Inspector of the Dead Read online

  The owner’s name was Thaddeus Mitchell, and as he locked the door, he showed no surprise that one customer remained, hunching over his drink at the end of the bar.

  Thaddeus shuttered the windows. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said.

  “Quentin Quassia, Doctor of Drink, at your service,” the man replied. Turning with a smile, he offered his sizeable hand. He had a round, florid face and a mischievous look in his eyes.

  “Where’s Edward?” Thaddeus asked.

  “In bed with a stomach ailment, but not because of anything he drank.” Quentin chuckled as if he’d made a grand joke. “Never fear—my brother and I are equally expert doctors of drink.” This, too, he found humorous enough to merit a chuckle.

  “But how do I know you can really do the job?” Thaddeus asked.

  “If you’re not satisfied, it won’t cost you a penny. I can make that promise because I know you’ll like the result.”

  “Show me.”

  Thaddeus went behind the bar and raised a trapdoor that revealed stairs down to the cellar. After lighting a lantern, he motioned for the stranger to follow him down.

  The cellar had a damp odor that came from the nearby river. The place felt cold. Several rows of large barrels stretched before him.

  The stranger carried a large sack. “I’ll start with the beer,” he said.

  “That’s what your brother always does. What’s your name again?”

  “Quentin Quassia.”

  “Your brother never gave his last name. Quassia. Unusual.”

  “It’s a plant from South America. Tea from it helps the digestion.”

  Quentin unpacked various bottles and packages, putting them on a shelf.

  Sitting on a stool, Thaddeus watched. He was thirty-two. He had owned the Wheel of Fortune for eight years and intended to sell it. With his profit from the sale and the £10,000 he’d saved over the years, he planned to retire on a country property. The return on his investment put to shame many of the financial schemes that he’d overheard clerks and their supervisors discussing over their pork pies and drinks.

  Anyone could get a beer license. The problem was how to obtain a gin license. In the early weeks of his business, Thaddeus had been happy to lose money, serving the best brew available, selling it for less than he paid, winning the goodwill of the neighborhood. After a time, he let his enthusiastic customers know that he was thinking about acquiring a gin license. When he asked them to support his petition to the necessary magistrates, they gladly did so, and after acquiring the gin license, Thaddeus then consulted with a drink doctor, who gradually diluted the beer and the gin, adding ingredients to make the beverages taste the same as before. In this fashion, three casks of beer or gin could be multiplied into seven. Although Thaddeus kept the price of the drinks as low as he had earlier, his profit would have made the eyes of the financial experts widen.

  Of course, Thaddeus could have diluted and adulterated the beverages on his own, but his father—a tavern owner also—had warned him to rely only on an expert, lest his customers sense the difference.

  “Your brother never told me what he puts in the beer and the gin,” Thaddeus told Quentin.

  “Of course not. If you knew our secrets, we’d be out of business.”

  Quentin opened four empty barrels and distributed the beer from three full barrels so that each of the seven contained the same amount. He then measured and added various ingredients to each barrel.

  One of the substances was in fact the powdered wood from quassia, the plant that provided Quentin’s last name. Quassia stimulated appetite, which was why Thaddeus’s customers devoured his pork pies and demanded more beer.

  Next came licorice, just enough to add a distinctive taste that allowed Thaddeus to brag to his customers that his brewer was a genius.

  Then Quentin added powdered Indian berry, which had an extreme intoxicating effect that compensated for the reduced alcohol in the mixture.

  “Where are your casks of water?”

  “There.” Thaddeus pointed.

  The two of them added the water to the seven barrels and tasted the result.

  “You’re right. This beer’s as good as your brother makes,” Thaddeus said.

  “Better than what my brother makes.”

  “Perhaps, but I’m not paying you any more than I pay him.”

  Quentin laughed and proceeded to the gin. Again he distributed the contents of three barrels so that they were equally divided into seven.

  “What do you call this when you serve it to customers?” Quentin asked.

