The Silent Cry (2 page)

They was both from somewhere else, up west for certain, or in from the country.”

"City," Evan corrected. "City boots. City skins. Country men would have had more colour.”

"Then up west. They wasn't from any were near 'ere, that's for certain positive. So 'oo around 'ere would know 'em to 'ate 'em that much?”

Evan pushed his hands into his pockets. There were more people passing the end of the alley now, men going to work in factories and warehouses, women to sweat shops and mills. The unknown numbers who worked in the streets themselves were appearing, pedlars, dealers in one thing and another, scavengers, sellers of information, petty thieves and go-betweens.

"What does a man come here for?" Evan was talking to himself.

"Something he can't buy in his own part of the city.”

"Slummin'," Shotts said succinctly. "Cheap women, money lenders, card sharps, fence a bit o' sum mink stolen, get sum mink forged.”

"Exactly," Evan agreed. "We'd better find out which of these, and with whom.”

Shotts shrugged and gave a hollow laugh. He had no need to comment on their chances of success.

"The woman, Daisy Mott," Evan began, starting towards the street. He was so cold he could hardly feel anything below his ankles. The smell of the alley made him shrink tighter and feel queasy. He had seen too much violence and pain in a short space of hours.

"The doc were right," Shotts remarked, catching up with him. "An 'of cup o' tea wi' a drop o' gin wouldn't do yer no 'arm, nor me neither.”

"Agreed," Evan did not argue. "And a pie or a sandwich. Then we'll find the woman.”

But when they did find her she would tell them nothing. She was small and fair and very thin. She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five. It was impossible to tell. She was tired and frightened, and only spoke to them at all because she could see no way of avoiding it.

The match factory was busy already, the hum of machinery a background to everything, the smells of sawdust, oil and phosphorus thick in the air. Everyone looked pallid. Evan saw several women with swollen, suppurating scabs, or skin eaten away by the necrosis of the bone known as 'phossie jaw', to which match workers were so susceptible. They stared at him with only minimal curiosity.

"What did you see?" Evan asked gently. "Tell me exactly what happened.”

She took a deep breath, but said nothing.

"In't nobody cares were yer was comin' from," Shotts interposed helpfully. "Or goin'.”

Evan made himself smile at her.

"I come inter the alley," she started tentatively. "It were still mostly dark. I were near on 'im well I saw 'im. First I reckoned as 'e werejus drunk an' sleepin' it orff. "Appens orften down 'ere.”

"I'm sure!" Evan nodded, aware of other eyes staring at them, and of the supervisor's grim face a dozen yards away. "What made you realise he was dead?”

"Blood!" she said with contempt, but her voice was hoarse. "All that blood. I 'ad a lantern, an' I saw 'is eyes, starin' up at me. That were well I yelled. Couldn't 'elp it.”

"Of course. Anyone would. What then?”

"I dunno. Me 'eart were goin' like the clappers an' I felt sick. I fink as I jus' stood there and yelled.”

"Who heard you?”

"Wot?”

"Who heard you?" he repeated. "Someone must have come.”

She hesitated, afraid again. She did not dare implicate someone else. He could see it in her eyes. Monk would have known what to do to make her speak. He had a sense of people's weaknesses and how to use them without breaking them. He did not lose sight of the main purpose the way Evan too often did. He was not sidetracked by irrelevant pity, imagining himself in their place, which was false. He did not know how they felt. He would have said Evan was sentimental.

Evan could hear Monk's voice in his mind even as he thought it. It was true. And people did not want pity. They would have hated him for it.

It was the ultimate indignity.

"Who came?" he said more sharply. "Do you want me to go around every door, pulling people out and asking them? Would you like to be arrested for lying to the police? Get you noticed! Get you a bad name." He meant it would make people think she was a police informer, and she knew that.

"Jimmy Elders," she said, looking at him with dislike. "An' 'is woman.

They both come. "E lives 'alfway along the alley, be' and the wood door wif the lock on it. But 'e don' know wot 'appened any more'n I do. Then ol' Briggs. "E went for the rozzer.”

"Thank you." He knew it was a waste of time asking, but he had to go through the motions. "Had you ever seen either of the two men before, when they were alive?”

