The Mercy Killings Read online

  THE MERCY KILLINGS

  Esther and Jack Enright Mystery

  Book Six

  David Field

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  MORE BOOKS BY DAVID FIELD

  Chapter One

  Walter Missingham pulled hard on the oars of his flat-bottomed skiff as his son Michael pushed it as far out into the floating seaweed as his long waders allowed, then jumped over its stern to join his father on their short trip out to their oyster cages. It was low tide on the Thames, and behind them lay their cottage in the village of West Mersea, on the Essex bank of the Thames Estuary. It was early April in 1896, and they could expect a decent harvest for the local market.

  The water was flat and oily, and they made good progress once they were clear of the clinging seaweed that came and went with the tides. Walter rowed steadily, with the ease that came naturally to a man raised on the water from which they eked out their living, and Michael squinted into the midday sun as he watched for the first of the cages to become visible just below the surface, in order to alert his father when it was time to ship the oars. Upstream to his right Michael could see the bows of a coastal freighter working its way carefully down the available navigable channel on its way to Sheerness and beyond, while way out to his left in the open ocean he could just make out the funnels of a large warship under full steam ploughing its way north from Chatham.

  He looked back inboard, and then past the bow of the boat, just in time to warn his father that they were nearly there. There were a dozen cages held down by hooks at this first location, and the same number a further half mile downstream; with a bit of luck they would fill all the eight mesh sacks they had brought with them, which were now lying in the scuppers awaiting their fill of fresh oysters.

  The boat bumped slightly as its bow caught the front of the first row of cages that, at low tide, were barely a foot below the surface, attached to the riverbed by anchor hooks that Michael had dived to attach when he had been only fourteen. Walter grunted as he unhooked the first cage and lifted it into the boat; then they both rummaged urgently through its contents for the largest of the shells, throwing them into the open sack between the feet of their waders. The first cage yielded a promising harvest, and after replacing it on its anchor hook Walter used its top as a lever with which to pull their flat craft down to the next cage. As he did so, Michael’s attention was caught by something white bobbing in the water ahead of them.

  ‘What’s that?’ He nodded towards the object that had somehow got itself impaled on the metal rim of the cage furthest out into the channel. His father followed his nod and shrugged.

  ‘Damned if I know. Let’s take a look, shall we?’

  Walter pushed their vessel slowly down the line of cages until he reached the final one, where a small, rounded white parcel of some sort was caught on the metal frame of the cage, just below the water line. He looked down suspiciously at it, then back up towards Michael.

  ‘Pass me that ’ook, lad. Some’ow I doesn’t like ter touch it.’

  His first attempt resulted in the hook simply tearing at whatever was wrapped around the parcel and as he tried again more vigorously the bundle was dislodged from where it had been impaled and was on the point of sinking to the bottom until Walter leaned out of the boat and grabbed it with both hands, holding it high in the air as water cascaded from it. Then he swung inwards with a sudden cry of fear and disgust and dropped it into the bottom of the boat, where it landed with a dull squelch. A foul odour reached their nostrils as greeny-yellow puss oozed out from underneath it.

  Walter grabbed onto his nose tightly, then leaned over the side in order to vomit copiously into the water that was lapping gently against the side of the oyster cages. Michael stared down, horror-stricken, at what his father had hauled on board, then stated the obvious.

  ‘That don’t smell too good. What is it — some sorta dead fish?’

  ‘No, son, it ain’t no fish. Push us off an’ I’ll row us back in.’

  ‘What about the other cages?’

  ‘Forget the other cages. We gotta take this in afore it stinks the boat out.’

  ‘Can’t yer just throw it back?’

  His father looked back at him disbelievingly. ‘Maybe yer Mam shoulda done that ter you, if that’s what yer’ve grown up like — not carin’ a damn for the dead.’

  Michael wrinkled his nose. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s not what it is now,’ his father advised him as he prodded it enquiringly with the toe of his waders and rolled it over to face his son. ‘It’s what it once were.’

  Michael turned his head sideways to get a better look at it, then all but choked as the realisation hit him.

  ‘Bloody ’Ell! It’s a bubby, innit?’

  Chapter Two

  Esther Enright smiled lovingly as she gazed out of the kitchen window to where five-year-old Lily was playing happily on the swing that Jack had proudly constructed on the grass strip that separated the rear steps from their vegetable patch. Beyond the neat straight mounds that revealed where he had planted seed potatoes in front of the somewhat withering survivors of last winter’s cabbages was the railway line that led, to the left, into Barking Station, down Bunting Lane, along which their house — number 26 — stood out because of the fresh coat of paint that had been Jack’s first job when they had moved in last Autumn.

  ‘Mummy,’ three-year-old Bertie called from the kitchen table where he sat drawing a picture of what he claimed was a horse, ‘Baby Miriam’s under the table.’

  ‘She’s only learning how to walk,’ Esther advised him with a smile as she turned and watched their one year old stubbornly pulling herself upright with the aid of a table leg, before sitting down heavily on her padded bottom. ‘She’s not interfering with what you’re doing, so let her do what she pleases. There was a time when you used to do that.’

