Death in the Peerless Pool (6 page)

‘Indeed she did.'

‘Then she wouldn't have far to go, would she?'

The Apothecary considered for a moment, then changed the conversation's direction. ‘Did Hannah have any particular friends that you know of? Either on the staff or outside the hospital?'

Forbes looked thoughtful. ‘No, she didn't. The fact was that she kept herself very much to herself. Spoke to few; did her duty; befriended no one but fell out with none. She had a way with her, if you understand me, that seemed to discourage comradeship. She was alone and happy like that.'

‘Obviously an austere woman,' John stated with just a hint of a smile.

‘Very. There was some that were quite nervous of her.'

‘Why?'

‘Only because of that. Because of her forbidding manner.'

‘Might one of the inmates be sufficiently afraid of her to be driven to commit murder?'

Forbes screwed up his face to hide the fact that he was grinning. ‘They hate all us warders, but her they hated most of all.'

John stood up, indicating that the interview was at an end. ‘Mr Forbes, I must thank you. You have been most helpful. However, I'm afraid there is one other thing.'

‘Yes?'

‘If no kith or kin can be found, then someone who knew Hannah Rankin well will be asked to identify the body. Would you be willing to do so?'

Forbes gulped. ‘If nobody else is available, I suppose I must.'

‘I will inform Mr Fielding.'

They walked back down the corridor together, listening to the wail of the wretched patients, glimpsing through one open door a half-naked man, his hands on his genitals.

‘Stop that!' bellowed Forbes, but the poor creature continued, totally oblivious of the world beyond his own pathetic needs. Very sobered, the two friends stepped through the heavily fortified front door and into the fresh air of the garden beyond, where both drew a deep breath.

‘God grant that I never end in such a place,' Samuel said morosely.

‘Amen to that,' John answered with feeling. He looked around him and saw that the beautiful girl, Petronelle, had started a meaningless solitary walk, wandering in circles, going nowhere, without purpose. Looking up, she caught his eye and began to head in his direction.

‘Only a shilling,' she said sadly.

‘Not now, my dear,' the Apothecary answered.

Petronelle burst into tears. ‘But I need the money to buy food.'

John shook his head. ‘No, they feed you here.'

She looked at him, very puzzled. ‘Do they? What place am I in?'

‘You're in hospital,' Samuel replied kindly. ‘Where they look after you.'

Very briefly, a look of cunning came into Petronelle's eye. ‘Some do, some don't,' she answered.

Thinking of the warders' attitude as personified by Forbes, John inwardly shuddered at the thought of cruelty being meted out to such a delicate creature.

‘Who is unkind to you?' he asked, determined to take the matter up with Dr Crow himself, should it prove necessary.

Petronelle took his arm, her lovely face staring up into his. ‘She's gone now,' she whispered.

‘Who? Who's gone?'

‘Her. The wicked one.'

‘Tell me which she is.'

‘The one who came for me. Oh, Sir, the one who came for me.' Petronelle's beautiful lips quivered and tears glistened in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mama, Mama,' she sobbed.

John slipped an arm round the girl's heaving shoulders and was rewarded with a frantic clawing of his coat. ‘You won't let her take me, will you?' Petronelle implored.

‘Nobody's going to harm you. You're safe here,' the Apothecary answered, wishing he believed it to be true.

‘She thinks I don't remember,' the girl continued in a whisper, close to his ear. ‘She thinks that because I'm grown I've forgotten all about it. But I haven't. I'll always remember her and the way she came for me.'

So saying, Petronelle's mood seemed to swing and she wandered off again, her eyes vacant, her beautiful face as devoid of expression as a mask.

‘I wonder what she meant by all that,' said Samuel, staring after her.

‘I don't know,' John replied thoughtfully. ‘But I have every intention of finding out.

