Inspector of the Dead

by David Morrell

  “Pay or I’ll summon a constable.”

  “I don’t have any money. I’ll work for food.”

  “Bother someone else.”

  The boy picked crushed cabbage leaves from the flagstones, hardly making a face as his teeth no doubt crunched on grit that was mixed with the leaves.

  The next day Jeremiah Trask returned and saw the boy approaching the same stall owners.

  And the day after that.

  “You again! Don’t you get tired?”

  “Give me food, and I’ll work harder than anybody ever worked for you.”

  “Take this apple, and don’t come back.”

  “I’ll take it only if I work for it.”

  The stall owner sighed. “Make a pile of those empty sacks and put ’em in the back.”

  Afterward, the man tossed the boy the apple. “Yeah, you’re hungry all right. I never saw anybody eat an apple so fast. Even the core.”

  “Maybe you have another job for me.”

  “Oh? What makes you think so?”

  “The way you’re shiftin’ your weight from boot to boot. You look like you need to use the necessary.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s what my mother called the privy.” The boy’s voice trembled when he mentioned his mother. “You don’t have anybody to watch the stall when you use the necessary.”

  “My wife’s usually here. She’s sick.”

  “When you go to the necessary, I bet people steal from you.”

  “It can’t be avoided.”

  “Today it can. Have you got a stick? Give it to me. Nobody’s goin’ to steal from you while you’re gone.”

  “God help me, I need to go so bad I’m leavin’ a shoeless boy to watch my stall.”

  As the man hurried away, two beggars approached.

  The boy cracked one of them across the head and bared his teeth at the other. “I work for the man who owns this stall! If you want more of this stick, step closer!”

  “Hey,” a constable demanded. “What’s this about?”

  “These beggars tried to steal from here.”

  “And you didn’t try to steal also, I suppose?” the constable demanded.

  “I work here.”

  “Certainly you do. You’re comin’ with me.”

  “Hey, what’s the trouble?” the returning stall owner asked.

  “This Irish beggar claims he works for you. He struck this one here and looked like he was about to do the same to the other.”

  “Oh, did he now?” The stall owner smiled and tossed the boy another apple.

  Chomping on it, the boy looked in Trask’s direction and noticed him watching. With a chuckle, Trask turned away.

  The stall owner’s wife died the next day. The day after that, the man sold his business, and the new owner told the boy to go away, summoning a constable to emphasize the point.

  But the boy refused to be discouraged. Not only was he determined; he also had imagination. Seeing that many farmers couldn’t get their carts close to the stalls, the boy told one of them, “I’ll watch your cart for a penny while you deliver your baskets and sacks.”

  “Steal from me is what you’ll do.”

  “I worked for Ned, the stall owner, until his wife died. He’ll tell you I can keep the beggars away.”

  The farmer frowned at the gathering crowd. “Stealin’s always a problem.”

  “For a penny, it ain’t a problem any longer. Just give me your horse whip.”

  “A horse whip, eh? You’re a tough ’un, are you?”

  “As tough as I need to be. Deliver your baskets and sacks. No one’ll steal from you.”

  “If you trick me, I’ll find you and give you a whippin’.”

  “What you’ll give me is a penny.”

  When the farmer returned, he saw the beggars keeping their distance.

  “Looks like you didn’t have any trouble.” The farmer picked up another basket.

  “Well, we did for a moment, but everythin’s fine now.”

  One of the beggars held a blood-streaked chin.

  “Hey, did you say a penny to guarantee nobody steals from my cart?” another farmer asked.

  When the last of them drove away, the boy held five pennies.

  He looked up warily as Jeremiah Trask approached, offering his hand.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  Trask laughed. “You’re right to be suspicious of everyone. But perhaps I can help you. My name is Jeremiah Trask. And yours is…”

  The boy hesitated.

  “What harm can there be if you say your name to someone who offers help?”

  “…Colin O’Brien.”

