The Murder of Patience Brooke (5 page)

‘To get back to Bagster, the gardener, all I am saying is that we must question him. And he has to be a suspect until we eliminate him. We need to know about his relationship with Patience. Who else can you think of who might have had contact with her?’

‘She went to church with the girls so there is the Reverend Mr Goodchild and his curate, Mr Fidge. They may know something of the pedlar, even something about Patience. Mrs Morson could tell us if she ever went to church other than on Sunday.’

‘Earlier, when you came for me, we both thought about the implications for the Home and the Home Secretary is to be told that the reputations of Mr Dickens and Miss Coutts may be involved in the matter. So we need to think about anyone who might have disapproved of your work, who might have wished to damage the reputation of the Home.’

‘I have tried to keep the purpose of the Home secret. Our near neighbours were not to be told and I thought that the girls’ neat dresses would disguise them in a way. There would be no shades of the prison house about them, but things get out. There is the dissenting chapel –the Reverend Obadiah Godsmark does not like us. He is a believer in punishment – the mortification of the flesh. I think he would rather they were whipped and pilloried because, of course, they cannot be saved. There is, naturally, a place in Heaven for him and the other elect. He stopped Patience in the street to warn her that he knew she was living in a house of sin. He wrote to me, a ranting, canting epistle foretelling my doom and the surety of hell’s pains for the harlots – his word, not mine – I was harbouring. He clearly believes that I am keeping a seraglio there. And at the end, he had the nerve to suggest that if I were in need of a spiritual guide in the house, he would be willing to come here to teach them their sin and their punishment.’

‘Well, we shall have to see this true disciple – though my gorge rises at the thought.’

They drove on, each with his own thoughts. Dickens, in a state between sleep and waking, saw in his mind’s eye the man with the crooked face, saturnine and menacing, with no eyes or mouth, just a twisted yellowness, dressed in Godsmark’s black cassock then with Godsmark’s face, white and raging, spittle on the thin lips, shouting silently at a woman in a grey dress.

Superintendent Jones thought also of the man with the crooked face and how to find him. He thought also of Isabella Gordon whom he had yet to meet, and if there was a connection between them. He was inclined to think that Isabella might know something.

The city was near now. From somewhere at a distance came the shrill note of a far-off railway whistle. They were going past Kensington Gardens, shadowed and silent under the moonlight, past the deeper dark of St George’s burial ground from which Laurence Sterne’s body vanished, to turn up later in Cambridge – the bodysnatchers at work. There was traffic now ahead, the lumbering waggons and carts making their way to the markets from the nurseries and gardens of the suburbs and villages. They reached Oxford Street, waking up to the cold early morning and turned into Endell Street.

The wagonette stopped in the yard behind Bow Street Station. Superintendent Jones got out and went to fetch Constable Rogers. He glanced worriedly at Dickens’s white, strained face.

‘I will be back in a few moments.’

Watching his companion disappear through a stained wooden door, Dickens felt suddenly alone, not knowing what he should do next. He ought to go home to see Catherine and his children yet they seemed distant, hardly real compared to the lurid events of the past hours. And it wasn’t just that; he felt that he belonged more to the superintendent, to Patience – and Mrs Morson – he should not think of her. She seemed far away, too. Houseless Dick, he thought. That was how he saw himself, belonging nowhere, essentially alone – what an irony. A man so well known that people stopped him in the street to tell him how they loved Mr Pickwick and his faithful Sam Weller, how they had trembled at the death of Nancy, how they had wept at the death of Little Nell, and he had a wife and eight children. Sometimes it seemed to him that he cared more intensely for his fictional children – how he had hated to kill off Paul Dombey, how he had felt pursued by Little Nell, and that he was a kind of murderer. Perhaps it was because he knew them to their very souls and he could not know his own children so deeply.

Superintendent Jones came back with the rosy-faced Rogers.

‘We’ll take care of her, Mr Dickens,’ Rogers said, his natural cheerfulness moderated by his understanding of the meaning of Dickens’s white face.

Dickens got down from the wagonette and Constable Rogers drove it in through the wooden door.

‘Time to go home, Charles,’ said the superintendent.

