A Murder by Any Name

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  Nick and Sir Thomas bowed, and along with John, who sidled past the Queen as if she had the plague, left the room.

  It wasn’t until they had entered Nick’s room in the palace and were seated in front of the fire, with a cup of ale in their hands, that they allowed themselves to relax.

  “Bloody hell,” Nick said.

  “I’d rather face the rack,” Sir Thomas said, running his hand over his face. It was the first time Nick had seen his composure crack.

  “I don’t think so,” Nick said.

  Sir Thomas looked at him. “Would you have tortured me?”

  Nick shrugged. “Probably. No offense.”

  Sir Thomas gave a weak grin. “None taken.”

  Nick briefly told John about the fire. At first it was all he could do to stop him returning to Bankside. John kept asking about Maggie and the children.

  “They’re fine,” Nick said for the umpteenth time. “Henry rather enjoyed himself,” he added then regretted it when he saw John’s jaw tense. “Black Jack’s boys are keeping an eye on things until we get this sorted.” When his friend still looked unhappy, Nick said, “I need you here, John. Maggie and the children are safe.”

  “All right,” John said eventually. “So what happens now?”

  “Now,” Nick said, putting down his cup and getting to his feet, “I’m off to interview an apothecary’s apprentice.” With no other leads to go on, Nick thought he might as well satisfy his curiosity about the mysterious servant who had purchased Guinea spice for his master. A waste of a morning, he suspected, but he couldn’t just sit in his room and wait for his deadline to expire or, worse, the murderer to strike again. “You?” he asked Sir Thomas.

  “I’m going to stay right here by this comfy fire,” he said.

  “Avoid the Spider, you mean?” Nick said.

  “And my wife,” Sir Thomas agreed.

  “By the way,” Nick said, “seeing as you’re being so affable all of a sudden, what’s the name of this mystery woman you’re seeing?”

  “Who says I have a mistress?”

  “I do.”

  Sir Thomas looked at Nick for a moment, then shrugged. “She wasn’t my mistress,” he said. “A dalliance, no more.”

  Nick waited. He had noticed the use of the past tense.

  “It was Mary.”

  Nick nodded. Hugh had told him that Mary had taunted him by saying that she was sleeping with a man and not a boy. She must have been drawn to Sir Thomas’s hard-bitten air of experience, his quiet self-confidence, so different from Hugh’s vain posturing. He had also been right in his assessment of Sir Thomas’s character; he would never dishonor his wife by taking a permanent mistress but, like many men—like Nick himself—would find temporary assuagement of his lust with someone known to be promiscuous. He wondered if Mary had known this or if she had thought she had found true love. The thought made Nick sad. But Sir Thomas could not have been with Mary the night before. Almost every moment of her last hours were accounted for. Even so, he could understand why Sir Thomas had been reluctant to name his lover to the Queen the day before in such a public place as the Great Hall. Coming so soon on the heels of Mary’s violent death, he might have been torn to pieces by the mob.

  “You were investigating the custom fraud the night Mary was murdered,” Nick guessed, another piece of the puzzle falling into place.

  “That’s correct,” Sir Thomas said. “So you see, I couldn’t very well blurt that out in front of everyone, could I?”

  “You could have told me when I talked to you in the Tower.”

  “I didn’t know about you and Cecil then, did I? I had no idea I could trust you.”

  Before Nick could reply with a scathing comment about the Spider, there was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” he shouted.

  A page in the Queen’s livery entered. Behind his shoulder, standing in the doorway, Nick glimpsed a woman who looked familiar.

  “Someone to see you, Your Honor,” the page announced with ridiculous formality. He was young, Nick noted, perhaps only eight, the minimum age for a page, and new at his job, judging from the pristine nature of his uniform. Give him a few months and he would be as slapdash, scruffy, and insolent as the rest of the Royal Pages.

  Nick beckoned for the woman to enter, and when she stepped into the light, he recognized Mistress Plunkett, Sir Christopher’s cook.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Your Honor,” she said, bobbing a curtsey and glancing nervously around the room as if she expected to see the Queen sitting there.

