The Butcher's Block Read online

  Dan turned in the direction of Charing Cross and passed the area known as the Savoy with its jumble of houses, barracks, churches and coal wharves. A few steps later he turned into Cecil Street and walked down towards the river. Halfway along he went in through an unlocked door squeezed between a lodging house and the steam baths. He ran up a flight of wooden stairs and opened the door at the top into a long room. Though it was early, the gymnasium was full of snarling, grunting men whose half-naked bodies gave off the familiar smell of sweat and liniment.

  It was sixteen years since boxing trainer Noah Foster had watched a wild street brat fight with a bigger opponent amongst the crowds assembled for the Oliver v Johnson match at Blackheath. Dan and his adversary had been there to take advantage of the spectators’ distraction to dive into a few pockets. The other boy had claimed the territory as his own and given the outsider a beating. A thief Dan might have been, but Noah had seen that he had the courage, speed and bearing of a born athlete. So Noah had given the boy a home, found the decency in him, and turned him into a disciplined pugilist.

  Dan returned the greetings of several of the athletes, some sparring with their fists muffled in leather gloves, others punching sacks, some lifting weights. He had trained with many of them, and some he had also defeated in gymnasium competitions. At the far end of the room, Noah Foster’s assistant, Paul, shouted instructions to a young novice who had not progressed beyond aiming enthusiastic punches at the air.

  Dan went through a curtained doorway into the living rooms. Noah looked up from his newspaper. “Hallo, son,” he said, folding the journal and placing it on the table beside his half-full coffee cup. “Can I get you something?”

  “I’ll have some coffee.”

  Dan lowered himself into a seat opposite Noah’s. The old man busied himself at the fireplace with the coffee jug, placed a cup of dark liquid in front of Dan and topped up his own.

  “What have you done to your hand?”

  Dan spread out his fingers and looked down at his swollen knuckle. “You should see the other man.”

  The attempt at lightness failed. Noah looked at Dan for a moment, then rose and reached a box of bandages, oils and balms down from a shelf. He poured some hot water from the kettle into a bowl, which he took back to the table, then he sat down and washed Dan’s wound with a clean cloth.

  “So what’s happened?” he asked as he worked.

  “There’s an officer dead. Kean.”

  A guarded look came into Noah’s face. Dan knew what he was trying to hide: his fear of one day hearing the same news of Dan, who had been nobody’s child until Noah Foster took him in and brought him up as his own.

  “It’s a nasty one, Dad.” Briefly, Dan described last night’s find.

  Noah listened without interrupting. He tied the ends of the bandage, wrung out the bloody cloth and threw it on the fire where it sizzled and steamed on the coals. “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “We worked together sometimes. He was a good officer.” Dan stood up. “I’ll go and get changed.”

  “As to that, no hitting with that hand. Stick to lifting some weights and a bit of leg work. I’ll come and have a look at you by and by.”

  Though he had not had much sleep, Dan pushed himself through his exercises and felt more energetic by the time he had finished. He went to the steam baths to shower, shave and dress, left his dirty clothes at Noah’s to go out with the laundry and set off for Guy’s Hospital.

  He crossed the river by Blackfriars Bridge, which was jammed with foot and wheeled traffic. The river was crowded with barges and boats. Further down, beyond London Bridge, ocean-going vessels moored in the centre of the stream towered over smaller craft darting around them. Strung along the shores was an irregular network of quays and warehouses, some old and sagging, others new and solid. Watermen and passengers jostled around the numerous flights of steps down to the water. The yeasty smell of breweries, the putrid smell of tanneries, the sickly, burnt smell of sugar refineries, and the smoke of innumerable chimneys, furnaces and forges filled the air.

  He passed through the iron gates into the courtyard of Guy’s Hospital. A group of students loafed noisily, heedless of the crowd of herniated, injured and abscessed poor who waited for the outpatients’ room to open. Dan crossed the court, ran up a flight of stone steps and passed through a door in an archway which brought him into a long corridor. None of the nurses and dressers who hurried between the male and female wards took any notice of him, but the top half of the door in the porters’ lodge just inside the entrance shot open and a craggy face under a shiny hat thrust itself out.

  “Not open yet. Join the queue.”

  Dan reached into his pocket for his staff of office. “I’m from Bow Street. I need to speak to the head porter.”

  The man regarded the wooden tipstaff with its gilt crown with an unimpressed air then said, “Come in, then.”

  He shut and secured the top half of the door before sliding back bolts top and bottom and swinging the whole door open. Dan entered a cluttered den with a table and four chairs arranged around a small fireplace over which hung an ancient and smoke-stained kettle. All the signs pointed to the seriousness with which the porters took their comfort when they were not doing their rounds, delivering messages or running errands for the surgeons. The wooden chairs were softened with worn, flattened cushions, and the table was covered with cake, bread, cheese, biscuits, jugs: enough supplies to ensure that hardly an hour need go by without something to drink and nibble on.

  “Are you the head porter?” Dan asked.

  The porter planted his feet wide apart and rested his hands magisterially on his round stomach. “I am. Mr Rummage at your service. And you are?”

