Four Thousand Days Read online

  ‘Long day, Miss Friend?’

  She turned to the young man across the aisle. She’d seen him here before, always on Fridays, always in the lectures open to the public. He was good-looking in a plebeian sort of way and had shoulders like a dray horse. ‘How do you know my name?’ she had to ask.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, genuinely apologetic. ‘It goes with the territory, I’m afraid. I’m a policeman.’

  She glanced down at his feet. Yes, that was entirely possible.

  ‘Constable Adam Crawford, A Division.’

  ‘Scotland Yard?’ she queried.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ he said. ‘That goes with the territory too.’

  ‘I’ve seen you here before.’ She stuffed her notebook into her satchel.

  ‘Every Friday,’ he said. ‘The public lectures. Archaeology’s a bit of a hobby of mine.’

  ‘Good for you.’ She stood up and he stood up with her, towering over her even without the helmet.

  ‘Look … er … I know this is a bit forward,’ he said, ‘but, well, it’s teatime. Could I buy you a cuppa at the Jeremy Bentham?’

  She looked into his eyes. They were hazel and watchful and kind. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, and swept past him. At the top of the stairs, as the other students made their way out of the auditorium, she half turned. ‘Let me buy you one.’

  Constable Adam Crawford was a man of two worlds. By day, whenever he could get away from the endless shifts, he roamed the bookshops around University College, soaking up the culture of the ancients and chatting to the students, most of whom were only a year or two younger than he was. By night, however …

  He walked his beat along Tothill Street, listening to his hobnailed boots clattering at the regulation two and a half miles an hour. He knew every inch of this street and the others around it. It was a warm night, for all it was already October and high clouds scudded under the moon, vanishing in turn above the silhouettes of the rooftops. From somewhere, a dog barked. He checked the time by the Abbey clock; half past two.

  He became aware of it, faster than most people, because that was what they trained and paid him for. Raised voices around the corner, and shouting. By the time the glass shattered, he was at a full run, his truncheon in his hand, his heart pounding. Under an awning across Storey’s Yard, he could make out an altercation between a man on the pavement, swaying and shouting obscenities up at another man, sticking his head out of an upstairs window.

  ‘It’s got bloody nothing to do with me,’ the upstairs man was insisting. Then he caught sight of Crawford. ‘Oh, about time,’ he said. ‘I’ve been shouting for help for bloody hours.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ retorted the man on the pavement. ‘Get down and let me in, you shit, or I’ll have the law on you – this one, in fact.’

  Adam Crawford hated to be the man on the spot, a wind-up tin toy that the public could operate at will. Yet, so often, he was exactly that. He had to play Solomon in the most complex of situations and he usually had a split second in which to do it. At moments like these, even the most academically minded copper resorted to the well-worn truisms of the station-house. ‘Now then,’ he said to the pavement man, ‘now then, what’s all this?’

  The man squared up to him. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘is that I’ve got a bloody job to do. And that arsehole up there is preventing me doing it.’

  Crawford looked up to the arsehole in question. The man was in his nightshirt and cap, not unreasonably at that hour of the morning. He dropped his gaze back to the man on the pavement. ‘And what is your job, exactly?’ he asked.

  The man drew himself up to his full height, frowning at the constable’s collar badges. ‘I’m a rent collector. And her inside owes me five weeks’ back rent.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me!’ the man in the window thought it best to remind everybody.

  ‘Have you been drinking, sir?’ Crawford asked the man on the pavement. He kept his truncheon handy, just in case.

  ‘I may have been,’ the rent collector said, ‘at some time in the past.’

  Judging by his breath, some time in the present would be more accurate. ‘Only, the only reason I ask,’ Crawford said patiently, ‘is that it is half past two in the morning and that, you’ll agree, is not a usual time to collect rent.’

  ‘It may not be usual to you, mate,’ the man said, ‘but, trust me, it’s the only time you’re likely to find some of those bastards home. Catch ’em when they’re half asleep, not ready for any malarkey or smart answers, and you may, just may, get a bob or two out of ’em.’ He threw his head back. ‘That’s if helpful arseholes don’t mind opening the front door, of course.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ the man above grunted.

