Bloody Relations Page 7

  “Are you asking me to believe that you had no idea who this gentleman might have been? One of your regulars? Surely his height and bulk and posture would have given you some indication.”

  “You may choose to believe what you wish, sir. I am telling you what actually happened.” Mrs. Burgess drew a deep breath, inflating her considerable bosom in the process. “And since I do not inquire after the names of our callers—we know them solely by the nicknames the girls give them—I might tell you only that it could have been Fluffy or Tumbles. But I cannot do even that. The parlour here was unlit. The moon was down in the west. I had one candle that was jarred out when the pale gentleman almost knocked me over. I cannot say more.”

  The story continued without interruption on Marc’s part to the point where Sarah, whose turn it was, took Jocko’s money and led him into her cubicle, after which Mrs. Burgess and Molly retired to one of the bedrooms in the domestic wing, and Frieda and Carrie to the one next to it. The door adjoining the two halves of the house was left open so that any “nonsense” in Sarah’s cubicle could be heard and dealt with. The outside parlour door was barred. After a while, perhaps half an hour later, Mrs. Burgess came out of her room, noted that Frieda and Carrie were asleep, tiptoed to where Sarah was entertaining the young man, and saw that they were naked and fast asleep. The heavy snoring from Jocko suggested that he was in a deep, drunken stupor. He had arrived drunk, of course, and nearly incoherent (they hadn’t realized that he stammered), which had prompted a short debate among the women as to whether they should accommodate him or pitch him outside to fend for himself. But he had waved a lot of money at them, appeared harmless, and Sarah had been willing to do her share during an evening when business had been scarce because of the gala. At this detail, Mrs. Burgess came close to losing control, but when the two girls leaned down to console her, she shook them off gently.

  Marc was inclined to accept the story as true thus far. He had been alert throughout for any sign of a rehearsed version. But the interjections by Molly and Frieda, and the occasional fuzziness in Mrs. Burgess’s recollection, seemed too natural to have been preplanned. Moreover, the trauma and sheer horror of the murder, whatever their involvement, had left them exhausted, so that any act they might have felt compelled to put on would have been nigh impossible to carry out. The second thing Marc was watching carefully for was any evidence of tension or conflict among the members of the household. It had occurred to him that, even though he had no firsthand experience of how brothels were run—he had begged off the many excursions to the local dens arranged by his fellow officers—there were bound to be petty jealousies and perhaps powerful enmities aroused whenever a group of people were cooped up for long periods of time (the barracks being but one example). Clients would naturally prefer one girl to another, prompting rivalries or aggrievement over a fair division of spoils. And surely the madam, invariably an older woman and authority figure, would have ambivalent and conflicting emotions regarding her charges, complicated by the presence of competition from neighbouring establishments.

  Marc was aware that Cobb, who could be heard outside tapping and probing the windows, felt the murder to be the result of a domestic dispute, and if he were right, then motive could be the key to solving it. But there was clear evidence of mutual affection between Mrs. Burgess and the other three girls. It was conceivable, of course, that they all had some reason to hate Sarah and had colluded to get rid of her and blame a nameless client. He would have to keep an open mind about that. Still, he was bothered by the fact that neither Mrs. Burgess nor her three surviving girls fitted the stereotypical view of madam and whore, relayed to him in suffocating detail by his fellow officers eager to broadcast their exploits. What he had expected to find here were women of varying age, coarse demeanour, lathered with makeup and perfumed to camouflage their rapidly decaying bodies, and conveying in every word and gesture a sense of defeat, resignation, ennui, and hopelessness. But Carrie, Molly, and Frieda were of an age, perhaps twenty or a bit more. They looked as if they could have been cousins, sharing a slim build, heart-shaped faces, light complexion (Scots or Irish), and curly brown hair. Moreover, the best adjective Marc could think of to describe them would be “wholesome.” For here in the bland daylight, without makeup or corsets or coiffed tresses or lurid frocks, they looked healthy and guileless. And, Cobb had assured him, Sarah was of similar age and robustness, despite the shocking state of her body in death.

