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.’
Powerscourt was looking at his fingertips, rubbing them slowly together. But it was Lady Lucy who spoke.
‘Could he not have gone somewhere else, William? The Italian Lakes, or somewhere on the Rhine, perhaps. It would be so dreadful if this corpse was that poor old man.’
‘I don’t think he was poor.’ Burke laughed cheerfully, a man reputed to be able to value the top men in the City to the nearest ten thousand pounds. ‘Certainly not poor.’
‘No matter how rich you are you shouldn’t have to end up like that. If it was Old Mr Harrison,’ said Lady Lucy, defending the rights of the dead.
‘I’m not sure how to proceed,’ said Powerscourt. ‘It’s unlikely that further inquiries in the City will make any progress. Maybe somebody should scout around their house in the country – Oxfordshire, did you say it was, William?’
‘It is,’ said Burke, resuming the mantle of business. ‘But please be very careful, very discreet. The Harrisons may know that I was behind the inquiries made in Lombard Street. Word will surely reach them that I made further inquiries in Germany. We need to be very careful indeed.
’And I must be off home. Thank you so much for the lemonade. You won’t forget that you are coming to me for the weekend in the country, to be there at the installation of my new vicar? I never realized that when I bought the house and the land I bought an incumbency as well!’ William Burke laughed in the joy of his own prosperity. ‘You have to read a lesson, Francis, you will recall. And I’ve got the Bishop coming as well. Publish it not in the streets of Gath, as the parsons say,’ Burke smiled at his hosts, ‘but I saved his whole diocese from bankruptcy three years ago. But that’s another story.’