Serial Sunday: Murder in Hackney, Part III

By Paul Leone.

The question of the hour – “Who on earth is Clifton Reeves?”

The answer, at least the official answer contained in the bowels of the Records Section, wasn’t hard to find.

Clifton Jonathan Reeves

Born: 22 September, MCMXCVIII, Olney, Buckinghamshire

Domicile: Flat 8D, 400 Mare Street, Hackney, Londonshire

Parents: Matthew L. Reeves✝ & Harriet (Ballard) Reeves✝

Arrest Record Précis

1: Commercial Larceny, against Waverly Brothers Chemists, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire – 7 June, MMXIII; charges waived: MINOR

2: Commercial Larceny, against Famizi Marcà, Aldgate, Londonshire – 15 March, MMXV; charges waived: MINOR

3: Personal Larceny, against Meredith Booker, Hackney, Londonshire – 28 July, MMXVI; fine: MINOR

4: Third degree Assault, against Meredith Booker, Hackney, Londonshire – 28 July, MMXVI; fine: MINOR

5: Narcotics Possession, against the Kingdom, Hackney, Londonshire – 13 June MMXVIII; nine months gaol: ADULT

6: Narcotics Distribution, against the Kingdom, Hackney, Londonshire –13 June MMXVIII; nine months gaol: ADULT

7: Second Degree Assault, against George Audu, Bromley, Kent – 2 March, MMXXI; one year gaol: ADULT

8: Narcotics Possession, against the Kingdom, Brent, Londonshire – 13 November, MMXXII; one year gaol: ADULT

9: Narcotics Distribution, against the Kingdom, Brent, Londonshire – 13 November, MMXXII; one year gaol: ADULT

A perfectly concise record of a life as far as His Majesty’s constables and courts were concerned, but it raised more questions with Keziah than it answered. She’d never heard of Olney, but soon discovered it was a town about an hour north of London, entirely unremarkable at first glance. It wasn’t quite as rustic as the Norfolk village she’d grown up in, but it was a world away from the post-industrial blightmare of Hoxton. Where had this Reeves gone wrong?

Aside from noting they were both dead, there was nothing about his parents in the file. When had they died? How? Keziah guessed it was around the time of his first arrest for petty theft from a chemist’s shop.

She stared at the documents for a moment, then shut the folder. Reeves’ no doubt woeful past wasn’t nearly as important as finding him and putting him away for his most recent violation of the law. To that end, Keziah left the promised land of Murder and Manslaughter and descended to the second storey offices of Iniquity Branch.

If she had turned left off the lift, she would have found her way to Prostitution and then her old domain of the Human Trafficking Section at the end of the hall. Instead, she turned right and passed by the Electronic Crime offices, suffused with the faint blue light of a hundred computer monitors, before reaching the offices of the Narcotics Section, a sprawling zoo that covered nearly half the second storey. The investigators there were engaged in a never-ending war to empty the sea with their spoons or, as Cat had once put it, stuck between the Scylla of massive public demand for illegal narcotics and the Charybdis of the fact that illegal narcotics were illegal for a reason, namely that they were both addictive and dangerous.

After getting past the battle-axe of a receptionist manning the front desk of Narcotics, Keziah wandered through the maze of desks until she found the one with a nameplate reading DSC LUCY SUMNER on it. The Detective Senior Constable in question was currently engaged in investigating a bowl of takeaway bìgołi. She looked up at Keziah and gestured ‘sit down’ while finishing a mouthful of pasta.

Keziah grabbed a chair from an adjacent and momentarily empty desk and took a seat.

“Carter, isn’t it? From M&M?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Saints, don’t call me ma’am, I’m not that old,” Sumner said with a laugh. “What can I do for you?”

“Clifton Reeves.”

Sumner frowned a little and leaned forward. “Sounds familiar... Go on.”

“He’s a potential suspect in a case I’m working on. At least one witness claims he did it.”

“For what that’s worth,” Sumner, laughing again.

Keziah nodded. “He’s got a list of arrests as long as my arm. It looks like your section was the last to deal with him.”

“Reeves... Badger Reeves?”

