staff here might indulge in. Present the lace. The surgeon will pronounce strangulation. If commanded, tell of the entry by coal chute. That should be sufficient to have a verdict for us to continue. I will tell you later what other clues — such as they are — have been afforded me by my interview with the child. The coroner, most likely, will have no need or show any interest as yet in her words.”
“I shall be diligent,” answered Caldwell.
“This bodes some strange eruption to our state,” mumbled Endersby.
“Sir?” said Caldwell, his shoulders held back.
“At ease, Sergeant. Hamlet once again. To your duty. We shall meet again today at Fleet Lane Station House. Let us say past noon or one o’clock.”
“Certainly, sir,” Caldwell said, and headed toward the staircase.
“Now, young constable, we have dire duties before us,” Endersby said, closing his satchel, straightening his hat, and indicating to the young recruit to lead on. The young man went forward and led Endersby out to the yard of St. Giles. Presently, in a rushing hansom cab, Endersby’s confusion lay somewhat abated even if his mind kept conflating clues and fears. With a second murder to be investigated, he reminded himself of Peel’s Sixth Principle to “exercise persuasion, advice, and warning.” As a professional detective he knew he must find proof rather than issue arrests on mere hearsay. And yet, how might he confront two such similar crimes happening in one night? He had to act quickly. He must not hesitate. He felt he was being chased by an ugly troll about to strangle him, an old memory from his boyhood that rose in his imagination as he pitied the second matron lying dead in Shoe Lane. He asked the constable to explain who he was and what had happened.
“I’m a night watch constable, Colby, sir, responsible for Shoe Lane to Fleet Street and eastward to St. Paul’s. Early this morning, just before dawn, a gentleman from the Shoe Lane House of Correction approached me and requested I come to view a most unfortunate sight. A matron strangled in her parlour, a bit of cloth choked in her mouth.”
“Recall the cloth, Constable. Anything peculiar about it — shape, colour?”
“Sir, not to put too fine a point upon it, I reckon on inspection it seemed to be but a snag of old lace.”
“Indeed,” Endersby replied.
“And, sir, if I have your permission, I must recall, as well, a most horrific detail.”
“Granted,” Endersby said, curtly.
“The victim’s neck, sir, was bruised: a dark thick bruise. Given the toppled state of the victim — in her chair, sir, lying back on the floor — I had the opportunity to imagine that she may have been strangled, sir, with a rope or some such item.”
“Most astute, Constable.”
The hansom pulled into a narrow yard in which there was a building of dark stone so similar to St. .Giles that one could conclude they were of the same lineage.“Before we descend, Constable, one final preliminary,” Endersby said. “Tell me of the child.”
“Little to tell, sir. In my view, a most peculiar happenstance. On my way to alert constables and a surgeon at Fleet Lane Station House, I saw crouched in a doorway a young female dressed in the muslin worn by the wards of Shoe Lane. To be precise, she appeared unharmed. She had fallen asleep and was cold. On closer inspection, I noted she was light-haired, no more than ten years old. I brought her back to Shoe Lane whereupon the head Matron took her away.”
“Most curious,” replied Endersby. Under his professional politeness Endersby felt a deep fear. A copy cat incident? One man trawling the workhouses of London to kill at random? And the abandoned girls?
“Anything else, sir?”
“Let us both keep our eyes open and our ears cocked, Constable. I will treat you, if I may, as a second set of my own senses. To verify what I see and hear. Are you agreed, sir?”
“Most respectfully, sir. I am agreed,” the constable replied. While the recruit helped the inspector climb down from the hansom, Endersby’s gouty foot pinched him hard. Entering the grand portal, the inspector noted immediately a different atmosphere from St. Giles. Doors were slamming, voices shouting, people rushing by. “Pandemonium, Constable,” Endersby exclaimed, walking toward a large door that had just opened. In a room full of chairs, a cluster of men and women stood huddled like cattle in the rain. “Holla!” the inspector shouted. The fumbling crowd froze. A master approached, his hands shaking. Endersby quickly introduced himself and the constable. Like hungry dogs to a tossed bone, the others scrambled up to the inspector and began barking out their stories. Questions flew: who did this? Why our matron? Is the child dead or alive? “Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to sit down,” Endersby commanded.
The inspector began his questioning. After a time, he sent the young constable to inspect the coal chute. He then singled out the head master and ordered the others to return to their duties. Endersby viewed the victim, who had been placed conveniently on a pallet next to the female ward. What astonished Endersby were the similarities between this murder and the one he had just investigated not seven streets away in St. Giles. The magnifying glass revealed a bruise. And there were tiny bits of metal rust and a length of the same lace.
Why lace? Endersby asked himself again. He took the sample, opened his satchel and placed the lace in an envelope. While doing so, he listened as the master confirmed that no one had witnessed nor heard the crime being committed. “It was I who found her,” he explained, describing his discovery of the body during his morning round. Tracing the footsteps of sooty coal dust that led from the parlour into the corridor, Endersby remarked on their shape and state of preservation.
“Master,” Endersby then said. “Will you allow me to speak to any of the children? Those who are calm enough to tell me stories?” The master hesitated. He appeared so distracted it was as if the inspector’s words had been uttered in a foreign tongue. A woman appeared and asked the master to come upstairs, so Endersby decided he could no longer wait for permission. He would have to act before pertinent evidence was destroyed. The girls of the only open ward, the one next to the parlour where the body lay, were restless and agitated as he questioned them — some claiming to have heard a man whispering in the night, one certain it was her dead father come to rescue her. He asked if any one of their rank was missing. On asking once again about the intruder, most heads shook.
“He surely stinks,” one child said, her voice hoarse from shouting.
“Did you see him?” Endersby asked, hoping for a description.
“No, sir,” came the reply. “My head was under my pillow.”
All the girls said they had hidden their faces. Dark figures are the bane of childhood, thought Endersby as he thanked the crowd. Here in Shoe Lane there were fewer than twenty females, the oldest perhaps eleven years, skeletal reminders of the injustice of the metropolis. Endersby clenched his fists. These shadows of children had become targets of a roving killer.
A round, squat woman appeared in a white bonnet. “A most horrible deed; I am struck to the marrow with fear.” The matron curtsied.
“The found child, Matron. I wish to see her, if I may.”
Endersby followed her out the front portal while she explained that the child was being tended in the kitchen at the back of the House of Correction. Sudden spring rain fell lightly. As Endersby adjusted his broad-brimmed hat and his suede gloves, his mind took
