Sword and Song (2 page)

“Sword?” Hugh asked.

“How can I afford a sword?” I protested. “I’ve been looking for a good cheap cane.”

“I mean,” Hugh said. “Are you by any chance totally unarmed?”

Belatedly, I saw why he asked. At the mouth of the alley leading up to the Black Gate, a pair of sullen lads were lounging against a wall, hands in pockets. One was smiling, unpleasantly.

“I’m unarmed,” I admitted.

Hugh dragged his hands out of his pockets and showed me the dark gleam of a pistol. “I was teaching in the country today, and thought I might have to ride back to town in the
dark.”

“For God’s sake, put that away! They’ll attack us just to steal it.”

The lads let us pass, although they eyed Hugh’s fine clothes. This is the poorest end of the town, where thieves and thugs congregate, with probably not a penny between them. Hugh’s
clothes must represent a year’s gin to anyone with enough daring. And they all clan up against outsiders, so if Bedwalters had a dead body in here, the chances of finding the killer were
almost certainly remote.

The Black Gate obstructed the street ahead, ancient grimy stones topped with crenellations and pierced by tiny arrow slits. It was a long time since any warrior had defended this gatehouse and
the stones were crumbling. We walked through the archway into another street and looked left and right for Mrs McDonald’s. No torches here, and in the darkness all the houses looked much the
same.

A young girl darted out of a door. “Mr Patterson?” She was no more than ten years old and dressed up in so many ribbons and flounces it was difficult to see her shape. Rouge
disfigured her face. I began to feel uneasy.

Hugh frowned. “Doesn’t Bedwalters’s
inamorata
live somewhere near here?”

Bedwalters the constable is a respectable man, running a respectable writing-school and enduring a respectable marriage to a respectable woman who doesn’t know what it means to be civil.
And in the meantime, he conducts a liaison with a girl of the streets whom he patently adores, and who quietly heals all his worries and cares.

I’ve met her several times, a girl of eighteen or so, dressed in poor clothes but clean and tidy, her brown hair tied back simply. She plies her trade without complaining, accepting what
is and what cannot be with equal stoicism. She once defended Bedwalters to me, passionately. A
good
man, she called him. Well, no one condemns a man for straying from home, especially not a
man with so shrewish a wife.

The door was low enough to make both Hugh and me duck; we found ourselves in a bare, ugly hallway, hung with badly-framed engravings almost too embarrassing to look at. From upstairs came the
sounds of several couples enjoying sexual congress; a murmur of voices filtered from the first room inside the house, immediately on the right.

The girl gestured to the half-open door. “Mrs McDonald’s in here.” I glimpsed the back of a gaudily-dressed woman, and pushed open the door.

Bedwalters sat by the side of a low bed; the straw mattress was torn and leaking, and topped by blankets stained by unimaginable activity. He was a man both feared and adored by his pupils, and
so respected that the Vestry of All Hallows elected him constable year after year; he was known for his quiet and his calm, his decent demeanour. Now his middle-aged face was white as ice, his wig
awry on his bald head, his clothes thrown on anyhow and mis-buttoned. He was staring into mid-air, like a man for whom the world is so painful it can only be ignored.

The woman glanced round, said in a broad Scotch accent: “Oh, thank goodness. Mr Patterson, is it? Pray sir, you do something with him for
I
can’t.”

I moved towards Bedwalters, hearing Hugh swear behind me. The constable was plainly not aware of my presence. His left hand clutched the hand of the girl who lay on the bed, staring at him with
empty unseeing eyes. The girl Bedwalters so loved, who once told me she would do anything to protect him. A thin girl with dulled brown hair, dressed only in a thin shift.

A shift soiled by a browning stain of blood.

I bent to check for the girl’s breath but she was patently dead; the flesh of her bare arm was chill. She had one wound, in the middle of her back, close to the spine.
One wound and one wound only, but it had been enough.

“Stabbed from behind,” Hugh said contemptuously. “She wouldn’t have had a chance to defend herself.”

Mrs McDonald had drawn back to give us room. “He won’t let her go,” she said, nodding at Bedwalters. She was an elderly woman but tall and upright; her dress was gaudy, her
face sour, and she had one of the broadest Scotch accents I’ve heard in a long time.

