Free from all Danger

by Chris Nickson

  Bartlett thought with his fists. No one was going to cow him or send him packing. And if he was telling the truth, no one had tried. Maybe there was something else behind Kidd’s death.

  Rob had a hard job even finding the other pimps. It was late afternoon by the time he’d seen them all, pathetic men content to make their living off a woman’s body. But none of them had been threatened; their denials were real enough.

  ‘How do you feel, Mr Armistead?’

  The man was in his bed, a servant dancing attendance. The doctor had been and gone, prescribing a poultice to draw out any sickness from the wound. Armistead was wealthy enough to have a hearth in the bedroom, and the servants had the fire blazing merrily.

  ‘I’ll be fine. That’s what they say,’ he answered gruffly. But he looked shaken. Without his wig and fine clothes, Armistead looked older, more frail, with a worn, padded body. His face was pale, and he kept sipping from the glass of brandy at the bedside. His expression turned hard as he looked at the constable. ‘But it’s no thanks to you, is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Nottingham answered. ‘I had men there. But we couldn’t catch them.’ It was a lie, but he wasn’t about to give him the truth.

  ‘Then you’d damned well better try harder! I’ll be sending John Brooke a letter about it. I was lucky. Happen the next one won’t be.’

  The constable nodded. With one hand on the doorknob he turned and said, ‘I take it you’d prefer I said nothing to Mrs Armistead about Miss Marsden’s presence at the market.’

  That changed the man’s tone. But he was right. The boy and girl needed to be found very soon. Five more minutes and he left, passing the icy, disapproving stare of the man’s wife and hearing the longclock in the hall ominously ticking away the seconds.

  ‘Carter and Naylor were waiting for me,’ Rob said. ‘They had some story that you’d dismissed them.’

  ‘I have. We need to find a pair who won’t spend their duty drinking. They could have had those cutpurses.’

  They talked about it all as they walked out to Marsh Lane. The night hung cold and foggy around them. How did you catch a pair who were small and nimble? The constable’s men couldn’t be everywhere in town to stop them.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll start going through Leeds. Everywhere they might sleep.’

  ‘They’ll simply disappear for a while and go back as soon as we’ve left,’ Lister said.

  ‘I know,’ Nottingham agreed wearily. ‘Maybe we’ll be lucky.’ But he didn’t believe his own words. ‘What else can we do?’

  ‘Two wounded,’ Brooke exploded. ‘One of them a woman.’

  ‘Three,’ Nottingham said as he held up his bandaged hand. Not long after seven o’clock and still pitch dark outside. Candles burned bright in the mayor’s office. The anger came off him in waves. Brooke picked up Armistead’s letter then tossed it down again.

  Damn the man, he’d written anyway, the constable thought. He’d hoped the mention of Miss Marsden might keep pen from paper.

  ‘Why haven’t you caught them yet? I asked you back because you were good, Richard. Now we have all this.’

  ‘We have five murders—’

  ‘Moneylenders, a pimp and a pair of whores!’ He slammed down a fist. ‘Do you really think decent folk give a damn about them? They want to feel safe when they walk down Briggate. That’s what’s important.’

  ‘We’re going through all the places they could be.’

  ‘Then catch them. I want them in the jail, Richard. That’s an order.’ He picked up the dish of coffee going cold on his desk. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’

  ‘You don’t look happy,’ Rob said.

  ‘I’ve just been flayed alive by the mayor,’ Nottingham said. He poured a mug of ale and downed it in a single gulp. ‘For now, we go after the cutpurses and ignore everything else.’ He paused. ‘That’s what he wants.’

  Lister hadn’t expected anything else. If people didn’t feel secure, they’d complain. To the aldermen, to the Mercury. That embarrassed the corporation. Simon Kirkstall had been good at keeping them all sweet; it had been his sole talent. But he’d never had to deal with anything like this pair.

  ‘Waterhouse and Dyer are already out. They’re starting by the old manor house. I sent the other two down past Fearn’s Island. They’ll work their way back from there.’

