He handed Frobisher an envelope and said, “Message came for you, sir, while you were in your office with that woman.”
“?‘That woman’ has a name,” Frobisher said irritably. He returned to his office to read the contents of the envelope. Even the smallest action felt as if it necessitated secrecy on his part in this place.
It was as well, he thought, that he hadn’t read it in front of the desk sergeant as it was unlikely that he would have been able to keep the surprise off his face, although, of course, it wouldn’t surprise him at all if the message had already been read and its contents disseminated around the station.
* * *
—
“Going out again, sir?” the desk sergeant said as Frobisher retrieved the dog.
“Yes,” Frobisher said.
“Like getting blood from a stone,” the desk sergeant said to Sergeant Oakes, who had just come down from the women’s cells.
“Probably going off to see his fancy woman again, that Kelling woman,” Oakes said. He sauntered out of the station, leaving his chortling laugh behind like an echo. The Cheshire Cat came to the desk sergeant’s mind. He had read Alice in Wonderland to his daughter, a long time ago. He had no idea why it was popular. It was complete nonsense.
* * *
—
“I prefer a cat, to tell you the truth,” Edith Coker said, eyeing the dog. It was sitting in front of her, one paw raised in supplication. It overestimated its winningness. “Are you allowed?”
“To take it to work? Probably not.”
“Oh.”
Frobisher had thought he might be able to let the dog off the leash in Regent’s Park, but there were ducks that made it flighty. The dog sat now quite placidly, gazing up at Edith Coker sitting on the park bench. “He’s very obedient,” Frobisher said. “I think he might have come from a circus.” The dog turned its head to look at him. Frobisher didn’t know why he said that, he had no evidence of a circus background for the dog. He supposed he was trying to make it more interesting in Edith Coker’s indifferent eyes.
She had been ill, she said, “at death’s door,” and she did seem worryingly brittle, her face leached of all colour and her voice tremulous. It was a shock to see her so weak, as Frobisher had heard that she had been cast from the same iron mould as her mother. He wondered what the illness had been, but it was hardly his place to ask. Instead he said, “I hope you’re feeling better?”
“Some,” she said plainly. She took a long, slow breath before adding, “My eyes have been opened to many things. And now I’d like to open yours.”
Oh, Lord, he thought, a Coker who’s caught religion. She’s going to preach to me. An evangelical. She was, but not in the way that he feared.
“I have to tell you,” she said, “about Inspector Arthur Maddox.”
“Go on, Miss Coker,” he said quietly, unwilling to put her off by betraying his eagerness. The dog was less inscrutable, wagging its tail, keen to hear the story that Edith’s pale lips wished to tell.
* * *
—
Maddox had been her lover, she said. Frobisher blinked at the word, startled by her candidness. He had not been expecting the revelation of a secret paramour, he had been expecting ledgers, paperwork, accounts, all the ways in which Maddox was skimming money off the clubs and businesses that he “protected.” No doubt, Frobisher had thought, the man also turned a blind eye to some dope-dealing and petty thieving. It seemed, however, that his venality was so much worse, so much more dreadful than Frobisher had ever suspected. (What a naive fool he had been.) At first, as Edith began to talk quietly, her voice hardly above a murmur, Frobisher felt cold disbelief for what she was telling him. Surely this tale had to be coming from a woman scorned, a jilted paramour seeking vengeance? Yet the more she talked in that steady, determined way, the more he knew in his heart that Edith was telling the truth.
She wove a tapestry for him, all the threads forming a pattern that he suddenly realized had been there all along, months ago when he was still in Scotland Yard, long before he came to Bow Street, but that he had been too blinded by his preoccupation with Nellie Coker to see. It was not the clubs that were taking the girls, it was Maddox and his sidekick, Sergeant Oakes.
“Oakes?” Frobisher felt more disappointment at Oakes’s perfidy than that of Maddox. He had trusted Oakes. He had called him “a safe pair of hands.”
Maddox was the gamekeeper-turned-poacher. He took girls “who no one would miss, I suppose,” Edith Coker said. “Supply and demand, Chief Inspector, the oldest trade in the book.” Girls who had run away from home, girls from orphanages, girls from the street, girls from dance schools, girls lured with promises of a clean bed and a square meal or a transformation in their fortunes. Girls were sometimes transported by Oakes in Maddox’s car to the better parts of town, Edith said.
“And brought home afterwards?” Frobisher asked. A feeling of dread descended on him.
“Not always.”
“And you knew?” She knew that the man she shared a bed with was running a prostitution racket all over London? She was a party to these vile schemes?
“I didn’t know,” she said carefully. “But I suppose I never asked. Mea culpa, Chief Inspector, I was a fool. A sin of omission,” she added, “rather than commission.” It was what he had said to Gwendolen when he divulged the existence of Lottie to her. (Pah. Sophistry.) Gwendolen had been right, it was a weak defence at best, although really it was no defence at all. “I was hoodwinked. I thought I loved him. Trust me, Chief Inspector, I have paid the price of my folly.”
“Those girls were missed,” Frobisher said. By the Mrs. Taylors, the Mr. and Mrs. Ingrams. They hadn’t forgotten their girls. They wanted them back.
And there was more, of course. Tisbury Court and Dame Wyburn—who sounded like a jolly character in a pantomime but was a bawd of the worst kind. And a Mrs. Darling in Henrietta Street—he had sent the inept Cobb there to mollify Gwendolen. She had urged him to go there himself but he had laughingly dismissed her concerns. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Mrs. Darling, according to Edith, was a procuress but also, worse, dear God, an abortionist. He thought of the damaged body of the owner of the crucifix, alive when she went in the water. Did she have any proof against this woman? Edith laughed, a hollow, mirthless kind of laugh, and said, “Only what you see standing before you, Inspector.” Oh, Frobisher thought, that was why she had been so ill.
He had thought that Edith would hand over hard evidence, perhaps even stand up in court and denounce Maddox and he would be put away for his malfeasance, but she shrank from the idea. She would not testify in court. “Not in a million years.”
“Then why tell me?”
“So that you know everything, of course. You’re the detective, it’s up to you to find the evidence. Maddox is about to seize our clubs, Chief Inspector. More power, more money, more girls.”
Was that her motivation?, Frobisher wondered. Not to atone, but to safeguard the family business?
“You can interpret it how you want, Chief Inspector.” She gave a helpless shrug. It might have been misinterpreted as callousness but Frobisher recognized the look in her eyes. She was past caring about life, he had seen the same thing in Lottie.
He escorted her out of the park, worried that she was too fragile to make her own way. The dog had long since tired of Edith’s litany of depravity and had to be roused from sleep.
* * *
—
“No rest for the wicked,” the desk sergeant said merrily when Frobisher returned. “Another body, sir. Someone phoned while you were out. Anonymously.” He had trouble pronouncing the word.
“At Tower Bridge?” Frobisher hazarded. It seemed to be his fate. He felt a kinship with Sisyphus.
“No. A murder. You’ll never guess where. You’re going to like this one, Inspector.”
I doubt it very much, Frobisher thought gloomily.
The Riddle of the Sphinx