‘Has anybody been down to it, sir?’ he asked Pearson, indicating the trench.
‘The area was cleared as soon as it was discovered, constable. You can imagine it caused quite a stir.’
‘Nobody likes to see a dead body before their elevenses, sir.’
Those assembled watched as the peeler leaned tentatively to stare into the trench and then signalled to a man nearby. ‘Do you mind, mate?’ he said, and handed the worker his helmet, then unbuckled and removed his belt, truncheon and handcuffs before descending the ladder to inspect the corpse at close quarters.
They crowded round to stare down into the cutting and watch as he stepped round the body, lifting one arm and then the other. Presently, the peeler crouched and the watchers held their breath in expectation as he turned over the body.
In the trench, Abberline swallowed, unaccustomed to being on show and wishing he’d left instructions that the men be asked to move back. They lined both sides of the trench. Even the figures of Fowler and Mr and Mrs Pearson were there. All of them were gazing down at him fifteen feet below.
Right. He turned his attention back to the corpse, putting aside all self-conscious thoughts to concentrate on the job at hand.
The body then. Face down in the mud, with one arm raised as though trying to hail a carriage, the dead man wore a tweed suit. His brown boots were well shod, and though covered in mud were otherwise in good condition. Not the attire of a derelict, thought Abberline. Crouching, heedless of the mud that soaked his clothes he took a deep breath and reached to the man’s shoulders, grunting with the effort as he rolled him over.
From above came a ripple of reaction but Abberline had his eyes closed, wanting to delay the moment he saw the man’s face. With trepidation he opened them and stared into the dead gaze of the corpse. He was in his late thirties and had a bushy white-flecked Prince Albert moustache that looked cared for, as well as thick side whiskers. By the looks of him he wasn’t a rich man but neither was he a worker. Like Abberline he was one of the new middle classes.
Either way, this was a man with a life, whose next of kin, when they were informed, would want an explanation as to how he ended up in a trench at New Road.
This was, without doubt – and Abberline couldn’t help but feel a small, slightly shameful thrill at the thought of it – an investigation.
He tore his gaze away from the man’s sightless open eyes and looked down at his jacket and shirt. Visible despite the mud was a bloodstain with a neat hole at the centre. If Abberline wasn’t very much mistaken, a puncture wound.
Abberline had seen victims of stab wounds before, of course, and he knew that people armed with knives stabbed and slashed the same way they punched. In quick haphazard multiples: bomf, bomf, bomf.
But this was a single wound, direct into the heart. What you might call a clean kill.
By now, Abberline was vibrating with excitement. He’d feel guilty about that later, remembering that there was, after all, a dead man involved, and you shouldn’t really feel anything but sorrow for him and his family in that situation, and certainly not excitement. But even so …
He began a quick search of the body and found it immediately: a revolver. Christ, he thought, this was a geezer armed with a gun who’d lost a fight with a knifeman. He pushed the gun back into a jacket pocket.
‘We’ll need to lift this body out of here,’ he called up in the general direction of the bossmen. ‘Sirs, could you help me to cover him and put him in a cart for taking to the police morgue?’
With that he started to ascend the ladder, just as orders were called out and a team of men began to descend the other ladders with varying degrees of eagerness and trepidation. At the top, Abberline stood wiping his mucky hands on the seat of his trousers. At the same time he scanned the lines of assembled men, wondering if the killer was in there somewhere, admiring his handiwork. All he saw was row upon row of dirty faces, all watching him intently. Others still crowded around the mouth of the cutting, watching as the body was brought up then laid on the flatbed of a cart. The tarpaulin flapped as it was shaken out then draped over him, a shroud, the face of the dead man hidden again.
By now it had started to rain in earnest, but Abberline’s attention had been arrested by the sight of a smartly dressed man making his way over the boards that crossed the expanse of mud towards them. Not far behind lolloped a lackey carrying a large leather-bound journal, its laces dancing and jerking as the lackey tried unsuccessfully to keep up with his master.
‘Mr Fowler! Mr Pearson!’ called the man, gesturing with his cane and instantly commanding their attention. The entire site quietened, but in a new way. There was much shuffling of feet. Men were suddenly studying their boots intently.
Oh yes? thought Abberline. What have we here?
Like Fowler and Pearson the new arrival wore a smart suit, though he wore it with more style – in a way that suggested he was used to catching the eye of a passing lady. He had no paunch and his shoulders were squared, not stooped with stress and worry like his two colleagues. Abberline could see that when he doffed his hat it would be to reveal a full head of almost shoulder-length hair. But though his greeting was warm, his smile, which was a mechanical thing that was off as quickly as it was on, never reached his eyes. Those ladies impressed by his mode of dress and general demeanour might well have thought twice upon seeing the look in those cold and piercing eyes.
As the man and his lackey drew close to them Abberline looked first at Pearson and Fowler, noting the discomfort in their eyes and the hesitation in Charles Pearson as he introduced the man. ‘This is our associate, Mr Cavanagh, a director of the Metropolitan company. He oversees the day-to-day running of the dig.’