  ‘You don’t have a key?’ Crawford asked the rent collector.

  ‘Not to this door, no. I have to her room, of course, in fact all of ’em on the ground floor. It’s a bitch, ain’t it? Welcome to London!’

  ‘Would you mind unlocking the door, sir?’ Crawford called to the man above. ‘The sooner I let this man in, the sooner I can arrest him for disturbing the peace.’ He felt glass under his feet. ‘And breaking windows.’

  ‘Arrest him?’ both men said simultaneously.

  ‘That’s marvellous,’ said the upstairs man. ‘I’ll be down.’

  ‘’Ere’ – the rent collector swayed – ‘you can’t arrest me for doing my job.’

  ‘There’s a long list of jobs I can arrest you for doing,’ Crawford told him, ‘from breaking and entering to interfering with sheep. Now, stand still and don’t be a nuisance.’

  The bolts slid and rattled and the upstairs man had become the downstairs man. ‘You stay with him,’ he snapped at Crawford. ‘He don’t have access to anything not on this floor. And, yes, I’d be happy to press charges.’

  Crawford followed the rent collector through the gloom of the passageway. As it got darker around the corner, the constable lit his bulls-eye and it flashed its beams over the walls and flooring, once expensively papered and linoleumed, now a little shabby. ‘Elegant,’ he muttered, as the light fell on an obscene message scrawled at eye level. The rent collector ignored him. He had been called worse a dozen times on any given day.

  ‘Here we are.’ He knocked on a black-painted door, pressing his ear to the woodwork. ‘There you go,’ he mumbled. ‘Nothing.’

  He pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket, and fumbled with two or three before he found the right one. ‘I’m glad you’re here, in a way,’ he said. ‘You can arrest the bitch for non-payment of rent.’ He kicked the door open and waited until Crawford’s lantern beams lit the place. There were two rooms leading off a tiny inner hallway, with cheap painted furniture and heavy fringes. They were both visible from the door. The constable couldn’t help noticing that above the bed was a framed picture telling the world that God is Love. On a whim, he turned it round and on the back, in gilt lettering, were the words ‘Love Conquers All’. But it was what was on the bed that held both men’s attention. A young girl lay sprawled on the covers, her eyes wide open and dull, her mouth slightly gaping. Her arms and legs were thrown wide like the da Vinci drawing of Vitruvian Man that Crawford knew well. He carefully lifted her head on to the mattress and, pointlessly, felt for a pulse. There was a glass phial on the bedside table, beside the red-fringed oil lamp. The dead woman’s clothes were hanging in a deal wardrobe. The smell in the room and the cold of the limp corpse told Crawford that she had been dead for about a day, perhaps two.

  The shock of the sight seemed to have sobered Downstairs Man up. ‘My God,’ he whispered, and then, ‘Poor little Alice.’

  ‘Alice?’ Crawford repeated, frowning at him.

  ‘Yes. Alice Groves,’ the rent collector said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Upstairs Man nodded. ‘Alice Groves.’

  ‘Well, that’s odd, gentlemen,’ Crawford said, ‘because I happen to know this woman.’ He played his bulls-eye’s beam on to the dead face, just to make doubly certain. ‘And her name was Helen Ric
hardson.’

  TWO

  The night had brought the damp cold of impending winter, creeping north-west from the sullen river, dark and brooding in front of the wharves and quays to the East. Joseph Bazalgette’s ornate dolphin standards stood sentinel along this stretch of the Thames and it was already dawn before the vergers of the Abbey came to light the tapers and the gas.

  Constable Adam Crawford had done what he could in the dead woman’s room, then he had secured the premises, as his superiors had it, and stood at the door until one particular superior turned up.

  Inspector Athelgar Blunt of A Division was not known for his concern for his underlings. Seen one man in uniform, seen them all, in his book. He was a dapper little man, only just tall enough for the Metropolitan Police, and he had the baggy eyes and drooping jowls of an out-of-sorts bulldog; at this time on a cold morning, a bulldog chewing a wasp. The tenacity that went with the breed was wholly missing in Athelgar Blunt, however, and he intended to make short work of this.

  ‘You first finder?’ he grunted at Crawford as he alighted from the hansom.

