Inspector of the Dead (29 page)

Westminster Hospital was behind Westminster Abbey, on a street called Broad Sanctuary. Centuries earlier, the area had acquired its name because that was where desperate people sought the church’s protection from debt collectors and political enemies. But he had received no sanctuary for his father when he’d gone to Westminster Hospital to beg doctors to help him.

Inside the dour building, he brushed snow from his coat. He heard groans and smelled disease.

“Can I help you?” a man behind a counter asked.

“My brother’s here. I came to visit him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Matthew O’Reilly.”

“I don’t remember an Irish patient,” the clerk said in confusion.

“He was knocked unconscious by a horse. He wouldn’t have been able to give his name.”

“I’ll check the records.”

The man went into a back room as if determined to assure himself that he couldn’t possibly have forgotten an Irish patient.

Stairs led downward. A sign said
MEDICAL SCHOOL,
another word for “morgue.”

He descended the stairs and reached a hallway of doors, one of which was open. A clerk peered up from a desk. “Can I help you?”

“Inspector Ryan sent me with a message for the surgeons examining Catherine Grantwood.”

The clerk nodded, seeming to recognize Ryan’s name. “Third door on the left. But you’ll need to wait. The surgeons haven’t arrived yet.”

“Thank you.”

He went down the corridor and knocked on the door. When no one answered, he went inside.

The room had a tiled floor with a drain in the middle. It was cold because of ice along both sides of a metal object the shape of a shallow bathtub. The odor of death was familiar from the months he’d spent on battlefields. A sheet covered what was obviously a body.

With a trembling hand he pulled back the sheet. Despite the horrors of the Crimea, he wasn’t prepared for what had been done to the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

To his wife.

To his unborn child.

“Catherine,” he murmured, weeping.

He imagined her terror as she came down the stairs and heard what was happening to her parents. When the intruders looked up and saw her, panic must have made her heart pound so fast that she feared she would faint. Hearing frantic steps behind her, she raced in the only possible direction—upward—hoping to reach her bedroom and secure the door.

He flinched as he thought about the pain when the first knife struck her. But she kept running upward, and the men kept stabbing, trying to quiet her. Frenzy gave her the strength to reach her room, but she couldn’t shut the door in time, and the men burst inside, striking with their knives, doing everything they could to stop her screams.

His tears fell on Catherine’s face. He drew a trembling finger along her once-glowing skin that now had the dullness of death. Dried blood covered breasts that he had previously seen only once—on his wedding night.

“This is
my
fault,” he said. “
I’m
the one who did this.
I’m
the one who killed you.”

No!
a part of him insisted.
Her parents killed her!

“I want to die,” he said.

The
queen
killed her!
Lord Cosgrove and all the others did it! The shopkeeper Burbridge did it! The same as all of them killed our mother and father and Emma and Ruth!

“I want to die,” he repeated with greater determination.

Not before we kill the queen.

The door suddenly opened. A man wearing an expensive frock coat stepped in, only to pause in surprise and stare over his spectacles.

“Who the devil are
you?
”

“I was looking for my brother. A horse kicked his head and—”

“What are you doing with that woman’s body?”

“I told you I’m looking for my brother. I raised the sheet to see if—”

“Quickly, someone bring a constable! There’s an Irishman touching Miss Grantwood’s body!”

“I’ll get help!” a voice yelled from along the corridor.

“Please,” he said. “No. This isn’t what you think.”

“Step away from the body!” The accuser raised his walking stick. “You vermin, you’ll regret coming here.”

“Don’t call me ‘vermin’!”

He twisted the walking stick from the man’s hand and struck him across the forehead.

Before the body hit the ground, he reached the corridor and saw a snow-specked constable hurrying down the stairs, accompanied by the clerk he’d spoken to in the hallway.

“What are you doing there? Stop!” the constable demanded.

Aware that police helmets were reinforced, he struck the walking stick against the patrolman’s chin, then swung and cracked the clerk’s skull.

