Beneath London (7 page)

He stopped just outside the open door, listening again to the silence, and then peered in past the low lintel. There was the unmistakable smell of a dead body on the warm air, and he could hear the buzzing of flies. The interior of the cottage – one room, very nearly square, and with a wooden floor – was dark, and it took him a moment to see that someone sat on a chair by the hearth, unmoving. It was a corpse, headless – a woman, no doubt Sarah Wright. Her gown was soaked with blood, and she was tied into the chair. There were several turns of rope about her body.

He took in the rest of the room before going in: a tall cupboard set into a recess in the wall, the contents strewn on the floor – dishes, books, cooking implements. The cupboard itself had been pulled away so that the intruder could see behind it. The bed stood on its side, the torn mattress on the ground spilling out feathers. A loom near the hearth had been broken to pieces, a half-woven rug in the frame. Floorboards had been prised up, exposing the packed dirt beneath.

Someone had pulled the place apart searching for something. Quite possibly they had murdered Sarah Wright because she wouldn’t give it up – the secret, perhaps, that Mother Laswell had mentioned, although to murder her in this horrific fashion… There was a necessary room in the corner, with a door that stood open, the small closet clearly empty.

St. Ives looked carefully around himself at the trees that stretched away on all sides. The place had a lonesome air to it. A pair of squirrels scampered along beside the stream now and up the trunk of a beech, chattering to each other, and a rooster strode out from behind a pile of firewood and stood looking at him. He stepped into the interior of the cottage, where he set his shillelagh against the corner of the wall by the door. He saw now that holes had been dug into the dirt beneath sections of torn up floorboards. Had they found what they were looking for, he wondered, and he walked across to view the body, his eyes growing used to the dim light. From the charnel house smell it was likely that she had been murdered yesterday, the village boys discovering her this morning.

A bunched square of cloth lay on the floor, which he picked up and held to his nose, immediately smelling the residue of chloroform, although it had dried by now. Whoever had committed the atrocity had done Sarah Wright the service of deadening her senses. Possibly she had simply been murdered with the chemical, although the ghastly quantity of spilled blood argued that her heart had pumped it out unto the very last moments. The incision appeared to be remarkably neat to him – the work of someone who was familiar with the use of a scalpel and saw.

There was a rattling outside now – the sound of a wagon drawing up, having come along the road from the west. St. Ives stepped to the door and retrieved his shillelagh, before looking out at the wagon, and recognizing the driver – Dr. Lamont Pullman, the coroner, along with the village constable, a pleasant but slow-witted man named Brooke. With a deep sense of relief St. Ives went out under the now cloudy sky to meet the two men, leaving the door open as he had found it.

SIX

T
he several houses that lined Lazarus Walk were large, many-roomed structures from the last age, with multiple chimneys and lamp-lit geminate windows glowing through the fog. Beaumont looked into the courtyard of number 12, through a broad, scrolled-iron gate between the high walls of granite stones that separated the immense house from the rest of London. It was a half-timbered mansion with colored glass in the downstairs windows. Many years ago someone had bled money to build it.

There was no gatekeeper to be seen. A gold-painted Berlin carriage, very old and very elegant, stood on the cobbles near the arched front door, its two patient horses waiting in front of a large carriage house, lanterns lit within. A man – the driver, perhaps – came out of the carriage house now and stood smoking a pipe, the reek of burning tobacco mingling with the fog. He was a narrow man, his legs needlessly long –
The Duke of Limbs
, Beaumont thought. He wore a red bowler hat with a low dome. Beaumont waved the handbill at the man, who stared at him with a look of disapproval on his face. A crowd of laughing people jostled Beaumont, shoving him against the iron bars of the gate, one of them knocking his hat askew and laughing as he did it. The chin ribbon saved it before it fell.

“Be off with you, dwarf!” the gangly driver shouted at him, but Beaumont held up the handbill again and pointed at the picture drawn on it. The man considered him for another moment before stepping across to the gate and said, “State your business, then.”

“I’m here to lay claim to my reward, your honor: twenty pounds, it says here on this bill, as you can see right enough.”

“Tell me what you know, then, and I’ll fetch your money. If it’s worthless to Mr. Klingheimer I’ll fetch you a kick in the arse.”

“I’ll fetch my own reward from Mr. Klingheimer, if you please, sire,” Beaumont said. “It’ll spend better in my hands than it will in yours. The man you see here, I was his coachman, the same situation as you, I don’t doubt. A black Landau coach, which I cleaned and polished and cared for the horses. I was ostler and driver both for near on a year.”

“And where is he now, this master of yours?”

“Under my hat, which is where he’ll stay.”

“Tell me what the man did, then. What line of work?”

“All manner of evil more than aught else. Viversuction, poisons, resurrection. I had nought to do with any of that. It weren’t in my line. I mostly minded his horses’ business, not his.”

“Go around back, then,” the man said, “down the lane there. If it’s twaddle you’re peddling, you’ll regret it.” He nodded up the road, where there was no doubt a cut-through. “The red door, first you come to. Don’t bang the knocker. Mrs. Skink will open it in due time.” He turned away and walked back into the coaching house, disappearing within.

Beaumont considered what he would reveal as he walked along the narrow bit of pavement toward the red door, which he could see now through the wisps of fog blowing past, hiding and then disclosing things. He realized that he had little to say to anyone that he had not already said, except that the man they sought had gone to damnation, a prisoner of the toads. They would pay little for news about someone who was as good as dead. Beaumont would brass it out, though, to see what came of it – a farthing for his trouble, perhaps, which was twice better than half a farthing.

