Sedgwick needed to be alone, to walk and calm himself before going back to the house on Lands Lane. James would be asleep, Isabell too, or fretting at her mother’s breast. He knew Lizzie would still be awake, starting at every noise, waiting, worrying about him.
He strode up Briggate, past the patch of blood smeared over the flagstones where the thief taker had died, up to the Head Row, then out past Burley Bar and down the hill away from the city. There was a nip to the night air and he breathed deeply, taking in the scent of grass and animals.
But there was no silence out here, no peace in nature. Owls hooted and creatures scurried, branches creaked and leaves rustled. In the distance he could hear the bleat of sheep and the soft lowing of cattle from a barn up the hill.
He waited as the anger stopped throbbing in his head, standing still in the darkness, fists clenched and pushed deep in his coat pockets. He’d been wrong and he knew it; that was why it galled so deeply. He’d made the simplest of mistakes and then he’d panicked.
He wouldn’t have blamed the boss if he’d let him go on the spot. He should never have done what he did, not with the girl in the way. But he’d been so scared that Walton might escape that he’d just pulled the trigger at the first opportunity.
He could feel himself beginning to shiver from what had happened. He’d killed men before, when there’d been no other choice, and with Walton all he’d done was save the city the cost of a trial. Those other times, though, it had been him or them, with no one else in the way. He could have found another way with the thief taker if he’d only thought calmly. He pulled the coat more tightly around himself and saw the eyes of the serving girl pleading and praying as he aimed the pistol. He’d never forget that look, the terror as she stared helplessly at him.
He was no believer but he silently thanked God for saving her. Maybe he shouldn’t be doing this work, he thought, not if he acted like that. Even Rob knew better. He could find something else to bring in a wage and support his family.
But even as everything cascaded through his mind, he knew it was just guilt and fury with himself. He loved being the deputy constable and hoped that some day he could replace the boss. Not if he was that stupid, though. He stood still until the shaking passed.
As soon as Walton fell he’d been on him, freeing the girl, pulling her away, watching in horror as the blood flowed from her scalp. Her friend was still screaming, the sound seeming to come from miles away. He’d pulled out his kerchief and dabbed at the wound, praying it was nothing. But the blood wouldn’t stop.
He looked around, noticing the people stopped and staring, keeping their distance from death and danger.
‘You,’ he said, picking a man’s face from the crowd. ‘Go and fetch the apothecary.’ When the man didn’t move, he yelled, ‘Now!’
The kerchief was soaked in moments. The girl was breathing, but her eyes were closed, her hands limp and chilled, all the colour gone from her face. He could feel prickles of cold sweat on his back as he knelt, the fear she might never wake.
He had no idea how much time passed before the apothecary arrived, a wheezing, fat old man carrying his medicines in a large bag. Only as he began to examine the girl did the deputy look at the thief taker. The ball had smashed a hole in his scalp, and flies already covered the edges of wound. Dead and no loss to the world.
He felt as if something was separating him from everyone else. The people gathered around, almost thirty of them, rumbled with speculation on the servant girl, betting on whether she’d live or die, or casting glances at Walton, carefully making the sign of the evil eye after looking at the corpse. No one stared at him; it was as if he wasn’t there.
Finally he tossed a beggar boy a coin and sent him for the coroner, watching as the boy limped away.
‘Mr Sedgwick,’ the apothecary called, rousing him from thoughts that travelled nowhere. ‘She’ll be fine.’
The girl had her eyes open, although she seemed to struggle to focus. The man had stopped the bleeding and wiped her face clean. He took her hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ he told her, not sure whether she even understood him. He looked up and saw her friend. ‘I had to do it,’ he explained, even though the words seemed weightless, vanishing in the air. ‘I had to do it. Please, tell her that. There was nothing else I could do.’
Before the clock struck the hour it was all over. Willing hands lifted the girl and helped her home; she’d only be left with a scar and a memory of terror. Brogden the coroner pronounced the thief taker dead and Sedgwick sent one of the men for the Constable and then fetch an old door to carry the body to the jail.
He felt weary, his shoulders bowed as if the world had thrown its whole weight on to him. He slowly made his way home. A dead cat clogged the runnel in the middle of the street, water and piss puddling around it. He stepped over it and unlocked his door.
Lizzie sat slumped by the light of a candle stub, stirring as he walked in. Her face was in shadow, and as he moved closer he could see she’d been crying, the salt marks on her cheeks, her eyes brimming.
‘John,’ she said. Her voice was no more than a raw, husky whisper. ‘They said someone was dead. I thought it was you.’
He pulled her tight to him, her tears falling freely as she sobbed. Tenderly, he wiped them away with his fingertips, kissing her forehead, her hair, her lips.
‘I’m here,’ he told her, his lips close to her ear. ‘Everything’s fine, love. Everything’s fine now.’
She rested her head against his shoulder. Her fists grasped his coat tightly, the spasms slowly leaving her body. He could feel her warmth, her breath soft on his neck.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go to bed.’
The Constable was late to the jail. The sun was full risen, carters arguing for right of way in the streets, servants out shopping or working in the heavy steam and harsh lather of the Monday wash. Lister sat at the desk writing his report and Sedgwick paced the room anxiously, pushing a hand through his wild hair.
