The cellar smelled of rat droppings and metal that had rusted in the damp.
It had been partitioned, with a brick wall and a door twenty feet away. This side was empty except for some shards of wood that looked like they once belonged to a crate. The wind whistled at a low pitch through a grate in the ceiling near the outer wall.
I headed toward the door. It was composed of vertical wooden boards, partly rotted, but barred on the other side, and I put my eye to one of the cracks. It seemed all darkness over there, but I pounded my fist against the wood. If anyone was down here with Colin, guarding him, I wanted him to come through that door.
From the other side I heard a sound.
It was almost inhuman. But not quite.
I shouted Colin’s name and put my ear to the widest crack. All was silent. Yet I hadn’t imagined the noise.
I took out my knife and pushed it between two boards to force the bar up, to no avail. It was too heavy for the blade.
The wood was rotted—but not so rotted I could tear it apart without working at it first. I found one board that was loose and drew my knife repeatedly down the side, shearing pieces off until I could get my fingers around it and pull it away. I reached through the gap and lifted the bar out of its brackets.
As the door opened, I grabbed the lamp and swung it around the room.
As I expected, I was in the other side of the cellar, this part slightly larger than the one I just left. The walls were wetter, the floor was muddier—and there were wooden pillars and some walls, making separate areas for sorting and storing goods.
“Colin?” I cried out. “Are you here?”
My shout returned from the brick walls thin and hollow.
Only silence.
I hurried toward the entrance to the first alcove and then the next.
My lamp threw a misshapen shadow onto the wall, a grotesque of a figure bound to a chair, his head fallen on his chest.
Oh, dear God, I thought.
I dropped the lamp on the uneven dirt floor and bent over him, raising his head, which offered no resistance to my touch. Gently I lifted his arm away from his belly, where a dark red stain spread across his shirt.
“Colin,” rasped from the back of my throat. I went down on my knees, laid my fingers at his neck, at his wrist. If there was a pulse, it was too faint for me feel it, though the skin was still warm. My forehead fell against his shoulder, and tears filled my eyes, blurring my vision. I pulled his sleeve away from his wrist and up his arm. It was as I feared. Burn marks up and down. And his fingers. His poor broken fingers. Three of them. He’d held out against making a confession for longer than most would have.
With a sob rising in my throat, I sent a silent, thankful prayer that Ma would never see him like this.
With my knife, I cut the ropes that fastened Colin’s arms and legs to the chair. His bulk slumped forward, and I caught him before he hit the floor. I laid him out, gently as I could, and placed my thumb and forefinger across his eyelids to close them all the way.
And they fluttered.
“Jaysus,” I hissed under my breath, and hastily raised the boy’s head out of the dirt with one hand and ripped off my coat with the other. The buttons popped and flew. I drew the coat around Colin, clumsily, holding it close and settling behind him so he rested against my chest instead of that cold floor, and wrapped both my arms around him. “Colin,” I murmured. “It’s Mickey. Colin. Colin, can you hear me?”
His eyelids fluttered again, then closed. But his lips parted.
At last, he opened his eyes. I saw the glint of them in the light from the lamp. “I thought you were gone,” I said.
“Will be,” he managed.
I wouldn’t lie, not to a dying man. But I tightened my grip.
An incoherent noise and blood came from his mouth.
“Who did this? Was it Finn’s men?” I asked.
A faint nod. “Finn and Coo …”
“Finn and who else, Col?”
“Cooper.”
“Finn and Cooper,” I repeated. Just as Elsie said.
“Tell Ma I love her.” His voice slurred. “And Elsie.”
Blood was dropping from his mouth and nose now, and a gurgle rose from the back of his throat. I shifted to keep him as close to me as I could.
“Mickey.” Weak as his voice was, I heard the brokenness, a note of regret, of something that might have been an apology.
“Shh,” I said and rocked him side to side, just once. “It’s all right. I know.”
I don’t know how long we sat there, in that hellhole of a place where the water dripped down the walls and the rats lurked just beyond the circle of light given off by the lamp. Perhaps it was five minutes, perhaps ten.
