Corpse Thief Read online

  The crowd erupted with delight and dismay as money began to change hands. And at last Joshua Hawke managed to look away. Straight into a pair of malevolent brown eyes that glittered above an aquiline nose.

  “Some kind of Mary-Ann are you, friend?”

  Hawke swallowed thickly as he stared up at the thinner of the two Giltspur Boys. “What?”

  The skinny fellow sniffed hard through his hooked nose and licked narrow, chapped lips. “After a buttock banquet?” he asked with a gentle Irish lilt. “We saw you staring, so we did.” The man’s companion - broad, fleshy cheeks almost as red as his hair - stood in grim silence at his shoulder, but he nodded agreement slowly.

  “You are mistaken, sir,” Hawke said, struggling to peel a suddenly parched tongue from the roof of his mouth. “I was not looking at you, but at the baiting.”

  “Ah, but you were,” the Giltspur said. “Thought we’d wander over, so we did. See what it is you find so intriguing, Nancy-lad.”

  Hawke shook his head, furious with himself for having let his attention slip so catastrophically. He decided to ride out the danger with bluff belligerence. “Begone, sir, I would place a tanner on the next bout.”

  With an ostentatious gasp, the Giltspur planted a hand on his own chest. “Ah! Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Then I must be mistook after all!” He made to turn, then paused, clicking his fingers as if struck by sudden epiphany. “But now that I think on it. I do believe we’ve met before.”

  Hawke felt vomit rise through his gullet. He swallowed it back with difficulty, throat burning. “Oh?”

  The Giltspur winked. “At The Bell.” Now the brown eyes flickered away from Hawke, scanning the crowd of bodies that ebbed and flowed around them. “I think you’ve been a-spyin’, boy, so you have. Naughty, that. Very naughty. You and your lovely lady.”

  “Lady?”

  “Don’t play the dullard, boy. Saw you together, so we did.”

  “I do not...”

  “I said don’t bother yourself. We saw the two of you back at Smithfield. You were in the tavern swillin’ gin. What is she? Blackamoor?”

  “No, sir, I...” Hawke persisted, though he knew his denials were mere wasted breath.

  The bigger Giltspur pulled club-like fists from the pockets of a thick overcoat. Something glinted bright and sharp in one. His confederate said, “The girl was watching us, so she was.” He tapped his nose with a bony finger. “Don’t think we didn’t spot yous. So you followed us here. By my reckoning, that makes you worth killing. Who’d you work for?”

  Hawke backed off a step, giving himself room so that he could pat the knife at his waist. “Fuck yourself, friend.”

  Both Irishmen apparently found that comical. “No, boy,” the thin one replied. “I don’t think I will. Your lady, on the other hand.” He licked his lips. “Cunny’s cunny when all’s said and done, eh? Black, white, brown or yellow, tis all the same to me.” He flashed a nasty grin, displaying all three teeth left in his skull. “I’ll swive her raw while you’re scooping your own guts off the floor.” He grunted and the man with the blade shifted forwards. “I’ll tell him to do it quick if you point us in the right direction, so I will. Now, where is she?”

  “She’s here,” replied Corissa Lott. And then she stabbed the skinny Giltspur in the side of the neck.

  Her victim reeled away in horror, hand pressed hard over the wound, steam-wreathed blood seeping freely between bone-white fingers. His hulking companion lumbered forwards, stepping round the injured man who was bending low, curling and clenching around the sudden pain. The big fellow snarled like one of the bulldogs, knocking Hawke clear as he lunged for Corissa, whose own forearm was stained with blood, the slender knife still in her grip. She was backing away, staring at the man she had hurt, and for a second she failed to react. The Giltspur grabbed her wrist with a meaty paw, twisted it savagely so that the blade dropped away, and then hauled her into him, enveloping her slim frame within his bear’s embrace.

