by Mike Ashley
Walsingham’s smile became a chuckle. “Of course. That’s another of Henry VIII’s great legacies to us.”
Urmston shook his head. “And this is the land I love?”
“But let’s not dwell on the negatives, Robert.” Walsingham rubbed his grubby hands against the chill. “Instead, let’s discuss how we may use your undoubted skills to our mutual benefit.” He made to lumber away. “Come with me if you would. There’s nothing else to see here.”
Urmston glanced again towards the scaffold. Father Campion’s head, looking more like a waxen effigy than a fragment of humanity, had been mounted on a spear, a grimace of agony still etched into its dirt-smeared face. One of the apprentice executioners, for the approval of the crowd, was hefting into the air a great square of torso, with an arm and shoulder still affixed to it. It was like something from a butcher’s yard, the pallid flesh contrasting sharply with the rich, red innards. Blood dripped steadily from the grisly trophy. At the sight of that, Urmston could only agree; there was nothing else to see there.
A few moments later, they had passed into a small tavern, which had clearly been commandeered for the day. The Secretary of State warmed himself by the crackling hearth, shared a jug of mulled wine with Urmston, then with the aid of a sturdy footman, washed his face and hands in a bowl of rose-scented water, and threw a heavy ermine cloak over his ragged garments. In the tavern courtyard, a royal coach had been drawn up and was awaiting their pleasure. Walsingham dispatched a groom to deliver Urmston’s horse back to his home address on Drury Lane, then ushered his unwilling guest into the coach.
“Ride with me, if you would, Robert,” he said. “At least as far as King’s Street.”
A moment passed, then crimson taffeta drapes were closed over the windows, to block out the cold, and with a shout from the driver, the carriage jolted into motion. In the dim, reddish light within, Urmston stared blankly at Walsingham. The scheming nobleman stared back, with a catlike smile. “What do you know of the Southwark Stews, Robert?” he eventually asked.
Urmston shrugged. “Pain, poverty, pestilence . . .”
“There have been six murders there in as many months.”
Urmston feigned surprise. “Only six? Things must be improving south of the river.”
“Six murders by the same hand,” Walsingham added. “And a gruesome, fiendish hand it is.”
Fleetingly, the nobleman’s poise faltered . . . he frowned, his brow creasing as if something genuinely troubled him, a thing Urmston for one had never seen before.
“I don’t understand, my lord.”
“Neither does anyone else.” Walsingham shook his head. “There’s no apparent sense to these murders. The victims are unrelated, they had offended no one . . . they certainly possessed nothing worth stealing.”
“In which case, forgive me for asking, but how do we know they’re connected?”
The nobleman glanced up and met his agent eye-to-eye. “Because of the mutilations.”
“Mutilations?”
The Secretary of State nodded. “Ritualistic mutilations, in fact.”
“Tell me more.”
The nobleman considered. “Well . . . it’s a vile business. The victims have all, so far, been women of low repute . . . whores or serving-wenches. But each one was subjected to a shocking assault. Brutally beaten, then dispatched with knife-blows to the throat. Following death . . .” he paused to swallow his distaste, “. . . at least it is to be hoped it was following death, they were gutted like fishes, their inner organs strewn around the murder scene or removed altogether.”
Urmston sat back. “Clearly the actions of some lunatic.”
“Every known lunatic in the district has already been incarcerated,” Walsingham replied. “Yet the atrocities continue.”
“And the parish bailiffs . . . what role do they play in this?”
“A rather ineffectual one, it would seem . . . at least, in the opinion of the Privy Council.”
Urmston started. This did surprise him. “The Privy Council? Since when were they interested in a nonpolitical crime?”
“Since a district of the city which is already a powder-keg of discontent fell under a progressive succession of monthly murder fines.”
“Ah.” Urmston rubbed his chin. A more familiar story was now starting to unfold.
“Everything which can be done, seems to have been done,” Walsingham added. “The Watch has been doubled . . . in fact trebled, all streets and houses have been searched, strangers questioned . . . still nothing arises.”
“Except fear.”
“Fear and fury. The two go hand-in-hand down Southwark way.”
