Chapter Fifteen

Neither of us spoke. The sight of Susan being flung into the police vehicle was imprinted on my mind like a series of photographs. Amongst them was an image of her face twisted in fury, her sharp little teeth had cut her lip and blood mixed with spittle had gathered at the corners of her mouth. I saw her disordered hair, her fingers scratching at the policemen’s eyes. Gone were her demurely folded white-gloved hands, the smooth hair tucked in at the nape of her neck. And the way she had swung her callipered foot! I would not be surprised to learn that she had indeed broken the fellow’s arm, as I was sure I had heard the crack of it from across the street.

Will spoke first. ‘I suppose it was not unexpected.’ He shook his head. ‘And yet the manner of it. Three burly constables against one terrified girl.’

‘That’s not how they’ll see it. I’m afraid it won’t be in her favour that she resisted so fiercely.’

‘And so many things already point to her—’

‘Almost everything, in fact.’

‘Who else might it be? She has a history of violence, she has every reason to want revenge – have you forgotten what Dr Mothersole told us?’

‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I remember it very well. I’m only surprised that Dr Christie didn’t tell us himself, but sent Dr Mothersole as his emissary.’

‘Who is there, other than Susan, who might choose so distinctive a form of mutilation? She’s from the Rents – you’ve seen her there yourself and she’s quite at home in the place.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Pole also knew about being “stitched up”.’

‘You think there’s room for doubt? You think Susan is innocent?’

‘I think there’s every possibility,’ I said.

We were walking down St Saviour’s Street now, past the site of the old Infirmary. It had taken hardly any time at all to knock the place down. Some of it had been taken away to be used in other buildings, the rest had been pounded to rubble and packed into the earth to provide a base for the foundations of the bridge that replaced it. When I had lived there with my father, in our rooms above the apothecary, it had felt permanent, strong and impregnable. All day people had come in and out – doctors, patients, nurses, medical students – all of them talking, arguing, laughing, complaining, so much noise and bustle, so much life and purpose. In its place now there was nothing but the silent colossal legs of a railway viaduct. The infirmary building had always looked so large and imposing, with its tall, high-roofed façade, its courtyards and ward buildings, its sturdy medieval chapel. Now, I could see that it had been small and cramped, a vestige of the city’s ancient past – adapted, certainly, and modernised in a piecemeal kind of way to accommodate the needs of later centuries. But it was a building that had looked to history for its worth and belonging. St Saviour’s, like the past, had become unfashionable. Obsolete and irrelevant, it had been stamped into the ground, obliterated to make way for the future. Yet was it really so easy to blot out what once had been? The city’s history was embedded in its very fabric, in the plague pits that pocked its soil, the streams and rivers that flowed beneath its streets, in the lives of its citizens, some of whom still remembered when there were orchards and fields where engine sheds, slaughter houses and gin shops now stood. Time moved forward and change was inevitable, but the past had long fingers and would not let go of us so easily.

‘I think we need to discover who Dr Rutherford really was,’ I said. ‘Where did he come from? Why was he here at Angel Meadow?’ We were standing beneath the railway bridge. Its span was incomplete, and its ragged half-finished end jutted out precariously, a mass of scaffolding, wooden spars, ropes and tarpaulin leading only to the abyss. ‘Dr Golspie thought progress was turning some of us mad. D’you remember?’

‘Yes,’ said Will. We looked up at the looming half-structure overhead. ‘Perhaps he was right.’

Crouched at the foot of the half-finished bridge, in the shadow of its massive arch, was St Saviour’s Parish Church. Its ancient spire, whose weather vane had once pricked the heavens, was dwarfed by the new structure that reared beside it.

‘I once saw a man in a balloon get caught on that weather vane,’ I said. ‘His name was the Great Goddard. His balloon snagged and he fell to his death. If he got caught on it now he could just step out of his basket and onto the bridge. Dr Stiven was with me. He said it was a lesson I should never forget – that death could come in the most macabre and unexpected of ways.’

Will was staring over the lych-gate at what remained of St Saviour’s churchyard – that part of it that had not been eradicated by one of the railway bridge’s giant feet. He had supervised the removal of the bodies before the bridge was built, but there was a small section of humped greensward that remained. ‘Shall we go in?’ he said.

I hesitated. My parents’ graves were against the southern wall of the old church but I had not visited them for a while. They had each other, now, which was what they had always wanted, and that last time I had visited I had felt unwelcome – a stranger almost.

‘Come on,’ said Will. He took my hand and pushed open the gate.

My parents’ graves looked out over the mounded plots of their fellow incumbents, towards the ivy-covered wall and the tumbledown hovel where Old Dick the sexton lived. Theirs was a well-tended spot, neatly laid out, weeded and hoed, with the roses that grew on it in late summer bright and blowsy against the grim sooty walls of the old church.

