Inspector of the Dead

by David Morrell

  Now, for the first time in eight years, he was alone with strangers. Two of them were police officers. This might be his only chance.

  “We think that the man who calls himself Anthony Trask actually has the last name of O’Brien. Is that true?” the Opium-Eater asked.

  Trask scrunched his eyes shut once.

  “Do you know his first name?” the Opium-Eater continued.

  Again Trask scrunched his eyes shut once.

  “If you have the strength, let us assign a number to each letter in the alphabet. In that way, you can spell his name.”

  Trask lowered his eyelids three times.

  “The letter C,” the Opium-Eater said.

  Trask calculated which number would correspond with the letter O. Exhausted, he pressed his eyes shut fifteen times.

  Then he closed his eyes twelve times.

  “L,” the Opium-Eater said.

  And nine times.

  “I,” the Opium-Eater said. “Is the next letter N? Is his first name Colin?”

  Yes! Protect me from him! Trask inwardly screamed.

  THIRTEEN

  A Bottomless Inner World

  Horseshoes thundering, the police wagon sped down Constitution Hill, passed Green Park, and stopped at the main gate to Buckingham Palace. Snow kept falling.

  De Quincey and Becker jumped down among the many guards at the entrance. Officers shouted directions to soldiers. Constables took positions along the walls that bordered the palace’s gardens.

  As Becker showed his badge to the guards at the gate, another police wagon arrived. Commissioner Mayne hurried to join them.

  “A man who matches the colonel’s description was seen at the morgue in Westminster Hospital,” Mayne reported. “A surgeon found him holding up the sheet that covered Catherine Grantwood’s body. After attacking the surgeon, two constables, and two clerks, he escaped. He’s wearing brown corduroy trousers and a matching laborer’s coat. Every patrolman is looking for him.”

  “But dressed that way, he can hide among millions of laborers,” Becker said, “or else he can change his appearance again.”

  Commissioner Mayne nodded tensely. “The palace is more heavily guarded than ever. Unless he shows himself again, I don’t know what else can be done.”

  “Has Her Majesty been informed?”

  “That’s why I’m here. She’s in conference with Lord Palmerston. It’s better to explain everything to both of them at once.”

  With Mayne giving orders to constables, they gained speedy access to the palace. An escort hurried them along spectacular hallways and up the Grand Staircase.

  Again they were taken to the Throne Room.

  “I don’t understand why Her Majesty chose so vast an area to meet with her prime minister,” Mayne said.

  The explanation became obvious when they were permitted to enter.

  This was Lord Palmerston’s first official day in office. Prime ministers weren’t sworn in during a public ceremony. Instead they received their power in a symbolic private conference with Her Majesty. Queen Victoria sat on her throne. Prince Albert stood conspicuously next to her. She wore a regal tiara as she peered down from the high dais toward Lord Palmerston, who seemed uncharacteristically small—which was evidently how she and Prince Albert wanted him to view their relationship. The chill of the immense room perhaps emphasized their attitude toward him, also.

  They turned, confused by the interruption.

  De Quincey, Mayne, and Becker swiftly approached and bowed.

  “Your Majesty, at your dinner on Sunday, do you recall our discussion about Thomas Griffiths Wainewright?” De Quincey asked.

  “The murderer?” Queen Victoria nodded, continuing to look confused about the interruption. “Albert remarked that murderers must inevitably reveal their guilt by their behavior, but you maintained that some murderers are so callous, they manage to conceal what they are. You used the example of Wainewright, with whom you shared a meal without having any suspicion of his homicidal character.”

  “On Sunday evening, at least one of your guests no doubt followed the conversation with great interest, Your Majesty. When Edward Oxford discharged two pistols at you fifteen years ago, do you recall a young Irish boy who ran next to your carriage, begging you to help his mother and father and sisters?” De Quincey asked.

  “I have no recollection. The gunshots are all that I remember.”

  “No one else paid attention to him, either,” De Quincey said. “The boy’s mother and sisters died in Newgate. I suspect that the father suffered his own harsh fate. Since that time, the boy has plotted to avenge himself on everyone whom he begged for help.”

  “An Irish boy? But no one who is Irish attended Sunday’s dinner,” Lord Palmerston objected.

  “Colonel Trask did, My Lord.”

  “Colonel Trask? Why do you mention him? He isn’t Irish.”

  De Quincey merely looked at Lord Palmerston.

  “You’re telling me that Colonel Trask is Irish? How can that be, when his father isn’t Irish? How is it possible that the father of a beggar could have become as wealthy as Jeremiah Trask?”

  “We don’t yet know those answers, but our thoughts often create a false reality, My Lord.”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Just because everyone says that Jeremiah Trask is the colonel’s father, that doesn’t make it true.” De Quincey turned toward Queen Victoria. “Your Majesty, Colonel Trask is the man responsible for the recent murders and the threats against you.”

  “A war hero who saved my cousin’s life? A knight of the realm? One of the wealthiest men in the empire? No.”

  “His real name is Colin O’Brien, Your Majesty,” Becker said, “and please believe us, with all his might, he intends to harm you.”

