What the Devil Knows Read online

  “Something heavy.”

  “Well, hell.”

  Gibson’s eyes narrowed with a smile that faded quickly. “Crushed the back and left side of his cranium, plus his temporal bone.”

  “So he was hit more than once?”

  “Oh, yes. A good four or five times, I’d say. I suspect the blow to the back of the head knocked him down; then your assailant hit him a few more times for good measure once he was on the ground.”

  “And the wound to his throat?”

  “That came next. Believe it or not, he was still alive when it was cut.”

  “Jesus. How is that even possible?”

  “Some people are hard to kill.”

  Sebastian forced himself to take another look at the dead magistrate’s face. Sir Edwin Pym had been a fleshy man, with full cheeks and bushy silver side-whiskers, caked now with dried blood. His gray eyes were open and staring, his mouth sagging, the cut across his fat neck raw and gaping.

  “What was used to slit his throat?”

  “Don’t see how it could’ve been anything other than a very sharp razor.”

  “Not a knife?”

  “I doubt it. The cut’s too clean.”

  “He’s sliced from ear to ear.”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  Sebastian turned to stare out at the rain-beaten garden with its stone-lined paths and a towering ancient chestnut whose leaves were turning a glowing amber with the coming of winter. It was one thing to kill a man, but to slash and repeatedly batter a living, breathing being with such bloody abandon suggested a level of savagery—or fury—that was difficult to think about.

  Gibson said, “I hear people are panicking, buying blunderbusses and rattles, convinced it’s the Ratcliffe Highway murderer come back to kill us all.”

  Sebastian shifted to meet his friend’s troubled gaze. “You didn’t happen to attend either of the inquests three years ago, did you?”

  Gibson shook his head. “No. But I read the accounts in the papers. This sounds like what I remember of the surgeon’s reports.”

  “Any chance we could be dealing with the same killer?”

  Gibson’s eyes widened. “I suppose so, but . . . Surely that isn’t possible, is it?”

  “Probably not.” Sebastian let his gaze drift around the dank, stone-walled room. “Did you perform the autopsy on the seaman who was butchered the same way ten days ago?”

  “No. But I can find out who did, if you’d like.”

  Sebastian nodded. “It might help.” His gaze settled on the dead magistrate’s neatly folded clothes resting on one of the long shelves across the back of the room. “I assume his pockets were empty?”

  “Oh, yes. Someone picked him clean. But whether or not it was the killer, there’s no way to tell.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “I did notice one thing that may be relevant.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “I think yon magistrate was tupping a woman right before he was killed.”

  “I won’t ask how you know that.”

  Gibson swiped a hand down over his beard-stubbled face. “No, don’t.”

  Sebastian found himself suddenly repulsed by the dead man’s large, bulging white belly and flaccid sex. “Sir Henry said the old bastard had a reputation for picking up doxies, the younger the better. It’s possible that’s how the killer lured him into that alley—with a girl.”

  “Could be. Except why not kill him right away? Why let him do the deed first?”

  “You have a point there. So maybe he wasn’t lured. Maybe he was in the alley with the girl when the killer came upon them.”

  “If so, then what happened to the girl?”

  The rain beat harder on the roof, nearly drowning out the rattle of a cart’s iron-banded wheels thumping over the cobbles of the distant lane. Sebastian drew the cold, damp air deep into his lungs and shook his head. “Good question.”

  Chapter 10

  For reasons he couldn’t quite explain, Sebastian found himself standing with his shoulders hunched against the rain, his gaze once again on the chandler’s shop that now occupied Number Twenty-nine Ratcliffe Highway.

  It was the vicious slaying of Timothy and Celia Marr’s tiny fourteen-week-old baby boy, he decided, that made the Ratcliffe Highway murders so inexplicable. There was a certain brutal logic in a thief deciding to kill his victims in order to avoid being recognized and possibly hanged. But the gruesome slaughter of a helpless babe made no sense. It whispered of the kind of evil that lay beyond the bounds of normal human comprehension, of a man who took a sick delight in killing even the innocent, simply for the sake of killing. And that, combined with the scale and brutality of the other deaths, made these murders singularly horrific and profoundly disturbing.

