Copperwaite, an exasperated breath of air flowing from him, bit back an urge to again verbally prod his senior partner for words. He felt a powerful need to hear something-anything-from the worldly, former army colonel.
Finally, Sharpe turned and shouted at them all, his voice sounding like a drill sergeant who'd missed a meal. “Anyone locate a scintilla of information, evidence, identifying item about the ground? Anyone? Anything?”
“ 'Fraid not, Inspector,” replied one of the Charring Cross district bobbies.
“Aye and not aught of ye've seen the like of her before today?” Sharpe blurted out in his native Cockney, raising the eyebrows of several of the uniformed men milling about.
“Sorry, sir… She's a stone cold mystery, this one. Not from the district so far as we know,” came the answer.
“Perhaps new to the area then? Have a check with housing authority and what-do-you-call-them? Housewarming people. D'ya know any Warm Welcoming groups in the area?”
Sharpe then snorted into a handkerchief, bent down over the prone dead and once more examined her features with the care of a man preparing to paint in oil. With a gentle, gloved hand, he turned her cheek from side to side, studying the hard-etched, weary, worn features, his pipe still dangling, unlit.
Sharpe finally asked, “What do you really make of her, Coppers?”
Copperwaite pushed closer, kneeling in over the other side of the body, pleased that his senior had used his nickname. He and Sharpe now formed a kind of human arboretum about the deceased, their eyes intent on the dark results of the morning's find. “She's likely in the wrong place at the wrong time… Like, as I assumed, out here hooking, I suppose, when this madman with spikes and a cross grabbed her up?”
“Then you suppose too much, but tell me why.”
“I don't know…”
“Exactly. You do not know, so you rush in with words to fill empty space, Coppers. CID men can't work that way. Now tell me why you suspect her to be a common whore? Certainly not the way she dresses? Come on, man! Why do you make her out a whore?”
“I can't righdy say“
“Yes, you bloody well can. Go on.” Sharpe's frustration gave way to a flood of anger. “It's because of the district we're in, and perhaps the killer knew full well we'd take her for a whore, dumping her here.”
Copperwaite, some ten years Sharpe's junior, looked more closely at the body and announced, “Look at her veins. Recently popped. They're not exactly shot, but she's done drugs. Not the most beautiful creature I've ever seen,” he added with a grim shrug. “Most all of your street tramps're real hags, wouldn't you agree?”
“Virtual witches, but this woman, she's hardly a hag, Coppers. Somethin' overweight, surely, but hardly more than what, in Bow Bells, you'd call wholesome and-”
Copperwaite laughed at the use of Bow Bells' “wholesome”-another word for a fat woman.
Sharpe thundered on, adding, “And as for her features, she might be the picture of a British maiden in her youth: comely, rather proper and staid, if you're asking me. Like we earlier agreed, someone's mum or a bloody librarian, perhaps, but I see no whore before me. And one thing I've learned to trust on this job is my first impressions, my first instinct.”
“Aye, I suppose you might say so, something pleasant about her demeanor. Maybe she's more Irish than English…”
“Now you be looking for a fight! How would you be tellin' that?” Sharpe put on an Irish accent.
“I'm just supposing.”
“Suppose? Suppose her age for me then.”
“I'd say somewhere 'bout in her early to mid-fifties.”
“Agreed. And that fact is-while not average for your typical girl working the Bow Bells as a hooker-making her easy prey for the bloody bastard who's done her up this way, or so you're supposing?”
“Exactly.”
“Christ, man, you'll never make full inspector if you think like… like one of those bobbies over there,” Sharpe muttered under his breath. “You're a Scotland Yard lieutenant now, Coppers. No ordinary bobby.” Sharpe gave a quick glance to the men and women in uniform, and the few detectives that'd come on scene from nearby district boroughs.
Copperwaite gritted his teeth, his young eyes flashing over the body once again. “She's no prostitute in your estimation, Colonel Sharpe?”
“I'll not be mocked with my own hard-won military rank, Copperwaite,” returned Sharpe, edgy now.
“I meant no disrespect, Richard.”
“Look here… The moment we place her”-he stopped for emphasis, pointing to the corpse-”in that ill line of business. Indeed, the moment we place her in any category of people, without evidence, we are merely labeling her-”
“But Richard-”
“-and thinking less of her as a human being with a right to life like any other. We start in on the typical and useless procedures that ultimately lead to yet another unsolved case, of which I've had my bloody fill.”
“Still, we only have what our eyes tell us, and we've got to go by what our eyes tell us,” Copperwaite weakly countered.
Sharpe managed not to laugh, suppressing all but the smile. “The eye alone will be your downfall, Stuart. All right, suppose the needle marks you've perceived are there because the woman was, in life, diabetic?”
“I see, of course… Then we locate her doctor.”
“We can't assume a bloody thing. If we do, we're lost from the start. We can know or not know, but we cannot assume and work from assumptions.”
“Well, I should think we can assume she died of being nailed to a cross.”
“Perhaps… but it will take an autopsy to be certain even of that, and I suspect there's far more to this singular death than meets the eye, Stuart.” Sharpe fell silent once more while Copperwaite tightened his own jaw, his body stiffening.
Sharpe, having seen enough of the victim's vacant, pained eyes, gently closed the lids, and then he looked into his partner's fervid eyes where a deep and youthful fire burned. “Suppose the killer is himself a priest?”
“Shall we begin our inquiries with priests then?”
“No, of course not.”
“But why not if-”
“It's assuming too bloody much, Stuart.”
“But now you… just now yourself, you just now said-” the younger man sputtered.
“To bait you, ol' boy, to bait you, and you took it like a mouse on the scent. Shame on you.” Sharpe laughed loudly, sending his voice sluicing through the fog and upsetting the silent crowd of local officials who saw no humor whatsoever in this most grotesque, fantastic, eccentric, and bizarre of killings. “Let's turn the body,” suggested Copperwaite. “Why? What for?”
“But we always turn the body, Richard, always. It's part of the protocol.”
“But it's already been turned by men who found her earlier, some of these men standing about.”
“How can you know that? Now you're assuming, Sharpie!”
“Look at the grass beside her, Stuart. Use your eyes, man, and again, quit assuming that all things are as they appear. They seldom are.
“We know the bridgeman ran her over, yet we see no tire marks. The marks are on her backside then. The first bobbies on scene turned her over to have a look at her front side, her features, but no one wants to own up to that, Stuart.”
Copperwaite looked at the men standing nearby, nodding appreciatively to his wise mentor. Sharpe stared up at the recently completed bridge spanning the Thames.
Copperwaite pointed to the bridge and said, “The motorist who called it in was looking through a camera lens, a zoom camera, when he saw the bridgeman trying to right things after hitting the body. I'm told.”
“Saw it from up there, while crossing over the bridge. Actually, only after he stopped illegally to snap a photograph,” Richard calmly agreed. “He and his family were gaining an early start out toward Sussex, to see a bit o' the countryside, I understand. Anyway, after taking the name, they sent 'em all on their way. Or so I was told, Stuart.”