Dickens glanced at the kindly face and the man using his name for the first time. Fatherless Dick, he thought, was nearer the mark; here was the man who was as good as a father to him – solid, dependable, straight and simply just good where his actual father was everything else – unreliable, dishonest, and not always very good at all.

‘Thank you, Sam,’ he replied, accepting permission to use the superintendent’s name.

‘Take a cab.’

‘No, I’ll walk, I’d like the air, and it will give me some time to think. When shall we meet again?’

‘I must get moving. I shall go to the Commissioner’s house. He’ll see me – he’ll know it’s a matter of urgency. I’ll make arrangements for Patience’s body.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Well, as I said, we have five days before the death should be registered, probably longer when the Commissioner has seen the Home Secretary, so we need to find a safe place for her. The hospital, I thought. We will need to keep her on ice until she can be buried. I must do that today. I’ll go home tonight, and tomorrow morning we should go back to the Home. You must question the girls whilst I see the local constable and get him to make enquiries about the pedlar. Then, since it is Sunday, we might go to church.’ The superintendent smiled.

‘Not to chapel?’ Dickens smiled back.

‘I do not think I could face him on a Sunday.’

‘It might be a good time to catch him – at the height of his ranting – then you’ll see what kind of a creature he is.’

‘A good idea. We’ll try to make time for him.’

‘What about the constable at Shepherd’s Bush? Can he be trusted?’

‘Oh, I think so – two things: first, he is young and ambitious and will be told how discreet work in this case might lead to promotion. Second, you remember that Mrs Morson told us the story of his escapade with one of the girls – drinking tea in the kitchen when he should have been on patrol – he knows I haven’t forgotten that.’

‘Will I meet you at Bow Street? Might I suggest we take breakfast before we go?’

‘A capital idea. Shall we say ten o’clock? In the meantime, go home and take some rest.’

‘I shall. Goodbye, Sam – until tomorrow.’

‘Take the lamp – it’s still dark. If you meet any ruffians, they may take you for a policeman. You can invoke the authority of Bow Street and they’ll scatter. No need to arrest anyone.’

‘A pity. I should rather like to chase down a ruffian – if you’ll lend me your handcuffs.’

Dickens took the bull’s eye lantern and turned out into the street to make his way towards Covent Garden where the market was stirring. All night long, the wagons laden with their mountains of fruit and vegetables had been rumbling along suburban roads and through the main streets. Numbers of men and women who carried on their heads heavy baskets of fruit, winter pears, apples of every colour, the brown russet, the golden bob and Ribston pippins, made their way in a long straggling line to the market. It would soon be day, and the young seamstresses, milliners’ girls, barmaids and shopwomen would come to market to buy what flowers there were to be had on a cold winter morning – in winter, pots of snowdrops and crocuses and bouquets of real grasses were to be had, tinted to unreal colours; there were dried weeds and, marvellously, flowers carved from turnips and beetroot all in brilliant contrast to the dark green pine boughs.

Beyond the market, across Long Acre, his way took him to Seven Dials, at the entrance of seven obscure passages, a place he had described in
Sketches by Boz
as a place inhabited by unwholesome vapours and smells so vile it was hard to breathe. He traversed a street of dirty straggling houses and dingy little shops with unidentifiable objects in their grimy windows; surely nothing was ever sold from these dark caves. He was aware of the presence of various huddled forms in shop doorways. Once, one of these shapes rose before him from the gutter itself. It could hardly be human; it seemed to have no face and what might have been its head was swathed in some kind of ragged turban. A dark arm stretched towards him, ending in a bandaged stump rather than a hand. Dickens wondered how it could beg with no hand, and as he hesitated, feeling in his pocket, the shadowy thing vanished like a ghost down a hole in the pavement which seemed to Dickens to be the entrance to some underworld. And such a foetid stench came up from these foul openings that he hurried on, sickened. He saw a thin cat slithering through a broken window. It turned, giving him a haughty stare like some ragged aristocrat still holding on to his nobility in the face of starvation. He saw a boy, another Davey, curled up by a broken wall, dressed in a coarse, torn canvas jacket which would not fetch a penny at the ragshop; Dickens shivered at the sight of the bruised and filthy feet, naked in the bitter night.