  “Irish.”

  The boy bristled. “Does that bother you?”

  “Performance matters, not origins. I’m pleased that you gave your formal name and not a nickname. If you expect to rise in the world, you must make people respect you. Do you wish to be respected, Colin? Would you like to rise in the world?”

  “That’s what I’m tryin’ to do.”

  “Yes, I’ve been watching.”

  “Not just today. I saw you watchin’ me a lot.”

  “Colin, you’re not only smart—you’re observant. I come to Covent Garden market often because I have numerous business dealings that require me to feed large numbers of workers. I buy food here in bulk to keep my costs down.”

  “If you have numerous business dealings, as you call ’em, why don’t you hire someone to come here for you?”

  “But would that person make as clever a bargain? Never give people responsibility unless you’re confident that they can do the job better than you can.”

  “I do everythin’ myself.”

  “So I noticed. Would you like to work for me, Colin?”

  “Doin’ what?”

  The boy was distracted by a man trudging past with a basket of strange-looking objects.

  “What in blazes are those?”

  “Pineapples. They come via ship from a faraway place called the Caribbean. Expensive restaurants pay a premium to have pineapples brought to London for their best customers.”

  Trask impressed Colin by paying a sovereign for one. “Here. Be careful. It’s prickly.”

  The weight of the pineapple surprised Colin. He almost dropped it. “But how do I eat it?”

  “Use a knife to cut off the sharp leaves and remove the core. Then slice what remains. The juice is especially sweet. Perhaps you can share it with your mother.”

  The seemingly offhanded remark was deliberate. Trask needed to know whether his suspicion about Colin’s mother was correct.

  The boy looked down. “My mother’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And your father?”

  “Dead.” Colin’s voice was filled with anger as much as sorrow. “You still haven’t told me what work you want me to do.”

  “It’s difficult to explain in all this noise. May I buy you some bread, butter, strawberry jam, and hot tea at the eating house around the corner? Save the pineapple for later. By the way, it was one of my ships and one of my railways that brought the pineapple to London.”

  “If you’re so rich, how come you need me?”

  “Before I answer…” Trask guided him to the pillars at the back of a nearby church. “This once had a convent next to it. The convent had a garden. Over the centuries the name was shortened from ‘convent’ to ‘covent.’ Do you find history interesting?”

  “The past is all I think about.”

  “I want to hire you to pretend to be my son.”

  Jeremiah Trask’s nightmarish memory of regret ended abruptly as Colin leaned over the bed. A tear fell from Colin’s face and landed next to the tears that Trask himself wept.

  “Did you ever consider how many people might still be alive if you hadn’t approached me that morning in Covent Garden market?” Colin asked. “I might have died from disease or starvation. Or else I might have been so ex
hausted earning pennies that I wouldn’t have had the strength to pursue my revenge.”

  In the darkest of the night, in his blackest thoughts, Jeremiah Trask had indeed deluded himself that he could muster the willpower to reverse time, to go back to the past and make it different.

  If only. If only.

  At Covent Garden market, he had told the boy, “I’m going to spend a week at the estate of a business competitor while he and I negotiate a merger. He has a boy about your age. It would help my negotiations if you come with me, pretending to be my son. I’ll explain that your mother lived apart from me in Italy, that she died recently, and that I decided to accept responsibility for you. That will make me seem a person of character. If you become friends with his son, it might encourage a friendship between his father and me, helping the negotiations.”

  Promising Colin twenty pounds, Trask had taken him to a country house, where servants bathed him and cut his hair and provided him with clothes of a quality Colin had never dreamed of. He was given food of a variety and abundance unimaginable to him, and in such quantity that for a brief time it made him ill. An actor arrived to teach him how to disguise his Irish accent. He was given details about his supposed life in Italy with Trask’s supposed wife.