  He stared at the house, only dimly aware of the workmen and shawl-huddled women pushing past him, of the carts and wagons rattling up and down the wet street, of the brown-and-black dog nosing rubbish in the flowing gutter. He knew he could be wrong. Knew the deaths of Sir Edwin Pym and that obscure ship’s carpenter might have nothing to do with the dreadful series of murders that had terrified London three years before. But he found that difficult to believe. The strange manner of the killings was too similar . . . and Katie Ingram’s report of someone stalking her and her children too ominous.

  According to the 1811 reports, after thirteen-year-old Margaret Jewell, the neighboring pawnbroker, and the night watchman burst into Timothy Marr’s shop that December night to discover the horror within, they sent word to the nearest public office, which happened to be the Thames River Police Office in Wapping High Street. The policeman who responded was the first official at the scene. He immediately searched the premises, took possession of the bloody murder weapon he found there, and organized a search of the neighborhood.

  All of which made him someone Sebastian needed to talk to.

  * * *

  The Thames River Police Office was not one of the municipal public offices set up in 1792. Established by a separate statute eight years later, the River Police were entrusted with the prevention and detection of crimes on the river. In addition to forty-three watermen, they also employed five land constables. But the constables were supposed to deal only with matters related to the river. Thus the river policeman who responded to that frantic message on the night of the Marr murders was technically acting outside his jurisdiction. And when Sebastian stopped by the police headquarters near the Wapping New Stairs, he discovered that the man involved had left the service.

  “Is he still alive?” Sebastian asked the clerk behind the counter.

  “Oh, yes, my lord. He’s set up as a slopseller in Wapping Street, down by the corner of Brewhouse Lane. Horton is his name. Charlie Horton.”

  * * *

  Charlie Horton’s slopshop lay near the docks, in an area dominated by timber yards and cooperages and the government’s massive Gun Wharf. A slopshop sold hammocks and ready-made clothes to seafaring men, mainly flannel shirts, canvas trousers, and warm peacoats. It was closed for the Sabbath, but Horton himself opened the door to Sebastian’s knock.

  The former river policeman looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties. He was still upright and strong, with the craggy, sun-darkened face of a man who’d spent his youth at sea. His thick, short-cropped hair was iron gray, his eyes the color of the river on a sunny day, his hands big and blunt-fingered. When Sebastian introduced himself and explained the reason for his visit, Horton fixed him with a steady gaze and said with a lingering Scottish burr, “Yer wantin’ me to tell ye about what I found that night? Ain’t a pleasant thing to be rememberin’.”

  “I understand. But I’d appreciate anything you can tell me.”

  Horton swiped a hand across his face and looked away, so that for a moment Sebastian thought the man intended to refuse him. Then he nodded to the dark-hair
ed, half-grown lad playing with a small white dog near the fire. “Caleb, tell yer granny his lordship and me’ve gone for a walk, would ye?”

  “Your son?” asked Sebastian as the two men left the shop and turned to walk along the rows of ramshackle businesses and warehouses fronting the river. For the moment the rain had stopped, but the flagstones were wet, and the eaves of the ancient buildings lining the narrow, winding lane dripped. The scents of tobacco and spices, rum and hides and coffee—all the cargoes of the world brought here to the docks of London—hung heavy in the damp air.

  “Aye, my lord. He still has bad dreams from hearin’ me talk about them murders. Don’t want him to have to listen to it all again. He’s scared enough as it is with these new killings.”

  “You think the recent deaths are related to what happened three years ago?”

  Horton threw Sebastian a look he couldn’t quite read. “Reckon you must at least suspect it, my lord, else you wouldn’t be here talkin’ to me, now, would ye?”

