The Solitary House (2 page)

Once past St Giles Circus the line of shops peters out and the road narrows. A few minutes later Charles stops under a street-lamp before turning, rather less confidently this time, down a dingy side lane. It’s unlit, with alleys branching off left and right. He stands for a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark, and wonders if he should have hired one of those boys after all. He rates his chances well enough against a lone footpad, but for a year or more this part of London has been notorious for a spate of garrotting attacks, and the men who use these miserable backwaters for cover ply that trade in threes and fours. No-one but a fool or a foreigner would venture willingly into such a maze of dilapidated houses, seeming blind and yet teeming behind, as Charles well knows, with a desperate human detritus that has no choice but to call the vile haunts of Tom-All-Alone’s home. Even the fog seems more malevolent here. It funnels down from the main thoroughfare, and eddies ghostily into archways and casements. Charles takes a deep breath and starts off again, his ears suddenly attentive to the whispers and creakings of the crumbling tenements on either side. Half a dozen times in as many months the ground round here has been shaken by a sudden crash as one of these structures has subsided, throwing a tower of dust into the dirty London sky. The last was barely three weeks before, and when the scavengers moved in to rake the wreckage they found more than two
dozen bodies—men, women, and children—huddled together for warmth half naked, in a room less than fifteen feet square.

The farther Charles goes, the thicker the fog becomes, and once or twice he thinks he sees darker shapes and shadows loom and then retreat before him—if they are men they do not show themselves, leaving his agitated imagination oppressed by phantasms. But only too horribly real is the sound of the fever cart, creaking its own slow way through the narrow alleys somewhere nearby, the cries of warning smothered in the dead air. He’s more relieved than he’ll admit to turn a bend in the alley and see the entrance to a low covered way, with a solitary lamp looming at the farther end. He ducks his head and starts along the tunnel, though not without at least one anxious glance behind: If ever there was a place precisely adapted for thieves to waylay the unwary, then this is surely it. The walls are running with moisture that drips into pools on the floor and slides in runnels down the back of his neck, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he’d been firmer with the cat. He quickens his step, but the farther he goes, the more he becomes aware of an all-too-familiar sickly reek. When he comes out into the open it’s to an iron railing and a choked and ruined burial-ground, crowded in on all sides by half-derelict buildings, the gravestones all but level with the first-floor windows, where here and there a dim light still seeps through the cracked and patched-up panes. The gate is standing open, and there are bull-dog lanterns on the far left side, close by what looks like the twisted stump of a stunted yew tree.

The police.

He can’t make out how many there are, but they’re expecting him, and one calls across in a voice he recognises. It’s Sam Wheeler—Cockney chipper and as quick as ginger. They worked together for six months out of St Giles station-house. It was Wheeler who’d taught Charles the ways of the London underworld, and Wheeler
who’d been at his side the night Field first took him to Rats’ Castle and the rookeries.

“Hey, Chas!” the constable cries, “we’re over ’ere. Mind where you’re walkin’, though, or you’ll find your body being committed to the ground rather sooner than you bargained for.”

Charles looks around. Humidity hangs like contagion in the atmosphere, staining the mouldering bricks and catching at the back of his throat. He knows all about the risk of infection in a place like this, and finds himself wishing to God he’d never come—never taken a case that has been doomed from the start and can only end in failure. But then he reminds himself that it isn’t just a case, it’s
the
case—the only one he has. And the only one he’s ever likely to have, if he gets himself a reputation for letting people down. He starts to pick his way slowly towards Wheeler, but the spongey earth sinks and sighs unnervingly under his weight. He swallows his scruples and steps onto one of the mossy half-buried stones, but his foot slips from under him on the slimy surface and he loses his balance and lurches forward, landing heavily on his side. He swears under his breath, but as he shifts his weight to get back up, his fingers push down through the mud into something else—something cold and viscid and putrid that comes away in his hand. He jerks his arm back and gets hastily to his feet, feeling the delayed prickle of cold fear as he breathes through his mouth and feels in his pocket for a handkerchief, willing himself not to retch like a woman. He glances across at Wheeler, wondering if he saw, but thankfully the constable’s attention is engaged elsewhere.

