Inspector of the Dead (17 page)

“No!” Mayne shouted. “
This
way.”

He dragged his wife and daughter back toward their front door.

The figure slid with alarming speed down the bedsheets.

Mayne fumbled in a trouser pocket for his key.

The figure released his grip and dropped.

With trembling hands, Mayne scraped the key against the door’s lock.

The figure landed, bent his knees, and rolled.

“Father!” Judith screamed.

Mayne shoved the key into the lock, twisted it, and thrust the door open.

As the man sprang to his feet, Mayne briefly saw that he had a beard. The speed—indeed the frenzy—with which the man charged toward them was terrifying, his palpably savage emotion communicating a rage more extreme than anything Mayne had ever encountered.

Mayne felt paralyzed by the force racing toward him. Abruptly, with a desperate shout, he pushed Georgiana and Judith into the house, hurried inside behind them, and slammed the door.

The three of them pressed against the door as their attacker walloped against it. Mayne turned the key as the man outside struck the door again and screamed.

“He can smash through a window!” Judith warned.

“Up the stairs! The master bedroom!” Mayne urged them.

“But he’ll have us trapped!” Georgiana said.

“Do what I ask!”

A window shattered in the sitting room.

They climbed hurriedly, hearing someone from a neighboring house yell, “What’s going on? You! What are you doing over there?”

Out of breath, they passed the shattered door to Judith’s room and the open door to the closet where the intruder had hidden.

With a final rush they entered the master bedroom, slammed the door, and slid a bureau in front of it. While Georgiana and Judith leaned against it, Mayne opened the closet and took out a firearms case from a corner.

The case contained an Enfield rifle-musket, the improved weapon that English soldiers were using in the Crimea. The rifling in the barrel meant that bullets flew with greater accuracy. Some members of the gentry who lived in Chester Square had acquired Enfields for hunting boar and stags in Scotland. A duke had invited Mayne to a shooting holiday on his estate there the previous autumn, but the pressures of work had prevented Mayne from going.

He tore a cartridge packet open and poured gunpowder down the barrel. After dropping a bullet down the barrel, he used the Enfield’s ramrod to tap the load securely into place. Then he placed a percussion cap under the weapon’s hammer.

All night long, sitting in a corner, with Judith and Georgiana next to him, he aimed toward the door.

J
ust west of the
Tower of London sat a gin-house called the Wheel of Fortune. Convenient to the banks, insurance companies, and trading enterprises of the business district, the Wheel of Fortune was nestled on Shore Lane, near the Thames. Many clerks and even their supervisors made their way to it after their daily labors. They claimed to savor the quality of its pork pies, but the real attraction was the bargain price of the beer and the gin.

Noting the late hour, the tavern’s owner herded his few remaining patrons out the door.

“Closing time. Drink up. I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks for your patronage. On your way now. Be careful of the snow. Don’t fall down and freeze to death.”

The owner’s name was Thaddeus Mitchell, and as he locked the door, he showed no surprise that one customer remained, hunching over his drink at the end of the bar.

Thaddeus shuttered the windows. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said.

“Quentin Quassia, Doctor of Drink, at your service,” the man replied. Turning with a smile, he offered his sizeable hand. He had a round, florid face and a mischievous look in his eyes.

“Where’s Edward?” Thaddeus asked.

“In bed with a stomach ailment, but not because of anything he drank.” Quentin chuckled as if he’d made a grand joke. “Never fear—my brother and I are equally expert doctors of drink.” This, too, he found humorous enough to merit a chuckle.

“But how do I know you can really do the job?” Thaddeus asked.

“If you’re not satisfied, it won’t cost you a penny. I can make that promise because I know you’ll like the result.”

“Show me.”

Thaddeus went behind the bar and raised a trapdoor that revealed stairs down to the cellar. After lighting a lantern, he motioned for the stranger to follow him down.

The cellar had a damp odor that came from the nearby river. The place felt cold. Several rows of large barrels stretched before him.

