Corpse Thief

by Michael Arnold

  Hawke looked down. The shape of a head leered back at him, shadowy features of a man’s face staring up sightlessly at the scudding clouds. A sharp smell greeted him too, like musty books and mouldy grain, wafting up between his knees. It was not bad, for the bloating rot was not yet upon this flesh, but the knowledge of whence the scent came did not help Hawke’s stewed stomach. Not for the first time he vowed never to touch a drop again.

  At Blackbird’s impatient prompt, Hawke withdrew the bars, careful not to let them clang against one another as he set them on the frozen grass, and quickly removed his gloves. He hated this part. Had dreaded it the first time, and, after so many successful lifts, acknowledged that it would probably bring bile to his throat for the rest of his life. He gritted his teeth, leaned down, and plunged his hands into the coffin. The body was solid. For a dreadful moment he wondered whether rigor mortis would prove their undoing, but he reminded himself that three days and nights in a wintry grave would take a stiffening toll on the warmest of flesh. The skin was slippery as he slid his palms over the shoulders, inserting his fingers between the arms and the upper ribs so that he might cleave apart the armpits. “Ready.”

  At once the end of a stout rope appeared at his ear, dangling like a poised viper. Hawke took it, instructed Gilroy to adjust the direction of the light, and carefully looped the thick hemp under the cadaver’s arms and behind its back. He pulled it tight, looked back at the waiting faces, and nodded to the man whose skin was the shade of strong coffee. “All yours.”

  Blackbird was tall, and that alone made him imposing, but what really sealed his formidable reputation was the brawn that encased his frame. His muscles strained beneath his shirt, shifting as his arms moved like round-shot in a sack, and now he replaced Hawke at the head of the grave, clasped the rope in both massive hands, and hauled.

  The body rose immediately, torso lurching upwards even as the arms hung loose and free, as though Blackbird were some macabre puppeteer. He pushed up with his broad legs, the power too great for the limp corpse to resist, and the callow marionette slid free, drawn from the small hole like a thorn from a pricked thumb.

  Hawke watched in silence. He was always reminded of the birth of a calf he had once seen. The pale form slipping out of its mother as the farmer drew back his gore-spattered arm. Here there was no gore, of course. Not even blood, for the dead did not bleed, but the movement of the body as it worked free of the narrow shaft always brought back that same memory. And now the pallid, almost translucent corpse lay before them. Goaty and Harlowe were already backfilling the shaft as the rest stared at their prize. The body was that of a grown man with dark hair and beard. Known in the trade as a large, it would fetch them eight guineas; if they could get it out of the cemetery unseen.

  “Well?” Blackbird said.

  Hawke crouched beside the body. The dead man looked to be in his mid-twenties, roughly the same age as himself. He lifted one of the porcelain-white arms, shook it roughly, let it drop, and turned back to glance up at the expectant faces. “Rigor’s passed.”

  A collective sigh seemed to whisper through the group while Blackbird went to join Hawke. Being by far the strongest among them, it was an unspoken fact of their work that he would be the one to shift the cargo into place. A swift nod exchanged, Hawke took the shoulders, repulsed once more by the slippery coldness of the dead skin, while his companion grasped an ankle in each vast hand. He wriggled forwards on his knees, lifting and pushing the legs so that the shins folded inward against the thighs. As he moved, Hawke twisted the body onto its side, easing the head down into the chest. It was not easy to force a large cadaver into the foetal position, even one now beyond the steel-limbed resistance of rigor mortis, but this was far from their first experience of the task, and it was achieved with little fuss. Blackbird took the rope in hand, and he looped it around the back of the knees, pulling tight so that they were fastened firmly to the chest. Goaty and Harlowe had finished returning the grave to its former neatness, and one of them produced a large cloth sack, unfurling it as though it were a flag. When Hawke had used a thinner cord to bind the wrists, he stepped away, giving Blackbird room to move. In a single motion, the huge man scooped up the trussed corpse like a new-born babe, hoisted it into the air and stuffed it inside the waiting sack. Goaty pulled the cord at its throat smartly shut.

