Inspector of the Dead (25 page)

He reached into his satchel and removed a bottle that was labeled
WHITE VITRIOL.
He used a dropper to apply some of the mild sulphuric acid to the gash. Then he took out a recently developed device known as a stethoscope. After attaching tubes to both of his ears, he pressed the device’s cup to Colonel Trask’s chest.

He pulled out his pocket watch, opened it, and listened, moving his fingers as if counting.

When Dr. Snow finally looked up, even in the room’s dim light, it was clear that his face was pale.

“What’s wrong?” Emily asked.

“His heart is racing two hundred beats per minute—almost three times what is normal.”

“Three times?”

“Motionless, he has no way to vent the energy inside him. I’m astonished that his heart hasn’t failed. I need to administer the chloroform. Quickly. If the colonel doesn’t manage to sleep, if his heartbeat doesn’t decline, I fear he will die.”

“H
e went in there!”
a constable shouted.

Ryan hurried along the narrowing street and stopped where it converged with six other streets in a pattern that its long-ago designer had meant to look like a sundial.

But there was nothing sunny about this wasteland. Originally a respectable area, Seven Dials had descended into squalor as the construction of railways into London destroyed numerous buildings in which the lower class lived. Ambitious developments such as fashionable Regent Street and New Oxford Street had similarly destroyed cheap housing for the poor. In the same way that countless rooks built nests in a single tree, tens of thousands of London’s underclass had sought shelter in those few affordable areas that remained and that eventually acquired the name “rookeries.”

Most lodging houses here had six beds per room with three people sleeping in each bed, although many also slept on bare floors. More than a hundred unfortunates squeezed into each three-story structure, the congestion stressing walls, stairways, and corridors until the crammed buildings were in danger of collapsing. Water pumps didn’t exist. Alleys were urinals. Each privy served four hundred people, the overflowing waste spreading into cellars. Only the most hopeless lived in Seven Dials—the mudlarks who waded along the Thames, searching for chunks of coal that had fallen off barges, or the scavengers who sold dead cats and dogs to fertilizer makers and, if the dead animals were fresh, to cookshops as supplements to so-called pork pies.

As Ryan stared at the gloomy, rotting entrance, he felt the desperation of Seven Dials waft over him. The rookery was considered so dangerous that few strangers—usually only policemen—entered it, and only for an unavoidable reason.

Ryan was forced to admit that the recent murders and Sir Walter’s possible link to them constituted a definite unavoidable reason.

“Constable, are you absolutely certain he went in there?” Ryan asked.

“No question about it, Inspector.” The constable aimed his lantern toward the tangled shadows of the forbidding wilderness.

Bloody hell,
Ryan thought, pressing a hand to the barely healed wounds on his abdomen.

From deep within the rookery, he heard a scream.

T
wo figures
—one of them short and slight—climbed the dark stairs toward Colonel Trask’s office, proceeding into the private room behind it.

“Father,” Emily said.

De Quincey watched as Dr. Snow put the mask on the colonel’s face and turned a valve on the chloroform canister. Then De Quincey gestured toward the stocky man next to him whose black, curly hair and matching beard gave him a dramatic appearance.

“Allow me to introduce the esteemed journalist William Russell.” De Quincey was careful not to call Russell a “war correspondent,” a term that Russell hated.

Becker, the porter, and the constable nodded in greeting, awed to be in the presence of the man whose writing had toppled the British government. They tactfully ignored that his shirt collar was open, his waistcoat unbuttoned. Above his beard, his cheeks were flushed, presumably from alcohol, although he gave no other indication that he’d been drinking.

Russell was thirty-four. His sad eyes communicated his weariness about the pain and death that he had witnessed. The previous year, the London
Times
had sent him to the Crimean War, the first time a journalist for a major newspaper had been dispatched to a combat area. He didn’t bother to request permission from the war office, the foreign secretary, or even from military commanders. Instead he disguised himself in a uniform of his own design. Then he boarded a ship loaded with army personnel, all of whom thought that he belonged to someone else’s unit. When he arrived on the Crimean Peninsula, an English officer described him disapprovingly as someone who “sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water, and smokes as many cigars as a Jolly Good Fellow. He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters.”

