A Study in Spectres Read online

  A STUDY IN SPECTRES

  SIMON PEARCE MYSTERIES VOLUME 1

  By Jess Faraday

  A Study in Spectres

  Simon Pearce Mysteries Volume 1

  By Jess Faraday

  Copyright © 2020 by Jess Faraday

  Published by: Blind Eye Books 1141 Grant Street Bellingham, WA. 98225

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Nicole Kimberling

  Proofreading by Dianne Thies

  Cover design by Dawn Kimberling

  First Edition March 2020

  For my family.

  THE GHOST OF ST. SEBASTIAN’S

  January 1887

  London

  So there we were, Fitzsimmons and myself—and the driver, of course—careening through the narrow, crumbling streets of the Spitalfields rookery on the hard wooden bench above a Black Maria. My breath was a series of white puffs in the chill night air. Fitz had jammed his bare hands into the pockets of his police-issue coat. His smooth cheeks were red, and his eyes glittered with excitement.

  In the two years I’d been walking the midnight beat, this was the first time I’d sent for the wagon. It’s mostly drunks we deal with. Sometimes there’s a fight. Nothing that can’t be sorted out with a few stern words or, failing that, the baton. The Maria was an expense and a bother, and if my new partner was to learn anything from me, it would be to use this resource, exciting as it was, with restraint.

  The woman locked in the wagon below us had committed no crime. At least not that night, though I can’t speak as to what might have happened had we not turned up when we did. We were taking her in for her own protection, even though she was the one who had started the fight.

  “Can’t you go a bit more carefully?” I asked the driver. A grizzled man in his fifties, he was built like a pillar box—cylindrical and heavy—but he could drive like the wind. And he was. All the same, even traveling at speed over sludge-choked, broken cobblestones, the passenger shouldn’t have been banging against the walls like that. The Maria was swaying a bit, but the horses weren’t stumbling, despite the fog and the stones slick with ice and mud and God only knew what. And yet our charge sounded like a coin rattling around in a beggar’s tin cup.

  And then she cried out. A few muffled words that I strained to understand.

  “Think she’s having a fit in there?” Fitz asked.

  I shrugged. I won’t say he was naive, Fitz, but he was young, like a puppy in a grown man’s body—all loose limbs, floppy brown hair, and undirected enthusiasm. Not unattractive for that, but definitely not my type. He’d have been mortified, actually, that the thought had even occurred to me. He was a simple man, and his upbringing had been, at least comparatively, sheltered. As for Sarah Goodfellow, our prisoner, well, she might have been having a fit, or it might have been something else. She hadn’t smelled drunk, but there were a lot of things a person could put in his—or her—body that weren’t drink.

  I’d seen Sarah Goodfellow around St. Sebastian’s before. She hadn’t recognized me, which was for the best. St. Sebastian’s churchyard was a known meeting place for a certain sort of man, and the night station inspector, Crowther, could live a long, happy life never knowing that I was that sort.

  One could also find female companionship at St. Sebastian’s. Sarah Goodfellow wasn’t there for that, either, though. She was a thief, and could cut a purse with the best of them. It was this combination of thieving, prostitution, and other low behavior that had caused St. Sebastian’s to hire a night watchman.

  When we’d come upon Sarah Goodfellow that night, she’d been engaged in an altercation with said watchman, a man by the name of Timson.

  Timson wasn’t inclined to argue, no less with women. War makes some men hard, but gentles others—as if they want to protect folk from the horrors they’d seen. Timson was the second sort. Always had a cigarette to share, or a kind word. But he did keep order. He’d been back from Afghanistan for a few years, but hadn’t lost his soldier’s brawn. Even if he did walk with a limp, I couldn’t imagine what might possess a pale, scrawny thing like Sarah Goodfellow to pick a fight with the man.

