Murder in St. Giles

by Ashley Gardner

  Donata rose on tiptoe and kissed my cheek, her lips cold. “Godspeed,” she whispered.

  I turned from her to follow Bartholomew, whose youthful stride already had him at the stairs.

  At the door, I swung back. “Why did you marry me, by the bye?” I asked Donata. “If I am a nobody after the family silver?”

  Donata, a vision in ivory and blue, looked straight at me. “To save you the embarrassment of a love affair, of course.”

  We hired a hackney to go to St. Giles. The coach took us from Mayfair and its tall houses with carefully cleaned brickwork, to rookeries whose tumbledown houses stood upright only because they leaned into one another.

  The hackney driver let us down at Tottenham Court Road and Great Russell Street, then chirruped to his horses, which clopped away quickly. We proceeded into the rookery on foot.

  Chimneys, nearly hidden by belching smoke, perched precariously on rooftops. I tripped over loose stones, lifting my feet to keep from treading in noisome mud. My stick found a hole that stank of a sewer, and I had to yank it free, catching myself before I fell into a larger hole, which was little more than an open cesspit.

  Brewster walked ahead of me at a brisk pace, paying no attention to my struggles. The last time I had come into the area, a few months ago, I’d been beaten for my pains. I noted men hovering in the shadows, and I made certain to keep myself not far from Brewster’s heels. I may have been a seasoned fighter, but the robbers here attacked in packs.

  We moved through narrow lanes and around a dog that raised a listless head as I passed.

  In a crooked street that dead-ended at a narrow house of three stories, an entire street’s worth of washing fluttering above us, Brewster halted.

  “In here, guv.”

  “Here” was a black doorway leading into the even darker interior of the house at the end. The smell that emerged was a mixture of urine, rotting vegetables, and a sickly odor of decay.

  Brewster unlocked the door with a key, then he shoved it open, reached for a lantern inside, and lit it. Feeble candlelight flickered through the holes in the lantern and fell upon the body of a man lying on his back, arms outstretched.

  “I dragged him here,” Brewster said. “Didn’t like to leave him in the street to be picked over.”

  The man lay as though Brewster had dropped him and ran for me without bothering to straighten his limbs. He was large, his torso square and covered by a patched brown coat.

  Gray and brown hair, thin, barely covered a bald patch on the top of his head, and his un-gloved hands were those of a laborer—coarse, broken-nailed, dirty.

  He wore breeches rather than trousers, the fabric shiny and worn. Coarse stockings covered his legs, and he wore square-toed shoes with holes in their soles.

  “Who is he?” I asked. I doubted Brewster would have hidden the body of a stranger and raced across London to find me.

  Brewster cleared his throat. “Jack Finch. Me wife’s brother.”

  I halted in astonishment. The dead man was as unlike Mrs. Brewster as Mayfair was from St. Giles—or at least as St. Giles was from a tidy, respectable district. This man had seen hard labor and was built like a fighter, very unlike the small, birdlike, and painfully neat Emily Brewster.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “Why is he dead in a back street near your rooms?”

  “He were beaten to death.” Brewster lowered the lantern to fully illuminate his face.

  The man’s head was bloody, his nose squashed, one eye open and filmed with white, the other crushed back into his cheekbone. His throat was covered with bruises, not from someone holding him and strangling him, but from repeated punches. I saw the outline of a fist on one side of his neck.

  His chest also had been kicked, boot prints clear on the ragged remains of his bloody shirt.

  “Robbers?”

  Brewster shrugged. “Don’t know. He had nothing to steal but his clothes.”

  He closed his mouth, nothing more forthcoming. Not where the man had been found, who Brewster suspected had done this, what he expected me to do. Brewster was reticent at the best of times, and now he descended into absolute silence.

  “Your wife sent for me, you say?” I prompted.

  Another nod. “’Course she did. He’s her kin.”

  I waited, but Brewster clamped his lips tightly closed again. I let out a breath. “Then I suppose I had better speak to her.”

  I glanced about the room, which was small and bare. A door on the other side led to a larger room, but one just as bare and quite cold. There was no sign of anyone living there.