  All of it had been a lie. Jeremiah Trask had no such wife. The business rival was actually one of Trask’s friends, and the other boy had been the friend’s companion, not his son. During the week at the estate, it was too much to expect that Colin wouldn’t sometimes lapse into his Irish accent. Even so, he made a commendable effort, and when he failed, he had the wit to explain that his supposed mother had employed an Irish servant whose accent was contagious. No, the accent wasn’t the point. That could be corrected. The point was to determine whether Colin could stay with the story about Trask’s wife having died in Italy and about Trask having accepted responsibility for his son.

  Colin was so amazingly believable that Trask rewarded him by taking him to Paris and showing him the opulence that Trask could provide. One night, after encouraging Colin to drink two glasses of wine, Trask entered the darkness of his bedroom and crawled into his bed.

  “I had a terrible choice to make,” Colin had explained to him years later, after Trask was paralyzed. “If I protested and screamed, you’d simply have told anyone who knocked on the door that your son had suffered a nightmare. Then you would have abandoned me in the worst of Paris’s streets. With revulsion tearing at my stomach, I agreed to do what you wanted. All the time I kept thinking of my mother and father and sisters. I told myself that if your wealth could be the means by which I achieved my revenge, then I would pay the cost. I would suffer anything for my family, just as they suffered.”

  And suffering there was. Night after night. With Jeremiah Trask’s business associates and his servants actually believing that Colin was Trask’s son—how else could Trask cohabit with a boy and not fear being hanged?—Trask had imposed the discipline he expected a son of his to tolerate. Colin had the best tutors so that his conversation wouldn’t embarrass Trask in front of his associates. Colin worked on Trask’s railways, helping to dig the channels and lay down the tracks until calluses grew so thick on his hands that he knew he would never be rid of them. “If you’re my son, you’ll show everyone you’re a man!” Trask had said, so that no one would suspect what Trask did to him each night.

  In an anguish of remembering, Jeremiah Trask peered up through his tears. If only he had never gone to Covent Garden market that day. If only he hadn’t seen the desperate Irish boy.

  His mind leapt forward to the summer seven years later when he’d told Colin that he’d grown too old to be of interest. “I’m sending you on a tour of Europe. You’ll have enough money to establish a new identity. In a few months I’ll tell everyone that, like my supposed wife, you sadly died from fever in Italy.”

  Trask relived his shock as Colin—amazingly strong—roared and threw him from the private car of the moving train. He remembered the panic that replaced his shock…then the pain that replaced his panic…and then the absence of pain as he lay paralyzed across a rail on the opposite set of tracks, blinking at the cinder-filled smoke that the train’s departing engine spewed.

  Trask wept for all his sins. Yes, if only. God help me, if only.

  Colin leaned over him. “Father, Mother, Emma, Ruth, Catherine, and the child I didn’t have a chance to name.” Abruptly the Irish accent dropped away. “Tonight, a woman whose likeness and blue eyes remind me of my dead sister—even their names, Emma and Emily, are similar—said that she was ashamed to know me. She called me a monster for threatening a two-year-old child. She said that I didn’t deserve Catherine and that I didn’t deserve to be a brother, a husband, or a father.”

  More tears dripped from the tormented, blood-covered face hovering above Trask.

  “Many times over the years, I could have killed the queen whenever her carriage left the palace and proceeded up Constitution Hill. It wouldn’t have been difficult. The only requirements are planning and the will to do it. But I kept postponing it, finding others to punish first. Did I fail to kill the queen tonight because I couldn’t bear for my hatred to end? Did I put myself in a position to fail so that I could try to kill the queen again and again and again? If I finally succeeded in punishing her, what then? Only you would have remained. And after you, who else could I have found to hate?”

  Colin O’Brien, or Anthony Trask, or whoever this man was, looked around in search of something. “Do you recall what I told you I would do if you answered questions from strangers when I wasn’t here? I vowed to imprison you even more in your body by blinding you.”

  Trask felt terror growing within him. Is he reaching for scissors or acid?