Keziah could only shrug. The nickname hadn’t come up in anything she’d seen or heard so far. “From Mare Street?”

“That’s the one. Yes, he is a nasty lad. Has he really graduated to homicide?”

“Maybe,” Keziah said. “But what can you tell about him? The file isn’t helpful.”

“Did the scribes leave something out?”

“No. I mean, nothing they were meant to include. It’s just...” Keziah paused, trying to put her thoughts together. Cat was so much better at this! “Who is he? How’d he end up in London? Where does he congregate?”

Sumner looked at her, a little puzzled. Then she smiled just a little. “Is this professional or philosophical curiosity?”

Keziah laughed, a little uncomfortably. “Well, both, I suppose. But I can’t arrest him if I can’t find him. Where is he likely to be, aside from his listed domicile?”

It was a real question wrapped around one intended to make her feel less embarrassed. In theory, the various branches and sections of the constabulary were supposed to be open access as far as their data went. If you were an investigator, you could access any information as long as it wasn’t marked section only, or hadn’t been stamped ‘internal’ by a supervisor (which could mean anyone from a detective inspector like Cat all the way up to the Sheriff himself), or the investigator hadn’t either intentionally or genuinely made a mistake with the database, or the decade-old software wasn’t balking, or it wasn’t a full moon.

Sumner understood. She wiped her fingers clean and then tapped at her keyboard for a few minutes. “Two places of interest are marked in the file. Lacy Red in Holborn.”

Keziah nodded. A strip club owned by Minskers who were suspected of involvement in a variety of criminal enterprises. She had raided the place twice as part of Human Trafficking, neither effort turning up any evidence of serious crime. “And the second?”

“Galvin’s. A pub near where Reeves lives.”

That, Keziah hadn’t heard of. She wasn’t especially surprised. There were over three thousand pubs in London and even the cabbies didn’t know all of them. She looked up the name on her phone. It was just on the far side of London Field Park from Reeve’s flat on Mare Street.

“Thank you.”

“I wish I could help with the philosophy,” Sumner said.

Keziah smiled awkwardly. “It’s fine. We’re constables, not clerics.”

She got to her feet and shook Sumner’s hand, surprising the other investigator a little.

“Good hunting,” Sumner said before turning her attention back to the lukewarm remnants of her breakfast in a bowl.

Keziah checked the clock above the door to the main hallway. Half an hour until Mortimer’s autopsy was scheduled down below. Just enough time...

She went down to the ground floor to catch her breath, literally and figuratively, in the Tower’s Nonconformist Chapel. It was small and dark, altogether a grudging concession to the constabulary’s non-Catholic ranks. A tradition of uncertain origin claimed that Princess Elizabeth, Mary the Great’s illegitimate half-sister, had spent the last years of her unhappy life in the chapel when it was a cell. It was also said the chapel was haunted by her ghost. Keziah had never seen any such spectres and considered it papist rubbish, constabulary fantasy, or, most likely, a little of both. Regardless of that, the chapel was pleasingly bare of ostentation, with just a few rows of seats (not pews), in front of the simple wooden table that served as an altar. A large wooden cross hung on the wall behind the altar table.

There were a handful of Bibles on a smaller table just inside the door. Keziah picked up the one with blue pages (the Gospel was marked by a slender section of red pages). It was a Geneva Bible, the bedrock of her reformed faith. Someone had carefully placed a card from the Fulham Church of the Apostles in it. That was a Henrician church, the largest in London and, so far as she knew, the entire Old World. They were, at least as far as she was concerned, half-papists. (The Henricians, on the other hand, considered themselves both the fathers and heirs of the true English Reformation.) She took the card and set it down on the Bible table, then looked to see what had been marked. It was Proverbs 10, part of which had been underlined:

“The memoriall of the iust shalbe blessed: but the name of the wicked shall rotte.”

She held the Bible for a moment before taking a seat near the front of the chapel. Hands clasped together, she murmured a prayer. “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done even in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

Keziah pondered the verses for a while. First the wicked had to be brought to account and then their names would rot. Lord, grant me the wisdom and will to see it done. May I bring the wicked to the courts of justice, Pharaoh’s though they be, so that they may repent before they face Thy judgement. Amen.

