Murder by Lamplight

Book 1: Dr. Julia Lewis Mystery

by Patrice McDonough

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

For fans of Andrea Penrose and Deanna Raybourn, and anyone who relishes riveting, well-researched historical fiction, this inventive and enthralling debut mystery set in Victorian London pairs the unconventional, trailblazing Dr. Julia Lewis with a traditional and skeptical police inspector, as they try to stop a wily serial killer whose vengeance has turned personal.
 
November 1866: The grisly murder site in London’s East End is thronged with onlookers. None of them expect the calmly efficient young woman among them to be a medical doctor, arrived to examine the corpse. Inspector Richard Tennant, overseeing the investigation, at first makes no effort to disguise his skepticism. But Dr. Julia Lewis is accustomed to such condescension . . .
 
To study medicine, Julia had to leave Britain, where universities still bar their doors to women, and travel to America. She returned home to work in her grandfather’s practice—and to find London in the grip of a devastating cholera epidemic. In four years, however, she has seen nothing quite like this—a local clergyman’s body sexually mutilated and displayed in a manner that she—and Tennant—both suspect is personal.
 
Days later, another body is found with links to the first, and Tennant calls in Dr. Lewis again. The murderer begins sending the police taunting letters and tantalizing clues—though the trail leads in multiple directions, from London’s music halls to its grim workhouses and dank sewers. Lewis and Tennant struggle to understand the killer’s dark obsessions and motivations. But there is new urgency, for the doctor’s role appears to have shifted from expert to target. And this killer is no impulsive monster, but a fiendishly calculating opponent, determined to see his plan through to its terrifying conclusion . . .

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

November 1866

Julia Lewis edged her way through the gawping crowd. Then a young policeman blocked her way when she finally broke through.

“Sorry, miss.” The bobbie pointed his truncheon. “That way will take you to the markets along the Commercial Road.”

“Thank you, Constable, but someone else is shopping today. I’m here to examine a corpse.”

He stared, opened his mouth, and closed it.

Julia sighed. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to call your superior officer?” She pulled out a note and checked the signature. “Inspector Richard Tennant?”

“Paddy,” he called over his shoulder to a tall, burly copper. “Lady wants to see the guvnor.” When he added, “It’s about the body,” the big man looked at her sharply.

His eyes dropped to her medical bag. “All right, Bert. Find himself and tell him he’s wanted.” The younger constable walked off, glancing back at her over his shoulder.

The big policeman touched his helmet. “The officer’s after fetching the inspector,” he said, the lilt and cadence of Ireland in his voice.

“Thank you, Constable . . .”

“O’Malley.”

Julia nodded. “Constable O’Malley.”

She dropped her medical bag and looked around. The note had directed her to a construction site, the last unfinished section of London’s massive sewer project, but the discovery of a body had halted all work. Pickaxes and shovels leaned against piles of gray stone and dusty brick while idled men puffed on clay pipes, in no hurry to resume their labors. They had pulled down a row of houses to make room for a tunnel, and the void yawned, like a gap-toothed smile, between dilapidated buildings, their pitched roofs and chimneys a jagged line against the sky.

It had rained the night before. Julia glanced up at a pewter sky that threatened another downpour. The murder scene would turn into a bog if the inspector didn’t hurry.

Minutes ticked by, and Julia tapped her umbrella against her side. She looked down at the watch hanging on its chain and then up at O’Malley. The constable smoothed the ends of his bushy mustache and turned away, whistling an off-key tune. Finally, a well-tailored man with a military bearing approached and touched the brim of his hat.

“Detective Inspector Tennant,” he said in a clipped baritone. He gestured to a short, wiry officer at his elbow. “Detective Sergeant Graves. How may I help you?”

Julia shifted her umbrella and extended her right hand. “Julia Lewis.” She nodded to the sergeant. “You sent for my grandfather, Andrew Lewis, but I’m afraid he’s unavailable. I assist him in his practice.”

