What the Devil Knows

by C. S. Harris

  “Did you hear anything the night he hanged himself?”

  Flood sniffed. “They asked me that at the inquest, and I told ’em I woke up at three and heard chains rattling. Nothin’ else.”

  “How did you know it was three o’clock?”

  “The church bells was strikin’.”

  “And that’s all you heard? The church bells and chains rattling?”

  Wendell Flood gave him a long, steady look. “Ye don’t have t’ be in here long t’ know not t’ pay too much attention to the things you hear.”

  The man’s meaning was more than clear. Sebastian met his gaze and held it. “When did they find his body? Do you know?”

  “Oh, aye. It was early the next morning. The turnkey—Beckett was his name, Joseph Beckett—he come into me cell and asked me and this other cove t’ help him cut the poor lad down.”

  “So you saw Williams when he was still hanging?”

  Flood nodded. “There’s an iron rod runs across the top of all the cells, up near the ceiling. We use it t’ hang our clothes and straw pallets from. That’s what he was tied to.”

  “By a rope?”

  “No, ’twas his own handkerchief.” For the first time Flood looked away and swallowed, his features pinched. “He didn’t die easy, the poor lad. Fought it hard, he did. His mouth was open and his eyes was bulging, and his arms was all bruised.”

  “Bruised?”

  Flood brought his gaze back to Sebastian’s face. “Aye.”

  “How far off the ground are these iron rails?”

  “Six feet two inches. I know exactly because they asked the turnkey about it at the inquest.”

  “And how tall was Williams?”

  “He was a middlin’ man, maybe five-eight.”

  Sebastian was beginning to feel the cold and despair of this place curl itself around his belly. “Are there beds in the reexamination cells?”

  “Nah. Just straw mats on the ground.”

  “A chair?”

  Flood gave a scornful laugh. “There’s a bucket t’ use as a chamber pot. That’s it.”

  “And had Williams used the bucket to stand on?”

  “Nope. It was still over in the corner.”

  “So a man who’d somehow managed to stand on the floor and tie himself to that bar could simply have untied himself if he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to die?”

  “Of course he could’ve.”

  “Were you there when they handed down the verdict at the inquest?”

  “Aye. Called it self-murder, they did. Said those who had him in custody were in no way t’ blame for what happened to him. That’s what they said, at any rate. But when they brought in those other two coves and locked them in the reexamination cells, they posted a guard in there with ’em all the time to make sure that nothin’ happened to them.”

  “What other two coves?”

  “A tall, meaty sailor they called Long Billy, and a shorter cove by the name of Cornelius Hart.”

  “Hart?”

  “That’s right. Heard he was found dead a couple of months ago. Makes ye think, don’t it?” He cocked his head to one side, his eyes alive with all that he’d carefully left unsaid. “Well, don’t it?”

  Chapter 39

  Before he left Coldbath Fields Prison, Sebastian asked to see the turnkey Joseph Beckett.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible, my lord,” said the plump, fussy clerk to whom Sebastian addressed this request. “He’s dead.”

  “When did he die?”

  The clerk peered at him over the upper rims of the silver-framed spectacles he wore pushed down on the end of his nose. “Must be two—no, nearly three years ago now. He was found one morning down by St. John’s Gate with the knife still sticking out of him.”

  “He was murdered?”

  “Well, that was the general consensus, yes,” said the clerk with a high-pitched titter. “Men don’t usually stick knives in their own backs, now, do they?”

  * * *

  Sebastian’s next stop was the Mount Pleasant cottage of the prison surgeon, a man named Thomas Webb. Mr. Webb was not at home, but a helpful butcher’s boy passing in the street suggested Sebastian try the Blue Dog on Clerkenwell Green.

  “Spends most o’ his days and nights there,” said the boy. “Whenever he’s not at the prison. Says tobacco smoke is the only thing’ll get the prison stink out o’ his nose.” The boy flashed Sebastian a cagey grin and winked. “Leastways, that’s what he says.”

  * * *

  “You want me to tell you about my postmortem examination of John Williams?” said Webb when Sebastian found him in the Blue Dog’s smoky taproom. The prison surgeon was a sallow-faced man somewhere in his forties or fifties, his shoulders rounded and slumped, his once dark hair heavily laced with silver. A general air of untidiness hovered about him; his hair was greasy and overlong, his old-fashioned black coat in want of a good brushing, his waistcoat straining over a bulging stomach and stained with what looked like egg. He sat at a table in the center of the room, a tankard of ale before him and a lit cheroot dangling from one corner of his mouth.

  “If you don’t mind,” said Sebastian, settling in the chair opposite him.

  Webb took a long, slow drag of his cheroot, his eyes narrowing against the curling smoke. “What on earth for?”

  “It’s been suggested his death might have some bearing on certain events of today.”

  The surgeon exhaled a long stream of blue smoke. “Don’t see how it could, but very well. What do you want to know?”

  “What time was it when you saw Williams?”

  “Must’ve been around nine in the morning or thereabouts.”

  “Was he still hanging?”

  “Oh, no. The turnkey and a couple of the other prisoners had already cut him down and laid him on his bed.”