  Sebastian nodded. “Do you believe John Williams was really the Ratcliffe Highway murderer?”

  Horton stared out at the forest of masts filling the river. “Maybe. Or I guess I should say maybe he was one of ’em. Never did see how it could’ve been just one man done the killing. Even if we hadn’t found two sets of bloody footprints leading away from the back of the Marrs’ house, how could one man beat to death three people in one room? You answer me that. Surely one of the three would’ve run, especially the woman. If nothin’ else, she’d have run to try to save her babe, wouldn’t she? I mean, what mother wouldn’t? Instead, she was found still in the shop, lyin’ just a few feet from the lad.”

  “The apprentice?”

  “Aye. James Gowan was his name. From the looks of things, he’d just put up the shutters but hadn’t had time to put the pin in ’em. I think the killers must’ve been watchin’ from the shadows outside, and as soon as the shutters went up, they followed the lad inside, locked the door behind ’em, and started killin’.”

  “The shop door was locked from the inside?”

  “Aye. That’s why the pawnbroker from next door had to go over the back fence to try to get in. Found the back door standin’ open, he did.”

  “Where was Timothy Marr?”

  “Behind the counter. He may’ve been there when the killers broke in, or he may’ve gone back there after somethin’ he could use as a weapon. But there wasn’t nothin’ in his hands. People say the family must’ve been killed as part of a robbery gone wrong, but that don’t make sense. Marr had five pounds in his pocket, and there was more money in the till. None of it was taken.”

  “The killer—or killers—could have been interrupted by the girl coming back and knocking on the door.”

  “Oh, aye. Sure enough, she said she heard footsteps, so there’s no doubt the killers was still there when she came back. But you’ll never convince me they was there to rob Marr. Why kill that wee babe in its cradle? What robber takes the time to bash in a baby’s skull and slit its throat, but don’t bother to first scoop up the money he’s supposedly come to steal?”

  A seagull screeched overhead, and Horton glanced up, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the heavy gray skies. “Long as I live,” he said quietly, “I’m never gonna forget the sight of that blood-soaked cradle.”

  Sebastian said, “Where did you find the ship’s maul?”

  “That was upstairs, in the Marrs’ bedroom. Leanin’ against a chair by the bed, it was. And get this: there was more’n a hundred and fifty pounds in the drawer of a chest right beside it, untouched.”

  “The maul was the only weapon you found?”

  “Aye.”

  “So if there were two killers, one of them took his weapon away with him.”

  “Aye, I suppose he must’ve.”

  “There’s no doubt the maul was the murder weapon?”

  “Oh, no doubt at all. Drippin’ with blood and all covered in hair and flesh, it was. A real mess.” Horton paused, then said, “There was a rippin’ chisel found lyin’ on the counter downstairs, but it was completely clean—not a trace of blood on it.”

  “A ripping chisel?”

  “Aye. Big iron thing nearly two feet long. We never could figure out exactly what it was doin’ there, or why Marr didn’t pick it up and use it to try to defend himself.”

  “Perhaps he tried. Perhaps he was reaching for it when the killers knocked him down.”

  “Aye. That could be it.”

  “What about the blade that was used to slit the victims’ throats? Was that found?”

  “Not then, no. A month or so later, they found a knife they thought might’ve been the one used, but I never believed it. And only Celia Marr’s throat was slit, by the way—hers and the wee babe’s.”

  “Neither Marr nor his apprentice had his throat cut?”

  “No. ’Twas only at the second set of killings, the ones at the King’s Arms, where everybody’s throat was slit.”

  “Were you called to the scene of the second set of killings?”

  “No, thank God.” They’d reached the wharves along the Thames now, near where the worn stones of a set of watermen’s steps led down to the gray, wind-whipped river. Horton stared out over the water, his face contorting with remembered horror. “Once was enough. I never want to see something like that again.”

