Peter Thompson came through a door in the rear of the room and held out his hand to me. He was a tall, bony man with lively eyes in a thin face, wearing a frock coat and breeches that hung loosely on his limbs. So he’d looked every time I’d seen him. He was only minus his frayed gloves this morning, clasping my hand with a bare, callused one.
I’d been in the office to which Thompson ushered me before, long ago, when I’d investigated the affair of the Glass House. I’d met Thompson not long before that, when his men had pulled the body of a young woman out of the water and asked my help identifying it.
Thompson’s room hadn’t changed. He had a desk and chair for himself, a stool for any visitor. I remained standing, remembering that the stool was less comfortable than leaning on my walking stick.
“Thank you for coming, Captain.” Thompson also remained standing, a man who disliked to be still. “I hesitated to write to you, but this has been weighing on my mind for some time. Puzzles intrigue you, so I decided to ask your opinion.”
While I’d gained something of a reputation for ferreting out things that were none of my business, I had to wonder why a man of Thompson’s repute would ask for my help. He had plenty of young, sturdy men at his disposal to assist him in investigations.
“It is an old mystery, I’m afraid,” Thompson said. “I must not lie to you—my superiors have told me to let it be. If no one has come forward in all this time, we are to make a mark through it and continue with more pressing matters. But I dislike leaving a thing unsolved.”
“And you recalled that neither did I,” I supplied.
The corners of Thompson’s lips twitched. “You have a tenacity I admire, Captain. I believe you are the exact man for this little problem.”
“You’ve piqued my interest,” I said. “As you knew you would with your cryptic letter. Now I cannot leave here without knowing the whole of it.”
“For that, I must show you.” Thompson took up his hat and gestured for me to follow him out of the office. He led me from the house entirely, and around a narrow path between buildings to a yard in the back.
Brewster was not having me walk through tiny, dim passages with only a man from the River Police to protect me. He fell into step behind me, his stride even.
Thompson opened the door to another gray stone house, its bricks crumbling from years of exposure to damp, mist, and rain. A light rain was falling now, fog thickening until we stood in a ghostly atmosphere, the air gray-white around us.
Inside the door was a set of steps leading into a cellar. Thompson took us down these into clinging chill.
Candles burned in the darkness to light our way. Crates and boxes were piled in the room below, in front of open cupboards of filled pigeonholes. In spite of the cold, it was somewhat dry down here, no windows to let in the outside air.
Two young men stood in front of tall desks, making notes in ledgers. When they saw Thompson, they stood upright, at attention.
“Take some air, lads,” Thompson told them. “Stretch your legs.”
The two patrollers looked grateful and wasted no time hurrying up the stairs.
“They catalog things here,” Thompson said, waving his hand at the ledgers. “Things we find in the river, goods seized from smugglers, evidence in cases, that sort of thing.”
I glanced at Brewster. I wasn’t certain that information about goods taken from smugglers was a wise thing to pass on to a known thief, but Brewster did not comment or even look interested.
“They catalog things more gruesome as well,” Thompson said. He moved to a heavy, bolted door, and when he opened it, my breath fogged in the air that came out.
We looked into a chamber with a very low stone ceiling and thick walls, as though it had been carved into the banks of the river. The cold was enough to make my throat raw.
Shelves held wooden and metal crates and boxes, though not as many as in the outer room. Thompson lifted a crate from only a step inside the door and brought it out.
He set down the crate to close and lock the door again then carried it to a long table at the back of the main room. Brewster helped him lift the crate to this table, then Thompson used a long piece of metal to pry off its top. Thompson reached inside, lifting out a rolled piece of canvas.
“Will you move the crate for me, sir?” Thompson asked Brewster. Brewster lifted it down, clearing the table, now as intrigued as I was.
Thompson laid the canvas bundle on the table and carefully unrolled it.
“’Struth,” Brewster breathed.
On the dark, stained canvas was a collection of bones. Human bones, clean and preserved.
Thompson started laying them out, one by one, until we gazed down at a near-perfect skeleton of a human being lying before us. The skull, which was mostly intact, bore a large gouge from the top of the head down to the right eye socket.
Someone had smashed a cudgel into this poor creature long ago and left him to die.
“Here we are, Captain,” Thompson said. “I want you to help me discover who she is and what villain out there killed her.”
Chapter Two
“Her,” I repeated.
“That’s what the coroner said at the time.” Thompson straightened one of the hand bones, as though a whole, living woman lay there. “She was fished out of the river ten years ago, caught up on pilings, but no one ever turned up looking for her, and we were never able to find out who she was. We put out a report when we found her, but no one came forward. It’s weighed on me for a long time. And then the other day, I thought—this is something that the captain might be interested in.”
Thompson read me well. I was unfortunately drawn to intrigue, especially when it involved a poor individual who couldn’t fight back, or who had lost against a stronger opponent.
On the other hand, Thompson was optimistic about my abilities. A woman who’d been killed long ago, who was an unidentified collection of bones, and whom apparently no one had missed, would be a bit too cryptic a puzzle, I thought.
“That she was brutally killed is not in question,” I said, touching the gouge on the skull. The bone was smooth under my fingers. “Though how do you know she did not receive these injuries from a fall? An accident?”
“I don’t, not for certain,” Thompson admitted. He fished from the box what looked like nothing more than scraps of cloth. “Her clothes had mostly rotted away, except for a few trapped pieces I managed to clean up.”
I lifted a pale tatter of fabric that held a hint of blue. “Her dress?” I asked.
“I believe so, or undergarments. Also this.” Thompson dug one more item from the box, a gold chain with a locket.
It was an ordinary locket, a small oval on a chain, the gold still bright even after years underwater. Whatever had been engraved on the outside, however, had been worn away, only faint scratches remaining.
I slid my thumbnail into the locket’s crease and pried it open, but found nothing inside. If she’d kept a sketch, silhouette, lock of hair, or painting within, the river had long since destroyed it.
“That was fused around her neck,” Thompson said. “No clasp. I had to cut it from her.”
Interesting. “May I take these with me?” I asked, holding up the fabric and necklace. “If I can determine what sort of cloth it is, how common or how fine, we can at least conclude how wealthy was her family, which could narrow her to certain parts of town.”
“She was a tart, most likely,” Brewster said. “Killed and tossed into the river, no one coming forward to look for her. A lot of them don’t use their own names, and no one knows who they truly are.”
He spoke matter-of-factly, not condemning. In Brewster’s world, a person made a living any way he or she could—he’d met his wife while she was a courtesan in a bawdy house.