Urmston gave a contemptuous sniff. “Well . . . I don’t suppose we can let the lives of a few downtrodden women threaten the stability of the capital.”
“With the country torn stem to stern ’twixt Catholic and Protestant, we can ill afford outbreaks of major disorder, Robert . . . especially in London. Mary Stuart waits in the wings. Her supporters need only the slightest excuse.”
Urmston nodded. He appreciated the danger of course, but it was enjoyable to see Walsingham discomforted. “So . . . what exactly do you propose?”
The Secretary of State mused for a moment. “Well . . . somewhat to my astonishment, the Privy Council’s first response – that a £400 reward be posted – has so far been ignored. I, therefore, propose something more radical; namely, that one man in my employ, needless to say the most efficient of my agents, be brought into this business, presented with all the facts and then commissioned to bring the villain to justice by any means possible.”
“And if he fails?” Urmston wondered.
“He mustn’t.”
“But if he does?”
“He mustn’t!” Walsingham said again, in a graver tone than his agent had ever heard him use before.
When he returned home that afternoon, Urmston went directly to the solar. It was a smaller, darker room than the parlour, but nevertheless the part of his house he inhabited the most. In here were his shelves of books and maps, his measuring instruments, his ornate globe, his oaken desk laden down with papers and diaries. A good fire was already roaring in the grate, and a moment later, Urmston’s manservant, John Kingsley, came in, bringing his master a gown and slippers, and a small repast of bread, cheese and a tankard of beer.
While Urmston ate, he related the events of the morning and the new mission set before him. Kingsley, a middle-aged fellow, with a head of shaggy grey hair, but broad shoulders and ruddy, journeyman’s hands, remained taciturn, though even he was mildly surprised by the day’s outcome.
“That’s a tall order, my lord.”
“Isn’t it,” Urmston replied. “I suppose I should be flattered.”
“Has his lordship granted special powers?” the servant wondered.
Urmston nodded, and indicated a small scroll, tied with a ribbon, now lying on his desk. “I requested a warrant to question, search and detain any person I saw fit, in connection with the case . . . and he already had one prepared. Bearing my name . . . damn his infernal cheek!”
“At least it should prove a worthy chase, my lord.”
“His words too,” said Urmston thoughtfully. “For once, we pursue a miscreant whose crimes aren’t born of idealism, whose heinous deeds are a concern to us all, whatever our persuasion.” Urmston looked round at his servant. “His lordship said that to catch this villain, might even help salve my conscience . . . for all those other poor wretches I’ve sent to their fate.”
Kingsley raised an eyebrow. “He called them ‘poor wretches’?”
Urmston gave a bitter chuckle. “Not quite.”
“Well, at least he’s being truthful in one respect,” the servant ventured. “There shouldn’t be any sleep lost, if you bring this one to heel.”
“If doesn’t come into it, John. If doesn’t come into it at all.”
This Child alone, and only he,
He hath the world from sin set free.
>
Blest Mary Wanders Through The Thorn
The narrow alleys of Southwark snaked among sordid rookeries of buildings, so filthy, so decayed, so propped against each other that they looked ready to slump into rubble at a moment’s notice. The dark and squalid passages between them were more like open sewers than footpaths, rutted, muddy, awash with the contents of chamber pots and infested with rats, which scuttled back and forth careless of kicking or stamping feet. Even on a frosty December morn, when in other stretches of the city, steeples rang the Yuletide solstice, squares teemed with jolly tradesmen and mistletoe bedecked the shop-stalls, where all manor of seasonal delights were arrayed, from dates and figs to hanging rabbits and fat, pink salmon, this dockside quarter was a dismal warren of hopelessness and despair. Little, if anything, was on sale here; drunken cackles were the only sounds of mirth. The swirling smoke of countless coal and wood fires mingled with the mists of the season to bring down curtains of gloom in every court and ginnel. The people who cluttered them, like black phantoms for the most-part, were exclusively of the tattered and lame variety, as dirty and vermin-ridden as the crumbling structures they dwelled in. Everywhere, there was a foetid stench of offal, of rotted straw, of festering human waste.
