The Devil's Ribbon (18 page)
Hatton was pensive, taking over at the Zeiss. ‘So he was anointed, Albert? But by whom? A priest?’ Hatton looked at it under the viewing columns. ‘It’s an odd colour. Is it saffron? Isn’t that what Catholics use?’
‘Saffron is golden, Professor,’ added Patrice, who had stepped forward to help. ‘This seems more orangey in colour.’
‘Hmm. Quite so. Orangey yellow, I’d say. Good thinking, but in forensics we need to be precise.’
Hatton walked over to the adjoining door where they kept a few rudimentary botany books, to notice a new and delightful sketch clipped to the line in the gallery. It was an image he rarely saw in the mortuary. A depiction of beauty, tranquillity – peace. It was the girl they hadn’t cut. The girl they’d buried. The slum girl. But in this picture, there was no shadow of cholera on her skin, just a sleeping alabaster angel, made modest by a shroud. The lad had followed Hatton into the gallery and said, ‘I have called her
Sleeping Beauty
, Professor. And she is, isn’t she? She reminds me a little of my elder sister, Katherine …’
‘You have a sister?’ said Hatton, turning to him. ‘I’ve a sister, too. Her name’s Lucy. Married a doctor, like me, would you believe?’ He rubbed tired eyes, though it was only six o’clock in the evening. ‘A general practitioner, and they live north, in Derbyshire, and I must confess, I miss her.’ But then he added in a brisker voice, ‘Albert, what do you say to hanging this picture above the sink, next to our
Perfect Specimens for an Exacting Science
sign?’
‘Yes, why the devil not?’ said Roumande, a touch of concern on his face, catching Hatton’s eye, who was thinking perhaps he’d said the wrong thing, but nevertheless handed the youth a florin. ‘Get it framed, Patrice, and then with whatever’s left, have some supper on us and an early night. You look tired and we have a huge amount of work tomorrow.’
‘Thank you, monsieur.’ The lad doffed his cap, sticking the pencil behind his ear, taking a few minutes to admire the picture himself, as Hatton took Roumande by the arm and whispered in his ear, ‘I know that look, Albert. Have I done something wrong?’
Roumande lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘He dines at Fleur de Lys tonight, remember? The girls and Madame Roumande are cooking a feast for him. They’ve been at it all day, as far as I know. You know what women are like, but it’s the least we can do for one who’s alone here in London, making the best of things. He hasn’t seen his sister for years. So many rural children are vagabonds, magpies we call them, wandering village to village, desperately looking for any kind of work.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m afraid, these days, it’s normal in France. The country’s gone to the dogs.’
A little embarrassed about his earlier comment, Hatton did his best to smooth over it, saying to Patrice, with as much forced jollity as possible, ‘Well, don’t let me keep you from dinner with Madame Roumande. I hear she’s gone to a great deal of effort for you. Sylvie’s an excellent cook and the girls an absolute delight, as you know. So go with a light heart, Patrice, and enjoy their excellent company.’ But Patrice didn’t go. Instead, he stood, looking at Hatton, surprised at his dismissal and asked, with genuine concern,
‘But shouldn’t I organise a body wagon for Limehouse, Professor?’
Although slightly unnerved by the remark, Hatton couldn’t blame the lad for this enquiry. It was only natural to ask. But the dead would be gone by now, gathered up by the families, blessed by priests, and under shrouds.
‘The last place you should be is Limehouse. Stay away from the rookeries. It’s a tinderbox out there.’
The lad despatched, Hatton turned to Roumande.
‘Sorry friend, but I’m finished for the day, and anyway, I need to think, not cut. I need a breath of fresh air, a long walk to blow away
the cobwebs …’ Hatton sighed, thinking of the long day which had unfolded, but one image above all stuck in his head. Not Mr Hecker and the millstone, but that poor boy, lying in a pool of blood on the cobbled lane in Limehouse. The little cap on his boyish head, his severed trunk, and, looming in the distance, a heartless world that cared so little for children. The merciless river, the beaching docks, and another innocent lost, all in the name of what? A riot, because men wanted their jobs back, who had their own families to feed. Hatton shook his head and then stretched his hand out to Roumande –
goodbye, see you tomorrow, then
– in an absurd show of formality.
And as he did so, felt Roumande’s great arms around him, his eyes full of concern as he said, ‘You know we did our best today, Adolphus, and we can’t do any more.’
‘But that child, Albert. I can’t help thinking, if only we’d known. If only we’d got to Limehouse earlier, we might have been able to save him.’
Roumande shook his head. ‘We did what we could. You heard what Grey said. These killers haven’t finished, and this Pomeroy fellow might still be alive. Drogheda is tomorrow and we must focus on the living. Agreed?’