  Joshua Hawke fell. He heard Corissa’s desperate pleas, muffled by the fat fingers of a captor preparing to tear her limb from limb, and knew she must think he swooned. All to the good, he thought, for if she considered him pathetically feeble, then so would the huge Irishman. He rolled forwards quickly, pleased that his agility had not gone the same way as his strength, and Corissa’s blade was in his hand. The Giltspur Boy seemed not to flinch as the wicked tip punctured his skin. Indeed, as Hawke threw himself clear, sprawling amongst the legs of stunned onlookers, he wondered whether the bovine brawler would notice at all. But then the big man howled. Not because of the pain, but because he was crumpling like an undermined building, sloping inexorably to one side as his leg began to fail. His face was bright red, creased in a grimace of confusion, and he put his hands to the collapsing limb like a pair of buttresses.

  Θ

  It was chaos.

  Hawke and Corissa sprang free, allowing themselves to be swallowed by the pulsating melee of a crowd thrown into panic. They stumbled pell-mell through the human gauntlet, shouldering a ragged path, hauling one another along as a hue and cry rose up in their wake. Corissa, smaller and more nimble, took a natural lead, not looking back, ducking and weaving along her improvised route like a twinkle-toed pugilist. It was impossible to tell how lethal her blow had been, for things had happened so quickly, but as they crossed the threshold into the tavern, her victim could still be heard shrieking above the din like a gelded hog.

  They ran through the building, kicking open the doors and emerging onto the wide, empty road.

  “Christ on His cross,” Hawke panted through a surge of relief that stole the air from his chest.

  “How did you do that?”

  He looked down at the woman. Her brown eyes shone in the moonlight. “Do?”

  “You are a sot, by your own admission,” Corissa said, not taking her gaze from his. “The way you moved.” She shook her head slowly, reflecting on all she had seen, weighing its implication.

  “I slit the tendon at his heel,” Hawke said. “Clean through. He’ll not be walking again for a long while.” He shrugged. “If ever.”

  Shouts from inside the tavern made them move again. They crossed the road, moving into the shadows of the narrower alleys. “I would not have thought you capable, Joshua,” Corissa said after a long while.

  “Come,” Hawke spoke in the blackness. “Let us be gone from this damnable place.”

  Θ

  It must have been approaching midnight when Hawke returned to the overcrowded rookery that was his home. The street lamps disappeared as alleyways became constricted, and his senses sharpened instantly with the gathering gloom. The rookery was a place of unfettered danger, where lawmen feared to tread and visiting strangers might vanish into thin air. A labyrinth of rotten hovels, gin shops, brew-houses and brothels. Respectable homes had lined the roads once, but they had long since fallen to ruin, their door-less entrances gaping like black mouths, poised to devour any who dared enter. Within, separated by crumbling stairways and mouldering corridors, each squalid space would be let out by avaricious landlords to as many desperate souls as possible. The area was a hub for Irish immigrants especially, and their large, vulnerable families might find themselves squeezed twenty or thirty to a single room. Men and women, young and old, crammed cheek-by-jowl; lice-infested, disease-ridden and desperate, sleeping head-to-toe on floorboards that stank of piss and shit.

  The very nature of St Giles, its pervasive odour of decay and its oppressive air, put Hawke in a dark malady that had but a single cure, and, upon entering Buckbridge Street, he skirted past his lodgings and continued instead to the nearest of the area’s countless gin palaces. The building had once been a modest terrace house, two windows wide and three main storeys high, topped by a garret storey in the roof. He had often thought it would, in its pomp, have been a pleasant enough structure to behold, erected in soft yellow brick, with clever arches to the upper windows and a pair of large, imposing chimney-stacks bearing
a level of workmanship that spoke of care and pride. But those high windows were covered now in nailed boards, the crests of the stacks were clogged with birds nests, and the roof was patchy, like corrupted skin, where its tiles had long been stolen. Only the ground floor managed to rekindle something of the building’s former self, for it had always been intended as a shop front, with huge, rectangular windows facing the street. Those windows had been put through, and the big timber door was marked with a long, pale scar where some kind of ram had battered it open, but its function remained the same.

  Hawke pulled his knife and went inside. Even at this time of night, the gin shop was open for custom. It was murky, lit only by a single flickering lamp, and the whole place smelled strongly of tobacco and damp. The shop, taking up almost the entire ground floor space, was a sparse affair, the decor uniformly miserable. There were only a half-dozen chairs and a single table that appeared to have been split straight down the middle, while bundles of rags lay against the walls, the snores coming from within those stinking piles betraying the sleeping folk within. But, crucially, there was a long counter at one end, against which a lone patron perched, swaying precariously on his high stool. Seeing no immediate danger, Hawke sheathed his blade and crossed the sticky floor.