“Are you a nurse, Miss Lewis? Because we need a—”

“It’s Doctor Lewis.”

“Surely you’re not proposing to—”

“Indeed, I am, Inspector.”

Sergeant Graves had been rocking heel to toe, his thumbs hooked into his pockets, fingers drumming his jacket. He stopped. “Blimey.” He looked her up and down. “Never.”

Julia smiled. “It’s true, Sergeant. I’ve thought about carrying my medical diploma with me. But even rolled up, it won’t fit into my bag.”

Reactions like his still galled her, but four years after qualifying, she usually managed to hide her irritation. The sergeant returned her smile, but Tennant did not. She sighed. No sense of humor.

“Is the victim over there, Inspector?” She nodded to the line of policemen’s helmets and shoulders visible over the edge of a ditch.

Tennant nodded. “But I’m afraid it’s not a sight for . . . Doctor Lewis, I don’t think—”

“Inspector Tennant, you sent for my grandfather, and I am standing in for him while he convalesces. I am a fully qualified doctor listed on the medical register. Now, shall I proceed with the examination? Full-blown rigor may set in if we dither much longer.”

Tennant stepped aside. “Of course, Doctor.”

Julia picked up her bag and brushed past him. “I’ve seen my share of dead bodies.”

Sergeant Graves called after her. “Not like this one, you haven’t, miss—Doctor.”

“A lady doctor,” Tennant muttered. “Heaven spare us.”

Julia edged down the twenty-foot incline, dislodging a shower of loose pebbles. It ended in a half-completed drainage tunnel. At the bottom of the pit, viscous ochre mud sucked at her boots. She skirted around piles of bricks and ducked under a web of oak scaffolding.

Sergeant Graves scrambled into the pit after her, Tennant trailing a few paces behind. He struggled to navigate the slope— surprising, Julia thought, for a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties.

The lower half of a man’s body, propped on its left side, extended from the end of the brick tunnel. His upper torso, shoulders, and head were thrown into shadow. His trousers and underdrawers had been yanked to his ankles, forming a tangled mass around his boots. His right hand covered his genitals. Was it placed there after death? Julia thought it probable. Traces of blood stained the soil under his fingers.

Julia took a breath. Steady on, she thought. You’ve done this before. Still, she’d never examined a murder victim, and she’d be damned if she let the policemen see her hand shake.

She pulled a vulcanized rubber glove from her medical bag and crouched in front of the corpse. One of the constables groaned when she exposed the gory mess hidden there. He reached reflexively to cover his crotch.

Julia looked over her shoulder at Tennant. “Have your officers searched the area carefully, Inspector?”

“Of course.”

“I should have them look again. The killer may have discarded the man’s—” The stricken expression on a young constable’s face stopped her. “You may find the victim’s member somewhere nearby.”

They’ll probably never find it, Julia thought. Carried off by feral cats, most likely. And rats had been busy with the fingertips and earlobes.

She stood up. “Not as much blood as one might expect; the mutilation must have happened postmortem.” She walked around the body. “Sodomized as well, it seems.”

For a big man, Constable O’Malley moved quickly and deftly. He looked around, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and straightened up with a broken stick in his hand. “With this, Doctor? Looks to be blood on it.”

“Possibly.” She stashed the evidence in a cloth bag. “Well spotted, Constable. Thank you.”

A chipped front tooth slightly marred O’Malley’s friendly smile. While he had the open countenance of an easygoing man, the broken nose on his round, amiable face told another story perhaps. The right hand that offered Julia the stick had several sunken knuckles and misaligned fingers. Metacarpal fractures—quick with his fists? And with his wits, she thought. He’d watched every move she’d made.

Tennant had said nothing since he’d entered the trench. Julia noticed his slight pallor. Despite the morning’s chill, a layer of sweat covered his forehead.

“Shall we shift the body forward, Inspector?”

Tennant turned away abruptly. With his back to the mouth of the gaping tunnel, he nodded. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to have your report on my desk tomorrow morning?”

