“Chief Inspector?”
“Yes.”
* * *
—
There were plenty of corpses in Southwark mortuary but no washed-up young girls. Unlike the Dead Man’s Hole, Frobisher had been here many times in the course of his career. The morgue occupied the site of the old Marshalsea prison, known to Dickens. “Little Dorrit,” he said to the morgue attendant, who replied, with not a trace of wit, “No one by that name here, guv’nor.” Frobisher sighed.
No Amy Dorrit. No drowned girl. “Try Snow Hill,” the morgue assistant said with little conviction. “Or Kew,” with even less conviction.
He set off again. Much as he disliked being chained to his desk—Frobisher bound, his liver pecked at by bureaucracy—this pointless trailing around was time-wasting. He wished someone—that Baird chap, for example—would invent a portable telephone. Much more useful than a televisor.
Not at Snow Hill. Not anywhere. The end was his beginning—he found her in the small Bow Street police mortuary.
His walk back along the Embankment had left him feeling low. He couldn’t help the odd sense that Gwendolen Kelling’s missing girls were the harbinger of something. There was evil in the air of London.
* * *
—
Frobisher took an inventory of the girl laid out on the marble. A skinny little thing, stranded for ever somewhere in her teens, never to grow old, her life snuffed out like a candle. She was as naked and exposed as the day she was born. Brownish hair, still damp. Small breasts like moulds, a veil of freckles across her body not bleached away by the river water. Frobisher winced at the lack of modesty. Gingerly, he lifted an eyelid. No matter how lifeless the dead appeared to be, Frobisher always felt unease that a corpse might suddenly flinch back into life if he touched it. A milky hazel eye gazed back at him. Definitely dead.
Her clothes had been removed and neatly piled at her feet. A frock, underwear and one shoe, silver. The kind of shoe that girls went dancing in. The frock was a flimsy, shiny thing, as if she’d been to a party, but that meant nothing—London was one long party. Traces of lipstick on her mouth indicated she hadn’t been in the water long. Given the tide, she might not have travelled far on her river journey. No identification, of course. A big bruise on her cheek like a lilac in full bloom. A small silver locket still on a thin chain around her neck.
The police doctor, Webb, appeared, pipe in hand. “Wondered where you were, Frobisher,” he said. “She’s been on the slab for hours.”
“You sound like a fishmonger,” Frobisher said, not bothering with the niceties. He disliked Webb. He was glib and “full of himself,” as Frobisher’s long-dead mother would have said.
“Well, then that makes you the fisherman, Frobisher.”
“Found drowned?” Frobisher asked curtly. Found Drowned—it was the title of a painting he had seen somewhere, he couldn’t remember the artist—Millais or Watts, someone like that. Another fallen woman. And, yes, he went to art galleries, they were a healthy reprieve from the more loathsome aspects of his job. He dabbled himself in watercolours. Amateurish stuff that he showed to no one. His taste was for neither the classical nor the avant-garde but for the Romantic, maudlin even. Something else that was not to be shared with Bow Street.
“Yes and no,” Webb said. He pointed to a small wound in the girl’s neck. “Carotid artery,” he said. “A knife. A small one.”
“Big enough,” Frobisher said.
“Unconscious before she went in the water, I would think, but there’s water in her lungs. So she drowned before she bled to death. The water is too cold for anyone to survive very long in it. Their body temperature drops rapidly and they succumb to what we term ‘hypothermia.’ The cold alone would have been enough to kill her. Whichever way you look at it, she had no chance.”
Frobisher felt nauseated. It was long past lunchtime and he still hadn’t eaten. There would be nothing waiting for him in Ealing tonight. Lottie was in one of her blue moods. An inadequate word for the nearly catatonic state she fell into regularly.
“Third female this month, so far,” Webb said.
“Fourth,” Frobisher said. “A woman washed up at Richmond last week. Suicide, I think.” He picked up the shoe and examined it. “Just the one?”
“Yes.”
With Webb’s assistance, Frobisher removed the locket from the girl’s neck. When it was opened it revealed a photograph of a woman, undamaged by immersion. The girl’s mother, he supposed. You might expect the photograph of a father on the other side of the diptych but instead there was a slightly out-of-focus picture of a dog, a terrier by the look of it. For some reason the dog made him sadder than the mother did. Perhaps he should get a dog for Lottie? A little spaniel or a Yorkshire terrier—would that cheer her up? Did she even like dogs? Frobisher had no idea. He hardly knew his wife at all, she had a fugitive nature, unwilling to be present. He’d had a dog all through his boyhood, a collie, a farm dog called Jenny. He tried never to think about her. The manner of her death （poison, meant for crows） had marred his Arcadian childhood.