“What happened?”

“She had a customer. One of the other girls saw her bringing him in the door. Next thing, she’s screaming her head off.”

“Screaming’s not unusual in here, surely,” Hugh said, bending down and shaking Bedwalters’s shoulder gently.

“Not that kind of screaming,” she said dryly. “You can tell when they mean it. When they’re frightened. And Nell was.”

Ironic, I thought – I never learnt the girl’s name until after she was dead. “And?” I prompted.

“Nothing else to tell. When I got here, she was like you see. So I sent for the constable.” She nodded at Bedwalters. “I knew he had an interest in her.”

“He was in love with her,” I said.

“He’s a married man,” she said, dryly. “Like all the rest. And he just sits there! Can’t shift him, can’t get any sense out of him. Not till he said to send
for you.”

I looked round, at the bare room, the thin body on the bed, Bedwalters’s bleak absorption in his grief. Over the past year I’d become all too familiar with this sort of scene. Death
is an everyday event, but illness and the acts of God, perplexing though they may be, are only to be expected. The acts of men, however, all too frequently fill me with anger.

“I need to speak to the girl who saw Nell and her customer,” I said. Mrs McDonald turned and bellowed into the back of the house. I knelt down in front of Bedwalters, put my hand on
his arm. Recognition stirred in his eyes. He said hoarsely: “He didn’t need to do this.”

“No.”

“When did she ever hurt anyone?”

“Never,” Mrs McDonald said. “She’s been here six years, since she was twelve, and never once said an unkind word. And always ready to help them as needed it.” She
added, “Wish I had a houseful like her.”

“So can you think of anyone who might want to hurt her?”

Mrs McDonald laughed cynically. “There’s some as like to do it for fun.”

“This isn’t a man going too far in the heat of passion,” I said. “This is a deliberate act of killing.”

“Maybe she recognised him,” Hugh said. “Maybe he was someone well known in the town?”

I shook my head. “If he’d wanted to keep his identity secret, he wouldn’t have come back here with her.”

A woman hesitated at the door. She was wearing a shawl over a shift that was patched with blood and the leavings of her clients. Her gaze settled on the corpse on the bed then shifted away
again.

“Mr Patterson wants to know what you saw, Maggie,” Mrs McDonald said, jerking her head at me.

She shrugged. “I saw them.”

“When?”

“Hour, two hours ago.” Maggie had been born within a couple of miles of the house, to judge by her accent. How old was she? Three or four years older than myself – around
thirty, possibly? Getting dangerously close to the end of her attractiveness even to the most undemanding of men.

“Where were you?”

“In the kitchen having a bite to eat. Back of the house.”

“And they were...”

“Outside her door.”

“What did he look like?”

Another shrug. “A man.”

“Young, old? Tall, short? Dark, fair?”

Eventually she decided he was youngish, shortish, dark. “He spoke nice,” she said. “Reckon he was an apprentice.” She waxed lyrical briefly. “Had a lovely
waistcoat, embroidered, bright colours. Roses.”

“God help us!” Hugh said horrified. “Apprentices never have any taste.”

“Did you hear him say anything?”

Maggie pondered a good while then looked genuinely puzzled. “Well now, there’s a strange thing. He asked her if she had the book.”

“The book?” I echoed, startled.

“Aye. The book he’d given her to keep safe. And she said she had it and she’d be glad if he took it away with him. So he said he would.”

“What kind of book?”

“Never said ought about that.”

“Did they say anything else?”

She shrugged. “Never heard ought.”

“Did the man see you?”

“Nah, never looked my way.” She looked alarmed. “You think he might come for me next?”

“Not if he didn’t notice you. But best keep quiet about what you saw just in case.”

She nodded. “Think that’s why she got killed – so she couldn’t say nothing?”

“Possibly.”

“Then you’re looking for a fool,” she said. “You learn to keep your mouth shut in this business. Nell knew that. She’d never have said ought.”

“Presumably he didn’t know that.”

“Didn’t want to know, more like,” she said. She seemed to be looking at Nell’s body without much emotion. I said: “Doesn’t it distress you?”

