What the Devil Knows Page 11

“No worries, no worries! I was just about to go for a gander around the brewery. Try to do it every day. Important to keep an eye on things, eh?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good, good, then you’ll not mind walking with me while we speak.”

  They crossed a vast paved entrance court surrounded by towering redbrick buildings and crowded with sweating, shouting men and snorting teams of shires hitched to wagons piled high with oaken kegs, barley, or coal. The cold air was heavy with the pungent smell of fermenting beer, fresh manure, steam, and raw lumber from a new warehouse going up nearby.

  “We didn’t have steam power until I put it in myself in 1805; can you believe it?” Buxton-Collins said proudly, shouting to be heard over the roar of the machinery from the enginehouse. “And this we only just put in—” An eye-watering stench boiled out at them as he flung open the door to a cavernous room filled with clanging machinery. “Mechanical mashers! Amazing, isn’t it? Until this year, all we had was a crew of sturdy Irishmen with long oars and mashing forks.” He let go of the door to brace his hands against the sides of his enormous belly as he laughed. “Like something out of the Middle Ages, it was.”

  “You produce mainly—what? Porter?”

  “Mostly, yes. That’s what people want these days. Has to be aged for two years, which is good for us. There’s not many can afford to tie up their capital in a big vat for two years. Come look at this.” He led the way to a newly built vat house filled with dozens and dozens of enormous vats set up on thick iron pillars. The air was so heavy with the smell of oak and fermenting beer that Sebastian imagined a man could get light-headed simply by breathing in there for too long. “The biggest vats hold almost two thousand barrels. Impressive, eh?”

  “Very.” Sebastian let his head fall back as he stared up at the vats’ massive wooden staves and thick iron hoops. “As long as one of them doesn’t break.”

  Buxton-Collins laughed so hard he started wheezing. “Oh, no fear of that, believe me.”

  “How many public houses do you supply?” Sebastian asked as they turned to walk along the nearest row.

  “Close to a thousand, I’d say. About five hundred we simply supply, maybe two hundred we own outright, and then another three hundred or so we finance.”

  “And the ones you own or finance are all required to sell only your beer?”

  The brewer winked. “What do you think?”

  “I’ve heard that if a publican in the Tower Hamlets won’t agree to sell only your beer, the magistrates won’t give him a license.”

  The good-natured, indulgent smile slid off the brewer’s fat face. “Not sure who told you that, but there’s not a bloody word of truth to it. You hear me? Not a bloody word.”

  Sebastian let his gaze drift over the vats towering above them. “You knew Sir Edwin Pym and Nathan Cockerwell, I assume?”

  “Oh, aye. Terrible business, what happened to them. Terrible.” Buxton-Collins heaved a heavy sigh. “People are saying we will be forced to follow the lead of the French and establish a proper police force. Although to be honest, I can’t help thinking it might be better to see four or five individuals get their throats slit every year rather than subject Englishmen to that kind of control.”

  “As long as one of those slit throats isn’t yours?”

  He laughed. “True, true.”

  “Who do you think killed them?”

  “Pym and Cockerwell? Oh, footpads. No doubt about it.”

  “You think so?”

  “But of course. Who else could it be?”

  “Do you remember a Wapping publican named Ian Ryker? He kept the Green Man on Rope Walk Lane.”

  “Ryker?” Buxton-Collins pursed his lips in an exaggerated pantomime of remembrance. “Can’t say I do.”

  “Cockerwell revoked his license last summer after Ryker refused to sell only your beer.”

  “Did he?” Buxton-Collins cast him an amused sideways glance. “I hope you don’t think I deal with such matters personally?”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

  The brewer pushed open a door that led back out to the court. “You’re thinking Ryker might be behind these savage killings?”

  “No, he couldn’t be; he died last summer.”

  “So you’re wondering if perhaps there’s someone with a similar grudge? If you like, I could ask my agents if there’ve been any other cases.”

  “Yes, that might help,” said Sebastian.

