“My hope,” said Arthur, “is to find the tattooist who inked this design upon the leg of Morgan Nemain, and most likely upon the leg of Sally Needling as well. This image meant something to these girls. They kept these papers imprinted with the image, and at least one of them had it permanently inked onto her skin. Perhaps they told the tattooist what it meant. What it symbolized.”
“Have you given any thought to the possibility that the murderer himself drew the tattoo onto Morgan Nemain’s skin, after she died?”
“Lord, Bram, but isn’t that a gruesome thought? I don’t know where you get these ideas. No, I don’t find that a likely scenario. In the first place, the Yard man said that the tattoo had not been drawn recently. Moreover, if Sally was in possession of a stack of the same drawing, it seems most probable that whatever involvement these girls had with the crow image, they had it voluntarily, and they had it long before Sally’s murder.”
“Well reasoned, Arthur. But how do you intend to find the tattooist? There must be a thousand seamen in London who know how to apply ink to a hot needle.”
Now it was Arthur’s turn to smile. He stepped back and gestured to their surroundings. The midday din of Aldgate descended on them. Carriages rattled and banged their way down High Street. A gang of young boys kicked dirt into the air as they jostled one another and chucked pebbles at the passing horses. Beggars shook their rusted tins, and pickpockets followed quietly behind any man with a decent topcoat. And the stench, that horrid dead-fish stench, drifted across it all in gusts from the docks to the south. Arthur inhaled deeply, sucking in the putrid air and puffing it back out again between his grinning cheeks.
“ ‘Now put yourself in that man’s place,’” said Arthur. “ ‘What would he do then?’ Or, in our case, she?”
Bram frowned. “That’s a quote from something, isn’t it?”
“Yes. From A Study in Scarlet.”
“That’s one of your own stories!”
“Indeed. And it’s good advice, don’t you think? Come.” Arthur led Bram east away from the station, along High Street. “Imagine you’re a young girl, fresh-faced and twenty-six years of age, from a northern heath. You come into the city occasionally, for shopping, the theater, and perhaps the occasional suffragist lecture. You and your girlfriends have decided to burn ink onto your bodies, in order to symbolize something or other. Where do you go?”
“To the Strand. She would ask about in the shops there, the places she’d been before, about who in the city could draw the tattoo.”
“Close, Bram, but I fear not quite right. On the contrary, Sally would have gone anywhere besides the Strand. She wouldn’t want to be recognized in those familiar shops, asking around for a tattooist. What if her parents discovered her trip? What would they think? It would be a disaster.”
“But they say that painting on the body is becoming more common in these late days. I haven’t seen a British sailor without a burnt mark on his forearms in years. And, not that I listen to such gossip, but they say that even the Duke of York has been tattooed, that it was done up while he was in Malta.”
“Yes, yes, of course, George of all people would attract such stories. Bit of an Orientophile, that boy. But behavior befitting the rude men who work on the seas, and the rude heir to Wales, is not necessarily behavior befitting a solicitor’s daughter from West Hampstead. If Sally was inked, she was inked in secret.”
Arthur thought that Bram seemed impressed by this reasoning, but that he was doing his best to conceal it.
“Why, she’d go to the docks, of course,” said Bram. “She could have anything she liked done in secret by the river. This neighborhood’s reputation, in matters as unladylike as these, precedes it.”
“Very good,” said Arthur. “Precisely.”
At this, Bram made a strange face, though Arthur had no idea why. He was too busy enjoying the requisite pedantry of detective work. This was ever so much more thrilling than his day at the Yard, sifting through papers. To discover something for oneself was exciting, of course, but to then explain it to a mystified audience… Well, a detective needs an audience. Arthur felt that he understood his old Holmes more and more with every passing day. “Now then, our girl is off into London, headed for the docks. Where does she go?”
“The closest stations are the Shadwell and Fenchurch stations on the Blackwall line, or, better yet, Wapping Station on the East London line.”
“Indeed you’re right,” said Arthur. “That’s how a city dweller would get there. But Sally Needling wasn’t from the city, was she? To make it to the Blackwall line, she’d have had to muck about between trains at Cannon Street. Frankly, it’s confusing, even for someone like me. And she doesn’t know the docks at all. She’s a simple country girl. Don’t you think she’d have taken the simplest route possible to any stop that read as next to the London docks on a rail map?” Arthur produced a rail map from inside his coat pocket and stretched it out between his hands. “See here! She’d have taken the Great Northern to King’s Cross, obviously. Then she’d have taken the Metropolitan line here, to Aldgate.”
“But the Mark Lane station is closer to the docks.”
“Yes, but would she have known that? I suspect not. Examine this map.” Arthur stopped walking and turned to face the wall of a tavern. He spread the map flat against the wall with his palms. Inside, he could hear the clinking of pint glasses and the squeaks of boots on beer-sodden boards. It was a tuneful clatter, a song beaten out every afternoon by a drunken rabble on dirty glass and crumbling wood. The Ballad of the Midday Bitters, Arthur thought.
“Does it not look,” he continued, “from the way the streets are drawn, as if it would be easier to get to the docks from Aldgate Station than Mark Lane? You and I know that in the world as it exists, Mark Lane is closer. But in the world as Sally Needling understood it, Aldgate is the nearer. She’d have looked at this great, wide street right here-the Commercial Road-and decided it was an easier route than the crisscrossing mess she’d have had to dodge through by the Tower. So she’d walk east from the station, to the Commercial Road, and then turn right onto Leman. She’d approach the docks this way, right from Wellclose Square. Come along!”
Arthur hurried, dragging the rail map through the air behind him like a kite. Bram followed along as Arthur dodged his way between the pickpockets and the whores, south toward St. George. As he ran, Arthur observed the shop fronts they passed: tobacconists, public houses, shipping offices, boardinghouses. As they neared Wellclose Square, Arthur veered off east, but a tap on the shoulder from Bram put him back on track to the south, toward the docks. On the corner of St. George and Well Street, just below the Wellclose Square, he found what he’d been looking for: a Far Eastern spice merchant.
“Tang Spice,” read the hand-carved sign out front. “Import and Export.”
“Aha!” cried Arthur. “Perfect. What does Sally know of tattooing, save that it is an art cultivated in the East? She’d certainly have gone to an Eastern shop to procure its services.” He pulled open the crooked front door and entered the spice merchant’s shop. Instantly a host of smells washed over Arthur and Bram as they stepped past the doorway. Neither man had the faintest clue as to the origins of these intoxicating scents. Strange perfumes clogged their nostrils and lightened their heads. The sensation was dizzying, but oddly pleasurable.
A small Chinese man, old and frail, appeared from a back room. He had a single scrap of white hair atop his head, and he wore a dirty robe, stained with streaks of bright orange.
“Sirs,” whispered the old man. “How do I help?”
“I hope you’re able to help me quite a bit,” said Arthur quickly. “Do you by any chance work with ink?”