Inspector of the Dead
Page 27
The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral beckoned. Beyond it lay the bleak stone wall and the iron-studded door to Newgate Prison. Somber families waited to visit loved ones. Even fifteen years later, he remembered standing outside with his father, and the oppressive feel of the dark interior when they were finally admitted.
He remembered when he had seen his mother in there for the last time and how sickly and despairing she had looked after only a few days. He remembered the last time he’d seen Emma and Ruth, his beloved sisters, peering back at him, hopeful and yet afraid, waving what they thought was a temporary good-bye as the guard and the sergeant led them into the prison and their doom.
He went to the nearby alley that he’d limped back to after begging the queen and had discovered that his father was dead, the body being placed on a morgue cart. He had never learned where his father and mother and sisters were buried, so he had made a random choice of graveyards and decided that they were in the paupers’ section at St. Anne’s Church in Soho, where his pilgrimage now took him.
The same as fifteen years earlier, he again saw gravediggers burying the bodies of the poor between layers of boards, stacking them as deeply as possible. So many bodies. There wasn’t the slightest marker to identify who was deposited in the paupers’ section.
Because his mother had always wanted a garden, he had decided that a spot near bushes next to a wall was where they rested. As a boy he had come here every day, standing where he imagined they’d been buried, telling them how much he loved them, promising how strong he intended to be, vowing that he would punish everyone who had put them there.
It gave him intense satisfaction to remember that, when his leg had finally healed, he went to the Inns of Court and waited for a solicitor who’d been particularly uncaring. He watched the arrogant man step from his chambers. He ran past the man and lunged, thrusting him under a speeding carriage. Hearing a thump and screams, he darted into an alley, squirmed over a fence, squeezed through a hole in a wall, and kept running, his escape route thoroughly practiced.
He’d done the same to a heartless barrister. The thump and the screams were gratifying as he raced down another alley, but it wasn’t enough merely to hear them die. He wanted to see fright. He wanted to see pain. Quick punishment didn’t make up for what had been done to his mother and father and sisters, to dear Emma with her brilliant blue eyes and blessed Ruth with the endearing gap in her teeth.
Now, amid the falling snow, he bowed his head.
Tonight, at last, the four of you will rest in peace, he thought.
Abruptly he was racked with grief for two other loved ones.
“My wife. My unborn child.”
Forget about them. They don’t matter, a part of him thought.
“Catherine.”
She was only one more way to punish her parents, a voice within him said.
“No.”
You used her.
“No, I loved her.”
You convinced yourself of that in order to make her believe you. Oh, the shock on their faces when they learned that she was married to you, a man they considered beneath them. Oh, the more satisfying shock when they learned how completely she was yours, that she was with child.
“My unborn…”
A vicar walked through the graveyard’s archway and glanced toward him in surprise. “You’re alone?”
Instead of answering, he wiped tears from his cheeks.
“I was certain I heard two voices,” the vicar said.
“A storm’s coming. I’d better be on my way.”
“One of the voices was Irish. Are you certain no one else was here?” the vicar asked.
“No one.”
“Young man, you look troubled. I hope you find peace.”
Tonight, he thought, peace will come.
He headed westward.
No! That’s the wrong way! a part of him shouted. The palace is to the south, not the west! Where are you going?
In the falling snow on Half Moon Street in Mayfair, he stood across from the Grantwood mansion, watching constables come and go.
His laborer’s clothes prompted a patrolman to tell him, “Move along.”
“I did some carpentry work for Lord and Lady Grantwood. This is a terrible thing.”
“Yes, terrible,” the constable said. “There’s nothing to see here. Keep walking.”
“The daughter was pleasant to me, for which I was grateful. Please give my respects to the family.”
“There’s no family left,” the constable said.
“Do you know when the funeral is to be?”
“As soon as the bodies are released from Westminster Hospital.”
“Hospital?” His breathing quickened. “You mean some of them are still alive?”
“The detectives ordered the wounds to be studied in the morgue there. Maybe there’s a way to tell what sort of knives killed the daughter.”
“Knives? There were several?”
“For the final time, I’m telling you to move along.”
No, the palace is to the south! Why are you heading southeast?
As the snow strengthened, he took a wide route around the treed expanse of Green Park and St. James’s Park. Because of their proximity to Buckingham Palace, police patrols would undoubtedly be watching for him in those places. Even disguised as a laborer, he might be stopped by an enterprising constable.
Westminster Hospital was behind Westminster Abbey, on a street called Broad Sanctuary. Centuries earlier, the area had acquired its name because that was where desperate people sought the church’s protection from debt collectors and political enemies. But he had received no sanctuary for his father when he’d gone to Westminster Hospital to beg doctors to help him.
Inside the dour building, he brushed snow from his coat. He heard groans and smelled disease.
“Can I help you?” a man behind a counter asked.
“My brother’s here. I came to visit him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Matthew O’Reilly.”
“I don’t remember an Irish patient,” the clerk said in confusion.
