Wild Boy (13 page)

He felt a touch on his shoulder and jumped in fright. But it was just Clarissa’s rope. The end was tied in a loop that brushed the ground, waiting for him to climb on. Quickly he stepped into the loop and clung on to the line, as Clarissa began to yank him up the side of the house. As he rose, he looked down, searching the yard for any other movement. But there was none.

The rope scraped over the gutter. “Climb over!” Clarissa called.

Fighting the pain in his shoulder, Wild Boy pulled himself onto a wide ledge that framed a sloping attic roof. Clarissa sat close by, her feet flat against a chimney around which she’d pulled the rope. She was out of breath, but looked pleased with herself.

“This is how we do it in the circus,” she said, tugging her boots back on.

The fog was thinning, offering glimpses along the river — the sleek stone arches of London Bridge in one direction; in the other, the grim gray bulk of the Tower of London. The fog was confusing, disorientating. It played tricks with your mind. Wild Boy hoped that was what had just happened in the yard. . . .

Clarissa already had her lock picks out as she tried to open a door in the attic roof. She swore, banged a fist against the wood. “This is bolted inside too — this house is like a prison. How could the killer have gotten in and out?”

Wild Boy wasn’t sure, but he was more and more eager to find out. He sensed that the answer could be the clue they needed to catch the killer. But he couldn’t solve it unless they could get inside. “Maybe we could —”

CRASH!

With one powerful kick, Clarissa broke open the door. The crash echoed like thunder around the rooftop. “Got it,” she said, grinning.

Wild Boy could barely believe what she’d done. “Are you crazy? The coppers are down there!”

He rushed to the edge of the roof, but was relieved to hear the police still chatting in the street below.

Clarissa pushed the door. “I done my bit,” she said. “Now you better do yours.”

T
he attic door swung open and the darkness breathed in, sucking thick streams of fog into its gaping mouth.

Wild Boy stepped cautiously into Doctor Griffin’s house. It was as dark as a pit. He was supposed to be searching for clues to hunt the killer, but he could barely see five yards in front of his face. He groped his way forward and felt something hard and round perched on a shelf.

“Wait,” Clarissa said. “I found a light.” She struck the flint and steel of a tinderbox and lit a candle.

Wild Boy blinked, dazzled. When he looked again he was staring at a human skull. He staggered back and bumped into Clarissa.

“Get off me,” she snapped. “Don’t —”

Her mouth stayed open but no more words came out. She turned and stared around the low-roofed attic. “
Bones,
” she said finally.

The attic was full of bones — hundreds of human bones. There were bones all over the floor, bones in boxes, and bones in stacks against the slatted walls. Human skulls lined a shelf, and two whole skeletons guarded the top of a spiral staircase that wound deeper into the house.

“What
is
this place?” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy crouched to examine several books in a pile. Titles on the spines read
Encyclopaedia of Anatomy
and
The Morbid Dissection of the Human Body.
Inside were drawings of human bodies — diagrams of twisting muscles and maps of internal organs, like those he’d seen in Professor Wollstonecraft’s caravan.

“I bet the hooded man did this!” Clarissa said. “He must’ve murdered hundreds of people. He’s obsessed with bones!”

“Clarissa,” Wild Boy said, before she got carried away, “these bones ain’t got nothing to do with the hooded man. This is an anatomy school.”

He’d heard of these places — medical schools where doctors carved up corpses to study their insides. Clarissa looked horrified, but Wild Boy felt a shiver of excitement run through his hairs.

Clarissa handed him the candle. “You go first.”

The floorboards groaned under his bare feet as he led the way down the rickety spiral of wooden steps. The wallpaper was faded and peeling away, revealing walls that were streaked with damp. There was an acrid smell in the air, like rotting meat, that grew stronger with each step.

At the bottom of the stairs was a room that stretched from window to window along the length of the house. Several wooden tables ran down its center. On each was a sack filled with something large and lumpy, like a bag of potatoes.

Clarissa pulled her hair around her nose. “Where are we now?”

“A classroom,” Wild Boy said.

He spotted signs of the tables’ grim purpose everywhere: rags on the floor to soak up sticky spillages, iron buckets to catch fatty drippings. This was where the Doctor’s students dissected corpses. No wonder the place stank.

His heart beat harder as he guided his candle over the tables and the sacks. Most of the bags were tied with rope, but one had fallen open. Wild Boy raised the top . . . and stepped sharply back, gagging with revulsion.

“What is it?” Clarissa said. “What’s in there?”

Wild Boy knew he should warn her, but he couldn’t resist the opportunity this presented. So he just stepped back and shrugged. “Nothing much,” he said.

She had to look. When she did her face turned almost green. Inside the sack was the body of a young woman. With wide-open eyes and slate-gray skin, the corpse looked like one of the waxworks that showmen displayed at the fair.

Clarissa leaned against the table, fighting back sick. “You should have said,” she seethed.

