The Blue Girl

Also by Alex Grecian

The Yard

The Black Country

The Blue Girl

Alex Grecian

G. P. P
UTNAM’S
S
ONS

New York

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Copyright © 2013 by Alex Grecian

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Published simultaneously in Canada

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The girl’s skin was a delicate shade of blue, the color of a robin’s egg. Her white dress rippled and her outstretched arms and legs spread out over the canal’s surface, one of her hands resting on a furry pale frond of milfoil that stretched up from the bottom of the canal seeking the hi
dden sun.

It was a grey Sunday morning and fog had settled everywhere like dust. Even from the canal’s edge, and even through the mist, I could see that the blue girl’s eyes were open, staring up at the indifferent sky. She could not have been older than eighteen. A crew of ditchdiggers, interrupted on their way to some public project, stood nearby leaning on their shovels, their hats in their hands.

I waited on the east bank, shifting from foot to foot, dancing awkwardly with the cold. When Dr Bernard Kingsley finally arrived, pushing through the onlookers, his black bag swinging like a cudgel, I let out a sigh of relief. Kingsley paused to take the arm of a young girl who had followed him through the crowd. She nodded at him and folded back the cardboard cover of a large tablet of paper. I watched as she produced a chunk of charcoal and began sketching the scene.

“I sent for you an hour ago,” I said.

“I’m busy,” Kingsley said. “Why haven’t you got the body out of there yet?”

“I thought you’d want to see where she was in relation to . . .” I stopped and looked around, gestured at the water, the high muddy banks, even the people standing above the girl, looking down on her. “You know, the area.”

“What I would have liked to see is in this mud we’re standing on. If there were footprints here, shoe prints, they’ve been obliterated by you lot of bloody herd animals.”

“Most of these people were here when I arrived. There was nothing I could have done.”

“Perhaps. But your first duty, when there is a murder, is to preserve everything so that the detectives and I may observe what there is to see.”

I nodded, but said nothing. I thought I
had
been preserving things, but I didn’t want to argue the point. I could feel my cheeks growing warmer, but Kingsley seemed not to notice. I picked up a long stick from the bank and shoved it out into the water. I pulled it back up and frowned at the water that dripped from the end of it.

“Fiona?” Kingsley said.

“I’m finished here, Father,” the girl said.

Kingsley nodded and gestured to the water. “Then let’s get her out of there, Constable,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Why can’t you?”

“My shoes will be ruined.”

“Your shoes?”

“Yes, they’re new.”

“Take them off.”

“I would, but then the hems of my trousers would be ruined.”

“Why are you wearing new shoes and trousers on duty if you’re so concerned about them?”

“What else would I wear?”

Kingsley shook his head and ran a hand through his prematurely grey hair. “Is there another policeman we might persuade to wade into this canal?”

“Inspector Tiffany was here, but he’s gone. Between the strike at the docks and the other murders last night . . .”

“Other murders?”

“They seem to be unrelated to this one. Only the usual crime.”

“More bodies for me to deal with today.”

“I suppose so.”

“No matter. There are always bodies. You’re alone here?”

“To guard the scene, yes sir.”

Kingsley sighed and looked around at the crowded bank. He pointed to the ditchdiggers. “You there, would any of you be willing to get wet for a penny a man?”

Without a word, three of the men set down their shovels and lowered themselves carefully down to the water’s edge. They moved out into the frigid canal as if in a trance, their legs invisible beneath the brackish surface. They stopped when they reached the girl. They stood at her side for a long moment, unmoving, until one of them reached out and touched her face. When he drew his hand back, her eyes were closed. A tear of canal water rolled down her cheek and disappeared into the tendrils of her hair.

The men floated her across the water, barely touching her, and her hand slid from the milfoil as she drifted toward shore. More onlookers waded in and gently took the blue girl’s arms and legs and guided her in. A large angry-looking man with a fine ginger beard stooped and lifted her and she came free of the water’s surface. He turned and carried her to land, where an old woman laid a blanket on the ground. The big man set his burden down and stepped back. More blankets were produced for the dripping men as they emerged from the canal. Some of the women in the crowd made the sign of the cross, moving their fingers quickly from their foreheads to their lips and then their chests as they looked down on the dead girl.