  Nor did their mistress, Madame Renée, fit the received notions of a woman in her profession. First of all, she had been quick to drop the façade of “Madame Renée” and encourage the use of her real name. Secondly, she did not give the appearance of having worked in the trade herself, an almost universal prerequisite for the job of madam. While showing the world the effects of middle age (she looked about forty)—plumpness of flesh with unmistakable sagging of chin, forearm, and, no doubt, breast—she too wore no makeup, nor were there any signs that she regularly used it beyond some lip rouge and a pat of powder on the cheeks. She didn’t need it because while she was, and always had been, plain of feature, her eyes and range of expression radiated a personality to be reckoned with: shrewdness, detached humour, toughness, and strong feeling, for and against, Marc thought. Whenever she was interrupted by Frieda or Molly, she showed no irritation but merely paused, listened, and then carried on. Marc surmised that she governed with a productive mix of strict authority and genuine affection. At least, this seemed to be the case so far. There was still a ways to go.

  Cobb and Carrie came back into the room. “All the windows are the same: high and narrow. And they got them cloth screens nailed onto them from the inside. No sign of any of ’em being tampered with.”

  “I’ve told you, sirs, that no one entered this house after the pale gentleman.”

  “It would seem unlikely, I agree,” Marc said, “even though you all say you went sound asleep after Mrs. Burgess here assumed that Sarah was safe for the night.”

  The girls readily agreed.

  “Sarah didn’t like to be woke up and moved once she nodded off with her last caller,” Carrie said, back on her perch with one pretty knee boldly exposed.

  “ ’Course, we never let a caller stay the night,” Frieda said.

  “That’s right, Mr. Edwards. I have a hard-and-fast rule about that. I roust them out at two o’clock whatever they might wish or whatever money they’re prepared to offer me. Peter and Donald are always ready to escort them back to Lot Street and their wives’ cold beds.”

  “Which rule you violated last night.”

  Mrs. Burgess slumped in her chair. When she looked up, her eyes were swimming. “Why do you think I been up all night? It’s the worst mistake of my life. But as I told Constable Cobb, we all thought the fellow was harmless and too drunk to do much. We felt sorry for him, if the truth be known. I never seen a young man look so desperate, so pleading—more in need of mothering than whoring.”

  “That was my opinion of him, too,” Marc said.

  “You knew him, then?” Mrs. Burgess asked. “Nobody’s yet told us who he was or how he happened to come here with one of our regulars.”

  Marc hesitated before deciding how to answer. “I’m not at liberty to tell you his name, but he’s a gentleman about twenty years old, and is one of the party who arrived with Lord and Lady Durham.”

  Mrs. Burgess’s face went even paler than it already was. The girls sucked in their breath.

  “You mean to say he’s connected to one of the bigwigs the girls saw coming across the bay yesterday like Jesus walking on water?”

  “I’m afraid so. You’ll understand why Lord Durham has asked me to make the most thorough investigation of the facts and—”

  “—and pin the blame on one of us!” There was both defiance and apprehension in the glower she turned upon Marc.

  Two of the girls began to weep, but Mrs. Burgess raised a restraining hand and they blubbered to a stop.

  “Not so,” Marc said
. “I have carried out four previous investigations in the province, three of them under the aegis of a governor. In each instance I got to the truth, even when it proved to be unwelcome news. I have sworn to Lord Durham that I will do so here, and he has agreed to abide by my findings whatever they may be.”

  Mrs. Burgess gave him a long, searching appraisal. Finally she said, “Well, as I have no say in the matter, I’ll take you at your word. For now.”

  “Thank you. Now, back to the facts of last night. All of you claim to have fallen into a deep sleep about one-thirty or so. I don’t think the exact time is as important here as the precise sequence of events. All was well, you told Mr. Cobb, until you, Molly, were wakened by a scream of some sort.”

