Inspector of the Dead Read online

“Do the neighbors know what happened to mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did any of them bring you food?”

  “No,” little Ruth said.

  “But what about the friend mother made down the road? The one who said that mother’s knitting would find a market at Burbridge’s shop?”

  “She turns her back on us,” Ruth said. The gap in her front teeth had formerly brightened her features, but now it made her look like the saddest child Colin had ever seen.

  “Father.” He managed to stand. “We need to go to him.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said bravely. “We need to help Papa.”

  They gathered all the food that they could find: a few crusts of bread and a potato.

  Colin’s weakness prevented them from hurrying. Hour after hour, they plodded along the dusty road, slowly nearing the roar and the brown haze of London.

  The light was dwindling when they finally reached the spot near Newgate Prison where their father had said he’d be waiting at eight, noon, and six. But the bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral tolled that it was much later than six.

  “He’ll come in the morning,” Colin said.

  But their father didn’t arrive at eight or at noon the next day, either.

  Holding hands to keep from being separated in the chaos of the crowd, they set out in search of him.

  Colin recognized a costermonger he’d seen on prior days. The weary man pushed his cart along the street, and although his smock was dirty from the day’s efforts, his large silk neckerchief was spotless, a mark of pride among his kind.

  “Please, sir, do you know where—”

  “No beggin’ here,” the man complained, waving them from his cart. “I didn’t haul these vegetables all the way from Covent Garden market, just to give ’em away to the Irish.”

  Colin approached a crossing sweeper. Sweepers knew everything that happened in a neighborhood. This one—even with his ragged broom and his bare feet—had a cheery expression that went with the sunny color of his tousled hair. He didn’t seem much older than Colin, but despite their shared poverty, the sweeper’s manner made clear that even he had better prospects.

  “Do you remember seein’ me and my father around here the past week?” Colin asked.

  “I remember everythin’. Just a minute.”

  The sweeper ran ahead of a gentleman and a lady. Without being asked, he swept dirt and horse droppings from in front of the well-to-do couple as they made their way toward the Old Bailey courthouse.

  The man tossed a penny onto the grimy paving stones.

  “Thank you, sir!” the sweeper exclaimed, as if he’d been given a fortune.

  He returned to Colin. “What do you want?”

  “Do you remember what my father looks like?”

  “I told you I remember everythin’. I been on this corner for five years, and nothin’ gets past me.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Maybe. What’s it worth to you? Ah, never mind. You look worse off than me. Your father’s down that alley.”

  It was the alley with the water pump that Colin and his father had used.

  Colin, Emma, and Ruth rushed along it. Their father lay at the far end, unconscious and delirious. Soaked with sweat, he raged with fever. His boots had been stolen. So had his coat and his shirt.

  “Papa!” little Ruth exclaimed. “What are we going to do?”

  “Surely someone somewhere will help us,” Colin said. His voice breaking, he fought against his despair. “Surely in this great city, with so many millions of people, someone will pity us.”

  TEN

  Watford

  Away from London’s fog, the dark English countryside had a canopy of stars. In his private railway car, Colonel Trask watched shadowy meadows, streams, and thickets appear to speed past.

  A clock on the wall indicated eight minutes past seven. Every other clock in England’s railway network would display the equivalent time, because years ago when Jeremiah Trask had founded the British railway system, he’d established a universal railway time, the specifics of which were telegraphed each morning to every station in the country. In precisely one minute this train would reach the village of Watford, seventeen miles northwest of London’s Euston Station.

  As the locomotive reduced speed, Trask noted the irony that Catherine’s cousin would soon need to accept him as a relation, even though the cousin belonged to one of the aristocratic families that had objected to Jeremiah Trask and the coming of the railway.

  When the train hissed to a stop, lamps revealed a rustic building with a ticket office, a telegraph office, and a waiting room.

  Trask slipped his left arm into his overcoat and draped the opposite sleeve over his sling. After putting on his top hat and leather gloves, he opened the door to his car and stepped onto the wooden platform. No other passenger departed. This wasn’t a scheduled stop. He had made a sudden decision not to wait until tomorrow to visit Catherine at her cousin’s.

  A man in livery approached him. “Colonel Trask? Your telegram arrived. The carriage you requested is on the other side of the station.”

  “Do you know the way to the Clarendon estate?”

  “Yes, sir.” The driver picked up his bag. “Please follow me. I read about what you did in the war, Colonel. May I say that it’s an honor to meet you?”

  “Tell that to every soldier who returns from the Crimea. They’re all worthy of honor.”

  A breeze carried the scent of the moisture from yesterday’s snowfall and the nearby River Colne. As the train chugged out of the station, Trask listened to the crackling sound of horses’ hooves breaking pockets of ice in the road. Laughter from a pub was the only other noise. After the roar and clatter of London, the silence reminded Trask uneasily of the quiet that had preceded Russian attacks in the war.

  “Here are the gates, Colonel,” the driver said ten minutes later.

  Lamps glowed in the windows of a splendid manor. Dogs barked.

  After the driver set down his bag, Trask gave him a sovereign, a generous payment.

  “You’re a gentleman, Colonel.”