Finally Nottingham arrived. His face was serious as he removed his coat and the tricorn hat and picked up the note addressed to him, then put it aside.
‘I’ve been to see the girl and the mayor,’ he said. ‘She’s well enough, she’s recovering and making sense. Another day or two and she’ll be back at work.’ He glanced up to see the relief on the deputy’s face. ‘The mayor wasn’t happy. It’s bad for the city to have a man killed on Briggate.’
‘I’m sorry, boss,’ the deputy said. He shook his head shamefacedly. ‘I just didn’t know what else to do. He’d got the girl.’
‘That’s what I told his Worship. He accepted it, finally.’
‘Thank you,’ Sedgwick said. ‘I know I was wrong yesterday, boss. I just wanted to say—’
The Constable held up his hand. ‘It’s done, John. But I’d go and see the lass, if I were you. She works for Alderman Wilkins.’ He smiled as the deputy’s face fell. ‘Don’t worry, the mayor will look after anything he might say.’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘Right. Anything on the child snatcher?’ He looked between their faces as they shook their heads. ‘Rob, I’m going to need you to work as much as you can for now. We need to find whoever’s doing this before she can take someone else.’
‘She?’ Lister wondered in astonishment.
‘Mark Morrison said it was a woman in a blue dress with dark hair who said she’d take him back to his mother when he was lost. She gave him something to drink. That was all he remembered.’
‘So it’s a woman behind it all?’ Rob asked.
‘It looks that way.’
‘It could be a pair working together,’ Sedgwick offered, and the Constable sighed deeply.
‘That’s possible,’ he admitted.
‘So where do we look?’ the deputy said.
‘Mark was found at the south end of the Bridge,’ Nottingham answered slowly. ‘There were plenty of us out on this side of the river. I’ve been wondering if he was kept over
on the far side.’
‘Enough folk over there,’ Sedgwick observed.
‘Then go out and ask them. See if anyone’s just moved into the street, if there were any strange sounds on Saturday. You both know what to do. I’m going to keep looking for whoever killed Lucy Wendell. Now go on. And John,’ he added, waiting until the men were at the door, ‘try not to kill anyone today, please.’ He winked as they left.
Once he was alone he broke open the seal on the letter. Inside it read simply, ‘Good job. Buck.’
He walked through to the cold cell. Walton’s body was still there, covered with an old, dirty sheet. There were stains by the head where blood and brains had leaked. Later today he’d be gone and buried in a pauper’s grave outside Leeds. At least that problem had been resolved. And, as he’d told the mayor, the city had been spared the expense of the hangman’s fee. For a few days the talk would be of the man shot on Briggate, but even more of how he’d tried to grab the girl. And the deputy would be able to go into any beer shop or inn and have drinks bought for him by men whose own courage would have failed them.
The Constable had hoped for the spectacle of a trial. He’d wanted to see the thief taker in the dock, confronted by his evidence and by testimony, all his pride stripped away. He’d thought that being from the capital would let him outwit the provincials. For once he’d looked forward to the obscure words of lawyers and judges. The verdict would have warned off others who thought Leeds an easy place.
In the end, though, there’d been justice. He hadn’t managed that for harelip Lucy yet. The more time that passed, the less likelihood that people would remember her; he knew that all too well. If it dragged on much longer her killer might never be found, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. The picture of her body, the small, charred mound of the foetus on her belly, was fixed clear in his mind. He’d never be able to put it aside. God alone knew that he’d seen plenty of brutality, men murdered, even the skin cut from their backs, but this horrified him even more. She’d done nothing, hurt no one.
With nowhere else to turn, he decided to talk to her mother again. There might be something, some small idea, some thread he could follow that would lead somewhere. First, though, he needed to make his own visit to the dead.
At the churchyard he realized he hadn’t been to Rose’s grave as often since the stone had been set in place. His heart was still full of her, he could hear the quiet sound of her laugh and see her smile, but the memories were growing gauzy and fainter as time passed. He knelt, placing his hands on the ground where grass had grown in full, deep green and breathed slowly, ashamed of himself for letting her go but knowing he could do nothing else.
He moved between the memorials, over to a space by the wall. A flat slab lay on the ground, placed there just a month or two before. It was simple, giving nothing away. Only the name Amos Worthy, and the years of his birth and death. Another connection to his own history severed by time. The man had been a criminal, a pimp, violent. But a long time before he’d also been the lover of Nottingham’s mother, something the Constable had only discovered two years before. It had created an odd bond between the pair.
Finally he shook his head to rouse himself and walked down the Calls. The builders had almost finished work on the house where Lucy had died, a new front wall in place, the timbers light and clean, the limewash standing out in brilliant white. He could hear the workmen inside, laughing and joking. Soon someone else would live there, and in time none would remember the fire or Lucy’s killing.
Alice Wendell answered the door as soon as he knocked, almost as if she’d been expecting him. The room was scrubbed spotless, each of the few pieces she owned precisely in its place. He knew it was her way of giving order to a world that had collapsed around her. And part of her nature. The air smelt of vinegar and her knuckles were red and raw from cleaning.
