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Bits of graying plaster on the walls either crumbled on their own or were the unfortunate victims of angry patrons. It was hard to tell if they’d punched the wall or if they’d been shoved into it. Perhaps both scenarios were true. Wallpaper lay half ripped from the hallway, and the rest was stubbornly hanging on. It was dark like the rest of the interior. As dark as the deeds that we were about to investigate.
I made the awful mistake of looking down again and spotted drops of dried blood. Unless the victim had been attacked here, our murderer must have exited this way. My stomach gave an involuntary flip. Perhaps I wasn’t as anxious to study another loss of life as I’d imagined earlier. Maybe nearly a month free from the worry of destruction wasn’t enough of a respite at all.
Thick layers of dust and cobwebs gathered in the corners, adding to the crawling sensation along my back. Buckets of refuse attracted flies and other vermin I didn’t wish to inspect too closely. It was a horrendous place to live and an even more abysmal place to die.
“Which direction?” I asked, half turning to my companion.
Thomas motioned toward the back end of the building, down a narrow corridor. There were more rooms off to each side than I’d have thought could fit on this floor. I raised my brows, surprised there was no desk clerk station in the main entry. Peculiar for a hotel.
As we moved forward a few steps, I also noted that the door numbers began at twenty and furrowed my brow. “Is this not the ground-floor entrance?”
“There’s a stairwell through that door that leads down to the first floor,” Thomas said. “The body is in the last room on the right. Watch your step.”
It was an odd configuration. One that lent itself nicely to hiding a murderer or aiding them with escaping detection from witnesses. Before I stepped into the corridor, I dared a glance up, noticing people staring down, their expressions as bleak as their surroundings.
A mother rocked a baby on her hip while several young boys and girls watched with empty stares. I wondered how many times they’d witnessed police coming into their borrowed home, removing another body like yesterday’s rubbish.
I recalled my earlier worry over Thomas’s birthday party and shame crept in. While I was fretting over dessert courses and French delicacies and mourning the loss of frilly shoes, people were struggling a few blocks away to simply survive. I swallowed my revulsion, thinking of the person who’d been slain here. The world needed to be better. And if it wasn’t possible for it to be better, we, its inhabitants, needed to do better.
I gathered my resolve and moved slowly down the corridor, using my cane to test the creaking floorboards to ensure I wouldn’t fall through. A policeman stood outside the room and, much to my surprise, nodded as Thomas and I drew closer. There was no scorn or mockery in his gaze. He didn’t view me and my skirts as unwelcome, which bolstered my first impressions of the New York City Police Department. At least for the moment.
“The doctor’s been waitin’ for you both.” He pushed the door open and stepped back. “Careful, now. The room’s a wee bit crowded.”
“Thank you, sir.” I managed to step into the quarters, but there wasn’t much space to spare. Thomas moved behind me, and I paused long enough to run a cursory glance around the room. It was sparsely decorated—one bed, one nightstand, one tattered, blood-soaked quilt. In fact, as I edged farther inside, I saw the bedding wasn’t the only thing splattered in blood.
Uncle stood over the tiny bed frame, pointing to the victim. My pulse slowed. For the briefest moment, I felt as if I’d been transported back to the scene of Miss Mary Jane Kelly’s murder. It was the last Ripper crime and the most brutal. I didn’t have to move closer to see this woman had been practically eviscerated. She was unclothed from the neck down and had been stabbed repeatedly about her person.
I felt, more than witnessed, Thomas moving around behind me and shifted to glance at him. The rogue was almost dancing in place, his eyes alight in the most abhorrent manner.
“There is a body,” I whispered harshly. It was incredible that he could carry on as if it were a regular afternoon stroll by the river.
Thomas drew back, his hand clutching his chest. He looked from me to the body, his eyes going wide. “Is that what that is? Here I was convinced it was a Winter Ball. Shame I wore my best
suit.”
“How clever.”
“You do say you like a man with a rather large—”
“Stop.” I held my hand up. “I beg of you. My uncle is right there.”
“Brain.” He finished anyway, grinning at my reddening face. “You truly astound me with the direction your filthy mind travels in, Wadsworth. We’re at a crime scene; have a care.”
I gritted my teeth. “Why are you so flippant?”
“If you must know now, it’s—”
“There you two are.” Uncle had the look of a man on the verge of a rampage. I could never quite tell if death was a balm or an irritant to him. “Clear the room!” Policemen inside paused, staring at Uncle as if he’d possibly lost his good senses. He turned to a man in a suit and raised his brows. “Inspector Byrnes? I need a few moments alone with my apprentices to examine the scene. Please have your men wait in the hall. We’ve already had half of Manhattan trouncing through here. If anything else is disturbed, we won’t be of much use to you.”
The inspector looked up from the victim, taking in my uncle and then me and Thomas. If he, an American inspector, was annoyed that an Englishman was tossing him out of his own crime scene, it didn’t show. “All right, boys. Let’s give Dr. Wadsworth some time. Go ask the neighbors if they’ve seen or heard anything. The housekeeper said she saw a man—get me a description.” He glanced at my uncle. “How long’s she been here?”
Uncle twisted the ends of his mustache, his green eyes scanning the body in that clinical way he’d taught both me and Thomas. “No more than half a day. Maybe less.”
Inspector Byrnes nodded as if he’d suspected the same. “Witnesses say she rented a room between the hours of ten thirty and eleven last night.”
Uncle observed the victim again and seemed to stare through her into that calm place necessary to locate clues. People in London thought him heartless. They didn’t understand he needed to harden his heart in order to save them the pain of never knowing what happened to their loved ones.
“We’ll know more once we perform a postmortem,” he said, motioning for his medical satchel, “but an initial glance—based on the current state of rigor mortis—indicates she might’ve perished between the hours of five and six. Though that may well change once we’ve gathered more scientific fact.”
