What the Devil Knows

by C. S. Harris

  She was crying freely now, great, body-racking sobs that tore through her thin frame. Unwilling to push her, Sebastian waited.

  She brought up her handkerchief to wipe her eyes and nose. “It was nearly half an hour later that the watchman finally came by, and then Mr. Murphy from next door came out to help. That’s when—that’s when we found them.” She looked up at Sebastian with watery, pleading eyes, her voice a torn whisper. “You ain’t gonna make me tell you any more, are you, my lord?”

  “No,” said Sebastian, feeling hollowed out by what he’d just heard and hating himself for what he’d put her through. “No, I’m not. I’m sorry for asking you to go through it all again. Thank you.”

  Chapter 41

  Charlie Horton was sweeping the pavement in front of his slopshop when Sebastian turned his horses into Brewhouse Lane. The sky above was white with high clouds, the light flat, the narrow cobbled street crowded with rattling drays and carts, the air ringing with the hoarse shouts of lumpers and draymen and the whistling of the wind through the rigging of the ships lying at anchor out in the Thames.

  At the curricle’s approach, the former river policeman looked up, his hands tightening around the handle of his broom, his face unreadable as he watched Sebastian rein in.

  “Go ahead and walk ’em,” Sebastian told Tom as the boy scrambled forward to take the reins. “I could be a while.”

  “Aye, gov’nor.”

  Horton watched Sebastian hop down and walk toward him. “Heard what happened to you last night. You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

  “How did you come to hear about it?”

  “Still got friends in some of the public offices.” Horton’s eyes narrowed as he studied Sebastian’s face. “Looks like they got you a bit.”

  Sebastian had to stop himself from reaching up to touch the back of his hand to his cheek. “That’s from a few days ago, actually. I seem to be making some people more than a bit nervous. You wouldn’t have any idea who, would you?”

  Horton shook his head. “I might be inclined to suspect Pym or Cockerwell if they weren’t dead.”

  Sebastian glanced toward the open door to the slopshop, where the boy, Caleb, hovered, and said to Horton, “Walk with me a ways?”

  Horton nodded and handed the broom to his son. “Finish up here, would you, lad?”

  “I was up at Coldbath Fields Prison this morning,” said Sebastian as they turned to walk down the street, past a string of low, grimy brick buildings housing everything from sailors’ victuallers and sailmakers to squalid lodgings and pawnshops. “I wanted to talk to the turnkey who was in charge of John Williams the night he supposedly hanged himself. Only when I asked, they said the man was murdered just a few weeks after Williams was found dead.”

  Horton nodded, his features grim. “It’s one of the reasons I worried the lad might not have killed himself. Always figured that turnkey could’ve let a couple of men into the cell and turned his back while they strangled him. And then they killed the turnkey so’s he couldn’t rat them out.”

  “Who would have the ability to do something like that?”

  Horton looked over to give him a tight smile. “Anyone with money. Or power.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  Horton shrugged.

  Sebastian swerved around a small tan-and-white dog nosing something unidentifiable on the pavement. “I also had an interesting conversation with Margaret Jewell—or Meg, as she now calls herself.”

  “Ah, poor wee lass,” said Horton with a sigh. “I hear she ain’t been right since that night.”

  “I’m not sure any child could be after such an experience. She says one of the carpenters who worked on putting in Marr’s bay window came into the shop the afternoon of the murders and asked them to look for his missing ripping chisel again.”

  “Aye. That was Cornelius Hart.”

  “You mentioned him as one of the men you thought might have been involved in the murders, but I don’t recall you saying why.”

  Horton squinted up at the darker clouds beginning to bunch overhead. “I suppose part of it was because of the rippin’ chisel—I never could see where it fit in the whole thing. But it was also because you could tell the man was hidin’ something. He claimed he barely knew Williams, but then he sent his wife around to the Pear Tree askin’ Mrs. Vermilloe if the lad had been arrested yet. Why would he do that?”

  “Any other reason?”

  Horton was silent for a moment. “It sounds kinda feeble when you say it like that, don’t it? I reckon maybe the biggest reason I thought he was mixed up in it was because he was in tight with Billy Ablass, and I always figured if anybody else was involved, it was Long Billy.”

  “You said Hart is dead?”

  “Aye. Found dead last summer, he was.”

  Sebastian looked over at him. “How did he die?”

  “Stabbed in the back in an alley off Cinnamon Lane.”

  “Did they ever identify his killer?”

  “No.”

  Sebastian pressed his lips into a tight line as he watched a drunken sailor stagger out of a nearby grogshop. He was beginning to realize that the true number of murders he was dealing with reached into the double digits. “How long was this before the seaman Hugo Reeves was murdered?”

  “A month or two. Early August, I think.”

  “But Hart wasn’t bludgeoned?”

  “Nope. Just stabbed. Throat wasn’t slit, neither.”

  “Was there any connection between Reeves and Hart? Or Reeves and Williams, for that matter?”

  Horton thought about it a moment, his gaze on a ponderous old eighteenth-century carriage laboring up the lane toward them. “I suppose they could’ve been shipmates at one time, but if they were, I don’t know about it.”