  Brewster straightened the dead man’s arms and legs from their ungainly position and pulled his coat square. He gestured me out then locked the door behind us.

  The dog we had passed in the last street stood outside, watching us warily. It was thin, its pale coat ragged, a sorry and pinched-looking specimen.

  The dog went to the door we’d closed, put its nose to a crack, and sniffed hard. It gave us another wary glance over its shoulder and began a soft whine.

  “Is the dog your brother-in-law’s?” I asked.

  Brewster shrugged. “Don’t know. We hadn’t seen the man in donkey’s years.”

  The dog ceased its whining and sank down, hollow-eyed, grunting a little as it rested its weight on the door. I studied the animal, which might have golden hair under the filth, its drooping ears that of a hunting dog.

  It was difficult to turn from the sad eyes, but I made myself do so, as Brewster was already striding off for the next street.

  I did not ask why Brewster hadn’t run for a magistrate. We both knew that the first instinct of a Runner would be to arrest Brewster, a known criminal, for the murder. Even a fair magistrate would question him closely.

  I scanned Brewster’s face for telltale signs that he’d fought Mr. Finch himself, but with gloves on his hands and his collar turned up, I could discern nothing. His face bore nor bruises, but Brewster was skilled at deflecting blows.

  Brewster lived with his wife in a building as sagging as any in these streets, the staircase inside winding upward through smells and noise. Brewster’s landing was swept clean, the floor scrubbed, Mrs. Brewster doing her best to make her corner of this world respectable.

  The door flew open as we reached the top of the stairs. “You brought him?”

  Mrs. Brewster was willowy compared to her husband and stood a good foot and a half shorter than he. Her graying brown hair straggled from its knot, and her brown eyes were red-rimmed.

  She regarded me calmly, but her anxiousness was apparent. “Come in, Captain. I’ll give you coffee, as I know you’re partial to it.”

  I followed Brewster inside, but not before both of us had scraped our boots on a worn metal rod propped in the hallway. Brewster did this without resentment, as though it were a habit. It would never do to get the mud and muck of London on Mrs. Brewster’s floors.

  Mrs. Brewster had already hurried to the next room and soon returned with a tray holding cups and a pot of fragrant, steaming coffee.

  She poured out, her lips pursed. I accepted my cup with thanks and took a sip. The coffee was nothing like the expensive brew Donata had specially blended for me, but it was drinkable.

  “Tommy and I found him,” Mrs. Brewster began. She poured coffee for her husband and set down the pot and sat back, hands on her knees. “A-lying in the street, he was. Tommy says for me to nip back here, and he’ll hide him, and I told him he must find you. ‘The captain will know what to do,’ I says. What do we do, Captain? Jack wasn’t a good man, by any means—he was cruel as a north wind—but he’s my brother. Wouldn’t be Christian to leave him to rot, would it?” I noted that she did not meet my eyes.

  Brewster took a noisy sip of coffee. I looked to him, but he didn’t speak.

  “How did you find him?” I asked. “Where was he? Does he live around here?”

  Mrs. Brewster hesitated. After a quick glance at Brewster, she said, “Let’s just say he w
as living elsewhere, at His Majesty’s pleasure. I ain’t seen him in years. Me and Tommy, we was walking home from having a bit of breakfast in the pub, and there he was, lying across the street in a lonely stretch. I knew it was me brother, though I ain’t set eyes on him in a long time. He’s a bit older than me, gone from our house before I was grown. But it were him. Our Jack. Tommy says he’ll stash him somewhere safe, sends me home, and runs for you.”

  They’d agreed on the story to tell before they’d parted, I could see. I’d have to be patient to untangle the true one.

  “He’d been convicted, you said.” The man’s bare hands had been hard from manual labor, which meant detention in the hulks or a prison and then transportation to work in the Antipodes. “For what crime? Did he escape, or had he finished his sentence?”

  Brewster shook his head. “No one escapes, guv. They hunt you down like a dog. As for what crime, could have been anything with Jack Finch. Robbery, fighting, breaking up a pub, counterfeiting, receiving, blackmailing, even killing if he could get the verdict reduced to manslaughter.”