Kingsley held out a handful of pennies to the men, but none of them took their payment or even looked at him. Then the crowd broke and the onlookers began to drift away, disappearing in the morning fog, one after another, moving off to their homes and churches, and perhaps they had been changed. Kingsley, Fiona, and I were left alone with the dead girl.

Her features were plain and her limp, dark hair splayed across the blanket, hanks of it falling across her forehead. Her sodden white gown did little to disguise the shape of her body, the darkness at the tips of her breasts and between her legs.

“She’s lost a shoe,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“She’s only got one shoe.”

It was true, the girl’s left foot was bare, but Kingsley shrugged off my observation. It was probably irrelevant. Kingsley’s daughter Fiona set her tablet on a patch of dewy grass and knelt by the body. She reached out and removed the shoe from the girl’s other foot. She pushed the soft pale legs together and pulled the girl’s dress down to cover her knees. I averted my eyes and found myself looking at the sketch on Fiona’s tablet. Despite the speed with which I’d seen her draw it, the likeness was incredible; the position of each limb sketched out accurately, but with a sort of loose poetry of movement, as if the dead girl were dancing in air rather than floating. It seemed to me that Fiona had casually captured the girl’s absent soul.

Fiona saw me staring at the tablet. She snatched it up and stood, clutching the tablet to her chest, hiding the sketch from view. She handed the girl’s shoe to her father and then looked away over the water, into the fog.

Kingsley took the shoe and frowned at it. He shook it and turned it over and a small silver coin fell into his palm. I craned my neck to see. On the coin was a raised portrait of the young Queen Victoria. He turned it over. The words “six pence” were surrounded by a garland and topped with a crown.

“A silver sixpence,” Kingsley said.

“She was robbed,” I said. “She hid her sixpence away in her shoe so the thief wouldn’t get it, but he killed her anyway.”

“That is a possibility.”

“No,” Fiona said. She was still looking away from us, toward the muddy canal. “She was getting married. Silver sixpence in her shoe. It’s a superstition meant to bring good luck on her wedding day.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “I’ve heard that before.”

“If she was a new bride,” Kingsley said, “that may give you a clue in trying to identify her, mightn’t it, Constable?”

“It’s not much of a clue, but it’ll have to do, I suppose.”

“It’s Sunday,” Fiona said.

“Yes?”

“If she got married yesterday, she’s already had all her bad luck at once.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“The rhyme. The one about the days of the week. Saturday’s bad luck for a wedding.”

“Luck is for people who don’t know any better,” Kingsley said. “We’ll need to transport this poor girl’s body to my laboratory.”

“I’ll have some of the boys bring her around,” I said.

“Please take care when moving her.”

“Of course. What do you think did her?”

“Well, it wasn’t only bad luck. Take a look at her throat.”

I looked and saw deep purple marks in the translucent flesh. “Strangled?”

“Indeed. It looks as though someone choked her and threw her away.”

“She wasn’t an especially pretty girl, was she? For a bride, I mean.”

“Every bride is special, Constable. This one is no exception.”

I nodded and looked away at the tendrils of milfoil on the canal. Asinine comments about defenseless women are a particular specialty of mine.

•   •   •

Let me be clear: I have no illusions that I’m a good man, or a good policeman. I joined the Metropolitan Police Force in order to impress the sort of girl who likes a man in uniform. I’m not a bad-looking fellow, charming enough and, if there is work to be done, I prefer to shirk it. I generally get away with ducking responsibility through the judicious use of a wink and a smile. I’m doing my best to be a better person. When it occurs to me. I suppose I’m very much like everybody else in England, but at least I’m honest about myself.

The murder of the girl in the canal bothered me for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. Perhaps it was the funerary atmosphere that had surrounded the discovery of her body. Maybe it was the mixture of pity and disgust I had felt while looking down at her body. Whatever the reason, I felt an unfamiliar sense of duty.