  Sir Walter Cumberland and many others disagree, Trask thought. As he mounted the steps, he looked forward to Catherine’s smile.

  He knocked on the door, hearing the carriage clatter away. Dogs continued barking.

  He knocked a second time.

  A manservant opened the door and looked puzzled.

  “I’m Colonel Anthony Trask, here to see my fiancée, Miss Catherine Grantwood.”

  “Catherine Grantwood, sir?”

  “She expected me tomorrow, but I decided to come this evening.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  Blast it, the driver brought me to the wrong manor, Trask thought.

  “Who is it, Henry?” a woman asked in the background.

  “A Colonel Trask, My Lady. He says he’s here to see Miss Grantwood.”

  A shadow approached, revealing a middle-aged woman with graying hair. She wore an elegant hooped dress.

  She studied Trask, judging the quality of his tailoring. She frowned at the overnight bag next to him. “Colonel…?”

  “Trask, My Lady.” He removed his top hat and bowed slightly.

  “Catherine isn’t here.”

  Trask’s mind swirled with confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  “We expected to see her late this afternoon, but she never arrived. It’s quite unlike her not to send a telegram if her plans changed. I hope nothing’s wrong.”

  “Never arrived?” Trask felt stunned.

  The woman stared past him toward the darkness, not seeing a carriage. “From where did you travel?”

  “London.”

  “I’m afraid you made your journey for nothing.”

  Catherine never arrived? Trask thought. My God, what happened? Did Sir Walter come back to the house? What did he do to stop her from leaving?

  In the distance, he heard the receding sound of the carriage.
With a chilling premonition, he dropped his bag and rushed from the door. In the light of the moon, he saw the carriage’s lantern wavering in the distance. Beyond the gates to the estate, the road curved to the left toward Watford.

  If I race across this field, Trask thought desperately, I might be able to reach the driver at the curve!

  “Stop!” he yelled.

  He charged across frozen slush that reminded him of the Crimea.

  “For God’s sake, stop!” he yelled to the far-off carriage, running with a frenzy that exceeded anything he had known in the war.

  “Stay here with Papa,” Colin told his sisters. “Maybe no one will notice you in this alley. If anyone bothers you, tell him I went to find a constable.”

  It was actually a doctor he went to, but the doctor frowned at his dirty face and tattered clothes, telling him, “I have too many patients already. The ones I have can pay.”

  Colin found no better response at several hospitals. “Your father sounds too far gone to be saved.”

  He ran back to the Inns of Court and tried to beg solicitors and barristers for help, but their clerks relentlessly scratched the steel nibs of their pens across sheets of paper and, without looking at him, told him to go away.

  The only suggestion came from an elderly gentleman who sat reading a newspaper while waiting to be admitted into an inner office. After listening to the boy implore a clerk about his mother and father and sisters, the man lowered his newspaper, saying, “If it’s that bad, claim to be debtors. Petition the prison to let your two sisters stay in the cell with your mother. At least they’ll have shelter and something to eat until your mother comes to trial. A shoplifter, eh? Not good.”

  Drenched with sweat at the end of the hot June day, dizzy from his lingering illness, Colin told a guard outside the prison, “My father’s sick.”

  The guard showed no interest.

  “My mother’s inside.” Colin pointed toward the gloomy, soot-covered entrance to the prison. “I don’t know when she’ll be sent to trial.”

  “For what?”

  By now, he knew enough not to say “shoplifting.” He quickly answered, “She borrowed money to buy food for my sisters and me, but now she can’t pay the money back. We don’t have any way to get food.”

  “Debtors, eh? And Irish to boot.”

  “A man at a barrister’s office told me my sisters could stay in prison with my mother until our debts are settled and she can go to trial.”

  “The law allows it. Sisters, did you say? How old are they?”

  “Five and thirteen.”

  “I’ll speak to my sergeant. I can’t promise anythin’, but if I was you, I’d have ’em here in an hour.”

  Finally, someone would help!

  Colin rushed back to the alley, where a man who stank of gin studied his father and particularly his sisters.

  Colin straightened his back and walked past the man, trying to muster the authority of someone ten years older and a foot taller.

  Emma’s blue eyes looked weary. “Papa doesn’t move. He only whispers mother’s name.”

  “I found a place for the two of you to stay.”

  “The two of us? But we can’t leave Papa,” Ruth said. Tears streaked the dirt on her cheeks.

  “If you’re in a safe place, I’ll have more time to try to help father and mother. Please. You need to come with me. We have less than an hour.”

  “Come where?” Emma asked.

  “To the prison. You’ll stay with mother. You’ll have food and shelter. She’ll be glad to see you and know you’re safe.”

  They reached the prison just before the cathedral’s bells rang and the hour would have elapsed.

  “So these are your sisters?” the guard asked, a sergeant standing next to him.

  “Yes, sir. Emma and Ruth.”

  “Well, we’re here to help you, Emma and Ruth,” the sergeant said. “Come inside. We’ll take you to your mother.”

  “Thank you,” Colin told him with relief.

  “You’re a small one to have so much responsibility,” the sergeant said. “We’ll make your burden lighter.”

  “Thank you,” Colin repeated.