  “Cream of the Valley.”

  “Ha.”

  The only ingredient that Thaddeus was allowed to know about were the cakes of sugar that he’d been told to obtain.

  Quentin added the necessary amount of sugar to each barrel, experience having shown that after customers acquired a fondness for sweetened gin, they wouldn’t accept the gin supplied by honest distillers.

  “Now a little flavor.” Quentin added the powder of juniper berry.

  “And a little bite.” He poured in a measured amount of a substance known as vitriol, which chemists called sulphuric acid. Some customers learned to crave it.

  “And water.” Quentin filled the barrels and stirred. “You now have another delivery of Cream of the Valley.”

  Thaddeus tasted it. “Yes, better than your brother makes. Can you come back next time instead of him?”

  “Edward wouldn’t like me stealing his customers,” Quentin said with another chuckle.

  “You’re the happiest man I met today.”

  “No point in being glum. But I’ll be happier when you pay me.”

  Thaddeus counted out three sovereigns. After the two men climbed the stairs, Quentin shouldered his bag of ingredients and walked across the sand-covered floor toward the exit.

  “Tell your brother I hope he feels better,” Thaddeus said.

  “Thank you. He’ll be grateful for your concern.”

  As the man who called himself Quentin stepped outside into the cold, he thought, Feel better? Hell, Edward Quassia won’t feel anything again. He’s frozen stiff under a snowdrift with his head bashed in.

  The member of Young England had taken care only to seem to taste the beer and gin that he’d diluted and adulterated. Although the tavern’s owner hadn’t consumed enough to be affected, tomorrow the thirst-creating beverages would show unforgettable results. Young England and the bearded man who led them would be pleased.

  “In the morning, I heard distant pounding on my front door,” Commissioner Mayne told the shocked group in his Scotland Yard office.

  Ryan and Becker listened intently. De Quincey and Emily sat on wooden chairs next to them, having spent the night at Lord Palmerston’s house. His Lordship had reluctantly invited them to resume living there after it appeared—to his horror—that the queen might ask them to stay at the palace.

  “My fear,” Mayne continued, “was that the intruder might have regained access to my house, waiting for my family and me to emerge from the bedroom. With great unease, we finally took the risk. After we slid the bureau away and opened the door, I aimed the Enfield toward the corridor. The pounding downstairs increased, along with a man’s voice shouting my name. The door to the closet in the corridor remained open. We hurried past it, and past my daughter’s shattered door. I aimed the musket this way and that as we descended.

  “When I called to the man beyond the front door, he identified himself as the constable who’d driven me home the previous night. I quickly unlocked the door, but even if two other constables had accompanied him, I wouldn’t have felt safe. The window of the sitting room was shattered. The house was extremely cold, but no colder than I felt inside. After the constable used his clacker to summon other patrolmen, they searched the entire house. They found marks where the intruder had indeed pried open the skylight.”

  “And your servant?” Ryan asked.

  The commissioner shook his head. �
�While she slept, the intruder had…”

  The group became silent.

  “There was a note, of course,” De Quincey finally said.

  Mayne nodded. “The intruder dropped it into the sitting room after he shattered the window.”

  “And I assume that the note’s message was ‘Young England’?” De Quincey asked, fingering his laudanum bottle.

  “Yes.”

  “Today there’ll be another murder in a public place comparable to the church and the skating area—somewhere that a crowd would normally feel safe,” De Quincey predicted.

  “I recalled every constable who isn’t already on duty,” Commissioner Mayne said. “But given the increased protection at the palace and the various crime areas that need to be investigated, there aren’t enough patrolmen to watch everywhere.”

  “The storm may have helped us,” Becker suggested. “Given the condition of the streets, there’s less traffic. Not to mention, even before the newspapers appeared this morning, word of the killings spread rapidly. Some people are staying home out of fear.”

  “But because houses have been attacked in addition to public places, people won’t feel safe behind their locked doors, either,” Ryan said.