  “His ‘bed’ being a straw pallet?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long do you think he’d been dead?”

  “Hours. He was stone-cold. But then, it was late December, and there’s no heat in the prison, you know.”

  “Must be miserable in the winter.”

  “Oh, yes. The deaths always soar at that time of year.”

  “And how did Williams die?”

  “Hanged himself, of course. It was more than obvious. You could see the mark the handkerchief had left all around his neck, and there was a deep impression from the knot, just here—” The surgeon turned his head and pressed his fingertips up under his right ear.

  “The impression from the handkerchief went straight across his neck?”

  “It did.” Webb reached for his tankard and drank deeply, draining it; then he looked at Sebastian expectantly.

  Sebastian signaled the barmaid. “The mark wasn’t V-shaped or angled in any way?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Was the hyoid bone broken?”

  Webb stared at him. “How would I know? I looked at the man; I didn’t dissect him, for heaven’s sake.”

  Sebastian waited while the barmaid placed a couple tankards on the table between them, then said, “According to one of the prisoners who helped cut Williams down, his arms were bruised.”

  Webb took a drink from the new tankard, then swiped the back of one hand across his wet mouth. “It’s not uncommon to see postmortem staining on the arms and legs of those who’ve been hanged. The uneducated might mistake such discoloration for bruising, but it’s not. John Williams hanged himself; there was never any doubt in my mind.”

  “So he had discoloration on his legs, as well?”

  “I’ve no idea. I didn’t remove his clothing. Why would I? It was obvious how he’d died.”

  “He was still dressed?”

  “Except for his boots and his coa
t, yes. He must have taken them off when he laid down to sleep . . . before he decided to kill himself, I suppose.”

  Sebastian watched the surgeon take another long drag on his cheroot. “How often do prisoners hang themselves from the iron rail in those cells?”

  “I’ve seen it once or twice over the years,” said Webb, the smoke leaking out of the sides of his mouth as he spoke. “Must admit I didn’t expect it that time, though.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “I saw Williams when he was brought in. Quite cheerful he was, and confident of being released as soon as he was given a fair hearing—rather naively, I thought.” The surgeon shook his head, tsked, and reached for his ale again. “The melancholia must have come upon him suddenly during the night. Prisons can be unpleasant places after dark.”

  “I’m told the prison governor ordered a watch kept on two other men who were later held there for questioning about the Ratcliffe Highway murders.”

  Webb shook his head. “It wasn’t the prison keeper who did that. The order came from Bow Street magistrate Aaron Graham.”

  “It did?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Do you know why?”

  The surgeon took a final drag on his cheroot, dropped it to the flagstone floor, and ground it beneath his heel. “That’s a question you’d need to ask of Bow Street.”

  * * *

  Sebastian sat beside the river Thames, not far from the end of Old Gravel Lane, where a set of watermen’s stairs led down to what they called Execution Dock. It wasn’t exactly a dock, but it was definitely a place of execution.

  It was here that the Admiralty hanged those convicted of piracy or murder on the high seas. The gibbet was placed out in the river below the low-tide mark, where the Admiralty’s jurisdiction began. They always used a shortened rope to make certain the condemned men strangled to death slowly, thus making their end as painful as possible. Already that year, six men—including a fourteen-year-old boy—had been led here by a pompous procession headed by the marshal carrying a silver oar, the symbol of the Admiralty’s authority. Afterward, when it was all over, the bodies were chained at the low-water mark and left there for days, until three tides had washed over them.

  Sebastian lifted his face to the cool wind blowing off the water and breathed in the smell of rope and tar and exotic spices carried from the rows of ships rocking at anchor in the middle of the river or knocking against the wharves. The Crown was big on ceremonial processions for those they were about to kill or those they had killed. He thought of John Williams, still ironed at the ankle, his three-day-old corpse paraded through the streets of Wapping and Shadwell before being ignominiously dumped into a narrow hole. Had he been guilty of the horrible crimes that would forever be attributed to him? Or was he simply another victim, a convenient scapegoat? Sebastian was coming more and more to believe the latter. And he was increasingly convinced that the explanation for today’s deaths lay buried in the murky events of that cold December.

  Sir Henry Lovejoy had sent another message to Aaron Graham, the aged magistrate now taking the waters in Bath. But it was doubtful the old man was in any shape to remember what he’d known—or suspected—about John Williams’s death in Coldbath Fields Prison, or why he had ordered a watch kept on the two suspects who’d been committed to the same prison for reexamination.

  Sebastian pushed to his feet, his gaze on a skiff heading out to a towering East Indiaman, his heart heavy with the knowledge of what he was about to do. There was one person he hadn’t spoken to yet, someone who probably knew more about the murder of the Marr family than anyone. He’d thus far avoided questioning Margaret Jewell, the servant girl who’d been just thirteen when her life dissolved into a nightmare. And though he was still reluctant to ask her to relive that awful night, he knew he had to do it.

  Chapter 40

  She called herself Meg now, as a way of differentiating herself from the child she’d been—the child who cheerfully set off one cold December night to buy oysters and came back to a blood-splattered horror.