  “Gin,” he said, unnecessarily, to the pock-scarred man who emerged from an anteroom.

  The bar tender pulled a bottle from somewhere behind the counter and filled a glass, sliding it into Hawke’s eager hands when a couple of coins had passed the other way. Hawke realised he was still shaking, still reliving the bloody skirmish at Hockley-in-the-Hole, and he gripped the vessel hard. He sank the gin without pause. The impassive bar tender took the cup with tattooed fingers and replenished it. Hawke drained it again. The warmth was luxurious within his chest and guts. He realised, too, that the shaking was beginning to subside. He felt suddenly exhausted.

  “Leave the bottle,” he said, producing more money. The bar tender gathered the coins deftly and made himself scarce, slipping down a steep flight of stairs that presumably led to his cellar. Hawke fished within the lining of his coat, laying fingers upon a small glass container, which he thumbed open without delay. He tilted it carefully, letting two drops of its dark liquid tumble into the pale gin, before returning it to its secret home. He swirled the bottle, making sure the tincture was well mixed, then drank deeply, satisfied that his face was beginning to feel numb. Gradually he turned his mind away from the baiting and the fight and the breathless chase that followed. It was harder to push the image of Corissa Lott from his mind. Her bright eyes, the smell of her hair, the mildly amused smirk she seemed to preserve for him alone. Yet to dwell on her was to court unimaginable danger. He had left Corissa on Great Russell Street, within spitting distance of Szekely’s home, and now, he knew, she was best forgotten. Instead he reflected upon the task set by George Ruthven. A dead sewer scavenger and a mutilated girl. Who had killed them? Why? Hawke still possessed the stalks that had been taken from Betsy Milne’s ruined corpse, and he took them from his coat, placing them either side of the gin glass. He stared blearily at them. If he had hoped for a flash of inspiration, nothing came. He knew he needed to discover their significance. One was a section of a fennel stem, but the other was still a mystery. Identifying that second stalk would need to take priority, he told himself.

  And what else did he know? He lifted the gin glass and stared down onto the surface of the liquid. “The girl’s father,” he muttered quietly, “promises vengeance in his grief-stricken fury. Lucas, a resurrectionist, murdered.”

  “Eh?” the other man at the counter said, looking up from his drink. His eyes were blood-shot and entirely vacant, and the movement of lifting his head almost toppled him from the stool.

  “Nothing, friend,” Hawke replied. “That is to say, I have enlisted your help in my investigations.”

  “Quite... so...” the inebriated fellow managed to utter, before slumping forwards, head in hands.

  “Ruthven considers the crimes related,” Hawke went on. “An eye for an eye. But Szekely believes the death of Lucas is a symptom of gang-warfare, nothing more.” Hawke waited as his unwitting sounding board coughed up a thin stream of vomit that streaked his coat sleeves. “I had presumed Ruthven was right, but now that I have encountered the raging Butcher Milne, I discover a man not basking in promised retribution, but seeking it still.” He paused to drink deeply, setting down the cup and taking up the fennel. If he did not think Milne had killed Lucas, then was it the Giltspur Boys as Szekely believed? “No,” he said to the stupefied man at his side, “it was not them. Maybe.” He laughed bitterly at the web in which he had found himself entangled. “A girl, a tosher and a resurrectionist, and I cannot fathom who did away with any of them.”

  “Come again, sir?”

  Hawke looked up, startled, chiding himself for the lack of discretion. It was the bar tender who spoke, returning with a crate of gin bottles that clinked as he set them on the counter. Hawke smiled, nodding at the vomit-covered sot at his side. “My friend and I set the world to rights.”

  “Just as you should.” The patchy skin of the barman’s brow creased further as he frowned suddenly. “I got some dried beef out back if your belly growls. Good an’ tasty.”

  Hawke followed the man’s gaze and realised that he was looking at the plant stems. “This is no meal, I assure you.” He fished for another coin. “But I’ll take some of that meat.”