He charged up the stairs and reached the main floor, where the first man he’d spoken to was bringing a patrolman through the entrance. Snow gusted beyond the open door.

“There!” the man said. “That’s the Irishman I told you about!”

“Put down the walking stick!” the constable ordered.

He knocked the policeman to the floor.

He knocked the other man to the floor, then raced outside, disappearing into the snowfall.

“T
hat’s where
Colonel Trask lives.” The porter gestured toward one of the adjoining houses on Bolton Street in Mayfair. “I sometimes come here to deliver business papers.”

“Thank you,” De Quincey said.

As the chill flurries thickened, De Quincey, Becker, and a constable stepped down from the police van. They approached the white stone building, where Becker knocked on the oak door.

A butler opened it, looking puzzled.

“I’m Detective Sergeant Becker. Is Colonel Trask here?”

The butler frowned at the badge that Becker showed, apparently unable to imagine why a policeman would come to this particular door—and surely the badge should belong to the uniformed constable, not to a man who was dressed in a commoner’s clothes and had a scar on his chin.

“The colonel hasn’t been here in several days,” the butler replied.

“What about Mr. Trask senior? We need to see him.”

“That isn’t possible. He never receives visitors without appointments.”

“Please tell him to make an exception. We’re here on an urgent matter that concerns the queen.”

“But this is his hour for manipulation.”

“I don’t care
what
he’s manipulating. Tell him—”

De Quincey slipped past the butler and entered the house.

“Just a moment,” the butler objected.

“We don’t have a moment,” Becker said.

He and the constable followed De Quincey.

“Where’s Mr. Trask?”

“In his bedroom, but—”

As speedily as his short legs allowed, De Quincey scurried up the elegant staircase. The butler rushed after him. Becker and the constable quickly followed.

They reached the entrance to a huge dining room and continued climbing.

“You don’t understand,” the butler insisted. “Mr. Trask can’t be disturbed.”

“I wouldn’t care to see Her Majesty’s expression if she heard about his indifference to her,” Becker said.

At the next level, they faced several doors.

“Which one?” Becker demanded.

The butler raised his hands in frustration. He opened a door, peered inside, and motioned for them to enter. “Now you’ll realize what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

De Quincey, Becker, and the constable entered a bedroom, and finally they did understand.

T
he manipulation
to which the butler had referred wasn’t anything that Jeremiah Trask was doing, but rather it was something that was being done to him. A thin, frail-looking man of perhaps sixty, he lay on a bed while an attendant moved his pajama-covered legs up and down, flexing and extending them. Another attendant raised his arms, lowered them, and shifted them from side to side.

The interruption made the attendants pause only briefly before resuming their task. The gauntness of Trask’s arms and legs, not to mention their lack of resistance, suggested that Trask was incapable of moving them on his own.

“He’s paralyzed?” Becker asked.

“For the past eight years,” the servant answered. “Because of an accident.”

Pitying him, Becker took a moment to adjust to what he was seeing. “Mr. Trask, I apologize for intruding. I’m a detective sergeant. We need to speak to you about an urgent matter concerning the queen.”

“He can’t reply,” the servant explained. “The accident left him incapable of speech.”

Becker sighed, as if he’d thought he’d seen every form of misery but now had encountered a new one. “Can he communicate at all? Perhaps he can use a pencil and paper.”

“He can blink.”

“Pardon me?”

“He can answer questions that require a yes or no by blinking—once for yes and twice for no.”

“For the past eight years?” Becker shook his head forlornly. “God save us.”

De Quincey approached the bed.

Although Trask’s face was immobile, his eyes managed to shift in De Quincey’s direction. Their gray matched the pallor of Trask’s hair and his sunken cheeks, all of them the color of despair.

“Mr. Trask, my name is Thomas De Quincey. Many years ago, I wrote a book called
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
”

As if to prove his assertion, De Quincey withdrew his laudanum bottle and drank from it.

