laudanum bottle. “At the church you said that you and Sergeant Becker saw the same things that Emily and I did. Surely our many conversations seven weeks ago make you realize that wasn’t the case.”

  “A police investigation involves more than invoking the name of Immanuel Kant,” Ryan said, barely controlling his frustration. “Does reality exist outside us or only in our minds? I can tell you very definitely that reality exists at the front door and at the base of those stairs. Further reality exists in the kitchen beneath us, and reality very definitely exists tied to a chair in the library.”

  “Tied to a chair in the library?” De Quincey straightened with interest. He saw the open door on the opposite side of the hall and walked toward it.

  “Hey, you can’t go in there!” the constable on duty objected.

  “It’s all right,” Becker said. “I’ll go with him.”

  Ryan redirected his attention to Emily. “But how will you manage without Lord Palmerston’s support? You don’t have any money. Where will you sleep? How will you feed yourselves?”

  “Father says that he can survive on the streets just as he did when he was seventeen.”

  “But now he is sixty-nine. And what about you? How will you survive?”

  “Father says that he will teach me how to do it.”

  “I fear that opium has finally unhinged his mind.”

  “Death,” Emily said.

  “What?”

  “Father talks frequently about it.”

  “Inspector?” De Quincey’s voice interrupted from across the hall.

  Emily touched Ryan’s arm. “I think the reason Father came here is that helping you might give him a purpose and make him want to live.”

  Ryan crossed to the library, where he found De Quincey shifting from one perspective to another, studying the grotesquely positioned victim.

  “You look impressed,” Ryan said.

  “The noose, the blinded eyes, and the law book amount to a masterpiece.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t expect anything else from the man who wrote ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’”

  “The victim’s position suggests that the motive was revenge for an injustice.”

  “It doesn’t appear to have been robbery,” Ryan agreed. “The pens in his eyes are silver. A gold watch-chain dangles from his waistcoat. There are many other items of value in this room, but it seems that nothing was taken.”

  “You mentioned the kitchen. Are there other victims?” De Quincey asked.

  “A cook and a scullery maid,” Ryan answered. “Lady Cosgrove must have been away from home when the murders occurred.”

  Becker stepped forward, confused. “But when she returned and discovered the bodies, why didn’t she alert the police? Instead of raising an alarm, why did Lady Cosgrove put on a mourning gown and go to St. James’s? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “At least one of the victims hasn’t been found,” Ryan said. “A bedroom upstairs was covered with dried blood.”

  De Quincey peered over the corpse’s shoulder and studied the black-rimmed piece of paper that Becker had returned to the open book.


  “There’s a name here. Edward Oxford?”

  “That means something to you?” Ryan asked.

  “How could it possibly not?”

  “I don’t understand, Father. Who is Edward Oxford?”

  Emily’s voice surprised them. Turning, they saw her at the library’s entrance, where she averted her eyes from the horror in the chair and looked up at the corniced ceiling.

  “Emily, it might be better if you stayed in the other room,” Becker suggested.

  “I’d rather be here with everyone than alone elsewhere in this house.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be alone in this house, either,” Ryan agreed.

  “Father, given the astonishment with which you say Edward Oxford’s name, I feel foolish not to recognize it.”

  “You were only six when it happened,” De Quincey explained. “Inspector, Edward Oxford is still in Bedlam, am I correct?”

  De Quincey referred to England’s only institution for the criminally insane—Bethlem Royal Hospital, commonly known as Bedlam.

  “Yes,” Ryan answered. “I would definitely have been told if Oxford had been released.”

  “But who is Edward Oxford?” Emily insisted. “What outrage did he commit? Sean, your tone suggests that it must have been something truly terrible. Is this related to the note that Lady Cosgrove received at the church? You refused to tell us what you read.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll need to ask Commissioner Mayne about that.”

  “Perhaps not,” De Quincey concluded.

  “What do you mean?” Ryan asked with suspicion.

  “At St. James’s Church, before you shoved the note in your pocket, I saw enough to determine that it consisted of only two words. If those words were ‘Edward Oxford,’ the same as in this note, the secret would be out—you wouldn’t need to conceal it any longer. That means the two words were something else. Under the circumstances, they could only be…Inspector, please tell Emily about Edward Oxford.”

  Wednesday, 10 June 1840

  Queen Victoria insisted on releasing her daily schedule to the newspapers. Having ascended the throne only three years earlier, the young monarch wanted to show how different she was from her recent predecessors, who had almost never been seen by commoners. Determined to establish a connection with her subjects, she took frequent carriage rides through London’s streets and wanted the populace to know exactly when she planned to do so, giving people ample opportunity to view and cheer their queen.