CHAPTER 51

WHAT HAPPENED ON WYCH STREET

Jed got the scent of the Alp as he passed an offal pedlar’s stall in Clare Market, and it was greatly to his credit that he did so since his attention was more than half distracted by a brimming crock full of old bone ends and butcher’s discards sending invisible tendrils of rank temptation across the alley at precisely the level of his nose.

Hodge heard him bark and caught the urgency in the dog’s tone. He was three floors above the street, which was a crowded and unsavoury mixture of meat sellers’ shops and greengrocers’ stalls so higgled in beneath ancient overhung gables and sagging casement windows that there was scarcely barely room to breathe, let alone pass through with any degree of ease or dispatch. Hodge immediately slung his hook across a narrow side alley and tugged it secure against the lip of brick it had found, and then with no hesitation swung across the short gap and walked himself down the crumbling wall, nimble as a salty topsail man coming down the foremast on a flat calm. He reached the ground and shook a curve back up the rope, freeing the grapple with a practised tug and catching it as it fell out of the sky.

He jogged out into the bustle of the market, still looping the cord in his hands, eyes searching for the dog.

He caught sight of the brindled tail disappearing in the direction of Wych Street and ran after it, buffeting shoppers and traders who were unwary enough to get out of his way or deaf enough to ignore his shouted entreaties to.

“Make a hole there!”

There was no question that Jed had the scent. He was humming with tension, his whole body vibrating with it, tense as a bowstring. Wych Street was a lot less crowded than the market and Hodge caught up with him halfway down from St Clement Danes.

“Where?” he said.

Jed mounted the step and entered a dingy shop-front beneath a sign reading “M. A. Ormes–Dealer in Coal”. Hodge followed him into a dark space which was as quiet, sooty and light-starved as any mine. An elderly man was propped between two piles of sacks, tallying an account book by the glimmer of a single candle.

“Do you have rooms?” said Hodge, gesturing at the stair at the back of the shop.

“Who’s asking?” said the proprietor.

“The Law,” said Hodge, and showed him a badge which he pocketed before the man had time to look closely at it. “Any new tenants?”

“No,” said the man. “Just the missis and myself on the next floor and then a nice young couple, no trouble, on the top. Been here three years, never a peep out of ’em. What kind of law are you…?”

“The busy kind,” said Hodge. “You stay put.”

Hodge took the stairs three at a time, Jed bounding ahead of him. At the top of the house was a closed door. By the time Hodge got to the landing, Jed had his nose to the crack under it and was inhaling noisily, as if trying to suck the contents of the room on the other side bodily across the floor.

Hodge did not stop. His blackthorn stick was in one hand and a knife in the other as he went through the door boot first. The cheap wood splintered as the lock tore free, and he leapt inside.

The room was clean but meanly furnished. There was a small grate with cooking paraphernalia ranged around it, a deal table with two mismatched chairs and an oilcloth tacked to it on which were laid place settings for two; there was one moderately easy chair leaking horsehair from a split covering of threadbare velveteen, and behind a thin curtain of cheapest cotton, much laundered so that the original sprigged roses which had once splashed cheerfully across it were now more like the faded ghosts of flowers past, was a bed.

“Come out, I say; by oak, ash and thorn I shall have you, you bastard!”

And he ripped the curtain aside.

There was no Alp.

But there had been.

The dead woman was proof of that.

And the Alp was long gone, at least half a day from the look of her. She lay on her back in a rumpled shift which was more than half off her body, her mouth open and white-lipped as if she had died between one breath and another, her eyes open and unseeing in a face already showing the beeswax pallor of the long dead. Because her shift was rucked up, he could see the blood in her body had given way to the insistent pull of gravity so that the underside of her limbs were a mottled bluey-purple against the grey sheets, a startling imperfection when compared with the idealised pale marble quality that death had brought to her skyward features, a paleness caused by the draining of that very blood from even the smallest capillaries of her skin.

Even though she bore all the signs of a none too recent death, Hodge still unaccountably found his hands on her shoulders shaking her, trying to wake her.

He heard himself saying “No, no” repeatedly, all trace of exultation gone from his voice. He felt the sting in his eyes and the catch in his throat, and he knew that somehow something had broken inside him. In a long and steadfast life of adventure and service he had certainly met failure before, and he had seen death in mind-scarringly worse guises than this case. There was no reason he could have given for why something cracked deep within him, why failing to catch this particular breath-stealer was so insupportable, but maybe it had something to do with the long and painstaking search, the lack of sleep, the slow and unmarked erosion of his vital energy which resulted from following his tireless dog. Maybe it is not the last straw which breaks backs, but all the ones that went before it. Whatever it was, Hodge broke.