  The bar tender grunted. “As you wish.” He glanced at the fennel again. “That stuff’s good only for animal fodder. Pig an’ rabbits.” As he turned away he added, “Or ground up by god-damned quacks.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  FRIDAY

  It was almost noon the following day when Hawke reached the premises of, as the gin palace barman had put it, the god-damned quack. The journey had not been a long one, for the shop of Ansell Brommett was located in the same disreputable neighbourhood as Hawke’s own lodgings but the morning had been one of swimming senses, burning eyes and a skull that felt as though it were a blacksmith’s anvil. Eventually Hawke had clambered out of his bile-stained bed and crawled across floorboards still bearing the dark reminders of Lucas’s murder. He had hauled on his breeches and fumbled to get into his shirt, and then he had collapsed for a little nap that had, he later realised, stretched to several hours. Now, with a pounding head, churning guts and hands that trembled like candle flames in a draught, Hawke was struggling to keep his precarious perch upon an uneven three-legged stool as the subject of his visit bustled around him like a bee at a flowerbed.

  “Sage, vinegar and a dash of betony.”

  Hawke wrinkled his nose as the bundled cloth wafted past. “Stinks.”

  The man carrying the poultice rolled his small, chestnut eyes. “It will ease her bruising.”

  “The stench will have me revisiting my breakfast.”

  “Do not blame me for your gin habit, young man.” Ansell Brommett, a man perhaps just into his forties, with delicate features, a willowy frame and a gait made awkward by childhood rickets, tutted his way across the large chamber. He added, “And your red eyes condemn you for the abuse of laudanum.” The space was more cluttered maze than orderly workshop, crammed with boxes, bushels and overladen tables, with tall racks of potions and shelves that bulged haphazardly with books, scrolls and powder pots. There were glass jars everywhere, each coloured by strange liquids or piled to their stoppers with all manner of pills and lozenges, and where the shelves ceased, hooks began, from which there hung all manner of tools, from curved blades that reminded Hawke of gelding knives, to tiny saws and long tweezers. In the room’s corner, bathed in the glow of one of three oil lamps, a little girl, evidently Brommett’s daughter, was seated on an iron-bound chest. She looked to be eight or nine, Hawke reckoned, with a face full of freckles and loose, straight hair that had the same flame-red colour as her father’s. She had hurt her knee after a fall during a game with the other local snipes, and now Brommett crouched before
her, pressing the poultice against her injury. The girl, wincing, hissed her displeasure.

  “Then have a care, my poppet,” Brommett admonished. “Consider the placement of your feet before you place them.”

  In amongst the musty chaos, shadows shifted to the lilting tune of youthful laughter. Hawke had the distinct feeling that they were being watched.

  Brommett clapped his hands. “Go. Be gone, I say.”

  The girl jumped up, gave her father a peck on his neatly bearded cheek, and ran out of the room. More laughter. The shadows moved again, skittering out from their hiding places to reveal the gleeful faces of children. The trio, two girls and a boy, squealed with delight as their father shooed them through the low doorway and down the rickety staircase in pursuit of their sister. When he turned back it was clear he had failed in the mastery of a stern aspect, and instead shook his head amid his own rueful chuckle.

  Smiling, Hawke said, “It is a wonder you have time to study your potions, sir.”

  Brommett simply shrugged. “That it is, Mister Hawke, that it is, though I’d not have it any other way.” They were in the attic of a tap-house, and the boards creaked loudly beneath his feet as he sidled to one of the low tables. “When I brought the family here, I had a burning ambition to be London’s greatest apothecary. But you can see my attention finds itself drawn away all too often.” He laughed again, spreading his palms. “We are helpless before fate, are we not?”

  “Indeed. One might argue it is fate brought me here.” Or, Hawke thought, the vague, gin-soaked memory of the previous night’s brief conversation. He had made contact with a couple of reliable acquaintances after leaving Buckbridge Street, asked discreet questions, and the consensus had been unanimous; find Ansell Brommett. In the event, Hawke was content that he had followed the advice, for Brommett appeared to be a jovial enough fellow, with intelligence dancing behind a permanently amused gaze.