He waited as he had been told, standing several paces back from the stoop, removing his hat and holding it in the crook of his arm. The door was standing open at present, a greengrocer handing crates of vegetables through it to someone unseen in the shadows. The grocer went away in the direction of the river pushing his now-empty cart, and the door swung shut. Beaumont looked up at a bank of long windows that led out onto a narrow balcony along the third floor and at the ledges and heavy moldings that decorated the wall beneath it – foot and handholds enough for a person leaving by one of the windows. He had never been happy playing the ape, not since he was a boy, but he still considered houses as places from which a person might find it necessary to leave in considerable haste.

There was a clatter from within now, what sounded like a bolt banging open before the door was drawn back by a withered housemaid with a scraggle of hair and a long green gown with a tattered hem – Mrs. Skink, no doubt. Two men pushed out past her. Both of them stared at Beaumont for a moment, one of them with apparent ill intent, before they walked slowly in the wake of the grocer. The one who had given him the stink-eye was as bad a man as Beaumont could recollect, known along the river as Cobble, and was in the smothering lay, which paid well – better than the resurrection men were paid, the smothered corpses being still fresh and warm. Cobble had brought two of them to Narbondo one dark night at the old Shade House in the Cliffe Marsh near Egypt Bay.

Beaumont noticed that Mrs. Skink was regarding him now, as if taking his measure. He bowed to her when she gestured him forward, and walked into the dim light inside. He smelled cooking odors and heard the noise of the nearby kitchen, and he watched as the woman shut the door. There was a Chubb lock with a twist latch set into the door a foot from the top. The latch clicked shut when the door stopped against the jamb, which meant it was always locked unless the lock was fixed open. She lowered a heavy bar across the door and padlocked the bar into place. What did
that
signify, he wondered, a door with locks meant both to keep the outside out and the inside in? – and him inside now.

He saw that there was a closet in the wall with a black curtain across it, the curtain half open at the moment. Inside the closet stood a bed and a chair, the bedclothes tossed in a heap – Mrs. Skink’s cupboard, she being always on duty. The gaoler, he thought. He didn’t like the look of her, nor she of him, apparently. And there was something in the air of the house that wasn’t right – a smell of physic, perhaps, beneath the cooking odors, or the smell of death coming up through the floorboards. It was more than a mere
smell
– fresh ghosts, more like, troubled and unhappy. It was a house, he thought, that wanted to be burnt to the ground. He wondered now whether it was the sight of the man Cobble that had played on his mind, but his wondering was interrupted when the gangly man with the red hat appeared and said, “Come along, then.”

They set out along a hallway toward a flight of stairs. Beaumont looked back and saw Mrs. Skink hide the padlock key inside a pitcher-pot that sat on a shelf near the door. A blind mouse could find it, which meant that they hadn’t had any troubles with blind mice, so to speak. She sat down on a stool against the wall, crossed her arms, and bowed her head as if to sleep.

There was a maze of narrow corridors at the top of the stairs, and he memorized the left- and right-hand turns, noting the look of things in case he needed to find his way back out in a hurry. Dealing with the door locks would take some doing, especially since he mayn’t be tall enough to reach the pitcher that held the key to the padlock, nor the latch on the uppermost lock. He could use the doorkeeper’s stool, perhaps, which would make a handy weapon in a pinch.

At the top of the stairs lay another hallway, this one broad and paneled, brightened with electric-lamps suspended from the ceiling and with rich, Turkey carpet running along the floor. Heavily framed portraits lined the walls on either side, dark and dim with age. A door opened ahead of them, apparently of its own accord, and red hat ushered him into a large room, scattered with upholstered chairs and settees and wooden tables. It at first appeared to be empty of people, but then Beaumont saw that a large man in shirtsleeves sat at a desk along the far wall, writing with a quill pen. The door closed silently behind him, red hat having gone out like a ghost. It seemed as if the man at the desk – Mr. Klingheimer himself, no doubt – was unaware of his presence, which was an awkward business. Best to wait him out.

As ever, Beaumont glanced around quickly for something small that he might nick, the owners of the house being not likely to suffer if a loose item or two found its way into his pocket. A crystal paperweight with a garden of glass flowers inside caught his eye on a nearby console table, shining in the light of an Argand lamp. French crystal, no doubt. Heavy, but in that regard useful as a weapon or for beating out a window – or a man’s skull – if there were trouble. He picked the orb up, slipped it into his coat pocket and pinned it with his elbow, watching the back of Mr. Klingheimer’s head the entire time.

“That’s a lovely bauble, isn’t it?” Mr. Klingheimer said in a cheerful voice, without looking up from his work. “It was given to me by a woman who I remember fondly, dead now, alas.”

Beaumont bowed, removed the crystal ball from his pocket, polished it on his cuff, and set it down again on the console table. He glanced again at the closed door, wondering whether it, too, was bolted on the outside. He could play the flute caper again, as he had in the Goat and Cabbage, but it was one thing to strike a no-account piss-maker in a low pothouse, and another to strike a rich man in his mansion. And in any event, gaffing Mr. Klingheimer in the throat wouldn’t unlock doors. Beaumont would be brought to heel, and that would be the end of it.