The Sweet Smell of Decay (17 page)

The third day I woke with a linen bandage wrapped round my head. Dowling sat perched on a tiny three-legged stool next to my head.

‘That’s a fair old hole you got in the back of your head, Harry,’ he said softly. ‘Four inches long and half an inch deep.
Reckon I saw the bone. The edges are still blue and puffy, but I think we’ve got the worst out of it.’

‘Thank you.’ My mouth was dry. Dowling handed me a cup of ale.

‘What happened?’

Though my head still throbbed like a ripe maggot I told him my story. Once I’d finished he sat grim-faced.

‘I know Mottram,’ he said at last. ‘He has the brains of a big cow. His usual trade is thieving or cullying. He works with a partner. He stands up and looks big whilst his partner does the talking. He is a menacer. Never heard of him killing. Methinks you had the Lord’s arm about your shoulder, Harry. If it were not Mottram sent to dispatch you, methinks you’d be swinging from that pole as we speak, neck as long as my arm.’

‘Do you know where Mottram lives?’

‘Aye, Shoreditch, but he won’t be there now. He’ll be hidden now that he’s failed, his mate too. In fear of their own lives, if they be sensible. Whoever it was that paid them to kill you will be determined to make them pay for their failure.’

I closed my eyes.

Dowling cleared his throat and sat back up straight, thick lines across his weather-beaten forehead. ‘Harry, you want my wisdom, then I’ll tell you that you was saved for a reason. You didn’t escape out of your own cleverness. It was God’s will. If he saved you then he saved you for a reason. Fear not, saith the Lord, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, and thou art mine.’

‘Aye,’ I muttered.

‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed then ye shall say unto this mountain – remove hence to yonder place – and it shall remove.’

‘It is like a church in here. Ye know I don’t have that faith.’

‘I know that, Harry, one of your many faults. But you need faith now. Think on it. The Lord giveth wisdom.’

I fell asleep – as I always did in church – and dreamt of clerics with big shapely arses, large breasts and, no matter how hard I tried to change it, Dowling’s face.

Commotion. Dowling talking animatedly with someone in the front room. My name. John Giles’s name. Sitting upright I forced my stiff limbs to lever me up onto my feet. I staggered out towards the noise, the muscles in my legs tight and bruised. Dowling staring at me with his mouth open, already dressed. The door open. Men waiting outside. They were all about to go somewhere. The look on Dowling’s face said that something important was happening. It was dark and freezing cold – still night.

‘Wait for me,’ I said before returning to my room. All I had to wear was the butcher’s clothes. Never mind – it was dark – none would recognise me. I changed quickly. By the time I made it out the door most of the party were already halfway down the street, impatient. Only Dowling waited for me, shaking his head at my folly.

We hurried across the City towards the river, me shivering.
I tried to get Dowling to talk to me, to tell me what was going on, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. I perceived that he was not sure of it himself. We reached the Steelyard – already bustling, merchants trading grain, wheat, tea, rope, masts, linen, wax and other goods demanded by the navy and other seafarers. Candlelight shone softly through the fog and smoke, lending a strange air to the surroundings. I didn’t venture this way often. The soap boilers and brewers were already up and lively, and though we had to push and shove to get through the alleys, and though my feet sank three inches into the mud with every step, it was well lit and busy, safe to walk through. Ten minutes later we passed across the shadow of St Magnus Martyr, a huge square church with an imposing tower, now black against the orange sky.

A figure stepped out of the mists and came towards us. Young, another butcher, judging by his raw scrubbed hands. He gestured towards the Bridge and led us, hurrying. We ran the first hundred yards of the Bridge, bare as it was of houses to protect us from the icy night winds blowing off the river. After Rock Lock and Gut Lock we reached shelter. The houses here were tall and thin, four storeys high on either side, joined across the Bridge by tie beams. These tie beams held everything together, for the houses were only twelve feet wide, and eight of those twelve feet hung over the rapids that crashed through the starlings that supported the Bridge’s stone piers. Every so often, one of these houses crumbled away and dropped off into the river, leaving another gap for the freezing Thames gales to scythe through. There were more than a hundred and fifty shops over the next two hundred yards selling all sorts. The first of them were already open. This was a place to come during the day when the airs were warm; it was not a place for
a man to live. The road on the Bridge was just three yards wide and was already congested despite the early hour. The pressure was relieved only at the middle of the Bridge at The Square. The smiths were at work and the first smoke was winding up into the brightening skies.