  “Colonel Trask… Sir Anthony…I didn’t recognize you in—”

  “These work clothes? I decided that I’ve come too far from the days when I helped my father build railways. It’s a lesson to see how people react to me when I’m dressed as a laborer.”

  “I meant no offense, Sir Anthony.”

  “None taken. But I find myself short of funds and need to make a withdrawal.”

  “Of course. What amount do you require?”

  “I wish to transfer five thousand pounds to a man who operates a carriage service in Watford.”

  “Five thousand pounds?” the banker asked in surprise. It was a huge sum, given that a carriage driver might earn no more than a pound or two each week.

  “In service to me, his business was destroyed. I wish to repay him. I don’t know his name, but he recently broke a leg, and a Doctor Gilmore in Watford can identify him. Kindly make the arrangements at once.”

  “Yes, Sir Anthony,” the banker replied, not approving of such munificence.

  “Also I require five thousand pounds in notes.”

  Now the banker was truly perplexed. “Are you taking a long journey?”

  “Indeed.”

  At the end of the meeting, he put some of the banknotes in his pockets and the majority in a leather pouch.

  Outside the bank, he entered a clothing shop. Knowing that the police would be searching for a man in corduroy clothes, he bought woolen ones to replace them, changing their brown to gray, a color that would soon blend with the night and the worsening weather. He kept his workman’s cap but stuffed it into his overcoat pocket and replaced it with a gentleman’s top hat.

  He entered a cutlery shop and bought a knife in a sheath.

  By then the streets were almost deserted, only a few people shifting past him, eager to take shelter from the snow and the murderer whom newsboys were warning about. A few cabs and coaches braved the accumulation on the slippery cobblestones, but they would soon be gone.

  Constables lingered, however, watching from alcoves, alert for anyone who matched the description of the man who’d fled from Westminster Hospital. But his top hat and gentleman’s overcoat au
tomatically excluded him from being the criminal they watched for. Within five minutes he passed three patrolmen, and each time he said, “Thanks for keeping the rest of us safe.”

  “Just doin’ my job, sir.”

  He entered a chophouse, which was almost empty. He crossed the red and black tiles that checkered the floor and sat at a cloth-covered table next to shimmering coals in a glowing iron-lined hearth. He hoped to absorb the heat, knowing that it might be a long time before he could get warm again—or possibly never.

  “Sorry, sir, the kitchen’s closed,” the proprietor said, wiping his hands on an apron stretched over his large chest. “Because of the weather.”

  “For a sovereign, can you give me bread, butter, strawberry jam, and hot tea?”

  The gold coin he set on the table was far more than anyone usually paid for those items.

  “Right away, sir.”

  Bread, butter, strawberry jam, and hot tea had been what Jeremiah Trask offered him fifteen years earlier.

  Jeremiah Trask, he thought bitterly. You were punished, too.

  The sequence of his many victims streamed through his seething memory. He thought of the Newgate guards whose abuse had prompted Emma to strangle her mother and young Ruth and then hang herself. After ten years the guards had been released from their punishment in the nightmarish hulks. But that punishment wasn’t sufficient. By then he was in a position to receive reports about them. Discovering their shabby lodgings, he’d arranged for a tavern owner to promise to bring children to them. When they eagerly responded to a knock on the door, they discovered that it was he who visited them.

  He’d located the St. John’s Wood constable who’d callously delivered the news about his mother’s arrest. After following the constable to his lodging house, he had waited for him to go to sleep, then hurled three lanterns through his basement bedroom window, flooding the room with fiery coal oil, listening to the constable’s screams as he burned to death.

  He’d returned to the half-completed village in which he and his parents and sisters had lived. Because the people there had failed to offer food to his helpless sisters while he and his father struggled through the labyrinth of London’s legal system, he had poisoned the village well. A month later, it had given him satisfaction to find the village abandoned, the graveyard filled with many new occupants.

  The law clerks who’d scorned his father and him…the governor of Newgate Prison who’d failed to supervise the guards…the sergeant at the St. John’s Wood police station who’d sent his mother to Newgate…Year by year he’d advanced through his list, constantly adding to it, postponing and yet relentlessly approaching the culmination of his revenge: the destruction of those who most deserved to be punished.

  “Here’s your bread, butter, jam, and hot tea, sir.”

  In the Crimea, he would have given anything for a simple meal like this before he went into battle. He needed his strength. There was much to do.

  Mother.

  Father.

  Emma.

  Ruth.

  Something switched in his mind, other victims joining the litany of those for whom he grieved.

  My wife.

  My unborn child.

  I want to die.

  “Surely if we remain in the palace, he can’t reach us,” Prince Albert said.

  “Indeed you’re surrounded by constables and soldiers, Your Highness,” Commissioner Mayne confirmed.

  “But how long can the palace be guarded this way? Weeks? Months?” Prince Albert persisted.

  “If necessary, Your Highness.”

  “Longer than that?”

  The commissioner glanced down. “We’re searching for him, Your Highness. He needs shelter and food. He can’t escape us forever.”

  “But he has such immense resources. He’s been channeling his rage for fifteen years. His patience is infinite,” Prince Albert said.