  Sebastian watched a waterman ferrying a passenger across the ship-filled river. The splash of the oars was lost in the whistling of the wind through the ships’ rigging and the thump of the mighty hulls against the wooden wharves. “Tell me about the two sets of bloody footsteps that were found leading away from the Marrs’ shop.”

  Horton hunched his shoulders against the cold wind gusting up off the river. “A fellow who lived across the street—an old seaman by the name of Douglas—noticed ’em while I was still searchin’ the upstairs. After the magistrates settled on Williams as the killer, they tried to say we was confused, that the men searchin’ the house must’ve got blood on their boots and made the prints themselves by just milling about, but that ain’t the way it was. As soon as Douglas spotted the footprints, he kept everyone away until I come back downstairs. Then him and me followed ’em. Went down the yard and over the fence to an empty house that faced onto Pennington Street in the back. I reckon that’s how the killers got away. Some men was seen runnin’ down Pennington Street right before the hue and cry was raised.”

  “How many men?”

  “A fellow who claimed to have seen them said there must’ve been ten or twelve. I never believed that, but there was three men seen hangin’ around outside the Marrs’ shop right before the murders.”

  “Three?”

  “Aye. A tall, brawny fellow in a Flushing coat, a smaller cove in a torn blue jacket, and a third man that nobody could seem to describe.”

  “But you only saw two sets of bloody footprints leading away from the house?”

  Horton nodded. “Aye. Never could figure that out, unless the men seen in the street earlier had nothin’ to do with the killin’.”

  “Or the third man could have been posted as a lookout in front and didn’t get blood on his shoes.”

  “There is that. Blood and sawdust, it was.”

  “Sawdust?”

  “Aye. Marr was havin’ a carpenter do some work on his shop. You know that wide, fancy bay window you see there today? He’d just had that put in. Front of the shop used to be all brick.”

  “That might explain the ripping chisel you were talking about.”

  Horton nodded. “I remember there was somethin’ about one of the fellows who was doin’ the work complainin’ that his rippin’ chisel was missing, but I don’t recall it all exactly. Like I said, it was more’n a bit confusin’.”

  “Did you come up with any suspects besides Williams?”

  Horton huffed a
rough laugh. “Must’ve been fifty or more taken into custody by one public office or the other. When I got back to the River Police, they had three Greek sailors who’d been hauled in for somethin’ else, and for a time they was thinkin’ maybe they was the killers.”

  “Why?”

  “One of ’em had blood splattered on his clothes. Only, it turned out they had solid alibis, and the truth is, whoever did those killings would’ve had a lot more than a few blood splatters on ’em; they’d have been soaked in gore.”

  “Who else was questioned?”

  Horton frowned with the effort of thought. “Well, let’s see. There was a bunch of Irish and Portuguese sailors. Anyone with bloodstains on his clothes or who was found wearin’ a Flushing coat got hauled in. Someone said they thought a one-eyed man’d done it, so for a time anyone missin’ an eye—particularly if he was Irish or Portuguese—was in trouble. They even remanded into custody a servant girl who’d been dismissed by Mrs. Marr six months before.”

  “A girl?”

  “Aye. Thought it was batty, meself. Weren’t no way that little slip of a girl could’ve swung that big, heavy maul, let alone used it to kill three people before one of ’em overpowered her. They also looked real hard at Marr’s brother. They kept him locked up for days.”

  “Why?”

  “Seems the two’d had a big row. But in the end they let him go.”

  “Was there anyone in particular that you yourself suspected?”

  Horton stared off down the river toward the Isle of Dogs, his lips pressing together in a tight line.

  “So there was someone,” said Sebastian when the man remained silent.

  The ex-policeman let out a heavy breath. “Aye, my lord. Two of ’em, to be honest. One was a fellow by the name of Hart—Cornelius Hart. He was workin’ for the carpenter put in that bay window for Marr. But the fellow’s dead now; died late last summer.”

  “And the other?”

  “Ablass. Billy Ablass.”

  “Who is he?”