  ‘Yes, sir. Constable Crawford, A-four-three-one.’ The man saluted.

  Blunt looked up at the building, one of several identical ones that ran the whole of the east side of Storey’s Yard. ‘Well, come on, man,’ the inspector snapped. ‘What have we got? I don’t have all day.’

  Crawford led the detective along the murky passageway and into the dead woman’s rooms. The inspector took off his bowler and sniffed. ‘Knocking shop,’ he said. ‘Smells like a tart’s boudoir.’ Only then did he see the body. He walked around the bed, passing his hat to Crawford to hold. Then he paused. ‘Have you touched anything?’ he asked.

  ‘I felt for a pulse,’ the constable told him, ‘and moved her more on to the bed.’

  ‘How much more?’

  ‘A few inches. Her head was dangling over the edge.’

  ‘What difference would that have made?’ Blunt asked. ‘She was dead, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. As a dodo.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Shortly after half past two this morning by the Abbey clock.’

  Blunt thrust out a hand and felt the cold, clammy flesh of the woman’s neck. ‘When will you uniform people ever learn?’ he muttered. ‘You don’t touch a body at a crime scene, ever.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I was very careful otherwise. The glass phial on the bedside table. I used my cuff on that.’

  ‘What for?’ Blunt picked up the item in question – and not with his cuffs.

  ‘Er … I was thinking fingerprints, sir.’

  Blunt exploded with laughter, a less-than-respectful sound perhaps in that dead room. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Constable. Oh, I know the Assistant Commissioner believes in all that mumbo-jumbo, but those of us at the sharp end know better, don’t we?’ The inspector was peering hard into the constable’s face. ‘Now, then. For the benefit of your own promotional prospects, should you have any.’ He dipped his nose towards the phial’s open top. ‘What do you smell?’

  ‘Er … almonds, sir,’ Crawford told him.

  ‘No, Constable, you smell cyanide. Do we have a name for this?’ He was looking at the corpse.

  ‘Her rent collector believes it was Alice Groves.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Yes, sir, he was here as I arrived on my beat, trying to collect the rent.’

  ‘At half past two in the morning?’ Blunt was incredulous.

  ‘He implied that rent collecting has no timetable, sir.’

  ‘Did you detain him?’

  ‘No, sir. I have his particulars.’

  Blunt shook his head in despair. ‘Well, I just hope they pass muster, Constable. Not that this is a case for us.’

  ‘It isn’t?’

  ‘God, no. It’s suicide. Look at this hell-hole, rough even by Storey’s Yard standards. She’s on the game, your Alice Groves; gets by giving blokes one on this very bed. What is she? Twenty-three? Twenty-four? Maybe she was a good girl once – most of ’em were. They aren’t born with their legs open, metaphorically speaking. She’s not happy with her life. She gets an attack of the consciences. See that picture?’ He pointed to the wall. ‘God is Love. She’s a convent girl or somesuch. It all comes flooding back, the bell, book and candle bit. And then she takes her own life, while the balance of her mind is disturbed. That’ll be the coroner’s verdict, you mark my words. I don’t know what those blokes get paid for; we do all their work for them. Right. No need to waste any more time. Send for a Maria; we’ll get her to the mortuary – St Vincent’s is the nearest. You look a little put out, Constable. Is this your first dead body?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Crawford said. ‘It’s just …’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Blunt retrieved his hat. ‘Life’s flotsam and jetsam, chaff blown on the wind. It comes to us all in the end.’ Blunt paused, checking whether he had any other clichés in his armoury, but there was nothing. ‘Now, get that Maria and we can say goodbye to your Alice Groves.’

  ‘But she wasn’t my Alice Groves, sir,’ Crawford said. ‘She was my Helen Richardson.’

  Blunt frowned and the bulldog looked ready to snap. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

  ‘I attend archaeology classes, sir,’ Crawford admitted, a little shame-faced, ‘at University College. Every Friday before my night shift. So does … did … this woman. I spoke to her quite often. Only she wasn’t there yesterday …’

  ‘No,’ said Blunt, eyeing the constable with suspicion. ‘That’s because she was bollock naked and twice as dead.’ He closed to Crawford. ‘I don’t know what game you think you’re playing, lad,’ he said, ‘but as a rule I would say it’s better not to know suicide victims, especially when they’re unfortunates, ladies of the night.’ He turned to go, then spun back with a wry smile on his face. ‘Archaeology, my arse! Get the Maria and close this place up and we’ll say no more about it. You’re lucky I’m in such a genial mood this morning.’