  Esther reflected on how much Bertie looked like the pictures she had seen of Jack as a child and marvelled at how such a spoiled and over-protected little boy had grown up into the sometimes stern, but ever just, man who was now a Detective Sergeant in the Essex Constabulary. It presumably had a lot to do with the fact that when Jack had been fourteen years old, and his father had died, his Uncle Percy had persuaded his sister-in-law to allow the boy to be brought up with him and his wife Aunt Beattie, who were childless, while Constance also had a daughter, Jack’s sister Lucy, who she could bring up under her stern supervision. Percy had been — and still was — a police officer himself, and Jack had passed through his formative years idolising his uncle and adoptive father figure. When the time came to choose a career — and much to his mother’s disappointed disapproval — Jack had joined the police himself.

  That’s how she and Jack had first met, when Esther had been a humble seamstress living in a rented room in Spitalfields, a Jewish orphan with nothing to recommend her but her dark beauty. Jack had been smitten from the outset, but his mother Constance had needed more persuading, until she came to appreciate that Esther’s upbringing and education had been the best that her wealthy textile importer parents could provide for her, until their tragic deaths in a river acciden
t had left the poor girl to fend for herself. The fact that she’d done so with modesty and pride, avoiding all the obvious pitfalls that lay in wait for a single girl in the East End of London, had impressed Constance to the point that she’d actually encouraged and supported Jack when he’d announced his intention of marrying Esther eight years ago.

  Esther and Constance had inevitably had their confrontations, until her mother-in-law had finally realised that meeting Esther was the best thing that could ever have happened to her precious Jack, while Esther had continued to make it clear that her earlier life had required her to deal with much tougher people — even women — than Constance. They were now good friends, and ‘Nanna’ had even accepted that the upbringing of her grandchildren was something which she could sit back, watch and enjoy, rather than command.

  Esther, for her part, had begun to slip into a comfortable middle-class existence and had even consented to join the Ladies’ Guild attached to the local parish church. Although her religious education had been conducted by rabbis, she was the first to acknowledge the joint origins of Judaism and Christianity and was more than happy to lend a hand in the ‘good works’ that Constance and her fellow members conducted, given how good God had been to her in guiding Jack’s footsteps in her direction.

  Her pride had, however, been stretched to breaking point when the ever-determined Constance had achieved her ambition of bringing Jack back to Barking, away from all those ‘wicked criminals’ in what she considered to be Satan’s own playground, the working-class stews of East London where Jack and Uncle Percy had until recently worked alongside each other as detectives in the Metropolitan Police elite known as ‘Scotland Yard’. Being Constance, she had first of all made use of her Ladies’ Guild contacts in order to secure Jack a transfer, at Detective Sergeant level, to the somewhat under-developed Essex force. She had then used much of the remaining money from Jack’s share of the family trust established by his late father to acquire the vacant house in which they were now living, a ten-minute walk from the old family home, a few doors down from the parish church.

  Esther’s first proud impulse had been to refuse the gift and berate Constance for her condescension, but then wiser counsels had prevailed inside her sometimes-impetuous head and she reasoned that this was their best opportunity to get out of London, with all its overcrowded evils, and bring up their children in a safe place with open spaces and fresh air. It would do Jack no harm to emerge from under the protective wing of his uncle and he was already demonstrating the robust ability that was sometimes in danger of getting lost under his still boyish charm, as he rose to the challenge of being almost a senior officer — and certainly a more experienced one — in a rural police force.

  They had compromised with an agreement under which Jack and Esther would regard the house as a purchase under mortgage and make monthly repayments into the family trust funds as if they were paying it over to a bank in reimbursement of a loan, and with an interest component. By this means everyone had been satisfied and the Enright family were now the proud owner-occupants of a four-bedroom detached house on a country lane on the outskirts of a respectable Essex township.

  They had come a long way from the day that she and Jack had first met, investigating the evil deeds of the nightmare they’d called “Jack the Ripper”, and Esther reminded herself of how much she had to be thankful for as she set about preparing the midday meal, after smiling proudly out of the kitchen window yet again at their eldest, happily swinging in the sunshine as another train rattled past on its way down to Fenchurch Street.

  If Esther was satisfied that they’d made the right move, her husband Jack was less than convinced as he read the incoming crime reports and sighed with irritation behind his desk on the second floor of the ramshackle, and already overcrowded, police headquarters building in Chelmsford’s Arbour Lane. No wonder the Essex force had been eager to recruit someone with ‘Yard’ experience, or indeed any experience at all of detective work. The force might be one of the oldest of its type outside London, but it hadn’t moved with the times and Jack wasn’t simply only its second ever appointed Detective Sergeant — he was now the only one, after the early retirement of his predecessor, no doubt as the result of stress.

