The Silent Cry Read online

  “Exactly,” Evan agreed. “We’d better find out which of these, and with whom.”

  Shotts shrugged and gave a hollow laugh. He had no need to comment on their chances of success.

  “The woman, Daisy Mott,” Evan began, starting towards the street. He was so cold he could hardly feel anything below his ankles. The smell of the alley made him shrink tighter and feel queasy. He had seen too much violence and pain in a short space of hours.

  “The doc were right,” Shotts remarked, catching up with him. “An ’ot cup o’ tea wi’ a drop o’ gin wouldn’t do yer no ’arm, nor me neither.”

  “Agreed.” Evan did not argue. “And a pie or a sandwich. Then we’ll find the woman.”

  But when they did find her she would tell them nothing. She was small and fair and very thin. She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five. It was impossible to tell. She was tired and frightened, and only spoke to them at all because she could see no way of avoiding it.

  The match factory was busy already, the hum of machinery was a background to everything, the smells of sawdust, oil and phosphorus were thick in the air. Everyone looked pallid. Evan saw several women with swollen, suppurating scabs, or skin eaten away by the necrosis of the bone known as “phossie jaw,” to which match workers were so susceptible. They stared at him with only minimal curiosity.

  “What did you see?” Evan asked gently. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  She took a deep breath but said nothing.

  “In’t nobody cares w’ere yer was comin’ from,” Shotts interposed helpfully. “Or goin’.”

  Evan made himself smile at her.

  “I come inter the alley,” she started tentatively. “It were still mostly dark. I were near on ’im w’en I saw ’im. First I reckoned as ’e were jus’ drunk an’ sleepin’ it orff. ’Appens orften down ’ere.”

  “I’m sure.” Evan nodded, aware of other eyes staring at them, and of the supervisor’s grim face a dozen yards away. “What made you realize he was dead?”

  “Blood!” she said with contempt, but her voice was hoarse. “All that blood. I ’ad a lantern, an’ I saw ’is eyes starin’ up at me. That were w’en I yelled. Couldn’t ’elp it.”

  “Of course. Anyone would. What then?”

  “I dunno. Me ’eart were goin’ like the clappers an’ I felt sick. I fink as I jus’ stood there and yelled.”

  “Who heard you?”

  “Wot?”

  “Who heard you?” he repeated. “Someone must have come.”

  She hesitated, afraid again. She did not dare implicate someone else. He could see it in her eyes. Monk would have known what to do to make her speak. He had a sense of people’s weaknesses and how to use them without breaking them. He did not lose sight of the main purpose the way Evan too often did. He was not sidetracked by irrelevant pity, imagining himself in their place, which was false. He did not know how they felt. He would have said Evan was sentimental. Evan could hear Monk’s voice in his mind even as he thought it. It was true. And people did not want pity. They would have hated him for it. It was the ultimate indignity.

  “Who came?” he said more sharply. “Do you want me to go around every door, pulling people out and asking them? Would you like to be arrested for lying to the police? Get you noticed. Get you a bad name.” He meant it would make people think she was a police informer, and she knew that.

  “Jimmy Elders,” she said, looking at him with dislike. “An’ ’is woman. They both come. ’E lives ’alfway along the alley, be’ind the wood door wif the lock on it. But ’e don’ know wot ’appened any more’n I do. Then ol’ Briggs. ’E went for the rozzer.”

  “Thank you.” He knew it was a waste of time asking, but he had to go through the motions. “Had you ever seen either of the two men before, when they were alive?”

  “No.” She answered without even thinking. It was what he had expected. He glanced around and saw that the supervisor had moved a little closer. He was a large, black-haired man with a sullen face. Evan hoped she was not going to be docked pay for the time he had taken, but he thought she probably would. He would waste no more of it.

  “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  She said nothing, but returned silently to her work.

  Evan and Shotts went back to the alley and spoke to Jimmy Elders and his common-law wife, but they had nothing to offer beyond corroborating what Daisy Mott had told them. Elders denied having seen either of the men alive, or knowing what they might have been doing there. The leer in his face suggested the obvious, but he refrained from putting words to it. Briggs was the same.