Russell’s irresistible personality did indeed prompt revealing conversations that allowed him to report about the wretched conditions in the war. Because of incompetent planning, ordinary soldiers were forced to endure fierce winter storms while wearing summer uniforms, the lack of tents further exposing them to the deadly weather. In contrast, officers enjoyed warm accommodations, one of their commanders, Lord Cardigan, sleeping comfortably on his steam-powered yacht. As British officers savored wine, soldiers drank water from mud puddles. As officers feasted on cheese, hams, fruit, and chocolate, soldiers subsisted on salt pork and stale biscuits. Scurvy and cholera were rampant. More soldiers died from starvation, disease, and cold than they did from wounds.

Russell seized on the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade as the supreme example of incompetence. Lord Raglan ordered the Light Brigade, a cavalry unit, to attack a Russian artillery installation, but he neglected to specify which of many installations he had in mind. Other officers argued among themselves and failed to demand clarification, with the result that the Light Brigade attacked what turned out to be a heavily fortified Russian embankment. Caught in a devastating crossfire, 245 riders were killed or wounded, 60 taken prisoner, and 345 horses slaughtered.

Thanks to the telegraph, Russell’s outrage-producing dispatches reached British readers with then-unimaginable speed and fueled equally rapid consequences, his vivid turns of phrase adding to their immediacy. The Russians “dashed on towards that thin red streak tipped with a line of steel,” he wrote, a description that became “the thin red line” as an enduring synonym for the determination of British soldiers.

Emily stepped forward to shake Russell’s hand. “I’m honored to meet you, sir. You’ve done a service to women and the wounded by describing Florence Nightingale’s attempts to relieve suffering in the war.”

“I fear that I haven’t accomplished enough,” Russell said, peering downward. “Perhaps the new government will be wise enough to pursue the war with greater organization and discipline. As things now stand, we cannot win. In a few days, I return to the Crimea. Perhaps if I write better, the effect of my words will be better.”

“You write well enough, sir.”

With a nod of thanks to her, Russell approached the bed.

Dr. Snow had finished administering the chloroform. Colonel Trask’s eyes were now shut, but his body remained rigid.

“He looks as haunted as he did in the Crimea,” Russell noted.

“With new horrors to torment him,” Emily said.

“So your father explained. When the colonel discovered the bodies of his fiancée and her parents last night, he must have felt that he was still on the battlefield.”

“Mr. Russell, during the war, did you see paralysis of this sort?” De Quincey asked.

“Frequently. The privations that our soldiers endure, the terror that grips them as they wait for yet another battle—these sometimes cause even the bravest of men to be paralyzed. But I never expected it from Colonel Trask. The other men considered him an example of what they ought to be.”

Dr. Snow removed his stethoscope from the colonel’s chest. “His heart continues to race.”

“Perhaps laudanum will help,” De Quincey offered.

“No, Father,” Emily said.

“I agree with your daughter. Combined with the chloroform, laudanum might kill him. Keep someone with him at all times,” Dr. Snow advised. “I’ll return in the morning.”

“Mr. Russell, your familiar face might be the reassurance that he needs. Until he wakens, would you kindly wait with me in the next room?” De Quincey asked.

“For a man such as the colonel, I can’t refuse.”

“And Joseph,” Emily asked, “would you please stay so that I might ask you something?”

Becker looked surprised, both by the request and by Emily’s use of his given name, which attracted the notice of everyone except Emily’s father.

“Of course,” he answered, uneasy.

“T
he screams come
from
this
way!” Ryan yelled.

Accompanied by the wavering lights of numerous police lanterns, he hurried through the fog-shrouded maze of the Seven Dials rookery.

Sir Walter’s screams became more desperate.

Ryan charged along a lane that was so narrow it scraped his shoulders. A drooping overhang forced him to lower his head. He squirmed over timbers that propped up listing walls, the entire district in danger of collapsing.

The screams stopped.

