Corpse Thief

by Michael Arnold

  “Admirable.”

  “You are too kind. It will change lives, and make my fortune. That is my hope.” Brommett leaned across his chair to catch his wife’s attention. “Kitty, dearest, would you fetch our guest some sustenance? And perhaps remind the bairns that papa has business to attend.”

  Hawke opened his mouth to refuse, but his stomach griped again and he thought better of it. He took the bowl Mrs Brommett offered, revelling in the smell and the heat. As he blew on the thick, steaming contents, he noticed her usher the children to a far corner to eat.

  “Did you manage to contact my associate up at Clerkenwell?” Brommett asked, now that his offspring were occupied elsewhere.

  Hawke swallowed down the first spoon-full. It scalded the roof of his mouth, but he ignored the pain and went for more. “He spoke of Benandanti, as you suggested he might. The Friuli region of Italy, more specifically. In truth, he seemed much opposed to the notion.”

  “Of an Italian witch stalking London?” Brommett said, amused. “Does this surprise you?”

  “No.”

  “It is the strongest scent in the room,” the apothecary said, rising from his chair, “and it is logical that you should follow it. But for Signore Totti it may just represent a community torn to pieces by a frightened multitude. This place is a tinderbox, Mister Hawke, as well you know.” He went to the hearth, tapping the pipe against the chimney breast and collecting his own bowl from Kitty. “It takes but a tiny spark for flames to lick high.” He took his seat again, sighing deeply as he eased into it. “The streets have only recently been cleared since the last trouble.”

  Hawke nodded. There had been major rioting in August when the crowd awaiting Queen Caroline’s funeral procession had learnt that the bier was to be rerouted. Chaos had reigned, people had died, and the memory of it certainly gave texture to the picture Brommett painted. Hawke said, “Then does it soothe or disturb you to hear that the waters are rather muddier since last we met?”

  Brommett set to his meal with vigour, perhaps stalling as he weighed the question. Swallowing, he glanced up. “How so?”

  “There was a second body, discovered with the girl.”

  Kitty Brommett, still at the hearth, shifted round to look at him. “She of the vines?”

  Hawke regarded her, vexed. “Indeed.”

  Kitty shrugged. “Come now, Mister Hawke, you are surprised that a man divulges detail of an intriguing conversation to his wife?” She flapped a hand at him. “Tell us of this second poor mite, do.”

  “Not a mite,” Hawke replied, admonishing her with a prim tone, “but an adult. A tosher-man.”

  Ansell Brommett snorted scornfully. “Might you not have enlightened me of this the last time we met?”

  “It did not matter then,” Hawke explained defensively.

  The apothecary frowned beyond the fragrant steam. “Two bodies in the same location might be attributed to the natural flow of the sewer.”

  “Possible,” Hawke said, and the theory certainly had credence. The normal movement of effluent through the miles of subterranean highways may well have thrust the cadavers together, caught up in a common kink with so much other detritus.

  “But you are not convinced,” Brommett asserted perceptively. “Were they dispatched in the same manner?” When he received a shake of the head for reply, he asked, “Then are they in fact linked?”

  “I cannot be sure.”

  “Why?”

  “The tosher was killed after he came across the girl wrapped in vines.”

  “A substantial leap,” Brommett cautioned, “would you not concede?”

  “There was a witness, of sorts,” Hawke said to the obvious surprise of the others. “Another tosher-man. He did not see either murder enacted, but came upon the final moments of his colleague, who had been stabbed right through the body.”

  “Did he glimpse the murderer?” asked Kitty.

  “Alas, no. But he tells of a swift and savage attack, with no sign of theft. The tosher-man was carrying a significant haul of trinkets he had recovered from the sewers.”

  Brommett sucked his teeth, then nodded. “A logical assessment, all told. Why, then, are the waters muddied?”

  “Because on his dying breath, the tosher-man spoke of an Irish harp, worn by the perpetrator.” Hawke set the bowl, scraped clean, on the floor and rubbed his eyes again. “So you see, I have another line of enquiry. Do I seek an Italian magician, an Irish rebel or one who would lay the blame at the door of such folk?”

