“They brung the bodies to the place, the place where the long dead wait.”
“The morgue?”
“That’s what they called it, but weren’t nothing but tables on tables rowed up through the place, and all too short for them long, long bodies. Their legs all hung down over the edge. Hung down to the floor, but they didn’t walk out of there and they didn’t dance no more. They never did dance for me.”
“I can’t imagine Dr Kingsley would allow you anywhere near his work.”
“Weren’t no doctor there. Just us as was rounded up from the workhouse, and we cut on them bodies and they was still.”
Day looked at the man. The knife hung at his side, as if forgotten. The energy Day saw in the dancing man every morning was absent. The man’s effort to find a connection to his life and memories had drained his spirit.
“Rest,” Day said. “In the morning you’ll dance and this fever dream will be forgotten.”
“I’ll dance for you, bluebottle. I dance for ’em all, all the dead. Just like you do. Just like you. You and me.”
“You’re nothing like me. Go to sleep.”
“I got a choice, is all. Keep me out of that workhouse and I’ll show you how to dance. You watch me and you’ll learn. See if you don’t. Dancing’s good. And you gotta do it now ’cause the dead don’t remember how.”
Day turned and trotted back up the street as quickly as he could, but he could still hear the dancing man behind him long after he returned to the Yard.
“Dance, bluebottle, dance.”
13
Day was only a quarter of the way through the enormous pile of papers on his desk when Inspector Michael Blacker swung open the gate and entered the detectives’ warren of the common room. Blacker had his topcoat draped over an arm, and he stopped at Day’s desk on his way to the coat hooks at the back wall.
“Still here or returning?” Blacker said.
“What time is it?”
“Coming up midnight. I’d have been back here sooner if there were any police wagons to spare tonight. Always a shortage of those, it seems. What about you? Thought you had a pretty young wife to go home to.”
“I do. I mean…” Day sat back and tossed a sheaf of papers at the larger stack on the desk. The impact made a few of the topmost pages slide off the desk onto the floor. “There’s so much here.”
“Little’s files?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I came back. Couldn’t sleep knowing someone’s out there killing detectives.”
“I had no intention of being here this late. I thought I’d move Little’s papers over here and perhaps organize them so that I could start in on it all tomorrow morning, but I had no expectation that there would be so much to deal with.”
“No shortage of crime around here, Day. And no extra time in the day to deal with it all. Never any extra time in the day.” Blacker waved a finger at Day and grinned. “Your name is a blessing, Day. I’ve made a crack without even realizing it.”
Day sighed and bent down to pick up the fallen papers while Blacker finally hung up his coat and hat. Blacker came back to Day’s desk and pulled a chair up to the other side of it.
“You want some help with this?”
“Well, I wouldn’t turn it down.”
Blacker sat and pulled a folder from the stack.
“You’re still assuming Little came upon something in an investigation and that it led to his death, then?”
“I have no idea. This is a place to start. I thought I’d give his family the day to mourn before I call on them tomorrow.”
“Good of you.”
“They may know something, but it would be indecent to intrude upon them today.”
“Of course. What about the scene?”
“The train station? Kingsley seemed quite certain that he wasn’t killed there. I doubt very much I’d find anything more than the doctor already did.”
“If we could determine where he was killed…”
“Yes. Or who did it.”
Blacker smiled and nodded. “Point taken. This is a place to start,” he said.
He opened the folder and began to read. Day rummaged through the papers until he found the sheaf he’d been looking at and resumed where he’d left off. Little’s filing system seemed to be completely random. His case files had been shuffled together in no particular order. Day skimmed through case after case, trying to impose order on them, trying to find some possible connection between Little’s job and his death.
“What is that stench?”
Blacker was sniffing the air in the closed room.
“I didn’t want to sit at his desk, so I moved the files over here.”
“Right.”
“But I couldn’t find a box to do it. There’s so much here, I didn’t want to spend the night going back and forth. There are no boxes anywhere in this building.”
“Sir Edward likes to keep a clean workplace.”
“Clearly. I had to borrow a box.”
He pointed to the milk crate on the floor.
“How can a box stink up the entire room?” Blacker said.
“Its origins are dubious.”
“Well, we don’t need it now.”
“I promised the owner I’d leave it outside for him.”
“Outside is a good place for it.”
Blacker stood and picked up the crate. He left the room by the back hall and returned a minute later, wiping his hands on his vest.
“We need a window,” he said. “It’ll take all night for this odor to leave us.”
“In hindsight, I should have left the box where I found it. Once I was committed to getting it, I felt I had to follow through.”
“Good trait in a detective. Shall we get back to the business at hand?”
“There’s just … How could any one man possibly hope to solve so many cases?” Day said. He waved his hand over the stacks.
“How many do you have? How many cases have collected on your own desk in the week you’ve been here?”
“Including Little’s cases?”
“Just your own.”
“More than a dozen. I’ll never solve them all.”
“No, you won’t,” Blacker said. “So which case is most important? Of course, that’s been decided for you: The murder of another detective has to come first. But when you’ve solved that one, you’ll have to choose the next most important case from the stacks.”
“But how? How do you decide that?”
Blacker shrugged. “You just do. Give it time and you’ll get a feel for it.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll go back to wherever you came from and probably live a much happier life.”
Day stared at the papers in front of him without seeing them. He looked up when Blacker began talking again and realized that the other detective had been watching him.
“Being an inspector with the Yard is a responsibility and an honor,” Blacker said. “You keep that front and center in your mind and it all tends to seem a bit more manageable.”
Blacker grinned his lopsided grin and bent his head to read. Day sighed and did the same.
Judging by Day’s preliminary count before moving the files over to his own desk, Little had been working on at least a hundred cases at once and had made almost no headway on any of them. Day tried to organize the files as he went along, creating three separate stacks on his desk.
In the first stack, he put Little’s notes on cases that seemed to Day to be solvable, things he could follow up on once Little’s own unfortunate case was resolved. That first stack was the largest of the three by far, but as the night wore on, fewer case files made their way there. Day became jaded as he worked. There was too much crime for any one man to care about it all.
A rash of burglaries in Highgate had stumped Little for some time. The intruder had entered through half-open windows, often two or three stories up, only to take small trinkets and baubles. The circumstances seemed to rule out all but an extremely agile child, but a smudged handprint on one window frame had led Little to conclude that a trained monkey was involved. The task of rounding up every organ grinder in the vicinity had apparently been too daunting for Little and, after forming the idea, he had abandoned it. Day made a note to follow up on the case to see if any organ grinders had been contacted and filed the case in his “probably solvable” stack. But it seemed to have no bearing on Little’s death.