“Of course.”

Tennant scrambled awkwardly up the graveled incline, leaving Sergeant Graves to oversee the removal of the body. The help will do the cleanup work, she thought.

“Carefully, now,” Julia said to the constables as they moved into place.

When the victim’s head and shoulders cleared the end of the tunnel, a bobbie muttered, “Bloody hell. It’s the Saint of Spitalfields.”

He watched the coppers perform on his stage.

The first scene the night before had been so easy. Would the clergyman come? There was a boy who needed help. Of course, he would. He’d aided so many boys over the years, hadn’t he? The “Saint” had followed the messenger into the fog-shrouded night, probably thinking Providence and his collar protected him. But when the messenger breathed a name and place in the old cleric’s ear, the man froze as if an icy shard had pierced his heart.

With a blade at his throat, the clergyman had listened to what would happen next.

He’d gathered his cast, observing them like a director surveying the stage. Right on cue. The inspector and his crew couldn’t drag their eyes away.

Look at me. Look what I have wrought, he wanted to crow.

No, he’d stay quiet, behind the fourth wall, invisible. It was still early in the first act, and he’d planned an open-ended run.

He watched them wince and cringe, relishing the final shock as the scene ended. And that woman—an unexpected addition to his ensemble—he’d add her to the script. Why not?

Doctors. They’re just as guilty.

The following day, Julia’s grandfather struggled down the back staircase to her office on the first floor. Dr. Lewis leaned his shoulder against the doorframe, stopping to catch his breath. He watched his granddaughter, her head down, absorbed in a document.

“I saw your last patient leave by the side gate, Julie. I wanted to catch you before you left for the clinic.”

Julia looked up. “You didn’t have long to wait.” She picked up a list and waved it at him. “Only three of your patients have agreed to see me. I suppose the rest have gone to Uncle Max?”

“I’m sorry, Julie.”

In the half-light of the shadowy hallway, his gray hair looked darker than it was. Then, when he moved into the room, stooped, stiff-gated, and supported by a cane, her heart caught. Within a month, he had become an old man. He was no longer the grandfather who had taught her to swim, raced her across the pond, and hiked the cliffs of Dover. Julia noticed he’d missed the third button on his waistcoat.

“How did the police take to the substitute Doctor Lewis?”

“About as you’d expect. Consternation all around, although Inspector Tennant tried to swallow it. More or less.”

He cleared his throat. “Julie, I should like to talk to you about—”

“Can it wait, Grandpa?” She tapped the document on her desk. “I have to finish this medical report for Scotland Yard, and I’ll be late for the clinic before I’m done.”

“Julia.”

There was something in his tone, and he’d used her proper name instead of his usual Julie.

“You can’t keep up this pace, my girl. Hurling yourself back and forth from your practice to the clinic—it’s punishing. Surely you see it’s not good for you or your patients. You’ve looked exceedingly tired of late.”

“Grandfather . . .”

“Have you been home in time for dinner one night this week?”

Julia rounded her desk, slipped her hands inside his jacket, and pushed the forgotten button through its slot. Then she kissed him on the cheek. When she stepped back, her right hand came away with his watch.

“I’d make an excellent pickpocket. It’s my deft doctor’s touch.” She smiled and showed him the face. “You see? I’m going to be very late.”

He didn’t return her smile. Instead, he retrieved his watch and tucked it away, frowning.

“Last night at the dinner table, you barely kept your eyes open. No, don’t shake your head at me. By heaven, I’m a doctor, too, or have you forgotten? I know a case of exhaustion when I see one.”

“I’m as strong as a cart horse.” Julia smiled again. “And you’re a fine one to talk. Why are you fully dressed and taking the stairs? You should be resting until luncheon.”

His attack had come as a shock to them both. Four weeks earlier, her grandfather had been changing for dinner when he felt an intense tightness in his chest, and his knees gave way. Julia knew diseases of the heart were always unpredictable. A second attack could come at any time, or it could be years away.