  Instead, the hand that came into view held a bottle of laudanum, one of the medications on the table next to the bed.

  “Who would I finally have found to hate and punish? The person who killed my beloved wife and my unborn child.”

  The anguished man pointed at himself.

  “My punishment can never be severe enough. Long ago I vowed that one day I would allow myself the ultimate satisfaction of lancing your eyes and your eardrums. Blind, deaf, unable to feel, you’d be entombed in the darkness and silence of your paralyzed body, with nothing to do except to bemoan the cesspit that you are.”

  Colin trembled and opened the laudanum bottle.

  “As the start of my punishment, I refuse to do that. Instead I shall do something that every part of me screams for me not to do. To give myself pain, I’ll perform a kindness to you and put an end to your suffering. Are you weary of being imprisoned in your body? Would you like me to end your penance and pour this opium down your throat? You’ll drift quickly off to sleep, and perhaps your final dreams will be about something other than your sins. Would you allow me to begin my punishment by ending your punishment?”

  Squeezing away his tears, Jeremiah Trask shut his eyes once. His voice would have broken with gratitude if he’d been able to speak.

  Yes!

  For a second time, De Quincey stepped down from a police wagon in front of the mansion on Bolton Street. As snow blew past, an overhead lamp allowed him to study the front door.

  “There aren’t any tracks leading up to it,” Commissioner Mayne noted.

  “All the same, I’m certain that he came here,” De Quincey said. “At the palace, when I asked him to explain about Jeremiah Trask, the look of hate on his face was so profound that I can’t imagine him not returning here to deal with that hate before he runs.”

  Accompanied by three constables, they approached the door and knocked. No one answered. When De Quincey tried the door, he found it unsecured. “The same as at the homes of his other victims.”

  De Quincey pushed the door open and felt relieved that he didn’t discover the corpse of a servant lying on the floor.

  “What do I hear?” Commissioner Mayne asked.

  Muffled shouts and pounding led them downstairs to the servants’ a
rea.

  A key protruded from a locked door next to the kitchen. The door rumbled with the frenzy of the assault on the inside.

  When a constable unlocked it, four desperate servants hurried out, blurting what had happened.

  De Quincey cautiously led the way to the upper levels. The door to the bedroom was open. In response to a groan, one of the constables entered first, then motioned for everyone else to follow him.

  Holding his bleeding head, a policeman rose from the floor. A servant hurried to him.

  De Quincey and Commissioner Mayne approached the motionless figure on the bed. There was a difference between the immobility of paralysis and the immobility of death. After eight years of having been imprisoned within his body, Jeremiah Trask finally wore a peaceful expression. His eyes were closed. An empty laudanum bottle lay next to him.

  De Quincey withdrew his own bottle and swallowed from it.

  “This is where opium will lead you,” the commissioner warned.

  De Quincey shrugged. “But now whatever memories afflicted him have finally been extinguished, and he suffers no regrets.”

  A constable entered the bedroom. “Commissioner, footprints in the snow approach and leave through the kitchen’s back door. I followed them, but they merged with other footprints on a nearby street. There’s no way to tell where he went.”

  “So he’s still out there, waiting for another chance to kill the queen,” Mayne said.

  “Or perhaps he’s finished,” De Quincey offered. “Whatever his reason for hating this man, something in him changed. Notice the peaceful expression on Jeremiah Trask’s face. He wasn’t afraid of what was being done to him. This death wasn’t an act of hate. It was a blessing.”

  “Good evening, My Lord,” De Quincey said, rising as a servant opened the door and Lord Palmerston entered. Outside, a coach departed from the curved driveway, disappearing into the darkness and the snowfall.

  Only a few days earlier, De Quincey had stood on this spot, greeting Lord Palmerston for what he had assumed would be his final hours in London. An eternity of terror had happened in the meantime, somehow making him feel alive, but now despair again settled over him, and given what he was about to do, he believed that this occasion would truly mark his final hours in London.