A nearby voice startled Ryan. “Never saw so many bobbies come in here in me life.”

“But how many’ll get out?” another voice wondered in the darkness. “This one over here looks like the peeler who arrested me last year.”

“Warm-lookin’ coat he has.”

Ryan heard a faint scuffle.

“Here!” a constable shouted, pointing.

Ryan charged down steps and kicked at a door, the wood so decayed that it crumbled off its hinges. In shadows, what looked like dogs raged over a struggling figure.

But they weren’t dogs.

Ryan waded into the chaos. As constables struck with their truncheons, he pulled away a ragged man, then another, a frantic boy, a snarling woman.

Police lanterns revealed Sir Walter trembling at the bottom of the pile. His boots, frock coat, and waistcoat were gone. His face had claw marks.

“There’s more coming all the time!” a constable warned from the doorway. “This lane will get us out! But you’d better hurry!”

Sir Walter whimpered when Ryan reached for him, seeming to fear that Ryan was another attacker. His walking stick lay on the dirt floor, blood on its knob showing that he’d tried to defend himself.

“Stop Sir Walter! He tried to kill me with his walking stick!”
the man at the top of the staircase had shouted.

What
else
might he have done with it?
Ryan wondered.

He grabbed it and dragged Sir Walter from the building. He flinched when a rock struck a wall next to his head.

Something rumbled.

“They yanked away a timber support!” a constable shouted. “The wall collapsed! The lane’s blocked!”

“Climb over!” Ryan ordered.

A rock hit his shoulder, but the pain of it didn’t worry him as much as a different pain. The effort of chasing Sir Walter had strained the scar on his abdomen. He struggled over the collapsed wall, the frenzy of police lanterns guiding him.

“Faster!” Ryan yelled to Sir Walter, who shivered uncontrollably.

More rocks hurtled toward them.

“You can push us around outside, but in here,
we
do the pushin’!” another voice jeered. “This is
our
world!”

“Give us a shillin’!”

“Give us a pound!”

“Give us ever’thin’ you have!”

Pulling Sir Walter with his left hand, Ryan used his other hand to keep a tight grip on the walking stick, although what he really wanted to do was press his fingers over the strain in his stomach.

With a startling
bang,
a board landed next to Ryan, so close that he felt a rush of air. The pursuers had climbed to the roofs and were hurling down whatever they could find. Bricks, roof tiles, and even dead rats cascaded into the alley.

Ryan saw the deeper shadows of a recessed doorway. Despite his throbbing abdomen, he raised a boot and kicked at the barrier, hearing a satisfying
pop
as the door’s latch disintegrated.

“This way!” he yelled, pulling Sir Walter through the opening.

Constables followed, their lanterns revealing a cluster of faces so accustomed to permanent darkness that the lights agonized them, making them raise their arms to shield their eyes.

Ryan tugged Sir Walter along a cluttered hallway, managed to avoid a gaping hole, crashed against another door, and burst into a farther alley.

Amid cascading debris, the passage widened. As a rock struck Ryan’s back, he hurried through an archway and entered a street, the rocks, bricks, and roof tiles now clattering behind him.

Sir Walter slumped against a wall. Ryan slumped next to him, holding Sir Walter’s walking stick.

Constables struggled to catch their breath.

“Inspector, the front of your coat has blood on it,” one of them said.

A
s De Quincey,
Russell, and the porter left the bedroom, Emily adjusted the blanket over Colonel Trask. She dimmed the lamp and sat in a chair. Despite the reduced light, her blue eyes were intense.

Becker stayed in the room as Emily had requested. Self-conscious, he sat opposite her.

“Joseph, what I wish to ask you about is Newgate,” she said.

“An unhappy subject.”

“Indeed. After you searched Newgate’s records, you reported to Sean, Commissioner Mayne, and my father about what you found. You told them why the boy’s thirteen-year-old sister smothered her younger sister and her ill mother and then hanged herself. The expression on your face made clear that the motive was disturbing. Please tell me what you told the others.”

Becker glanced down at his hands.

“I proved that I’m steady,” Emily said. “Please don’t isolate me.”