“I also wrote a series of essays about the fine art of murder and one about
Macbeth
and another about the English mail coaches that traveled our great land before your railways put an end to that adventurous means of transportation. At night, I used to enjoy sitting atop those coaches, feeling the speed of the mighty horses, watching the different shades of darkness we passed.”

Trask kept staring at him.

“I was a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and even wrote essays that helped establish their reputations before the latter—a snob—turned against me for marrying what he called a milkmaid. The quantity of my opium ingestion is such that crocodiles and sphinxes threaten me in my nightmares. The only things more persistent are the infinite bill collectors who pursue me. A landlord once kept me a prisoner for a year, forcing me to write my way out of the debt I owed him.”

Trask’s eyes communicated no hint of confusion or annoyance or amusement. His gaze was as impassive as the sphinxes to which De Quincey had referred.

Noting that saliva leaked from a corner of Trask’s mouth, De Quincey took out a handkerchief and dabbed it away.

“All that is by way of introduction. As a stranger who imposes himself upon you, I hope that this helps to remove any barrier between us, for I have a question that I must ask, and its personal nature is such that I beg your indulgence. Are we sufficiently acquainted? Do I have your permission to ask the question?”

Trask studied him with motionless features. He closed his eyelids for an instant longer than a normal blink would require.

“I take that as a yes. Thank you. Forgive my bluntness. Is Anthony Trask your son?”

A moment passed. Then another. And another.

Trask closed his eyes once. Then again.

It seemed to De Quincey that the effort Trask made to scrunch his eyelids shut was the equivalent of screaming.

No!

F
rom the prison
of his withered, unfeeling body, Jeremiah Trask peered up at the strange man whose clothing suggested that he’d just come from a funeral. This tiny visitor, the tall man with him, and the constable were the only unfamiliar people he had seen in…had the servant said “eight years”? The force of so much lost time assaulted Trask’s mind, making the room seem to spin. Could he possibly have lain immobile on this bed for
eight years?
With each day the same, with no way to measure the passage of weeks and months, he felt trapped in a constantly repeating hell. The only variation occurred when the man who called himself Anthony Trask brought bankers and lawyers, claiming to have carefully explained the details of various business ventures to him.

“Isn’t that right, Father?” the man who called himself Anthony Trask would say. “Last night, I read the documents to you. I told you my analysis of their implications. You agree that we should move forward with these projects and that I represent you when I sign the contracts.”

In front of witnesses, Jeremiah Trask had always closed his eyes once to indicate yes, afraid of the scissors or the acid that his supposed son had vowed to inflict on his eyes if he failed to obey. He couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped not only in his withered body but also in the blind darkness of his mind. His mind was already dark, tortured by the countless times he’d imagined how his life would have been different if he hadn’t gone to Covent Garden market that morning fifteen years earlier and seen the ragged boy desperately begging vegetable sellers for food.

Now, for the first time in eight years, he was alone with strangers. Two of them were police officers. This might be his only chance.

“We think that the man who calls himself Anthony Trask actually has the last name of O’Brien. Is that true?” the Opium-Eater asked.

Trask scrunched his eyes shut once.

“Do you know his
first
name?” the Opium-Eater continued.

Again Trask scrunched his eyes shut once.

“If you have the strength, let us assign a number to each letter in the alphabet. In that way, you can spell his name.”

Trask lowered his eyelids three times.

“The letter
C,
” the Opium-Eater said.

Trask calculated which number would correspond with the letter
O
. Exhausted, he pressed his eyes shut fifteen times.

Then he closed his eyes twelve times.

“
L
,” the Opium-Eater said.

And nine times.

“
I,
” the Opium-Eater said. “Is the next letter
N?
Is his first name Colin?”

Yes!
Protect me from him!
Trask inwardly screamed.

H
orseshoes thundering
, the police wagon sped down Constitution Hill, passed Green Park, and stopped at the main gate to Buckingham Palace. Snow kept falling.