  “He were a bad ’un,” Mrs. Brewster said with a decided nod. “Always, even as a youth. Beat us younger ones if we crossed him. I was that glad when he disappeared when he were sixteen and never came back. We heard of him over the years, but he didn’t come home again, thank the Lord.”

  It would be easy enough to discover what Mr. Finch had been sentenced for, where he’d been sent, and for how long. The Old Bailey kept records of trials, and I could ask Sergeant Pomeroy or my magistrate friend Sir Montague Harris to look into it for me.

  “Was Mr. Finch trying to find you, do you think?” I asked Mrs. Brewster.

  Again she would not meet my gaze. “He never wanted much to do with me before. But it’s no secret I married Tommy, so if he decided to speak to me, he’d only have to ask about to know where we’re staying.”

  “So he could touch you for money?”

  Mrs. Brewster considered then dipped her head in a nod. Her husband said nothing, only took another slurp of coffee. He’d removed his gloves, and I did see abrasions on his fingers, but he usually had cuts and bruises, as he sparred with his fellows to keep fit.

  “Everyone knows Tommy’s got a decent wage,” Mrs. Brewster said.

  Everyone knew Tommy Brewster worked for James Denis, she meant, who was a generous employer.

  “Maybe he was coming to see you,” I said to Brewster.

  “Don’t know what for,” he rumbled.

  “You work for a powerful man. I imagine gentlemen queue up to ask you for intercession with him, perhaps even an introduction to the powerful man himself.”

  Brewster grunted. “They’d be unlucky. Mr. Denis don’t like gossip about ’im, nor do ’e like us bringing around every friend and ’quaintence askin’ ’im for favors. ’E’s not a cherry-table hinstitution.” Whenever Brewster was irritated, his language slid back into his thick working-class cant.

  “Regardless,” I said. “Your brother-in-law might not know you wouldn’t speak to Denis for him, and come to find you on the off chance. There had to be a reason he was in the street for you to trip over him.”

  “I didn’t bring you here to talk about whys and wherefores,” Brewster growled. “We just need to know what to do now. Have a quiet funeral? Where do we store the man until then? Will any decent vicar bury him? I don’t like to bother His Nibs with this little problem, so we were thinking maybe you could give us some advice.”

  “Tommy,” Mrs. Brewster admonished. “Don’t be rude. The captain came all this way.” She turned to me, eyes holding worry. “We really don’t know what to do. Tommy was all for dumping him in the river, but as I say, he’s me brother. Is he all right where he is until we bury him? The poor lad should have that at least.”

  I should be amused, I supposed, that they’d turned to me to ask how they could hide a dead body. I, a stickler for honor, could be trusted to keep something so shameful as a murder in the family quiet, couldn’t I?

  “He’s the victim of a crime,” I pointed out. “Do you not want to know who killed him? To find him some justice?”

  Mrs. Brewster shook her head. “Our Jack were a bad man, Captain. Only a matter of time before someone did him over. It’ll be someone he owed money, or else he robbed the wrong man or had his way with the wrong man’s wife. His life, such as it was, is over. I only want him to rest in peace now.”

  “That may be,” I said sternly. “But this is still a crime, Mrs. Brewster. It will have to be reported to a magistrate.”

  “And the moment you rush out of here to find a Runner,” Brewster said over his cup of coffee. “Is the moment I thrash you, Captain. No magistrates, no Watch. Or I beats you for it.”

  Chapter 3

  I regarded Brewster with some concern, not for his threats but for whatever reason he might be making them.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked.

  Brewster moved the coffee cup from his mouth, squarely meeting my gaze. “Don’t believe I did.”

  Brewster had been in his lifetime a pugilist and a thief. Somewhere along the way, James Denis had hired him for both his muscles and his skill in thievery.

  While he might not fight for a living any longer, Brewster was strong and dangerous. He could easily have beaten his wife’s brother to death.

  “If you give me your word,” I said.

  “You have it.”