I’d lain beside this boy many nights, as Ma told us stories about giants and monsters, the fairies and Johnny Freel. Often the tales were violent, and Colin was only five or six, but he would stoutly declare he wasn’t scared if he saw Pat and I weren’t. Perhaps if he’d been able to admit he was frightened, if he hadn’t felt ashamed of his fear, he wouldn’t have ended up here. God knows.
He drew in a breath, as if to speak or sigh.
But the breath ended there, and he became a dead weight on my chest.
I wrapped my arms more tightly around him. One throat-searing cry broke from me and then another. The brick walls threw the howls back at me, as if in sympathy, and the tears burned out of my eyes onto my cheeks for this boy I loved.
At last, my tears were spent, and the cold of the place had sheared its way into my hands and legs. My back grew too cramped to sit any longer. A long, low, mournful horn droned from a steamship, then a bell tolled from a church, every sound an insistent summons from the world outside. A world where I had responsibilities.
Gently, I shifted Colin off me, stood, put on my coat; then, hoisting him over my shoulder, I went out to the street. There were no cabs at this hour, of course, but I walked a furlong or so upstream to a new warehouse with a sturdy pier and a boathouse. I bashed the lock with my truncheon and manhandled a lighter off one hook and then the other, dropping it into the water. I put Colin in the prow of the boat. The moon, pale and spare and curved as a shard of oak from a planed plank, shone above, dodging clouds. By its light and the glimmerings from the gas lamps along the embankment, I saw Colin’s face. It was beaten and bloody, yes. But in the drift of dark curls over the brow and the softness that clung to his mouth and chin, I saw the boy. Who he was and all he might have been. And the only thing I could do now was deliver his body to his mother and hope I could find a way to live with what I’d done years ago and what I’d failed to do in recent days.
I climbed in and took up the oars, feeling like some terrible spirit of the underworld, ferrying this boy home.
The river traffic was light, with only a few tugboats and barges in sight, and they kept to the middle where the ebb tide would help them. The margin of the river was hushed, quiet enough that I heard the squeak of the oars turning in the locks. It crossed my mind that here was another dead body in a boat—not one of the innocent young women in the case last spring, but still a young person who deserved this death no more than any of them did.
For the next hour, I wasn’t a policeman. The tide was running against me, but it made no difference. I rowed as if twin devils powered my strokes, the oars feathering out of the water, dropping to just below the surface, shredding the moonlight on the water again and again. Gritting my teeth against the burning in my arms and back, I wished terrible things from the bitterest, vilest part of my heart. I wished that Finn Riley was shot, murdered in cold blood, by a pistol he’d once used himself. I wished that he was lying dead in an alley. Tortured first, if not by McCabe, someone else—anyone else—I didn’t care. I wished his head was held under water, with his body thrashing, his arms and legs pumping in a silent, desperate plea, until they stopped, and he was gone. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
The hour on the river worked the worst of the rage out of me, and when I reached Wapping, my chest heaved, and my hands tingled fiercely as I released the oars. The boat drifted the last few feet to the pier’s end. I reached for the post and held it, resting my damp forehead on my shirted forearm. The wind from the river chilled the sweat on the back of my neck. As I tied up the lighter, wrapping the line around the cleat, I drowned my fury and regret and grief, sank them deep to cope with later, and trod up the damp wooden planks. At the door, I put my hand on the metal handle, the cold a welcome relief to my hot palm. I heaved the door toward me, the effort familiar, restoring me to something like myself.
The clock on the wall said it was half past nine. Sergeant Trent took one look at me and said, “Sir, are you all right? There’s blood—”
“It’s not mine,” I said. “Colin Doyle’s body is in the boat. Fetch the stretcher and bring him inside, please.”
Dismay flooded his face. “Oh Jaysus, Corravan. I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
From his desk, Sergeant Trent took the key for the shed where the pole-and-canvas stretcher was stored. “Philips,” he said, and tipped his head sideways to tell him to come along.
Stiles was standing beside his desk, his eyes on me as I approached.