“Annie?” said a voice behind him. “Oh my God!”

He turned to see a youngish man in a clerk’s tight jacket standing in the doorway with a piece of wet fish wrapped in a damp twist of newspaper in his hand.

The hand opened in shock and the fish slapped to the floor.

“What have you done?” yelled the man as he launched himself across the room. “Murder! MURDER!”

The clerk wrenched Hodge off the bed and threw him into the wall. Hodge did not defend himself. Jed snarled into the attack, but Hodge waved his hand.

“No, Jed! Stay.”

The clerk stared in horror at his wife’s lifeless body.

Hodge said nothing. He felt quite exhausted by the three words with which he’d stilled the dog. For the first time in his life, he could not think what to do next, nor could he bring himself to care much about it.

The clerk was six inches shorter than Hodge, and half as wide. He was thin as a pen. He came at him in a fury, snatching up the poker as he did so.

He caught Hodge a glancing blow on the side of the head, and then another less well-placed one on the neck.

Hodge did not defend himself.

The clerk kicked Hodge’s legs out from under him, and was about to hit him again when the coal seller and his son came through the door. They took in the ghastly scene with horrified indrawn breaths, and then came across the room in a flurry of oaths and boots and set about kicking the life out of the fallen Terrier Man.

Hodge lay there, one eye disappearing behind a bloodied swelling, feeling the blows as if they were happening to someone a long way off. Someone who deserved them. Someone who welcomed the oblivion they would inevitably bring.

Jed whined and snarled, and pawed at the floor, but Hodge held him with the remaining power of his eye. “No,” he croaked. “Go.”

He could stop Jed attacking, but persuading the terrier to leave him was beyond his powers.

“Stomp him,” shouted the coal-man’s son enthusiastically. “Stomp the life out of the murdering bastard!”

Hodge turned halfway round, and even managed a kind of weak smile through his split lips as he saw the hobnailed boot rising above his eye.

The boot never landed. A whirlwind entered the room and grabbed the son by the collar, tossing him across the room into the wall. The coal merchant turned and met a fist like a hammer that dropped him on the spot, and in the next instant the clerk found his throat gripped so tight that he could not breathe as Hodge’s rescuer lifted him bodily off the ground and held him there, his boots kicking air as he took in the scene.

Hodge looked up at The Smith.

“Too late,” he said thickly, looking at the dead woman’s feet which were all he could see sticking over the edge of the mattress from where he lay, mashed into the angle where the floorboards met the wall.

The Smith looked down at him like a thundercloud.

“Just in time, I’d say,” he growled.

He let the clerk go and looked at him. The clerk’s frenzied grief drained from his face as he met the banked-up fire in The Smith’s eyes.

“This was your wife?” said The Smith.

The clerk nodded.

“Then my sorrow for your loss,” said The Smith. “You will remember how happy she was, and that you parted on loving terms. You will believe she died without pain, sleeping, and that she always told you to find another and make her as happy as you made her should she die before you. You will mourn the year out and, come next summer, will feel that she has let you go and now watches over you with joy. You will not be diminished by her death, but strengthened by the happy memory of her. You will forget I or my friend or his dog were ever here. And now you will sleep for ten minutes.”

The Smith waited as the man sneezed, and then led him to the easy chair and lowered him into it.

“What are you?” said a voice hoarse with dread.

The Smith turned and saw the coal-man’s son cowering against the wall.

“What do you see here?” said The Smith pointing at his eyes. The son looked into them and after a spasm of choking, relaxed.

“Downstairs you go,” The Smith said. “And you too forget us.”

The young man sneezed and stumbled out of the room like a man sleepwalking.

The coal seller stirred and found his chin held by The Smith.

“And you fell on the stairs running up them when you heard the poor gentleman here call for help. Which he will do in eight minutes or so. Go and sit on the landing. And again, forget us entirely.”

The Smith watched him stumble away. Then he crossed to the dead woman and felt her chest.

“Broken ribs,” he said. “You found your Alp.”

“Not in time,” said Hodge, who had not moved.

The Smith straightened the girl’s shift and made her look a little more decent. He sighed. Then he turned and looked at Hodge.

“Can you stand?”

Hodge shook his head.

“I’ve half a mind to leave you here with your self-pity,” said The Smith. “Only we don’t have men to spare.”

He picked up Hodge’s knife and stuck his cudgel in his belt. Then he bent, grabbed the Terrier Man around the middle and walked over to the window. He peered out and saw the flat roof beyond. He nodded at Jed.

“We’ll come back and pick up the trail later.” And with a disgusted snort, he carried Hodge out of the room and past two sets of now unseeing eyes, back into the anonymity of the street below.