The Kingdom of Bones

SEVEN

The next morning, about an hour before noon, a group of men passed through the gates of the cattle yard. Three were in police uniforms, and two were not. They were led by Superintendent Turner-Smith, a formidable figure with a broad white mustache, a war wound, and a walking stick. Despite his impediment, the others had to hasten to keep up with him.

The group crossed the marshaling area to reach the slaughterhouse. There was a bellowing from the nearby pens, and a foul country smell in the air. The business of the cattle market had been under way since first light, but after the last arrivals the stones of the yard had been swept and most of the dung moved outside the walls. Turner-Smith spied an approaching figure and altered his course in order that the two of them should meet.

The approaching figure was a man of less than thirty, brown-haired and black-suited. He’d a broad forehead and serious eyes, as brown as any Spanish girl’s.

“Well then, Becker,” Turner-Smith said. “What do you have for me?”

Sebastian Becker, the youngest inspector in the city police’s Detective Department, fell into step beside his superior and pointed the way.

“It’s the head slaughterman we need to speak to, sir,” Becker said. “He’s waiting for us upstairs.”

“They use stairs?” Turner-Smith said. “Who’d have imagined such talented animals?”

“There’s a ramp, sir. Or I could have the evidence brought down. They slaughter the animals on one floor and butcher them on another.”

“I think I can manage the ascent. We may be in a knacker’s yard, Sebastian, but I’m not quite ready to turn myself in for cats’ meat yet.”

“No, sir.” Becker did not blush, but nor did he smile. He directed them into a whitewashed passage that would take the party away from the auction ring and into the heart of the abattoir.

As they entered the passage, one of the other two detectives knocked him with a shoulder and almost bumped him into the wall.

“Forgive me, brother,” the man said without looking at him, and in a tone that did not suggest repentance.

Sebastian knew that he was little liked by his fellow officers. In a force where promotion was mainly a matter of putting in the years and awaiting your turn, Sebastian’s appetite for the job seemed to be held against him.

“No harm done,” said Sebastian.

Nobody paid them any attention as they made their way through. The work here was hard, and conducted at speed because the killing floor set the pace for the rest of the workforce. The animals came unwillingly from the pens, usually having to be dragged with ropes and driven with sticks; one was in the loading enclosure as they went by, thrashing dangerously and surrounded by slaughtermen in caps and leather aprons. One swung a hammer and stunned the beast; another leaned in with a knife as it dropped, and slit its throat.

In the time that it took the police party to reach the ramp, the others had shackled its back legs and its carcass was being lifted on a chain hoist. The blood came out of it as if poured from a bucket, steaming in the thick air and flooding into a collection trough.

Elsewhere on the same floor, men stripped to the waist were pulling the lights out of carcasses while others flayed the hides off, adding them to a growing heap like bedsheets of bloodied rubber. Sebastian glanced back as they ascended the ramp, and noted that one of the uniformed men had taken out a handkerchief and was pressing it over his face. The sights were no doubt bearable to men as experienced as these, but the smell was unlike anything he’d encountered before. He looked at Turner-Smith, and saw that his superior seemed unperturbed.

Sebastian could guess why he’d faced no competition when he’d picked up this case. Something questionable found in a charnel house—it was a dirty job with no promise of glory, and no doubt his fellow detectives had been amused to see him volunteer for it. If he hadn’t, they’d probably have steered it his way. It was their usual practice. If an indigent was found facedown in a sewer, Sebastian could expect to score a day in the muck followed by a week of barbed comments about some imagined stink that followed him around.

He’d grown used to this. It was something that he could endure—if not easily, then at least without complaint. As far as Sebastian was concerned, the death of a pauper was still a tragedy, if only to the pauper. Everybody needed someone to establish their name, to record their passing, to draw out the story of their final moments on this earth. Including those who died unloved and without company.

Especially those who died unloved.

On this occasion, Sebastian was looking for something specific. Within a few minutes of his arrival, he’d known that there was more to this than a routine unpleasantness. After a first look at the evidence, he’d sent a message to the main police office, directly to the great Turner-Smith himself. Turner-Smith, more aware of Sebastian’s character and work record than even Sebastian knew, had laid aside all his other duties in order to respond. Eyebrows were raised. It was almost without precedent.

The head slaughterman waited for them at the top of the ramp. He was bearded, with a scarf tied around his head like a pirate’s. There was a belt over his apron, and a long knife stuck through the belt. The blade of the knife had been worn down by repeated sharpening, almost to rapier width.

Sebastian explained, “When the carcasses have been eviscerated and skinned, they’re brought up here to be butchered.”

Lines of men and women worked at wooden butcher blocks. The men mostly hacked, the women mostly carved. The stench up here was worse than the stench below. The very air was misty and red; muslin had been hung to keep flies at bay, but to no great effect. The muslin had once been ivory-colored, but was now spattered and brown.

“The offal is sorted into these vats,” Sebastian said, and nodded to the head slaughterman. They were now at the tripe tables, where the lowest of the workers had the job of scraping feces and worms from the animals’ intestines.

The slaughterman ordered one of the tables cleared, whereupon he lifted up a bucket and dumped its contents onto the surface for the visitors to inspect. They landed and spread with a thick, slopping sound.

There seemed little to distinguish this material from the guts, organs, and assorted entrails that lay all around them.

“More offal?” said Turner-Smith.

“Not quite,” said Sebastian. “The man knows his meat. And he tells me that these items are almost certainly human.”