  I did not know what worth Brewster put on his own promises, but I’d learned the man did have principles. He’d saved my life more than once, nearly at the cost of his own. Brewster was adept at a lie, but he was also loyal.

  “Very well then,” I said. “I will take it. But I still believe we should report the crime. Someone else may have run for a magistrate already, and it will not look well when it is discovered who the man is, or that you found him and hid him away instead of reporting the incident.”

  Brewster sniffed and wiped his nose. “This is St. Giles. Watch and patrollers don’t care what goes on here. They’re afraid to come in.”

  “That’s as may be, Tommy, but I think the captain’s right,” Mrs. Brewster said. “Folk will wonder why I let my brother be bashed to death and didn’t say nothing about it. They’ll think it’s because you did it. I don’t need you banged up and taken away from me. Who’d lug the washing water up the stairs?”

  She spoke lightly, but her eyes were too bright, and one hand balled in her lap.

  “I’ll speak to a magistrate who is just,” I said, trying to sound reassuring.

  Brewster’s lips tightened. “Don’t matter. Runners will come into it, won’t they? If ye swear to tell them I weren’t nowhere near St. Giles at the time in question, then I’ll let ye talk to your magistrate friend.”

  “I have no idea where you were. When did it happen?”

  “Found him this morning. So sometime in the night.”

  “And where were you?” I asked.

  Brewster took yet another noisy sip of coffee and pinned me with a hard stare. “Tell them I was running an errand for His Nibs. Back here by two in the morning—clock struck that as I let myself in the door—then with me wife the rest of the night.”

  “She can vouch for you?”

  Mrs. Brewster’s hands tightened. “I were asleep. I can’t say exactly when he came home.”

  “What was the errand?” I asked Brewster. “Where did it take you?”

  “It’s His Nibs’s business—why don’t you ask him?” He trailed off into a mutter. “Cor, with you two in the witness box, I’m done for.”

  “You expect me to invent an alibi for you, in other words,” I said.

  Brewster slammed down his cup. “All you need say is that I were following you about, keeping you out of trouble. Takes me away from home most nights. I know you can lie, Captain. I seen you do it, nice and smooth. Or at least hide the truth.”

  “The trouble with that,” I said, “is there will be other witnesses to say you weren’t with me. My wife, for
instance. Bartholomew, Barnstable, and a host of servants. They’ll know you were nowhere near. They keep an unnerving eye on me.”

  “Aye, and they’ll lie themselves black in the face for you if her ladyship tells them to.”

  No doubt that was true, but would they do so for Brewster?

  “I’d rather get to the truth,” I said. “It’s easier to argue when you have the truth on your side.”

  Brewster’s scowl told me the truth hadn’t served him well in the past. “I’d never have bothered to tell ya, if Em hadn’t insisted. I should have gone to His Nibs.”

  “Why didn’t you?” James Denis, whom Brewster usually referred to as His Nibs, as though he were superstitious about speaking his name, was a very resourceful man.

  Brewster heaved a rattling sigh. “He don’t want no trouble from us. Something like this happens, we take care of it, discreet-like. He don’t want attention drawn. If ye can’t be discreet, please go away.”

  “Tommy! He’s tryin’ to help.”

  I set aside the coffee and moved my stick to brace my weight, but I remained seated for the moment. “I’ll do whatever I can to find the culprit and bring him in. I owe you that. But if I don’t speak to a magistrate, and the crime is reported, as I say, it will lead back to you. Better that we come forward.”

  “You go forward,” Brewster growled. “I ain’t going near a magistrate’s house.”

  I climbed to my feet. “I can speak to him alone. I will ask you two things—that you do not touch the body again, and that you return to my wife’s house and see that her bloody cousins come nowhere near the place. The butler will turn them away, but he might need assistance.”

  “Huh. No families hate each other more than aristos’,” Brewster said darkly. “I’ll look after her ladyship. You make sure my missus don’t have to witness me hanging, that’s all I ask.”

  Brewster would not allow me to walk out of St. Giles alone. He slid on his coat and took up his squashed hat and led me with poor grace through the rookery back toward Broad Street. That road led to High Holborn, where I could find a hackney.