"No." She answered without even thinking. It was what he had expected. He glanced around and saw the supervisor had moved a little closer. He was a large, black-haired man with a sullen face. Evan hoped she was not going to be docked pay for the time he had taken, but he thought she probably would. He would waste no more of it.

"Thank you. Goodbye.”

She said nothing, but returned silently to her work.

Evan and Shotts went back to the alley and spoke to Jimmy Elders and his common-law wife, but they had nothing to offer, beyond corroborating what Daisy Mott had told them. He denied having seen either of the men alive, or knowing what they might have been doing there. The leer in his face suggested the obvious, but he refrained from putting words to it. Briggs was the same.

They spent all day in and around the alley which was known as Water Lane, going up and down narrow and rotting stairs, into rooms where sometimes a whole family lived, others where pale-faced young prostitutes conducted their business when it was too wet or too cold outside. They went down to cellars where women of all ages sat in candlelight stitching, and children of two or three years old played in straw and tied waste bits of rag into dolls. Older children unpicked old clothes for the fabric to make new ones.

No one admitted to having seen or heard anything unusual. No one knew anything of two strangers in the area. There were always people coming and going. There were pawn shops, fencers of stolen goods, petty forgers of documents, doss houses, gin mills and well-hidden rooms where it was safe for a wanted man to lie for a while. The two men could have come to do business with any of these, or none. They may simply have been entertaining themselves by looking on at a way of life different from their own, and immeasurably inferior. They could even have been misguided preachers come to save sinners from themselves, and been attacked for their presumption and their interference.

If anyone knew anything at all, they were more afraid of the perpetrators, or of their peers, than of the police, at least in the form of Evan and P.C. Shotts.

At four o'clock as it was growing dark again, and bitterly cold, Shotts said he would make one or two more enquiries in the public house where he had a few acquaintances, and Evan took his leave to go to the hospital and see what Dr. Riley had to say. He had been dreading it because he did not want to have to think of the younger man again, the one who had been still alive in that dreadful place. The memory of it made him feel cold and sick. He was too tired to find the strength inside himself to overcome it.

He said good-day to Shotts and walked briskly in the general direction of Regent Street, where he knew he could find a hansom.

In St. Thomas's hospital he went straight to the morgue. He would look at the bodies and deduce what he could for himself, and then ask Riley to explain to him what else there was to learn. He hated morgues, but everyone he knew felt the same. His clothes always seemed to smell of vinegar and lye afterwards, and he never felt as if the damp were out of them.

"Yes, sir," the attendant said dutifully when he had identified himself. "Doc Riley said as you'd be 'ere some time, prob'ly today. I only got one body for yer. Other one in't dead yet. Doc says as 'e might pull through. Never know. Poor devil. Still, I suppose yer want ter see the one I got." It was not a question. He had been here long enough to know the answer. Young policemen like Evan never came for anything else.

"Thank you," Evan accepted, feeling a sudden surge of relief that the young man was still alive. He realised now how much he had been hoping he would be. And yet at the same time it meant he would wake up to so much pain, and a long, slow fight to recover, and Evan dreaded that, and his own necessity for being part of it.

He followed the attendant along the rows of tables, sheet covered, some with the stark outline of corpses beneath, others empty. His feet rang in the silence on the stone floor. The light was harsh, beaming back from bare walls. It was as if no one but the dead inhabited the place. There were no concessions to the living. They were intruders here.

The attendant stopped by one of the tables and pulled the sheet off slowly, uncovering the body of a middle-aged, slightly plump man of average height. Riley had cleaned him up very little, perhaps so Evan could make his own deductions. But with his clothes absent it was possible to see the terrible extent of his injuries. His entire torso was covered in contusions, black and dull purple where they had bled internally while he was still alive. On some the skin was torn. From the misshapen ribs, several of them were obviously broken.

"Poor devil," the attendant repeated between his teeth. "Put up one 'ell of a fight afore they got 'im.”

Evan looked down at the hand nearer him. The knuckles were burst open and at least two fingers were dislocated. All but one of the nails were torn.

"Other 'and's the same," the attendant offered.

