India Black by Carol K. Carr Page A

docks. “Something seemed amiss,” he told the reporter (a mastery of understatement, if I’ve ever heard one). “And so I went round the back to see if anything was wrong.”
    To the young constable’s dismay, he found the body of one middle-aged man, well dressed, the pockets of his black broadcloth suit turned out and empty, and bearing just the faintest impression of rouge on his veined cheeks. In a fever of excitement (his first dead body!), the bobby had blown his whistle, bringing his counterpart from the next district, and in a twinkling, the full force of the local constabulary had been brought to bear on the crime scene, Scotland Yard had been notified, and Inspector Miles Havelock of the Criminal Investigation Division was on the scene. In no time at all, the victim was identified, the widow notified (she was now in seclusion; requests for a few words were sternly declined by the family solicitor), and Inspector Havelock had assured the public that the killer would be found.
    There were related articles extolling the virtue of Bowser—his first at Oxford, his prowess at rugby and cricket, his service to Queen and country—all the usual twaddle when respectable public Tories die. Just once, I’d like to read the real obituary: “Bloody fool, drunkard, poltroon and lout. Enjoyed buggering stable boys. Voted Liberal more than once.” Now that would be worth reading.
    The papers also contained the usual laments over the escalating crime rate and the inability of the Metropolitan Police Force to keep reputable citizens from being thumped on the head, all tinged with a wistful nostalgia for a kinder, more innocent era, when virtue reigned and the streets were safe. Wherever the writers of this kind of drivel had lived before now, it clearly wasn’t London.
    There was one question the eagle-eyed reporters seemed not to have asked, and that was what precisely had compelled Constable Peters to amble behind an abandoned warehouse. His intuition aside, it seemed an odd thing to do, or perhaps it was just a happy coincidence (at least for Mrs. Latham, who needn’t worry any longer about when her husband would be home), but my money was on a dark stranger with a malacca walking stick, standing in the shadows and playing the role of deus ex machina .
    I hadn’t bothered to report the missing Arabella to the authorities. They’d have looked at me as though I should be occupying a bed in Bedlam. A prostitute who disappeared wasn’t cause for alarm; she’d have run off with a suitor or found another house to work in or been lured away by another madam who promised her a bigger share of the takings (in that case, good riddance to her). To be truthful, I didn’t want the police making any inquiries about Arabella, anyway. An investigation might turn up the interesting fact that she’d gone missing the very day that Sir Archibald Latham had been found dead by a clairvoyant peeler. I thought it likely that Arabella didn’t want to take any chances of being connected to a customer’s death, even if it had been an innocent one, and of course, it didn’t look all that innocent since I’d seen fit to move the corpse somewhere else. Arabella probably had some secret in her past (don’t we all?) and had reasons of her own for packing up and moving on. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over her, nor Bowser for that matter, but when I went to bed that night, I slept fitfully, dreaming of a haughty smile and grey eyes.

FOUR
    T uesday dawned, another chilly, cloud-shrouded day with a light drizzle that left a glaze on the pavement. The factories were working at full throttle, and the smoke from the tanneries and mills and rendering plants mingled with the vapors rising from the Thames and the soot from thousands of chimneys, creating a poisonous yellow haze that hung in the air like a veil. People scuttled past on the sidewalk, mufflers and scarves wrapped over their noses and mouths, blinking their eyes against the