The stranger carried a large sack. “I’ll start with the beer,” he said.

“That’s what your brother always does. What’s your name again?”

“Quentin Quassia.”

“Your brother never gave his last name. Quassia. Unusual.”

“It’s a plant from South America. Tea from it helps the digestion.”

Quentin unpacked various bottles and packages, putting them on a shelf.

Sitting on a stool, Thaddeus watched. He was thirty-two. He had owned the Wheel of Fortune for eight years and intended to sell it. With his profit from the sale and the £10,000 he’d saved over the years, he planned to retire on a country property. The return on his investment put to shame many of the financial schemes that he’d overheard clerks and their supervisors discussing over their pork pies and drinks.

Anyone could get a beer license. The problem was how to obtain a
gin
license. In the early weeks of his business, Thaddeus had been happy to lose money, serving the best brew available, selling it for less than he paid, winning the goodwill of the neighborhood. After a time, he let his enthusiastic customers know that he was thinking about acquiring a gin license. When he asked them to support his petition to the necessary magistrates, they gladly did so, and after acquiring the gin license, Thaddeus then consulted with a drink doctor, who gradually diluted the beer and the gin, adding ingredients to make the beverages taste the same as before. In this fashion, three casks of beer or gin could be multiplied into seven. Although Thaddeus kept the price of the drinks as low as he had earlier, his profit would have made the eyes of the financial experts widen.

Of course, Thaddeus could have diluted and adulterated the beverages on his own, but his father—a tavern owner also—had warned him to rely only on an expert, lest his customers sense the difference.

“Your brother never told me what he puts in the beer and the gin,” Thaddeus told Quentin.

“Of course not. If you knew our secrets, we’d be out of business.”

Quentin opened four empty barrels and distributed the beer from three full barrels so that each of the seven contained the same amount. He then measured and added various ingredients to each barrel.

One of the substances was in fact the powdered wood from quassia, the plant that provided Quentin’s last name. Quassia stimulated appetite, which was why Thaddeus’s customers devoured his pork pies and demanded more beer.

Next came licorice, just enough to add a distinctive taste that allowed Thaddeus to brag to his customers that his brewer was a genius.

Then Quentin added powdered Indian berry, which had an extreme intoxicating effect that compensated for the reduced alcohol in the mixture.

“Where are your casks of water?”

“There.” Thaddeus pointed.

The two of them added the water to the seven barrels and tasted the result.

“You’re right. This beer’s as good as your brother makes,” Thaddeus said.

“
Better
than what my brother makes.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not paying you any more than I pay
him.
”

Quentin laughed and proceeded to the gin. Again he distributed the contents of three barrels so that they were equally divided into seven.

“What do you call this when you serve it to customers?” Quentin asked.

“Cream of the Valley.”

“Ha.”

The only ingredient that Thaddeus was allowed to know about were the cakes of sugar that he’d been told to obtain.

Quentin added the necessary amount of sugar to each barrel, experience having shown that after customers acquired a fondness for sweetened gin, they wouldn’t accept the gin supplied by honest distillers.

“Now a little flavor.” Quentin added the powder of juniper berry.

“And a little bite.” He poured in a measured amount of a substance known as vitriol, which chemists called sulphuric acid. Some customers learned to crave it.

“And water.” Quentin filled the barrels and stirred. “You now have another delivery of Cream of the Valley.”

Thaddeus tasted it. “Yes, better than your brother makes. Can you come back next time instead of him?”

“Edward wouldn’t like me stealing his customers,” Quentin said with another chuckle.

“You’re the happiest man I met today.”

“No point in being glum. But I’ll be happier when you pay me.”

Thaddeus counted out three sovereigns. After the two men climbed the stairs, Quentin shouldered his bag of ingredients and walked across the sand-covered floor toward the exit.

“Tell your brother I hope he feels better,” Thaddeus said.

“Thank you. He’ll be grateful for your concern.”

As the man who called himself Quentin stepped outside into the cold, he thought,
Feel better? Hell, Edward Quassia won’t feel anything again.
He’s frozen stiff under a snowdrift with his head bashed in.