‘I keeps it lookin’ nice,’ said a rough voice at my elbow. ‘I do it for her, o’ course.’

‘Hello Dick,’ I said.

‘Old Dick,’ he said. ‘There’s many a Dick, but none’s as old as me.’

Will grinned. ‘How’s your dog?’

‘I ain’t got no dog, young feller,’ said Old Dick. ‘Dog died years ago. Only got meself now.’ He looked at Will closely, and a scowl wrinkled his walnut brow. ‘I know you. You built that thing.’ He jabbed a stubby tortoiseshell fingernail in the direction of the railway bridge. ‘Whatever it is. Can’t see why we need it. Can’t see where it’s goin’. Nowhere, by the looks o’ things!’

I rummaged in my satchel. ‘Would you like some balm, Dick? For your fingers? I’ve got some comfrey here – comfrey and arnica. It’s my mother’s recipe.’

‘Yesm.’ Old Dick put out a hand. It was wrapped in black, greasy bandages, the fingers beneath twisted and gnarled as tree roots. I passed him the pot. He sniffed it and grunted, then thrust it into the pocket of his coat. ‘I got summat fer you, an’ all,’ he said. ‘It’s in me cottage.’

Will and I exchanged a glance. There was not a more repulsive dwelling in all London, and I could not begin to imagine what on earth he might have for me hidden inside it. But he was already walking away, stumping through the graves with his ancient tricorn hat pulled down low over his eyes, and we had no choice but to follow.

Old Dick’s hovel was smaller and meaner than I remembered. The table had vanished altogether – perhaps he had used it for firewood at last, for it had been fit for little else. A kettle so furred with soot that for a moment in the gloom I mistook it for a crouching cat, sat in the hearth. The fire smouldered meanly, a thin stream of black smoke issuing from a mound of sticky-looking coals. There was nowhere to sit, and so we stood. Will and I were equal in height, and our heads brushed against the grimy beams of the ceiling. Will carried his beloved stovepipe hat under his arm, mine dangled from my fingertips. Old Dick vanished into the shadows that gathered thickly in a corner of the room. I could make out an old box, and a mound of filthy rags – I assumed this wretched nest was the old sexton’s bed. He re-emerged a few moments later with something in his hand. He spat on it, and rubbed it on his coat, and as he stepped forward I could see that the thing he held was pale and roundish, and the size of a small grapefruit – I felt my stomach lurch.

‘Thought I should give it you ‘cause o’ what ‘appened that time,’ said Old Dick. ‘That time afore we buried yer father.’

‘The resurrectionists?’

‘That’s it. Well, they done brought this ‘n last night. Not much of a one, but that’s all there were,’ and he handed me a small pale skull. ‘Baby,’ he said.

‘Someone buried this?’ I said. ‘One little skull, all on its own?’

‘Queer, ain’t it?’ whispered Old Dick, peering at the skull with his one sharp eye. ‘But that’s what I seed. It were two o’clock. I ‘eard the chimes. I seed the lantern.’

‘How many were there?’ said Will. ‘Was it a man?’

‘Yis,’ said Dick. Then, ‘Naw!’

‘Yes and no?’ said Will. He sighed. ‘Which is it, sir?’

‘Dunno.’ Old Dick shuffled over to the fire. He jammed the kettle onto the soot-caked trivet and hunkered down, his rag-wrapped hands outstretched to the dismal coals. He seemed to have forgotten we were there.

Outside the fog was now so thick that we could hardly see our way to the gate. The crooked gravestones, so forlorn and neglected in the light, assumed almost human form, hunched like silent beggars, lost in the gloom. The arch of the railway bridge was nothing but a dim shadow overhead. Will’s eyes looked huge and dark beneath his tall black hat, his whole appearance ghostly, as if he were receding into another time and place. It was clear that he had the same impression of me, for he took my arm and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Jem. This fog sets my nerves on edge.’ The skull in my pocket felt cold beneath my fingers.

At the apothecary, Gabriel was asleep before the fire. I shoved him awake with my foot and put on a pot of tea to brew. ‘Well, Jem,’ said Will as he set down the skull before us on the stove top. ‘What do you make if it?’

‘Where did you find that?’ said Gabriel. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Stinks.’

‘It’s from St Saviour’s churchyard,’ said Will. ‘Of course it stinks. The ground is little more than a mush of decomposed flesh. I had hoped never to touch the contents of the place ever again.’

‘Who’d bury a head on its own?’ said Gabriel. ‘Who does it belong to?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Will.

‘Yes, we do.’ I said. On the underside of the skull, at the base of the occipital bone a number had been scratched and inked: 260442. ‘It belongs to Dr Rutherford.’