  ‘We’ll begin by the grammar school,’ Nottingham decided.

  They’d barely crossed the Head Row when Lister heard someone calling his name. He turned and saw the sexton of St John’s church, a large, sweating man with a halo of wild white hair around his head, puffing his way out of the lych gate.

  ‘What is it, Mr Castle?’ he shouted. ‘We’re busy.’

  ‘At the church,’ the sexton said. ‘Please, sir.’

  Rob looked at the constable. Nottingham nodded. A minute or two would make no difference. They followed as the sexton waddled along the flagstones and into the porch of the church.

  There, wrapped in a bundle of rags, lay a baby.

  ‘I just came in and I saw it,’ Castle explained. ‘I was going to fetch me wife.’

  ‘Get the poor thing inside,’ the constable said. ‘It’s bitter out here.’ He picked up the child. ‘Skin’s cold. It only looks a few hours old. In the vestry. Start a fire before it freezes to death.’

  The baby hadn’t woken. Rob wasn’t sure it ever would.

  ‘We can’t take it,’ Castle protested. ‘We’ve had six and my wife won’t stand for another.’

  So much for Christian charity, Lister thought.

  ‘What about Mrs Brett?’ Nottingham asked. ‘She used to take care of foundlings.’

  ‘She died last year, boss.’

  ‘Who do we have, then?’

  ‘No one,’ Rob admitted. He watched as the constable held the child close inside his greatcoat, trying to keep it warm and alive.

  ‘A girl,’ Nottingham said after a moment and looked at Castle. ‘Your wife’s going to have to look after her until you can find a wet nurse.’

  ‘But—’ the older man began.

  ‘She was left here,’ the constable reminded him quietly. ‘The church will want to do its share, I’m sure.’ He put the child in Castle’s unwilling arms. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, isn’t that the verse?’

  ‘What about the mother?’ Lister asked as they walked through the churchyard.

  ‘We can’t do anything about her,’ Nottingham replied bleakly. ‘Except hope.’

  Nottingham remembered some of the places they searched, a few from his childhood, others from all the years of work. Rob knew more spots. But by the time they arrived, most of the children had scattered. The ones who remained were ill or simply too tired to run off.

  The constable saw their faces, grim, defiant as they stared up at him. They couldn’t know he’d once been exactly like them. He’d waste his breath if he tried to explain. He was authority, he was the enemy.

  ‘Those are all the camps I know,’ Rob said by late afternoon. It was already dark, with a chill that ate through their clothes. They hadn’t found the pair, but Nottingham had never truly expected they would.

  ‘More children than there used to be,’ the constable said as he settled into his chair at the jail, grateful for the warmth of the fire.

  ‘Sign of the times, boss,’ Lister told him, pouring a mug of ale. ‘People keep coming here. You must have seen that.’

  ‘It’s been that way as long as I can remember.’ He had the scrawled reports from the other searchers. Nothing, of course. He pushed them across the desk for Rob. ‘So how are we going to catch them?’

  ‘Unless we have a stroke of luck, we probably won’t,’ Lister answered.

  It was the bleak truth and Nottingham knew it. He sighed and nodded.

  ‘You might as well go home. There’s nothing more we can do here.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I have a few people to see first.’

  Never mind what
the mayor said. Nottingham wasn’t going to ignore the murders. Brooke could issue all the commands he liked but those deaths wouldn’t vanish.

  For two hours he walked up and down Briggate, trying to talk to the whores about the dead girl, about Charlotte, about pimps and moneylenders. He wasn’t about to give up. He ducked into the inns and taverns, talking to the few old faces he recognized.

  It was futile, he decided as he walked back down Kirkgate. But it confirmed what he suspected. Only one man, working alone, could stop any word from spreading. The knowledge didn’t help him find the killer, but at least that offered some faint direction.

  He tried not to think about the children he’d seen earlier. They’d freeze on a night like this, gathered tightly together to try and stay warm. He knew them better than they could ever imagine, and there was nothing he could do to help them.