  It was for her own protection that we took her in, as I said. She was going at Timson like a rabid cat, and she wasn’t going to stop just because we told her to. I’d seen it too many times before. We’d break up the fight, then the minute we turned our backs, she’d be back again, harrying Timson until Timson lost patience, and Sarah Goodfellow lost a few teeth—or worse. Did she have a legitimate gripe with the watchman? Did she have a screw loose? Either way, we were within our rights and duty to hold her somewhere for a bit until she calmed down.

  Which might be quite a while, considering how she was thrashing around down there.

  “What’d she say to you?” I asked Fitz. Fitz had taken down the prisoner’s side of things, while I’d talked to Timson.

  “Something about a ghost in the churchyard.” There was a light in Fitz’s eyes, an excitement in his voice. He liked ghost stories, gruesome legends, and tales of ladies in distress, in which he could imagine himself the hero. “She said Timson’s in charge of it. Said he sends it after folks he don’t like. Said the ghost already killed two others what prowl the churchyard. The lady reckoned she’d put a stop to it.”

  “Is that so?”

  I like to read too, but my taste runs more to the factual. I’ve read some about ghosts, and they seem to cause a lot of bother, making scary noises and tossing objects about, but I’d never heard about one actually hurting people. Too difficult for the spirits to “pierce the veil” to that degree, is what they reckon.

  “It got two friends of hers, as a matter of fact,” Fitz continued. “One last Saturday, the other the Saturday before that. Beaten to death.”

  My stomach dropped. It was a rough life on the back streets of East London, and I’d seen more than a few denizens of these streets come to a violent end. A lot of my colleagues pretend death doesn’t bother them, but the truth is, that sick feeling never completely goes away. Especially when a fellow realizes how few twists of fate actually keep him from a similar path.

  “Not uncommon on this side of town,” I said after a moment.

  “No,” Fitz agreed. “The uncommon part is, them men was found, each in his doss, alone, with the door locked from the inside.”

  I frowned. “From the inside? How’d they manage that?”

  “That,” Fitz said, his eyes wide and bright, “was how the lady knowed the ghost done it.”

  I wasn’t convinced, not by a mile. Still, I could feel the question burrowing under my skin like a mite, and I knew it wasn’t going to stop bothering me until I gave it a good scratch.

  “Did she tell you the names of her friends?” I asked.

  The driver was slowing down, now, pulling up to the station. Fog had gathered around the Maria, and when I descended into the thick clouds, I had the strange sensation that we were being watched. I shook it off.

  “One was named Fisher, I think,” Fitz said—a disembodied voice in the night, until he stepped through the wall of fog on the other side of the Maria’s back door. “The other was Woods.”

  “Did she say where they were found? Which houses?” The East End was riddled with doss houses, though few, I imagined, had separate rooms, no less with locking doors.

  Fitz shrugged. The driver joined us behind the Maria and took out his ring of keys.

  “You’ll have to ask her,” Fitz said.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but the minute the driver opened the back of the wagon, the remark died on my tongue. Sarah Goodfellow was lying on the floor of
the wagon, covered in cuts and marks she hadn’t had when we put her inside—marks that didn’t look like anything one might expect a person to sustain during a short trip in a secured police wagon.

  “Miss?” Fitz asked cautiously.

  “Sarah Goodfellow,” I said sternly. “This is Constable Simon Pearce. It’s time to stop playing around.”

  I gave her shoulder a shake. Her head lolled to face us—long hair sweat-stuck to her face and neck. A spot of blood the size of a shilling coin glinted on her skull beneath her hair, in the light of the streetlamp behind us. She stared at us with sightless eyes.

  The driver gasped. Fitz crossed himself, and I could see from his expression exactly what he was thinking. Beaten to death, alone in the back of a locked Maria, with two constables above. Silenced by the Ghost of St. Sebastian’s.

  “It wasn’t a ghost,” I told him.

  He nodded. He heard me, but he wasn’t listening.

  “There’s no such thing,” I said.

  He nodded again, but from the daft smile spreading across his face, I knew it was only a matter of time before he shared his enthusiasm with his mates at the station, and the Ghost of St. Sebastian’s made us a laughingstock.

  “Not a word in there.” I grabbed Fitz’s arm. “Not until we find out what really happened. Promise me.”