“Look at that rat!” Sam cries, pointing. “Did you see it? What a monster! Almost as big as a dog! Ho—there he goes—there—straight under that stone!”

Charles wipes his hands hurriedly and throws the handkerchief from him in disgust. No amount of laundering will persuade him to use that thing again. Then he steadies himself and sets off once more, and as he comes closer to the light he can see that the ground about the tree stump has been disturbed. He edges closer and squats down,
telling himself to forget the stench and the squalor and concentrate on looking carefully, and thinking clearly. That’s what he’s good at: using his eyes and applying his mind—just as he was taught by his great-uncle Maddox, the celebrated thief taker. His parents had named him Charles in Maddox’s honour, though not without some misgivings: Maddox might have made a lot of money out of his chosen profession, but it was not one well-regarded by the middle classes. Not then, when Maddox was practising, in the early years of the century, and certainly not now. But then again, the Victorian bourgeoisie can rely on a properly constituted police force, which is a luxury their grand-parents never had. Thief taking may never have been a particularly respectable occupation, but it was an essential one, nevertheless, and all too often the only bulwark between order and anarchy. ‘Charles Maddox’ he is, then, the second of that name, but his parents could hardly have expected he would want to emulate his predecessor in a far more significant way, and take up the same low calling. When he turned seventeen Charles reluctantly agreed to follow his father into medicine in a last forlorn attempt to salvage their relationship, but he lasted less than a year before giving it up and beginning the world again where his heart really lay—with the Detective.

The second officer comes up now and stands behind him, watchful but silent. Charles thinks he’s seen him before, but can’t remember his name. Clough, is it? Or Cuss? Something like that, anyway. The officer’s face is as sharp as a hatchet and his skin as dry as an autumn leaf.

“So what do you make of it?” the man says eventually, in the same level tone he might use to order a beer. Was it indifference—or just an appropriate and commendable detachment? Charles can’t be sure.

“Can you tell me who found it?” he asks.

“Couple of lads, playing where they shouldn’t. I doubt they’ll be back here in a hurry.”

“And it was like this?”

“Nothing’s been moved. Not yet.”

Charles bends down and looks more closely, straining his eyes in the low light. Without a word, the man brings the bull-dog lower, and Charles feels the lantern’s warmth on his skin. It’s clear to him now what must have happened. Judging by the exposed knots of red yew root, the last week’s rain has washed at least an inch of mud from the surface of the soil. And what it’s revealed is the tiny body of a newborn baby, still wrapped in a dirty blue woollen blanket, a scrap of white cotton tangled about the neck. He may never have completed his medical training, but Charles knows enough to make a pretty shrewd guess how long these bones have been here. In this waterlogged London clay, probably three weeks; certainly no more than four. The eyes are long gone, but wisps of pale hair are still pasted to the small skull, and the flesh is largely intact, though almost black with putrefaction and scored with the marks of teeth and claws. Indeed, the rats seem to have done an unusually efficient job. One hand is completely gone below the wrist, but the fingers of the other are curled as if to a mother’s touch. When Charles lifts the edge of the sodden blanket the gaping belly is swarming with larvae. But that isn’t the worst of it. Underneath the body he can already see the buried blue of another coverlet, and the broken rib cage of another small child. His breath catches. He glances up at the officer, “Do you want to, or shall I?”

“Be my guest. It’s not a job I relish.”

Charles takes a pair of gloves from his pocket, and the officer hands him a small trowel. Five minutes’ careful digging reveals three bodies buried under the first, one next to the other, exactly aligned. Indeed, they look for all the world like infants in a cradle. Sleeping soundly side by side, carefully swaddled against the night air. Charles sits back on his heels. “So what do we think? Are we assuming it’s a woman?”

The other man considers. “Most likely, in my experience.”

“And the same one each time?”

“Hard to tell for sure. Could be two of them. The body on the top’s
a lot more recent, but the other three are like peas in a pod. Probably all went in together.”