“He was knocked unconscious by a horse. He wouldn’t have been able to give his name.”
“I’ll check the records.”
The man went into a back room as if determined to assure himself that he couldn’t possibly have forgotten an Irish patient.
Stairs led downward. A sign said MEDICAL SCHOOL, another word for “morgue.”
He descended the stairs and reached a hallway of doors, one of which was open. A clerk peered up from a desk. “Can I help you?”
“Inspector Ryan sent me with a message for the surgeons examining Catherine Grantwood.”
The clerk nodded, seeming to recognize Ryan’s name. “Third door on the left. But you’ll need to wait. The surgeons haven’t arrived yet.”
“Thank you.”
He went down the corridor and knocked on the door. When no one answered, he went inside.
The room had a tiled floor with a drain in the middle. It was cold because of ice along both sides of a metal object the shape of a shallow bathtub. The odor of death was familiar from the months he’d spent on battlefields. A sheet covered what was obviously a body.
With a trembling hand he pulled back the sheet. Despite the horrors of the Crimea, he wasn’t prepared for what had been done to the most beautiful woman he had ever known.
To his wife.
To his unborn child.
“Catherine,” he murmured, weeping.
He imagined her terror as she came down the stairs and heard what was happening to her parents. When the intruders looked up and saw her, panic must have made her heart pound so fast that she feared she would faint. Hearing frantic steps behind her, she raced in the only possible direction—upward—hoping to reach her bedroom and secure the door.
He flinched as he thought about the pain when the first knife struck her. But she kept running upward, and the men kept stabbing, t
rying to quiet her. Frenzy gave her the strength to reach her room, but she couldn’t shut the door in time, and the men burst inside, striking with their knives, doing everything they could to stop her screams.
His tears fell on Catherine’s face. He drew a trembling finger along her once-glowing skin that now had the dullness of death. Dried blood covered breasts that he had previously seen only once—on his wedding night.
“This is my fault,” he said. “I’m the one who did this. I’m the one who killed you.”
No! a part of him insisted. Her parents killed her!
“I want to die,” he said.
The queen killed her! Lord Cosgrove and all the others did it! The shopkeeper Burbridge did it! The same as all of them killed our mother and father and Emma and Ruth!
“I want to die,” he repeated with greater determination.
Not before we kill the queen.
The door suddenly opened. A man wearing an expensive frock coat stepped in, only to pause in surprise and stare over his spectacles.
“Who the devil are you?”
“I was looking for my brother. A horse kicked his head and—”
“What are you doing with that woman’s body?”
“I told you I’m looking for my brother. I raised the sheet to see if—”
“Quickly, someone bring a constable! There’s an Irishman touching Miss Grantwood’s body!”
“I’ll get help!” a voice yelled from along the corridor.
“Please,” he said. “No. This isn’t what you think.”
“Step away from the body!” The accuser raised his walking stick. “You vermin, you’ll regret coming here.”
“Don’t call me ‘vermin’!”
He twisted the walking stick from the man’s hand and struck him across the forehead.
Before the body hit the ground, he reached the corridor and saw a snow-specked constable hurrying down the stairs, accompanied by the clerk he’d spoken to in the hallway.
“What are you doing there? Stop!” the constable demanded.
Aware that police helmets were reinforced, he struck the walking stick against the patrolman’s chin, then swung and cracked the clerk’s skull.
He charged up the stairs and reached the main floor, where the first man he’d spoken to was bringing a patrolman through the entrance. Snow gusted beyond the open door.
“There!” the man said. “That’s the Irishman I told you about!”
“Put down the walking stick!” the constable ordered.
He knocked the policeman to the floor.
He knocked the other man to the floor, then raced outside, disappearing into the snowfall.
“That’s where Colonel Trask lives.” The porter gestured toward one of the adjoining houses on Bolton Street in Mayfair. “I sometimes come here to deliver business papers.”
“Thank you,” De Quincey said.
As the chill flurries thickened, De Quincey, Becker, and a constable stepped down from the police van. They approached the white stone building, where Becker knocked on the oak door.
A butler opened it, looking puzzled.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Becker. Is Colonel Trask here?”
The butler frowned at the badge that Becker showed, apparently unable to imagine why a policeman would come to this particular door—and surely the badge should belong to the uniformed constable, not to a man who was dressed in a commoner’s clothes and had a scar on his chin.
“The colonel hasn’t been here in several days,” the butler replied.
“What about Mr. Trask senior? We need to see him.”
“That isn’t possible. He never receives visitors without appointments.”
“Please tell him to make an exception. We’re here on an urgent matter that concerns the queen.”
“But this is his hour for manipulation.”
“I don’t care what he’s manipulating. Tell him—”
De Quincey slipped past the butler and entered the house.
“Just a moment,” the butler objected.
“We don’t have a moment,” Becker said.
He and the constable followed De Quincey.
“Where’s Mr. Trask?”