  He stayed long enough to watch the guard and the sergeant escort his sisters into the prison. Emma held little Ruth’s hand. Nervous about the clamor into which they entered, his sisters looked back and waved to him uncertainly. He waved in return, trying to assure them that this was the best way.

  The moment they disappeared beyond the studded door, he ran to the alley where his father lay. After wiping his father’s sweat-beaded brow, he soaked a rag in water from a different pump and squeezed it over his father’s lips.

  “I’m doin’ everythin’ I can think of,” he promised, and raced away.

  “Thank heaven you heard me!”

  His overcoat flapping, Colonel Trask scrambled up a ditch onto the frozen road. The carriage’s lantern revealed the frosted vapor of his frantic breathing.

  “At first, I thought I was imagining a ghost,” the driver said. “A laborer died in that field last summer when a cart struck him. At night, people claim they can still hear him scream for it to stop.”

  Rushing into the carriage, Trask barely heard what the driver said. “Return to the station! Hurry!”

  “What happened back there, Colonel?”

  “There’s no time!”

  As the driver urged the two horses onward, their iron shoes slipped on the ice.

  “Any faster and the horses will fall,” the driver said.

  “The station! Just get me to the station!”

  Despite the cold, Trask found that he was sweating. He’d lost his top hat in his race to intercept the carriage. Beneath his overcoat and suit, his undergarment stuck to his skin. Never arrived, he kept thinking. Catherine. Sir Walter.

  The lamps of Watford gradually became brighter. Before the driver had a chance to stop at the station, Trask jumped down and rushed toward the ticket office.

  But no one was there. The telegraph operator wasn’t on duty, either.

  The office door was locked. Trask used his gloved fist to smash the window. He stretched his arm through and grabbed a schedule that lay on a desk.

  The driver approached, looking startled at the broken window. “What if a constable heard?”

  “I own the damned railway,” Trask muttered, searching through the schedule. “I can break every window if I choose.”

  In the glow of a lamp above the door, he ran a finger down a list.

  “Blast it, there isn’t a train into London tonight!”

  “Not until eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” the driver said. “That’s when I bring travelers to the station.”

  “We’re going to London.”

  “Excuse me, Colonel?”

  “Now.” Trask tugged him toward the carriage.

  “But London’s seventeen miles in the dark! It’ll take us at least three hours to get there. The horses won’t bear it.”

  “I’ll pay you fifty pounds.”

  That was a fortune. The driver probably took home only a pound a week after he fed and stabled his horses.

  “But Colonel, if my horses get lamed, even fifty pounds—”

  “A hundred pounds! I don’t care what it costs!” With greater desperation, Trask yanked the driver toward the carriage. “Take me to London!”

  “Caitlin O’Brien,” Becker said, staring at a yellowed document in the Scotland Yard storage room.

  “You found something, Joseph?” Emily asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What’s the matter?” Ryan asked.

  “Caitlin O’Brien,” Becker repeated, moving the document closer to his lantern. “She’s described as thirty years old. Fair hair. Pleasing features. The word ‘Irish’ is underlined. Married. On the first of June, she was arrested for stealing a shirt from a linen shop in St. John’s Wood.”

  “But we’re looking for something that happened on or after the tenth of Ju
ne, when the boy begged the queen to save his family,” Emily reminded him.

  “Yes,” Becker said. “The last date on this document is the eleventh of June. It didn’t take long.”

  “Didn’t take long for what?” De Quincey asked.

  Becker shook his head sadly and pointed at the faded document. “There’s nothing here about her son, but the record indicates that she had two daughters: Ruth, who was five, and Emma, who was thirteen. Somehow they were admitted to the prison under the guise that their mother was arrested for debt rather than stealing. In that case, the law permits a mother and her children to stay together until arrangements are made to pay the debt.”

  “Joseph, you sound as if something happened,” Emily said.

  In the attic’s gloom, they brought their lanterns and peered over his shoulder, reading.

  “Oh,” Emily said when she saw the item.

  “Save my mother and father and sisters,” Ryan murmured, recalling what the ragged boy had begged the queen. “But he wasn’t able to save them. The thirteen-year-old smothered her little sister. Then she did the same to her sick mother. Then she hanged herself.”

  The horses struggled to maintain a rapid pace on the frozen road. Perched in front, Trask held a lantern before him, augmenting the light from the one on the driver’s side, revealing furrows of ice.

  “But why the urgency?” the driver insisted. “What happened?”

  “She should have been here.”

  “She, Colonel?”

  “Why didn’t she arrive? Faster! Does the road get any better?”

  “When we reach the turnpike.”

  “Thank God. How far is the—?”

  Abruptly the horse on the right slipped. With a panicked squeal, it dropped to its knees. The carriage tilted. Amid the animal’s anguished wails an axle snapped.

  The vehicle flipped, throwing Trask into the air. To avoid landing on his lantern, he hurled it away, hearing it crash above the ditch. He landed so hard that the breath was knocked out of him.

  Coal oil gushed from the shattered lantern, the wick igniting it. In the sudden blaze, Trask gaped upward from the ditch as the carriage kept tilting and plunged toward him.