I sent a runner to the Yard, but no one was available to help me. There had been six other murders in London the previous night and a dead girl in the water was too common a sight to warrant pulling an inspector off another job. Two men were sent from the workhouse instead. It was evident that neither of them had shaved in days and they both smelled of stale beer. I would not have used their jackets to polish my shoes. The men lifted the blue girl onto a stretcher and bore it away for delivery to Dr Kingsley’s laboratory at University College Hospital. I accompanied them to ensure that no liberties were taken with the body during transport.

Fiona was waiting for me at her father’s laboratory.

“Father’s had to go out again. The other bodies.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have them put her on one of the empty tables.”

“Which one?”

“It doesn’t matter. Wait right here, I have something for you.”

She scurried through a door on the other side of the room. The two men tipped the stretcher and toppled the blue girl onto a table near the wall. One of them touched the brim of his hat, nodded at me, and they were gone.

I looked around the room. It was large, but the space was filled with a dozen long wooden tables, their surfaces burnished and copper colored with use. Each table had a hole in the middle and the floor gently sloped to a drain. Corpses already rested on five of the tables. Now six. I tried not to think about what went on in that room. My stomach has never been strong.

I looked at the blue girl. But for the pallor of her skin and the terrible bruise on her throat, she might have been napping. The laborers had left her in an awkward pose and I eased her onto her back, smoothed her sodden white dress, and crossed her hands over her chest. I concentrated on posing her. I only knew that I didn’t want to look up and see the rest of those bodies again. One was missing a head.

“That’s kind of you.”

I turned and smiled at Fiona. She brushed a pale strand of hair away from her face and looked at the floor. Her tablet of paper was gone and in its place she clutched a small, well-worn book to her chest.

“Idle hands,” I said. “I thought I might make her more comfortable. That’s ridiculous, I know, but . . .”

“Not at all. My father says that the way we treat the dead is an indication of how we treat the living.”

“Respect, you mean?”

“Perhaps. Sometimes I only half listen to the things my father says.”

I chuckled. “I should be going. My shift ended long ago.”

“Here.” Fiona held the book out to me. Its dull blue cover was blank, splotched and folded down the middle. There was no title on the spine. I thumbed it open. The pages were dog-eared and yellow.
Marriage Custom and Practise
was printed in faded letters on the first page.
By Robert Cream.

“Um, thank you, but I’m not much of a reader.” In my experience, ladies don’t care for a man who reads. They prefer a man of action, no matter what they say to the contrary.

“It might help you.” Fiona nodded at the silent blue girl. “She was superstitious. The silver sixpence in her shoe. There might be something useful in the book.”

“But I’m not a detective. And even if I were . . .”

“Nobody’s going to investigate her death, are they? Maybe they’ll take a quick look along the bank of that canal, but if no witnesses come forward, if nobody confesses to the crime, she’ll be forgotten.”

“I know it’s difficult, but these things happen every day.”

“But it isn’t every day this time. It was her wedding day. When she was killed, I mean. Someone killed her on her wedding day.”

“It would seem so.”

“She put sixpence in her shoe and she picked out a white dress and she was getting married. And then someone choked the life out of her, and if the last thing she saw was her new husband, there was no love for her in his eyes. She was discarded like rubbish, tossed in the water and left there.”

“It is a shame.”

“It’s more than a shame, Mr Pringle. It’s a crime. And don’t you have something to do with solving crimes?”

I looked away from her and my gaze fell on the limp hand of the blue girl. It had fallen from her chest again and now rested on the table, the fingers beginning to curl as rigor took hold. The blue girl, I realized, wasn’t much older than Fiona.

“You think the husband did it?” I said.

Fiona leaned forward and whispered. “Isn’t it always the husband?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.

“I’ll look into it,” I said. “I have an hour or two to spare.”

“You may need this, too.” Fiona drew a folded sheet of paper from somewhere in the pleats of her dress and handed it to me. I opened it. She had sketched the blue girl’s face as it must have been in life. It was still not a face I’d describe as pretty, but there was vivacity and dignity and hope captured there in a few deft charcoal lines. There was something compelling about that face.