  De Quincey looked up from his laudanum bottle. “Commissioner, please repeat what the intruder said about you, your wife, and your daughter.”

  “As he tried to smash down the bedroom door, he shouted, ‘Your daughter will suffer the way my sisters did!’ Then he yelled, ‘Your wife and you will suffer the way my mother and father did!’”

  “Does that mean anything to you, sir?” Ryan asked.

  “Not in the slightest,” Mayne replied. “It’s impossible for me to imagine harming anyone’s family.”

  “The killings include a prison administrator and a judge,” De Quincey pointed out. “And now you, a police commissioner, nearly became a victim, along with your family. Clearly someone has a tiger’s rage to avenge an injustice of the criminal system—or what the killer perceives to be an injustice.”

  “But that would include almost everyone who ever went to prison. They all claim they’re innocent,” Mayne said. “I’ve been a commissioner for twenty-six years. If we searched my records, how would we ever single out one family in all that time? Then we’d need to look at Lord Cosgrove’s records and those of the judge, trying to find a common link. That could take months.”

  Ryan echoed what Commissioner Mayne had told them. “Your daughter will suffer the way my sisters did.” He thought a moment. “Your wife and you will suffer the way my mother and father did.”

  “That’s what the intruder yelled,” the commissioner agreed.

  “Please help my mother and father and sisters,” Ryan added.

  “No, the intruder didn’t say that.”

  “But I heard it.” Ryan had a long-ago look.

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “In eighteen forty, when I arrested Edward Oxford after he shot at the queen, when it seemed at first that he was part of a revolutionary group, there was a theory that someone had staged a diversion to distract the queen’s guards,” Ryan explained.

  “A diversion?”

  “A boy,” Ryan said. “A beggar.”

  The ragged urchin raced next to the queen’s carriage.

  “Queen! Please listen, Queen! My mother and father need help! My sisters need help!” His accent was Irish.

  A mounted guard commanded, “Get out of Her Majesty’s way, you vermin, before I run you down.”

  Breathing hard, the boy strained to keep up with the carriage.

  “Please, Queen, help my parents! Help my sisters!”

  “You Irish scum, move on!”

  The horseman kicked the boy into the gutter.

  Ignoring the blood on his face, the boy struggled to his feet and raced after the carriage, yelling, “Please, help my mother and father and sisters!”

  “That’s when Edward Oxford fired at the queen,” Ryan said. “I told you how the surprise of the shot made the queen’s driver halt and how that gave Oxford a second chance to fire. Before I could get to him, the crowd pounced. They’d have killed him if I hadn’t got there and if other constables hadn’t arrived.

  “The crowd also attacked the boy,” Ryan added. “I remember a man punched the boy and yelled, ‘This Irish scum’s part of it. Ran in front of the horse guards! Tried to distract them! Yelled at the queen! Tried to make the carriage stop!’

  “The man held the boy by the back of his collar the way he would a struggling animal. ‘He’s part of it, I tell ya!’

  “‘Help my mother and father and sisters!’ the boy kept shouting.

  “I had no idea if he was involved or not, but it was better to take him to the station house than leave him with the mob. ‘Right, we’ll arrest him, too,’ I said.

  “But when I reached for the boy, the man loosened his grip. The boy fell to the path and scrambled away through the legs of the crowd. The man who’d punched him gave chase, but the boy reached the railing of Green Park, grabbed two of the spikes on top, pulled himself up, and leapt over before the man could stop him. I remember seeing a spike gouge one of the boy’s legs. The boy cried out and fell to the grass on the other side. But before the man could climb over, the boy lurched to his feet and managed to escape among the trees. He was limping, favoring his bleeding leg.”

  “Do you believe that the boy was part of a conspiracy against the queen?” Emily asked.