“In his bedroom, but—”
As speedily as his short legs allowed, De Quincey scurried up the elegant staircase. The butler rushed after him. Becker and the constable quickly followed.
They reached the entrance to a huge dining room and continued climbing.
“You don’t understand,” the butler insisted. “Mr. Trask can’t be disturbed.”
“I wouldn’t care to see Her Majesty’s expression if she heard about his indifference to her,” Becker said.
At the next level, they faced several doors.
“Which one?” Becker demanded.
The butler raised his hands in frustration. He opened a door, peered inside, and motioned for them to enter. “Now you’ll realize what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
De Quincey, Becker, and the constable entered a bedroom, and finally they did understand.
The manipulation to which the butler had referred wasn’t anything that Jeremiah Trask was doing, but rather it was something that was being done to him. A thin, frail-looking man of perhaps sixty, he lay on a bed while an attendant moved his pajama-covered legs up and down, flexing and extending them. Another attendant raised his arms, lowered them, and shifted them from side to side.
The interruption made the attendants pause only briefly before resuming their task. The gauntness of Trask’s arms and legs, not to mention their lack of resistance, suggested that Trask was incapable of moving them on his own.
“He’s paralyzed?” Becker asked.
“For the past eight years,” the servant answered. “Because of an accident.”
Pitying him, Becker took a moment to adjust to what he was seeing. “Mr. Trask, I apologize for intruding. I’m a detective sergeant. We need to speak to you about an urgent matter concerning the queen.”
“He can’t reply,” the servant explained. “The accident left him incapable of speech.”
Becker sighed, as if he’d thought he’d seen every form of misery but now had encountered a new one. “Can he communicate at all? Perhaps he can use a pencil and paper.”
“He can blink.”
“Pardon me?”
“He can answer questions that require a yes or no by blinking—once for yes and twice for no.”
“For the past eight years?” Becker shook his head forlornly. “God save us.”
De Quincey approached the bed.
Although Trask’s face was immobile, his eyes managed to shift in De Quincey’s direction. Their gray matched the pallor of Trask’s hair and his sunken cheeks, all of them the color of despair.
“Mr. Trask, my name is Thomas De Quincey. Many years ago, I wrote a book called Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.”
As if to prove his assertion, De Quincey withdrew his laudanum bottle and drank from it.
“I also wrote a series of essays about the fine art of murder and one about Macbeth and another about the English mail coaches that traveled our great land before your railways put an end to that adventurous means of transportation. At night, I used to enjoy sitting atop those coaches, feeling the speed of the mighty horses, watching the different shades of darkness we passed.”
Trask kept staring at him.
“I was a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and even wrote essays that helped establish their reputations before the latter—a snob—turned against me for marrying what he called a milkmaid. The quantity of my opium ingestion is such that crocodiles and sphinxes threaten me in my nightmares. The only things more persistent are the infinite bill collectors who pursue me. A landlord once kept me a prisoner for a year, forcing me to write my way out of the debt I owed him.”
Trask’s eyes communicated no hint of confusion or annoyance or amusement. His gaze was as impassive as the sphinxes to which De Quincey had referred.
“All that is by way of introduction. As a stranger who imposes himself upon you, I hope that this helps to remove any barrier between us, for I have a question that I must ask, and its personal nature is such that I beg your indulgence. Are we sufficiently acquainted? Do I have your permission to ask the question?”
Trask studied him with motionless features. He closed his eyelids for an instant longer than a normal blink would require.
“I take that as a yes. Thank you. Forgive my bluntness. Is Anthony Trask your son?”
A moment passed. Then another. And another.
Trask closed his eyes once. Then again.
It seemed to De Quincey that the effort Trask made to scrunch his eyelids shut was the equivalent of screaming.
No!
From the prison of his withered, unfeeling body, Jeremiah Trask peered up at the strange man whose clothing suggested that he’d just come from a funeral. This tiny visitor, the tall man with him, and the constable were the only unfamiliar people he had seen in…had the servant said “eight years”? The force of so much lost time assaulted Trask’s mind, making the room seem to spin. Could he possibly have lain immobile on this bed for eight years? With each day the same, with no way to measure the passage of weeks and months, he felt trapped in a constantly repeating hell. The only variation occurred when the man who called himself Anthony Trask brought bankers and lawyers, claiming to have carefully explained the details of various business ventures to him.
“Isn’t that right, Father?” the man who called himself Anthony Trask would say. “Last night, I read the documents to you. I told you my analysis of their implications. You agree that we should move forward with these projects and that I represent you when I sign the contracts.”
In front of witnesses, Jeremiah Trask had always closed his eyes once to indicate yes, afraid of the scissors or the acid that his supposed son had vowed to inflict on his eyes if he failed to obey. He couldn’t bear the thought of being trapped not only in his withered body but also in the blind darkness of his mind. His mind was already dark, tortured by the countless times he’d imagined how his life would have been different if he hadn’t gone to Covent Garden market that morning fifteen years earlier and seen the ragged boy desperately begging vegetable sellers for food.