  “It was a kind of shriek,” Molly said. “But it wasn’t Sarah. It was definitely a man’s voice, though I remember thinkin’ it was like a little boy screechin’ at somethin’ he seen in a nightmare, or somethin’ like that.”

  “I believe we may assume for the moment that the pale gentleman had woken up and witnessed the young lady dead and bloody beside him.”

  “Please, sir—”

  “I will not ask you or Molly to describe again the horror of that scene,” Marc said quickly. “Constable Cobb’s description and Dr. Withers’s report are all that we require on that score. There were no footprints or other smears in the blood on the floor or mat, so we’re satisfied you two didn’t dash in there and tamper, however innocently, with any aspect of that grisly tableau.”

  “I sent Molly out for help right off, then sat out here waiting, and keeping an ear and eye out for Jocko—the pale gentleman—and the knife in his hand.”

  “Did you have a weapon to defend yourself, had he wakened and attacked you?” Marc asked, and saw Cobb nod knowingly. It seemed a weak part of Mrs. Burgess’s story.

  “I had that poker over there by the stove,” she said evenly. “It was pitch-dark in here, though Sarah’s bedside candle may still have been going. I planned to stand by the archway over there and crown him if he appeared belligerent.”

  “And of course he would scarcely know where he was.”

  “But he never come out, did he? And I had no intention of looking again on poor Sarah—”

  “Naturally,” Marc agreed with a sympathetic nod. “And Constable Cobb’s description of that awful scene is very near to your own. But I am still a bit puzzled as to how or why the young gentleman cried out, apparently fifteen or twenty minutes after he had viciously stabbed her, and then dropped off to sleep again while she bled all over him and the—”

  Carrie’s sob stopped Marc’s comment, and she ran crying uncontrollably into the other wing of the house.

  “I’m sorry,” Marc said.

  “You better go after her, Frieda, luv,” Mrs. Burgess said, pointedly ignoring Marc and his seemingly gratuitous brutality. Frieda, about to emulate Carrie, stumbled out of the room. Her mistress then turned a baleful eye on the investigators, and said, seething, “The man was drunk. Drunks do unexplainable things. It is not up to me to account for his motives. I found him with Sarah’s dagger in his right hand and my darling’s throat cut and her lifeblood drained away.”

  “I suppose somebody could’ve taken the knife outta Sarah’s neck and put it in the gentleman’s hand,” Cobb said in an offhand tone.

  “They’d’ve been covered in blood and left their footprints in it.” Mrs. Burgess had braced herself to recall the details: her hands gripped the arms of her chair and there was a restrained tremor in her throat.

  “But I managed to edge my way around the other side between the bed and the wall,” Cobb said, “and reached the gentleman without any trouble. There wasn’t no blood over there.”

  Mrs. Burgess thought before responding to Cobb. “Yes, a person could do that, even a portly person like yourself. But could you reach across Jocko and pull the dagger out of Sarah’s neck or stick it in the fellow’s right hand without touching the blood on him or the bed?”

  Cobb was taken aback. “I suppose not,” he said at last.

  “And if I had stabbed the girl I treated like my own daughter and then reached over to plant the dagger on Jocko, would I not be covered in blood?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” Marc said.

  “And the chief constable himself and the doctor took lanterns and searched high and low for any signs of blood in here, in our bedrooms, or anywhere else in the house.”

  “That’s true,” Cobb said. “And when I went back into the other side of the house with Carrie a minute ago, I looked again, and Carrie helped me search the drawers and hampers for bloody clothes. And it ain’t easy to scrub bloodstains outta softwood floors.”

  “Good work, Cobb. I’ll do the same just to be absolutely sure.” Marc turned back to Mrs. Burgess. “Let’s move now to your sleeping arrangements. You told Mr. Cobb that you and Molly slept in one room and Carrie and Frieda in another. Was this usual?”