  “Line of enquiry?” Brommett echoed incredulously. To Hawke’s surprise, and not a little chagrin, the apothecary laughed. “A strange phrase for a hospital porter.” He called over his shoulder, “Wouldn’t you say, my love?”

  It was a challenge, pure and simple. Delivered with typical bonhomie, undeniably, but Brommett’s gaze twinkled with intrigue. His wife came up to stand at his flank, placing a hand protectively on the back of the chair. Her own face was impassive enough, but the stance alone made her seem like a sentinel. She said to Hawke, “What are we getting ourselves into, sir?”

  Silence hung between them, as heavy and ripe as Brommett’s tobacco smoke. Hawke regarded them both in turn. They were kindly folk, but patently bright, as shrewed as they were convivial. It was etched on their expressions, in stares now glistening with steel. He shook his head. “I like you, Mister Brommett, Mrs Brommett, truly. I can never express my gratitude for your hospitality. I cannot repay the hot meal, the...” he let his eyes flicker briefly to the dark vial on the mantelpiece, “the treatment.”

  “Oh, but you can repay us, Mister Hawke,” Kitty cut in, “with the truth.”

  “I cannot elaborate on my work,” Hawke resisted firmly.

  Brommett had set the bowl down and rubbed his beard with those delicate fingers. “You deal in danger, my friend. It oozes from every pore. I can help you. I want to help you, for this is my city too. But you owe me honesty.” He shrugged, smiling. “Besides, a little sharing of context might prove invaluable.”

  Hawke hesitated, for Brommett was more right than he knew, yet where else was he to turn? He was stuck fast between the twin boulders of Szekely and Ruthven, bad men both in their own worlds, and, without a breakthrough in either case, one would surely crush him. He licked dry lips. “I am here on behalf of Bow Street.”

  The Brommetts shared a glance. Kitty broke the silence. “You’re a Runner?”

  “Not as such. I work directly for Principal Patrol Officer George Ruthven. A matter of utmost secrecy.”

  Brommett breathed deep through his nose. “Then let us reflect.” He leaned forwards, placing elbows on knees and joining palms beneath his chin. “We have a possible Irish connection in this harp. What else did my Italian friend tell you?”

  Taking the question as tacit permission to proceed, Hawke said, “The night battles took place on Ember Days.”

  “Ember Days?”

  Kitty tapped her husband gently. “Fasting days and Emberings,” she recited, echoing exactly the memory verse given by Totti, “be Lent, Whitsun, Holyrood, and Lucy.”

  “And there you have the enquiry,” Hawke said. “I believe the girl was murdered during the Embertide following Holyrood, given the extent of her decomposition.”

  “Have there been others, then?” Brommett asked. “What of Lent or Whitsun? Why are bodies wrapped in fennel and sorghum not piling up around our ears?”

  Hawke screwed up his face in a weak grimace. “I know not.”

  “Runners,” Kitty interjected, “tend to deal with cases brought to the magistrates at Bow Street. Who’s to say there weren’t more, but those poor victims simply had no-one to seek justice on their behalf? There could be dozens for all we know, dragged out of ditches and slung in pauper pits, with none to mourn them. Nobody to care.”

  “Mayhap,” Brommett concurred softly, chewing the inside of his mouth as he gave the matter thought, “yet that is hardly high upon our agenda for now. Saint Lucy has only recently come a
nd gone.”

  “Then the final Embertide of the year is upon us,” Kitty said.

  Hawke nodded. “It begins this coming Wednesday.”

  “God help us,” whispered Kitty. Her blue eyes pierced Hawke like twin lances. “You think the killer will strike then?”

  “Or on the Friday, or the Saturday. Assuming he is, indeed, an insane Italian or Irishman with a penchant for medieval witchcraft.”

  Brommett rubbed his face hard. “When you put it like that...”

  “Precisely,” Hawke said. “It is madness, and yet I have almost nothing else to consider. You warn me against inciting a riot, but you offer no alternative.”

  “Almost?” Kitty said.

  Hawke looked up at her. “Beg pardon, madam?”

  “Almost nothing to consider, you said.”