  That, he understood. And he didn’t like it, but he wasn’t, thank God, the type to make a fuss.

  •••

  It goes without saying that the richer or more important a person is, the more attention his—or her—death will command. If that death is suspicious, the Yard will put the best men on the case, and those men won’t rest until a responsible party is found. And then that party will pay. Most people who die, though, suspiciously or not, are neither rich nor important, which means that, as far as Scotland Yard is concerned, the sooner their cases can be filed away, the better.

  No one was going to investigate the death of a twenty-two-year-old who made her living picking pockets in the shadows of St. Sebastian’s. That went double if she’d died in police custody. No moneyed relatives would offer a reward. There wouldn’t be any sensational newspaper stories immortalizing the investigators as heroes. There wouldn’t even be a trip to the new police mortuary in one of the new hand-operated ambulances that looked so disconcertingly like prams. No, the best Sarah Goodfellow could hope for was a brief rest stretched out on the table in a back room until someone arrived in the morning to take her to a shared pauper’s grave at St. Bride’s.

  Just my luck that Station Inspector Crowther had shifted his bulky frame from its usual position behind his desk, and was lumbering about, poking his bulbous red drinker’s nose into my case. He’d overseen Sarah Goodfellow’s arrival and had demanded statements from Fitzsimmons and myself, as if he’d been the one to bring the prisoner in. It had taken him exactly thirty seconds to declare the death an accident—a bump in the road that had caused an unrestrained prisoner to land awkwardly and break her neck. When I’d insisted there’d been no significant jolt, he’d warned me to restrain all future prisoners.

  I argued that a bump on the head might account for Sarah Goodfellow’s broken neck, but not for the bluish tinge around her lips, or the cuts and abrasions on her skin.

  Crowther, apparently assuming that we’d accidentally killed her while forcing her into the Maria, seemed confused as to why I was arguing to incriminate myself. More to the point, he said, if my questions caused him to stay late filling out paperwork, he’d be happy to make the report reflect my guilt. Fitz wisely kept his supernatural speculations to himself. When it was all over, though, he slipped away with a few of his mates, no doubt to exchange ghost stories for a pint or two, despite his earlier promise.

  As for me, once Crowther had returned to his corner of the room, instead of going home, I went to visit Sarah Goodfellow.

  I’d seen a few corpses in my short tenure with the Yard. It’s always horrible—the shock of a face with the light gone out of the eyes, the knowledge that this inert thing had once been a person, with hopes and dreams. Even if Sarah Goodfellow’s life had been one which a lot of people might have considered themselves lucky to avoid, she had still been someone’s child—and a good enough friend to want justice for her fallen comrades. Comrades who, like her, had died alone, apparently battered to death, behind locked doors.

  Her present chamber was not locked. No chance of her getting up and picking pockets now, and even less chance that someone might tamper with her shoddily dressed corpse. I eased open the door and turned the knob on the wall. The gas sconces came alive with a faint hiss, throwing my shadow and hers against the opposite wall in sharp relief. I turned the gas up to its highest setting and approached the table.

  Sarah Goodfellow’s lips still held a faint blue coloring, though it had faded since we’d removed her from the back of the Maria. This coloring was distinct from the nascent bruise on her cheek, which might well have happened when she fell. A bluish tint, I’d read, could result from asphyxiation. But how could she have been asphyxiated in the back of the Maria?

  As I’ve said, I enjoy reading—something I don’t admit to many people. And though it was tempting to indulge in frivolous things in order to escape from my morbid line of work, what I really enjoyed was scientific monographs, particularly those that shed light upon the mysteries in my field.

