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All around him brokers and merchants and commission agents pushed forward to peer into the water. Two sailors of foreign extraction appeared on deck and stared uncomprehendingly at the crowd.

‘There’s a corpse in the river! There’s a corpse in the river!’ The phrase spread quickly back across the bridge. Within three minutes word would reach the incoming passengers in London Bridge station. Within five minutes it would flash past Wellington’s statue and reach the portals of the Royal Exchange.

The tall young man stretched even further forward towards the murky waters of the Thames.

‘Oh, my God!’ he shouted. He fell backwards into the crowd and fainted away into the amazed arms of a fat and prosperous old gentleman who was surprised at how light he was.

The young man was the first to see that the body had no head, and that the hands had been cut off. A grisly stump of neck, clotted yellow and black, was inching its way towards the further shore.

Murder had come to the City at half-past eight on a Thursday morning.

Throughout the day rumour was King. Rumour, of course, was usually King in the temples of finance: rumours of revolutions and defaults in South America, rumours of unrest and instability in Russia, and, most frequent and most unsettling of all, rumours of changes in interest rates. But on this day one question and one question only dominated all conversations. Who was the dead man? Where had he come from? Why did he have no head and no hands? At lunchtime in the chop houses and the private dining rooms it reached its crescendo.

The tall thin young man, Albert Morris, was a hero for twenty-four hours. Revived by brandy and water in the partners’ room of the private banking house where he earned his daily bread, he told his story over and over again. He told it to his colleagues, he told it to his friends, he told it eagerly to the newspapermen who laid siege to his bank until he was delivered up to them.

The first rumour, believed to have come originally from the Baltic Exchange, was that the corpse was a Russian princeling, a relative of the Tsar himself, murdered by those foul revolutionaries, the body transported from St Petersburg to London and thrown over the side. The head, said the Baltic Exchange, had been removed so the Russian authorities would never know he had been murdered, thus forestalling any of those fearful reprisals for which the Tsar’s secret police were famous.

Nonsense, came the counter-rumour from one of the great discount houses. The corpse was not a Russian, he was French. He was a wine merchant from Burgundy who had been carrying on an affair with another man’s wife. The cuckolded husband, the discount house version went on fancifully, unable to avail himself of the service of the official guillotine, had chopped off the head which had looked at his wife and the hands which had caressed her body. The corpse had been packed in with a consignment of Burgundy’s finest and thrown into the river.

The last, and most ominous, rumour came from Home Rails on the Stock Exchange. This was the rumour that struck most terror into the small, but growing, female population of the City. Jack the Ripper is back, claimed Home Rails. They nearly caught him when he went for all those loose women in the East End. Now he’s going for men. This is only the beginning. More decapitated males were to be expected, dumped in the docks or carried upstream towards Westminster. Beware the Ripper!

The man charged, for now, with the responsibility of finding out the truth about the headless and handless corpse was sitting in his tiny office at Cannon Street police station. He was suffering, he knew, from his normal feelings of irritation and anger as he looked at his younger colleague.

Inspector William Burroughs was in his late forties. He was a stocky man with a small rather straggly moustache and tired brown eyes. Earlier in his career he had been involved in a successful murder investigation, and the reputation of being good with cases involving sudden death had stuck with him. But Burroughs knew that had been a fluke. An unexpected confession had solved the crime, not his detective skills. He had told his wife this many times, and as many times she had instructed him not to tell his superiors.

There are men who look good in uniform, men who carry it off well, men who can appear like peacocks on parade. Burroughs was not one of those. There always seemed to be a button undone, trousers not sitting properly, a tie adrift at the neck. His sergeant, on the other hand, always looked immaculate, like his bloody mother had washed and ironed him five minutes before, as Burroughs liked to tell himself. Sergeant Cork was still gleaming in his pristine state at half-past twelve on the morning when the body was found.

A couple of sailors had propelled the corpse gently towards the riverbank with a boathook. Inspector Burroughs had supervised the landing, blankets at the ready to cover the dead man. He had ridden with it to the morgue at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and delivered it into the care of the doctors. They had promised him a preliminary report by the end of the day.

‘We should be able to tell you how long he had been in the water, maybe how long ago he was killed,’ the young doctor had assured him. ‘Please don’t expect us to be able to help you with any clues as to who he might have been.’

‘Right, Sergeant Cork,’ said Burroughs, ‘we may as well start somewhere. I want you to go round or telephone all the police stations in the area and see if they have any missing persons on file.

‘And there’s one very unfortunate thing about this case, I can tell you. Very unfortunate. Just think what the newspapers are going to make of it. Headless man floating by London Bridge. Not just no head, no hands either. They’ll be all over it for weeks. And if the poor bloody police can’t find out who the man was, then we’ll be for it too. Look at those incompetent detectives, the journalists will say, they can’t even solve a murder right in the heart of the City. The newspapers will be out for our blood.’

‘Are we sure it was a murder, sir?’ Sergeant Cork had never been involved in such a prestigious inquiry before.

‘You don’t suppose he cut his head off when he had no hands left, do you? Or do you think he cut off his head first and then sawed his wrists off himself?’

‘I’m sure you’re right sir.’ Cork hastened to the telephone room. ‘I’ll get started on these inquiries.’

And please, please, the Inspector thought to himself, just once, get yourself a bit untidy.

2

Lord Francis Powerscourt had turned into a horse. He was trotting slowly along his hall in Markham Square in Chelsea, making clip-clop noises with his tongue and his back teeth. He had practised these in his bath and tested them out to his own satisfaction on his wife Lady Lucy.

‘Clip-clop, Clip-clop,’ said Powerscourt, negotiating his way past a Regency table outside the dining room. Now, he knew, was the time for a strategic decision. Should he go into the dining room and make a round of the chairs, pausing possibly to look at the grass outside the window? Or should he essay the more dangerous, but possibly more entertaining journey up the stairs to the first or the second or even the third floor?

Lord Francis Powerscourt was one of the most successful detectives in England. He had learned his craft in Army Intelligence in India and transferred the skills learnt there to solving murders and mysteries at home. He was in his forties now, the black curly hair still intact, the blue eyes continuing to inspect the world with the same detachment and irony as before.

‘Hold on tight, hold on very tight,’ said Powerscourt, as he began a slow ascent of the stairs. He could feel two small hands hanging on very tightly to his collar. Thomas Powerscourt was four years old, born a year after his parents’ wedding in 1892. Wandering about upstairs was Thomas’s sister, Olivia, who could now tell the world that she was two.