  “None was ever established,” Ryan answered. “When I went to Edward Oxford’s lodgings and found the documents about Young England, naturally I wondered if the boy was part of a plot. I investigated as best I could, but then my sergeant told me that Young England had been proven to be only a delusion of Edward Oxford’s deranged mind. I decided that the boy was no more than what he seemed—a child desperately trying to help his family. My curiosity remained, though, making me wonder why the boy’s family needed help. Perhaps because he was Irish like me, I never stopped looking for him as I patrolled.”

  “Did you ever see him again?” Becker asked.

  “Not once. Strange how memory works. I haven’t thought about him in years. And now…” Ryan turned toward De Quincey. “I’m sure I know what you’re going to say.”

  De Quincey nodded. “There’s no such thing as forgetting. The inscriptions on our memories remain forever, just as the stars seem to withdraw during daylight but emerge when the darkness returns.”

  “Ryan, do you truly suspect that the boy grew up to be the man who attacked my family and me?” Commissioner Mayne asked.

  “Your daughter will suffer the way my sisters did. Your wife and you will suffer the way my mother and father did,” Ryan quoted again, then switched to what he’d heard the boy shout years earlier. “My mother and father need help. My sisters need help. Please help my mother and father and sisters.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the boy fifteen years ago and the man last night are both related to a threat against the queen.”

  “You mentioned that the boy had an Irish accent,” Commissioner Mayne said. “So did the man who attacked my family and me.”

  The morning’s streets were a mess. Sir Walter Cumberland cursed as he left his club and saw the grimy slop that he was forced to walk through to reach the cab that he’d instructed the porter to summon.

  His head pounding from the considerable brandy he’d drunk the previous night to celebrate his engagement, he climbed into the cab and told the driver, “Half Moon Street in Mayfair. Traffic looks slight this morning. You shouldn’t take long getting there.”

  “Slight indeed,” the cabdriver said. “People are keepin’ off the streets because of the murders. Newsboys are shoutin’ about ’em every­where. You’re only the second fare I had this mornin’.”

  “Just drive.”

  Half Moon Street was where Catherine Grantwood’s parents lived, and after Sir Walter’s victory yesterday, he was on his way to reinforce what he’d achie
ved. But to his dismay, he saw another cab at the curb in front of his destination. He had no doubt who had hired it.

  It’s a good thing I decided to come back this soon, he thought. Furious, he jumped from the cab.

  As he prepared to knock on the door, it opened and Trask came into view. Sir Walter refused to think of him by his military title, let alone as “Sir.”

  At least, he isn’t wearing his damned uniform, Sir Walter thought. The way he tries to impress people with it is shameless.

  But what Trask did wear annoyed Sir Walter almost as much. The brushed fur on his top hat and the quality of his tailored overcoat were better than Sir Walter’s, even though Sir Walter’s was very fine indeed.

  “I should have known that you weren’t gentleman enough to accept the decision as final,” Sir Walter told him, gesturing with his walking stick.

  “It was Lord Grantwood’s decision, not Catherine’s,” Trask replied.

  “So you thought you’d appeal to him one more time? Do you think I don’t know about the collapse of the bank in which Catherine’s father had large deposits? Do you think I don’t know that he lost almost everything?”

  Trask closed the door, adjusted the sling on his arm, and glanced at people walking along the street. “If you don’t lower your voice, the entire neighborhood will know about it,” he said.

  “You took advantage of Lord Grantwood’s financial crisis and persuaded him to sell you a railway easement through his country estate.”

  “I paid more than the easement was worth.”

  “Of course you did—because you wanted to buy more than the easement. Soon you found a strategy to meet Catherine while you supervised the railway construction.”

  “Her horse bolted. I rescued her.”

  “No doubt her horse bolted from the noise of the construction. Perhaps you timed an explosion so that it frightened the animal.”

  “Be careful, Sir Walter.”

  “Then you took advantage of your visits, supposedly on business, to strengthen your friendship with her.”

  “I did nothing that Catherine didn’t welcome.”