  They spent all day in and around the alley, which was known as Water Lane, going up and down narrow and rotting stairs, into rooms where sometimes a whole family lived, others where pale-faced young prostitutes conducted their business when it was too wet or too cold outside. They went down to cellars where women of all ages sat in candlelight stitching and children two or three years old played in straw and tied waste bits of rag into dolls. Older children unpicked old clothes for the fabric to make new ones.

  No one admitted to having seen or heard anything unusual. No one knew anything of two strangers in the area. There were always people coming and going. There were pawnshops, fencers of stolen goods, petty forgers of documents, doss houses, gin mills and well-hidden rooms where it was safe for a wanted man to lie for a while. The dead men could have come to do business with any of these, or none. They might simply have been entertaining themselves by looking on at a way of life different from their own and immeasurably inferior. They could even have been misguided preachers come to save sinners from themselves, and been attacked for their presumption and their interference.

  If people knew anything at all, they were more afraid of the perpetrators, or of their peers, than of the police, at least in the form of Evan and P.C. Shotts.

  At four o’clock, as it was growing dark again, and bitterly cold, Shotts said he would make one or two more enquiries in the public house, where he had a few acquaintances, and Evan took his leave to go to the hospital and see what Dr. Riley had to say. He had been dreading it because he did not want to have to think of the younger man again, the one who had been still alive in that dreadful place. The memory of it made him feel cold and sick. He was too tired to find the strength inside himself to overcome it.

  He said good-day to Shotts and walked briskly in the general direction of Regent Street, where he knew he could find a hansom.

  In St. Thomas’s Hospital he went straight to the morgue. He would look at the bodies and deduce what he could for himself and then ask Riley to explain to him what else there was to learn. He hated morgues, but everyone he knew felt the same. His clothes always seemed to smell of vinegar and lye afterwards, and he never felt as if the damp were out of them.

  “Yes sir,” the attendant said dutifully when Evan identified himself. “Doc Riley said you’d be ’ere some time, prob’ly today. I only got one body for yer. Other one in’t dead yet. Doc says as ’e might pull through. Never know. Poor devil. Still, I suppose yer want ter see the one I got.” It was not a question. He had been there long enough to know the answer. Young policemen like Evan never came for anything else.

  “Thank you,” Evan accepted, feeling a sudden surge of relief that the young man was still alive. He realized now how much he had been hoping he would be. And yet at the same time it meant he would wake up to so much pain, and a long, slow fight to recover, and Evan dreaded that, and his own necessity for being part of it.

  He followed the attendant along the rows of tables, all sheet covered, some with the stark outline of a corpse beneath, others empty. His feet rang in the silence on the stone floor. The light was harsh, beaming back from bare walls. It was as if no one but the dead inhabited the place. There were no concessions to the living. They were intruders here.

  The attendant stopped by one of the tables and pulled the sheet off slowly, uncovering the body of a middle-aged, slightly plump
man of average height. Riley had cleaned him up very little, perhaps so Evan could make his own deductions. But with his clothes absent it was possible to see the terrible extent of his injuries. His entire torso was covered in contusions, black and dull purple where they had bled internally while he was still alive. On some the skin was torn. Several of the misshapen ribs were obviously broken.

  “Poor devil,” the attendant repeated between his teeth. “Put up one ’ell of a fight afore they got ’im.”

  Evan looked down at the hand nearest him. The knuckles were burst open and at least two fingers were dislocated. All but one of the nails were torn.

  “Other ’and’s the same,” the attendant offered.

  Evan leaned over and picked it up gently. The attendant was correct. That was the right hand, and if anything, it was worse.

  “Will you be wanting to see his clothes?” the attendant asked after a moment.

  “Yes, please.” They might tell him something, possibly something he could not already guess. Most of all he wanted to know the man’s name. He must have family, perhaps a wife, wondering what had happened to him. Would they have any idea where he had gone or why? Probably not. Evan would have the wretched duty not only of informing them of his death, and the dreadful manner in which it happened, but where he had been at the time.