Her grandfather sighed, searching her face. “Julie. Listen to me, my dear. You must know there aren’t enough hours in the day or days in the year to wash it all away. Until you forgive yourself—or, better yet, understand it wasn’t your fault—you’ll stay trapped in the prison you’ve made.”

All this exaggerated concern, she thought. Would you say this to me if I were a grandson?

Julia had begun to doubt that she’d ever win the professional respect that was automatic for men who earned a medical degree. Now it was her grandfather. The one man who’d always encouraged her worried she wasn’t up to the job’s rigors. I’ll just have to work harder. Harder than any man.

And she could see no other way to silence the voice except by filling her days with work. But, tired as she was, on many nights, sleep eluded her. One face haunted her; one voice returned in her dreams.

She jumped, Julia.

Constable O’Malley elbowed Jonathan Graves outside the inspector’s office and tipped the post so the sergeant could see it. Graves read the direction on the envelope: “To Inspector Tennant of the Yard,” written in a florid hand in purple ink.

“What are you thinking, Sarge—a love letter for himself?”

Graves took the post and added it to Dr. Lewis’s report. “Don’t know, mate. But I’ll wager a pint he won’t turn a hair when he sees it.” He nodded at the medical report. “Lady doctors—what next?”

“She’s a cool one, now,” O’Malley said. “Never a blink, even after she spied the clergyman’s knob went missing. Knows her stuff and all. And she’s thorough. Looked over every inch of the ground around the corpse. Most docs only have eyes in their heads for the body.”

Graves grunted. “Coppers in skirts before we know it, Paddy.”

When the inspector waved them in, Graves handed him the post and the medical report. “You sent for us, guv?”

Tennant didn’t answer. He was staring at the top letter. As the silence stretched out, the officers exchanged glances.

Graves shifted his weight and cleared his throat. “Sir?”

The inspector looked up from the envelope. “Why isn’t Higgins in a holding cell? What are you waiting for, Sergeant? He’ll be outside the Blind Beggar, thirsty for his first pint of the day.”

“Thought that, with the Atwater case, we were handing Higgins off.”

Tennant fixed his stare on Graves.

“Right, guv. We’ll get on it.”

“Take the constable with you.”

Outside, at the end of the hallway, O’Malley said, “What’s with himself? The frost’s on him, sure. Still, that letter gave him a turn, so you’re owing me one, Sarge.”

Graves eased his collar. “I could do with a pint right now.”

After the officers left, Tennant looked at the calendar and flinched: November 14. Two years earlier, he had celebrated his greatest success, the arrest of the infamous “Railway Murderer.” The hunt for the man who bludgeoned a respectable banker in his first-class carriage had left the city on edge, assaulting English ideas of security and propriety. Such horrors were confined to the unsavory corners of the capital, or so people thought.

Fear made good press, and the swift arrest of Franz Meyer made Tennant’s career. The inspector’s star had risen along with newspaper circulation. Ridership on the North London Line returned once the killer was behind bars. Then, a year earlier, on the first anniversary of Meyer’s execution, Tennant received the first letter written in purple ink. A prank, he thought at the time, dismissing it.

But the same message had arrived in his post that morning—a single, livid line scratched across creamy writing paper.

You hanged the wrong man.

A messenger from the chief inspector’s office stuck his head around Tennant’s door just before noon.

“The chief sends his compliments, Inspector. He’d like to hear your report by the end of the day.”

Tennant thanked the man but doubted the preamble of politeness came from Chief Inspector Clark. He tried to put the blasted letter out of his mind and opened the medical report, flipping to the signature page at the back.

“Julia R. Lewis, M.D.,” he muttered. A lady doctor—that will put the chief’s knickers in a twist.