  “Foster, Principal Officer, Bow Street. I’m looking for one of your men. An ordinary looking sort of fellow, middle-aged, wears a blue coat and white cravat.”

  “No one like that here. Most of my lot are older men. Ex-Army or Navy, many of ’em.”

  “So you don’t know anyone who’s got a line in selling bits of bodies left over from the dissecting room?”

  Rummage’s eyes narrowed, deepening the lines around them. “So that’s what you’re here about, is it? Pinning it on the working folk when nine times out of ten when a body goes missing it’s the young gentlemen you ought to be looking at.”

  “The students, you mean? Why would they steal from their own dissecting room?”

  “We haven’t got a dissecting room. They go to St Thomas’s for their anatomy classes. But we have got a mortuary.”

  “Are you saying that the students take bodies from the mortuary to dissect at St Thomas’s?”

  “They can’t cut ’em up here.”

  “They could dismember them in the mortuary, though? To make it easy to carry them, for instance. Or to make a profit by selling the separate parts to other medical schools.”

  “I suppose they could do that. They’d have to clear up after themselves.”

  “Do all the bodies in the mortuary come from the wards here?”

  “They don’t walk in off the street.”

  “So is there any way of finding out if a man called Kean was admitted over the weekend?”

  Rummage rubbed a fat finger down the side of his ruby nose. “The answer would be, he wasn’t. Taking-in day is Thursday.”

  It seemed unlikely that Kean had been missing since Thursday without anyone noticing. Even so. “I might as well check while I’m here.”

  “You’d have to look at the surgeon’s books.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You could ask the dressers.”

  “I’ll do that. Do any of the students match the description I gave you?”

  “I couldn’t say. There’s seventy or eighty of ’em at any one time. They come one year, they go another. All look the same to me.”

  �
�Very well, Mr Rummage. Now, take me to see the dressers.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “They’ll be busy getting ready for outpatients.”

  “And I’m busy serving the magistrate of Bow Street.”

  Rummage fetched a deep sigh, adjusted his hat, made a great to-do of lifting a bunch of keys from a hook by the door and locking the door when they were on the other side of it. He led Dan down the corridor past the wards, where most of the patients lay in miserable silence, either waiting for their treatment, or having already received it. Dan followed Rummage into a large room with a bare wooden floor and wooden benches around the walls. Leading off from it was a room filled with chests and cabinets, from which a couple of women gathered lint, ointments and bandages and packed them in the dressers’ portable tin boxes lined along the counter.

  Rummage stalked past without deigning to notice the women, ahemed and knocked loudly on the open door of the consulting room. Inside, a harassed-looking man in his shirtsleeves and wearing a stained linen apron was setting out lotions, blisters and plasters on a trolley next to a high, narrow wooden bed. On the desk, between a pile of paperwork and a stack of ledgers, black leeches writhed in a glass jar.

  “This is Mr Forrester of Bow Street Magistrates,” Rummage said. “Wants to look at the admission lists.”

  “Oh, yes,” the other replied, looking about him as if he expected the lists to appear out of the air. “They’re here somewhere. Will it take long?”

  “Thank you, Mr Rummage,” Dan said. “I’ll find my own way out.”

  The porter sniffed, jangled his keys, and walked off.

  “The name’s Foster,” Dan said, walking into the room.

  “Oh, yes, Foster, yes. I’m – ah – Evans. Dresser, yes, dresser. Was it the admission lists you wanted to see?” Evans dithered around the desk, shifting things from one spot to another and then back again.

  “Is it one of those?” Dan asked, pointing at the ledgers.

  “One of those? Ah yes, it is. Here we are. Admissions.”

  Dan cleared a space for the book on the edge of the desk and, stooping over the neatly ruled lines of text, ran his fingers slowly down the columns labelled name, age, sex and reason for admission. It was a parade of horrible diseases or ghastly injuries: scalding; fell from scaffolding; run over by a cart…

  He tapped one of last Thursday’s entries with his forefinger.

  “It says here gunshot wound to abdomen. Man called Noakes. Do you remember it?”

  Evans looked at the page. “Ah, yes. Patient died a few hours later.”

  “Was he conscious when he came in?”

  “Was he –? Yes.”

  “If someone was brought in unconscious, you wouldn’t know their name unless there was someone with them who could tell you?”

  “Or something amongst his – ah – effects, if any.”

  “But you are sure this man was conscious and gave his own name?”

  “Yes, oh, yes. If the patient is unconscious we make – ah – make a note of it in the book.”

  So it could not have been Kean. None of the other entries looked as promising. There was no trace of the dead man having been at Guy’s.

  Chapter Four

  When Dan turned into Bow Street he saw that a crowd had gathered around the Magistrates’ Office. Newspaper men, porters, idlers, market traders, hawkers, women with children in tow, and other representatives of London’s street life pressed around the front of the building. The door that was usually open to the public was shut and guarded by two patrolmen. Seeing Dan pushing his way through the mob, one of them banged on the door. Someone inside turned the key.

