Inspector of the Dead by David Morrell Read Free Book Online

is a gentleman from the Illustrated London News, ” Ryan told them. “Please describe Lady Cosgrove’s escort to him. He’ll draw a picture, and you can help him make it appear exactly as you remember the man. When everyone is satisfied,” Ryan told the artist, “put it in the newspaper. I’m hoping someone will identify him. After that, go to the front and make sketches of the body.”
    “But you already have someone taking photographs of it.”
    “Which might not be adequate.” Still absorbing the shock of the two-word note in his pocket, Ryan said, “I need to have everything done twice.”
    “Ryan.”
    The authoritative voice made Ryan turn. Commissioner Mayne took quick, troubled steps toward him.
    Mayne was fifty-eight. His thin features looked shrunken beneath thick, gray sideburns. This was his twenty-sixth year as a commissioner, and the effort showed on his face. No one knew more about London’s Metropolitan Police, or indeed about law enforcement anywhere in the world, than he did.
    “I passed several journalists outside,” Mayne said.
    “A team of constables is keeping them at a distance, sir. I know you had an emergency meeting with the home secretary. I wouldn’t have interrupted if this didn’t need your immediate attention.”
    Ryan suddenly wondered if there was a home secretary. Given the government’s collapse, did Lord Palmerston still hold that position? The political chaos made everything uncertain.
    “The murder of someone as distinguished as Lady Cosgrove—in St. James’s.” Mayne sounded outraged. “I came at once.”
    “I’m afraid it’s even worse than you think, sir.”
    “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
    “Lady Cosgrove was holding these.” Ryan removed the envelope and the note from his pocket.
    Mayne stared at the bloodstains on them. Taking the note from Ryan, he studied the two stark words.
    His face became gaunter.
    “Heaven help us. Who else knows about this?”
    “Only you and I, sir.”
    For one of the few times in the fifteen years that Ryan had known him, the commissioner looked shaken.
    “We’re without a prime minister and a cabinet,” Ryan said. “Because this concerns Her Majesty’s safety, shouldn’t the queen be told at once?”
      
    A ccompanied by a constable, Becker hurried along Piccadilly, hoping to avoid attention but attracting stares nonetheless. Twenty-six years earlier, the public had been slow to accept helmeted policemen on seemingly every corner. But in 1842, an even more alarming development had occurred: a plain-clothed detective unit. The radical notion of a constable out of uniform was greeted with great suspicion. The middle and upper classes granted that there was merit to disguised policemen infiltrating taverns, gambling dens, and other places of low repute where criminals plotted their outrages. But at what point would these detectives become spies? How would respectable citizens know whether the seemingly ordinary person they spoke to wasn’t actually a detective prying into their personal affairs?
    Clothing that appeared inconspicuous on ordinary streets didn’t have that advantage in wealthy Mayfair. It was difficult to say which attracted more attention: Becker’s shapeless garments or the uniformed man who accompanied him. He felt eyes peering from behind closed curtains. A group of servants leaving their places of employment for their half-Sunday of liberty regarded him nervously, evidently assuming that Becker was a criminal whom the constable had arrested. The scar on Becker’s chin indicated a rough background. But if that were the case, why was the constable escorting the criminal into the heart of Mayfair instead of to the nearest police station?
    Following the directions Becker had received at the church, he turned right onto Half Moon Street, then left onto Curzon Street, navigating his way to the side-by-side houses on Chesterfield Hill.
    “Go to Lady Cosgrove’s house,” Ryan had told him.