  There might once have been a time when Jack had dreamed of being the head of his own force of men, but that had been in the context of a bustling Scotland Yard, with dozens, if not hundreds, of eager, highly-trained and experienced officers who had access to seemingly limitless resources. His current ‘force’ consisted of two constables recently dragged out of uniform, with only the vaguest idea of how to acquire evidence when it wasn’t actually dumped on the ground in front of them and with little more in the way of resources than a telegraph office by means of which they could call for assistance from elsewhere — which normally meant Scotland Yard anyway.

  First, but not necessarily foremost, was Detective Constable Henry Baggot — the more senior of the two, if only in years — who would be even fatter than he currently was were it not for his weekend cricket matches. Baggot had proved his value in street brawls, in which opponents would bounce off him, or sprain their wrists in an effort to penetrate his ample gut, but he’d never quite got the message that detective work involved a subtler approach to suspects than shoving their arms up their backs and hauling them down to the cells. Baggot didn’t seem to appreciate — however many times Jack reminded him — that before a suspect might be arrested, some evidence was required to justify the loss of liberty that this involved, and it was probably only a matter of time before the local force was sued for false imprisonment, assault or something similar.

  Then there was Constable Billy Manvers, and Jack lived in dread of the day when he was required to advise Billy’s young wife that she was now a widowed single mother of two, such was Billy’s over-enthusiasm to prove his worth by boldly confronting even those villains who conducted business with firearms. He’d been hospitalised twice during Jack’s few brief months at Chelmsford — once with a gunshot wound that was fortunately only to the left arm. For all his eagerness, Billy also failed to appreciate that detective work was a longer-term waiting game, quietly accumulating something called ‘evidence’. Jack had learned that the hard way from Uncle Percy, he reminded himself, and he could only aspire to be as good a mentor to Billy as Percy had been to him.

  As Jack shifted through the papers on his desk, he was unsurprised to discover that several more families in rural Essex had been deprived of the contents of their garden sheds, washing lines and outhouses during the past twenty-four hours. It all seemed to be the work of the same person or persons who’d been at it for weeks now and must surely have cornered the market in garden forks, spades and bags of fertiliser. Perhaps he’d send Harry Baggot to investigate — on foot, in the hope of reducing his girth. Of marginally more interest was last night’s fight in the Black Swan (the ‘Mucky Duck’, as the locals called it), in which two of the town’s less worthy citizens had fought themselves to a standstill before being heaved out of the wreckage of what had formally been the public bar by two uniformed constables. One of them was Robert (‘Mad Rab’) Prescott, so one could anticipate a ‘payback’ rematch between Rab’s wife Martha and the rarely sober ‘common law’ spouse of the loser, Ted Price, who would at least have to take time out from her usual occupation of shoplifting from grocery stores.

  Finally, there was an alleged rape in the deserted windmill at Great Dunmow, which Jack quickly lost interest in when he spotted the name of the victim. If Clara Bristow had been subjected to intercourse without her consent, he concluded, then it could only have been because the alleged offender hadn’t paid in advance, and he wasn’t about to waste valuable police time on a case that the jury would throw out once Clara’s previous convictions for loitering for the purposes of prostitution were revealed by a grinning defence barrister.

  That left Jack with the simple task of deciding which train to catch home later that afternoon. He had to choose carefu
lly, if he wanted to make the necessary connection that no-one had mentioned when his mother had gleefully announced that his new house was ‘convenient for the station’. It was not, however, so convenient for the trains, since in its enthusiasm to provide a swift service from Fenchurch Street to Tilbury and Southend, the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway Company had declined to be delayed by diverting to Chelmsford. The trains certainly ran every half hour at busy times, but if he wanted to travel by train from Barking to Chelmsford, Jack was required to change at Pitsea, to catch a Great Eastern Railways train that would complete his journey to work on a better class train that had left Liverpool Street on its way to Norwich.

  He’d just decided that he could justify catching the ‘up’ Norwich to Liverpool Street express train that left shortly after four, which connected nicely with a local train that would get him home in enough daylight to water his tomato seeds under glass beneath the kitchen window, when there was the usual heavy thump on the door that announced the imminent arrival of Harry Baggot. Out of breath with uncharacteristic excitement, Harry lost little time is delivering the news.

  ‘They’ve found another baby’s body, Sarge — in the Thames, this time.’

  Jack sighed. The third in as many months, and he’d need to take charge of this one himself.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Do you think we’ve laid out enough pieces of fruit cake?’ Esther asked Constance as they stood surveying the tea table in the church hall, ahead of the meeting.

  ‘Almost certainly, dear,’ Constance replied with a nod, ‘but you’d better check that Mary filled the tea urn to capacity before she turned on the gas. It’s quite a warm day, and there’ll be lots of demand for drinks, I suspect.’

  It was the monthly ‘outreach’ meeting of the Ladies’ Guild and the vicar’s wife, Clarice Spendlove, had arranged for a guest speaker whose address to the members was being eagerly anticipated, given all the recent scandal regarding the prosecution of a bookseller in London’s Tottenham Court Road for stocking the ‘wicked’ volume entitled The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People by American physician Charles Knowlton, in which he not only advocated contraception within marriage, but actually gave practical advice on the methods available.