It was time to see it done. She rose and left the chapel.

***

Keziah was pleasantly surprised to run into Cat in the narrow lobby of the West Block. Her partner and supervisor was just emerging from one of the lists, looking something like a sniper in search of a target.

“Good morning,” Keziah offered after failing to think of anything better.

“Goodwife Carter,” Cat said, slowing, not stopping, and nodding at the younger detective. “Anything new on the Mortimer case?”

“I think I know who killed him.”

Cat nodded absently, then stopped and turned around. “Beg pardon?”

“A man named Cliffton Reeves. A habitual offender. One of the bystanders grabbed at the scene named him, at least.”

“And what about our helpful bystander?”

“No weapon on him when he was found, no gunshot residue on his hands.”

“Promising. Make sure you knock down any possibility he did it, though.”

Keziah nodded. Any one of the locals they’d hauled in would make a fine alternative suspect – the fact that there were six of them would make a defence barrister almost giddy.

“And what’s next on the hunt?” Cat asked.

“The autopsy and legal identification.”

“By?”

“His niece from up north. As far as we can tell, the only near kin that lives in England.”

“And then?”

“Find Reeves and see what he has to say for himself.”

Cat nodded, clearly expecting more.

“I’ll arrange a search warrant for his flat.”

Hearing that, Cat offered two pieces of sage advice appropriate for any young detective. “Good luck” and “Don’t screw up the paperwork.”

Keziah smiled wanly and then descended into the depths of the East Block. She felt the chill the moment she got off the lift in the basement and, not for the first time, wondered why they didn’t relocate the medical examiner’s annex that handled the grim work of post-mortem analysis to the main building in Camden.

The suspicion among the constabulary was a simple one – Camden was simply too fine a neighbourhood to befoul with corpses and especially the careful cutting apart of said corpses. Primrose Palace, a 17th century royal residence situated atop a prominence on the west end of Camden, alone dictated that unsavoury business be conducted elsewhere, be it in the basement of the Tower or in the halls of Parliament. And so the humble toilers in the field, be they medical examiners with scalpel and saw, or constables with pen and paper, went about their business in the cold if not quite stygian depths of the East Block.

As Keziah navigated the maze of hallways down below, she felt the faint, pervasive stench more than she actually smelt it. Weirdly, for her at least, the smell was stronger after she left the premises. The cold stayed behind in the medical examiner’s den, but the stench lingered all day long. How the medical examiners and their assistants coped with it, she had no idea.

Murders, which happened two or three times a week in London, were only the tip of the iceberg. Suicides, drug overdoses, drownings, unattended deaths, and all manner of lethal accidents, vehicular, workplace or otherwise – anybody whose passage into eternity even hinted at mystery ended up beneath the Tower. It was a relentlessly bleak job, not to mention a poorly paid one, and Keziah wasn’t surprised that many medical examiners drifted away to positions in the surrounding counties, where murder was rare and the money was better. She wasn’t surprised that now and then, one of the good doctors ended up on a gurney when things got too bleak.

The doctor on duty that day was Sarpedon FitzGeorge, a soft-spoken Haytian with a deft touch with the tools of the trade. Keziah watched, not very chatty herself, as Dr. FitzGeorge meticulously deconstructed the late preacher, pausing every few moments to make a verbal note of his findings. In the end, there were no great surprises. The wounds were caused by 10mm bullets, one of which had messily torn through the right ventricle. No great surprise there – 10mm semiautomatics were a popular weapon among urban matadors despite their heavy recoil, or perhaps because of it. There was an allure to overkill, too, at least for your typical sociopath. The constabulary’s standard issue handgun was a .42 calibre Argyll, a ‘Scottish spitgun’ in the opinion of many officers, Keziah among them. She favoured the .45, but she hadn’t fired a 10mm, a .42 or a .45 except at the Tower’s shooting range since her earliest days in uniform.

“Death would have been instantaneous,” Dr. FitzGeorge told Keziah as he removed a bullet lodged in Mortimer’s rib cage. “A small mercy.”

“Mm.”