  “Good,” Blackbird intoned as the light was snuffed and the shovels and hooks collected. “This one goes to Doctor Vine.” He licked his full lips slowly, drew the bulging sack up and over his shoulder, and began to walk towards the cemetery gates where their lookout’s own lamp still shone in the dark.

  And then it flickered.

  They all saw it, clear as day in the depths of night. The light that young Lucas had been dangling during their efforts, solid and assured, was winking, one moment bright, the next black as the sky. Which meant trouble.

  Blackbird stole a glance over his shoulder, first checking for menaces in the shadows, then making sure his gang were at his back. With silent acknowledgement, the five men and their heavy cargo pressed on. They moved between the stones of the dead, quiet as the bones beneath their feet. The ground was lumpy and treacherous where the soil of centuries had mingled with shallow graves, shifted and risen into so many tufty mounds. But the men were experienced in this most clandestine enterprise, experts in excavation, but also in evasion. Blackbird negotiated a path that kept them in the darkest recesses of the burying ground, unseen by any but the keenest eyes, and soon they were pressed up against the bricks of the wall that enclosed St George’s cluttered plot. They snaked along beside it, all the while listening for the sounds of watchmen cocking pistols and searching the grass for the primed jaws of man-traps. If a man made his living by stealing the dead, the threat from vigilant and vengeful kin was a very real hazard.

  But no clicks came from the dark. No steel teeth slammed closed about their legs, and up ahead they spotted a flaxen-haired youth, crouching low behind a steeply slanted tombstone. Hawke and the others followed Blackbird to the temporary shelter of a cluster of stones nearby.

  Lucas was the newest member of the gang, and had yet to graduate past lookout duty, but he was a sensible lad and had killed his light as soon as he felt his warning would be heeded. He stared back at his companions from the gloom, the whites of his eyes visible as tiny grey orbs. With a jerk of his head he indicated a point away to his right.

  Hawke stared out into the cemetery. At first he saw nothing but a darkness only penetrated by the moon-gilded outlines of mossy stones. He wondered for a moment whether the green young man had allowed his imagination rather too long a leash. A lapse that would see him corrected at the end of Blackbird’s mallet-like fists. Then the shadows began to shift. It was barely perceptible at first, but, as his eyes drilled into the inky near distance, he knew that the movement was real. Arms gestured, heads bobbed. Two figures, it seemed, locked in animated discourse, some thirty yards away. They were both men, Hawke guessed, for though he could discern no features, both were tall and broad at the shoulders. One pivoted a half-step, and his silhouette, outlined for a split second by the moon, appeared to have a hook in place of one hand. Fortunately neither seemed to have noticed the faces hidden in the shadows.

  Hawke made to move, but a thick forearm swung across his chest like a sailboat’s boom.

  “Wait,” Blackbird growled softly.

  “Should we not take our leave?”

  “If they’re res-men,” Blackbird replied, “we need to send out a message.” He took his free hand from Hawke’s chest and placed it upon his own waist. It was where he kept his knife. “This is Szekely’s turf. He’ll not thank us for letting his rivals find profit at his expense.”

  That was true enough, Hawke conceded, but still he shook his head. “Only two of them?”

  “Might be others,” Goaty whispered from a little way behind.

  “And where are the tools?” Hawke persisted. “Shovels, hooks. Not even a sack between them.�
�

  Blackbird considered his words for a moment, staring hard at the two silhouettes. He adjusted the bulging sack at his shoulder, finally betraying a sign of discomfort. “If they ain’t here for a dig, what’s their business?”

  Hawke shrugged. “What do we care?”

  Eventually Blackbird nodded, looking at the others. “Hawke’s right. Let us take this bugger to market.”

  Θ

  Theophilus Vine’s anatomy school was one of the smaller establishments in the city. A terraced house, mid-way along Stanhope Street, of blackened bricks and dilapidated windows, it seemed a far cry from the ostentatious institutions with which it competed. But compete it did, for the simple reason that Doctor Vine paid well, and, as a result, his students always had fresh corpses to poke and prod and cut.