  “What about Timothy Marr and the publican of the King’s Arms? Any connection there?”

  “Not that I ever heard of. Old John and his wife ran that public house for fifteen years, whereas Timothy Marr opened up his linen draper’s shop just months before he was killed.”

  “But Marr was originally from Wapping, wasn’t he? His father was a haberdasher here.”

  “Aye. His brother still is.”

  “What about the women who were killed? Any connection between them?”

  Horton looked thoughtful. “Not that I know of.”

  They paused at the corner as the air filled with the bleating of a herd of goats being driven down to the docks. Sebastian said, “I seem to remember you telling me you found the blood-covered shipwright’s maul upstairs in the Marrs’ bedroom.”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “Because Margaret Jewell said she heard footsteps coming down from upstairs right before she heard the baby cry.”

  “Aye,” said Horton, obviously not seeing where Sebastian was going with this. “I remember her sayin’ it.”

  “Was anything taken from the bedroom or kitchen? Anything that could have been used to bash in a skull?”

  “No. Asked Margaret about that specifically, I did. Nothing was taken from the house at all. She was sure of it.”

  “So if there was only one killer, and he left the maul he was using upstairs in the bedroom before he went down into the basement and killed the babe, what did he use to smash the baby’s skull?”

  Horton stared at him, and it was as if the sun-darkened skin were suddenly stretched taut over the bones of his face. “Well, I’ll be a s—” He broke off, his lips parting as he drew a quick breath.

  The last of the goats passed with a backward kick, and Sebastian squinted down to where the river’s forest of masts rocked back and forth against the darkening clouds. At this point on the river, the tide could rise and fall twenty feet in a day. It was rushing back in now, filling the crisp air with the smell of the sea.

  When Horton rema
ined silent, Sebastian said, “I suppose one man could have brought two heavy weapons with him, but I doubt it. We know he also had a razor with him, and that ship’s maul is massive. So why would he burden himself with a third weapon? I think you were right when you said there must have been more than one killer. One man brought the maul, and a second man brought a different weapon he used to help his partner kill the Marrs and their apprentice. I think the men then went upstairs looking for the Marrs’ baby. They were up there when they heard Margaret ringing the bell at the front of the shop. But rather than run, the way a couple of thieves would surely have done, they left the maul upstairs and then took the time—with Margaret now banging on the door—to go down to the kitchen. With the maul upstairs, they used the second man’s weapon to murder the baby boy. And only then did they escape out the back door. They didn’t take the money from Marr’s pocket or from his till or even the hundred and fifty pounds in his bedroom drawer because they weren’t there to steal.” Sebastian brought his gaze back to the former river policeman’s face. “I think they were there to kill—to kill them all. And even with Margaret banging at the door, they didn’t leave until everyone was dead.”

  “Hell and the devil confound it,” whispered Horton, swiping a meaty hand down over his face. “Margaret Jewell told me that—and she said it again at the inquest, about how she heard the footsteps comin’ down the stairs and then the babe’s cry. But I never put it together with that maul bein’ left up in the bedroom like that. It was just sittin’ there, too—leaning against the chair. It wasn’t like they’d got scared and dropped it; they left it there deliberately. Only, why would they do that?”

  “Because they wanted it found,” said Sebastian. “They were careful to take the second weapon—whatever it was they used to kill the baby—away with them because they wanted people to think there was only one killer. But they left the maul because they knew those initials would eventually lead the authorities to the Pear Tree.”

  Horton turned his face into the wind blowing up from the river, his eyes narrowing. “They set Johnny Williams up, didn’t they? From the very beginning, they set that lad up. They got someone to lay information against him, and when he was taken into custody and thrown into that isolation cell up in Clerkenwell, they killed him.” He drew a deep breath, then let it out. “But the murders stopped. Why would they stop?”

  “Because the killings weren’t random,” said Sebastian. “Those two families were killed for a reason. It’s just that no one has ever figured out what that reason was.”

  Painful shadows shifted in the old policeman’s eyes. “But why? Why kill two entire families, including a wee innocent babe? Who would do something like that?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “That’s what I can’t begin to fathom.”

  Horton chewed at his lower lip with his teeth. “And why has it started up again now?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” said Sebastian, although that wasn’t strictly true. He could think of several reasons why the killing of Pym and Cockerwell echoed the Ratcliffe Highway murders.

  The problem was, if he was right, then Charlie Horton—the policeman who’d openly criticized the official explanation for the events of three years before and lost his position because of it—was right at the top of the list of suspects.

  Chapter 42

  As he drove away from Brewhouse Lane, Sebastian found himself adding up the uncounted victims. Johnny Williams, buried at the crossroads as a suicide. The turnkey from Coldbath Fields Prison, stabbed in the back. The ship’s carpenter Cornelius Hart, who’d suffered a similar fate . . .

  The brutal killing of two entire families in 1811 had captured the terrified city’s imagination. But no one had noticed that men tangentially connected to the Ratcliffe Highway murders had continued to die suspicious deaths.

  Turning up Old Gravel Lane, Sebastian reined in before the grim, soot-covered brick workhouse run by the parish of St. George’s. The air here was so heavy with a foul stench that it was hard to breathe.