  “Must you speak to her about that night, your lordship?” said Mrs. Jane Maple, the chandler’s widow to whom Margaret Jewell was now apprenticed. She was a middle-aged, kindly-looking woman with full cheeks and a massive bosom, and her face fell when Sebastian explained why he’d walked into her shop. “It’s dreadfully hard on her anytime it comes up.”

  “I understand,” said Sebastian. “I truly am sorry. But it’s important that I hear what she has to say.”

  The woman sighed. He could tell it went sorely against the grain with her, and if he’d been anyone but who he was, she’d probably have told him no. But who was she, a simple Wapping tradesman’s widow, to say no to the son and heir of the Earl of Hendon?

  * * *

  At fifteen, Meg Jewell was a thin, wan thing with dull brown hair and a pale, plain face.

  She huddled in a wooden chair beside Mrs. Maple’s kitchen fire, her head bowed, her hands turning over and over in her lap as she threaded a white handkerchief through her bony fingers. She looked so forlorn that Sebastian came close to telling her he was sorry and walking away without asking her anything. But the thought of Katie Ingram and her three young children and the very real danger they faced drove him on.

  “Can you tell me about that night, Meg?” Sebastian said gently. “I know you don’t like to think about it, but it’s important.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him, her breath coming hard and fast enough to jerk her narrow chest.

  He said, “What time was it when you left the shop?”

  She swallowed, her voice a thin, quiet reed. “A bit before midnight, my lord. Mr. Marr, he gave me a pound note and told me to go buy some oysters for supper. Mrs. Marr had never been well since her confinement, you see, and he thought maybe the oysters would be good for her.”

  “A pound note would buy a lot of oysters,” said Sebastian. At a penny a dozen, oysters were a staple for the poor.

  “Oh, it wasn’t all for oysters, my lord,” she said quickly. “He wanted me to go pay the baker’s bill, too.”

  “What were the Marrs doing when you left?”

  “Mrs. Marr was downstairs in the kitchen with Timmy, and Mr. Marr and James—that’s James Gowan—they were in the shop folding up lengths of cloth and getting ready to close. We were all tired. We’d been open since eight that morning.”

  “That’s a long day.”

  She nodded. “It didn’t help to have that carpenter come by, troubling Mr. Marr about the ripping chisel that had gone missing. He wanted us to look for it again, so we did. Looked all over, but we never found it.”

  Sebastian thought about the clean ripping chisel that had been found on the shop’s counter amidst the carnage of that night. Had Marr or his shop-boy somehow found it after Margaret left for oysters? Was that why it was simply lying there?

  “What was he like as a master?” Sebastian asked. “Mr. Marr, I mean.”

  She stared at him for a moment in silence, then said, “He was always most agreeable with the customers.”

  The phrasing struck him as telling. “What about with you and the shop-boy?”

  Meg dropped her gaze to her lap again. “He could be . . . impatient sometimes. He had what he called ‘ambitions,’ and he was always talking about how he expected us to work as hard as he did. He’d just spent all that money taking down the old brick shop front and putting in that big new window so’s folks could see his bolts of cloth and everything better. Mrs. Marr said he was a bit anxious about it because it cost so much—that that’s why he was always wanting things done just so.”

  In other words, thought Sebastian, he was an impatient, demanding taskmaster pushing hard to get ahead in the world. The kind of man who would sue his own brother over their father’s will.

  “What time did you come back with the oysters?”

 
Meg shook her head. “I couldn’t find any oysters, my lord. The stall he sent me to was closed. So I went to John’s Hill to pay the baker’s bill, only he was closed, too. It was past midnight by then and everything was closing. I tried another oyster stall that was closed, so I gave up and went back to the shop.”

  It struck Sebastian as odd that Marr had sent the young girl out so late when he must have known everything was closing. Had the linen draper not realized the time? Or had he wanted her out of the way for some reason?

  “I was afraid he’d be mad at me,” Meg was saying. “But when I got back to the shop, all the lights were out, the shutter was up on the front window, and the door was locked.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I thought at first they must’ve forgot I was out, so I rang the bell. It was late and the streets were getting empty, and I was so cold and scared. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t come and let me in. So I pulled the bell harder and banged on the door, and that’s when . . .” Her voice faltered, and she swallowed hard.

  “That’s when what, Meg?”

  She sucked in a quick breath. “That’s when I heard footsteps comin’ down the stairs. I thought they were finally coming to let me in. Only, then I heard the baby cry out—just once. It was a funny, sharp cry that broke off sudden-like. And after that, I didn’t hear anything.”

  Sebastian felt a chill run up his spine as the significance of what she was saying struck him. “You heard the footsteps coming down the stairs?”

  She looked at him uncertainly, as if wondering why he had questioned that. “Yes.”

  “And then you heard the baby cry out?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then what did you hear?”

  “Nothing. It was eerie quiet. I was so scared I was shaking. I tried hollering and banging the knocker as hard as I could. I even kicked the door, but nobody came.” Her voice cracked, then fell to a whisper. “I reckon they were all dead by then.”