Hatton cast his eyes to the floor. ‘Yes, Albert. You’re right, of course.’
‘We must see this Dr Meadows first thing tomorrow, because that chemical compound was at both crime scenes. Somebody’s brushed it off by accident. It’s come off their clothes perhaps and might yet lead us to these killers, but as to the rest, you’re tired, Adolphus, so leave the oil and the botany with me, for this evening.’
Hatton was grateful to Roumande, but when it came to plants, Hatton was no amateur. Before he moved to Edinburgh to begin life as a pathologist, he’d spent some time at the Hunterian School in London.
Scrimping and saving, he had footed the bill himself. A young man, eager to learn, he’d gained a solid grounding in all things anatomical, surgical, physiological, and botanical.
Years ago, at the school, the chief apothecary had stressed to Hatton that ‘A knowledge of buttercups can be just as useful when it comes to saving lives as any amputation knife. You’re from the country, am I right? Well, sit yourself down, young Master Hatton, and let me show you something.’
And here was a world where petals were moons, stamens swam, pollen had tails, became wormy like creatures that slithered. Hatton had gasped in amazement at this cellular universe.
Science
, he’d thought.
This is how a man should feel. Sick with excitement. Raw with energy. Captivated
.
‘So,’ said the apothecary, ‘this flower is St John’s Wort and is used commonly for a melancholic state of mind. Are you the melancholic type, would you say, Mr Hatton?’
Hatton had looked up from the microscope, with unadulterated wonder in his eyes.
‘No,’ said the apothecary. ‘No, I don’t think you are. You are more a man of passion.’
Mister Smith, Mr Joshua Smith,
Hatton was sure he’d read in
The Lancet,
the man was now chief druggist for the Society of Apothecaries, based in a large classical building, a minute’s walk from Dr Meadows, the university chemist, who he would see at nine o’clock tomorrow. It would be an honour and a pleasure, he thought, to see him again.
‘You carry on, Albert,’ he said. ‘I have ideas of my own.’
‘Mister Smith is dead, sir. Hung himself a month ago. But you can come in and look round the place, although he left nothing to nobody, just
some old books and some pestles and mortars, but only the chipped ones are left. The others got nabbed pretty quickly by the druggists.’
Hatton thanked the beadle, who opened the door to a dusty room, where it seemed nobody had ventured for years – a pile of botany books on an otherwise empty shelf, a lingering herby smell, cobwebs in corners.
‘The old microscope’s gone. But help yourself to the books. It’s science the public wants now, not flowers. Sad state of affairs. Dead by fifty-two. How old did you say you are?’
Hatton looked at the beadle. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Well, if I may say, you don’t look a day over forty, sir. Anyway, help yourself. Poor man had fevers towards the end, saw visions, couldn’t sleep. St John’s Wort and overwork was the root of it. Very easy to become a slave to both in the medical world, ain’t it, sir?’
Forty, did he say?
Good God,
thought Hatton,
I am only thirty-five,
but also thinking poor, poor Mr Smith. Hatton sat down and flicked through various books, every now and then having to blow away dust, dead woodlice, moths until he found what he was looking for. A simple tome –
British, European and New World Flora
– which he tucked under his arm to read later at home.
It wasn’t the breakthrough he needed, thought Hatton, as he made his way towards his lodging rooms in Gower Street, not knowing if that’s really where he wanted to be – after the day he’d had, he was in need of a drink. But to sup ale by his own, to talk to strangers or stare into dregs? He couldn’t face it. Instead, Hatton turned off before he reached his road, and found himself in Bedford Square Gardens.
Sitting down on a bench, he watched chaperoned girls skip by and children with hoops making a nuisance of themselves. Across the
square, a dowager lady took a swipe at a boy who was taunting her dog, and beyond her, a young couple walked arm in arm, nestling close and whispering sweet nothings, he supposed.
It was still hot, but a breeze was lifting and a current of air expired a tepid sigh on his skin as he shut his eyes. Voices melding into chatter, children laughing way off somewhere, and so close the zerring of a wasp, and all around the chirrups of London sparrows. Another breath of air as Hatton felt the stirring of the grass beneath his feet, the resonance of a wood pigeon cooing, or was it doves?
One thought drifted into another. Images popped into his head, fields of flowers formed but were they primroses, marigolds, or celandine? Unsure, Hatton opened his eyes again to see the two embracing lovers. Sweethearts, his sister would have called them. But Lucy had gone north to the smoke of Derbyshire. She was sitting somewhere now, a GP’s wife under the shadow of those dark, satanic mills, and not drifting through the flotsam of London, as Hatton felt himself to be, unanchored by convention, respectability, a spouse.
