3-Book Victorian Crime Collection: Death at Dawn, Death of a Dancer, A Corpse in Shining Armour. Caro Peacock
Six
‘Would you be kind enough to tell me where they keep people’s bodies,’ I said.
The porter blinked. The edges of his eyelids were pink in a brown face, lashes sparse and painful-looking like the bristles on a gooseberry. Odd the things you notice when your mind’s trying to shy away from a large thing. When he saw me coming towards him over the cobbles among the crowds leaving the evening steam packet, he must have expected another kind of question altogether. Something along the lines of ‘How much do you charge to bring a trunk up from the hold?’ or ‘Where can I find a clean, respectable hotel?’ Those kinds of questions were filling the air all round us, mostly in the loud but uneasy tones of the English newly landed at Calais. I’d asked in French, but he obviously thought he’d misheard.
‘You mean where people stay, at the hotels?’
‘Not hotels, no. People who’ve been killed. A gentleman who was killed on Saturday.’
Another blink and a frown. He looked over my shoulder at his colleagues carrying bags and boxes down the gangplank, regretting his own bad luck in encountering me.
‘Would he not be in his own house, mademoiselle?’
‘He has no house here.’
Nor anywhere else, come to that. He would have had one soon, the tall thin house he was going to rent for us, near the unfashionable end of Oxford Street when we … Don’t think about that.
‘In church then, perhaps.’
I thought, but didn’t say, that he was never a great frequenter of churches.
‘If an English gentleman were killed in … in an accident and had no family here, where might he be taken?’
The porter’s face went hard. He’d noticed my hesitation.
‘The morgue is over there, mam’selle.’
He nodded towards a group of buildings a little back from the seafront then turned, with obvious relief, to a plump man who was pulling at his sleeve and burbling about cases of books.
I walked in the direction he’d pointed out but had to ask again before I found my way to a low building, built of bricks covered over with black tarry paint. A man who looked as thin and faded as driftwood was sitting on a chair at the door, smoking a clay pipe. The smell of his tobacco couldn’t quite mask another smell coming from inside the building. When he heard me approaching he turned his head without shifting the rest of his body, like a clockwork automaton, and gave me a considering look.
‘It’s possible that you have my father here,’ I said.
He took a long draw on his pipe and spoke with it still in his mouth.
‘Would he be the gentleman who got shot?’
‘Possibly, yes.’
‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘She said his clothes had an English cut.’
‘Who said?’
Without answering, he got up and walked over to a narrow house with a front door opening on to the cobbles only a few steps away from the morgue. He thumped on the door a couple of times and a fat woman came out in a black dress and off-white apron, straggly grey hair hanging down under her cap. They whispered, heads together, then he gave her a nudge towards me.
‘Your father, oh, you poor little thing. Poor little thing.’
Her deep voice was a grieving purr in my ear, her hand moist and warm on my shoulder. Her breath smelled of brandy.
‘May I see him, please?’
She led the way inside, still purring ‘Pauvre petite, oh pauvre petite.’ Her husband in his cloud of pipe smoke fell in behind us. There were flies buzzing around the low ceiling and a smell of vinegar. The evening sun came in through the slats of the shutters, making bars of red on the whitewashed wall. Three rough pinewood tables took up most of the space in the room but only one of them was occupied by a shape covered in a yellowish sheet. The woman put her arm round me and signed to the man to pull the sheet back. I knew almost before I saw his face. I suppose I made some noise or movement because the man started pulling the sheet back over again. I signed to him to leave it where it was.
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. Please …’
He hesitated, then, when I nodded, reluctantly pulled the sheet further down. They’d put my father in a white cotton shroud with his hands crossed on his chest. I took a step forward and untied the strings at the neck of the shroud. The woman pulled at my arm and tried to stop me. Trust your own eyes and ears, he’d said. Never let anybody persuade you against them. He’d been talking at the time about the question dividing some of his naturalist friends as to whether squirrels were completely hibernatory, standing in some beechwoods with Tom and me on a bright January day. I tried to keep the sound of his voice in my head as I lifted up his right hand, cold and heavy in mine. I pulled the shroud aside with my other hand and looked at the round hole the pistol ball had made in his chest, right