  The six men and their newly excavated prize entered Vine’s premises through a little side door away from the prying eyes of the main street. They were sheltered by the night, but that did not tempt them to recklessness. After all, it was not legal to dissect a human being unless that hapless person had been condemned to the fate after the gallows.

  They grunted and hissed their way through the passage at the rear of the building, following Vine’s assistant, Clementine, who had opened the door wearing a thick woollen robe pulled tight over her nightgown and a sour expression on her face. She was a ruddy-cheeked woman of middle age, with flat features, an unnaturally depressed nose and gnarled hands that should have belonged to a prize-fighter. She had a fussy, discontented air, and bustled along quickly, clearly peeved at the hour as she showed them through a yellow and white door that bore a hand-written sign: Anatomy Theatre.

  Light filled the space within as Clementine lit a trio of oil lamps. The room had once been a kitchen, Hawke reckoned, for it still had a giant iron hearth at one end, a deep sink at another and hooks and shelves on all the walls. For its most recent incarnation, however, the cooking utensils, jars and pans had been supplanted by all manner of wicked looking implements, the tools of the dissector’s trade. Tongs and blades and callipers, bone saws of varying size and shape, drills, scissors, scalpels and little curved knives, all beautifully crafted, all marked with their owner’s initials, and all capable of eliciting a deep shudder within Hawke.

  At Clementine’s surly order, Blackbird, Hawke, Harlowe and Goaty manhandled the sack through the score of empty chairs that were strewn about and laid it out on the cold tiles at the room’s centre. They cut it open without delay, the body slithering free like a giant baby torn from the grisliest womb imaginable. Blackbird spoke briefly to Clementine, coins chinked between them, while Hawke and the others unbound the dead flesh, hefted it onto one of the theatre’s two stained and knife-scarred tables and pulled each limb straight. In the light Hawke found himself staring at the face of the dead man. He had been right in his guess. A man of perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, just a little younger than himself, with fresh, unblemished skin beneath the whiskers. His eyelids had peeled back, revealing hazel eyes that stared serenely at the low ceiling. What had killed him?

  “Puncture wound,” a high-pitched, nasal voice rasped in startling answer.

  Hawke turned on his heels, half expecting to see some black-cloaked warlock standing behind, evil eyes boring into his mind. “Doctor Vine?”

  Theophilus Vine was a taciturn fellow of small stature, thinning pate and burgeoning midriff. He was in the process of putting on a filthy apron, brown with dried blood, and peered down at the body through thick spectacles that perched daintily on the end of his sharp little nose. “Here, d’you see? That was what you were considering, was it not? How the poor fellow met his maker?”

  “Aye, sir,” Hawke muttered, embarrassed at his transparency.

  “Stabbed,” Vine declared. He placed his forefinger on the lily-white abdomen, indicating a thin red line that was perhaps an inch across. It looked to Hawke like nothing more than a scratch.

  The youngest of the gang, Lucas, moved up to stand beside Hawke. He was in his late teens, tall and thin, with a shock of unkempt hair that reminded Hawke of a straw thatch. “Don’t look much.”

  Hawke shook his head. “Never do.”

  “Quite,” Doctor Vine agreed, pushing his wire-rimmed lenses further up his nose. “The entry wound is often surprisingly nondescript. But it is the depth of the thing, d’you see?”

  With that, he went to one of the wall hooks and selected a slender probe that was as long as his forearm, with a sharp point and a bone handle. Returning to the subject, he teased apart the livid surface skin with thumb and finger, inserting the probe into the wound. It stopped when about half its length had been swallowed by the flesh. “A proud six inches. It’ll have pierced a vital structure.” He straightened suddenly, the glint of enthusiasm twinkling across his eyes. “Still. We must make certain!”

  Make certain? Hawke knew a deadly stab wound when he saw one. He had seen too many. Had come from a place where swords had cut down families, where the streets had run with the blood of innocents. He felt like weeping at the memories, seared onto his mind for as long as he drew breath, only dimmed when he was in his cups, and then for so fleeting a time it was hardly worthwhile.

  “Turn ‘im, lads,” a voice growled. Hawke looked up to see that it was Blackbird, and he quickly set himself to the task.

