They made their way into the scrum.
“Lenox,” said Mayne, spotting him after a double take. “I wondered whether you might come. It would appear that your anxieties were prescient, regrettably.”
“The same killer?”
“I would wager so.”
Lenox nodded gravely, though doing it without any authority or experience, twenty-three, he felt an impostor—felt twenty-three going on sixteen. “I got into a cab as soon as I saw the newspaper this morning.”
Mayne hesitated. “You had better come through. You know Field?”
The question was a perfunctory one. Yes, he knew Field; everyone in England knew Field. Down to his face: When a sensational case appeared in the press, there were inevitably line drawings in every paper, above the fold of the first page, portraits of the victim, the suspects, the inspector, and the witnesses, on either side of a large square picture of the scene. (Only the Times still refused to stoop to such illustrations.) Tomorrow Lenox would be able to see twelve different portraits of Field in twelve different papers.
The city loved him, and the counties loved him more. Criminals grinned and touched their hats when they passed him. He was a close personal friend of Charles Dickens, who rumor said was basing a character in his next novel on the inspector.
So Lenox knew Field—but didn’t know him. “Charles Lenox,” he said, extending a hand.
“Field. Pleased to meet you.”
It was a good face, the one that would appear in the papers tomorrow. You saw why it was trusted: round, stolid, intelligent without being nervously intellectual, proper King George side-whiskers, a shirt that covered his whole neck so that he looked a high-buttoned and tightly contained bulk of human.
“The pleasure is mine,” said Lenox.
Field chucked his chin toward Graham. “Who is this?”
“My valet.” There was a subtle change in Field’s face, and Lenox blushed. Hell and brimstone. The very first crime scene he had ever visited, and within twenty seconds he had made an utter fool of himself.
“I see.”
Field turned away slightly, and Lenox wondered if he was now suddenly recollecting Lenox’s name, a joke among the other inspectors, the amateur who bothered them with his occasional presence around Great Scotland Yard.
Mayne, too, looked at him oddly. “Your valet.”
Lenox thought as rapidly as he could. “And assistant,” he said in what sounded to his own ear like an unnaturally loud voice. “I’m a private detective, Inspector Field. I brought Mr. Graham because I was wondering, Sir Richard, if he might have permission to go to the Challenger and see whether another letter had arrived. They sat on the last one long enough. And the first was just braggadocios, enough that I wondered if its author might have written a sequel, out of pride.”
Field turned back to him, and Lenox saw that this had been the right stroke. Among other things because it reminded everyone that Lenox had connected the letter of the day before to Walnut Island. It also explained and disposed of Graham.
Mayne nodded. Field assessed Lenox, then said to Graham, “If you go, take Constable Bryant, over there, with the gold tooth, badge ninety-nine. They’ll listen to him at the Challenger if they won’t listen to you.”
Graham had previous orders—to survey the crowd—but he was very far from simple, and nodded. “I shall return here directly afterward,” he said to Lenox, wisely dropping the word “sir,” and walked away.
This goodbye, too, had been clever—it gave Lenox a reason to remain indefinitely, since he had a later reunion planned here—and the young detective silently blessed his friend, who was already walking toward Constable Bryant, badge ninety-nine, of the gold tooth, for being smarter than himself.
Field had turned away again. His hands were clasped behind his back, and Lenox watched as he returned to the water. Wavelets, cresting in small dirty-white foam from the swollen deep blue of the river’s center, rushed one over the other at the bank. Five or so feet beyond the reach of the water there was a lumped figure under a sheet; and in sacral hush around it, several constables with nothing to do except look solemn.
Among them was Inspector Exeter. So, he was here, too.
Lenox glanced behind him and saw that Sinex was among the crowds. More information there, probably.
“I hope I can be of assistance,” Lenox said to Mayne.
“It is Field’s matter entirely now.”
“Not Sinex and Exeter’s?”
Mayne shook his head. “They will assist Field.” He paused, and some complicated arithmetic passed through his mind. “But I can let you have a look at the body.”
“I’d be glad of the chance.”
“I wouldn’t offer too much in the way of opinion to Field, unless you see something glaring.”
Lenox nodded. He had already been counting on silence as his best ally.
There had been something in Mayne’s words, though. Lenox wondered, as he followed the commissioner, if perhaps Mayne and Field were at odds. One was the direct superior, but the other more famous and influential. Perhaps that had led them into conflict?
Lenox’s path into the case became clear to him in that moment: he could be Mayne’s own eyes.
Mayne nodded as they came up to the sheet. “I’ve only just arrived myself. We’ll see her for the first time together.” He made a sour face. “Bloody foul thing to happen,” he muttered.
The crowds, sensing a convergence upon the body, pushed forward.
One of the constables, apparently first among equals, greeted Sir Richard with a grave nod, and, at the commissioner’s tilted chin, stooped down to lift the sheet. A phalanx of bodies stood behind it to conceal it from the crowd.