But Lucy was not a woman to suffer a fool. He heard her voice in his head, insistent. ‘Gather yourself and less of the long face. You’ve work to do, so up, up I say. And you’ve the perfect excuse, haven’t you, Addy? This secret of Ardara? And if you like her so much, no more moping, brother. For heaven’s sake, just go and see her.’
He looked at his pocket watch. It was gone seven o’clock, midsummer bright as the storm clouds dissipated. He could walk there from Bloomsbury, instead of going home, and at a quick pace be there in thirty minutes or so. And with that thought, he put his best foot forward, remembering a tune he used to whistle along the lanes in Hampshire when
his father was still alive, as they chatted amiably, past the hedgerows, up to their farmstead, with the scent of wild strawberries in the air.
But how on earth had he ended up here, in London, among cadavers, felons, and murderers? Hatton laughed despite himself, sticking his hands in his pockets, having entirely forgotten the wad of correspondence he’d taken from The Yard, the tin of peppermints, and the cold square thing, which initially appeared to be a cigarette case. Smooth on one side and the other? An embossed pattern which Hatton knew, as he looked at it now, was Indian hemp, better known as cannabis.
A drug case
, he thought, as Hatton opened it up to find a syringe, nestled in green velvet, which he tapped, then held up to the light, but it was completely empty.
He’d test it tomorrow in the morgue, but experience told him this syringe hadn’t been used before. So why did Inspector Grey have an injection in his evening jacket, of all things? Was the Inspector an addict? Hatton thought of the scene in the mortuary and the Inspector’s insistence on laudanum. And his behaviour was certainly inclined to the erratic.
Hatton took one of the mints, popped it in his mouth, knowing that Gabriel McCarthy had been injected. But Hatton trusted his intuition on matters of murder, and Inspector Grey didn’t seem the murdering kind. Too in love with himself, thought Hatton. The act of murder required something else, deep within the core of a man. A cause? Passion? Fear?
Grey displayed none of these emotions, only deep-rooted vanity and a certain kind of histrionics. Although he was definitely, in Hatton’s opinion, a brazen liar.
He took the pistol from the sacristy, the bullet rounds, the leather gloves, and shook the Father’s hand.
‘Don’t take no for an answer,’ said the priest. ‘I want him dead or gone, understand? And I’m sure there’s another mechanism somewhere, stashed away in White Lodge. Get it from him and make sure there’s nothing else hanging around that the police can trace back to us.’
O’Rourke said, ‘Very well,’ though he had a heavy heart.
Judas
, he thought.
I’m a fucking Judas
… But his loyalty was to Ireland, not Damien, and today had been a day from hell. The priest smeared in dying men’s blood, whipping the crowd in Gaelic, goading the rioters on, whilst O’Rourke spewed out the story in green ink, as fast as
the bullets were flying – ‘
Bloody Carnage in Limehouse.’ ‘Innocents murdered …’ ‘Death to all British’, ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá!
’
‘The rest of London will be alight soon, go up like a fucking firecracker,’ O’Rourke muttered to himself as he entered an Irish tavern on Highgate Hill, spotting Damien McCarthy surrounded by heaps of leather-bound files, bills from the estate, Points of Notice. He didn’t look up, but seemed woebegone and preoccupied.
Did he know something? Did he sense what was coming?
O’Rourke stuck his hand deep into his pocket to feel the cold hard metal of the gun.
‘All right?’ said O’Rourke.
Damien stood up, got the round of porter in, and started talking of the terrible events in Limehouse and how he was desperate to be there but ‘O’Brian told me to stay away, and my responsibilities are many now, John.’
I have to manage all of this
, his eyes said, as they flittered across the huge pile of papers he’d scattered across the tavern table. ‘I think I see my brother in the study, hear his voice, our arguments echoing through the drawing room, like a ghost. Do you know I called him a West Brit bastard the last time we spoke? And the next time I saw Gabriel he was dead. So I came here to try and concentrate, but Ardara is a heavy burden. How terrible, that it took my brother’s death for me to understand that.’
O’Rourke took a chair, lit a pipe, and let the other man speak. ‘After the famine, all the work committees left,’ Damien continued. ‘Not that they did much when they were there. But you’re from Fermanagh, aren’t you? So it wasn’t so bad for you?’
O’Rourke spat a bit of baccy out across the floor. ‘People died there, too.’
‘But at least you had the roads, John – the docks, the silver mines, and fisheries – and Donegal is not like the North. Our people were hard to reach and the hungry season is upon the cottiers again, so I’m starting to think perhaps my brother had a point.’
So, thought O’Rourke, an ache in the pit of the belly, it’s started, just like O’Brian said it would. With the single stroke of the pen, the last will and testament, Damien was the estate manager now, had a Seat in the House, responsibilities and all the trappings of a West Brit life. How long then would it be till this man, his friend, sitting in front of him, would buckle?