De Quincey and Becker jumped down among the many guards at the entrance. Officers shouted directions to soldiers. Constables took positions along the walls that bordered the palace’s gardens.

As Becker showed his badge to the guards at the gate, another police wagon arrived. Commissioner Mayne hurried to join them.

“A man who matches the colonel’s description was seen at the morgue in Westminster Hospital,” Mayne reported. “A surgeon found him holding up the sheet that covered Catherine Grantwood’s body. After attacking the surgeon, two constables, and two clerks, he escaped. He’s wearing brown corduroy trousers and a matching laborer’s coat. Every patrolman is looking for him.”

“But dressed that way, he can hide among millions of laborers,” Becker said, “or else he can change his appearance again.”

Commissioner Mayne nodded tensely. “The palace is more heavily guarded than ever. Unless he shows himself again, I don’t know what else can be done.”

“Has Her Majesty been informed?”

“That’s why I’m here. She’s in conference with Lord Palmerston. It’s better to explain everything to both of them at once.”

With Mayne giving orders to constables, they gained speedy access to the palace. An escort hurried them along spectacular hallways and up the Grand Staircase.

Again they were taken to the Throne Room.

“I don’t understand why Her Majesty chose so vast an area to meet with her prime minister,” Mayne said.

The explanation became obvious when they were permitted to enter.

This was Lord Palmerston’s first official day in office. Prime ministers weren’t sworn in during a public ceremony. Instead they received their power in a symbolic private conference with Her Majesty. Queen Victoria sat on her throne. Prince Albert stood conspicuously next to her. She wore a regal tiara as she peered down from the high dais toward Lord Palmerston, who seemed uncharacteristically small—which was evidently how she and Prince Albert wanted him to view their relationship. The chill of the immense room perhaps emphasized their attitude toward him, also.

They turned, confused by the interruption.

De Quincey, Mayne, and Becker swiftly approached and bowed.

“Your Majesty, at your dinner on Sunday, do you recall our discussion about Thomas Griffiths Wainewright?” De Quincey asked.

“The murderer?” Queen Victoria nodded, continuing to look confused about the interruption. “Albert remarked that murderers must inevitably reveal their guilt by their behavior, but you maintained that some murderers are so callous, they manage to conceal what they are. You used the example of Wainewright, with whom you shared a meal without having any suspicion of his homicidal character.”

“On Sunday evening, at least one of your guests no doubt followed the conversation with great interest, Your Majesty. When Edward Oxford discharged two pistols at you fifteen years ago, do you recall a young Irish boy who ran next to your carriage, begging you to help his mother and father and sisters?” De Quincey asked.

“I have no recollection. The gunshots are all that I remember.”

“No one else paid attention to him, either,” De Quincey said. “The boy’s mother and sisters died in Newgate. I suspect that the father suffered his own harsh fate. Since that time, the boy has plotted to avenge himself on everyone whom he begged for help.”

“An Irish boy? But no one who is Irish attended Sunday’s dinner,” Lord Palmerston objected.

“Colonel Trask did, My Lord.”

“Colonel Trask? Why do you mention him? He isn’t Irish.”

De Quincey merely looked at Lord Palmerston.

“You’re telling me that Colonel Trask is Irish? How can that be, when his father isn’t Irish? How is it possible that the father of a beggar could have become as wealthy as Jeremiah Trask?”

“We don’t yet know those answers, but our thoughts often create a false reality, My Lord.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Just because everyone says that Jeremiah Trask is the colonel’s father, that doesn’t make it true.” De Quincey turned toward Queen Victoria. “Your Majesty, Colonel Trask is the man responsible for the recent murders and the threats against you.”

“A war hero who saved my cousin’s life? A knight of the realm? One of the wealthiest men in the empire? No.”

“His real name is Colin O’Brien, Your Majesty,” Becker said, “and please believe us, with all his might, he intends to harm you.”