  “Always happy to be of assistance,” said Buxton-Collins, standing in the weak morning sunshine with his folded hands resting above his large belly. His face creased into a smile that looked surprisingly jolly as long as one didn’t notice his eyes.

  Chapter 21

  Paul Gibson was elbow-deep in the chest cavity of the pale, eviscerated corpse laid out on his stone slab when Sebastian came to stand in the outbuilding’s open doorway.

  The day might have been clear, but it was still cold enough that the surgeon had a brazier burning beside him. Unless he was dissecting a cadaver filched from one of the local churchyards, Gibson usually did keep the building’s door open, for the high-ceilinged room always reeked of death.

  Sebastian glanced at what the surgeon was doing to Nathan Cockerwell’s insides and then looked pointedly at the far wall. “Anything interesting?”

  “Not really.” Gibson set aside some dripping organ Sebastian made no effort to identify, then reached for a rag to wipe the dead magistrate’s body fluids from his hands and arms. “The bones of his face and head are too shattered for me to be able to tell what he was hit with. His throat was slit quickly and deeply, most likely with a very sharp razor. Beyond that, all I can say is that you’re probably looking for the same man who killed Pym—but then, I assume you’ve already figured that out for yourself.”

  “Nothing to tell us where he’d been or what he was doing before he was killed?”

  Gibson tossed the rag aside. “Only that he’d been drinking to excess on top of a fish dinner, which he’d also eaten to excess. Judging from the condition of his heart and liver, I’d say he regularly did both.”

  “So he was foxed?”

  “Let’s just say he wasn’t sober—which presumably made him easier to kill.”

  “But no indication of where that might have happened?”

  “That he was killed? None whatsoever.” Gibson limped from behind the table, his face tightening with pain as his weight came down on his peg leg. “I talked to Walt Salter, by the way—he’s the surgeon who performed the postmortem on the ship’s carpenter who was killed a couple of weeks ago.”

  “And?”

  “He said the wounds on Hugo Reeves’s body reminded him of the victims of the Ratcliffe Highway murders—and he should know, seeing as how he did the autopsies on all seven victims.”

  Sebastian blew out a long, troubled breath. “Coincidence seems increasingly unlikely, although we could be dealing with a copyist.”

  “Could be,” Gibson agreed. “But if we’re not, that means the authorities hounded an innocent man into killing himself three years ago.”

  “Either that or John Williams had a partner who’s still alive—and still killing. Did this Salter do the postmortem on Williams’s body?”

  “No, that would have been done by the prison surgeon.” Gibson scraped a palm across his beard-stubbled chin. “Do I take it you’re thinking Williams might have had a bit of help hanging himself?”

  Sebastian met the Irishman’s troubled gaze. “I think it’s a distinct possibility, wouldn’t you say?”

  * * *

  “I still have the lads looking into Hugo Reeves,” said Lovejoy when Sebastian stopped by his office in Bow Street. The magistrate’s office was small and lined with bookcases crammed with well-worn books and volumes of scientific journals, for new discoveries in everything from electri
city to botany were Lovejoy’s secret passion. He sat behind his plain, serviceable desk, the wig of his office still on his head from a recent hearing, his spectacles pushed down to the end of his nose. “But so far, I can’t say they’ve found anything of interest. We’re also looking into the voyage of that ship you said both Williams and Ablass were on—the Roxburgh Castle. The Admiralty hasn’t been able to locate the manifest of the 1810–1811 voyage, so we don’t know yet if Reeves was on it, as well. It seems there was a mutiny on the ship that year, which might explain the missing manifest—it’s been filed someplace else.”

  Sebastian nodded. “I’m told Ablass was the ringleader.”

  “Was he? Interesting.”

  “Do you know if there were any similar killings between the time of the Ratcliffe Highway murders and Reeves’s death?” said Sebastian.

  “No. None. We’re quite certain of that.” The magistrate paused to open one of the deep drawers in his desk. “I think you might find this interesting, though.” He leaned over, then straightened to lay a big, heavy hammer on the desktop with a thud.