  Rob didn’t go home immediately. Five minutes after leaving the jail he was knocking on Sexton Castle’s door, a tiny stone cottage tucked behind Harrison’s almshouses on the edge of St John’s churchyard.

  ‘Have you found her?’ the man asked. ‘The mother.’

  ‘No.’ There was no sense in saying they had too many things to do; he’d never understand. ‘I was wondering if you’d found somewhere for the baby.’

  The image of the tiny girl had stayed in his mind throughout the day. Not just her, but the way Nottingham held her and gazed at the child. It had stirred something. He couldn’t even put a name to it, just a sense of unease, and a little fear. Emily wanted a child, but no matter how they tried, she never caught. Her miscarriage two years before seemed to have changed something inside.

  ‘Mrs Webb is suckling,’ Castle told him. ‘She has milk for one more.’

  ‘Will the girl survive?’

  ‘That’s in God’s hands now. Mrs Castle said she was very sickly. Maybe it would be better for her if she passed.’

  Rob stared at him, shocked. ‘Why do you say that?’ How could any death be good?

  ‘Why?’ The sexton seemed surprised by the question. ‘The poor girl’s come into the world with no one to want her. It would be a blessing.’ Reproach crept into his voice. ‘But we’ll do what we can for her while she’s here, sir.’

  ‘The poor little thing,’ Emily said when he told her. She didn’t need to ask how anyone could abandon a baby. Emily spent her days with the poor and the desperate; she understood their hold on life was precarious.

  ‘She might not live.’ He sat by the fire with his boots off, toying with a cup of ale as he soaked in the warmth.

  ‘Too many don’t.’ She looked at him and arched an eyebrow. ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The only thing certain was the way the thought of the girl’s face and tiny, helpless body had stayed with him. ‘I …’ He shook his head.

  TWELVE

  A chill mist laced the dawn, leaving everything hazy and blurred. No wind, a clear sky, and dark smoke slowly spiralling up from the chimneys. Nottingham pulled the greatcoat closer around his neck.

  It was cold enough to keep most people off the streets. But he was hoping that two children who’d found the taste for theft and wounding would be out. He’d primed the men, spreading them around the town. Rob had brought in two new recruits from somewhere, a pair he swore could think and who’d do the job soberly; he’d see how they liked a day of being out in this.

  The constable tried to stay out of sight. They knew his face, and he had the wound to prove it. It was healing now, the skin on his palm itching, a reminder to stay alert and keep his own knife close to hand.

  By dinner his feet were numb with cold. A pale sun shone but it offered no warmth. He had to keep walking, to keep watching, but he’d seen not the slightest trace of the pair. He felt as if his body knew every inch of Briggate and the Head Row. Too cold for Con to play his fiddle or for Jem to sit and tell his tales. Even the butchers in the Shambles only shouted their wares listlessly, wrapped in their heavy coats and mufflers.

  He was close to the Talbot and his belly was rumbling. He’d see if Harry Meadows’s improvements extended to the food.

  ‘Mr Nottingham.’ The man had the same broad smile, rubbing his hands together. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Ale and some stew, Mr Meadows.’ He began to reach for some coins, but Meadows stopped him.

  ‘You and your men never pay here. You have a hard enough job as it is.’

  The food was good, a far cry from the spiced, rancid beef Matthew Bell used to serve. Warmed inside, he sat by the fire, letting the heat fill him as he ate and drank. The place was doing a fair trade; word must have spread.

  Then it was back to the cold, until he returned to the jail as dusk fell. Rob was already there, poking the fire to stir the blaze. He shook his head.

  ‘I checked with the men. No one’s seen them. No reports of cutpurses, though. Maybe we’ve scared them away.’

  Nottingham shook his head. ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  ‘No.’ He exhaled slowly. ‘But we can hope.’

  ‘Go home. You look perished.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I still have things to do.’ When Rob looked at him curiously, he simply smiled. ‘Go and spend some time with that daughter of mine.’

  Lister walked by Emily’s school; the shutters were closed and the door locked. But she wasn’t at Marsh Lane.

  ‘Not seen her since this morning,’ Lucy told him. ‘You two haven’t been rowing, have you?’