  Blackbird and Doctor Vine oversaw matters as the other men slid hands beneath the body, Hawke and Lucas at the thighs, Goaty, Harlowe and Gilroy at the shoulders. In a well-practised manoeuvre, and on the count of three, they lifted and turned the deceased - pale, naked flesh shimmering in the warm light - so that he rested face-down on the table.

  “Looks like he’s had a beating,” Lucas noted in a rich East Anglian burr, pale eyes snaking across the mottled blue patches that covered the skin from shoulders to buttocks.

  Vine shook his head, running his fingers almost tenderly along the spine. Pale tracks were left in their wake, scored where his nails moved through the sickly sweet liquid that had already begun to ooze through the skin. “The blood pools after death, young man.”

  Gilroy scratched at his crotch, rolling his eyes at the naive youth. “They all look like this, Lucas. I’m a porter over at The London, and I can’t tells you ‘ow many I seen like it.” He left his genitals alone long enough to sniff his hand. “And now they’ll shave him so he looks like one o’ them wax models, and they’ll start slicin’ him up.”

  “But that is not our work,” Blackbird’s voice echoed around the room. All eyes moved to see that he was already at the door. “We’re done here, lads. Let us be away.”

  Θ

  The day was bright for all that it was cold.

  Hawke walked briskly along Bow Street, digging at a rotten gum beneath one of his molars with a sharp length of wire. The pain came in pulses, making him bite down on the metal strand. He welcomed it, for it cleared his mind.

  A short distance later, and he was running up the steps leading to the door of the Dog & Bull. Shouldering it open, he was immediately forced to squint against the pungent fug of tobacco and stale beer. The inn was quiet at this time of day, unlike the less salubrious establishments he frequented amongst the rookeries around Seven Dials. A few pairs of eyes glanced through the smoke at him in half interest, but most gazed implacably into their pots, oblivious to another face in the sprawling city.

  Hawke turned to his left, moving quickly to a rough wooden table pressed up against the alehouse’s only window. Taking a seat, he stared out through the dirty glass at the street beyond. He kept his greatcoat fastened while his body thawed, but took off his topper and placed it on the adjacent chair. Absently, he still prodded at the ragged and swollen gum while he observed the world go by. A costermonger pushed a barrow full of wizened red pippins over the cobbles, its load wobbling precariously as the front wheel bounced. Hawke watched in silence until the costermonger trundled past one particular group of buildings. They were handsome structures, he supposed, if stern-faced and austere, l
ooming over Bow Street like the sentinels they spawned. Numbers 3 and 4. He stared hard.

  A shadow startled him and he looked up. The man was tall, with fists like bear paws and the frame of a wrestler. One might, Hawke had often thought, forgive the assumption that he was a pugilist or navvy, but for the fellow’s elegant attire. His blue coat, yellow waistcoat and jet-black cravat were the clothes of a man of means.

  “May I sit?” the huge man asked as he took off his hat, his voice rounded by education, if forged unmistakably among the smoky, gas-lit streets of the capital.

  Hawke nodded at the chair opposite, as though he had any choice in the matter. “My guest, Mister Ruthven.”

  George Ruthven was around the age of thirty, though his bearing and demeanour spoke of a man far older. His sandy hair was oiled neatly against his scalp, his mutton-chop side whiskers were pristinely trimmed to form a precise frame for his florid face, and his manner exuded confidence. He had small eyes that never stopped moving, twinkling with an unnerving intelligence, and his shoulders were permanently squared to keep his frame at its most imposing. He slid onto the bench opposite, setting his badge of office, a gilt-topped tipstaff, upon the table. Somewhere about his person, Hawke knew, there would be a William Lacey pistol, though he kept that concealed.

  “Well?” Ruthven said.

  “Gin,” Hawke replied, coiling the wire and putting it in a pocket. He glanced out the window, at the brown leaves tumbling along the road before a bitter wind. “With some hot water,” he added with a slight shiver.

  “It’ll be the death of you,” Ruthven said. His thick red brows twitched. “Again.”