Inspector of the Dead Read online

  The man looked surprised that a strangely dressed but respectable-seeming woman was in the river area at such an hour. His surprise increased when Becker identified himself. “Detective Sergeant Becker. Is there a place where the colonel can rest?”

  “He has a room behind his office.”

  The man guided them past a murky reception area and up a staircase. The lamp revealed pockmarks on his face.

  “Are you a night watchman?” Becker asked.

  “A porter. The colonel lets me keep a room here. I helped him build railways. He’s always been fair to me. If he’d asked me to go with him tonight, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He was taking the train to Watford.”

  So the horse did come from there, Becker thought.

  “Why was he going to Watford?” he asked, feeling the colonel’s weight as they carried him up the stairs.

  “The colonel’s fiancée has a cousin there.”

  The colonel’s dead fiancée, Becker thought.

  “Did Sir Walter Cumberland do this to him?” the porter asked.

  Becker reacted to the name. “What makes you say that?”

  “Sir Walter came here around noon and accused the colonel of buying Miss Grantwood from her parents. The colonel struck him several times and knocked him into the gutter.”

  They reached the top of the stairs, where a corridor of shadows faced them on each side. The echo of their boots resounded in a vast darkness.

  “This is the colonel’s office.”

  The porter searched among keys on a ring and unlocked it. Inside he lit a gas lamp on the wall, then opened a farther door and led Becker and the constable into a private room that was simply furnished with a wardrobe, a table, two wooden chairs, and a narrow bed tucked into a corner.

  Becker felt uncomfortable about invading the colonel’s privacy.

  “It’s a pleasant room—one that I’d be happy with.” He helped the constable place the colonel on the bed. “But it’s not what I expected of a wealthy man. I imagined him living in a fine hotel or the luxury of a Mayfair mansion.”

  “His father has a house in Mayfair, where the colonel often stays,” the porter explained. “Mr. Trask senior is confined to his bed. Nearly worked himself to death. But the colonel makes certain that his father is cared for.”

  Through the open doors, Becker heard someone pounding on the entrance downstairs. “We’re expecting a physician named Dr. Snow.”

  “Will he stop the colonel from being this way—not moving, not even blinking? If I didn’t see his chest rising, I’d swear he was dead.”

  Sir Walter charged past a gentleman who came around a corner, the force of his passage knocking him against a wall.

  “Watch where you’re going!” the man exclaimed.

  But Sir Walter paid no attention. Hurrying along a corridor, he reached the club’s back door, thrust it open, and raced into an alley that tradesmen used for deliveries.

  Still clutching his walking stick, he veered to the right. Without an overcoat, he immediately felt the night’s cold. In spite of the fog he saw his urgent breath bursting from him in frosty gusts.

  Shouts pursued him.

  “Sir Walter, stop! I told you I’m a Scotland Yard inspector! I need to speak to you!”

  The alley ended at the Haymarket. Sir Walter darted to the left, hoping to rush into one of the many theaters along the street and mingle with the audience when it departed. But the quantity of brandy he’d consumed caused him to misjudge how late the hour was. All the theaters were dark.

  He reached an oyster house, but it was dark also. Ladies of the night beckoned him toward the glaring gaslights of a tavern, but when they saw the desperation on his face, they quickly retreated.

  Behind him, the bootsteps pounded closer.

  As he sped to the right onto a side street, the effect of the brandy made it difficult to keep his balance on the frozen slush. For a moment he considered stopping, but he feared that the brandy would also make it difficult for him to explain why the man at the club had accused him of trying to murder him.

  What other things might I not be able to explain? he thought.

  He rushed onto another street, the night’s chill seeping into him.

  “Sir Walter, I order you to stop!” the pursuing voice shouted.

  At the shuttered food shops on Coventry Street, a constable’s lantern startled him. He charged toward the opposite side, and now there were two shouting voices. The raucous noise of a police clacker filled the night. A second clacker answered.