Abberline touched his brow, thinking to himself, What’s your story then?
‘I hear a body has been discovered,’ said Cavanagh. He had a large scar on the right side of his face, as though somebody had once used a knife to underline his eye.
‘Indeed, sir, it has,’ sighed Pearson.
‘Let’s see it then,’ demanded Cavanagh, and in the next moment Abberline drew back the tarpaulin only for Cavanagh to shake his head in non-recognition. ‘Nobody I know, thank God, and not one of ours by the looks of him. A soak. A drunk like the poor soul serenading us over there, no doubt.’
He waved at where, on the other side of the fence, a broken-down man stood watching them, occasionally breaking into song as he brandished a bottle of something foul and broken.
Cavanagh turned his back on the cart. ‘Marchant! Get these men back to work. We’ve lost enough time as it is.’
‘No,’ came a lone voice, and it was the voice of Mrs Pearson. She took a step in front of her husband. ‘A man has died here, and as a mark of respect we should suspend the dig for the morning.’
Cavanagh’s automatic smile was switched on. Instantly oleaginous he swiped his tall hat from his head and bowed low. ‘Mrs Pearson, please forgive me, how remiss it is of me to forget that there are more delicate sensibilities present. However, as your husband will attest, we are often the site of misadventures and I’m afraid that the mere presence of a dead body is not enough to prevent the tunnel work continuing.’
Mrs Pearson turned. ‘Charles?’ In return her husband lowered his eyes. His gloved hands fretted at the handle of his stick.
‘Mr Cavanagh is correct, my dear. The poor soul has been removed; work must continue.’
She looked searchingly at her husband, who averted his gaze, then Mrs Pearson picked up her skirts and left.
Abberline watched her go, noting Cavan
agh’s air of sly triumph as he went about the business of mustering Marchant and the men, and the sadness in the face of Charles Pearson, a man torn, as he too turned to leave in the wake of his wife.
Meanwhile, Abberline had to get this corpse to Belle Isle. His heart sank to think of it. There was scarcely a worse place on the whole of God’s green earth than the Belle Isle slum.
Among the men who were, at that very moment, being urged, cajoled, bullied and threatened back to work by the site manager was a young Indian worker who, though he appeared on the worksheet as Bharat, and if any of the men working beside him were curious enough to ask that was the name he would give them, thought of himself by another name.
He thought of himself as The Ghost.
To all outward appearances The Ghost was unremarkable. He wore similar clothes to the other navvies: shirt, neck scarf, railwayman’s cap, waistcoat and work coat – though no boots, he went barefoot – and he was a competent, conscientious worker, no better or worse than the next man, and he was perfectly personable should you engage him in conversation, not especially loquacious and certainly not the sort to initiate a conversation, but then again not particularly retiring either.
But The Ghost was always watching. Always watching. He’d caught sight of the body and by good fortune had been close enough to look before the order was given to evacuate the trench. He’d also seen the drunkard by the fence and in the ensuing commotion had been able to catch his eye and then, as if responding to an itch he had rubbed his own chest, a tiny insignificant gesture practically invisible to anybody else.
And then he’d watched as Abberline arrived. He’d watched Cavanagh come bustling on to the site, and he’d watched very carefully indeed as the tarpaulin was drawn back and Cavanagh had gazed down upon the face of the dead man and hidden his look of recognition.
Oh, he was good. The Ghost had to give him that. Cavanagh’s powers of concealment were almost on a par with his own, but his eyes had flickered briefly as he looked down upon the face. He knew the man.
Now The Ghost watched as Abberline left on the cart, taking the body to Belle Isle no doubt.
And he watched as shortly after Abberline had left, the drunk had departed also.
6
Prince Albert had been dead some months, and though his taste in facial hair lived on, his adherence to decency and good manners had evidently failed to percolate through to the general public. Quite the reverse it seemed; there was a pall that hung over London, dark and malignant. Some blamed it on the queen’s absence; she mourned Albert still and had taken to the Highlands to do so. Others said the overcrowding was to blame – the terrible stink, the poverty and crime – among them those madmen who thought the best way to solve that problem was by building an underground railway. Still others said that actually it was not the overcrowding that was to blame; rather it was the construction of the underground railway that had thrown the city into disarray. This last group were apt to point out that the underground railway had thus far exacerbated overcrowding by evicting thousands of tenants from their homes in the Fleet Valley, the city’s biggest slum. Which was true; it had.
Ah, but at least we’ve got rid of the city’s biggest slum, said the first group.
Not really, scoffed the second group. You’ve just moved another slum into first place.
Have patience, pleaded the first group.
No, said the second, we won’t.
Sitting on the board of his cart, reins held loosely in one hand, Abberline thought it over, how the higher-ups made decisions in the clubs and boardrooms that affected us all. And to what end? For the greater good? Or their own personal benefit? A line from Lord Tennyson’s poem about the charge of the Light Brigade sprang to mind: ‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die.’