  It was nearly midday before the Maria turned up and two burly coppers carried what was left of Alice Groves out of her last known abode and into the black wagon. The horses snorted and shifted as they felt the extra weight. Crawford had padlocked Alice’s rooms in the absence of the keyholder and was about to get himself home after a long night when a face he knew came bobbing along the road.

  ‘Constable Crawford.’ The man raised his hat.

  ‘What are you doing here, Fenton?’

  ‘My job, Constable. You?’

  Crawford looked down at the ferret of a man in his loud chequered suit. ‘Trying not to step in the horse-shit.’

  Fenton ignored him. ‘What have we here?’ He tried to peer into the glazed, barred windows of the Maria.

  ‘That is a horse-drawn police vehicle,’ the constable told him, ‘affectionately known as a Black Maria, named after—’

  ‘Come off it, Adam!’ Fenton laughed. ‘This is me, Freddie. We go way back, you and me.’

  ‘That was before you started working for the gutter press,’ Crawford told him. ‘Get lost.’

  ‘Gutter press?’ Fenton repeated, with all the outrage of Fleet Street behind him. ‘I resent that!’

  ‘Shame,’ Crawford shrugged.

  ‘Look, the Illustrated Police News may be a shade on the yellow side …’

  ‘A shade?’ Crawford’s eyes widened. ‘It’s yellower than a bunch of bananas.’

  ‘Come on, Adam,’ Fenton wheedled. ‘For old time’s sake. What have we got? Murder? Rape? Anything unmentionable?’

  ‘What’s unmentionable,’ Crawford scowled, ‘is people like you. Why don’t you lurk around a graveyard somewhere, like the ghoul you are?’ And he walked away.

  ‘Well,’ Fenton said to the air beyond Crawford’s shoulder, ‘he wasn’t very friendly, was he?’ And he looked up to an overhead window, where a face peered out. ‘Good morning,’ he called cheerily, with a triumphant look at the disappearing Crawford. ‘Freddie Fenton, Illus
trated Police News. Can I have a word?’

  ‘But this is … awful.’

  It was the best that Angela Friend could do. Her Monday morning had begun well. Together with Anthea Crossley and Janet Bairnsfather they were met at the doors of University College by Constable Crawford. He was not in uniform, but neither was this the day of the public lectures. She had been on her way to the library when she saw him and there was something about the expression on his face that alarmed her. The charming and slightly diffident man she had taken five o’clock tea with only last Friday was stiff, awkward, at a loss to know how to begin. And, yet, he had to; that was why he was here.

  All thoughts of the library forgotten, she had gone with him to the Jeremy Bentham and they found a quiet corner.

  ‘Did you know her well?’ he asked her. ‘Helen, I mean.’

  ‘Probably no better than you.’ Angela paused and looked at him, looking for the tell-tale flicker of a man not sharing everything, but there was nothing and her heart skipped a beat. In the middle of bad news, she felt unaccountably happy. ‘She was very keen on Roman stuff, I do remember that, particularly the first century. My speciality is Corinthian Greece, as you know, so I really wasn’t much help.’ She looked at him again. ‘I just can’t believe this. Murdered, you say?’

  Crawford held up his hands. ‘The CID are calling it suicide,’ he said, ‘but, although I didn’t know her well, in the chats I’ve had with Helen there was never any indication of that.’

  ‘Telephonist, wasn’t she? With the Central Exchange?’

  ‘Er … perhaps,’ he flustered.

  ‘Adam,’ she raised an eyebrow. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

  He took a breath, looked around him and launched into it. ‘I believe that she was an unfortunate,’ he said.

  Angela’s eyes widened. ‘A prostitute?’ The word was delivered a little too loudly for anyone’s liking. Arguably the only person in the building except Crawford familiar with the word was Tom and he used a whole thesaurus of alternatives.