  “Not at all,” Nick said. “Come in and sit down.”

  “I’ll stand if you don’t mind, sir,” she replied.

  Nick noticed that she was doing her best to erase her London accent, but she was nervous, even distraught, and it kept creeping back into her speech. It would have amused him if he had not picked up on her distress. He introduced her briefly to John and Sir Thomas. “Now, Mistress Plunkett,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s Perkin,” she said. “He’s gone and fetched up dead.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Fleet Ditch

  Nick stood on Ludgate Bridge on the corner of Bridewell and Fleet Streets, staring down into the ditch. Formally a wide river, the word fleet being a derivation of the Saxon flod, meaning “flood,” the Fleet was anything but a flood now. Originating from a spring on Hampstead Heath in Caen Wood and emptying into the Thames, it had once been Roman Londinium’s main source of sweet water. As the city grew, it had been used by Londoners as a convenient repository for their household waste, despite numerous royal edicts banning such a practice. A succession of kings had vowed to have it cleared of debris and offal, to reinstate its former swift-running glory when it was said that ten ships could sail up the river side by side, but it had filled up with rubbish almost as fast as it had been dredged, its water undrinkable for centuries. One of Nick’s classics tutors at Oxford had told him he had found Roman coins on the bank; Nick hadn’t asked him what he had been doing rummaging around ankle-deep in shit with his moth-eaten robe hoicked up about bony knees, but that image had given him much solace as he sat in his tutor’s stuffy rooms, translating endless passages of Livy and Cicero.

  Now he watched as the two guards he had commandeered from the palace, strips of cloth tied over the lower half of their faces to stop them keeling over from the noxious vapors emanating from the great sewer, dragged the body of Perkin out from under the stone balustrade of the bridge nearest to the bank and laid him flat on his back. If the weather had not been so cold, the sewer all but frozen solid, the body would have washed into the Thames and might never have been found. Nick was not sure why he had come to view the body except that Mistress Plunkett had reached out to him in her distress and the Fleet was on his way to the apothecary’s.

  On the walk over, he learned from Mistress Plunkett that a servant from the Fleet Prison, emptying the piss pots that morning, had seen a foot sticking out from under the bridge. He had alerted the turnkey, Master Plunkett, and he in turn had recognized the lad and sent for his wife.

  Nick crossed the bridge and clambered down the slick sides of the embankment to the Fleet, trying not to inhale nor look at the mountain of filth below, even though it was covered in snow. John and Sir Thomas prudently opted to remain on the bridge. Despite her husband’s objections, Mistress Plunkett had returned to Sir Christopher’s house, saying she had to prepare a meal in readiness for her master’s return that afternoon.

  Shuddering with horror at the thought of falling into the ditch, Nick gingerly approached the body. Perkin lay as if asleep, eyes closed, face relaxed. Nick sighed. He didn’t think he could stand looking at the premature death of the young one more time. He had ordered a bucket of water to be brought from the prison well and now signaled to one of the guards, making sure to stand well back. The guard sluiced the body down, washing the muck off the face and front of the body, and Nick crouched beside it to get a closer look. He had
already sent for Eli and had asked him to meet him at the Fleet Prison on the bank above them, but he found that studying a corpse in situ was often helpful. The body was in pretty good shape considering it had lain in a sewer for several days. The cold and snow had kept the rats at bay and prevented the body from sinking into the morass or being carried to the Thames.

  Perkin’s right arm lay at an odd angle, partly under the body, and straightening it, Nick realized it was broken at the elbow. He glanced up at the bridge, judging the distance. If the body had been tipped over the balustrade, the arm could have broken on impact. From his conversation with Mistress Plunkett the day before, Nick estimated that the boy had been murdered the night before last—the same night Mary had been killed—after running away from Sir Christopher’s house. But for the absence of bruising to the face and grazed knuckles, Nick would have thought the most likely cause of death was a tavern brawl turned deadly. After witnessing the boy’s hatred of the dog and his master, Nick thought Perkin just the sort to pick a fight after downing a few pints of ale.

