David Dickinson: Death and the Jubilee

His own new woman was striding ahead of him along the path. Richard hurried to catch up. ‘Wait for me, Sophie,’ he cried, breaking into a trot.

She turned and smiled. ‘That makes a nice change, Richard. Men asking for women to wait so they can catch up!’

She turned and, as if contradicting her own words, she ran off down the path, calling back as she went, ‘Can’t catch me! Can’t catch me! That’s what they say in the playground!’

Eventually he did catch her and there ahead of them was the Tudor front of Hampton Court Palace, with the King’s Beasts on guard around the entrance gate.

‘Cardinal Wolsey, wasn’t it?’ panted Richard. ‘It was built by Cardinal Wolsey in fifteen hundred and something or other?’

‘It was built by Cardinal Wolsey,’ said Sophie, moving effortlessly into teacher and suffragist mode in a single sentence. ‘Then he had to give it to Henry the Eighth. I expect he maltreated some of his wives down here. What right did he have to cut their heads off just because they wouldn’t give him another male to maltreat another generation of women? It’s dreadful. Just because men have the power they think they can abuse women as though they were cats or dogs or something like that.’

Richard groaned inwardly. He hadn’t made the connection between Hampton Court and the suffragist cause when he proposed this expedition. Now he suspected this tirade could go on all afternoon.

‘Really, it’s all so unfair,’ said Sophie, looking, to the young man, impossibly attractive as her eyes flashed with indignation. ‘I have to go to a meeting of the Women’s Franchise League this evening. I shall remind everybody of how we are surrounded, even in our history, especially in our history, by the great injustices done to women by men. There is talk of another petition for the suffrage. This time we shall get more signatories than ever before.’

Richard stared at her hopelessly, helplessly. If she felt like that about men, he wondered to himself for the hundredth time, how could she ever engage her emotions with one? Was conventional love incompatible with her views? Was his mother right all along?

‘Come along, Sophie, you can keep talking as we go along. What do you say to one of those pies on Eel Pie Island?’

In a gesture that lit up his heart like a sudden flash of lightning, she squeezed his arm briefly and ran ahead. ‘I’d love one of those pies, Richard. Can’t catch me!’

Every day the reluctant army made its way across London Bridge. Every day the slaves of Money and the Market went to their temple in the City by steam railway, on foot, by bus, by underground railway, by horse and carriage.

On Monday the rumour might be that there had been further finds of gold in the Rand. On Wednesday it might be that there was a great loan to be floated for a railway to link the remotest parts of Russia. On Friday it might be the flotation of another great manufacturing interest, the shares guaranteed to reach levels well above par in a day or so for those wise or foolish enough to buy them well in advance.

But of the identity of the corpse floating in the river there was no information. The popular papers printed stories on the body until even their over-fertile imaginations ran out. The procession of bounty hunters continued to make their way to the police offices, protesting their certainty of the corpse’s identity and barely concealing their greed for the gold of the insurance companies.

Powerscourt, as requested by the Commissioner, had put the word about Mayfair and Belgravia. Lady Lucy, a veteran of such missions now, had invented a story of an aunt of hers in the Highlands who had disappeared one winter day and not been found for a month, when her corpse was found floating in a swollen stream, grossly disfigured. She worked conversations round to this story all across her considerable acquaintance, but she caught nothing. Powerscourt’s sisters, pressed reluctantly into service, did their best but failed.

Only William Burke, Powerscourt’s financier brother- in-law, held out a faint glimmer of hope.

‘I’ve known men disappear for quite a long time – the pressure of debt, the fear of being hammered on the Exchange,’ he had said thoughtfully to Powerscourt in his club, savouring a glass of their finest claret. ‘I’ve known even more who should have disappeared and saved their fortunes while they could. But it seems a bit extreme to arrange to have your head cut off as well, unless there was some question of inheritance.’

Sometimes the police were hopeful. Occasionally they would find what they felt were genuine cases of lost or disappeared persons. Constables would be despatched to houses in Muswell Hill or Mortlake, Camden Town or Catford, to make inquiries. Always the disappearance seemed to be genuine, but the height or the age was wrong. The body itself remained in splendid isolation in the refrigerated mortuary of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, watched over by a couple of porters and a flock of unruly medical students.

And then, on a blustery Monday evening in April, at ten o’clock at night, there was an imperious knock on the door of the Powerscourts’ house in Markham Square. Lady Lucy was deep in Jude the Obscure . Powerscourt had fallen asleep by the fire, dreaming of cricket matches and late cuts in the summer months ahead.

‘Mr William Burke, my lord, my lady,’ said the footman.

A rather weary financier strode into the room and fell gratefully into an armchair by the fire.

‘I have just returned from the Continent. I’m on my way home to see Mary and the children, if any of them are still awake.’

‘Some tea? A glass of wine? Maybe even some lemonade to quench your thirst?’ Lady Lucy was quick to offer comfort to the traveller.

‘What a capital suggestion that lemonade is, Lady Lucy. Those trains are very dusty. Lemonade would be just the thing.’

‘Francis, you remember the corpse in the river, the body by London Bridge? Well, I think I may have some news but I am not sure. I have been to Germany on business, to Berlin, that frightful city, so very Prussian,’ Burke shook his head, ‘and to Frankfurt and to one or two other places. The only person of my acquaintance who fitted the description of the corpse – Oh, thank you so very much.’

Burke paused to drink deeply of his lemonade.

’That is uncommon good for a weary traveller,’ he said to Lady Lucy with a smile. ‘Maybe we could make something of it in the way of business. Where was I?’ He looked round suddenly as if he wasn’t sure if he was in Frankfurt or Chelsea.

‘Ah yes, the only person of my acquaintance who fitted the description of Francis’ body was Old Mr Harrison of Harrison’s Bank. I think he was christened Carl-Heinz but he came to be known over here as Carl and he was certainly the right age.’

‘How old would you say he was, William?’ asked Powerscourt.

‘Probably over eighty. Maybe well into his eighties. I made discreet inquiries in the City – you cannot imagine what impact it could have on a private bank’s standing if its founder had been found floating in the Thames without his head – and the word came back that he was in Germany, either Frankfurt or Berlin.

‘Now . . .’ He paused to smile again at Lady Lucy, thinking that five years of marriage had made her even prettier than when he had first met her. ‘. . . it might seem odd for a man of that age to go off to Germany at this time of year – in a few months it would be different – but he was always a tough and resourceful old bird. However,’ Burke leaned forward and looked Lady Lucy full in the eye, ‘I made more discreet inquiries when I was in Germany. I said I’d heard he was in town, would he care for lunch or dinner, that sort of message. But everywhere the answer was the same. Carl Harrison was not in Frankfurt. Carl Harrison was not in Berlin. Carl Harrison was not and had not been in Hamburg. I must have been misinformed. So.’ He rose and clicked his heels together in the German fashion and bowed. ‘No Old Harrison in Germany. No Old Harrison in London. But why should they say he was in Berlin when he wasn’t? Over to you, Francis.’