“I did say.”

“You said
nothing much.
There’s a dead body in there!”

“A dead body
is
nothing much.”

Wild Boy didn’t really believe that. Until last week he’d never even seen a corpse. Now he was in a room full of the things. He was scared, but fascinated too.

“Why are they still here?” Clarissa said.

“Must be the fog,” Wild Boy said. “The coppers can’t take them away till it clears.”

His eyes widened as he reached the table at the far end of the room. “Over here,” he said. “The murder was done here.”

Clarissa rushed closer. “How do you know?”

And then she saw. This table was different from the others. The body laid on it wasn’t in a sack but covered by a sheet of black tarpaulin. And painted in white on the sheet were three words:

“The Doctor’s body,” Clarissa said. “It’s still here an’ all.”

Wild Boy raised his candle so it lit the wall behind the table. There, in crimson letters that had dripped down the wallpaper, was written:

Wild Boy hocked up a ball of spit, fired it hard at the wall, and watched it trickle down over the bloody writing. Seeing his name written like that —
written in blood
— made him more determined than ever to catch whoever had done this, to make the person pay for setting him up.

He could tell from the look on Clarissa’s face that she felt the same. She snorted, and blasted another oyster of phlegm at the wall. “The hooded man’s gonna regret messing with us,” she said.

Wild Boy turned and took hold of the tarpaulin. “You ready?”

Clarissa nodded. “Ready.”

He yanked the sheet from the table, revealing the corpse of Doctor Charles Ignatius Griffin. They both recoiled, revolted by what they saw — the bloated body of a young man with bushy black side-whiskers. The man might have been handsome once, but his eyes were now gray and glazed with death, his cheeks were sunken, and the tip of a dark tongue rested between cracked black lips. His sleeves were rolled up, and his shirt and waistcoat were torn and stiff with dry blood.

“It’s
him,
” Clarissa said.

Wild Boy recognized him too. Doctor Griffin was the man from whom they stole the letter at Greenwich Fair.

Sick rose from Wild Boy’s belly and stung his throat. But he forced it back and edged closer. “Look,” he said.

On the Doctor’s finger was a gold ring, decorated with a single raised letter — a
G.
“Professor Wollstonecraft had the same ring. But it was gone when I saw him in the stable. The killer took it.”

Setting his candle down, he pulled the ring from the corpse’s rigid finger and slipped it into his pocket.

“You’re
stealing
it?” Clarissa said.

“I ain’t stealing it. It’s a clue.”

“Oh. Anyway, how did the killer get in here if all the windows and doors were locked from inside? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I know. . . .”

“So why are you grinning like that?”

Wild Boy turned, hiding the smile that had spread across his face. Clarissa was right. This crime didn’t make sense — and that thrilled him. This was the puzzle he’d come here to solve.

Almost immediately his eyes were drawn to clues around the table. Clarissa kept talking, but he didn’t hear. His senses were now totally focused on the crime scene. He stepped back and studied the bloodstains on the floor. Then he crouched and picked up an empty sack beside the table. Turned it over, his grin spreading even wider.

“Ha!” he said.

“What? What do you see?”

He rushed to the other end of the table and inspected a cabinet of surgical instruments — long, curving knives and miniature hacksaws. He prodded one of the knives, and then did the same to those in other cabinets along the classroom. His excitement mounted as more clues emerged in the candlelight. He already had a good idea of what had happened here, but a few pieces of the puzzle still didn’t fit together.

He rushed back to the Doctor’s corpse and examined a large bloodstain that ran over the edge of the table’s surface. He drew a fingertip slowly around the mark, tracing its pattern.

“Splash marks,” he muttered.

Leaning closer, he peeled a single strand of hair from the blood. He held it so close to the candle that its end sizzled in the flame.

“Is that a silver hair, or white?” Clarissa said. Eager to look busy, she grabbed a pencil from a cabinet and added the clue to her list. “Tell me what you’ve seen! How did the killer break into the house?”

“He didn’t.”

“What?”

Wild Boy nodded toward the array of surgical tools. “See them knives? They’ve been sharpened, but the others in the room ain’t.”

“So?”

“So the Doctor was about to use them. He was working when he got killed, or he was about to. His sleeves are rolled up, see?”

“He was about to cut up one of these bodies?”

“No. Not one of these.”

Wild Boy stood over the empty sack on the floor. In a way, he wished he was wrong about this. In a bigger way, he was exhilarated that he was right. “This bag had a body inside. The Doctor lifted it onto the table. There are threads from the sack on his hand and on the table, see?”

“So what happened to the body?”

“Exactly!” Wild Boy said. “Now look, the Doctor’s blood is here on the table. These sides have splash marks. The blood didn’t spill out. It
landed
here.”

“You mean . . . What do you mean?”

“I mean he was stabbed while he leaned over the table. Stabbed by someone lying on the table.”

“But the person lying on the table . . . It was the dead body.”