What Angels Fear

Chapter 28

Sebastian met Jumpin’ Jack Cochran and his two-man crew in a dark byway just off Highfield Lane. A cold wind had come up, tossing the bare branches of the elm trees and silhouetting against a storm-swirled sky the church’s spire just visible above the slate roofs of the nearby row of houses.

“Don’t kin why yer so feverish to tag along,” said Jumpin’ Jack, hawking up a mouthful of spittle that he shot downwind. “ ’Tain’t as if the good doctor’s affeared we cain’t be relied on t’ deliver the goods.”

The grave robber was an incredibly tall, lean man somewhere between forty and sixty, with deep-set, narrowed eyes and rawboned features and a good two weeks’ of graying beard grizzling his cheeks and chin. But he was a natty dresser, with a bright red kerchief tied around his neck and striped trousers that showed only a hint of mud around the cuffs. The resurrection business was a lucrative one.

Sebastian simply returned the man’s quizzical stare and made no attempt to put his reasons into words. This man made his living stealing dead bodies from churchyards. He would never be able to understand the compulsion that had brought Sebastian here, the belief that his responsibility for the desecration of Rachel York’s grave somehow obligated him to be there to witness it.

They left the resurrection men’s cart and horse in the care of one of the lads and set off down a narrowed, darkened alley. They walked softly, their long-handled tools wrapped in sacking to prevent them from clanking together. In a nearby yard, a dog began to bark, deep, throaty howls that blew away with the wind. They kept walking.

Rachel York had been laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Stephen’s, an ancient sandstone pile that rose up suddenly before them. Hundreds of years of internments had raised the level of its graveyard so far above the street that the swelling soil had to be contained by a stone wall some three feet high. And still it bulged out, pestilent and seemingly filled to bursting.

Along the top of the wall ran a high iron fence topped with a menacing row of spikes. But at the end of the alley lay a narrow side gate, half-overgrown with ivy, which someone had been paid to leave unlocked. The same person had obviously been compensated for oiling the gate’s hinges. No telltale squeak shrieked out into the stillness of the night as they slipped quietly inside.

A foul stench hung in the air, dank and vaguely, sickeningly sweet. The other men moved as if blind, only risking an occasional flash of their shuttered lantern as they crept through the dark, moonless night. But Sebastian could see almost too well the scattered gray headstones and looming arches of tombs, the occasional pale glow of a skull or long bone protruding here and there from the muddy earth. The cold night air filled with sounds, the wind rising through the bare branches of the trees, the stealthy, muffled padding of feet on a muddy path and the hushed, strained breathing of nervous men.

“Here ’tis,” whispered Jumpin’ Jack, his lantern flashing for an instant on a mound of naked, freshly turned soil. Unwrapping their tools, the two men set to digging, shovels scraping softly as they sank deeper and deeper into the earth.

The stench was stronger here. Lifting his head, Sebastian realized it came from the long, half-filled trench of the poor hole, half-lost in the gloomy shadows of the far corner. In the distance, the dog was still barking. From somewhere nearer at hand came the slow, steady drip, drip of water.

The thwunk of metal striking wood echoed around the yard. Jumpin’ Jack let out a grunt of satisfaction and said, “Got it.”

Sebastian forced himself to look down into that dark hole. The resurrection men were experts at their business. Rather than exhuming the entire coffin, they’d simply dug down to the head. Using one of the shovels as a pry, Jumpin’ Jack levered open the top of the casket. Then the young boy with them—a stocky lad of about sixteen named Ben—jumped down into the hole. Wheezing a string of curses under his breath, he slowly eased what was left of Rachel York from the coffin, the still, white-clad body showing ghostly pale against the darkness of the turned earth.

Squatting down beside the corpse, Jumpin’ Jack slipped a knife from the sheath at his side and began with swift, practiced strokes to cut away her shroud.

Sebastian’s hand reached out to grip the man’s arm, stopping him. “What are you doing?”

Jumpin’ Jack hawked another mouthful of spittle, his pale eyes glittering in the darkness as he spat into the gaping hole beside them. “Ain’t no law agin cartin’ a dead body through the streets. But ye can win yerself seven years in Botany Bay, if’n yer caught with a stiff in graveclothes.”

Sebastian nodded and took a step back.

They stripped the body of everything except the band wound lengthwise around her head to hold her jaw closed. Then, leaving the naked body lying in the muddy path, they shoved the grave clothes back into the coffin, closed the lid, and quickly shoveled the earth back onto the empty grave.

“You there, Ben,” said Jumpin’ Jack, squatting down to grasp the body’s bare white shoulders. “Grab her feet.”

Sebastian collected the shovels and the lantern, while the other two men lifted the body between them, one bare arm flopping down to drag limply in the mud as they set off toward the gate.

From somewhere in the distance came the cry of the watch, One o’clock and all is well.

They carried Rachel York’s body into the small stone outbuilding behind Paul Gibson’s surgery and laid her on a flat granite slab with drains cut around the outer edges in a way that reminded Sebastian, uncomfortably, of an ancient sacrificial altar he’d once seen in the mountains of Anatolia.

He paid Jumpin’ Jack fifteen pounds, which was the going price for a “half-long” and more than a good housemaid could earn in a year. As the resurrection men’s cart rattled off into the night, Paul Gibson thrust home the bolt on the outside door, then limped over to hang his oil lamp from the chain suspended above the table.

Golden light flooded the room, throwing the two men’s shadows tall and unnaturally thin across the rough plaster of the wall behind them. “Nasty piece of work, this,” he said after a moment.

Sebastian had to force himself to look down at what lay on the slab before them. Rachel York had been a beautiful woman, her body long limbed and gracefully made, slim of waist and hip, with full, ripe breasts. Now her soft flesh was deadly pale, and smeared with the mud from her grave. But he could see other marks, bruises left by hard fingers digging into her wrists. More bruises, on her arms, her cheeks. And ugly slashes across her neck so deep that one might almost imagine her attacker’s objective had been to sever her neck. Reaching out, Paul Gibson untied the band around her head and her jaw fell open. Sebastian looked away.

“It would have been better if I could have examined her before she was bathed and laid out and dumped in the mud,” Paul said. “Much will have been lost.”

Sebastian didn’t like the way the small, stone-walled outbuilding smelled. Or the way it felt. He knew a sudden, driving urge to get away. “How long will it take?”

Paul Gibson reached for what looked like a butcher’s apron and tied it around his neck and waist. “I might be able to tell you something in the morning, although, of course, the full postmortem will take longer.”

Sebastian nodded, the smell of death so thick in his nostrils that each breath became a labor. He realized that Paul Gibson was looking at him strangely. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard?” said the doctor.

“Heard what?”

“This afternoon, your father walked into the Queen Square Public Office and confessed to the murder of Rachel York.”