  He scurried into an alley and paused in the darkness, trying to catch his breath. Plodding forward, ready with his walking stick in case someone accosted him, he stumbled over something. When it groaned, he realized that it was a beggar on the verge of freezing to death. In horror, he again hurried forward.

  More police clackers and shouting voices joined the pursuit.

  I’ll die like that beggar if I don’t find a place that’s warm, he thought.

  At the next street, he was completely confused about his location. The number of police lanterns behind him increased, illuminating the fog.

  “This way!” a voice yelled. “I hear him over here!”

  A noise guided him: the stomping of hooves. He reached a wall on which a sign advertised ALDRIDGE’S HORSE AND CARRIAGE REPOSITORY. The commotion had wakened the animals.

  Can I climb the wall? he thought. Can I hide among the hay bales?

  He shoved his walking stick under his waistcoat and jumped upward, but his numb fingers lost their grip on the top. He fell hard onto the cobblestones, stood with effort, withdrew his walking stick, and lurched onward. The street narrowed. The lamps became farther apart.

  Then nothing made sense. In every direction, there was only a jumble of decrepit lanes. Walls leaned, touching and supporting one another. Broken windows gaped. Doors hung askew. Boards dangled.

  Amid a pile of debris, something made a scraping sound.

  “Who’s ’ere?” a feeble voice asked. “A bobby?”

  “Naw. Don’t have a uniform. This un’s dressed like a gentleman.”

  “Don’t have an overcoat, neither,” a third voice said. “Maybe some’un took it afore we could. Kind sir, it’s terrible cold. Can you spare us some pennies?”

  “And your frock coat and your waistcoat?” a fourth voice asked.

  The scraping sounds came closer, shadows surrounding him.

  My God, Sir Walter thought in a panic, I’m in the Seven Dials rookery.

  “Thank you for coming,” Becker said as Dr. John Snow entered the dimly lit room behind Colonel Trask’s office.

  “Well, I can’t complain about being wakened to treat a war hero.”

  The man who had identified a Soho water pump as the source of a cholera epidemic the previous year, Dr. Snow was in his early forties, with a slender face, a high, balding forehead, and dark sideburns that emphasized his narrow jaw. He carried a leather satchel.

  He paused in surprise when he noticed Colonel Trask sitting motionless on the bed, staring in anguish toward a wall.

  “We don’t know how badly injured he is,” Emily said.

  “Bring hot water and clean rags,” Dr. Snow told the porter. “Hurry.”

  “I’ll help,” Emily said, rushing away.

  “We need to undress him,” Dr. Snow told Becker, who knew how unusual it was for a physician to be willing to do this. Physicians rarely laid hands on their patients, leaving that crude job to surgeons, the lower members of the medical establishment.

  They raised the colonel and removed his tattered overcoat.

  “Look at the burn marks on it,” Dr. Snow commented. “Easy with the sling. Good. Now help me with the rest of his clothes.”

  Although Trask’s eyes were open, he showed no indication of being aware that the two men moved his legs and arms to undress him.

  Already uneasy about having entered the colonel’s private ro
om, Becker felt more self-conscious as he helped Dr. Snow tug off the colonel’s shirt and trousers. Beneath was a woolen undergarment that reached from his neck to his ankles, covering his arms to his wrists.

  “I don’t see any blood on his undergarment. No need to remove it,” Snow decided.

  Emily and the porter returned, the porter carrying a basin of steaming water while Emily held a stack of rags.

  “Emily, you shouldn’t be here,” Becker said. “The colonel isn’t in a decent state.”

  “Nonsense. I see nothing that I didn’t see when I ministered to Sean as he recovered from his wounds. When I changed the dressing on Sean’s abdomen, I saw more than his drawers, I assure you. If I’m to pursue a career as a nurse, I expect to see even more without being shocked.”

  It was Becker who exhibited shock.

  “A career as a nurse?” he asked.

  “Yes. Florence Nightingale’s service in the Crimea shows that women are fit for more than being shopgirls or governesses. If not for her, many of our wounded soldiers would have died from lack of care.”