  ‘You’d have heard if we had.’

  ‘True enough.’ She put her hands on her hips and stared at him. ‘Then I daresay she’ll be back when she’s ready, unless she’s run off with a tinker.’ Lucy grinned.

  Once Emily arrived, she hung her long, heavy cloak on a nail and hurried up the stairs without even glancing at him.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. She was sitting on their bed, hands over her face. He put his arms around her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I went to see that baby.’ She sniffled and tried to smile as she wiped the tears from her cheeks. ‘She’s just so helpless.’

  He didn’t know how to reply; he’d never seen her like this. Emily was always so certain about things, ploughing ahead and expecting everyone else to follow. This was a side of her he didn’t know, fragile and unsure. He held her close.

  ‘We could take her,’ she said tentatively after a long silence.

  ‘Us?’ Rob couldn’t believe it. She had her school, he worked all hours … he didn’t even know how long before the baby would be weaned.

  ‘In time. When she’s ready.’ She moved, resting her head against his chest. ‘I’ve thought about it. Lucy’s here all the time. Papa’s only going to be constable until they find someone else; you said that yourself.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘And we don’t seem to be able to have our own children.’ That was the nub.

  ‘Maybe we will.’

  ‘We need to face the truth. There’s no point in hoping, is there? She’s going to need a home. We could call her Mary, after Mama.’

  He’d been wrong. Emily wasn’t unsure at all. She’d already come to her decision and made her plans.

  ‘Are you certain?’ It was the only thing he could ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied after the slightest hesitation. ‘I am.’

  ‘Perhaps I suppose I should start calling you Mama, then.’

  Suddenly she had her arms around his neck, kissing him deeply.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone yet,’ Emily warned. ‘Nobody. Not until I have everything arranged.’ She hesitated. ‘And we know she’ll live.’

  At least he was out of the weather. With darkness, a light rain had begun to fall, quickly turning to sleet so sharp that it seemed to burn his cheeks. Nottingham moved from one inn to the next. Con was playing in one corner of the Pack Horse, his old hat set out for coins, a cup of ale on the table next to him.

  The constable searched for all t
he faces he’d once relied on once for information. Only a few were still around, two in the New King’s Arms, one in the Rose and Crown. What had happened to them all, he wondered? But none of them had anything to offer him on the killings.

  ‘Nowt,’ Ned Carr said. ‘I haven’t been asking, but there’s no one saying a word, and that’s not like folk. Nobody knows what’s going on.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Ee, don’t ask me.’ He lit a taper from the fire and put it to his pipe. ‘I listen, and there’s nothing to hear.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll tell you summat odd, though. Do you remember Walter Dunkley?’

  He had a faint memory of the man. Big, rowdy, liked to drink.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s been slinking around the last few weeks. Not been out taking a drink. Hardly seen him anywhere,’ he added. ‘Not like him at all.’

  The constable laid two coins on the table. ‘Where does he live?’

  A cellar room, and pitch black on the stairs. Nottingham felt his way down carefully, one hand against the wall, testing each of the wooden steps before he put his weight on it. At the bottom he groped his way to a door and knocked hard.

  He remembered Walter as soon as he saw him, illuminated by the weak glow from a lantern. But the man had changed. His cheeks were hollow and the clothes sagged on his body. This wasn’t a killer; this was someone who barely had a hold on life. Come spring he’d be no more than a husk, if he was still here.

  ‘What do you want?’ There was no menace in his voice.

  ‘People are wondering where you’ve been.’

  ‘None of their business.’

  The constable could see past him. There was no fire in the room, only a brown patch of slow, trickling damp on the wall.

  ‘Maybe it’s not,’ he agreed. ‘But they worry.’

  Dunkley snorted and spat on the ground.

  ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ Nottingham asked.

  ‘Right enough.’

  ‘What do you know about the recent murders?’

  The man started to laugh. Before he could catch his breath it turned into a bout of coughing that doubled him over. Dunkley groped for a small bottle on the table and managed to take a swig.