“I found Colin. Finn Riley’s men tortured him. Left him for dead in Houghton’s old warehouse.”
“Good God, Corravan.” His face was full of sympathy, and his hands twitched at his side, as if he longed to do something. “I’m so bloody sorry.” I began to turn away when he added, “Elsie Doyle is in your office.”
I pivoted back in surprise. “What?”
“She arrived hours ago,” he said. “She insisted on waiting for you.”
A hoarse groan slipped out from between my lips.
Stiles winced. “What can I do?”
“Find Finn Riley,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own, and I choked out the rest: “I tried to make McCabe promise not to kill him, but he might do it anyway.”
“Don’t give him another thought,” he said. “You look after Elsie and Mrs. Doyle. I’ll set up a house-to-house search, working in circles—”
“Start at the Half-Moon pub,” I said. “Near Shadwell Basin.”
“And I’ll send his picture to the train stations and docks. He won’t get far.” He paused. “Houghton won’t protect him; he’ll only be a detriment to the League now.”
The League.
I added, “Look into a man named Clarence Tomlinson. He owns the Observer, the Post, and the Standard. Perhaps others.”
“Tomlinson,” Stiles repeated.
I nodded. “And send a message to Belinda for me.” I gave him her address in Belgravia. “Tell her what’s happened, and that I’ll be with the Doyles.”
“Of course.”
At my office door, I took a breath so deep it hurt my lungs, then turned the handle.
Elsie looked up at me. Her hands were knotted in her skirts, her face full of hope. “Mickey?”
I couldn’t answer, and her face crumpled. I closed the door and held out my hand. Wordlessly Elsie took it, clinging so hard her nails bit into the flesh near my thumb, and let out one broken little moan. I knelt beside her as she let go of me, dropping her head into her hands as if she could no longer hold it up.
Some moments passed during which we said not a word, and she uttered not another sound. There came a soft knock at the door.
I pulled it open to find Stiles holding two cups of hot tea, the steam and the smell of bergamot rising from them. As always, it was kindness that undid me. I blinked to stop the burning sensation at the corners of my eyes and held out my two hands.
“Thank you, Stiles.”
His eyes flickered to Elsie, tearless and ashen and immobile in her chair. “I’ll fetch you a cab,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I nodded and pressed one hot cup into her cold hands. Mostly she clung to it, but she managed to gulp down a few sips. I leaned against the wall with mine.
At last, she broke the silence with a whisper: “We have to tell Ma.”
“She’ll want to see him, I imagine,” I said. “I can bring her. Better here than the morgue.”
She shook her head, her head down, her eyes on her cup. “I don’t know, Mickey.”
“Why?”
“When she went to see Pat, she took to her bed. Didn’t get out of it for days.”
I hadn’t known that.
She raised her eyes to me. “Was it Finn Riley?”
I nodded, and I saw by her expression that she understood what that meant.
“Then there’s no reason for Ma to see him dead, is there? If it’s a blood relation you’re needing, I can sign any papers.” Her chest rose and fell, and her brow was creased with worry. “It’ll hurt her worse than him dying, Mickey. Seeing his body, how he suffered.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “She doesn’t have to see him,” I said. “And I’ll come tonight and stay until …”
My voice faded. Until what? Until Ma stopped weeping? Until her heart didn’t ache anymore? In every Irish story Ma ever told, it seemed the monster was slain or the maiden won or the gold dug out of the ground on the third try. Perhaps our hearts aren’t meant to withstand more than three breakings, in life as well as in a story. I knew Elsie was right. After Francis’s and Pat’s deaths, Colin’s might break Ma, break her in a way that couldn’t be undone. I could have sat in my office forever that night, putting off the moment when we would have to tell her.
But eventually, we finished our tea, and the cups were cold. Elsie set hers on my desk and stood. Then, fumblingly, she came close and dropped her forehead onto my chest. Her entire body heaved with wordless, splintering pain, and as she sobbed, I held her close, like I had once—I don’t remember why—when she was a child.
When we both were.