‘Word is,’ said O’Rourke sipping his beer, ‘you were seen talking to that detective? That you even shook his hand?’
McCarthy grew pale. ‘What of it? He’s investigating the death of my brother. He was giving me his condolences, nothing more than that.’
‘Father O’Brian sends his condolences, too, but’ – O’Rourke leant over the table, the veins down the side of his face jumping a little, his breath rank – ‘he wants to know are you doing a deal for clemency? Because if there’s a whisper of a deal with the British …’
‘Jesus,’ hissed Damien, looking over his shoulder. ‘Keep your voice down, and what the devil do you take me for anyhow? A deal with the British? I’d rather cut my own throat. How can you think so little of me?’
O’Rourke leant back on his chair, tapped his pipe. ‘Ardara is a mountain of debts, and it’s well known only British government money, dirty money, keeps the wolves from the door, am I right? Word is, your brother was feeding the government information.’
Damien laughed. ‘Rubbish! You knew my brother. He wasn’t a spy,
for pity’s sake. He was a liberal and a do-gooder who headed up those work committees and almost killed himself doing it. He thought what he was doing during the famine was
right
. Misguided, till his last sorry breath, but with a good heart.’
O’Rourke said, ‘Answer the question, Damien. Has that Inspector Grey from The Yard offered you and that widow some sort of protection?’
Damien’s face drained of colour. ‘Protection? Protection from what? Protection from whom?’ thinking,
My God, I’m out, I’m definitely out
. ‘Why did you really want me to meet you, John? Tonight of all nights? You know I bury my brother tomorrow,’ said Damien solemnly, but knowing that, at twenty-one, he was a man now, with responsibilities and he would face these people down. Already ‘these people’ he thought. It had taken no time at all.
O’Rourke hesitated, moved a little closer, dropped his voice to a whisper, leant forward, a dark-eyed messenger. ‘Father O’Brian thinks you should give it all away. All of it back where it belongs, to the people of Ireland. There’s nothing but blood in that land. You know it, Gabriel. Give it away or it’ll be the death of you.’
The word caught in Damien’s throat. ‘What did you call me?’
‘I only think it could be the death of you.’
‘You called me Gabriel.’
‘Did I?’
Damien looked at O’Rourke, searching his eyes for the truth but only saying, ‘It’s an easy mistake I suppose, though I’m not grey yet. That’ll come I suppose with all of this.’ He pushed the bills, the letters, the parliamentary papers, the newspapers with a great whoosh off the
tavern table. O’Rourke stood up, a great shadow across the bar, and in a second, the landlord had gone, the customers vanished but O’Rourke knew what he was going to do before he said it.
He put the gun on the table. ‘You must relinquish your Seat, go back to Ireland and take the widow with you, never to be seen again. And God forgive me, Damien. I didn’t mean anything by calling you your dead brother’s name. The heat plays games with our heads. Drives men mad and sure, did you hear in the rookeries that a man was cut in half with a spade? A ribbon stuffed in his mouth. Rumours are spreading like wildfire.’
‘A ribbon? A fucking ribbon? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.’
‘Bury your brother, then leave. Tell the widow to pack her bags tonight. A vessel sails for Dublin tomorrow.’
‘I don’t have a choice, do I?’
‘I’ve given you a choice, so take it – go home.’
Damien stood up and was about to leave the tavern when O’Rourke said, ‘One more thing. O’Brian’s worried about incriminating evidence at the house.’
Damien put his hand deep inside his frock coat pocket and took out a huge iron key. ‘You know the safe in Gabriel’s study? The one behind the landscape of the island, that Sorcha painted?’
O’Rourke nodded. He knew the picture. He’d been to the place once or twice, under cover of darkness, when the rest of the house was asleep. As a guttersnipe journalist, he’d been required from time to time to snoop around, to go to places uninvited, under the behest of Father O’Brian. He’d admired the oak desk, the crystal paperweights, the sixteenth-century maps of Ireland, and he remembered a burnished
oil of a skiff, a tawny river, meadows of bright orange flowers and in the distance an ait, a river island. He’d poured himself a sherry, toasted Gabriel’s health.
‘First place they looked,’ said Damien. ‘But I’d already put the timer in the crypt, never dreaming for one minute my brother would end up lying there. It’s a dissenter’s tomb, beyond the Egyptian passageway, three catacombs down on the left. But for God’s sake, don’t scale the railings or you’ll be seen. Go round the back of the house; the tunnel starts at the bottom of White Lodge meadows. It’s dark down there and the tunnel’s full of rats but goes all the way to the crypt, and once you’re inside, you’ll see the timer there. Sure, my brother was more useful to us in death than life, wasn’t he?’