“With all due respect, sir,” Brodie replied. “There are things that all manner of injury might tell us about the person who did this. I understand that it is a most delicate matter, however quite necessary,” he insisted.
“No other… injuries were found,” Sir Fielding said quite emphatically. “There were no other marks, or residue under the fingernails.”
Brodie nodded. “Thank ye for yer expertise, sir. It is most important to the inquiry.”
“Will that be all then? As you might well imagine, the family is most anxious to have Miss Mainwaring’s body returned to them for the appropriate mourning.”
“Of course,” Brodie replied, with a look across at me, and then not to be put off. “And the items we requested, sir?”
“The attendant will provide them. I’m certain that you understand, I have other matters I must attend to, a class awaiting my arrival for a lecture I am to give.”
By all means, I thought, a lecture was most important as compared to the grief of a family who had just lost someone in a most dreadful manner.
I reminded myself that if I was ever in a critical situation from injury that I might be better left to my own devices rather than seek the attention of Dr. Fielding. Lecture indeed! And with that, it seemed that our meeting was at an end.
We left the holding room and waited in the receiving area. The attendant we had first encountered upon arrival eventually appeared with a bundle wrapped in brown paper.
“We will need a signature, sir,” he reminded us.
Brodie made an impatient scrawl across the form at the young man’s note board, then took the bundle and thanked him.
“No residue under her nails, no other signs of assault, and only the faintest marks on her neck,” I commented as we left the hospital and found a cab.
“It would seem that was not the reason for the attack,” I added. “Then it had to be for some other reason.”
“Ye are the only woman I know who would find all of it curious, instead of fainting away at the sight of a dead body.”
“I don’t faint,” I reminded him. After all it wasn’t my first body.
We called next on Mr. Brimley, the chemist very near the office on the Strand, who had assisted us in previous investigations and had provided information that had been most helpful in solving those crimes.
He might have been a physician after studying at King’s College, however life or rather the streets of the East End, had taken him in a different direction.
He saw to the needs of the poor, dispensing medications, assisting women who had either attempted to rid themselves of an unwanted pregnancy in a place where poverty and starvation was rampant, or assisting in the delivery of the child. And then there was his treatment of all sorts of complaints and wounds, including bullet wounds. I could personally attest to his skill in that regard.
Mr. Brimley was also known to have a curiosity in the occasional body part that he came across— a severed hand or foot, and his most recent acquisition —a human eyeball.
All were meticulously preserved in jars with the appropriate solution for him to analyze and study. Most fascinating, as he put it.
However, we now had little to go on— no residue that might have told us something about Amelia Mainwaring’s attacker, and the lack of any significant marks that led to her death.
“Mornin’, sir. Miss.” We were greeted by his assistant, Abby. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, however wise beyond her years.
She had lived on the streets, making her way as best she could, which meant prostitution. She was exceedingly bright, with a worldly way about her that was almost heartbreaking, except for the fact that she didn’t see it that way at all.
Mr. Brimley had taken her in to assist in his shop when she showed a fascination for the profession as well as his research. She earned a small income— the most he could afford to pay. Still she seemed quite satisfied with the arrangement.
“Mr. Brimley says I could be a right fine chemist one day, or a physician! He even said that he would introduce me to a good friend at college,” she had excitedly explained not long ago.
“He’s even showing me how to read and write!”
“Teachingyou how to read and write,” he had corrected her at the time.
Actually, I could imagine it. More and more it seemed that women were taking places in professions once dominated by men. It was slow progress, but progress nevertheless, along with acceptance of women authors. After all, the ruler of Britain was a woman!
As usual, Mr. Brimley was in the back of the shop that he called his laboratory, with those jars of specimens, chemicals and powders, a pill making machine, along with microscopes along the counter at the wall, and photographic equipment— a recent addition as he studied those specimens that he gathered.
He looked up, with a slightly myopic gaze behind glasses with unusually thick lenses that he’d had specially made with magnifying lenses. They gave him the appearance of an enormous bug, slightly balding with the few hairs that were askew, and wearing his usual apron.
