Bill leered. 'The killing pen.' They mounted the platform as the gate clanged shut on a packed, snorting, heaving line of cattle. ''Ave a look at the knockers at work.'
Unhurriedly, the sledgehammers fell on the flat of the animals' heads, with a steady crack like a sportsman's gun. The knockers never missed. The beast fell, or sagged against the flanks of its fellows. Once the line was silent, and still save for mortal spasms, the knockers rested sweating on their hammers, the far gate was opened, and a team of men with hooks dragged the carcasses into the brightly gaslit building beyond.
Were they dead, Eliot wondered, or merely stunned? In the next building, it made no difference. All were raised by their hind hoofs on chains from the roof, and had their throats cut over buckets. The room was filled with men engulfed in leather aprons like a blacksmith's. They decapitated the animals with a stroke of a cleaver, tossing the heads like footballs into iron bins. They spread the carcasses on the flagged floor, shackling their hooves to short iron posts, and dextrously rid them of their hides. The shiny, bloody torsos were shifted by handcarts to worn wooden tables, where more aproned men chopped them to bits, separating the entrails into separate round bins of liver, kidneys, lungs, guts and tongues, with a final bin for all the rest.
Poupart's was hardly more than a shed, impossible to see across for steam. Bullocks' and sheeps' heads, bones with fragments of meat, bits of internal organs which had escaped becoming sausages, were dumped in boiling vats. The meat was sieved and minced, seasoned fiercely and packed into tins under heavy weights. The liquor went for pea soup, the skimmed fat for lard, the bones were crushed through steel rollers for meal to nourish the roses in London gardens.
''Londoners Love It,'' Eliot ended with a smile, after recounting his investigation to Crippen and Ethel Le Neve at Frascati's that evening.
'In Chicago,' Crippen said with quiet pride, 'they've got slaughterhouses so efficient, they say they use pretty well everything in a hog but its squeal.'
'Peter! You'll put me off my dinner,' Ethel dabbed her forehead with a tiny lace-edged handkerchief.
Crippen looked delighted. 'Ethel my dear, when you dine with two doctors you must be ready to hear strange things. Isn't that so, Dr Beckett?'
'Perhaps I should never have mentioned it at dinner at all, Miss Le Neve. But the Market made so strong an impression on me. There's a broad, tumbling Styx flowing into the heart of London,' he said dramatically. 'None of those beasts will ever return to their lush fields and flyblown byres, no more than we can reverse the torrents of the River Severn.'
'Yes, it is sad,' said Ethel. 'Ever so.'
Frascati's was large and handsome, a cafe and grill-room with the plush-curtained, palm-fringed winter garden upstairs. Ethel was prettier than Eliot remembered. She wore a plain cream blouse and a navy serge skirt, befitting the desk rather than the dinner-table. Her pearl necklace Eliot assumed a sham. When Crippen had introduced her with muted effusiveness, she shook hands in a ladylike way, whole arm delicately raised. Her expression seemed consciously subdued, a lively young woman wrapping herself tightly in a mantle of modesty to suit the company. She differed from Belle as a bunch of violets from a bunch of bananas.
Conversation continued untaxingly with Ethel's enthusiasm for her new typewriter. 'A Smith Premier, with complete control from the keyboard,' she explained triumphantly. 'It has a combination paragrapher and column finder, with removable and interchangeable plattens, a stencil key, a ribbon-colour change and a back-spacer.'
Eliot gravely congratulated her on command of such advanced machinery. Then Crippen said unexpectedly, 'Did you know, Dr Beckett, that Belle is my second wife? I was married to an Irish girl from Dublin, called Charlotte Bell,' he reminisced pleasantly. 'A student nurse at the Manhattan Hospital. I was an intern. A pretty usual combination, isn't it?'
'Peter has a son,' Ethel added.
'Yes. Otto. He's in California now. My wife had a fit and died in her next pregnancy. That was in Salt Lake City, in the winter of '91.'
'Peter makes the perfect husband,' Ethel said with sudden spirit. 'He had no vices, and Belle can do what she likes with him. Their house is an absolute disgrace, Dr Beckett. She won't keep a servant, you know. The gas stove's rusty and the kitchen's covered with cooking stains, there's dirty dishes, knives, flat-irons, saucepans everywhere, mixed up with Belle's false hair and even her precious jewellery. And as like as not, some beautiful white chiffon gown that Peter's paid a fortune for, tossed over a chair with his collars and shirts. Once she even took in lodgers,' Ethel said indignantly. 'Germans,' she emphasized the horror.
Crippen murmured in mitigation, 'Four young students.' He paused. 'I had to black their boots.'
'Why, she's even had Peter make a cage for the cats, for fear they'll be put in the family way.' Ethel stopped abruptly, pink from the outburst. She added firmly, 'Of course, Belle and I get along very well together. Sometimes we're like sisters.'
'Belle has an extravagant temperament,' Crippen excused her. 'She's Polish.'
'Really?' exclaimed Eliot. So she was one of a million Central Europeans who had jumped out of the frying-pan into the melting-pot.
'Her father had a fruit-barrow in Brooklyn-as we'd say in London, a costermonger. Her mother was German. She called herself Cora Turner, and only after we married did I discover she was really Kunigunde Mackamatzki,' he revealed in a mild voice. 'She was nineteen. I had to win her from the protection of a man called Lincoln-'
Crippen broke off his sentence. The orchestra began the waltz from Franz Lehar's _Merry Widow,_ which gave George Edwardes a _succиs fou_ at Daley's in Leicester Square in 1907. Crippen put his hand on Ethel's and exchanged a look of dreamy sentimentality. 'Our favourite tune,' he explained to Eliot. 'All that is needed to put the crowning touch on our happiness.'
Eliot stared down at his plaice-rather than sole, it was the five shilling dinner-to avoid laughing at a pathetic little doctor who created romance from a tinselly restaurant, a banal tune and a commonplace typist with pretty eyes. He had a talent for Gemutlichkeit, Eliot thought. He suspected suddenly that Crippen had invited him to meet Ethel, had indulged in such confidences, to enrol him as an ally against Belle. He remembered his father's advice, never be inveigled into marital conflicts or the beds of young married women. He spent the rest of the meal talking mostly about the House of Lords. It bored Ethel, but Crippen seemed to draw from it intellectual uplift.
Over the fruit-salad, Crippen passed Eliot the promised cheque. He saw it was for a guinea. 'You're very generous,' he said warmly.
'The most generous man in the world,' Ethel agreed. 'You've only got to look at Belle's dresses and jewels, haven't you?'
It was approaching midnight when Crippen hailed a hansom. Ethel lived in Constantine Road on the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, barely a mile beyond Hilldrop Crescent. Eliot avoided a lift on the excuse of some excitement in the streets of Westminster. He strode towards the river down Kingsway, intending to take a tram along the Embankment to the Houses of Parliament. He heard the newsboys shouting a special edition. He thrust a ha'penny at a ragged urchin for the _Evening Times,_ eagerly scanning the front page under a street lamp in the rain.
On Lord Lansdowne's resolution, the House of Lords had rejected the House of Commons' Finance Bill by 350 votes to 75. Eliot crammed the paper into the pocket of his raincoat. 'There'll be a general election,' he exclaimed excitedly. 'A general election as soon as the year's out.'
He walked with a springier step, seeing himself as Dr Eliot Beckett, MP.