We emerged onto the south side of the river and traversed the wooden drawbridge passing under the arch of Nonsuch. The man led us to the Bear on the Southwark bank. A sodden dripping bundle lay on the cobbles. It looked like a body, covered with a thin cloth.

‘This is what we came for?’

‘Aye,’ Dowling nodded. He crouched on his haunches and slowly pulled the cloth off the face. John Giles stared up at us.

Huge, white bulging eyes protruded like little bloated guts. The colour in his eyes had dulled, like a new layer of thick white gristle had grown over the top of them. His mouth was pulled tight and wide and his front teeth stuck out – biting into his lower lip. There were deep little stabbing marks all over one cheek. Dowling ran a finger over them.

‘He has been cut about the face, cut before he died, else the skin would not have swelled up like that.’

The cuts were clustered around the middle of his right cheek. They seemed to form a deliberate pattern of some kind. A long cylindrical shape with vertical stripes hanging down from it like the branches of a tree, deep reddish-blue gashes sunk into puffy, white, clammy skin. Dowling touched the marks again. ‘I think it is supposed to be a grasshopper.’

He was right. The cylinder was the insect’s body, and the stripes were its legs. It was a very similar representation to that which sat above the Exchange. The lines were straight and
accurate, implying that Giles’s face must have been held in a vice-like grip while his face was cut.

‘I don’t understand.’ I turned away.

‘The knowledge of wickedness is not wisdom.’

That didn’t help. ‘He was hanging off the Bridge?’

‘Aye, hanging upside down, his head touching the water. Looks like they tied his hands behind his back and tied his feet together. Then they put a rope round both bindings and pulled it tight so he was trussed like a chicken. Then they bound another rope around the knot, a long one, exactly the length of the drop between the Bridge and the river. They tied one end to the top of the Bridge and threw him over.’ Dowling gazed up at the Bridge. ‘The fall pulled his shoulders and knees right out of their sockets. The pain must have blown every breath from his body. Then he would have drowned I suppose, his head was found hanging just below the surface of the water.’

Dowling rolled the body over so that the face was mercifully hidden and started to wrestle with the thick knots. The rope was wet and the knots had been pulled very tight. He took a short-bladed knife from his belt and cut through the rope around the knots. Giles’s limbs fell unnaturally about him like they were not his at all. He lay there like an animal on the slab, ready to be chopped up and parcelled.

‘There’s a hook above the middle arch. He was hanging off that.’ Dowling turned, eyes scanning the surrounds. He pointed at a lone figure sat away from everyone else. ‘That man is a boatman. He found the body at dawn.’

He was sat scrunched up on dry frozen mud, knees tucked up against his chest. His shabby wide-brimmed hat was pulled down over his ears, his big red nose stuck out like a lump of raw meat, a drip hanging from its tip over his marbled purple
hands. His shoes were sodden and misshapen. We went over.

‘Let me alone,’ he said gruffly, before either of us got the chance to speak, ‘I’ve had a terrible experience.’

‘We work for the Mayor so you have to talk to us,’ I replied without sympathy, ‘else I will throw you into the stone hold.’ It wasn’t he who’d been killed. I had no patience for Thames boatmen, no matter how terrible their experiences. They were a foul breed of mongrel scoundrels and I didn’t doubt that his apparent reluctance to talk belied his objective to get money from us. ‘I’ll give you a shilling if you tell me it all, and tell me it quick.’

He stared at me dejectedly then looked out at the river. He cleared his throat and looked a little happier. ‘I got up early today, this morning, see? I had a booking first thing at Westminster and I was shooting through the arches, riding the torrent. I almost run into it, but couldn’t see what it was, because there was so much fog. I rowed back against the tide so I could see it properly and God’s my witness I nearly fell out my boat when I saw it. His face in the water, bouncing on the waves. A rope from his feet climbing up into the fog. His face all white like a mask, grinning.’ He pulled a face and looked to the floor. ‘Shocking it was. Dropped me oars. Course, I shot off downriver once I’d dropped the oars. Bouncing it was, bouncing on the river.’

I dug out a shilling and dropped it on the cobbles in front of his feet. He picked it up and pocketed it without looking at me. We turned our backs on the wretch and stood in gloomy silence staring out at the Bridge.

