David Dickinson: Death and the Jubilee

Even Samuel’s wife Martha, so crippled now that she could scarcely manage the hundred yards to the church to lay the flowers on Sundays, could not remember how long it was since Old Mr Harrison had disappeared.

‘He’ll have gone to London to see the rest of them, to be sure,’ she would say anxiously, raking over the embers in the fire. But she didn’t sound as though she believed it.

‘None of the servants in the big house say he’s gone to London. And how would he get there? He couldn’t walk to the station, could he, not the way he is. I’ve taken Old Mr Harrison to and from that train every time he’s gone anywhere for over thirty years. And I haven’t taken him to the station, have I?’

‘No, you haven’t, Samuel.’

At half-past ten, after half an hour of waiting, Samuel took the pony back to its stall. He gave it some water. ‘He’s not coming today, either. Another day has gone,’ he said to the pony.

As he walked down the path to his cottage Samuel Parker wondered for the hundredth time if he should tell anyone about his vanished master. But he wasn’t sure who to tell. And he knew Old Mr Harrison would not want him to raise the alarm. ‘You can’t trust anybody these days,’ Samuel remembered the old man muttering to himself after a long day with his correspondence by the lake, ‘not even your own flesh and blood.’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was feeling curious as he made his way across London to the Commissioner’s office. Maybe another case was going to begin. Ever since he was a small boy growing up in Ireland he had been fascinated by riddles and puzzles. He had devoted much of his adult life to solving mysteries and murders, codes and cryptograms in Kashmir and Afghanistan and the summer capital of the Raj at Simla during his time in the Army. He had solved a gruesome series of murders in the wine business at Oporto in Portugal where the victims were dumped in barrels of port, their flesh turned purple by the viscous liquor, and a long catalogue of murders in Britain and Ireland. His most important case had come five years before when he had solved the mystery of the strange death of Prince Eddy, the wastrel eldest son of the Prince of Wales.

Sir William Spence, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, rose to meet Powerscourt in his office at Scotland Yard .

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very kind of you to come.’

‘As you know, Sir William, I am in debt to your service and its officers for help rendered me in the past more than I can say.’

This was true. In two of his previous cases Powerscourt had received invaluable help from the police force of the capital. On the last occasion the Commissioner had treated Powerscourt to a magnificent dinner at his club where they had consumed two bottles of the finest claret in the cellars and the old man had told him terrifying tales of army life on the North West Frontier forty years before.

‘Let me come straight to the point.’ Sir William’s moustaches were not quite as formidable as those of his constable, but they were still substantial. Powerscourt wondered if moustache cultivation was now obligatory for all those in police uniform. ‘You will have seen the newspaper coverage of the body found in the Thames.’

‘One could scarcely avoid it,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It has dominated the papers every day since the unfortunate discovery itself.’

‘Most of what you read is made up, of course. The newspaper gentlemen enjoy themselves most when there are no facts at all to be reported, apart from the body itself. I sometimes think how easy it must be to be one of these reporters, making up the most fantastic stories out of your head and then presenting them as the very latest news.’

Sir William shook his head at the sins of the reporters. ‘But let me ask you this, Lord Powerscourt. Have you any idea of how many people have come forward to claim the corpse? To say that it is a long-lost member of their family?’

‘I have no idea, Sir William.’ Powerscourt noticed that the four great maps of London, North South East and West, still adorned the office walls. And he observed that, as before, the East End was covered with small red circles denoting the most recent crimes.

‘So far we have had over one hundred and fifty.’ Sir William nodded to a pile of correspondence spilling out of a file on his desk. ‘Would you believe it? We have kept that figure well out of the newspapers, of course. If they were to print it, we would be deluged under a flood of more claims. Some of them may be genuine, families where the parent or grandparent has disappeared and they would like the reassurance of being able to bury him. But even then there is something greedy about them, as if the urge to wipe away the social disgrace caused by the disappearance could be washed away by a proper funeral. But the others. . . .’ Sir William paused and looked directly at Powerscourt.

‘Insurance claims?’ asked Powerscourt with a smile. ‘Claims that need a body or a proper death certificate to satisfy the insurance companies?’

‘You have it, Lord Powerscourt. Your powers are as strong as ever, I see. The attraction with these insurance claims is, of course, the money payable on the death of the subject of the policy. Without a body there can be no claim. So now we have the entry of the bounty hunters. We have one claim from a wealthy widow whose husband ran off twenty years ago but left her in possession of policies on his life. The widow is certain’ – Sir William reached for a letter from his file – ‘that the corpse by London Bridge is that of her vanished spouse. “Once I read the accounts in the papers,” Mrs Willoughby of Highgate writes, “I knew that it was Alfred come back at last, albeit in unfortunate circumstances. It would be the last act of a sorrowing widow to come and identify the body, however harrowing that might be. I believe I owe it to Alfred’s memory to perform this final act of piety from the living towards the dead”.’

Sir William looked up with a ghost of a smile disturbing his moustaches. ‘That might or might not be satisfactory. But then Mrs Willoughby rather gives the game away. “I believe it is customary in these circumstances for the next of kin to be given a copy of the death certificate so it can be forwarded to the appropriate authorities and the insurance companies.”’

‘Insurance companies plural?’ said Powerscourt quickly. ‘Was she going to cash him in twice, or even three times?’

‘We cannot tell.’ The Commissioner shrugged his shoulders. ‘But we do know this. We could have positive identifications of that corpse one hundred and fifty times over, and not one of them would be right. Not one.’

‘You don’t mean to say that you know who the corpse is, or rather was?’ Powerscourt was leaning forward in his chair, his mind racing through the possibilities of the case.

‘No, we don’t. But don’t you see how difficult our position is? Here are all these widows and orphans desperate to identify the body as their Alfred or Uncle Richard or Grandfather Matthew. Soon they will start writing to the papers saying the heartless police have refused to let them identify their loved ones. The longer the mystery remains a mystery the more hostile public opinion will become, the greater the pressure to open the floodgates and allow these bounty hunters to claim their prize. Unless we know who the dead man is, we cannot refuse them.’

‘What can I do to help?’ said Powerscourt, anxious to offer his services. ‘I mean to say, I cannot see how I could be of service, but I am more than willing to try.’

‘Lord Powerscourt, how very kind of you.’ The Commissioner fingered his moustaches. ‘And forgive me for burdening you with our troubles. Let me tell you what we do know that has not appeared in the newspapers and has not been made up.’