As Urmston and his servant were conducted through it by officers of the Watch, it struck the spy-catcher that even the most monstrous criminal could move with relative ease in so loathsome a pit as this. There was no one he saw here who wasn’t more like an animal than a human, who wasn’t gaunt and wolfish, who didn’t glare at the intruders through resentful, red-rimmed eyes. Crime was embedded in such a society: wife murdered husband and husband wife; children cheated parents, parents neglected children; neighbour stole from neighbour; women and girls, maybe men and boys too, granted their favours for the minimum price, else otherwise they’d be taken with force; the few coins one might scratch together would doubtless be frittered quickly in the alehouse or apothecary’s, anywhere in fact where blissful oblivion, no matter how brief, might be bought and sold.
“This was the scene of the earliest one, my lord,” said the first-officer of the Watch, standing back respectfully, torchlight glinting on his helm and breastplate.
Urmston and Kingsley came forward. A heap of cinders lay against the gable wall of a tavern. The indelible bloodstains on a few scraps of rag gave testimony to the tragedy which had occurred there.
“Tell us about it,” said Urmston.
“Er . . . a common harlot, she was. Name of . . . Swift, I believe.” The first-officer consulted a leather-bound notebook. “That’s correct. Abigail Swift. Murdered on the night of July 25th.”
Urmston glanced at the fellow, surprised. “That’s very informative. You’re a credit to your office, serjeant.”
The officer was a tall, burly fellow with a broad, ruddy face and a grey tuft of beard. He flushed at the unaccustomed praise, swapping his billhook awkwardly from one hand to the other. “Er . . . thank you, my lord.”
The fact that he could write at all was an improvement on most officials of his class.
“You’ve kept a careful account in each case?” Urmston asked.
“As careful as I could.”
Urmston nodded, then snapped his fingers and held out a requiring hand. “I’ll take charge of it, if you please.”
Rather surprised, the serjeant handed over the book.
When out on the inquiry, the spy-catcher’s manner was invariably brusque, even peremptory, though John Kingsley understood the reasons why. As an employer, Robert Urmston was inclined to informal friendliness, while in the privacy of his home life to actual conviviality. But when matters of state were at hand, he would remain disciplined and detached. It helped him, as he said, “maintain an emotion equilibrium essential to the task.” Kingsley wasn’t entirely sure what this meant, but he had a fairly shrewd idea that it referred to the cold shell from which his master conducted all his secret business; the grief, the fear, the fury his inquiries often inspired, were never allowed to penetrate. Of course, his aloof and fearsomely strict lawyer-father had set standards for this during Urmston’s early life, which the younger gent had only aspired to half-heartedly and had never quite achieved. In short, Robert Urmston found it more difficult than his father had to be continuously tough and unsympathetic, hence his recent depression and attempted resignation. That didn’t mean, however, that he let frivolity or even pleasantry intrude when the game was seriously afoot.
As Kingsley thought on this, his master retained his coolly reserved air, leafing attentively through the serjeant’s notebook. The details of the crimes he found there were sketchy, and in a spidery, uneducated hand, but they were more than he’d expected.
“I need as much information as possible,” he eventually said. “Do you have a record of all persons known to have consorted with these women on the evenings in question?”
“There are lists back in our barracks,” the watchman replied. “Home addresses where possible . . . no one we have spoken to is reported to have been armed at the time or to have borne visible bloodstains.”
“They were very bloody murders, I understand?”
“That’s correct.” The serjeant indicated the heap of rags and cinders. “This particular woman . . . her throat had been cut so savagely that the windpipe was entirely severed. The fiend almost removed her head. He also lifted her clothes and attacked her lower belly . . . I counted at least twenty puncture wounds, the sort made by a sharp but slender blade . . . very deep.”
“We were told she’d been disembowelled?” put in Kingsley.
The serjeant shook his head. “Not in this case, sir, though some of the later ones were. This is only an opinion, of course, but these killings . . . well, they seem to have got more ferocious as time has gone on. The last two or three, were . . .” his words faltered, “. . . bloodbaths. I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“I have,” Urmston replied.
Kingsley looked curiously round. “My lord?”
“Decapitation and disembowelment,” his master added. “I witnessed something similar yesterday . . . at Tyburn.”
