The Insanity of Murder by Felicity Young

as flashed him an obscene finger sign.
    As far as Pike knew, force-feeding was the only thing that had ever seriously rattled Florence. Dody had told him that its nervous impact on the women involved could be likened to that of men seriously affected by battle experience. After telling him this she had shot him one of her pointed looks, as if she might be alluding to something within himself. Stuff and nonsense, of course; everyone knew that women were more sensitive to trauma than men — why else were the lunatic asylums filled with so many of them? While Pike held Dody’s opinions on most things in high regard, he could not agree with her on this.
    He made his way through a rabbit warren of corridors in the Yard to his ground-floor office, keen to find out what progress had been made in the hunt for Lady Mary. He found Singh leaning over the desk, preoccupied with writing on a sheet of paper taken from the type-writing machine. By his elbow sat a small wooden box Pike had not seen before.
    Singh stopped writing and jumped to his feet like the NCO he had once been. ‘I thought I might miss you, sir. I was leaving you a note.’
    Pike looked at his assistant’s face and frowned. ‘What happened, Singh?’
    He touched his semi-closed left eye, swollen and purple as a turnip. ‘It is nothing, sir. I merely tripped down the steps of the section house.’
    ‘You’d been drinking?’ Pike knew full well that Singh’s religion did not allow imbibing.
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    And Singh knew full well that Pike was aware of it. This was not the first time the constable had turned up to work with a minor injury that he had brushed off with an obvious lie. He was a proud man who liked to deal with his problems his way. Pike could only hope that his own favourable treatment of the Indian was not making things worse for him in the section house. Perhaps, for Singh’s safety, Pike ought to let him go so he could return to the relative anonymity of the uniformed ranks. But to do so would be abhorrent. It would mean giving in to all the injustices of the system that Pike battled daily, such as the promotion of buffoons while the real talent was left to languish. Furthermore, Pike suspected Singh would be as unwilling to return to the ranks as he was to send him. On a more selfish note, Singh was the best assistant he had ever had, and almost irreplaceable.
    Pike shrugged out of his coat and hung it beneath his bowler on the hat stand. ‘What’s in the box?’ Above his name on the address label, the box was stamped in red with the name of the latest brand of popular tea, Typhoo Tipps. ‘Where did it come from? I haven’t ordered any tea. Even if I had, it wouldn’t be that smouch .’
    Singh picked up the box from the desk and weighed it in his hand. ‘It’s not tea, that is for certain, sir. It is far too heavy for tea. Lady Mary left it in the clerk’s office at the mortuary, but ran before the clerk could get her name.’
    ‘So that’s what she was doing in the mortuary.’ Pike frowned. ‘Why didn’t she give it to me directly? She saw me, why did she run? And wasn’t she supposed to have been at the rest home?’
    ‘Perhaps she did not want to have to explain herself, sir.’
    ‘Did you finally catch up with her?’
    ‘Hensman found her at her son’s house. She was speaking incoherently. He could not get a thing out of her.’
    ‘He seems to have that effect on people.’
    Singh gave one of his rare smiles, making Pike think that Hensman was probably the cause of the bruises. ‘Her son, Sir Michael, told Hensman he was today taking her back to the asylum –‘
    ‘Rest home,’ Pike interrupted sardonically. ‘Did she go back earlier, like she was supposed to, after she’d finished looking at the suffragette photograph album?’
    ‘Yes sir, but she was only at the home for a few hours before she ran away. When she turned up back at Sir Michael’s he decided to let her stay until the identification parade was