The Half Killed

by Olson, Quenby

  I blink again, each flickering of my eyes matching the frantic pace of the pictures changing inside my head. "And she knew…" But what she knew, the details of the conversation are already slipping away from me. Another brick drops into place. Another light is shut out. "I cannot remember. Something is trying to prevent me from recalling. But I knew..." I look up at him, my voice, my expression, my very posture shaped into an apology. "When I left her—Miss Wing—I saw it all, right before my eyes. But someone has tampered…" I blink. "It’s right there, and I can’t seem to focus on it."

  "Well, please," he says. "Come in." Those words spoken despite the fact he’s already closed the door behind me. He glances left and right, his gaze settling on an open doorway, and the room beyond it, cold and dark, furniture hidden beneath sheets, a fireplace stuffed with broken crates and a few dusty volumes.

  He walks towards me, and I notice the buttons on his shirt, misaligned, and the collar sticking up on one side. And his eyes, still swollen with sleep. A sleep I must have snatched away from him. "I woke up a few moments ago. Um, if you could wait here, not more than a minute."

  He runs up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and I soon hear the clomp of footsteps above my head, the bang of a drawer, or a door, and he appears again, shoving his arms into the sleeves of his coat as he returns to my side.

  "Your shoes," I point out, glancing at his tangled laces.

  "Oh, right." He drops to one knee, and when that boot is taken care of, switches to the other. "I'm sorry," he says as he pulls himself up, hands straightening his collar, running over his hair, settling on the cockeyed buttons of his shirt. "I didn’t realise how tired I was." A quick check of his pockets, and he dashes towards the door, but he pauses with his hand on the knob, his fingers flexing and releasing as he turns around once more, his red-rimmed gaze fixing on me. "Wait, where are we going?"

  "To eat," I tell him, while he fiddles with his collar. "I find I am in great need of sustenance."

  "Of course." Another flick of his collar, which refuses to react to his ministrations. "But this Miss Wing, how did you find her? You were able to call on her, at her home?"

  I wave my hand, a sharp dismissal of his question. "It was coincidence that drew me towards her, nothing more. The important thing is that she is still alive, at least for the moment."

  A line appears between his eyes, and I notice a trembling in his jaw, an attempt at masking a yawn from my sight. "You should not have gone without me," he says, his eyes no longer on my face. "You had no idea what could have been waiting for you there."

  "A woman was waiting for me there. Young, alone, and afraid. That is all."

  He nods, mollified. "And she helped you? You were able to see who is behind all of this?"

  "Only a glimpse," I tell him, and I feel the heat of guilt flush upwards into my cheeks. "But it will come again. I am close now, and whoever it is, they’re frightened."

  I watch his jaw set, his throat tighten as he swallows. "To eat," he says suddenly, echoing my previous statement. "Neither of us will be worth a damned thing if we’re both dead of starvation."

  My eyes widen at his language. He must still disapprove of my having gone to see Miss Wing without him. He steps past me and opens the door, the dusty corridor flooded by a broad shaft of afternoon light. I raise my hand to my face, and beside me Chissick ducks his own head, as if the brightness is a solid object that must be pushed against.

  "Chissick," I say, and he glances towards me, his eyes narrowed. "Your hat?"

  "Oh, of course." He steps back into the gloom, long enough to snatch his hat from a peg near to the door. He claps it on his head, gives his collar another tug, and offers me the crook of his arm.

  I cling to Chissick’s sleeve as we descend the narrow steps outside his door. I'm ready to speak again, my beleaguered mind straining to return to the details of my conversation with Miss Wing, but my thoughts are interrupted by a voice from behind my left shoulder. I glance at Chissick, but before he can put voice to another word, Trevor passes out of the glare of the sun and into view, his hat squashed beneath a crooked arm that bears no jacket or coat. A faded grey shirt appears to be the only covering the upper half of his person will tolerate at this time of day, and when he sees me, a brief touch of thumb and forefinger to his brow is all the acknowledgement I receive.

