City of Darkness

Chapter TWENTY

October 5, 1888

9:14 AM



Rain was peppering in sharp, hard drops as Trevor and Davy stepped from the coach on Atlantic Street. The two men pulled their collars up about them and held their hats tightly with one hand as they ran to a nearby canopy for shelter. Davy had written down directions they’d gotten from a witness the night before and he fumbled for the note in his pocket. Just the mention of Mad Maudy had put fear in the girl’s face, even though Trevor had assured her that she was not in trouble.

“Start at the Bullwick Tavern and halfway down the third block, you’ll find an alley. Follow it back to the water and then go a little further. There’ll be a wooden shack with a chimney.” Davy read.

“Follow it to the water and then go farther? It sounds as if her house is floating down the bloody Thames itself,” Trevor said, but if the girl had been a mite uncooperative, her directions were as good as gold. Within minutes Davy and Trevor found themselves at the end of the aptly-named Atlantic Street, a broken down thoroughfare which butted the waterfront and reeked of rotten fish. The two men held their scarves over their noses as they walked toward the water and a lone crude building with smoke escaping from its chimney. Hard to imagine a young debutante picking her way through the muck to such a hovel, no matter how desperate she might be. Trevor approached the front door and knocked soundly.

“Go away, ‘tis too early in the day!” a rough voice exploded from inside.

“Are you Maud Minford? I wish to speak with you,” Trevor shouted, for the wind along the channel was fierce.

“You know me, do I know thee?”

“I’m detective Trevor Welles of Scotland Yard. May I have a few minutes with you?”

“Scotland Yard, is that what you say? What do you want with ole’ Maudy?”

“Only to ask you some questions, Miss Minford.”

Trevor and Davy took a step back as they heard a latch unlock and the door slowly widened to reveal a single squinting eye.

“I heard your voice and now I see you. I didn’t hear the voices of two.”

“This is Officer Davy Madley,” Trevor said, although he felt ridiculous shouting into a crack. “We are both from Scotland Yard and we need a little of your time. May we come in?”

Finally, the door swung all the way open and there stood before them a huge woman several inches taller than Trevor and towering as much as a foot over Davy. Her head was flat and as round as a wooden bucket and her thin gray hair was cropped short. Nor had John Harrowman exaggerated about the amount of facial hair she sported. Her hands and arms looked strong and powerful, the fingers stubby, and her voice was deep.

“Come in if you must, but the likes of you I do not trust.”

“Thank you, Miss Minford,” said Trevor, as he and Davy entered. The house smelled, if possible, worse than the waterfront. Maud went back to her fireplace and stirred something cooking in a pot. A broken loaf of bread lay on the table.

“Tis time you two removed your masks. What are these questions you must ask?”

“Miss Minford, I understand you are midwife to some of the local women? Is that true?” asked Trevor, a bit unnerved by the woman’s damned rhyming.

“That be my trade for which I am paid.”

“I understand you perform another service for these ladies, if needed.”

Maud jerked her shoulders, but made no comment.

“I’m not here to pass judgment on you, Miss Minford,” Trevor went on. “And I don’t particularly care what you do for a living. We have come to ask questions about your whereabouts on a certain evening.”

“It’s evil deeds that plant bad seeds.”

“Why must you continue to speak in these silly poems?” Davy muttered.

“Is it a crime that I speak in rhyme?”

“Let her be, Davy. Where were you on the evening of September thirtieth?”

“In my home. I did not roam.”

“Can anyone attest to that?” She gave him a scathing look and shook her head. “How do you feel about your clients, Maud?”

“I’m just a gardener with a hoe. I have no friend and no foe.”

“These women that come to you for your special services. Do you wish them pain and feel they deserve it? Trying to teach them a lesson, are you?”

“They all come crying, help me Maudy, get me back to being naughty.”

“We’ve heard, Maud, that some of these women die after being in your care.”

“Some of them bleed, when I pluck their weed. Some of them never recover, when they take too soon a lover. I do them all the same. I take no blame.”

Davy abruptly leaned across the sloping wooden table, surprising Trevor with his forcefulness. “I have trouble believing you don’t recall where you were on September 30,” he said. “It’s a famous night, isn’t it? Every paper in London screaming the next day about the double murders, and it’s all anyone in any bar in London has talked about since. Yet you tell us you don’t remember the evening.”

