The Thief Taker (5 page)

Chapter Eight

Charlie’s gaze was fixed on the shrouded shape of the corpse. It lay on a plain cot-bed, atop a straw mattress. Blood had leaked through the rust spattered straw, forming a dark pool on the floorboards below.

The girl’s body had been wrapped in a winding sheet, gathered in a crown of linen at the head. The winding sheet covered almost all of the face, leaving the eyes, set in their slice of death-pale skin, all that was visible of the dead girl’s features.

Downstairs a door closed, but he hardly heard it.

His mind had already ticked into thief taker mode and had been
framing possibilities as the blood-stained bedroom had come into view.

The floorboards were poorly fixed and afforded ample sound and light to travel up from below.

The murderer must have been able to hear the family below, as he worked.
Committing the crime with her family downstairs suggested he was brutally callous, as well as calculating.

Charlie returned his attention to the girl’s remains.

The dead face lay bloodless and pale. It seemed to be taking up the whole room.

Two silver groats weighed down her eyes, giving the face an inhuman quality.

Charlie guessed some mutilation must have been made to the lower face and was now respectfully concealed.

He took a step nearer the corpse and a choking stench arrested his nostrils.

Charlie drew the lavender nosegay tightly against his nose. His insides swirled bright and cold. In his experience deadly illnesses had distinct odours. Was it plague he could smell on the body?

From what he could see the upper features gave no indication that death had involved a struggle.

He considered this. Maria’s sister had either known her killer, or believed him a real plague doctor.

‘Bring out your dead!’

The loud ringing from the outside street jolted him out of his thoughts. And a hoarse cry announced the rumbling approach of a dead-cart. Since the pestilence had risen the burial wagons now patrolled London regularly. Plague victims could not be buried in proper graves, and their families were often too poor to pay for
a coff
in.

To Charlie’s mind the cart sounded ominously close and a sudden fear flashed through him. What if the dead-cart arrived here and shut him up inside?

Since April anyone found in a plague house was imprisoned there until they died or survived six weeks.

Instinctively he stepped out of sight of the window. And then he noticed that the winding sheet which swaddled the limbs tight was woollen.

This wouldn’t be strange in many parts of the city. King Charles had decreed all burial materials to be made of wool to bolster the country’s sheep trade. But in wealthy Holbourne he would expect householders to pay extra to avoid such a vulgar burial.

So the family did not have enough money to wrap their beloved daughter in linen. He logged the fact against the fee which Maria had offered.

Something wasn’t right.

The same uncomfortable feeling crept through him.

Softening his tread Charlie stepped from the room and back to the opening. He froze.

The ladder leading back downstairs had gone.

He was trapped.

Maria must have removed his means of escape almost the moment he’d stepped onto the landing.

Charlie tried to stem his racing thoughts and quickly distilled them to one. He had to get out. Now.

First he needed to know if Maria was still below. Perhaps she could be reasoned with.

He moved back into the bedroom. His mind was whirling with reasons why Maria might want to trap him here. Had she gone mad with grief? Was it an innocent relocation of the ladder? Nothing plausible sprang to mind.

‘I have seen the body,’ he shouted, keeping his voice casual. The rumble of the dead-cart echoed ever closer over the cobbles. ‘What more would you have me do Maria? For I should not like to take away the winding sheet.’

There was no reply, and he called again.

‘Would you have me know anything else?’ he said. ‘Or shall I come back down?’

Again he was greeted by silence.

So Maria had gone. Or was waiting silently downstairs for him. He made a quick assessment. The door had slammed.

So she must have stolen the ladder and left the house. And that could only mean one thing. She was bringing someone else back with her. Someone who she didn’t think he would have agreed to meet unless he was trapped on an upstairs landing.

This was bad.

He made a quick assessment. Two escape routes. The first posed two possible problems – the distance between the upstairs and the landing and the possibility that the front door had been bolted from outside.

The second was the bedroom window. One problem only. The distance of the fall.

He stepped around the bed and to the window.

The house was high, and the road beneath was cobbled rather than dirt track. He judged it was an ankle at least he risked by
leaping
. He struggled again to make sense of the situation.

Why would she have trapped him here?

He looked down again. If he made anything other than a clean break or sprain an amputation was unavoidable. Half the regulars at the Bucket wielded wooden limbs of some kind, and he had no intention of joining them. He didn’t have twenty shillings for the surgeon in any case.

