Kronberg Crimes 01 - The Devils Grin

his arms around me, and hoisted me back onto him. He moulded me on to his chest and fitted his mouth on to mine. His helplessness had made him desperate and hungry.

    ~~~

    Half an hour later the door clicked quietly and Garret tiptoed down the creaking stairs. As tense as a bow, I sat in my bed and could not bear the itch of the wordless peck he had left on my cheek.
    With a groan, I rose and poured water into the washbowl, slapped it into my face, and then washed the rest of my body. I quenched my thirst with the water left in the jug, then pulled my nightgown over my head. The cotton felt pleasantly cool against the hot summer air.
    With my tobacco pouch, a bottle of brandy, and a glass as companions, I settled down in my old armchair.
    Garret would soon have had enough of me, I was certain. Our relationship had always been too unidentified for him – it was neither fish nor meat. He had called it fucking and that irked me. But why should it?
    Yes, why should it?
    I wiped the thought away.
    The brandy burned itself down my throat, and my mind wandered to Guy’s Hospital, where I worked since the day I had arrived in London four years ago.
    I thought of Mary Higgins, a shy nurse no one seemed to notice. She worked one floor above my ward and had been quietly showing me affection for more than half a year. I had never returned it and had believed she would give up soon. Instead, she had got desperate and, without me noticing, followed me down to my basement laboratory on a late evening. When I finally had heard her approach from behind, it was already too late. She was so close that, as I turned around, all she needed to do was lean in and place a wet kiss on my lips.
    Startled I had pushed her away, begging her to regain reason. After she had left and the initial shock had subsided, I felt sorry for hurting her and wondered if that kiss could have landed her in the gaol, too. Probably not, as she did not know I was a woman.
    Living disguised as a man had given me a radically broader view on humanity. Man kind! I could observe men and women in their roles, while adopting the one or the other disguise and entering either world of social restrictions and behaviour. Sometimes I felt the insane urge to tell them all to cross-dress. How would the world change? I wondered, and laughed at the silly thought.
    I did wonder rather too much and had always asked too many questions. Maybe my motive for becoming a scientist was to find reason in all this chaos. After all, I had never felt I belonged to the human race.
    I lit a second cigarette and poured another brandy. The night had started to get chilly. I hugged my knees and gazed up at the ceiling. At the sight of the spots there, Holmes invaded my calm mind. How strange the man was, I thought, and snorted. Was it not I who was the oddity? I was a woman masquerading as a man. I was a scientist and a medical doctor who was occasionally consulted by Scotland Yard. And I was trying to solve a crime of which the Yard had no knowledge, and I was working on that same case with Sherlock Holmes, while fucking a highly accomplished thief, who believed I was a nurse. And I owned a penis on straps.
    Unusual did not even begin to describe it! I tipped the rest of the brandy into my mouth, flicked the cigarette into the cold fireplace, and wondered onto which shore life would puke me up some day.

Chapter Eight

    It was early in the morning when a red-faced Wallace McFadin stormed into my ward, calling my name from afar. I threw my hands up in the air and signalled him to be quiet; one cannot run and shout in a room full of sick and half-asleep patients.
    ‘My apologies! Me and another student, Farley, we found something!’ He said a little quieter once he had reached me, then rummaged in his pockets and extracted a small piece of paper.
    ‘You said we should observe everything, to find out about the history. The man you dissected a week ago – Farley and I had his right lower arm and hand for today’s anatomy lesson. The others got all the other parts and I saw his head and torso, so I knew it was him.’
    McFadin was talking rather fast.
    ‘So, we started dissecting his hand, he still had it balled up into a fist, and then we found this!’
    He waved the piece of paper in front of my nose. The sweet stench of decomposition combined with creosote was wafting off it. I took the note from him; one word was written on it in thick, smudgy letters:

    ‘He wrote with a piece of