Nineteen
The River’s Edge
By the time I arrived back at Grosvenor Square, the light had settled into that flat, late afternoon brightness that seemed neither day nor evening. I stepped down with more impatience than grace.
Rather than accept my escort back home, Rosalynd opted for a hackney. She wished to avoid the gossip that would erupt from her alighting from my carriage. And then there was the investigation. Although what we’d discovered had shed light on the matter, we were still no closer to finding out where the young women had been taken.
As Milford opened the door, he held himself a fraction more stiffly than usual. That was never a good sign.
“Your Grace. A packet arrived from Scotland Yard not half an hour past.” He lifted a brown envelope from the table in the hall. “From the Commissioner’s office.”
I took it from him. The weight felt wrong. Too light for what it ought to contain. After I made my way to my study, I slit the envelope open and drew out the contents.
Copies of reports lay inside. Thin sheets. Too few.
I spread them across the blotter. The smell of old ink and cheap paper followed. The sheets spoke of missing girls, one after another. Names, ages, meagre details of employment. Marie Gibbons, laundry maid. Alice Brent, seamstress. Two from St Agnes. Others from mission houses.
Each report shared the same conclusion in a different hand. “Likely left service of her own accord.” “No further action taken.” “Presumed to have gone elsewhere for work.”
I read them all. Then read them again. With each reading, my anger grew greater.
There had been no interviews with family. No return visits to employers. No effort to trace them beyond the first enquiry. Girls slipped out of their lives as neatly as if someone had opened a drawer and swept them away.
At the bottom of the stack lay the report I had most wanted. The coroner’s summary for the girl pulled from the Thames in late March.
Female. Approximate age seventeen to twenty. Clothing worn and plain. No papers.
“Body recovered near Stangate Wharf,” the police constable had written. “Brought to mortuary. No marks of violence observed at first inspection.”
The coroner’s surgeon had been more exacting.
“Linear abrasions present at both wrists. Bilateral. Cause uncertain. Bruising to inner thighs and upper arms, of indeterminate age. Lungs show the presence of river water, though not to the extent commonly observed in active drowning. No knife wounds. No fractures. No obvious contusions to head or neck. Signs consistent with recent sexual intercourse, timing undetermined. General condition undernourished.”
I sat back. The words blurred for a moment. Not from fatigue. From anger.
The surgeon had seen enough to feel uneasy. That much lay between the lines. Yet at the end of his neat script stood the verdict that allowed everyone else to shrug.
“Cause of death. Drowning. Verdict. Found drowned.”
No mention of restraint as anything more than “abrasions.” No suggestion that the bruising might speak of force rather than chance contact with the river. No thought that a girl underfed and marked in such a fashion might be more than an unfortunate prostitute who misjudged a night by the water.
I gathered the sheets into a rough order, matching dates in the margin to the timeline I had already begun in my own notebook.
Late March. The body in the river.
Two weeks before that, a knot of disappearances. A laundress sent on an errand who never returned. A girl who went to fetch linen and vanished. The seamstress from Mme Delacroix’s establishment. Another from a house in Bloomsbury.
Then a quieter interval. A long breath drawn before the pattern began again.
They had snatched the girls at regular intervals. Months now. Each cluster lined up with too much precision to be accidental. Whoever ran this machine did not act on impulse. He worked to a rhythm.
Someone ought to have seen it. Someone at the Yard ought to have cared enough to look past the assumption that poor women who vanished deserved their fate.
I pressed two fingers against my temple. That urge to drive back to Whitehall and drag the Commissioner from his office rose with a familiar sharpness. It would serve nothing. I had the reports now. Such as they were. If the Yard would not do its duty, I would.
Rosalynd would want to see these. I pulled a clean sheet toward me and took up my pen.
R,
