Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [76]
“Chief Superintendent Bowles asked me to find you, sir. He wants you back in London as soon as may be.”
“I’m involved with the investigation here—” Rutledge began defensively.
“Yes, sir, he knows that. But we’ve found a body. Whether she’s connected with your murder or not, we can’t say. But the Chief Superintendent wants you to have a look.”
Rutledge felt cold. There was no clear reasoning behind his reaction. But he was afraid to ask the name, afraid he might already know what it was. He’d only just heard it himself.
Marianna Elizabeth Trent.
Another dead end . . .
Driving hard and fast, Rutledge reached London in the middle of the next morning. Stopping briefly at his flat to shave and change his clothes, he went in search of Sergeant Wilkerson at the Yard.
They had not worked together very often. Wilkerson was Inspector Joyce’s man, and seldom free for other assignments. Joyce, in his mid-fifties, was a plodding but thorough policeman with no expectation of advancement and no desire for any. He had said, often enough, that policework and not paperwork was his pleasure, and the higher one goes, the deeper the tonnage of paper.
Wilkerson greeted Rutledge with some surprise. “You must have driven all the night, sir. Would you care for a spot of tea brought up to your office?”
“I did.” Hamish was all that had kept him awake on the road, after Colchester. And even Hamish had lost his edge on the outskirts of London. “Yes, send someone for tea, and then come upstairs.”
The tea provided by the Yard was black and strong enough to cope with any man’s drowsiness, coating the stomach with an unspeakable sludge that held the body upright for hours.
A few minutes later, Wilkerson stepped into Rutledge’s office and took the chair by the door. He waited until the constable on his heels had delivered Rutledge’s tea before beginning his report.
The Sergeant was as big as his voice, florid of face with thinning sandy hair and a double chin that overlapped the collar of his uniform, giving the impression he was on the brink of choking to death. A man who had come up through the ranks but bore no malice toward Rutledge, who had come from a very different background.
He began his report diffidently. “About this woman, sir. It was the usual thing. One of the boats on the river found her; can’t say whether she went in by accident or design. Bloated but hadn’t been there long enough for the fish to get at her. There were some bruises, but nothing to signify anything more than the tossing she’d taken in the water. The problem was identification.”
Rutledge, swallowing his tea with a grimace, nodded. Identification of the corpse was the first order of police work.
“She had none on her—no letters or papers or the like—and she didn’t match any of our missing persons records. We advertised more than a week for information. Then a woman who keeps a boardinghouse walked into a local station and reported that a lodger had skipped without paying her rent, and wanted her found. Right balmy old bitch, I’m told, arrogant and demanding. But the Sergeant on duty remembered the description of our lass, and soon enough they had the landlady down at the morgue. She couldn’t have identified the body—she only gave it a glance—but she did say the hair was right. We showed her the clothes the deceased was found in, but she wasn’t what you’d call certain what the lodger was wearing the last time she’d gone out. Or whether she could have been provided a new wardrobe by any gentleman she had taken up with. But the landlady did fling another fit about not getting her money, which made Inspector Joyce suspect she must be fairly sure it was the missing woman.”
Rutledge asked, before Wilkerson could put a name to the corpse, “Any trouble with her before? The landlady?”
“None, except for the occasional lodger who disappears