It was then he saw Maria walking back down the street towards the house.

She was accompanied by two burly looking men whose uniform Charlie recognised as from Newgate Prison.

Guards.

His hand dropped to the bag of counterfeit groats in his pocket. Owning forged coins counted as treason and was punishable by being half hung before having your heart ripped out and shown to you. Less fortunate counterfeiters were boiled in oil.

He stuttered out a silent curse. The men at Newgate tended to use a hands-on approach to questioning and would certainly empty his pockets.

Charlie swore. This ruled out escape by the window or the landing. If he fell badly the guards would easily catch him.

He scanned the room. Nothing. Only the bed and bare floorboards secured with thick nails. The few handfuls of straw inside the mattress offered nothing to break his fall.

Think
.
Why has she trapped you here and brought guards?

If he could work out the reason, perhaps he could talk his way out of danger.

His eyes flicked to the corpse. Maria had said her sister had been brutally murdered. Had she been telling the truth?

The winding sheet was not quite finished at the neck and
Charlie
took out his knife to slice open the wool.

He paused for a moment and then gripped the blade more determinedly. Maria had, after all, tricked and trapped him for no reason he thought he deserved.

‘Bring out your dead!’

The call galvanised him to a decision. Newgate guards would soon be in the house and if he wanted to avoid a traitor’s execution he needed to act. Ignoring his finer instincts he forced his attention back to the body.

His knife sliced the first inch of winding sheet and he paused for a moment.

The dead girl’s coin eyes glared at him accusingly.

Images of the last traitor’s execution swam before him.
Twitching
eyes. Shining intestines.

Charlie firmed his grip and slashed down. The wool winding sheet parted inch by inch, giving up a powder of woollen dust.

Voices floated up from the street below. Maria and the guards were closing in.

Turning back to the body, Charlie continued to cut.

An arm. A leg.

Pale and bloodied skin.

His hand began to shake.

A sharp pain bit into his arm. He jerked the knife down in shock, tugging and tearing the cloth fully away from the corpse.

It was just a flea bite, and he raised the injured wrist to rub the rising red weal, allowing his juddering heart to dance its rib-bruising beat.

He turned back to the bed, and the full vision of the murdered girl was before him.

His dagger clattered to the floor in alarm.

The corpse was now naked and exposed from neck to calf. And Charlie was confronted with the full madness of the
m
urderer’s wo
rk.

Maria’s sister had been decorated all over in flowering branches of hawthorn and white ribbon. Each finger and toe had been carefully tied and long lengths wound up each leg.

Her brown hair was knotted all over with fabric and foliage. The dead mouth was stuffed with it. Thorns from the branch sliced at her lips.

His eyes skittered over the rest of the body.

Dripped over the pallid torso was white candlewax. It seemed to have been arranged in the shape of . . .
letters.
Charlie struggled to make out the words.

‘He Returns’.

He returns?

His eyes slid to the throat. The girl’s neck had been cut down to the spine, and cream vertebrae were visible against the blackening meat of butchered tissue.

On the lower torso a livid red mark stood out against the
rivulets
of blood which had dried all over.

The killer had branded the girl.

The burned mark blazed out from the cold dead body. And the crimson lump of burned skin was raised in a shape he was only too familiar with.

It was a crown, over three knots.

Charlie’s hand flew to his keepsake, fingers tracing the identical pattern on his key.

For years he had searched for the meaning of the symbol, and he had never found any indication that it meant anything to anyone. But here it was, burned into the body of a dead girl.

It was then he realised why Maria had brought him here. The shock shook him so bodily he spoke out loud. ‘She does not want a thief taker,’ he said. ‘She thinks me her sister’s murderer.’

Chapter Nine

He returns.
Charlie turned the phrase over in his mind and the key in his hand.

He checked again for plague marks on the corpse. There were no ruptured veins. No swellings. The neck had been cut in a single deep slash which went nearly to the spine. Though the arrangement of the dead features suggested the girl had died without much struggle.

Then there was the hawthorn which decorated the body. On May Day young men hung hawthorn on the door of the girl they hoped to marry. But now was July and the thorn bush had no
obvious
use.

Think Charlie. Your life could depend on this.

With effort, he compartmentalised his thoughts, forcing his attention away from the approaching guards.

Branding. Words. Hawthorn. Candlewax.

It was a sacrifice, he decided. The more he thought about it the surer he was. The body had been laid out like some gruesome ritual.