He paged back to the beginning and started reading, wondering how much irrelevant nonsense he’d have to wade through before she got down to the facts. But the report surprised him. Dr. Lewis had done a thorough job: It was clear, comprehensive, but concise. “Cause of death,” he read, “a knife wound to the chest, a slim-bladed weapon plunged directly into the heart. Time of death: based on an examination of the body, sometime between eight p.m. and four a.m. Based on the condition of the ground, probably sometime before midnight.”

Dr. Lewis noted that the ground was damp, but the area under the body was dry. That night, the rain had begun shortly after twelve. The timing was consistent with the evidence of their only witness, a night watchman who’d seen the victim.

That narrows it down. The doctor seems to know her stuff. Tennant set the medical evidence aside and picked up the police report.

A letter in the victim’s pocket had confirmed his identity. The constable had been right, although Tennant had little reason to doubt him. The mane of snowy hair, the broken, gold-framed glasses found at his side, and the clergyman’s “dog collar” told their story. It made the mutilation of the body all the more shocking. The “Saint of Spitalfields,” the Reverend Mr. Tobias Atwater, was the rector of St. Edmund’s Church on Commercial Street. A tireless champion of the downtrodden, the sainted clergyman was dead, and Tennant hadn’t a clue about the killer’s identity or the motive.

They’d found a gold pocket watch and three pounds in paper and silver on his person, so robbery hadn’t been the motive. Then there was the mutilation, which made it hardly a run-of-the-mill crime. And the killer had stuffed something odd into the slit of the man’s waistcoat pocket: a popped balloon, a child’s plaything.

But why pick it up? Why hold on to it?

Next he reviewed the stack of witness interviews. Neither the clergyman’s housekeeper nor his part-time curate could explain what had brought Atwater to the site. The sewer under construction, soon to be part of the vast, citywide system, would carry its waste away from the eyes and nostrils of its East End residents. But the murder scene was a mile from Atwater’s rectory.

What was he doing there in the middle of the night?

A small army of coppers had conducted house-to-house and shop-to-shop interviews. Only one person said he’d seen the victim that night. Around 11:30, the witness spotted Mr. Atwater on Commercial Street near Christ Church, about a half mile from the murder scene. The man, a night watchman at the church, knew the clergyman by sight. He said Atwater was walking with someone he took to be a prostitute. According to the report, “Mister Atwater handed the streetwalker something the witness believed was a handful of coins. They parted, walking in opposite directions. The witness described the woman as ‘ginger-haired.’ ”

A henna-haired prostitute—wonderful, Tennant thought. There were hundreds in East London alone, and not one would talk to the police. He dropped the report on his desk and swiveled to look out his window. The leaden sky and curling chimney smoke failed to inspire. He tipped his chair back and stared at the web of cracks in the ceiling paint. The crime scene—something’s wrong there. Something about the position of Atwater’s body nagged at him.

Why take the time to drag it halfway into the pipe? Why not leave it out in the open? If concealment was the aim, why not shove it all the way in?

Tennant brought his chair down to the floor with a jolt. Had the killer’s placement of the corpse been staged to produce a series of shocks? First, he had exposed the clergyman’s naked lower body for the world to see. Then, when Dr. Lewis moved Atwater’s hand, the mutilation appeared. Finally, the last surprise: the victim’s face and identity. Had the killer thought it all out?

What kind of sick, calculating monster is this?

Tennant drummed his fingers on the medical report and opened it again.

The doctor’s cover letter listed two addresses: her practice at 17 Finsbury Circus and the Whitechapel Clinic in the East End on Fieldgate Street. Her clinic hours there were listed as noon to six.

He checked his pocket watch.

Tennant set out under a gray and lowering sky. He hopped off an omnibus and turned right on Fieldgate Street, the lane curving away from the noise of Whitechapel Road. As he walked on, the clatter and squeak of hooves and wheels on cobblestones faded.

Once, the neighborhood’s soot-blackened tenements must have been brick red and the trim freshly whitewashed. Now paint on the doorframes and lintels peeled away in curling strips. Up and down the road, ragged clothing drooped from lines and railings. When Tennant passed a row of shops, he pulled back as a butcher’s boy hurled a bucket of pink, frothy water into the street. By a grocer’s half-price barrow, he turned his head away from the sour smell of spoiling cabbage.