  Sebastian stared at the worn, heavy shipwright’s maul and felt his breath catch. “Is that it?”

  “It is. The Shadwell Public Office sent it to Bow Street after Williams was buried.”

  Reaching down, Lovejoy came up with a long iron crowbar that he set beside the maul, then a heavy ripping chisel. “Sobering, is it not?”

  Sebastian reached for the maul. “It is indeed.” The hammer was massive, with a wooden handle and a hefty iron head made thick at one end for driving nails, and narrow at the other for setting the nailheads below the surface of ships’ timbers. The pointed tip bore a small chip. He turned the maul in his hands and traced what looked like the initials “IP” crudely punched into the head. “What a ghastly relic.”

  Lovejoy nodded. “There’s also this,” he said, holding out a skillfully rendered drawing of a man’s profile. “Thomas Lawrence himself sketched Williams after his death.”

  “Good heavens.” Sebastian set aside the maul to reach for the print. Lawrence had chosen to draw Williams as if he were still alive and sitting up, his eyes open, his mouth closed. The face was obviously young, with a straight nose, full lips, and high cheekbones. The hair was curly and was drawn darker than Sebastian had expected, the ears small and low, the forehead sloping. Williams’s shirt was open, and around his neck, high up under his chin, Lawrence had drawn the twisted handkerchief that had killed the man.

  “When did he draw this?” asked Sebastian.

  “I’m not certain why or when Lawrence was given access to the body, but he was.”

  Sebastian was silent for a moment. “It doesn’t look like the face of a man who could commit such horrible murders.”

  “No. But then, what would such a man look like?”

  Sebastian found he could not tear his gaze away from that sensitive, doomed face. What were you really like? he wondered, tracing the handsome, delicate features. Did you do it?

  Did you?

  * * *

  According to Lovejoy, the man known to the world as the Ratcliffe Highway murderer had rented a room at an inn called the Pear Tree.

  Crowding together two and more to a room, eating in their lodging house’s big kitchen, and washing at the pump in the yard, seamen had a habit of returning to the same lodgings year after year, whenever they were in London between voyages. Sebastian figured if anyone could tell him about the man who had died so mysteriously in Coldbath Fields Prison three years before, it was the proprietor of his lodging house.

  The Pear Tree turned out to be a decrepit two-story inn with a low-pitched roof and grimy windows on a narrow cobbled alley near the docks in Old Wapping. Its taproom was a stark, ugly cave with a low, water-stained ceiling and a sawdust-covered floor that reeked of spilled beer, sweat, and the vague hint of stale vomit. It was early enough in the day when Sebastian arrived that there were only a few rough seamen lolling in the taproom, most of them looking hungover from the night before.

  “’E ain’t ’ere,” said the bent, gray-bearded old man behind the bar when Sebastian asked for the publican. “The missus is in the kitchen, though, if’n ye was wantin’ t’ talk t’ ’er.”

  “Please.”

  The old man stared at Sebastian a moment, then hobbled out from behind the bar to lead the way to a steamy, greasy kitchen that smelled of cooked cabbage and kippers. The room was empty except for a stout woman in a wooden chair beside the fire who sat with one gouty foot propped up on a stool before her. She said her name was Sarah Vermilloe, and she looked to be somewhere between fifty and seventy, with frizzy, fading red hair, a plain, lumpy face, and an enormous shelflike bosom. She was wearing a clean, starched white cap and a brown stuff gown made in the style of twenty years before, and her speech was markedly better than her surroundings might have suggested.

  “Course I remember John Williams,” she said as Sebastian settled on a bench beside the nearest trestle table. She was knitting a gray sock, her needles clicking at lightning speed. “Lovely young man, he was. Just lovely. And only twenty-seven when he died, poor lad.”

  The poor lad combined with the lovely young man suggested that Mrs. Vermilloe’s attitude toward her late lodger was far more charitable than one might have expected, given that the world considered him guilty of butchering seven people, including a fourteen-year-old boy and a helpless babe. Sebastian said, “How well did you know him?”

