“Little matter, what little matter?” he asked quickly once they were in the street.
When Gwendolen ignored the question and marched ahead, he grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her back. She glared at his hand on her arm until he let her go. “I’m not your dog on a leash, Inspector,” she bridled. The memory of Oxford hung between them.
“My apologies.”
He retrieved his actual dog from the lamppost that it was tied to. The dog greeted Gwendolen like an old friend, softening her mood, and she relented and told him how Nellie had phoned for help, and he told her of the murder that never was. “Something happened in there,” he said, “but I can’t for the life of me figure out what.”
He flagged down a taxi and told her he needed to pick something up from Bow Street and then he had to go to Southwark mortuary.
“Dear God—not Freda or Florence?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean to alarm you.” Much of their relationship so far seemed to have been built on them causing alarm to each other.
He soon returned from the police station, clutching another silver shoe, and held it up next to the first one, which he had left in her keeping. “What do you think? Are they a pair?”
“Well, they look like they are, but it’s hard to be completely certain. But look…” she said, turning over the shoe in her hand. “You haven’t examined it thoroughly. I make a better detective than you, Inspector.” The shoe had been branded with its ownership, initials burnt into the leather sole—“with a charred stick, probably,” she said. “My brother Dickie used to do that, not with his shoes but pretty much everything else. I expect the girls in the dance schools get mixed up all the time, they all look alike—the shoes, I mean, not the girls. An M and a C—does that mean anything to you, Inspector?”
He looked at the sole of the shoe he had brought from the station. It was a match. The same initials. Yes, it did mean something to him. It meant a great deal. “A girl called Minnie Carter,” he said.
“And she’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“In the mortuary we’re going to?”
“That I’m going to. I hope to find her there. I promised her mother. Minnie was wearing one of the shoes when she was pulled from the river.”
“And you found its partner in the Sphinx. What does that mean, do you suppose?”
“I think it means that someone killed her there,” Frobisher said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Not that someone wants you to think that she was killed there?”
Frobisher sighed heavily and said, “Occam’s razor, Miss Kelling. You have a tendency to overcomplicate.”
“And you have a tendency to oversimplify. There are people trying to ruin Nellie.”
“I am one of those, may I remind you.”
“And your Inspector Maddox is another.”
“So I have recently learnt.” Frobisher sighed again. “We need to talk about ‘my’ Inspector Maddox.”
On the journey to Southwark he related Edith’s confession to her. Gwendolen had a strong stomach but nonetheless felt nauseated at what he told her. “Can’t you arrest Maddox?” she asked. “Today, now, before he does more harm? Before he ensnares more girls?”
“I only have Edith’s word,” Frobisher said. “And to be honest, her motives are not entirely clear. I need incontrovertible evidence. Even if some of the girls came forward, I’m afraid they are not necessarily the kind that a jury will believe. I’m not one of those,” he added hastily. “I will find a way.”
* * *
—
“I don’t want you to accompany me inside,” he said when the cab drew up in Southwark.
“Yet I shall.”
The dog was more obedient and waited in the cab, guarding the silver shoes.
“The little lady was just about to move on,” the mortuary attendant said. “You found her in the nick of time.”
It was, as expected, a bleak place. Several bodies lay on marble slabs, lining the walls. Some were still on the trolleys they had arrived on, all were covered by thin sheets. Cadavers. How Gwendolen hated that word. The cold air of the mortuary had a scent familiar to her from the war. Strong disinfectant fighting and failing to cover the scent of decomposition and, here, also the stink of formaldehyde from embalming fluid. She thought she might have to resort to the smelling salts that she always carried in her bag. For others usually, rather than herself. Miss Rogerson in particular had been prone to the vapours.