  “You never said anything about wanting to be a nurse,” Becker continued in surprise.

  “One sad day, I shall no longer need to attend to Father. I must consider what to do then.”

  Emily placed the stack of rags on the foot of the bed. She washed her hands in the basin of steaming water that the porter set on a table. Then she dipped a rag into the water and began cleaning the dried blood from the colonel’s face.

  For the sake of modesty, Becker put a blanket over him.

  Dr. Snow opened his satchel and removed a metal canister, from which a tube and a mask extended. He took out a bottle and poured a clear liquid into the canister. A faint sweet odor drifted from it.

  “What’s that?” the porter asked.

  “A chloroform inhaler.”

  “Is it safe?” the porter asked with suspicion.

  “The queen herself asked me to make chloroform available when she gave birth to her most recent child.”

  The porter continued to look suspicious.

  “Depending on the colonel’s injuries, sleep might be the best treatment that I can give him,” Dr. Snow said.

  Emily finished cleaning the colonel’s face. She swept grit from his hair and studied him. “The only wound I can find is the gash on the side of his forehead.”

  “It doesn’t appear to need stitches,” Dr. Snow decided.

  He reached into his satchel and removed a bottle that was labeled WHITE VITRIOL. He used a dropper to apply some of the mild sulphuric acid to the gash. Then he took out a recently developed device known as a stethoscope. After attaching tubes to both of his ears, he pressed the device’s cup to Colonel Trask’s chest.

  He pulled out his pocket watch, opened it, and listened, moving his fingers as if counting.

  When Dr. Snow finally looked up, even in the room’s dim light, it was clear that his face was pale.

  “What’s wrong?” Emily asked.

  “His heart is racing two hundred beats per minute—almost three times what is normal.”

  “Three times?”

  “Motionless, he has no way to vent the energy inside him. I’m astonished that his heart hasn’t failed. I need to administer the chloroform. Quickly. If the colonel doesn’t manage to sleep, if his heartbeat doesn’t decline, I fear he will die.”

  “He went in there!” a constable shouted.

  Ryan hurried along the narrowing street and stopped where it converged with six other streets in a pattern that its long-ago designer had meant to look like a sundial.

  But there was nothing sunny about this wasteland. Originally a respectable area, Seven Dials had descended into squalor as the construction of railways into London destroyed numerous buildings in which the lower class lived. Ambitious developments such as fashionable Regent Street and New Oxford Street had similarly destroyed cheap housing for the poor. In the same way that countless rooks built nests in a single tree, tens of thousands of London’s underclass had sought shelter in those few affordable areas that remained and that eventually acquired the name “rookeries.”

  Most lodging houses here had six beds per room with three people sleeping in each bed, although many also slept on bare floors. More than a hundred unfortunates squeezed into each three-story structure, the congestion stressing walls, stairways, and corridors until the crammed buildings were in danger of collapsing. Water pumps didn’t exist. Alleys were urinals. Each privy served four hundred people, the overflowing waste spreading into cellars. Only the most hopeless lived in Seven Dials—the mudlarks who waded along the Thames, searching for chunks of coal that had fallen off barges, or the scavengers who sold dead cats and dogs to fertilizer makers and, if the dead animals were fresh, to cookshops as supplements to so-called pork pies.

  As Ryan stared at the gloomy, rotting entrance, he felt the desperation of Seven Dials waft over him. The rookery was considered so dangerous that few strangers—usually only policemen—entered it, and only for an unavoidable reason.

  Ryan was forced to admit that the recent murders and Sir Walter’s possible link to them constituted a definite unavoidable reason.

  “Constable, are you absolutely certain he went in there?” Ryan asked.

  “No question about it, Inspector.” The constable aimed his lantern toward the tangled shadows of the forbidding wilderness.

  Bloody hell, Ryan thought, pressing a hand to the barely healed wounds on his abdomen.

  From deep within the rookery, he heard a scream.

