Where the Dead Lie

by C. S. Harris

  “If I had to make any bets,” he said, “I’d probably put my money on the Bligh sisters.” He stood up, water streaming from his naked body as he reached for a towel. “But I could be wrong.”

  “Were they following you, do you think?” she asked, watching him.

  “If they were, they must have had a merry time chasing me all over London. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t rather suspect the last two men I spoke with.”

  “Who were?”

  “The comte de Brienne and Sir Francis Rowe.”

  “Ah; my dear cousin. You said his name had come up, but you didn’t say you suspected him.”

  Sebastian ran the towel over his wet arms and chest. “Benji may have lifted the Baronet’s snuffbox.”

  “And that’s a reason to suspect him?”

  “It is when you know that last August he broke the neck of a six-year-old who tried to pick his pocket on the Strand.”

  “Dear Lord.”

  “However, your father verified that Rowe spent last Friday with the Prince, so I don’t see any reason for the man to want to set someone to kill me.”

  “Which leaves de Brienne and the Bligh sisters.”

  He roughed up his wet hair with the towel, then tossed it aside. “Yes.”

  “You need to be more careful.”

  He reached for her, pulling her into his arms. “I’ll try.”

  “Huh.” She slipped her hands around his waist and nipped at his ear. “Try harder.”

  He kissed her nose. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She let her hands slide lower on his hips.

  He said, “The cut over my eye is still open. I don’t want to drip blood on your gown.”

  “Mmm.” Her hands slid lower. “What can we do about that?”

  He gave her a crooked smile and tugged at the tapes of her gown. “Take it off?”

  • • •

  It was some time later, after dinner, that Sir Henry Lovejoy stopped by Brook Street to drink a cup of tea beside the library fire and tell Sebastian the results of the inquiries he’d sent to the metropolitan area’s various public offices.

  “I wish I could say their responses surprise me, but they don’t,” said Lovejoy, his gaze on the black cat assiduously washing itself on the hearth. “Most expressed frank incredulity that we would even ask. I fear the only time your typical magistrate or constable pays attention to the comings and goings of his district’s orphaned and abandoned children is when they cause trouble.”

  “You said, ‘most.’ So not all?”

  Lovejoy set aside his teacup and reached into his coat for a folded paper. “Sir Alexander Robbins—he’s the chief magistrate at Bethnal Green—reports that they had a rash of such disappearances in the past, but they’ve since ceased.”

  Sebastian sat forward. “When was this?”

  “He believes the first child went missing sometime in 1807 or 1808, although he can’t recall precisely. The disappearances continued over a three- or four-year period and then stopped.”

  “Does he provide the names of the children who disappeared?”

  “He does, yes.” Lovejoy passed him the paper. “They are listed in the order in which they went missing, although he says most of the ages are only approximate. He admits there may have been others, but these are the ones who had a close friend or a sibling—someone who was able to convince him the youngsters were unlikely to have gone off without telling them.”

  There were four names on the paper, two boys and two girls.

  Jack Lawson, 14

  Emma Smith, 15

  Jenny Hopkins, 14

  Brady Barker, 16

  Sebastian looked up from the list. “May I keep this?”

  “Of course.” Lovejoy reached again for his tea. “I’ve also set one of my men to looking into the ownership of that shot factory.”

  “And?

  “I gather it’s rather complicated. He’s still making inquiries.” Lovejoy took a sip of his tea and looked up. “Have you discovered anything at all?”

  “I wouldn’t have said so, except that my questions must be making someone uncomfortable: Two men tried to kill me this evening near Hanover Square.”

  The teacup rattled in Lovejoy’s hands. “Tonight? Who were they?”

  “Hirelings. But I’ve no idea who sent them.”

  “We’ll make them talk,” said Lovejoy grimly.

  Sebastian took a deep swallow of his own brandy and felt it burn all the way down. “Unfortunately they’re both dead.”

  “Ah. Well, that does make it more difficult. But I’ll set some of the lads on it first thing in the morning. They’ll soon sort it out.”

  Sebastian suspected that whoever they were dealing with was too clever to betray himself to hirelings. But he kept the thought to himself.

  After the magistrate had gone, Hero came to stand in the entrance to the library.

  “You heard?” Sebastian said.

  She walked over to scoop the sleepy black cat up from the hearth and cradle him in her arms. “I was discussing tomorrow’s menu with Cook, but yes, I did hear most of it.” He had told her of that day’s conversations with Ashworth and the comte de Brienne, along with some of what he’d learned from Jarvis. But he had stopped short of telling his wife that her father had threatened to kill him. “I wonder where else in London street children have disappeared without anyone noticing?”

  “It’s a disturbing thought, isn’t it?” He went to pour himself another drink, then came to stand beside her, his gaze on the flames.

  “What?” she asked, watching him.

  He glanced over at her. “I think I’ll pay another visit to the Rutherford Shot Factory in the morning.”

  “Why? What are you looking for?”

  He downed his brandy in one long pull and reached for the Bethnal Green magistrate’s list of missing children. “More graves.”