Pest House Row, as John and Samuel saw when they turned into the lane that ran between Old Street and Islington, stood, an untidy jumble of straggling houses, the sole reminder of the place in which the City Pest House had once been situated. Built in the last few years of the sixteenth century by money raised from companies interested in Sir Walter Raleigh's adventure at sea, namely his piratical exploits plundering Spanish galleons, the House had been erected ‘as a lazaretto for the reception of distressed and miserable objects infected by the dreadful plague'. Having taken in many patients at the time of epidemic, principally those poor wretches who were homeless, moneyless and friendless and who regarded the Pest House with hatred and horror, the building had finally fallen into disrepair in the early part of the eighteenth century and, in 1736, had been sold to the French Hospital, the governing body of which knocked down what was left and erected new buildings on the site.

‘Do you reckon there's a burial pit anywhere round here?' said Samuel, staring at the rise and fall of the land behind the cottages.

John shook his head. ‘No, the poor bastards were all thrown in at Mount Mill, weren't they?'

Samuel looked vague. ‘I'm not certain. Where is Mount Mill?'

‘Just off Goswell Street, near Peartree Street. Supposedly there are hundreds of plague victims buried there.'

‘Hurled into the ground with scant ceremony, just a few hastily mumbled prayers. Frightening thought.'

The Apothecary gave a cynical smile. ‘One could say the same for Hannah Rankin.'

Samuel shivered. ‘Don't! A goose walked over my grave when you spoke those words. Are you going to knock on doors in Ratcliff Row to find where she lived?'

‘In a moment or two. First of all I want to get the lie of the land.'

They had been walking as they talked and now found themselves standing outside the French Hospital, a gracious and beautiful building erected round three sides of a quadrangle. Funds for the project had been provided by a French Huguenot, James de Gastigny, Master of the Buckhounds to King William III. Though it had originally been intended that the Hospital should be a place of refuge for ‘Poor French Protestants and Their Descendants Residing in Great Britain', the asylum also had its share of aged and infirm people, providing them with a permanent home. But for the rest of the Huguenots it was a place of sanctuary, a shelter where they could find friendly advice in determining their future plans. The Hospital also acted as an agency for locating other French immigrants who had already settled elsewhere in London. As he walked past the entrance, John thought what an excellent place it would be to cloak the activities of a French spy ring.

Directly opposite the Hospital, on the other side of the lane, stood the rear of the complex that housed the Peerless Pool and the Fish Pond, together with the other buildings belonging to the Pleasure Garden, including Mr Kemp's grand dwelling place. There was the back way in, the Apothecary noticed: a gated entrance leading off Pest House Row. Would it have been possible, he wondered, for someone to have come through that gate and stealthily make their way to the Fish Pond, hidden by the cover of the trees? Certain that at night it would have been all too easy, he put his hand out to give the gate a push, only to find that today it was locked.

‘Interesting,' he said to Samuel.

‘What?'

‘If the gate is as secure as this at night, as Mr Kemp assures us it is, it means if the body were taken to the Fish Pond this way, the murderer either had a key or …'

‘Was let in by an accomplice on the inside, as you suggested.'

‘Exactly. Now listen to this.' And the Apothecary repeated to his friend the thought that had struck him after they had last parted company.

‘'Zounds!' Samuel's jolly eyes lit up. ‘Have you told Mr Fielding?'

‘Nicholas went round with a note containing the information early this morning. It should have reached the Beak before he set off for the Peerless Pool.'

The Goldsmith looked eager. ‘Shall we present our compliments to him before he leaves?'

‘By all means. But first let us find the lodging house of the late Hannah Rankin and see what information, if any, that yields up.'

On closer examination it was easy to see that the cottages of Ratcliff Row, which was situated a quarter of a mile further up the lane, directly opposite the fields and a path leading to Mr Kemp's house and the Pleasure Garden, had been rebuilt at the same time as the Cripplegate or God's Gift Almshouses. These had been founded by Edward Alleyn, the well-known actor and joint owner of the Fortune Theatre in Playhouse Yard. Originally put up in 1620, the almshouses had been modernised exactly one hundred years later. Each was one-storeyed, with a red-tiled roof, shuttered windows and a green front door that opened directly on to the street. The houses where Hannah had lived were similarly designed, except that their front doors were a bold, if somewhat weathered, blue. Jauntily approaching the first one, John raised the knocker.