  "Jules." He gives Chissick a nod and the full force of his attention. "I didn’t know if I’d find you at home this time of day."

  "You caught me just in time." I feel Chissick’s arm tense beneath my grip as he speaks. There can be nothing but ill to come from a visit from Trevor. Upon my first meeting him, there was the length of a dead body between us, and so his appearance now, on the heels of my visit with Edith Wing and as the pain in my head threatens to leave me crumpled into a heap in the dust, can bode nothing well.

  "I thought you’d like to know," Trevor speaks, his every word prefaced by a breath that seems to draw in all of the available air. "There’s another body." He winces, his gaze flicking towards me as if he would wish me anywhere but within hearing range of this pronouncement. "I wouldn’t have thought to bother you with it, but it’s the same wound at the throat as the other one. The same… everything."

  Chissick scuffs his heel across the dirt and grit of the pavement. A breath slides out of him, and his arm sags under my fingers. "We were about to find a place to eat, but—"

  "If you want to take a look before the peelers arrive and leave their mess and footprints everywhere, you might want to think about postponing your meal."

  "How far?"

  "It’s Southwark," Trevor says, and clears his throat with a gruff, wet sound that rings in my ears for several moments afterward. "It’s down by a pier, a dilapidated thing."

  Chissick nods, and turns towards me. His hands find their way to my shoulders, and I can feel his thumbs pressing on my collarbone. How light and frail a thing I must appear to him. "Are you well enough, after last night?"

  "Yes, I am." It is such a lie, but it comes so easily that I feel I have no other response to make.

  "Right, well." His fingers fall away from me, and there’s a sudden coolness in place of his touch. "That’s not far from here, not far at all." He rubs his chin, his knuckles scratching at the fresh layer of beard that hides the lower half of his face from view. "A bit of a walk? You’re not averse to that?"

  "Of course not," I say, and I feel Trevor’s eyes rest on me, before a frown and a low groan mark his disapproval.

  ***

  There's the crunch of gravel beneath my feet, and the sour smells of rot and something I recognise as being stagnant. And still, there is no breeze, nothing as wholesome or refreshing as that. And this brings me to realise that it's the very air around me that is still, and holding onto every scent that has passed through this area, until my nose—poor thing—is overwhelmed. All the smells of fish and soot and piss and muck have combined into an entirely new aroma, and I glance to my left, toward the solid edifice of Southwark Bridge, and I wonder if I'll be forever forced to associate this smell with those shallow arches.

  It's a small group gathered near the pier. Hardly a pier, I notice as I walk forward. A barked command, and I hear the rumble of wheels from somewhere behind me, the clatter of hooves, and I take it as a signal to breathe, to steel myself, and to clear my head as best as my mental companions will allow. Several yards away, there's a set of stone steps that descends into the sluggish water of the river. The pitted stones are caked with mud, with a yellow and green sludge that seems to shimmer even on the side where the sunlight does not reach. I wonder how much time has passed since those bottommost stones saw daylight, felt the brush of air across their surface. Maybe not since they were first constructed and set into place, however many years ago that might have been.

  I notice Chissick and Trevor already standing with the other men, four figures in all, two of whom I don't recognise. I circle them for another minute, and then I close in.

 
As Chissick is the first to acknowledge my approach, it's his discreet signal that alerts the man standing to his left. And like a chain reaction, the other two turn their heads, respond to my appearance before them with the knuckling of foreheads, fingers grasping for hats they'd long removed before my arrival.

  Trevor takes a step back, an awkward movement that admits me to the circle. "Not a pretty sight, is it, Miss?" he says, and pushes at his shirtsleeves, rolling up the cuffs to expose his meaty forearms.

  "No, it isn’t." It's something of a performance not to show I notice the shadow of suspicion in his eyes, the way he places himself between Chissick and myself, as if making a conscious effort to always keep us separate. He wipes his hand across his face, clearing away the perspiration along with his former expression, so that when he looks at me again, I only notice the sunburn on his cheeks, the skin on his nose blistered and already beginning to peel.