  “ ’Ere they are, sir.” The attendant turned and walked towards a bench at the farther end of the room. “All kept for yer, but otherwise just as we took ’em orff ’im. Good quality, they are. But you’ll see that for yourself.” He picked up underwear, socks, then a shirt which had originally been white but was now heavily soiled with blood and mud and effluent from the gutter in the alley. The smell of it was noticeable, even there. The jacket and trousers were worse.

  Evan undid them and laid them out on the bench. He searched them carefully, taking his time. He explored pockets, folds, seams, cuffs. The fabric was wool, not the best quality, but one he would have been happy to wear himself. It was warm, a rather loose weave, a nondescript brown, just what a gentleman might have chosen in which to conduct an expedition into an unseemly quarter of the city—not, perhaps, one as dangerous as St. Giles. No doubt for his normal business he wore something better. The linen of the shirt would suggest that his taste and his pocket both allowed a greater indulgence.

  All that told him was that the man was exactly what he’d thought, from somewhere else, seeking either pleasure or a dishonest business in one of London’s worst slums.

  The suit had been damaged on the knees, presumably when he had fallen during the fight. One knee was actually torn, the threads raw; the other only pulled out of shape, a few fibers broken. There was also a badly scuffed patch on the seat and it was still wet from the gutter and deeply stained. The jacket was worse. Both elbows were torn, one almost completely gone. There was a rent in the left side and a pocket all but ripped off. However, even the most thorough search, inch by inch, revealed no damage which could have been done by a knife or a bullet. There was a considerable amount of blood, far more than could be accounted for by the nature of the injuries to the dead man. Anyway, it appeared to have come from someone else, being darker and wetter on the outside of the garment and having barely soaked through to the inside. At least one of the man’s assailants must have been pretty badly hurt.

  “D’yer know wot ’appened?” the attendant asked.

  “No,” Evan said miserably. “No idea, so far.”

  The attendant grunted. “Come in from St. Giles, didn’t ’e? Reckon as yer’ll never find out, then. Nobody from there says nothin’ on their own. Poor devil. ’Ad a few garroters in from there. ’E must ’a crossed someone proper ter get beat like that. Don’t need ter do that ter no one just ter rob ’im. Gambler maybe.”

  “Maybe.” The name of the tailor was on the inside of the jacket. Evan had made a note of that, and the address. It might be sufficient to identify the victim. “Where is Dr. Riley?”

  “Up on the wards, I s’pec, if ’e in’t bin called out again. Fair make use of ’im, you rozzers do.”

  “Not of my choice, I promise you,” Evan said wearily. “I’d much rather not have the need.”

  The attendant sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. He said nothing.

  Evan went up the stairs and along the corridors, asking, until he found Riley coming out of one of the operating theaters, jacket off, shirtsleeves rolled up, his arms spattered with blood.

  “Just taken out a bullet,” he said cheerfully. “Damn fool accident. Marvelous thing, this new anesthetic. Never saw anything like it in my youth. Best thing to happen in medicine since … I don’t know what! Maybe it’s just the best thing—straight and simple. I suppose you’ve come about your corpse from St. Giles?” He shoved his hands into his pockets. He looked tired. There were fine lines crisscrossing his face, and a smear of blood over his brow and another on his cheek where he had rubbed his hand without realizing it.

  Evan nodded.

  A medical student walked past them, whistling between his teeth until he recognized Riley, then he stopped and straightened his shoulders.

  “Beaten to death,” Riley said, pursing his lips. “No wound from any weapon … unless you count fists and boots as weapons. No knife, no gun, no cudgel as far as I can judge. Nothing to the head more than a flat concussion from falling onto the cobbles. Wouldn’t have killed him, probably not even knocked him senseless. Probably just stunned and a little dizzy. Died of internal hemorrhage. Ruptured organs. Sorry.”

  “Could one man alone have done that to him?”