“C
olonel Trask
… Sir Anthony…I didn’t recognize you in—”

“These work clothes? I decided that I’ve come too far from the days when I helped my father build railways. It’s a lesson to see how people react to me when I’m dressed as a laborer.”

“I meant no offense, Sir Anthony.”

“None taken. But I find myself short of funds and need to make a withdrawal.”

“Of course. What amount do you require?”

“I wish to transfer five thousand pounds to a man who operates a carriage service in Watford.”

“Five thousand pounds?” the banker asked in surprise. It was a huge sum, given that a carriage driver might earn no more than a pound or two each week.

“In service to me, his business was destroyed. I wish to repay him. I don’t know his name, but he recently broke a leg, and a Doctor Gilmore in Watford can identify him. Kindly make the arrangements at once.”

“Yes, Sir Anthony,” the banker replied, not approving of such munificence.

“Also I require five thousand pounds in notes.”

Now the banker was truly perplexed. “Are you taking a long journey?”

“Indeed.”

At the end of the meeting, he put some of the banknotes in his pockets and the majority in a leather pouch.

Outside the bank, he entered a clothing shop. Knowing that the police would be searching for a man in corduroy clothes, he bought woolen ones to replace them, changing their brown to gray, a color that would soon blend with the night and the worsening weather. He kept his workman’s cap but stuffed it into his overcoat pocket and replaced it with a gentleman’s top hat.

He entered a cutlery shop and bought a knife in a sheath.

By then the streets were almost deserted, only a few people shifting past him, eager to take shelter from the snow and the murderer whom newsboys were warning about. A few cabs and coaches braved the accumulation on the slippery cobblestones, but they would soon be gone.

Constables lingered, however, watching from alcoves, alert for anyone who matched the description of the man who’d fled from Westminster Hospital. But his top hat and gentleman’s overcoat automatically excluded him from being the criminal they watched for. Within five minutes he passed three patrolmen, and each time he said, “Thanks for keeping the rest of us safe.”

“Just doin’ my job, sir.”

He entered a chophouse, which was almost empty. He crossed the red and black tiles that checkered the floor and sat at a cloth-covered table next to shimmering coals in a glowing iron-lined hearth. He hoped to absorb the heat, knowing that it might be a long time before he could get warm again—or possibly never.

“Sorry, sir, the kitchen’s closed,” the proprietor said, wiping his hands on an apron stretched over his large chest. “Because of the weather.”

“For a sovereign, can you give me bread, butter, strawberry jam, and hot tea?”

The gold coin he set on the table was far more than anyone usually paid for those items.

“Right away, sir.”

Bread, butter, strawberry jam, and hot tea had been what Jeremiah Trask offered him fifteen years earlier.

Jeremiah Trask,
he thought bitterly.
You were punished, too.

The sequence of his many victims streamed through his seething memory. He thought of the Newgate guards whose abuse had prompted Emma to strangle her mother and young Ruth and then hang herself. After ten years the guards had been released from their punishment in the nightmarish hulks. But that punishment wasn’t sufficient. By then he was in a position to receive reports about them. Discovering their shabby lodgings, he’d arranged for a tavern owner to promise to bring children to them. When they eagerly responded to a knock on the door, they discovered that it was he who visited them.

He’d located the St. John’s Wood constable who’d callously delivered the news about his mother’s arrest. After following the constable to his lodging house, he had waited for him to go to sleep, then hurled three lanterns through his basement bedroom window, flooding the room with fiery coal oil, listening to the constable’s screams as he burned to death.

He’d returned to the half-completed village in which he and his parents and sisters had lived. Because the people there had failed to offer food to his helpless sisters while he and his father struggled through the labyrinth of London’s legal system, he had poisoned the village well. A month later, it had given him satisfaction to find the village abandoned, the graveyard filled with many new occupants.

The law clerks who’d scorned his father and him…the governor of Newgate Prison who’d failed to supervise the guards…the sergeant at the St. John’s Wood police station who’d sent his mother to Newgate…Year by year he’d advanced through his list, constantly adding to it, postponing and yet relentlessly approaching the culmination of his revenge: the destruction of those who most deserved to be punished.