  Two figures—one of them short and slight—climbed the dark stairs toward Colonel Trask’s office, proceeding into the private room behind it.

  “Father,” Emily said.

  De Quincey watched as Dr. Snow put the mask on the colonel’s face and turned a valve on the chloroform canister. Then De Quincey gestured toward the stocky man next to him whose black, curly hair and matching beard gave him a dramatic appearance.

  “Allow me to introduce the esteemed journalist William Russell.” De Quincey was careful not to call Russell a “war correspondent,” a term that Russell hated.

  Becker, the porter, and the constable nodded in greeting, awed to be in the presence of the man whose writing had toppled the British government. They tactfully ignored that his shirt collar was open, his waistcoat unbuttoned. Above his beard, his cheeks were flushed, presumably from alcohol, although he gave no other indication that he’d been drinking.

  Russell was thirty-four. His sad eyes communicated his weariness about the pain and death that he had witnessed. The previous year, the London Times had sent him to the Crimean War, the first time a journalist for a major newspaper had been dispatched to a combat area. He didn’t bother to request permission from the war office, the foreign secretary, or even from military commanders. Instead he disguised himself in a uniform of his own design. Then he boarded a ship loaded with army personnel, all of whom thought that he belonged to someone else’s unit. When he arrived on the Crimean Peninsula, an English officer described him disapprovingly as someone who “sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water, and smokes as many cigars as a Jolly Good Fellow. He is just the sort of chap to get information, particularly out of youngsters.”

  Russell’s irresistible personality did indeed prompt revealing conversations that allowed him to report about the wretched conditions in the war. Because of incompetent planning, ordinary soldiers were forced to endure fierce winter storms while wearing summer uniforms, the lack of tents further exposing them to the deadly weather. In contrast, officers enjoyed warm accommodations, one of their commanders, Lord Cardigan, sleeping comfortably on his steam-powered yacht. As British officers savored wine, soldiers drank water from mud puddles. As officers feasted on cheese, hams, fruit, and chocolate, soldiers subsisted on salt pork and stale biscuits. Scurvy and cholera were rampant. More soldiers died from starvation, disease, and cold than they did from wounds.

  Russell seized on the disast
rous Charge of the Light Brigade as the supreme example of incompetence. Lord Raglan ordered the Light Brigade, a cavalry unit, to attack a Russian artillery installation, but he neglected to specify which of many installations he had in mind. Other officers argued among themselves and failed to demand clarification, with the result that the Light Brigade attacked what turned out to be a heavily fortified Russian embankment. Caught in a devastating crossfire, 245 riders were killed or wounded, 60 taken prisoner, and 345 horses slaughtered.

  Thanks to the telegraph, Russell’s outrage-producing dispatches reached British readers with then-unimaginable speed and fueled equally rapid consequences, his vivid turns of phrase adding to their immediacy. The Russians “dashed on towards that thin red streak tipped with a line of steel,” he wrote, a description that became “the thin red line” as an enduring synonym for the determination of British soldiers.

  Emily stepped forward to shake Russell’s hand. “I’m honored to meet you, sir. You’ve done a service to women and the wounded by describing Florence Nightingale’s attempts to relieve suffering in the war.”

  “I fear that I haven’t accomplished enough,” Russell said, peering downward. “Perhaps the new government will be wise enough to pursue the war with greater organization and discipline. As things now stand, we cannot win. In a few days, I return to the Crimea. Perhaps if I write better, the effect of my words will be better.”

  “You write well enough, sir.”

  With a nod of thanks to her, Russell approached the bed.

  Dr. Snow had finished administering the chloroform. Colonel Trask’s eyes were now shut, but his body remained rigid.

  “He looks as haunted as he did in the Crimea,” Russell noted.

  “With new horrors to torment him,” Emily said.

  “So your father explained. When the colonel discovered the bodies of his fiancée and her parents last night, he must have felt that he was still on the battlefield.”

  “Mr. Russell, during the war, did you see paralysis of this sort?” De Quincey asked.