“With all respect, my lord, this is different,” the first-officer replied.
“How so?”
“Well . . . this wasn’t no clean bit of work, like you might see from an executioner, or even a butcher in his shop. This was done in a frenzy . . . a tearing, a ripping . . . like the culprit had gone berserk.” The man shuddered. “Horrible.”
Urmston looked at him with interest. “ ‘Horrible.’ Are you qualified to use that word, serjeant?”
The watchman looked puzzled. “My lord?”
“On average, how many murders a week do you see?”
The serjeant shrugged. “Well, this is the Stews, my lord . . . one a week, perhaps. Maybe more.”
Urmston considered this. “Then you certainly are qualified. Lead on, if you please.”
Shuffling in a tight-knit group, the investigators and their escort strolled on, only torchlight casting the way before them. The labyrinthine alleys were almost subterranean in their cloying gloom.
“Tyburn, my lord?” Kingsley whispered. “You think there’s a connection there?”
A moment passed, then Urmston shook his head. “Just a thought, nothing more.”
But Kingsley wasn’t ready to accept this. He knew his master of old; already, he could tell, the razor-sharp mind was in motion, linking clues together, evolving theories. Always in the past, Robert Urmston had shown the uncanny knack for unmasking spies and traitors. For all his personal demons, he seemed to possess a natural-born instinct for detecting the villainous.
Kingsley indicated the first-officer’s broad back. “Do you trust this fellow’s knowledge, my lord?” he asked quietly.
“I find no reason not to. A man who witnesses one slaying a week, must be deemed more reliable than most when it comes to the basic analysis of murder.”
“With respect though, most of the killings he deals with wi
ll be assaults during theft . . . or perhaps the results of drunken brawls.”
Urmston nodded. “Which proves beyond question that the murders we are investigating stand out from the norm. He called them ‘horrible’ . . . he couldn’t suppress a shiver. We have the right man to guide us at this moment in time, though shortly, John, we must dispense with his services.”
That surprised and alarmed Kingsley. Even with several armed men, he already felt exposed in this dangerous neighbourhood. “We must?”
“The trappings of authority will only cause the criminal fraternities to close ranks,” Urmston replied. “Yet they are the ones we must move among if we hope to progress in our enquiry.”
The other five murder sites were much the same as the first . . . grim, lonely little spots in the yards of ruined tenements, in derelict lots or at the deepest points of arched side-alleys. The first-officer of the Watch was as good as his word. In each case, he’d kept some details of the victim, her known movements that evening, and the manner of her assassination. The bodies, of course, had all been removed to pauper’s graves, but Urmston still checked off each woman as he examined the scene of her death.
The second victim was Mary Judd; she had been slain on 8 August, throat cut, body stabbed and hacked as if by a madman. Lucy Gibbon had been slaughtered on 24 August . . . over ninety knife-wounds leaving her in a lake of her own blood. Dorothea Jonson had died on 21 September . . . she had been a servant-girl rather than a whore, but her death had marked the first of the disembowelments. Anne Grey had also been eviscerated – virtually torn inside out – and had had her head severed into the bargain; her date with destiny had come on 4 October. The most recent of the victims was Jane Wentworth; she had been killed on 22 November . . . in a fashion which no sane person could imagine. Enclosed in a tanner’s shed on a marshy reach of the Thames, just below Neckinger Wharf, which was shunned at night because of the rotted corpses of pirates which hung there, the killer had been able to take his time, and indeed he had, burning articles of the woman’s clothing to light his way through the long dark hours. Bound and securely gagged, the victim had been sexually tortured with a variety of crude implements, most of them lifted from the tanner’s shelf. A severe and prolonged beating had fractured many of her ribs, so that when the maniac finally cut into her, laying back the flesh in great gory flaps, a variety of soft organs had been easily within reach; one after another of these he had then removed, slicing and dicing them as the fancy took him, all within sight of her doubtless goggling eyes. Nobody could tell when death had finally claimed the poor creature, but the monster had practically emptied her before he’d ceased, slashing off her head with several brutal blows of his knife, and placing it alongside her heart in the glowing embers of the fire, where it had slowly cooked until dawn.