  • • •

  Friday, 17 September

  Sebastian reached Clerkenwell just as the rising sun was spilling its golden light across the gentle hills beyond the city.

  Leaving Tom with the horses, he walked across the weed-choked, rubble-strewn field to the factory’s cluster of ruined buildings. “Inchbald?” he called and heard his voice echo in the stillness.

  It was too early, surely, for the ex-soldier to be out begging. Yet when Sebastian reached the gaping doorway of the brick warehouse that Inchbald had made his home, he found it empty except for some rusting machinery, piles of broken crates, and a mound of what looked like ragged blankets and old clothes.

  “Rory Inchbald?” he called again, breathing in the unpleasantly dank, moldering air.

  Sebastian turned, hands on his hips, to look out over the uneven wasteland. He had walked the factory grounds before and found nothing, although at the time he hadn’t exactly been looking for more graves. The problem was, in this muddle of weeds, tumbled old bricks, and abandoned, rusting machinery, how obvious would an older, overgrown burial be?

  The cawing of a crow drew his gaze to the nearby shot tower. He stared thoughtfully at the medieval-style parapet at the structure’s top. Then he crossed to the door at the tower’s base. The door was locked, but the weathered, ancient wood splintered easily with his first kick. Two more hard kicks and the old panels tore away from the lock. The door swung inward to bang against the brick wall behind it.

  The interior was dusty and dim, lit only by small, arched windows that pierced the thick walls at infrequent intervals. Here at its base the tower stretched perhaps thirty feet across, although it narrowed perceptibly toward the top far above. A rickety wooden staircase wound around the inside of the curving brick walls, and Sebastian climbed it carefully, testing each step before trusting it with his weight.

  Once, coal and lead would have been hoisted up through the towe
r’s open central core to the rough wooden platform above. There the coal would stoke a furnace that melted the lead. The melted lead would then be poured through a screen to form neat round balls as it fell toward the water kept far below. Decades of thick coal dust and splattered lead now grimed the walls, and as he neared the top, Sebastian found everything covered with a thickening greenish crust thanks to the arsenic once used to help the molten lead pour smoothly.

  The staircase ended at an upper chamber some twenty feet across. A broken iron tripod and rusting cauldron still stood beside the trap door in the center of the plank floor; the remnants of an old pulley system hung suspended from the ceiling above. Even with the cold morning breeze blowing in through the open doorway that led to the parapet, the air here was foul.

  He crossed quickly to the crenelated outer walk. The golden light of the early sun threw long shadows across the uneven ground far below, highlighting each mound and depression. Some of the irregularity, he now realized, came from the abandoned, overgrown channels that had once carried water from the Fleet, for water was an important part of the shot-manufacturing process. He picked out old blast mounds and abandoned sluice gates. And then, as he continued to study the rugged field’s patterns of shadow and light, he noticed several inexplicable rectangles the size and shape he was looking for.

  One, near the wall of the closest warehouse, was thick with crabgrass, knotweed, and ragweed, annuals that typically germinated in spring and then grew through summer. But while the surrounding field also showed the tall flowering stalks of biennials such as Queen Anne’s lace and mullein, both were conspicuously absent from that six-by-two-foot depression.

  And he knew then that he was looking at a recent grave.

  Chapter 32

  Sebastian stood with his arms crossed at his chest, one shoulder propped against the warehouse’s rough brick wall as he watched Paul Gibson carefully scrape dirt from the bones slowly emerging from the soft earth of the grave.

  “How long do you think it’s been here?” Sebastian asked.

  “Hard to say.” Gibson grimaced as he shifted his position in a way that threw his peg leg out to one side. “You bury a body four feet deep, and it can take two or three years to reduce to a skeleton. But at twelve inches like this? There can be nothing left except bones after six months.”

  “So he could have been killed in early spring?”

  “Probably. Although I don’t think this was a ‘he.’”

  “You can tell?”

  “Not with absolute certainty. But the indications are we’re looking at what’s left of a young girl. Somewhere between fourteen and sixteen.”

  “It’s probably Mary Cartwright,” said Sebastian, and felt something tear deep inside him.

  Gibson gently lifted the skull free from the earth and turned it in his hands. “She was buried facedown.”

  “I guess whoever buried her didn’t want to look at her face.” He gazed off across the rubbish-strewn field to where Mott Gowan, the parish constable, was supervising a party of volunteers clearing weeds from every suspicious-looking mound and hollow. And he knew a rising tide of frustration and helplessness laced with raw, potent fury. “How the blazes will we ever identify any of them when all that’s left is bones?”

  Gibson set the skull aside and reached again for his trowel. “We can’t.”

  • • •

  They found the grave of Rory Inchbald next, buried just six inches beneath the earthen floor of the warehouse.

  “Bloody hell,” said Sebastian, staring down at the one-legged soldier’s pale, dirt-covered face. “He didn’t know anything. Why kill him?”

  Mott Gowan swiped one forearm across his face. “Maybe somebody thought he saw more’n he did that night. Or maybe he wasn’t tellin’ us everything he knew.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Sebastian again and turned away.

  • • •

  By the time Sir Henry Lovejoy arrived at the shot factory after his morning court sessions, they had uncovered three more skeletons.