She shrugged again. “We all come to it. And the likes of us faster than anyone else.”

“That doesn’t mean to say the murderer shouldn’t be brought to book.”

She laughed. “For killing one of us? That’ll be the day!”

“Very likely,” I said. “I’d be grateful if you could ask the other girls if they saw or heard anything.”

“Yeah, all right,” she said. But I fancied she wouldn’t bother.

I got up and looked about more carefully, watched curiously by Hugh and Mrs McDonald, and hopefully by Bedwalters. In an ironic sort of way, despite her poor station in life Nell had retained
some pride. She had taken care of the home that was also her place of work. It was ordered and tidy; she must have dusted regularly – there were no visible footprints on the bare boards, no
hand prints on the scarred table that held only a candle. A rag rug on the far side of the bed was rucked up as if someone had tripped over it. The bedclothes on the far side of the body bore a
depression as if someone had knelt there. Nell’s shift was pulled up above her knees and had slipped down from one of her shoulders.

With so little to go on, it was only possible to guess what had happened. Nell had brought her customer here, they’d lain together and he’d then stabbed her. She’d clearly put
up no struggle – she must have been taken entirely by surprise.

“Would Nell have had a knife?” I asked Mrs McDonald.

“Maybe. Or maybe she borrowed one from the kitchen.”

“Could you check if one’s missing?”

She cackled. “Wouldn’t do no good. God knows what’s in there. There are twenty women in this house go in there to cut themselves a wedge of bread or cheese, or get a drink of
ale. Stuff’s always coming and going.”

I sighed. “It doesn’t matter. He almost certainly brought the knife with him, anyway.”

Hugh frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Because he took it away again. Maybe it could be identified as his – some people put their initials on their cutlery, or their coat of arms.”

“Are you saying this is a man of family?”

“I’m not saying anything at the moment. Many men carry a knife with them – butchers for instance, or some other trades. Or – ” I hesitated and Hugh raised his
eyebrows. “Maybe he came prepared,” I said. “Maybe he always intended to kill Nell.” I looked down on the girl’s body. One stab – a cold calculating gesture
rather than a frenzied, impulsive attack. This looked carefully planned.

“But why, for heaven’s sake!” Hugh demanded. “Because of a book!”

I looked down at Bedwalters. “Had she mentioned a book to you?”

He shook his head.

“He did take the book, I suppose?” Hugh asked.

There were few places in the room where a book might have been put away. A small clutter of feminine things – a gap-toothed comb, a few hairpins, a ribbon – lay on a table and, on a
chair, a neat pile of clean clothes. With great reluctance I slipped my hand beneath the mattress on which Nell lay, feeling for a book and finding only a purse, a poor cloth thing. When I emptied
it into my palm, I came up with three pennies, two farthings and a small but beautiful brooch in the shape of a red rose.

“I gave her that,” Bedwalters said. I put it into his hand. “Last year, on her birthday. She used to wear it when we were together.” He stared down at the small thing on
his palm, then closed his fist around it.

“Look,” Hugh said. “There’s no difficulty about this. In three days or so, Nell’s spirit will disembody and she’ll be able to tell us what happened.
She’ll tell us all about the book and who her customer was.”

He was right, of course. The spirit, once it disembodies, always lingers in its place of death; poor Nell would be confined to this house for eighty or a hundred years before her spirit’s
final dissolution. And it’s a rare murder victim who won’t accuse its killer. But Nell’s murderer must surely have taken that into account.

“He may not have given her his real name,” I said.

Silence.

“Right,” Mrs McDonald said. “So I can shut up the room and get on with business, till she comes back to us, can I? About time.”

“I’m staying here,” Bedwalters said.

For a moment he sounded remarkably like his old self, calm, confident, a man of business and standing in the community. He looked haggard still, but I felt a sudden hope that after all
he’d be all right, that he’d come through this tragedy and build up the pieces of his life again.

“I won’t leave her,” he said firmly. “Someone must keep her company.”

“The undertaker,” Hugh murmured.

“I’ll deal with her,” Bedwalters said. “Mrs McDonald and I will lay her out decently, and deal with her body and spirit.” He caught my hand. “You catch him,
Patterson.”

“Of course,” I said soothingly.