  Riley thought for quite a long time before he replied, standing still in the middle of the passage, oblivious of blocking the way for others.

  “Hard to say. Wouldn’t like to commit myself. Taking that body alone, without considering the circumstances, I’d guess more than one assailant. If it was only one man, then he was a raving lunatic to do that to another man. He must have gone berserk.”

  “And with considering the circumstances?” Evan pressed, stepping to one side to allow a nurse to pass with a bundle of laundry.

  “Well, the boy’s still alive, and if he survives tonight, he might recover,” Riley answered. “Too soon to say. But to take on both of them, and do that much damage, I’d say two assailants who were both big and well used to violence, or possibly even three. Or else again, two complete lunatics.”

  “Could they have fought each other?”

  Riley looked surprised. “And left themselves damn near dead on the pavement? Not very likely.”

  “But possible?” Evan insisted.

  Riley shook his head. “Don’t think you’ll find the answer is that easy, Sergeant. The younger man is taller. The older one was a bit plump; he was well muscled, quite powerful. He’d have taken a lot of beating, considering he was fighting for his life. And there was no weapon to give the advantage.”

  “Can you tell if the wounds were made attacking or defending?”

  “Mostly defending, as well as I can judge, but it’s only a deduction made from their position, on forearms, as if he were putting up his arms to protect his head. He may have begun by attacking. He certainly landed a few blows, judging from his knuckles. Someone else is going to be badly marked, whether it is anywhere that shows or not.”

  “There was blood on the outside of his clothes,” Evan told him. “Someone else’s blood.” He watched Riley’s face closely.

  Riley shrugged. “Could be the younger man’s, could be someone else’s. I’ve no way of knowing.”

  “What condition is he in now, the younger man? What are his injuries?”

  Riley was distressed; he looked overwhelmed by his knowledge, as if it were something he would have gladly put down.

  “Very bad,” he said almost under his breath. “He’s still senseless, but definitely alive. If he pulls through tonight he’ll need a lot of careful nursing, many weeks, maybe months. He’s badly injured internally, but it’s hard to tell exactly what. Can’t see insid
e a body without cutting it open. As much as I can tell, the major organs are terribly bruised but not ruptured. If they were, he’d be dead by now. Luckier than the other man where the blows landed. Both his hands are badly broken, but that hardly matters, compared.”

  “Nothing in his clothes to say who he is, I suppose?” Evan asked without any real hope.

  “Yes,” Riley said quickly, his eyes wide. “Apparently he had a receipt for socks with the name R. Duff on it. Must be his. Can’t think why you’d carry a receipt for another man’s socks. And he has the same tailor as the dead man. There’s a very slight physical resemblance about the shape of head, way the hair grows, and particularly the ears. Do you notice a man’s ears, Sergeant Evan? Some people don’t. You’d be surprised how many. Ears are very distinctive. I think you might find our two men are related.”

  “Duff?” Evan could hardly believe his good fortune. “R. Duff?”

  “That’s right. No idea what the R stands for, but maybe he’ll be able to tell us himself tomorrow. Anyway, you can try the tailor in the morning. A man often knows his own handiwork.”

  “Yes—yes. I’ll take a piece of it to show him. Can I see the boy’s clothes?”

  “They’re by his bed, over in the next ward. I’ll take you.” Riley turned and led the way along the wide, bare corridor and into a ward lined with beds, each gray blanketed, each showing the outline of a figure lying or propped up. At the farther end a potbellied stove gave off quite a good heat, and even as they walked up, a nurse staggered past them with a bucketful of fresh coals to keep it stoked.

  Evan was reminded sharply of Hester Latterly, the young woman he had met so soon after his first encounter with Monk. She had gone out to the Crimea and nursed with Florence Nightingale. He could not even imagine the courage it must have taken to do that, to face that raging disease, the carnage of the battlefield, the constant pain and death, and to find within oneself the resources to keep on fighting to overcome, to offer help and to give some kind of comfort to those you were powerless even to ease, let alone to save.