He came out of one of the vaporous lanes and turned into Crown Street. Here was some respectability and at least some signs of prosperity. He passed a stationer’s doorway where a little dog was sitting gazing out into the street with a comical air of proprietorship, its little black eyes appraising the stranger and one ear cocked interrogatively. Beware the dognappers, thought Dickens, unaware that he had spoken aloud. The little dog nodded and pulled back into the doorway where it lay down upon a few rags which made up its bed.

Dickens turned into the wider thoroughfare of Oxford Street; here were gas lamps so he put out his lamp. He passed the all-night coffee stand, a large brightly painted truck on four wheels with polished tin cans. Dickens was tempted by the thought of hot coffee and a sandwich, but there was a crowd. He noted the flash men and their bold girls, some good-looking, others like bedraggled hens, their feathers damp and ragged in the night air. Now there were some cabs about and men going to their work. He turned right into Cavendish Square and on to Portland Street, the grand houses such a contrast to what he had seen in Seven Dials. At last he came to Devonshire Terrace – home.

Superintendent Jones went about his business at Bow Street. Apparently, it had been a busy night, so the inspector on night duty informed him, yawning the while as he reeled off the list of beggars, brawlers and drunks and children swept in and swept out again. One or two were lying contentedly snoring in the women’s cells to be released to their gin and porter when daylight came. The superintendent had work to do, and summoned Constable Rogers to go to the hospital to see a doctor of his acquaintance who, he hoped, would take care of Patience after the superintendent had walked to Scotland Yard to see the Commissioner. In the meantime, he would go out to Wills, a nearby coffee shop, to take his breakfast – coffee at threepence a cup, eggs, bacon and kidneys and bread and butter.

Number
1
, Devonshire Terrace was a very good house, leased by Dickens in
1839
. It was on the Marylebone Road, last in a terrace of three – a house of thirteen rooms. Dickens’s progress from his tiny attic room at Baynham Street, a shabby, dingy, mean, yellowish house in Camden Town, where his parents had landed from Chatham in
1822
, to this near mansion in fashionable York Gate, was a story of rags to riches and Dickens was proud of his rise, of his own efforts.

Yet, he stood before the bright green door, seeing the house as a passer-by might, wondering who would live there. Sometimes Dickens could stand outside himself, a stranger in his own life. He could hardly imagine himself as husband and father to eight children; he was still often in his own mind the solitary forlorn boy who felt himself set apart, and who had to walk three miles to the dreary wharf where the blacking factory seemed to rot into the brown river. Devonshire Terrace was still shuttered, and like a stranger, he did not dare go up to the front door. He went round the back to the kitchen door. He knew that by now, the little kitchen maid, Amy, would be feeding the range. He knocked and waited. Then he heard the bolt being drawn back with a teeth-grinding creak. He made a note to see that it should be oiled. Such domestic details were never beyond him. The door opened. The little maid with her pale, almost white eyes with no lashes, looked out, puzzled to see her master standing at the back door.

‘Do let me in, Amy,’ he said and stepped into the kitchen. ‘No need to disturb anyone. I shall go upstairs directly.’

He put his fingers to his lips and was rewarded with a smile from the child, who was delighted to share a secret.

In his library, Dickens took off his heavy coat, lay down on his velvet sofa, promptly fell asleep and did not dream. At nearly nine he woke, refreshed, the terrors of the night dispersed. He was himself again, filled with energy and purpose, ready, he thought, for the chase – and hungry for breakfast. There was a knock at the door; his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, came in with the two girls, Mamie and Katey, or Lucifer Box, as Dickens called her, she being known for her fiery temper.

‘Papa, breakfast time – time to get up,’ cried Katey, coming in and standing over Dickens. Dickens, in a deep voice, intoned solemnly, ‘“’Tis the voice of the sluggard; I heard him complain. You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.”’

Katey and Mamie took up the poem, shouting in delight, ‘“As the door on its hinges, so he in his bed, turns on his sides and his shoulders, and his heavy head.” Sluggard, sluggard!’ they cried as Dickens stood up.