  At present, I was working my way through a series of monographs by a Dr. E. Bell. Bell wasn’t a police surgeon, as far as I knew, but he seemed to have a keen interest in the mechanisms of unnatural death, as well as an aptitude for reconstructing crimes. His writings intrigued me. Most of my colleagues carry out their work to the best of their abilities, but few of us have time to give our cases much detailed thought. More times than I care to admit, a person is found, arrested, and tried because he—or she—is the most convenient suspect. Many suspicious deaths are deemed accidental, because it would have been too difficult to prove either who had done the deed, or how they had accomplished it. I’ve often remarked to my superiors that it would be beneficial to invite Dr. Bell to speak at the Yard—to summarize those of his findings about wounds, poisons, or other evidence that might prove instructive. Needless to say, they dismiss the idea as wasteful of both time and money.

  Still, hadn’t we all chosen this vocation to serve justice and make London safer for everyone who lived here? Raucous laughter echoed down the hallway—some rude joke between my colleagues, no doubt. Perhaps not everyone considered this work his highest calling. And yet serving justice was at least part of the job, and even the lowest citizen deserved some small measure of it.

  “What happened, Miss Goodfellow?” Her thin, brown hair, which she had tied back in a long plait, had come loose. I smoothed it away from her forehead. She wore trousers and a man’s shirt. I doubted she’d meant to pass as a man, because she’d used her Christian name. I imagined her choice of garment was pragmatic, since the burden of female clothing would have substantially limited her stealth and agility. Fresh scratches on the back of one hand traveled up beneath her dirty sleeve. I turned the cuff back and examined them more closely.

  No specter had made these. They were self-inflicted. It was obvious from the blood beneath the grimy fingernails on her other hand. Similar scratches stood out along her neck, and even on one cheek. I thought back to the scene Fitz and I had encountered upon arriving at St. Sebastian’s. Sarah Goodfellow had been arguing with Mr. Timson—accusing him of sending the Ghost of St. Sebastian’s to murder Woods and Fisher. But this didn’t fit with either what I knew of Timson or what I’d read of ghosts—even if ghosts did exist. Whatever Fitz might think, this was not a reasonable conclusion.

  Which meant that Sarah Goodfellow had not been in a reasonable frame of mind when she’d made the accusations. The few times I’d seen her around St. Sebastian’s, she’d moved with swiftness and silence, evading me with alacrity. I’d never seen her talking to herself, no less ranting. The one time I’d caught up with h
er—she’d, of course, disposed of the evidence by then—she had acted more cocky than belligerent. This suggested tonight’s derangement had been temporary in nature. But was it due to some defect in her mind? Perhaps superstition taken to its extreme? Or perhaps, as I’d suspected, her derangement had been chemical in nature. As I’ve mentioned, there was no smell of alcohol upon her. Her movements had been quick, and her speech clear—as opposed to the slurring torpor one might expect from either drink or opium in any of its popularly consumed forms. But these two were far from the only intoxicants available to people in search of temporary escape.

  I jumped at a sudden screech behind me—a sound like a knife scraped on glass. I dropped Sarah Goodfellow’s hand and turned to see a plump rat scuttle along the wall and disappear into a hole in the baseboard. I shuddered. Filthy things. At the same time, I felt sorry for them. A constable’s salary is hardly generous, but it’s a damn sight better than hiding in the shadows and scrabbling for crumbs.

  The clock struck two. Suddenly the familiar end-of-shift fatigue came upon me, and the burn behind my eyes that came from working into the wee hours. I shook it off. I should go back to the section house, have some rest, and arrive fresh for my shift the next evening, but my mind was on fire with ideas. There would be no sleep until they were satisfied. I gave Sarah Goodfellow’s shoulder an awkward pat, pur our the light, and shut the door.

  Checking quickly to make sure Crowther was safely ensconced in his lair, and the records clerk soundly asleep at his post, I ducked into the room where reports were kept until it was time to take them away to their final resting place in some dusty basement crypt.

  In addition to the physical details of crimes, I’ve found it instructive to consider the details of the lives of the people involved in them. Though Sergeant Crowther says it’s a waste of time to think too deeply about these things, I’ve surprised him more than once with conclusions based on my analysis of information no one else thought important. I didn’t anticipate the files would contain a lot of personal information. But if any of the victims had a criminal history, it might shed some light upon the circumstances of their deaths.