  “ ’Oly ’ell!” said Tom, his voice muffled by the hand he’d clapped over his nose. “What’s that smell?”

  Sebastian handed the boy the reins. “Something dead, I suspect—or, rather, someone dead.”

  Tucked away in a corner of the workhouse lay the parish’s deadhouse, a tumbledown shack with a leaky roof. It was Sebastian’s intention to ask there where he might find the local surgeon, Walt Salter. But a body had just been pulled from the river near Wapping New Stairs, and Salter himself was there to deal with it.

  A paunchy older man with tightly curled salt-and-pepper hair that encircled his head like a dark halo, he had a jowly face, multiple chins, heavy bags under his eyes, and heavy eyebrows knotted as if in a perpetual frown. The frown deepened when Sebastian introduced himself.

  “Yes, I did the postmortems on the original Ratcliffe Highway murder victims,” growled the surgeon in a rough baritone, his attention all for the bloated, decaying corpse laid out on the slab before him. “What of it?”

  The dead man must have been in the water at least a week, and Sebastian was trying hard not to look at him—or to breathe too deeply. “I understand you testified at the inquests that you thought five of the victims’ throats had been cut with a razor.”

  “I didn’t simply ‘think’ it. Their throats were cut with a razor. All I did was state the facts.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Of course I’m certain. The cuts were made so deeply with one slice that the windpipes were severed. Nothing but a razor could do that without tearing and bruising the tissues, and there was none—no tearing or bruising at all. That wasn’t simply a razor; it was a bloody sharp razor.”

  “I thought a knife was found that they linked to the killings?”

  Salter gave a derisive snort. “Ah, yes, the ‘bloodstained French knife’ found a good month or two later at the back of a closet at the Pear Tree by some blackguard who swore he’d seen it in John Williams’s possession but somehow forgot to mention it earlier despite having been repeatedly questioned by the authorities. Earned himself thirty pounds of reward money with that little maneuver, he did.”

  “You don’t believe the knife had anything to do with the killings?”

  The surgeon’s lip curled with derision. “Of course it didn’t. The various inhabitants of the Pear Tree were ‘finding’ everything from bloodstained trousers to muddy socks for months, with the authorities beyond credulous when it came to handing out rewards.”

  Either credulous or complicit, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “Did you think Williams was the killer?”

  Salter’s expression shifted into something less confident, more troubled. “To be honest? No,” he said on a long exhalation of breath. “He was such a slight young man, and far from athletic in his build. I suppose he might have been one of the killers, but no one will ever convince me that he acted alone. Groups of people don’t simply stand around waiting to be killed when someone starts swinging a hammer and flashing a razor. They run. But judging from the way the bodies were found, there was no time for that. And that tells me there were at least two killers.”

  “Old John was found separate from the others, wasn’t he? On the steps leading down to the pub’s cellar?”

  “He was. But the steps went down from the kitchen, where the two women were killed, and his tibia was broken. I suspect he fell down the stairs—or his body was pushed down after his throat was slit.” The surgeon jerked his chin toward the bloated, disintegrating corpse on the slab between them. “Now go away and let me get to work before the stench from this fellow sickens everyone in the neighborhood.”

  Sebastian started to turn away, then paused to look back and say, “Did you by any chance do a postmortem on a sailmaker named Jack Harrison?”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Harrison. He was one of John Williams’s roommates at
the Pear Tree that December. Someone said he was killed this past summer.”

  “Oh, yes. Him. I did—late August, I believe it was. Why?”

  “How was he killed?”

  “Knifed in the back. Typical.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “What else would you expect?”

  Sebastian simply shook his head.

  “Interesting that you should bring him up now,” said the surgeon.

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “He’s the man who claimed to identify that bloody French knife as having belonged to Williams.”

  “He was?”

  “He was. Now go away.”

  * * *

  Why the difference? Sebastian wondered as he walked away from the deadhouse.

  Why quietly stick a knife in the backs of the turnkey Joseph Beckett, the sailmaker Jack Harrison, and the shipwright Cornelius Hart, but butcher Hugo Reeves, Sir Edwin Pym, and Nathan Cockerwell in a manner deliberately calculated to remind everyone of the Ratcliffe Highway murders? It made no sense unless he was dealing with two different killers. And yet that didn’t really explain it, either.

  Still pondering the possibilities, he drove to the Pear Tree, where he found Robert Vermilloe up on a step stool in the courtyard replacing a couple of rotted boards on the side of the inn’s dilapidated privy.

  “I understand you had a sailmaker staying here a few months ago,” said Sebastian, standing as far back from the noxious fumes wafting from the privy as he could without having to shout. “A man by the name of Jack Harrison.”

  Vermilloe ripped a rotted board from the privy and tossed it aside with a clatter.

  “We did. What of it?”

  “He was a roommate of John Williams three years ago?”

  Vermilloe tore off a second board and let it drop. “He was.”

  “So tell me about this knife he found and claimed belonged to Williams.”

  Vermilloe wrenched off another board. “He didn’t find it. He described it and suggested the constables search the room. And then they found it. All covered in dried blood, it was.”