This direct assault seemed to rattle the woman a bit. She walked over to her stove and poked a long bent spoon into her stew, stirring awkwardly. “You ask me fast, now let me think. I probably sat somewhere to drink.”

“Your stew smells very good, Maud,” Trevor said smoothly. “I bet you bake your own bread, too. May I try a piece?”

Davy all but rolled his eyes. He knew Trevor was just checking to see the creature’s dominant hand, but he could hardly believe his boss was willing to eat anything in this filthy room.

“Could you cut me a piece, Maud?” Trevor repeated.

“Cut your own, or do you now sit on the throne?”

“I do not wish to remove my gloves, dear lady. Could you please cut me a slice?”

Maudy jabbed the spoon back down in the stew and sternly walked to the table. She grabbed a long knife, sliced off a piece of bread with her right hand, and slammed it down in front of him.

“Are you here for a crime or just here to waste my time?”

“We’re finished.”

Trevor pushed away from the table with Maudy still giving him a miserable stare. Davy opened the door and both of the men thanked her, in the automatic manner of the Yard, before heading back up the alley to Atlantic Street. Once out of sight of the shack, Trevor began spitting out the bread.

“I was beginning to think your stomach was made of iron,” Davy laughed as he watched him shuddering and wiping.

Trevor laughed too, finally removing the last few crumbs from his lips. “She was certainly large enough to be the Ripper and perhaps even had a motive. It’s clear she hates her patients or clients or whatever you care to call them. But her skill with cutlery was quite sloppy, don’t you think?”

“Her riddles had me almost insane.”

“Did they rattle your brain? Gad, she has me doing it. The rhyming business is interesting, especially when you consider that the message slipped beneath my office door was set out like a poem. But could such an outlandish creature have strolled into Scotland Yard unnoticed?”

“Dressed as a man she could.”

“Perhaps. But there’s still the fact she appears to be right handed and lacks basic medical skill. I don’t feel she’s our Jack, but we’ll still keep an eye on her, repellant as that task might be.”

The dock front was jammed with activity, for apparently several boats had just come into the harbor and the men were streaming onto land. Itching for fresh food, fresh women, or just the chance to stretch their legs. They stumbled unevenly down the sidewalks, as if the land beneath their feet was swaying, and hooted back and forth to each other. You can feel their wild energy, Trevor thought, what it’s like for them to walk free after being cooped up on their ships. They’ll be back at sea within days or sometimes even hours, so whatever pleasures they manage to soak up in the moment will have to last them for weeks. It was easy to see how such explosive energy could very quickly come to violence.

About a block up, they passed a sailor wearing a dark pea coat, a felt hat, and a red neckerchief tied around his neck which reminded Trevor of the red fiber he still carried in his journal. He casually mentioned this to Davy and they followed the man to the breakfront where they passed another man with the same type of red scarf. And then another. Soon, he and Davy had passed dozens of sailors, all in the same dress.

“It’s like a bloody nightmare, isn’t it, Sir? There must be a hundred of those scarves right here.”

“Yes,” said Trevor, laughing despite himself. “No wonder the doctor thought I was daft. Trevor and his fibers. So this is what we come down to. Mad Maudy claims to have no memory of the evening in question, but in this part of town, where alcohol runs in the street like rainwater, hardly anyone seems to have memories. Most of them have alibis, yes, more than you can shake a stick at, but considering the alibis were provided by people just as memory-deficient and alcohol-saturated as themselves, what good are they?”

“So all these interviews, all three hundred of them, all these days….it all was useless?”

”Nothing’s useless. But the interviews are the old way, Eatwell’s method, and the deeper we go into this mess the more I see that my first impulse was the right one. This case won’t be solved through interviews, through trying to trick someone into using their left hand or their right hand, and it sure as hell won’t be solved by going up and down a row of barstools, listening to a group of drunken sailors swear their mate was right beside them on the night in question. This case will be solved by forensics. I always knew it. I just didn’t have the faith to push it through in the beginning. We need hard physical evidence.”

“But not the neck scarves, eh Sir?”

Trevor laughed. “Not the bloody neck scarves. Come on, boy, let’s head back for the Yard. I’ve got a better plan now.”