Then, at the bend where the lane met Plummer’s Row, the silvery tones of a set of handbells stopped him. Someone sounded the scale from behind an open window, sliding into a familiar melody: the chimes of Westminster. Tennant stepped back and looked up. A plaque over the door read WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY: ESTABLISHED A.D. 1570. A smaller sign in the window announced BELL-FOUNDERS OF BIG BEN AND THE LIBERTY BELL.

When the long-threatened storm finally broke, Tennant ran the last thirty yards to the corner of Fieldgate and New streets. He ducked into the doorway of the Whitechapel Clinic, shook out his rain-splattered hat, and waited for the ache in his left leg to ease.

The clinic surprised him. He’d imagined a charity facility located in one of London’s most impoverished districts would be a ramshackle affair.

Inside the front door, a wheeled invalid’s chair waited for a patient. In the wide corridor that ended at an office door, oak benches, deserted at the moment, lined the walls. Tennant’s steps slowed. He glimpsed two wards, one for men and the other for women, each lit by rows of oil lamps. On sunny days, natural light would stream through the large windows and brighten the space. Shelving at the far ends of the rooms held piles of snowy towels, lines of green and brown bottles, rolls of bandages, and sundry tools of the medical arts. Eight beds lined the walls of each ward, most of them filled. Tennant breathed in the sharp, clean, leathery scent of carbolic soap. His footfalls had clicked sharply against the stone floor, but the two nurses who ministered to the patients trod silently on cork-soled boots.

Julia spotted the inspector and waved him into her office.

“Is this a good time, Doctor Lewis? I have a few questions about your report.”

“Of course.” Julia gestured to a chair facing her desk.

“You seem well set up here, Doctor.”

“Supported by ill-gotten gains, I’m afraid.” At his raised eyebrow, she smiled. “Oh, nothing you can arrest us for—now. A century ago, my great-great-grandfather marched off to India with General Clive. He left England a humble lieutenant and returned with a cache of jewels and an eye-popping bank balance.”

“The fortunes of war?”

“Indeed, literally. Filthy rich, I suppose you’d call the Lewis family. I should think it unlikely he amassed that money in a strictly legal way.”

He nodded, unsmiling. “You have several open beds. After the past few months, is that a hopeful sign?”

Since the summer, cholera had been burning through the district. All autumn, London Hospital, “the London,” as the locals called it, had been swamped by the sick and dying.

“I think we’re finally on the other side of the outbreak. The number of deaths has fallen three weeks in a row.” Her eyes dropped to her desk clock.

“I shan’t take up much of your time, Doctor. I have only a few questions. Your report was comprehensive, but . . .”

Julia raised her eyebrows. “But, Inspector?”

“Sometimes valuable impressions or intuitions don’t make it into a clinical report.”

She smiled and shook her head. He looked at her curiously.

“Forgive me, Inspector. I remembered a professor from my medical school days. ‘Facts,’ he insisted. ‘Facts and observations—I want no flights of female fancy in your case notes.’ And here you are, asking me to speculate in an official report.”

He looked at the framed medical school diploma on the wall behind her. “I see you traveled all the way to America to qualify as a doctor.”

“No college in Britain admits women into their medical programs. Several do in the States.”

“And yet you are permitted to practice medicine here?”

“Pure accident, I assure you. I came in through the back door, the happy result of unintended consequences.”

“Oh?”

“Eight years ago, Parliament passed the Medical Act to weed out the charlatans in the profession.”

“Are there many?”

“I regret to say they are legion. Still, the new law keeps out the worst of the quacks. Now doctors must present their credentials to the General Medical Council before they’re added to the registry. But here’s the loophole: Parliament added a clause to the act recognizing the degrees granted by foreign medical schools. The act included students who’d begun. . .