When the front door clicked to a close, Alice entered the room he had just vacated. The back parlour was a dark room with a single bed in the centre, the wooden base held up by a pile of bricks at each corner. There was a bite to the air, the room colder than the street outside. A dozen shirts hung from a rope stretched diagonally across it, one end caught between the slightly open window and the other wedged between the top of a Welsh dresser and the wall.
Alice closed the door and peered into the nearby kitchen. Through the small window at the end of the room, a partly stone-flagged backyard was visible, a patch of bare earth beyond. An old lean-to housing the lavatory blocked what little winter light there was from entering the kitchen. There was no sign of running water; most working-class families were still filling buckets from a pump at the end of their street. The approaching twilight bathed the small area in shadows, the air fermenting with the smell of old dinners. With so many people living in the house the room was likely a place of much activity but, aside from a few black beetles scurrying across the floor and over the draining board, the overriding air was one of long abandonment.
The feeling of bleakness prevailed as the almoner made her way up the stairs. The rising wind caused a stray branch to tap rhythmically at the panes of the landing window, almost as if in warning.
It was a degree or two warmer upstairs than the kitchen had been but Alice shivered nonetheless as she ventured into the first bedroom. Bare, chipped floorboards bowed towards the middle of the room, the undulating surface and the sour tinge in the air adding to the general sense of unease.
Nothing stood out as being out of place. The bed, presumably belonging to Mr and Mrs Redbourne, stood low to the floor. Covered with a tatty, slightly stained tufted counterpane, it sagged drunkenly, as if in sympathy with the floor. Droopy curtains hung half-closed at the windows and an old leather suitcase stood up on end in front of a dressing table of dark wood, perhaps as a makeshift stool.
Back in the hall, another staircase wound itself over the first, leading to the second floor. Notes in the file showed that Mrs Redbourne had been specifically questioned about the empty rooms upstairs by the Head Almoner, Bess Campbell, who suspected that they may have been sub-let. Mrs Redbourne claimed that the space was uninhabitable due to damp walls and unstable floorboards, but the almoners had visited families who had carved living spaces into stables and coal bunkers; a loft space, however unsafe, would have been appealing enough to command at least a few shillings in rent from a desperate family.
Foreign voices and a clattering of footsteps drifted down through the floorboards, followed by a loudly slammed door. The window in the hall rattled in protest. Alice turned and stared at the cracked ceiling before moving further along the hall to a much smaller room.
Here, the entire floor was hidden by a horsehair mattress and an assortment of fraying blankets and clothes. In the twenty-six years since the first almoner was appointed in 1895, much intelligence had been gathered about the sort of secrets that could lay buried within families. As seekers of truth, the almoners knew that sometimes the sinister could be masked by a cloak of ordinariness. It was one of the reasons they were told not to hurry their home inspections, but to take their time, so that the hidden might somehow reveal itself.
Alice stood quietly in the doorway, running her eyes around the room. It was only at the sound of purposeful strides on the stairs that she finally turned around.
The face of Mrs Redbourne’s eldest daughter rose over the top of the banisters. The rustle of linen as the hem of Charlotte’s skirt brushed the stair beneath her feet seemed to whisper something other than her arrival. In the light of the upstairs hall, the shadows under the girl’s eyes became apparent, her cheeks speckled with a deep scarlet flush.
The almoner didn’t say anything; probably hoping not to attract attention from other family members. Instead, she took a step closer to the young woman and gave a reassuring smile. In that fleeting moment, the teenager’s desperation became evident.
After a wild glance behind her, Charlotte bit her bottom lip and then opened her mouth to speak. When no words came, Alice frowned and whispered: ‘Charlotte, are you alright?’
‘F-fine,’ the teenager stammered, the word at odds with her countenance. ‘But I-I think you should know –’ She stopped, then burst into tears. Alice’s fingers curled towards her palms, as if trying to encourage her to speak. ‘W-what I mean is, I should have said something sooner, but it’s too late now and …’, she faltered, her choked whispers stilted by the click of a door latch above.
Alice looked up. A middle-aged bespectacled gentleman wearing a long overcoat descended the stairs, a scarf knotted under his bearded chin. Charlotte whirled around and then scurried away, her long skirt fanning out behind her.
‘Good day, Madam,’ the man said in a heavy accented voice. Alice nodded and waited in the hall as the man traced Charlotte’s footsteps downstairs. The almoner’s expression was serious. As soon as she had crossed the threshold of the Redbourne’s home, something had struck a false note.
By the time she left, she later recorded in her case notes, it appeared as if something truly disturbing were about to unfold.
The out-patient department, which annually receives over 40,000 cases, is at present conducted in the basement, which is ill-lighted and insufficient in accommodation … The hospital is situated in one of the poorest and most crowded districts of London …
(The Illustrated London News, 1906)
It was still dark when Alice woke two days later, on Monday, 2 January. Three years into the future, in 1925, the live-in staff of the Royal Free would move to purpose-built accommodation on Cubitt Street. The bedrooms of the Alfred Langton Home for Nurses were clean and comfortable, according to the Nursing Mirror, each one having ‘a fitted-in wardrobe, dressing table and chest of drawers combined. Cold water laid on at the basin and a can for hot water, and a pretty rug by the bed … everything has been done for the convenience and comfort of the nurses’.
As things were, the nurses managed as best they could in the small draughty rooms of the Helena Building at the rear of the main hospital on Gray’s Inn Road, where the former barracks of the Light Horse Volunteers had once stood. Huddled beneath the bedclothes, they would summon up the willpower and then dash over to the sink, the flagstone floor chilling their feet.
Alice’s breath fogged the air as she dressed hurriedly in a high-necked white blouse, a grey woollen skirt that skimmed her ankles and a dark cloche hat pulled down low over her brow. After checking her appearance in the mirror she left her room and made for the main hospital, where the stairs leading to her basement office were located. Outside, a brisk wind propelled young nurses along as they ventured over to begin their shifts, their dresses billowing around their calves. The skirts of their predecessors a decade earlier, overlong on the orders of Matron so that ankles were not displayed when bending over to attend to patients, swept fallen leaves along the ground as they went.
Just before the heavy oak doors leading to the hospital, Alice turned at the sound of her name being called from further along the road, where a small gathering was beginning to disperse. In among the loosening clot of damp coats and umbrellas was hospital mortician Sidney Mullins. One of the tools of his trade – a sheet of thick white cotton – lay at his feet, a twisted leg creeping out at the side.
Sidney, a fifty-year-old Yorkshire man with a florid complexion and a bald crown, save for a few long hairs flapping across his forehead, often strayed to the almoners’ office for a sweet cup of tea and a reprieve from his uncommunicative companions in the mortuary. Standing outside a grand building of sandstone and arches of red brick, he beckoned Alice with a wave of his cap then stood back on the pavement, rubbing his chin and