His cart clattered over the rails towards where the tall, spired buildings of Belle Isle appeared like a smudge of dirt on the horizon. Already he could smell the foul stench of the horse slaughterers, the bone boilers, fat-melters, chemical works, firework makers and the lucifer-match factories.
To his left some poor deluded idiot had made a valiant attempt to grow a kitchen garden but it was overrun with sickly weeds that climbed the iron fences sprouting on either side of him. Dirty, barely clothed children were running in the wasteland on either side, lobbing old tin cans at one another, scurrying in the street outside the cottages. Inside each home were rooms and wash houses, and at night the householders and their tenants would cram inside, just as they would at the Rookery.
His cart came past the horse slaughterers. Under the arch went living horses, whose sense of smell and instinct must surely have warned them what lay ahead, and in the factory they would be put to death, then the flesh boiled in copper vats for cat food.
Outside in the yards men stripped to the waist used sledgehammers to break up bones, watched by ever-present groups of children clad in filthy rags tinged yellow from the sulphur in the air.
Abberline saw a group who had obviously tired of watching – after all, it wasn’t an activity with an awful lot of variety – and set up a game of cricket instead. Without the usual equipment they’d improvised with part of an old bedstead for a bat, while the ball was … Abberline winced. Oh God. They were using the decapitated head of a kitten.
He was about to shout across to them, to urge them for pity’s sake to use something else for a ball, when he became aware of a child who had wandered in front of the cart, forcing him to pull up.
‘Oi,’ he called, waving an irate hand at the young ruffian, ‘police business. Get out of the bleedin’ way.’
But the scruffy urchin didn’t move. ‘Where are you off to, sir?’ he asked, taking the head of the horse in both hands, stroking it. The sight softened Abberline’s heart a little, and he forgot his irritation as the boy rubbed his fingertips over the animal’s ears, enjoying the rare intimacy of the moment: boy and horse.
‘Where are you off to, sir?’ the boy repeated, tearing his eyes off the horse and turning his urchin gaze on Abberline. ‘Not to the knacker’s yard with this one, I hope. Say it ain’t so.’
In his peripheral vision Abberline sensed a movement and turned to see three other young scallywags climb beneath the fence and come on to the road behind him. Let them, he thought. Nothing of value back there. Not unless you counted a soggy corpse and the tarpaulin.
‘No, don’t worry yourself, son, I’m off to the mortuary with a body on the back.’
‘A body, is it?’ This came from the rear. One of the new arrivals.
A couple more children had arrived by now. A little crowd of them milling around.
‘Oi, you, get out of it,’ warned Abberline. ‘Nothing back there to interest you.’
‘Can we have a look, sir?’
‘No you bloody well can’t,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Now get out of it before you feel the business end of my truncheon.’
The first boy stood petting the horse still, raising his face to speak to Abberline again. ‘Why is the police involved, sir? Did this one meet a sticky end?’
‘You might say that,’ replied Abberline, impatient now. ‘Stand aside, son, and let me past.’
The cart bounced and jerked and he was about to turn to admonish the kids who were obviously trying to peek beneath the tarpaulin, ghoulish little sods, when it bounced again and this time Abberline, irritated and wanting to get the hell out of Belle Isle, shook the reins decisively.
‘Walk on,’ he commanded. If the kid stood in the way, well, that was his lookout.
He drew forward and the child
was forced to step aside. As he passed, Abberline looked down to see the young urchin smiling inscrutably up at him. ‘Good luck with your body, sir,’ he said, touching his knuckle to his forelock in a derisive way that Abberline didn’t care for. In return he merely grunted and shook the reins again, setting his face forward. He went past the rest of the houses to the mortuary gate, where he coughed loudly to rouse a worker who’d been dozing on a wooden chair and who tipped his hat and let him through into the yard.
‘What have we got here?’ said a second mortuary worker as he emerged from a side door.
Abberline had clambered down from the cart. At the entrance, sleepyhead closed the gates, behind him the Belle Isle slum like a sooty thumbprint on a window. ‘Body I need keeping cold for the coroner,’ replied Abberline, securing the reins as the attendant went to the rear of the wagon, lifted the tarp, peered beneath, then dropped it again.
‘You want the knacker’s yard,’ he said simply.
‘Come again?’ said Abberline.
The attendant sighed and wiped his hands on his apron. ‘Unless this is your idea of a joke you want the bleedin’ knacker’s yard is what I said.’
Abberline paled, already thinking of his encounter with the slum children and the way his cart had shook, remembering how his attention had been arrested, cleverly, perhaps, by the kid nuzzling the neck of his horse.
And sure enough, when he skidded to the back of the cart and swept back the tarpaulin, it was to see that the body from the trench had gone; in its place a dead pony.
7
Every night The Ghost made the same journey home, which took him along the New Road and past Marylebone Church. In the churchyard, among the ramshackle and raggle-taggle groupings of headstones was one in particular that he would look at as he went by.
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