  The day was clear but blustery and unseasonably cold, and the little magistrate huddled deep into his greatcoat as he stared down at one of the half-uncovered skeletons. “Five graves?”

  “So far,” said Sebastian. “One body, four skeletons. Gibson says all were probably buried sometime in the last two or three years.”

  Lovejoy swung his head to stare at Sebastian. “How can he know that?”

  Gibson knew these things because he buried cadaver parts in his own yard and then studied the effects of the passage of time on flesh and bone. But Sebastian could hardly tell the magistrate that. He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “From his experiences in the war, I suppose.”

  Lovejoy gave him a hard, steady look. “Yes; I suppose.”

  Together they watched Constable Gowan supervise the loading of a box of bones onto a waiting cart. Sebastian said, “Any luck yet discovering who owns this place?”

  “We’re making progress. Seems the factory used to belong to a woman named Margery Deighton, who inherited it from an uncle. But she went mad somewhere around the turn of the century.”

  “That’s when it was shuttered?”

  Lovejoy nodded. “She died without a will four years ago, and her heirs are still fighting over it.”

  “Over who owns it?”

  “No; over what to do with it. Some want to start the factory up again, some want to lease it, while the more affluent simply want to sell the land.”

  “How many heirs are there?”

  “A dozen or more.”

  “Do you have their names?”

  “No. But my lad is still on it.” Lovejoy stared out over the windswept field, his face held in tight lines. “Even after we received the report from Bethnal Green, I still kept hoping that what happened to Benji Thatcher was an isolated incident. But this . . . this tells us otherwise.”

  “Gibson says all were probably under eighteen when they died—with most considerably younger.”

  Lovejoy took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes with a splayed thumb and forefinger. “Merciful heavens. I can’t understand what manner of man could do this.”

  “Someone who values his own fleeting pleasure above the lives of his fellow beings.”

  Lovejoy looked over at him. “Who could possibly derive pleasure from doing this?”

  “A very twisted soul.”

  A shout went up from one of the excavations near the boundary wall, drawing their attention. As they watched, Constable Gowan reached into the shallow grave to pick up something. He studied the object in his hand for a moment before spitting on it and rubbing it between his fingertips. Then his hand closed in a tight fist and he turned to come loping toward them, one elbow cocked skyward as he held his hat clamped down against the wind.

  “What did you find?” Sebastian asked.

  “This.” Gowan opened his fist as he held out his hand.

  An old Spanish piece of eight lay on his dirty palm. At some point, someone had punched a crude hole through the center of the coin and threaded a rawhide cord through it. Now the cord was frayed and stained dark from the body fluids of the dead boy or girl it had rested against.

  “There was a lad name of Mick disappeared last winter. Used to wear this tied around his neck, he did. Said it was his good-luck piece.”

  Sebastian reached to take the coin. “You mean Mick Swallow? Jem Jones’s cousin?”

  “Aye. That’s the one.”

  • • •

  Jem Jones sat beneath the lone plane tree on Clerkenwell Green, his head bowed, his gaze on the dirty Spanish coin he held cradled in one palm.

  “Is it your cousin’s?” Sebastian asked.

  Jem nodded and swiped the back of his other hand across his nose.

  Sebastian handed the boy his own handkerchief. “Tell me about M
ick.”

  The boy sniffed. “Wot’s there t’ tell?”

  “How old was he?”

  “Fourteen or fifteen, I reckon.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  Jem sniffed again. “Guy Fawkes Day, last year. He was supposed t’ meet me at the bonfires, only he never showed up.”

  Sebastian found himself remembering the Dancer’s story of Benji Thatcher’s disappearance. He said, “You told me the other day you thought someone grabbed him. What makes you think that?”

  Jem ducked his head, his fingers rubbing the old coin’s surface over and over. “I hear they found a bunch o’ graves out by that old shot tower where somebody tried to bury Benji. Is that where ye got this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yer sayin’ Mick was in one o’ them graves?”

  “Probably.”

  Jem’s lower lip began to tremble, and he bit it.

  Sebastian said, “Why did Mick wear this?”

  “He’d found it the last time he went toggin’ with his da.”

  “His father worked the sewers?” It was a nasty and dangerous way to earn a living, combing London’s ancient network of underground sewers for items of value that had been swept underground by the rains.

  Jem nodded. “One day they was down in the sewers when Mick, he spots this coin layin’ out there on a mud flat. So he goes to pick it up. Only just as he’s reachin’ for it all excited, he hears this rumblin’ and a big stretch of that old tunnel just caves in and swallows his da. If it hadn’t been fer this coin, Mick woulda been standin’ by his da and he’d’ve been swallowed too. Mick figured the coin saved his life. Didn’t matter how hungry he got, he wouldn’t never sell it. Punched that hole through it and wore it around his neck, he did. Always. Said it was his good-luck piece.”

  Jem fell silent, as if struck by the realization that the lucky piece of eight had failed spectacularly to keep Mick safe from the hideous fate that had befallen him.

  Sebastian said, “When did this happen?”

  “I dunno. Three, maybe four years ago.”