‘Tha’d best come in,’ she said and waited until he was in the only good chair by the window. The woman he’d met just a short time before seemed withered now. Her hair was grey, wiry, her cheeks sunken, the flesh of her face almost translucent, as if she was slowly fading from the world. On her arms the skin had become wrinkled and her dress seemed to hang even more loosely on her bony frame. ‘Have you found him?’
‘No,’ he told her, ‘and I don’t know where else to look. I need your help.’
‘What can I do?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Finding them’s your job.’
‘Sometimes we can’t do our job by ourselves.’ He gave her a gentle smile. ‘Who did Lucy spend time with? What about her friends?’
She shook her head.
‘There were only me and her brother. We were the only ones cared about her.’
‘Are there other relatives?’
‘Nay mister, I had two brothers but they both died when the children were just bairns.’
‘No cousins or anyone Lucy might have known?’
Alice Wendell snorted. ‘Oh aye, there’s plenty of them all right, not as they’d have owt to do wi’ her. Who wants to know a harelip?’
‘What about friends?’ the Constable wondered. ‘Lucy must have had some friends.’
The woman stared at him, her eyes empty and hard.
‘Their mams used to tell them to have nowt to do with her, that she were bad luck. You ever heard a girl crying because the others told her she had to go away before she brought curses on them?’
‘No,’ he admitted, but he understood how he’d have felt if it had happened to his daughters.
‘There were a time it happened over and over, back when our Lucy were still young.’ She rubbed briskly at her eyes. ‘After that she just stopped trying. It were her and me and Peter.’
‘What about your son’s girl?’ he asked. ‘How was she with Lucy?’
‘Have you seen her?’
Nottingham shook his head.
‘She’s no more than a twig, that lass.’ Alice Wendell stopped, as if she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to say more. Then she took a breath. ‘I’ll tell you, I know our Peter isn’t a good man. He spends his money on drink or he’s off in the Talbot putting money on the cock fighting. And when he’s in his cups or he’s lost his brass he takes it out on her.’
‘That happens,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ she agreed sadly. ‘My man drank but he were never like that. Never raised a fist to me or my children. He knew I’d have killed him if he’d tried. But Peter, he doesn’t care, and he’s strong from working at the smithy. I’ve seen her all bruises and bleeding. He broke her arm once.’
The Constable waited.
‘But he loved his sister. He protected her. He’d never have done owt like that with her.’ He lifted her eyes to meet his. ‘Or wi’ me, in case you thought. He stayed in line around me.’
‘So who could Lucy have turned to?’
‘Do you think I’ve not spent all my nights thinking about that?’ she asked him, her voice desperate. ‘Do you think I’ve not asked God why she couldn’t come here and feel safe?’
‘She said she couldn’t come because he might find her,’ Nottingham said. ‘Do you have any idea at all who she meant?’
Very slowly she shook her head. ‘Nay,’ she answered. ‘There’s no one.’
‘And you don’t know who got her with child?’
‘No,’ she answered firmly. ‘Unless it were one of them Cates.’
‘I don’t believe it was. I mean that,’ he insisted. ‘We’ve talked to them.’
‘Only because Lucy looked like that.’
He said nothing, knowing she was right.
‘Until we can discover more, we’re stuck,’ he explained. ‘I told you, we traced Lucy for part of the time after she left Cates’s, but then there’s nothing. You see why I need your help.’
‘I don’t know more than I’ve told you.’ She paused. ‘And what now? Do you stop looking?’
‘No. I’ll keep on,’ he promised her, standing up. ‘If I can, I’ll find whoever did this and make sure he hangs
.’
He was at the door when she spoke again.
‘If I had money and lived in one of them big houses do you think all this would have happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered her.
‘Then tha’ dun’t know much, dost tha’?’
She was right, the Constable thought as he walked back along the Calls. Money could keep life’s evils at bay. With money Lucy would never have gone for a servant. She’d have had nurses and folk would have liked her in spite of her disfigurement. Poor was a hard trick of fate.
He’d have to talk to Peter Wendell’s girl; the deputy had said she might know more than she’d said. It would be better if he went himself this time. If Sedgwick hadn’t managed to draw the truth out of her, the weight of authority might make a difference.
He walked up Briggate towards Queen Charlotte’s Court. He passed the Shambles with the bloody carcasses and cows and sheep on display in the butchers’ shops, the stink of the offal and dead meat filling his nostrils.
In the court he picked his way beyond piles of rubbish, slowly rotting down and foul, and climbed the stairs to the room. He tested each step before placing his weight on it.
He had to knock twice before she answered, opening just wide enough to see who was there.
‘You’re Anne, aren’t you?’ he asked with a smile. Her face was thin and wary, eyes moving around as if she was hunted.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Richard Nottingham,’ he told her. ‘I’m the Constable of Leeds. Can I come in?’
The sheets had been quickly thrown over the pallet in the corner. The plates were dirty, flies hovering around them and crawling on the waste. She hadn’t emptied the night soil and the smell from the bucket brought bile into his throat.
Come the Fear Page 17