  “What’s happening? Why won’t they let us in?” one of the reporters bawled.

  “Why haven’t today’s sessions started?” demanded another.

  “Is it true there’s been an attempt to assassinate the King?”

  The clamorous throng surged after Dan. The guards pushed them back while he squeezed through the door. Inside, Lavender, the chief clerk, re-locked it.

  “Sir William’s waiting for you, Foster,” he said. “The surgeon is with him.”

  The sound of voices came from the main room where the gaolers, clerks and messengers had collected, their duties ignored. Dan glanced in as he passed along the corridor and spotted a number of fellow-Bow Street principal officers. They clustered around Perkins, the night clerk, bombarding him with questions. Why had Kean been murdered? Where had Mr Foster gone – did he know who’d done it? When would Sir William examine Wallace and Reynolds? Since Perkins did not have the answers, the interrogation only increased their frustration.

  Putting in a rare appearance at the office was John Townsend, holding court to an admiring circle of attendants. He rapped his cane on the floor to emphasise his utterances, which sounded authoritative enough, except that he knew nothing about Kean’s murder. For the last few years, Townsend had been employed as bodyguard to the royal family, in particular the Prince of Wales. That meant the races, boxing, gambling: a flash lifestyle Townsend had taken to with relish. A short, big-bellied man in his late thirties, he swaggered about town in a garish yellow waistcoat and a broad-brimmed hat like that worn by the Prince.

  Though no official announcement had yet been made about Kean’s death, the news had already begun to spread through the force. A few principal officers from other magistrates’ offices had come in to show their solidarity with their colleagues. So too had many local constables and watchmen.

  The housekeeper, the only woman amongst them, pressed a handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed, “He was always such a gentleman.” Dan wondered how she made that out. Kean had struck him as a man who lacked the most basic social graces.

  They caught sight of Dan and flowed towards him, shouting questions. He shook them off, loped up the stairs and knocked on Sir William’s door. The murmur of voices within broke off and Sir William called, “Come in!”

  The chief magistrate stood behind his desk. In one hand he held a glass of brandy; the other fidgeted with his watch chain. The surgeon had his back to the door and was bending over a metal tray on the desk between them. He had removed his hat and dark blue, high-collared coat, revealing a buttoned-up, vertically striped waistcoat over fawn breeches and black boots.

  “Ah, Foster,” Sir William said. “We were just about to begin. This is Mr Charlton of St Bartholomew’s Hospital.”

  Dan shut the door and advanced towards the desk, his stomach churning. The lidless basket stood on the floor by the surgeon’s feet. Dan forced himself to look at the tray where Kean’s remains lay.

  “If you will, Mr Charlton,” Sir William said.

  Sir William fortified himself with frequent swigs of brandy, while Dan was surprised at how his own stomach settled itself under the influence of Charlton’s cool professionalism. When the doctor had finished assessing Kean’s partial cadaver, he took a sip from his own glass and beckoned Sir William and Dan to draw close.

  “As you can see,” he said, turning the head to and fro to illustrate his points, “we have here the head and hands of a male in his late thirties or early forties. He appears well-nourished, so we can rule out death by starvation. As to what caused the death, it is impossible to say except that it was not from a blow to the head as there are no head wounds, and neither was it drowning. There are no defensive wounds on the hands, so it is likely that death did not occur during a fight or struggle. You see, incidentally, this pale band on his finger, which indicates that he wore a ring. The neck, so far as we have it, shows no signs of a ligature or knife entry.”

  “So he may have been shot or stabbed,” Dan said.

  “Or suffocated, poisoned or struck by lightning for all we can tell. It is difficult to place the time of death. Rigor begins within a few hours of death and affects the head first, but the whole body
is not affected until approximately twelve hours have passed. Here of course we do not have the whole body. In what we do have, rigor has passed: you see the jaw is loose. However, much depends on the temperature and we do not know how the remains were stored before being delivered to the body snatchers. All I can suggest is that he met his end during the last two or three days.”

  “That would fit with what I have ascertained of his movements,” Sir William said. “Mr Lavender tells me Kean came into the office late on Friday afternoon.”

  “Death could very well have occurred on Friday,” Charlton answered. “These severance wounds were done by someone who knows his business. You say that the men you apprehended claim that these items came from a porter at Guy’s, and they were going to offer them to St Bartholomew’s?”

  “That’s their story,” Sir William answered.

  “And it doesn’t hold up,” Dan said. “There’s no porter matching Reynolds’s description at Guy’s. No record of Kean ever having been there either. However he died, and wherever he was cut up, it wasn’t at the hospital.”

  Charlton took his hat and coat from the sagging chair where he had left them. “If I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to ask.”

  He gave a lingering look at the remains that had so nearly ended up on his dissecting slab, shook hands with Sir William, and left.

  “For heaven’s sake, cover it up,” Sir William said. He refilled his glass while Dan looked about for a cloth, and eventually had to settle for the one from the basket. “You’re sure about the porter?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let’s get Wallace’s and Reynolds’s depositions over with. After that, I have to go and tell Kean’s widow that this is all she’s got left to bury.”