  She tugged at her yarn, loosening a length from the ball she kept in a basket by her foot. “Came here whenever he was ashore, he did. Called this his home away from the sea.”

  “And how long had he been coming here?”

  “Must’ve been nine or ten years. As soon as he got off a ship, he’d come and give me his earnings to keep for him as his banker. Made me promise to only give him so much a week.”

  “He did?”

  Her eyes were dark and small and nearly lashless, and the skin beside them tightened when she smiled. “You look surprised. But that’s what the lads do—leastways, the smart ones.”

  “And John Williams was smart?”

  “Oh, yes; quite superior in every way, he was.” The knitting needles stilled as she leaned forward and dropped her voice in the manner of one imparting a secret. “Always figured there was a story there somewhere, if you know what I mean? You don’t see many seamen as fastidious as he, or who can read and write such a fine hand.”

  “What kind of a story?” Jake Turner had said something similar, Sebastian remembered. Not quite in the same words, but similar.

  “I just figured there was something in his past he was runnin’ from and didn’t want nobody to know about. My Robert called him foppish and prissy, but I do like a young man who takes pains with his appearance. That’s what he spent his money on, you know—clothes. And then he’d run low on funds and have to pawn some of them. Quite the natty dresser, he was. Always ‘bang up to the mark,’ as the nobs say. And a most pleasing countenance, he had. My Robert likes to say his face was feminine and weak, but I never thought so.”

  Sebastian was beginning to suspect that the absent Mr. Robert Vermilloe had not been nearly as fond of their dashing young lodger as his wife had been. “I’m told he was a big, tall fellow,” said Sebastian, who’d been told no such thing.

  “Oh, no; don’t know where you might have heard that, my lord. Not much taller than me, he was, and slight. Very slightly built.”

  Sebastian tried to envision a small, slightly built young man swinging a heavy ship’s maul and single-handedly wreaking the kind of bloody carnage Horton and Turner had described, and decided it was unlikely.

  “Are any of his mates still around?”

  She gave her yarn another tug. “Don’t know as he had any to speak of. He shared a room with a couple other men, but I wouldn’t have called them his mates. And I’m afraid Jack
Harrison was killed last summer and the other’s off to sea at the moment, if you was wantin’ to speak to them. The thing is, most of his friends were girls. Real popular with the ladies, he was—in a friendly way, I mean. Liked to go to the cock-and-hen clubs and have a good time drinking and dancing and singing. You know how young people do go on.”

  The cock-and-hen clubs were public houses where men and women could meet and dance. Many of the women who frequented them were prostitutes, which was why the moralists were always tut-tutting and preaching against them. But then, the moralists were against any activity for what they called the “lower orders” that didn’t involve hard work or prayer.

  Sebastian said, “Do you think he killed all those people three years ago?”

  Her hands stilled at their task, then sank to her lap. She was silent a moment, obviously choosing her words carefully.

  “No,” she said at last. “I never did believe it. They tied me all up in knots at that hearing they held, twisting things around and getting me to say things I never intended. But the truth is, I never had a more conscientious, good-humored, pleasant lodger than Johnny Williams. Yes, he’d get into fights when the other men’d make fun of him. But there wasn’t a mean bone in his body. Why would he suddenly do something like that? Not once, but twice?”

  “Why did the other men tease him?”

  “Because of his clothes and his ways and all.” She looked troubled. “You know what I mean?”

  Sebastian suspected he did. “You said he had lady friends; can you name any of them?”

  “Not right off the top of my head. But maybe if I think on it some.”

  “Thank you,” said Sebastian, pushing to his feet. “I’d appreciate it.”

  She looked up at him, her knitting lying idle in her lap, her lumpy, plain features twisted with grief for the handsome, gay young man who’d once befriended her. “I never thought he killed himself, either. Why would he do that? It makes no sense. He hadn’t even been committed for trial yet. Why would he give up hope?”