“It was not the first time he was shot,” the examiner said sometime later. He gestured at a monitor showing an x-ray of one of the victim’s legs.

Keziah frowned, leaned in, then saw faint cracks that might have been from a gunshot. Or any kind of wound, really. She wasn’t the doctor, just the detective.

FitzGeorge nodded. “There it is. An old injury. Was he in the Army?”

“The Navy, a long time ago.”

“Maybe he was in the Admiral’s Division.”

“Maybe.” As a former soldier, Keziah had a residual friendly disdain for the Naval Infantry, but the official Code of Honour limited disagreements to harsh words, the unofficial one to fisticuffs. “What about this?” she asked, pointing at a different crack running up and down most of the length of his shankbone.

“A broken leg. Another old wound. Professionally set.”

The Navy, the docks, the icy pavement... who could say? Keziah made a note although she doubted it would ever come up. Better to have and not need than need and not have.

“What’s to become of him now?” Dr. FitzGeorge asked a little later as he concluded his examination of the cadaver and prepared it for the next step.

“He has a niece come down from the North,” Keziah said. “Suppose she’ll let his church bury him. Or bring him back with her,” she said, expression and tone lending doubt to that last notion.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Dr. FitzGeorge said without looking up from Mortimer’s body.

***

Yvonne Briggs looked nothing like her uncle. She was tall, slender, blonde, stylishly dressed in an economical way.

Keziah stood at attention, watching in silence as the doctor pulled back the black sheet. He, and she, looked at Yvonne as she looked down at the body on the metal slab.

“Yes. It’s him,” Yvonne said after a brief moment.

“I’m very sorry for your loss. Your uncle was a godly man,” Keziah said.

Yvonne looked at her and shook her head. “He was bent in the head, just like those Yin Beshuas.”

“Bin Yeshua,” Keziah quietly corrected.

“Whatever they’re called, they’re loonies.”

Dr. FitzGeorge, wanting no part of the incipient debate, covered the body, slid it back into the wall, and withdrew a few feet.

“He used to be… he was never close to my parents. My father and he, they were too much alike, I suppose. They never got along.”

Keziah nodded, although she didn’t quite understand how that could be.

“My mother hated him, especially after the accident.”

“Accident?”

“At the docks. I was only a teenager. I don’t know what happened. Something at work, a machine… two men died, one on either side of him, but he only got his leg broken. That’s when he bent. Thought it was some kind of miracle or something. That he owed God. God. He made a nuisance of himself. Tried to become a proper priest, got turned down, blamed the Church and found a different one. Then they kicked him out, too. And then he just dropped out, least as far as I knew. Mum and dad had some idea where he was, of course, but they never talked about it. And now…” She exhaled savagely. “That’s where God got him.”

“He was a preacher, he did good.”

“Did he?” Yvonne asked.

Keziah couldn’t answer that in good confidence. Not in the absence of facts. “He was a preacher,” she repeated. Wasn’t that enough? She knew it wasn’t, not in a broken world, but still, that meant something.

“Some kind of, yeah.” Yvonne looked at Keziah with sudden suspicion. “Are you Bin Yeshua, too?”

“No.”

“Well then, guess neither of us knows nothing,” Yvonne said. “If you find who did this…”

“We will.”

Yvonne eyed her, nodded, said nothing else. After a moment, she headed for the door. Keziah sighed in silence and followed.

Keziah stared after Briggs, unable to believe it. “How could anybody be so nasty?” she asked FitzGeorge.

The doctor shrugged. “Nobody’s at their best down here,” he pointed out.

“Mm,” Keziah said. “If it’s ever my turn and my nephews treat me like that, you can cut them up.”

“I don’t think Dr. Landsman would approve, but I’ll tell him you said it was okay.”

“Cheers.”

Keziah stood there, still fuming. After a minute or two, Dr. FitzGeorge coughed. “It’s not a buffet, Carter. When you’re done…”

“When you’re done, you’re done.” Keziah glanced at the small steel door behind which lay Mortimer’s mortal remains, then nodded at FitzGeorge.

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Paul Leone is an author who, among other works, wrote the book In and Out of the Reich for Sea Lion.