Even before it descended, a woman appeared. ‘Yes?' she said beadily.

John assumed his urbane expression. ‘I am seeking the whereabouts of a Hannah Rankin. Would you be able to help me at all? Do you know where she lives?'

‘I might,' the woman answered, narrowing eyes that had not been large to start with.

‘So what must I do to obtain your assistance?' the Apothecary replied charmingly.

‘State your business,' she retorted. ‘That's what, young Sir.'

John conjectured possibilities, smiling the meanwhile. If he announced that he was conducting affairs on behalf of John Fielding, then he would have authority but little cooperation. If, on the other hand, he fabricated a feasible story, he might get a great deal further. His smile broadened and he bowed.

‘Mistress Rankin and I are distant cousins. I was hoping that I might pay my respects to her now that I am in town.'

The mean eyes glinted. ‘You don't look like no cousin to me. She's a rough thing, is Hannah.'

‘So you do know her?'

‘There's not many come and go in this row that I don't.'

Samuel entered the discussion with his usual disastrous approach. ‘I'll wager there's not much goes on here that you miss, Ma'am.'

He laughed heartily and looked affable but the woman curled her lip. ‘Are you saying that I am a busybody?'

Samuel began to bluster. ‘Gracious me, no. Merely a lady with sharp eyes who notices what her neighbours do.'

The woman made to slam the door shut but John stepped in to retrieve the situation. ‘Madam, as you correctly observed, I am not Hannah Rankin's cousin. However, I do represent the hospital of St Luke's, and the fact of the matter is that Hannah did not appear for work today, nor has she been seen there since the day before yesterday. I wondered, therefore, if you could tell me at which cottage she resides so that I might ask her landlord for information.'

‘Two doors down from me she lives, with one Mother Hamp, who takes in lodgers being as she is a widow woman.' She drew in breath. ‘So Hannah's disappeared, has she? I thought she'd been keeping strange company of late.'

The Apothecary raised a lively brow. ‘Really? Who, for example?'

‘A Frenchie from the Hospital, for a start. A right sly old fox he looks with his powder and patches. Then there was the coachman, a hulking big fellow. I wondered what she could be doing with such a pair of suitors.

‘You think they were that?'

‘Well, what else could they be, calling on a woman alone?'

‘Business connections?' said John, doubtfully.

Samuel snorted. ‘Hardly, I should have thought.'

Hannah's neighbour nodded. ‘Who could be doing business with a warder from the lunatic asylum? Unless it was something shady, of course.'

‘Perhaps that's the answer.' The Apothecary looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps Hannah was involved in some rum doings.'

The neighbour's ear for gossip was certainly acute: for she put her head on one side and said, ‘Was?'

Furious with himself for making such a crass mistake, John answered, ‘A figure of speech, that is all.'

But the woman did not seem altogether convinced for she watched the two friends closely as they went to the cottage where Hannah had lived, having politely thanked her for her help.

‘Do you think she believed me?' John muttered.

‘No,' Samuel whispered in reply.

‘The rumour of her possible death will soon be down the entire row.'

‘It's already started.'

And John saw out of the corner of his eye that the neighbour had gone to the house next door where she had been joined by another, very similar to herself, and that the pair of them were looking their way. Partly because of this, the Apothecary decided he must persuade Mother Hamp to let them in immediately and not stand talking on the doorstep, even if this meant revealing the true nature of his enquiry. Accordingly, when a greasy, grey-haired harridan of a great many years and exceedingly few teeth answered his summons, John, speaking in a low voice, said, ‘Madam, I urgently require you to let my companion and me into your house. We are here on the official business of Mr John Fielding of Bow Street.'

His plan was instantly thwarted by the crone cupping her ear and saying, ‘What? Speak up, young fellow. Can't hear a word.'

Horribly aware of the grin spreading over Samuel's jocund features, John leant close, his nose wrinkling at the terrible stink emanating from the hag's apparel and person, and repeated the message.

‘Bow Street?' she bawled in reply. ‘What have I got to do with Bow Street?'