  “The second body in the sewer,” Hawke answered. He groped in the pocket of his coat until his fingers fell upon cold metal. It was the object Milky Mayhew had given him. He tossed it to Brommett. “The very thing the dead tosher-man was clutching when he was found.”

  Brommett held it out on a flat palm so that his wife might see. Kitty said, “A button?”

  “Brass,” Brommett confirmed. “From a military garment.” He traced the numbers that were embossed on its surface with a fingernail. “One and seven, surrounded by twin fronds. It denotes the 17th Regiment.”

  Kitty craned to look at it. “Perhaps he took it from his killer.”

  “Or perhaps,” Hawke said glumly, “he had just picked it out of the water. Discovering such things was, of course, his reason for being down there in the first place.”

  Ansell Brommett made a sucking sound with his teeth. When he looked up, his eyes were glinting in the firelight. “And yet one does not often find this kind of thing, Mister Hawke.”

  “The button from a veteran’s coat?” Hawke replied testily. “I should imagine such a thing would be common place.”

  “In Paris, perhaps,” said Brommett with a slight smile.

  “The 17th Regiment, you said.”

  “Aye,” replied Brommett. He studied the tiny object again. “17th Regiment d'Infanterie de Ligne. This button is French.”

  Θ

  When he left the Brommetts’ lodgings the light was bleeding away. The tavern’s broad yard was a treacherous scape of deep wheel ruts, hardening by the minute, so that he was forced to pick his way carefully out onto the street like a twinkle-toed dancer, avoiding a rooting piglet and a dog lapping a pool of its own vomit. Always his mind turned circles, rotating about the twin axles of the cases he had been charged with investigating. And now there was the added complication of a connection with France. There were plenty of French emigres in England now that the wars were over. Artisans and artistes, fugitives, tradesmen and many more. Any number of those might have marched in Napoleon’s army in a former life, but to travel to the capital city of your most recent and bitter foe, still donning the coat that betrays your service? It seemed an unlikely decision to make. The kind of decision, indeed, taken by one who did not possess the funds to easily discard clothing of quality. But why would such a person travel to London in the first place? An impoverished French soldier would surely seek work or charity in Paris. It made no sense, which was why Hawke was relieved to know that Ansell and Kitty Brommett would now shoulder some of the burden. They had arranged to meet in the morning, and he hoped that they would have with them some further information.

  Out on High Holborn it smelled of acrid coal smoke but the starry sky was clear and crisp, free of the earlier oppressive mist. The temperature had duly plummeted with the sinking of the sun, and Hawke’s face began to sting as he made his way westward onto Broad Street, passing under the soaring Palladian bulk of St Giles-in-the-Fields, the black gaze of its high windows peering censoriously into his soul. On the opposite side of the road was a row of semi-derelict but overpopulated houses, backing onto a timber yard guarded by a vicious pack of deliberately underfed dogs whose snarls and howls carried up into the night like the call of tormented spirits. Ordinarily Hawke would have hooked a right into an alley that ran flush against the yard, a conduit into the heart of the rookery, but he was determined not to return home until he could be sure of his safety. As sure as was possible in a place like this. He therefore kept to the main thoroughfare as it skirted the slum and swung north to become Tottenham Court Road. His temporary doss-house at Black Horse Yard was the better part of a mile up ahead.

  Somewhere a scream rent the new night, a female or young boy, abruptly silenced. He halted to pull a gin bottle from the waistband at his hip, taking a mighty pull of the fiery liquid to combat the cold, and thrust it home, pressing on. Gaslight showed the way over slippery cobbles. A carriage chundered past, springs groaning low beneath the clatter of iron-bound wheels, and he instinctively placed a protective palm over his chest, feeling the hardness of glass within the inner-lining pocket. Having been impressed with the efficacy of Ansell Brommett’s home-made tincture, he had purchased a new bottle using Ruthven’s bribe money. The thought gave him perverse amusement.

  Hawke tilted down his topper to shield the upper portion of his face from the cutting air. Much good it did. He turned up the collar of his greatcoat, fastening the uppermost button beneath his chin so that the wool was snug about his cheeks. A fox, small and skinny, with half a tail and a scabrous flank, shot across his path, making him start. He snarled a curse as the creature slunk into the shadows. Breathed deeply to still his hammering heart.