  This heat must be near enough to lay the poor man flat. Every pore on his body seems to producing more than its usual share of moisture, so that when he raises his hand to his brow, I think I see several drops of sweat dribble from the rounded point of his elbow.

  The men, four of them in all, had been speaking in low voices as I approached, but have now fallen into an uneasy silence. After all, there is a sixth member of our little group I've neglected to mention. Stretched out on the gravel, she acts as a centrepiece to our meagre gathering. The lower half of her body is all layers of shredded and muddy skirts twined around swollen legs, while the upper half is shielded from view. One of the men has sacrificed his coat to the task of concealment, so I'm left to study the feet, one with a shoe and the other without, the stockings and petticoats stained a mottled grey by the silt and sediment of the river. For there's no doubt that this body was recently recovered from the water that even now edges away from us, drawn out by the tide.

  Dimly, I'm aware of what has brought all five of us here this morning. Another body. So many of them now. Should I be worried that this has become too regular of an occurrence? Chissick gestures, not to me, but to Trevor, and the top three inches of the coat are pulled back.

  Matted hair is all I see, no individual strands, but thick ropes of grey that cling stubbornly to the pale, slightly greenish skin of the forehead. The hesitation that stills Trevor's movements sends a frisson of anticipation through me, through all of us, until Chissick is forced to speak.

  "Just get it over with."

  No more hesitation now. The coat is pulled away, up and off, and given a hearty shake before it is returned to the man who surrendered it. That I should spend all of my attention on the fate of the ill-used coat should do much towards shedding some light on my current state of mind. There, on the ground, not three feet away from me, is a dead body. But my reluctance to react to its presence is not guided by any kind of revulsion, but rather a fear, of sorts. A fear of confirmation, if I wish to be more specific. Because I already know the identity of the woman lying there. I know her face, the sound of her voice, and with startling clarity, I remember the last words she said to me.

  I can take care of my own self.

  If I close my eyes, I can still picture her seated on her little wooden stool, a tray of tiles balanced on her lap. But that is only a memory. Now, her face is blotched and swollen. Trails of dried silt stream from her nostrils, from the corners of her eyes and mouth. It's when I take a second look at her eyes that my chest rises and falls, and I take to pulling in each and every breath through gritted teeth.

  Sissy's left eye, clouded and milky, still marbled with veins of blue, protrudes from its socket, while the other eye, the one I remember as being black and glassy, is gone. A dark slash from the gaping socket down to her jaw mars the entire side of her face. I close my eyes and look away when I realise that I’m staring at a sliver of exposed jawbone.

  "Who found her?"

  The question slips out, bristling with an authority I've not yet heard myself use.

  In reply, the oldest man in our group, the owner of the coat, moves forward. He bows his head as he looks at me, peering up through small eyes with pale lashes. His head is crowned with a tonsure of white, and the top of his scalp is sunburned and scabbed over.

  "I found her, ma'am," he says, raising his hand to his forehead, touching the brim of an imaginary cap. "The boy and I were out early this morning." He gestures to the youth beside him, a gangly thing still growing, judging by the amount of wrist and ankle left bare by his ill-fitting shirt and trousers. "Night and mornin’s the only time to go out nowadays, try to catch a bit of cooling over the water. But as I said, we were just fishin' and the like, and here we were coming up on morning, and this one spotted something like was billowing out, breathing on the surface of the water. And Tom said he thought something had got itself hooked up on the corner of the old pier. Didn't you, Tom?"

  The boy named Tom nods, his eyes downcast, both hands clasped and held over his groin. His colourless hair stands out at all angles from his head, flattened on one side, but sticking out like the quills of a porcupine on the other.

  "Yes, ma'am. Tom saw her first, 'course we didn't know it was a ‘her’ at the time, but we swung the boat round, our heads all full of wonderin' and worryin' about what it could be. I didn't want to think on it being someone having gone and pitched themselves off the bridge, but you gets all sorts, 'specially in those hours before sun's up to full strength, and we weren't taking any chances, so I says to Tom, I says, ‘I hope that's not a jumper!’ Didn't I say that, boy?"