The member of Young England had taken care only to seem to taste the beer and gin that he’d diluted and adulterated. Although the tavern’s owner hadn’t consumed enough to be affected, tomorrow the thirst-creating beverages would show unforgettable results. Young England and the bearded man who led them would be pleased.

“I
n the morning,
I heard distant pounding on my front door,” Commissioner Mayne told the shocked group in his Scotland Yard office.

Ryan and Becker listened intently. De Quincey and Emily sat on wooden chairs next to them, having spent the night at Lord Palmerston’s house. His Lordship had reluctantly invited them to resume living there after it appeared—to his horror—that the queen might ask them to stay at the palace.

“My fear,” Mayne continued, “was that the intruder might have regained access to my house, waiting for my family and me to emerge from the bedroom. With great unease, we finally took the risk. After we slid the bureau away and opened the door, I aimed the Enfield toward the corridor. The pounding downstairs increased, along with a man’s voice shouting my name. The door to the closet in the corridor remained open. We hurried past it, and past my daughter’s shattered door. I aimed the musket this way and that as we descended.

“When I called to the man beyond the front door, he identified himself as the constable who’d driven me home the previous night. I quickly unlocked the door, but even if two other constables had accompanied him, I wouldn’t have felt safe. The window of the sitting room was shattered. The house was extremely cold, but no colder than I felt inside. After the constable used his clacker to summon other patrolmen, they searched the entire house. They found marks where the intruder had indeed pried open the skylight.”

“And your servant?” Ryan asked.

The commissioner shook his head. “While she slept, the intruder had…”

The group became silent.

“There was a note, of course,” De Quincey finally said.

Mayne nodded. “The intruder dropped it into the sitting room after he shattered the window.”

“And I assume that the note’s message was ‘Young England’?” De Quincey asked, fingering his laudanum bottle.

“Yes.”

“Today there’ll be another murder in a public place comparable to the church and the skating area—somewhere that a crowd would normally feel safe,” De Quincey predicted.

“I recalled every constable who isn’t already on duty,” Commissioner Mayne said. “But given the increased protection at the palace and the various crime areas that need to be investigated, there aren’t enough patrolmen to watch everywhere.”

“The storm may have helped us,” Becker suggested. “Given the condition of the streets, there’s less traffic. Not to mention, even before the newspapers appeared this morning, word of the killings spread rapidly. Some people are staying home out of fear.”

“But because houses have been attacked in addition to public places, people won’t feel safe behind their locked doors, either,” Ryan said.

De Quincey looked up from his laudanum bottle. “Commissioner, please repeat what the intruder said about you, your wife, and your daughter.”

“As he tried to smash down the bedroom door, he shouted, ‘Your daughter will suffer the way my sisters did!’ Then he yelled, ‘Your wife and you will suffer the way my mother and father did!’”

“Does that mean anything to you, sir?” Ryan asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Mayne replied. “It’s impossible for me to imagine harming anyone’s family.”

“The killings include a prison administrator and a judge,” De Quincey pointed out. “And now
you,
a police commissioner, nearly became a victim, along with your family. Clearly someone has a tiger’s rage to avenge an injustice of the criminal system—or what the killer
perceives
to be an injustice.”

“But that would include almost everyone who ever went to prison. They all claim they’re innocent,” Mayne said. “I’ve been a commissioner for twenty-six years. If we searched my records, how would we ever single out one family in all that time? Then we’d need to look at Lord Cosgrove’s records and those of the judge, trying to find a common link. That could take months.”

Ryan echoed what Commissioner Mayne had told them.
“Your daughter will suffer the way my sisters did.”
He thought a moment.
“Your wife and you will suffer the way my mother and father did.”

“That’s what the intruder yelled,” the commissioner agreed.

“Please help my mother and father and sisters,”
Ryan added.

“No, the intruder didn’t say that.”

“But I heard it.” Ryan had a long-ago look.

“You’re not making sense.”