  Nick ran a finger over the crude stitching in the boy’s hose near his ankle and felt a sudden stab of pity. The boy had not lived long enough to get a new pair of hose, let alone shave every day. His short life had been dominated by the whims of a foolish master and a canine nemesis who nipped perpetually at his ankles. Mistress Plunkett had said that Perkin’s mother was dead and his father had been a violent drunk. Slowly Nick got to his feet. Not for the first time, he wondered at the benevolence of a God who had ordained that this boy should have such a brief and miserable life when his so-called betters lived long, luxurious existences before dying peacefully in their beds.

  At a sign from Nick, the guards lifted the body onto a makeshift stretcher and, slipping and sliding, carried it up the bank. Nick followed. Perkin’s broken arm fell over the edge of the stretcher and flopped toward the ground, jolting with each ungainly step the guards took. When they reached level ground at the top of the bank, Nick lifted it and placed it gently across the boy’s chest. The body was then carried into the prison and laid on a table that had been brought into an empty cell.

  Again, it was Rivkah who arrived instead of Eli. “Emily’s taken a turn for the worse,” she said. And then to Nick’s unspoken question: “The baby is thriving.”

  He took her aside. “Are you up for this?” he asked in a low voice. “After last night, I mean.” He could still smell the smoke in her hair.

  “I’m fine.” She turned away, but not before Nick had seen a look of gratitude in her eyes.

  Sir Thomas raised an eyebrow at a woman’s presence in the death chamber but wisely held his tongue. When Rivkah began to strip the body, he looked away, as if embarrassed.

  “No wounds on chest or belly,” Rivkah said. “But look here.” She pointed to a crust of blood in the corner of Perkin’s mouth that Nick had missed. “It looks like he coughed up blood. Help me turn him.”

  When Perkin was facedown on the table, Nick could clearly see what had killed him. One stab wound in the lower back over the right kidney and one stab wound higher up between the shoulder blades, slightly to the left of the spine. There was extensive dark bruising on the back, where the blood had settled. “This accounts for the aspirated blood,” Rivkah said, pointing to the higher wound. “The knife punctured a lung. And it looks as if it also punctured the aorta. And this,” she said, indicating the wound in the lower back, “tore through the kidney.”

  Nick shuddered. “How long would it have taken Perkin to die?”

  “If the first blow was to the aorta, then moments.”

  “Weapon?” John asked.

  “Long, wide blade, I’d say.”

  “Not a stiletto?”

  Rivkah placed her index finger and thumb on either side of one of the wounds. “See for yourself.” Her fingers were almost two inches apart. “And he was already dead when he broke his arm.” She had rolled up Perkin’s sleeve and was pointing to the elbow joint where a sliver of white showed through the flesh. “No bleeding.”

  So Perkin was dead when he went over the bridge. He hadn’t been the first dead body to be disposed of that way.

  “No sign of a struggle,” Rivkah said, wiping her hands on a cloth. “That’s why I think the first stab was to the aorta. He would have bled internally so fast that he would have quickly lost consciousness. The stab to the kidneys was to make sure.”

  That tallied with what Nick had seen for himself. Either Perkin had known his attacker, enough to have felt safe turning his back on him, or he had been taken completely by surprise from behind, say, in a dark alley.

  If Rivkah was correct about the aorta, then Perkin would have dropped where he stood, mortally injured. The killer had then carried his body to the bridge over the Fleet and tipped him in, hoping the body would go undiscovered. And if December had been its usual wet month and not one of unseasonable cold, his plan would have worked. Either the rats would have destroyed Perkin’s identity, and he would have ended up in a pauper’s grave with Nemo chalked on a crude wooden cross, or he would have been carried out to the river and eventually drawn out to sea by the tidal flow.

  Nick walked over to the barred window that looked out onto Shoe Lane. The sun had come out and was melting the snow on the rooftops. The steady drip, drip, drip from the eaves was like the deadline for solving the murders, counting down.