  Another nod from Tom, who in the full light of the afternoon, wears a green cast of his own around the edges.

  "See? Tom'll vouch for us, ma'am. And so it were as I said. We swung the boat round, and I rowed until I had a burning ache in my shoulders." Here, the old man moves his arms, around and around, back and forth, until I understand he's recreating the scene from several hours ago, all the way down to the stoop his shoulders must have worn as he pulled on the oars. "And I told Tom to bring out the grapplin' hook, and he took a stab at her." He stabs at the air, a move that would put D'artagnan to shame. "But that's when he did the damage to her face there, and we are sorry about that, ma'am. But you've got to understand, out there in the water, just a lantern swinging round your head for light... Right, Tom?" His head swings around and he locks onto the boy with an eager stare. "You're sorry about sending that hook through the old woman's eye, aren't you?"

  This is the last straw for poor Tom, who turns his back on the assembled company, gravel spraying out from beneath his heels as he lunges towards the water's edge. He retches loudly, and the rest of us avert our eyes, thankful for the old man's attempts to clear his throat and carry on with the conversation as the boy's coughing subsides.

  "He's very sorry," the old man assures us, again tipping his invisible hat in my direction. "Aren't you, Tom?" With a gnarled hand, he draws the boy back into the circle, clapping him on the shoulder. The action carries enough force to nearly send young Tom running back towards the river. But instead, he wipes his mouth with his shirtsleeve, and pushes several strands of sweaty hair out of his eyes.

  "Yes, ma'am." The boy's voice is pitched high, higher than normal, I suspect, as he still appears to be holding his stomach in check. "I never meant to... I didn't..."

  Perhaps it's the way the young man trembles, the weakness in him that draws the words of comfort from me. I tell him it will be all right, that I'm sure he meant no harm, that he was a good lad and that he did a good job. And I'm almost tempted to trawl my pockets for one of Marta's coins and make a present of it to the boy, but I wonder if it would somehow be deemed vulgar, and so I falter into an awkward silence, and the boy trains his gaze on the tips of his muddy boots.

  "Well," the old man says when no one ventures to speak for more than a minute. He says the word again, while his pale gaze darts here and there, as if searching for any part of the story left untold. "Well, we hauled her up all right. You wouldn't think it would be such a hard job for t
wo, but hanging off the corner of the pier like she was, and them skirts holding water like..."

  Unfortunately, he can't think of anything known for its absorption, so he stammers some more, his eyes still shifting in search of his previous thread. "Why, there was a moment or two when I'd thought we'd lost her. It’s the fat ones, you see, the way they put a strain on the nets, tearin’ ‘em to shreds if you’re not watchful. But we got her in all right. We got her in." He slaps his thigh, his grizzled chin nodding up and down for several seconds. "And then I sent Tom here running. A right little messenger boy when he wants to be, earns himself quite a bit of coin with those legs of his. And I told him, I said, ‘Now, we don't want any of those police mixed up in this business, leastways not 'til we've got our bearings settled about us.’ And here Tom runs into this good gentleman here." A nod towards Trevor, which quickly moves to include Chissick and myself. "And now here comes these fine—Yes, fine young people."

  As the old man flounders into silence, I find that it takes a concentrated effort on my part not to look at Chissick. Yet I feel his eyes on me as I move closer to the body, and the tone of his thoughts hovers around him like a fog. All I have to do is trail my fingers through it, and I can sense his uneasiness, and stronger than that, his wish for privacy. But here we all are, under the open sky, and suddenly I'm labouring under not merely the four pairs of eyes trained on the back of my head, but under the inquisitive gaze of the entire city.

  They watch as I kneel down, down and down, until I'm close enough to sweep the clotted hair from Sissy's forehead, my fingers breaking apart clods of mud that had worked themselves into a tangle. Still clearing away strands of hair that cling to her skin like seaweed, I travel down to her jaw, skirting over the wound in her cheek, the empty eye socket that stares up at the world with more menace than her own, original eye ever managed to convey.