But for what? ‘He returns’? Something to do with the new King?

Charlie sifted through his thoughts on who might be motivated to kill in this way.

Witches, perhaps. There were a few in the countryside. And since the King had returned, some had risen up in the city. They were known to sacrifice victims. Was this a witchcraft killing?

But something jarred at his deeper instincts.

What is wrong with the picture?

Somehow, something was missing. He didn’t quite know what. The murder scene felt unfinished. It was a nagging feeling that he couldn’t quite resolve.

He shelved the idea for a moment, turning to the matter of the guards. He was imprisoned on the upper floor, with a bag of forged coins, wearing a key whose symbol marked a dead girl. Even if he managed to convince the guards of his innocence it would likely follow some interrogatory procedures. London’s condemned criminals were often wheeled through the public streets, and Charlie had always held a cold terror that he might one day join the mangled wretches on the hanging cart.

You need to solve this crime.
The thought spiked him, urgently.

His eyes settled back on the branded corpse. There was no mistaking it. The crown over three knots. The same Charlie had carried since he could remember.

Never in his life had he seen the symbol anywhere else. Something stirred in him. That this could be a chance to find out his own hidden past.

Forcing his mind to be calm Charlie let the facts settle in.

The murderer used a knife to cut the throat.

He took hawthorn from somewhere. Likely Kings Cross where it grows most freely.

Candlewax. White. It can be got anywhere.

The crown-and-knots mark. He would have needed a special brand.

And suddenly he knew how to catch the killer.

The brand.

Only a few in the City could have made it.

‘All I need do is find the right blacksmith,’ Charlie was so struck by the simplicity of the plan he spoke aloud. ‘Find the blacksmith, find the killer.’

If not for the guards outside it would have been easy. But the Newgate men would never allow him to hunt out the murderer. They would take him straight to prison and ask questions later.

After weeks in Newgate, Charlie would be tortured to confess and executed as a counterfeiter and murderer. And as far as he knew, guards didn’t allow their victims out into the City, to gather evidence of their innocence.

The idea of losing a limb on the cobbled streets suddenly seemed more manageable, and he moved back to the window. Out on the street Maria and the guards had stopped. They were waiting for the dead-cart to trundle past them.

Her choice of Newgate guards brought with it an idea of how Maria had connected him with the key. Charlie occasionally reported to the prison with criminals. The Newgate magistrate must have recognised the shape on the body and told Maria that a thief taker wearing the same sign could be found in the Bucket of Blood.

The thought that he might be known as a wanted man in
Newgate
prison filled him with a bursting dread.

A kind of horrible inspiration dawned. The dead-cart was making its way towards the house. When the wagon drove under the window he might be able to jump on the back – into the mound of bodies. If he judged it right they would cushion his fall. It might give him a headstart outrunning the guards.

He stared out at the street, judging the distances involved. If he could get enough distance from the house as he fell, he would make it. His gaze fell on the piled-up corpses.

Ordinarily he crossed the road to avoid dead-carts. But what choice did he have? Given an opening Charlie knew he could outrun the guards. He took work as a sedan-chair carrier to keep him primed for chasing criminals through London’s twisting alleys. Few could match his speeds.

The only other option was to stand and fight.

His eyes settled on the approaching men. They had not yet thought to look up towards the window. From his vantage point Charlie could make out the weathered sword hilt of an ex-Civil War soldier.

Despite now being in their thirties and forties, those who had fought the Civil War made superb guards. Having survived the atrocities they lacked the rational fear of the average person and were battle-hardened in violent combat.

Charlie’s thin chest was latticed in hard sections rather than slung with heavy muscle, and his legs were slim. Carrying the sedan-chairs had added bulk and prominent veins to his forearms, but he was no match for the two Newgate guards. Charlie rated his chances in the average street brawl. But he was astute enough to pick his fights.

It was typical, he thought, that it had come to this. One minute he was happily selling forged certificates and making good money and the next he was forced to choose between torture, amputation or leaping into a pile of corpses. It was the kind of thing which always seemed to be happening to him.

His head span with trepidation as he put one foot up on the casement, and then another, splitting the dry wood as he heaved his weight into the space.

A cry came from the street. Maria had seen him and was
pointing
.

Beneath him the driver of the death cart urged his horse forward, and the wheels turned over the uneven street. The vehicle began to roll past the house until it was almost directly under the window.

Seizing his chance Charlie flung himself from upper storey.