Evan leaned over and picked it up gently. The attendant was correct.

That was the right hand and, if anything, it was worse.

"Will you be wanting to see his clothes?" the attendant asked after a moment.

"Yes, please." They might tell him something, possibly something he could not already guess. Most of all he wanted to know the man's name.

He must have family, perhaps a wife, wondering what had happened to him. Would they have any idea where he had gone, or why? Probably not. He would have the wretched duty not only of informing them of his death, and the dreadful manner in which it had happened, but where he had been at the time.

"Ere they are, sir." The attendant turned and walked towards a bench at the farther end of the room. "All kept for yer, but otherwise just as we took 'em orff 'im. Good quality, they are. But you'll see that for yerself." He picked up underwear, socks, then a shirt which had originally been white, but was now heavily soiled with blood and mud and effluent from the gutter in the alley. The smell of it was noticeable, even here. The jacket and trousers were worse.

Evan undid them and laid them out on the bench. He searched them carefully, taking his time. He explored pockets, folds, seams, cuffs.

The fabric was wool, not the best quality, but one he would have been happy to wear himself. It was warm, a rather loose weave, a nondescript brown, just what a gentleman might have chosen in which to conduct an expedition into an unseemly quarter of the city not, perhaps, one as dangerous as St. Giles. No doubt for his normal business he wore something better. The linen of the shirt would suggest that both his taste and his pocket allowed a greater indulgence.

All that told him was that the man was exactly what he thought, from somewhere else, seeking either pleasure, or a dishonest business in one of London's worst slums.

The suit had been damaged on the knees, presumably when he had fallen during the fight. One knee was actually torn, the threads raw; the other only pulled out of shape, a few fibres broken. There was also a badly scuffed patch on the seat and it was still wet from the gutter and deeply stained. The jacket was worse. Both elbows were torn, one almost completely gone. There was a rent in the left side and a pocket all but ripped off. However, even the most thorough search, inch by inch, revealed no damage which could have been done by a knife or a bullet. There was a considerable amount of blood, far more than was accounted for by the nature of the injuries to the dead man. Anyway, it appeared to come from someone else, being darker and wetter on the outside of the garment and having barely soaked through to the inside.

At least one of his assailants must have been pretty badly hurt.

"D'yer know wot 'appened?" the attendant asked.

"No," Evan said miserably. "No idea, so far.”

The attendant grunted. "Come in from St. Giles, didn't 'e? Reckon as yer'll never find out, then. Nobody from there says nothin' on their own. Poor devil. "Ad a few ga rotters in from there. "E must 'a crossed someone proper ter get beat like that. Don't need ter do that ter no one just ter rob 'im. Gambler maybe.”

"Maybe." The name of the tailor was on the inside of the jacket. He had made a note of that, and the address. It might be sufficient to identify him. "Where is Dr. Riley?”

"Up on the wards, I spec, if 'e in't bin called out again. Fair make use of 'im, you rozzers do.”

"Not of my choice, I promise you," Evan said wearily. "I'd much rather not have the need.”

The attendant sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. He said nothing.

Evan went up the stairs and along the corridors, asking, until he found Riley coming out of one of the operating theatres, jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up, his arms spattered with blood.

"Just taken out a bullet," he said cheerfully. "Damn fool accident.

Marvellous thing this new anaesthetic. Never saw anything like it in my youth. Best thing to happen in medicine since… I don't know what! Maybe it's just the best thing straight and simple. I suppose you've come about your corpse from St. Giles?" He shoved his hands into his pockets. He looked tired. There were fine lines crisscrossing his face, and a smear of blood over his brow and another on his cheek where he had rubbed his hand without realising it.

Evan nodded.

A medical student walked past them, whistling between his teeth until he recognised Riley, then he stopped and straightened his shoulders.

"Beaten to death," Riley said, pursing his lips. "No wound with any weapon… unless you count fists and boots as weapons. No knife, no gun, no cudgel as far as I can judge. Nothing to the head more than a flat concussion from falling on to the cobbles. Wouldn't have killed him, probably not even knocked him senseless. Probably just stunned and a little dizzy. Died of internal haemorrhage. Ruptured organs.