  “The girls sleep together in pairs, as they please on a given night. I have my own room, but Sarah often sleeps in her, ah, workplace, as she did last night, and if I think she might be doing that, I crawl in with Molly—”

  “I get nightmares if I sleep alone,” Molly said, “don’t I, Mum?”

  “I understand,” Marc said, smiling at Molly. “But you must see that if all four of you were fast asleep shortly after one-thirty when Mrs. Burgess decided Sarah was all right on her own, then in theory, any one of you could have feigned sleep, waited her chance, slipped into that room, and stabbed her.”

  Mrs. Burgess gave Marc a grim smile. “But such a person must have left the dagger there in her neck or else be covered in blood—which she would have no chance to clean off or disguise. Molly woke up well before two o’clock, raised the alarm, and Constable Cobb was here fifteen minutes after that. When could the killer have hidden her clothes and washed the blood off in the dark without leaving a speck anywhere outside that dreadful room? And then crawled back into bed with one of us?”

  That stopped the flow of conversation for half a minute. Cobb coughed. Carrie and Frieda, red-eyed, came back and sat beside the woman they called Mum.

  “What does the pale gentleman have to say for himself?” Mrs. Burgess said.

  “He’s too upset and confused to say much.”

  “Maybe he hasn’t got much to say.”

  “We don’t need any opinions from the likes of you,” Cobb said.

  Marc gave Cobb a reproving glance. He leaned back and said conversationally, “Could you tell me about Sarah, Mrs. Burgess? Perhaps knowing more about her might help us get to the truth, whatever it is.”

  Mrs. Burgess softened visibly. “The truth is, Mr. Edwards, whatever you think of the business I’m in, Madame Renée’s is a special kind of pleasure place for gentlemen. I took my life’s savings and had this house built exactly as you now see it. I even have a deed for an acre of property around it, so many of the houses you see about are squatting on my land, with my blessing. I decided from the outset that I would hand-pick three girls and train them in my own way. Only respectable customers are allowed in. We have codes of entry, as you now know, and our own trackers. We have strict rules of conduct, which I enforce.”

  “With yer poker?” Cobb asked, mainly to stanch this flow of self-justifying drivel.

  “Our gentlemen callers know that their identities are safe with me. They also know my girls are healthy and free from disease. They get checked over by Dr. Pogue twice a month. They’ve got their own accounts at the Commercial Bank in the city.”

  “All this is quite admirable,” Marc said, “but where does Sarah fit in? She makes four girls.”

  “Sarah was found by a tracker one night last November up on Lot Street. She had been thrown out of her family’s home for being pregnant. We learned she had been a servant for a few weeks in some fancy home in town—she never would say where—and there’s little doubt her employer or one of his sons got her in the family way and then gave her the sack. But I can’t
understand how her own flesh and blood could turn on such a sweet-natured and innocent girl. But they did. She was brought here that night—I found her on the doorstep—and I took her in. What else could I do?”

  “Mum has a soft heart,” Molly said.

  “But surely if she were with child, she would not be suitable for your enterprise,” Marc said tactfully.

  “That is correct. I took Sarah in out of charity. She was grateful, and she carried her weight here by cleaning, doing the girls’ laundry, and helping me.”

  “We loved her, didn’t we, Carrie?” Frieda said.

  “She was like a cuddly pet, she was,” Molly said.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone,” Carrie said.

  “Well, girls,” Mrs. Burgess said, “she’s gonna have a proper funeral. And I ain’t having her buried up in Potter’s Field. We’re all going to Gunther the undertaker this afternoon and make the arrangements.”

  This remark seemed to cheer the girls a little, as it was meant to. Cobb began to feel that they were going around in circles. He yawned conspicuously.

  “When did Sarah have her baby?” Marc asked.

  “Now that’s a sad story in itself,” Mrs. Burgess said. “She wasn’t due till this month, but in April she was doing an errand for me in town when her cramps started coming. Someone ran for the midwife. The babe was born dead, in a barn somewhere. The midwife took it away. Some kindly folks looked after her for three days. Then she came back to us, looking just awful.”