“Here’s your bread, butter, jam, and hot tea, sir.”

In the Crimea, he would have given anything for a simple meal like this before he went into battle. He needed his strength. There was much to do.

Mother.

Father.

Emma.

Ruth.

Something switched in his mind, other victims joining the litany of those for whom he grieved.

My wife.

My unborn child.

I want to die.

“S
urely if we remain
in the palace, he can’t reach us,” Prince Albert said.

“Indeed you’re surrounded by constables and soldiers, Your Highness,” Commissioner Mayne confirmed.

“But how long can the palace be guarded this way? Weeks? Months?” Prince Albert persisted.

“If necessary, Your Highness.”

“Longer than that?”

The commissioner glanced down. “We’re searching for him, Your Highness. He needs shelter and food. He can’t escape us forever.”

“But he has such immense resources. He’s been channeling his rage for fifteen years. His patience is infinite,” Prince Albert said.

“No,” Queen Victoria interrupted. “I refuse to allow it.”

“Your Majesty?” Commissioner Mayne asked in surprise.

“With so many soldiers outside the palace day after day, possibly for weeks and months, the people on the street will wonder why we feel the need for so much additional protection. The people might even think we fear that the Russians are about to invade.”

“We could go to Windsor Castle,” Prince Albert proposed. “The increased guards would be less conspicuous there.”

Becker walked to a curtain and pulled it open, revealing snow that streaked past a tall window. Shadows thickened.

“You wouldn’t be able to travel until tomorrow at the earliest, Your Highness. How many coaches would you need for yourselves, your children, and your staff?”

“Too many to avoid attracting attention,” a voice said.

They turned toward the interruption.

Ryan entered the room, leaning against Emily. Becker ran to him.

“Inspector Ryan,” Queen Victoria said, “you have blood on your coat.”

“I reopened the wound I received seven weeks ago, Your Majesty.” As Ryan reached a chair near the dais, Emily and Becker helped him ease onto it. “Dr. Snow has bandaged me securely.” Ryan winced. “Perhaps
too
securely.”

“You shouldn’t be here.” Showing her fondness for Ryan, the queen descended from the dais and walked toward him. “You need to rest.”

“When this is over, Your Majesty. All the time I was at Dr. Snow’s office, I kept thinking that the palace is exactly where I needed to be, protecting you as I did fifteen years ago.”

“Your loyalty touches me.”

“I would die for you,” Ryan said. “I heard you consider shifting locations to Windsor Castle. Your Majesty, you’d need so many coaches that you couldn’t possibly do it in secret.”

“Perhaps if we prepared
several
groups of coaches and sent them to different places,” Lord Palmerston offered. “The colonel couldn’t know which of them to follow.”

“But what would the newspapers make of numerous coaches leaving all at once and in all directions?” Queen Victoria objected. Although her voice was high pitched, it carried remarkable authority. “The result would be the same. With so much confusion, the people on the street would decide that we’re in a state of panic, presumably because of a Russian threat. Our enemy would take heart while our soldiers lost morale. No. While the storm persists, assign as many guards to protect the palace as you can. But when the weather clears…”

“Your Majesty, to make sure that I understand,” Commissioner Mayne said, “are you truly suggesting that tomorrow, to project confidence to your subjects, you wish the guards to be reduced to their usual number?”

H
is direction took him
past the gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall.

Despite his respectable appearance, a constable stopped him.

“If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what’s your business?”

“I’m on a personal errand to deliver a large amount of money to a lord whose identity I’m not permitted to reveal.”

“Large amount of money?”

“Five thousand pounds in banknotes.”

He opened the leather pouch and invited the constable to aim his lantern at it. The constable had never seen that much money in his life. He inhaled sharply.

“Best be on your way and finish your business in a hurry, sir. There’s a bad man on the streets.”