‘That’s five dead now,’ I reflected, ‘and poor fellows
we
be.’

‘Aye, poor fellows, indeed.’

‘Have you heard any news of my father?’ I asked awkwardly.

‘Not yet, Harry.’ He laid a hand on my shoulder before wandering off to speak to his colleagues, about cleaning up, I supposed. I stood with my hands in my pockets looking out over the river. Dowling’s clothes were warmer than mine. The river was busy now. The boatman had vanished.

‘Let me walk you home.’ Dowling returned from his directing. ‘Make sure it’s still there.’

‘Jane!’ I suddenly thought.

‘She went off to stay with her aunt at her house on Little Eastcheap,’ Dowling assured me. ‘Nice woman, her aunt – don’t you think?’

I didn’t even know she had an aunt. No desire to meet her neither. Last thing I needed was Jane soliciting reinforcements.

My front door was wide open. When he saw it Dowling bid me wait and went straight inside. No thought for his own safety, I noted approvingly. His turn, I reckoned. While I waited I tipped my hat to the baker who I didn’t like much.

Dowling reappeared quickly, even paler than he’d been before. ‘Learn to do well. Plead for the widow,’ he whispered. What that meant, I had no idea – but something wasn’t right. I pushed open the door, stepped in and stood in my own front room with my hands on my hips. There was a funny yet familiar smell. I looked to Dowling who flicked a finger in the direction of my kitchen.

‘I could tell you what is in there, indeed it might be better for you. Else you may choose to look for yourself.’

‘I choose to look for myself.’ I pushed Dowling out the way and threw open the door. I stopped two paces in, just short of a wide, sticky pool of dark-red blood, smelling rich and foul like the waste bins of any abattoir. The blood
formed a thick coagulation that covered most of the floor but congealed mainly around one leg of the kitchen table. On that table were two heads. One head was fat and bald with lots of chins and a thin moustache. Its eyes were rolled up and the mouth formed a small ‘o’. The lower chins were incomplete, ending in the ragged edge that marked where the head had been hacked from its body. The second head stared forward through narrow black eyes, its lips drawn and teeth bared, as if it blamed me for its predicament. This head was younger, hair thick, straight and brown. The lips were white, but from the corner of the mouth there trickled a still and stagnant line of dark blood. The heads had been cut savagely with some thick saw-edged knife, not very sharp.

‘I doubt that you recognise them,’ Dowling walked in quietly, ‘so I feel bound to introduce you to Mr Mottram and Mr Wilson. That is Mottram.’ He pointed to the fat head, ‘and that is Wilson.’ He pointed to the younger head.

‘The men that would have killed me?’ I pulled at the shirt about my neck. I felt hot and the room was stuffy.

‘Aye, Mottram and Wilson. We were looking for them. We didn’t find Mottram, but we found his wife. She gave us the name of the second man. She called him the weasel. That’s the weasel there.’ Dowling pointed at the second head again. ‘Wilson was well known, a thief and a bully. He ventured out with Mottram sometimes. He lived outside the city wall to the east, close to the Tower. We didn’t find him neither. Until now, that is.’

The table was thick with blood, soaked. It would never be clean again. What would Jane say? I would just have to get a new one. Dowling put an arm around my shoulder.

‘No sign of their bodies? Just the heads?’ My stomach
contracted and my skin prickled. I turned and walked weakly out the kitchen.

‘Just heads. I think they were killed as punishment for failing to kill you. Their heads I think must be trophies, to scorn our own poor efforts to find them.’ He closed the kitchen door quietly.

‘Matthew Hewitt, then.’ I looked at the walls, and cursed the pervasive malodorous stink that clung to them so tenaciously. ‘I
know
it is Hewitt.’ Hewitt that invaded my home with the dead, stinking artefacts of life now extinguished. Too many heads today. I shook my own head and walked back out onto the street where the air was clean of the smell of human blood and gore. Clean
er
, anyway.

Dowling sighed. ‘I fear that we have come to the end of it. John Giles dead, Joyce dead, now Mottram and Wilson.’

I looked into his big plain face, full of honesty and goodwill. ‘No.’

‘No?’ Dowling’s grin returned, faint.

I told him the idea that was taking form in my mind even as I spoke. My next great plan. Dowling’s grin disappeared and he started to protest. My soul was set, however. I was not going to let Hewitt go free. But first to Shoreditch to talk to Mottram’s wife myself.