  “No,” Queen Victoria interrupted. “I refuse to allow it.”

  “Your Majesty?” Commissioner Mayne asked in surprise.

  “With so many soldiers outside the palace day after day, possibly for weeks and months, the people on the street will wonder why we feel the need for so much additional protection. The people might even think we fear that the Russians are about to invade.”

  “We could go to Windsor Castle,” Prince Albert proposed. “The increased guards would be less conspicuous there.”

  Becker walked to a curtain and pulled it open, revealing snow that streaked past a tall window. Shadows thickened.

  “You wouldn’t be able to travel until tomorrow at the earliest, Your Highness. How many coaches would you need for yourselves, your children, and your staff?”

  “Too many to avoid attracting attention,” a voice said.

  They turned toward the interruption.

  Ryan entered the room, leaning against Emily. Becker ran to him.

  “Inspector Ryan,” Queen Victoria said, “you have blood on your coat.”

  “I reopened the wound I received seven weeks ago, Your Majesty.” As Ryan reached a chair near the dais, Emily and Becker helped him ease onto it. “Dr. Snow has bandaged me securely.” Ryan winced. “Perhaps too securely.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Showing her fondness for Ryan, the queen descended from the dais and walked toward him. “You need to rest.”

  “When this is over, Your Majesty. All the time I was at Dr. Snow’s office, I kept thinking that the palace is exactly where I needed to be, protecting you as I did fifteen years ago.”

  “Your loyalty touches me.”

  “I would die for you,” Ryan said. “I heard you consider shifting locations to Windsor Castle. Your Majesty, you’d need so many coaches that you couldn’t possibly do it in secret.”

  “Perhaps if we prepared several groups of coaches and sent them to different places,” Lord Palmerston offered. “The colonel couldn’t know which of them to follow.”

  “But what would the newspapers make of numerous coaches leaving all at once and in all directions?” Queen Victoria objected. Although her voice was high pitched, it carried remarkable authority. “The result would be the same. With so much confusion, the people on the street would decide that we’re in a state of panic, presumably because of a Russian threat. Our enemy would take heart while our soldiers lost morale. No. While the storm persists, assign as many guards to protect the palace as you can. But when the weather clears…”

  “Your Majesty, to make sure that I understand,” Commissioner Mayne said, “are you truly suggesting that tomorrow, to project confidence to your subjects, you wish the guards to be reduced to their usual number?”

  His direction took him past the gentlemen’s clubs on Pall Mall.

  Despite his respectable appearance, a constable stopped him.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, sir, what’s your business?”

  “I’m on a personal errand to deliver a large amount of money to a lord whose identity I’m not permitted to reveal.”

  “Large amount of money?”

  “Five thousand pounds in banknotes.”

  He opened the leather pouch and invited the constable to aim his lantern at it. The constable had never seen that much money in his life. He inhaled sharply.

  “Best be on your way and finish your business in a hurry, sir. There’s a bad man on the streets.”

  Two other constables stopped him as he made his way toward Green Park. By now the snow was so thick and the light so dim that they definitely needed their lanterns.

  “You’re not safe out here with that much money. Hurry to your destination, sir.”

  When he reached Green Park, he grabbed the spikes on the metal railing and vaulted the barrier, landing and rolling in the snow.

  He remembered vaulting the railing fifteen years earlier, fleeing a mob that accused him of taking part in Edward Oxford’s attempt against the queen. He re-experienced the agony when a spike pierced one of his legs and he limped painfully away, bleeding. Back th
en, after his family died, he had spent so many weeks in Green Park, finding refuge in it, even sleeping there, that he felt at home.

  Now, as snowflakes stung his cheeks, he threw away his top hat and replaced it with his worker’s cap. He also threw away the pouch of money. It was too bulky to keep with him, and he had no further use for it. Eventually, a poor soul would find the money and thank God for it.

  Proceeding through the cover of the storm, he reached the section of the railing across from the palace. He was only a few feet from where he had begged the queen to help his family and where Edward Oxford had shot at her.

  In the gloom he pressed against a tree, his gray clothes blending with it. A lantern moved along the opposite side of the fence. Abruptly, another lantern came from the opposite direction.

  “See anythin’?” a murky shape asked.

  “All quiet. As much as I hate this weather, at least we’ll see footprints if anybody crosses toward the palace.”

  “Unless this blasted snow falls harder and fills them.”

  “No chance. I counted how long it takes me to walk my section. Forty seconds from end to end. Even a blizzard wouldn’t fill tracks that fast.”

  “I hear the man we’re lookin’ for was in the Crimea. He’s used to runnin’ and bein’ in the cold.”

  “After we catch him, he’ll be sorry he didn’t stay in the Crimea.”

  The figures parted. Their lanterns going in opposite directions, the men faded into the falling snow.

  He moved farther along and reached a gate. From the protection of another tree, he watched one of the silhouettes walk past.

  He quietly opened the gate and followed. Approaching close enough to see a constable’s uniform, he thrust a gloved hand over the man’s nose and mouth. With his other gloved hand he grabbed the constable’s throat while tugging him backward.