  “You should be dead,” the voice whispered at his back.

  Hawke spun, freed the knife from his belt, then gaped. “Corissa?”

  She was holding a pistol with both hands, which she pointed at his chest. “Can be dead, still.”

  Hawke remembered seeing someone in the reflection of the tavern window on Drury Lane. He thought, it had not been a figment of his imagination after all. He looked down the pistol barrel. Its octagonal casing gave it a brutish, heavy appearance that was at odds with the delicate fingers curled about its stock. “You’d kill me? Why?”

  The deep brown eyes flickered to his feet and back. “Nice boots.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve always admired your boots, Joshua. They’re very smart.” She shifted her stance. Perhaps she was nervous, he thought, or maybe just cold. Either way, the pistol stayed steady, despite its obvious weight. “Bit too smart, really, for a gin-soaked opium eater, less still for one what makes his money digging up the dead.”

  “You babble, woman,” Hawke answered. “Are you drunk?” He tried to search for help in his peripheral vision, but the street was empty as a plundered grave.

  “I followed you. Have been for days.”

  “I was...”

  “Spare me,” she hissed. Her face was taut in the gloom. The black eyebrows furrowed deeply. “I’ve been following you, because Colan is suspicious. And he’s always right. You met that big bastard with the tipstaff yesterday. Took me a while to place him, but I got there. I got there. Then Red Lion Square.”

  “I do not know the place.”

  Corissa blew a sharp blast of air from her snub nose. “You sat supping gin. Alone. I reckoned you were just whiling away the time. Then I recognised someone else. A young lad. Went into the tobacconist opposite.” Her full lips glistened as she licked them. “The lad is one of ours.” She added pointedly, “He also runs messages for Bow Street.”

  Hawke returned the knife to his belt and raised both hands. “It is not what you think.”

  “I watched a while longer,” she went on undeterred. “The tobacconist’s shop was busy. Lot of comings and goings. Too much, one might say.” She squared her shoulders in challenge. “And you barely took your peepers off it.” She cast her eyes downward again. “Them boots, Joshua.”

  “I took them off a corpse,” Hawke protested.

  “Capital offence, that. Resurrect a body and you’ll do time. Steal a pair of shoes from one and you’ll swing.” She sho
ok her head slowly. “Those are army boots. So’s your voice.” Her tone was rising with her ire. “So’s the way you handle a weapon. I got to asking myself, do we have a cuckoo in the nest?”

  “No, Corissa. Please, I...”

  “You know what cuckoo chicks do when they hatch, Joshua? They kill all the other - the rightful - chicks. Push them out, off their high boughs. If a cuckoo’s egg is discovered in a nest, it must be thrown asunder.” She cocked the pistol, its metallic clunk sounding unnaturally loud in the empty street. “Smashed.”

  Hawke let his gaze drift beyond her. “Where are they? The others?”

  “I ain’t told Colan. Not yet.”

  “Why?”

  A pause, then, “You saved my life, back at Hockley.”

  Hawke, desperate, saw the chink in her armour. “Then you owe me a debt. Let us settle it now.”

  “A life for a life?” Corissa said, scathingly. “That ain’t how it works round here, and you know it. Colan won’t snuff you out quick. He’ll tease it out of you. I have not delivered you to him. If I kill you here, now, then you may count yourself fortunate.”

  “What do you want from me?” Hawke asked, stepping forwards but retreating as she twitched the octagonal muzzle. “What can I say?”

  Corissa’s white teeth glowed as she chewed her bottom lip in consideration. “Start with the boots and go from there.”

  Θ

  “A soldier?” Corissa said as they walked, her captive in front, at the shadow-cloaked edge of Tottenham Court Road. “I s’pose that accounts for some things.”

  “I deserted,” Hawke lied. Some truths were meant only for the grave. “Threw my uniform in a ditch.” He looked down at his feet as they negotiated the precariously uneven cobbles. “But good boots are expensive.”