Charles is silent a moment, then shakes his head. “I disagree. The earth here’s been turned over more than just once or twice. And surely even in this light you can see the difference in the bones.”

Not just the bones, in fact, but the flesh. One baby’s face is smoothed almost doll-like—unnerving the first time, but Charles has seen many times what grave wax can do. The other two underneath are withering one after the other into parched cages of separating bones, their mummified flesh dried in tight leathery tendons, the closed lids stretched paper-thin.

Charles glances up. “Whoever this woman was, she seems to have been trying to give them a decent burial—or the nearest she could manage. This last one looks like it even had a handkerchief or something put over its face—as if she couldn’t bear to look at it. And yet she kept coming back—kept re-opening the same grave.”

He stares at the open pit, struggling for a word to help make sense of it, and comes up only with
tenderness
. It jars horribly with the evidence of his own senses—not just the sight of decomposing flesh but the reek of decay eating into his skin and clothes—but the idea has caught his mind, and it will not go away.

The other man is dismissive; he’s clearly had enough of this wild-goose chase. “Come on, it’s no big mystery. She’d have needed time, even for a shallow grave, and this is the only part of the cemetery where you’re not much overlooked. It’s just common sense. Nothing more sinister than that.”

Charles nods; the man has a point—he should have thought of that himself. “All the same, think about what that actually
meant
. Imagine digging over the same piece of earth time and time again, knowing full well what you were going to find. What kind of woman could do that? It goes against every idea we have of the sanctity of motherhood—”

The man laughs. “Sanctity of motherhood, my arse! I thought they told me you’d been in the police? Most of the women round here
have already got too many mouths to feed. Baby farms cost money; a pillow over the face is free,
gratis
. And you know as well as I do that unless they’re either very careless, or very unlucky, there’s virtually no chance of getting caught. I’ve lost count of the number of dead babies I’ve seen fished out of the Thames, or found rotting in the street, but I can number the women we’ve prosecuted for infanticide on the fingers of one hand. The courts have better things to do with their time. As have we.”

He turns and waves at Wheeler, beckoning him over.

“Come on,” he calls. “There’s nothing for us here. Just another routine child-killing.”

Charles sticks the trowel into the ground and stands up. “So if dumping them in the river is so easy, why go to all the trouble of bringing them here? Not to mention the risk. It’s because this place is consecrated ground—that’s the only explanation that makes any sense. And that alone means this is a very long way from being
just another routine child-killing
.”

There’s a snort and Charles looks round to see Wheeler staring down into the gaping grave, a half-eaten apple in his hand.

“Jesus,” the constable says, taking another bite, “if this is your definition of consecrated, give me hellfire any day. Looks like the last one they put in over yonder had to be stamped on to get ’im in. The coffin’s rearin’ up out of the ground like the Last Trump’s already blastin’. Though at least ’e did
have
a coffin. Unlike these poor little buggers. Any use to you, Chas?”

Charles sees the other man’s cool and quizzical eye; he’s clearly been wondering all this time what right Charles has to be there, but has decided to say nothing.

Charles shakes his head. “I doubt it. The last anyone heard of the child I’m looking for was sixteen years ago, when it was taken to an orphanage at three months old. These bodies haven’t been in the ground anything like that long.”

“You ain’t got a lot to go on, if you don’t mind me sayin’ so,” mumbles Wheeler, his mouth full. “What’s the chance of findin’ one solitary
kid in a town this size—dead or alive? You might pass it in the street this very evenin’ and never know.”

Charles shrugs. “I have a picture of the mother, and my client hopes the child may take after her.”

“Your client,” says the other man softly, “must have money to spare—or a very poor understanding of the likelihood of success.”

The tone is purposefully neutral, but the implication is clear. Charles turns and looks the man squarely in the face. “My
client
refuses to give up hope,” he replies coldly, “even though I have explained very clearly that our chances are small. I am conducting as detailed an investigation as is possible after all this time, and doing so in the proper professional manner. I resent any suggestion,
Constable
, that it could possibly be otherwise.”