  “What time did your wife say she was expecting Sir Christopher’s return?” Nick asked, turning back into the room. Master Plunkett was standing by the door, turning his great ring of keys around and around in his hands, his eyes going everywhere except to the body in the middle of the room. He had known the lad, Nick remembered.

  “Sometime this afternoon,” the turnkey replied.

  “Right,” Nick said, making up his mind. “We’d better inform him his servant’s been murdered.” He let John and Sir Thomas precede him from the room. Master Plunkett followed. Rivkah was covering Perkin with a blanket. Nick saw how gently she laid it over him, smoothing it down like a mother tucking a child into a bed.

  “Sorry to keep dragging you across the river,” he said.

  Rivkah shrugged. “If a physician cannot keep someone alive, then the next best thing is to find out how he died.”

  “Perkin wasn’t your patient,” Nick said.

  Rivkah smiled. “To a physician, everyone is a patient.”

  Unconsciously, Nick touched a finger to his scar.

  They split up outside the prison, Sir Thomas gallantly offering to escort Rivkah to Temple Stairs, where she could catch a wherry back to Bankside. He offered her his arm, and with a quick glance at Nick, she took it. Nick watched as they turned right on Shoe Lane toward Fleet Street and the Strand. Sir Thomas was saying something to her, his head close to hers, and Nick could see her profile beneath the habitual hood she wore as she lifted her face up to his, laughing.

  Accompanied by John and Hector, Nick reluctantly turned in the opposite direction to Holborn, then right toward Cheapside. John was headed to Sir Christopher’s to await the nephew’s return; after seeing Rivkah onto a wherry, Sir Thomas said he had business elsewhere. Nick guessed that it was to do with the fraud case and asked no questions. Nick himself was going to beard Master Hogg, the apothecary, in his den on Candlewick Street, a short walk east from Cheapside. If Wat was out running errands, then Nick was determined to get a list of his customers and track him down. They arranged to meet up again at Sir Christopher’s afterward.

  “Think this death is connected with the ones at the palace?” John asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “The type of killing is completely different from Cecily’s and Mary’s murders.”

  “Three killers?” John stopped in the road to stare at Nick.

  Nick shrugged.

  They walked in silence for a few streets. “The knife is bothering me,” Nick said eventually. “It seems too big for street use. More like a carving knife than a dagger.”

  John pull
ed a face. “This case is getting me down. It seems like everywhere we look, we find a new murderer.”

  Nick clapped him on the back. “Be patient. We’ll get there.”

  Despite his words, Nick was deeply frustrated by the anomalies in all the murders, not least in this latest murder. Why, for instance, did Perkin’s killer not just leave him where he dropped and make his escape? Why risk discovery by carrying him to the bridge and tossing him over? Even that late at night, there was seldom a time when the streets were completely empty. Filled as it was with the destitute, London was alive with silent watchers. His guess was that the killer lived in the vicinity and did not want a body cluttering up his doorstep or the local watch asking awkward questions. The Fleet was just far enough away to serve as a convenient dumping ground.

  As they came to the Cross at St. Paul’s, Nick saw a small bundle of rags hunched on the lowest step, rocking back and forth in an effort to keep warm. He walked over and hunkered down in front of her.

  “Hello,” he said. “Remember me? Did you see anyone come this way last night? A man? Perhaps carrying something?”

  The girl stared at him. Her skin was chalk-white, her lips blue. Her thin body shuddered as if with fever. Nick couldn’t tell if she recognized him from before or if she had even understood his question. Coming to a decision, he reached into his money pouch and, bringing out a shilling, held it in front of her face. A spark came into her eyes, and she reached out a dirty claw.

  “You can have it if you come with me,” he said.

  Immediately she took his hand. Nick wondered how many men had offered her money but for very different reasons. Nick heard the pie-seller on the corner mutter, “Filthy bastard!” before spitting on the ground; the man was obviously thinking the same thing.

  “She can get warm by Mistress Plunkett’s fire while I go talk to Wat,” he explained to John. “She’ll die if she stays outdoors. Perhaps we can talk to her when she’s recovered.”