The Thames did that job on the other side.
Lenox had a strong stomach. One or two men stepped back—perhaps because it was a woman, for most if not all of them would have seen men’s bodies slumped outside of gin mills, thief-takers’—but Lenox leaned forward.
The woman was of early middle age, perhaps thirty, if he had to guess at a glance. Field, staring down at her intently, said, “You see that she is in an—unusual condition.”
The woman had on a thick white dress, almost a bridal gown in the style of Queen Victoria, in fact—who had first popularized that color for wedding dresses. It was muddied and soaked through. Very long plaits of hair were extended down her body.
More remarkably, though, there were garlands of flowers up and down the body, ribboned together by their stems, piled in a crisscrossing mesh far higher than her body, thick across her chest, her midsection, her legs.
Here was the source of the headline: Thames Ophelia.
She was laid out upon a large pine bier that gave her about a foot on every side, though she was quite tall, perhaps five feet eight inches, Lenox would have guessed. This bier seemed to be unmarked, at least at first glance. In fact, the edges looked cut cleanly enough that it might at one stage have been a large door or the side of a shipping crate.
There was thick white makeup on her face, in the style of a high lady of 1790 or so. It was obscene; and her eyes were raccoonlike, black kohl smeared around them more heavily than it was on the Egpytian mummies one saw in the museums.
The whole effect was uncanny—hard to look at.
“Grim,” said Mayne, more succinctly.
“Fancies himself quite a poet, this fellow,” Field said. He shook his head in disgust. He gestured to the abrasions around her neck. “Strangulation again.”
There was a moment of quiet. One constable very suddenly removed his tall police officer’s hat, and one by one all of his fellows followed suit.
“I suppose we can cover her again,” Mayne said.
But Lenox was too busy for ceremony. Instinctively, he stooped down next to Field. “What’s in her hand?”
Her thin-fingered hands were just protruding from the masses of flowers. There were numerous rings on them, two or three on some of the fingers. The left hand was open but the right was tightly closed.
Field carefully pried it open, though it was clenched in rigor mortis. Indeed, her pallid body, an unnatural purplish white, all seemed clenched around that hand. Field opened it and took something out.
He held it up. “A shilling.”
Field covered the body. Then he asked two constables to come forward and lift the board. They did this with ease—not too heavy.
“The body was discovered here, washed ashore?” Mayne asked.
Lenox was grateful someone else had posed the question, having committed to silence as a strategy.
One of the constables stepped forward and nodded. “A clerk from the Customs House found her, sir. Nathaniel Butler. He is accustomed to walking along the strand toward his office each morning after crossing Southwark Bridge.” They all glanced up at the immense Customs House, a few hundred paces off. “He called for help. I wasn’t far.”
This must be P. C. Wright, of Telegraph fame, then. “Well done,” said Mayne. “Was anyone else in the area?”
“The usual foot traffic. Light. Nobody who aroused immediate suspicion, sir. We have detained Mr. Butler as well as a seaman who was upon the shore nearby. He is still drunk, sir. Asleep in the police wagon. He may have seen something, however.”
Mayne sighed. “The body may be taken in for examination, then. Field?”
Field nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Though it is straightforward enough. Strangulation.”
A coroner examined all victims of murder, though the bodies could pile up (quite literally) for weeks on end, due to the shortage of qualified medical examiners, a problem Lenox knew Mayne had addressed to Parliament.
Two constables covered the unfortunate woman in her makeshift shroud again, and the two who were holding the long board upon which she lay began the slow and unsteady process of taking it to the same wagon where evidently this drunken seaman was sleeping in the front seat.
Lenox’s mind was full: the river; the Customs House; the shilling; the flowers; the hair; the board; the trunk; Walnut Island.
He glanced back at the crowd, which had filled in even more. There was a woman with a yoke around her neck, selling thick paper cones of piping hot porridge from the small copper buckets on either side of the yoke for a penny.
He turned away and looked across the great river. The high dome of St. Paul’s stood there far, far above the low-slung buildings around it. A smokeless day, clouds chased away by the sun, the sky a pretty blue—too pure for this to have happened. A very small flock of white birds rose out of a rooftop.
There was some sense of purpose in his spirit at the moment: this was the moment that he had known would come. It struck him that it was the dome that was false to him here. The woman who had died was real. This woman had lived; she had breathed as they all breathed here upon Bankside now; now she was gone. That must count for something.
He wondered if he was as unflappable as he supposed, because his heart was also beating hard.
The cortege headed slowly toward the police wagon, and Lenox, lagging them a bit, saw something glinting in the sand and stone of the beach. It broke his reverie.
The long board on which the body had lain had left a rectangular imprint upon the sand, flattening it. He knelt down and stared closely at the area. It was empty, except for the object that had caught his eye. He used his handkerchief to lift it carefully from the sand that had threatened to bury it, like a half-buried toy forgotten at the shore by a careless child. It was a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, the glass in them newly shattered.