River of Bones Read online

  ‘Don’t fuss, McCurley. Fleet Street isn’t far from here, I’m not seriously injured, and a policeman at my side won’t help matters much.’

  ‘How would they know I’m a policeman? I’m not wearing a uniform. In fact, I rarely am, in case you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘But everyone knows you are a police inspector.’

  ‘All the better. The drunks won’t dare attack you.’ He came to a halt and motioned in the direction of the slums. ‘Why are you doing this? Why put yourself in danger?’

  I shrugged, and walked on. Every step jostled my brain.

  ‘I can’t imagine the slum dwellers are paying you much.’

  ‘I’m not asking them for money.’ I reached Hanover Street and increased my tempo. The dark thing in the corner of my vision grew. Stupid Watchman Hooper must have given me a concussion.

  ‘You want to get rid of me,’ McCurley observed.

  ‘I want to stop your barrage of questions.’

  ‘My concern is justified.’

  We entered Fleet Street and found the same group of children guarded by the same three women. They had a bucket and wet rags, but instead of tea, they were giving them beer. It did not surprise me.

  McCurley was my silent shadow as I re-tied the handkerchiefs around my head and face, and stepped up to the huddled group of coughing and moaning children. The youngest had no pulse. I pulled up a bluish eyelid and tapped her eyeball. There was no reaction.

  ‘She is dead,’ I said to the women, and got defeated nods in return. McCurley bunched the brim of his hat in his fist, his expression that of a man who was nursing an old knife wound.

  ‘You haven’t seen my bag, have you?’ I quietly asked no one in particular.

  ‘It’s in my room,’ one of the women said with a trace of reluctance, then led me up a narrow set of creaking stairs. McCurley followed and I was glad of it. My vision was growing increasingly unsteady. Nausea crept up my throat.

  The room was home to many. I counted nine pallets. One was occupied by three children. They were all sick. I examined them, but they weren’t as bad off as the ones outside.

  ‘Why have you put the others out on the street?’ I asked.

  ‘They’d jus’ make the others sick.’ She pointed at the children on the pallet.

  ‘They all have typhus. Bring the other children back up.’

  She grunted, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and handed me my bag. It was considerably lighter, but I refrained from opening it and checking its contents. As McCurley and I were turning to leave, she tied a strip of white fabric to the window frame. The mourning cloth hung limply in the stale breeze.

  I felt nothing but exhaustion. My capacity for grief was used up.

  ‘Give me your bag,’ McCurley said on the dark stairwell, holding out his hand.

  I shook my head. I always grew more stubborn when I wasn’t feeling well.

  ‘Then give me your hand. It’s slippery here. The steps are rotten.’

  I put my hand in his and we walked down slowly, he descending a step ahead of me, grasping the mouldy wall for lack of a banister.

  Halfway down, one of the steps gave way and my footing slipped. McCurley threw out an arm, blocking me from falling. He steadied me and set me back on my feet.

  He frowned. Nodded upstairs. ‘Why are you helping them?’

  Mute, I shrugged again.

  There was something in his expression that gave me pause. Was it disappointment?

  I exhaled a sigh. ‘I don’t know how you can even ask me this. The mortality here is twenty per cent. Twenty of every hundred people die early of hunger and disease! And no one cares. No one. One of the most squalid tenement houses in Ward Seven is owned and kept by a prominent member of the Board of Health. He doesn’t give a damn, either. All that our government officials have to say about this is, “We need better immigration control!” or “Slums need to be demolished because they are a breeding place for evil!” The Bureau of Statistics of Labor and the Board of Health regularly send men into Wards Six and Seven to classify the occupations of the population and assign health status. They count and describe and file away the lives of thousands of people, but only after thoroughly prettifying their data. And then they discuss the fate of these people in meetings, and issue reports of their own efforts for the newspapers. But is any good ever done? Is anything accomplished? Never! Did you see the sheer number of mourning cloths?’ Furious, I thrust my fist toward the room behind us and regretted the movement instantly. The stairwell seemed to tilt away from me.

  Lids at half-mast, eyes unfocused, McCurley nodded. ‘This is the way I grew up. In a slum just like this. Worse than this, even. New York’s Lower East Side. Drunks everywhere. Babies born alcoholics. Children drinking gin from milk bottles.’

  I was speechless. ‘How did you escape?’

  ‘My mother didn’t touch a drop. I guess that’s what saved me and my siblings. In the beginning, anyway.’ He took another slow step down the stairs and stopped. I leant my shoulder against the wall.

  ‘It all changed when our father…’ He cleared his throat. ‘That’s what we were supposed to call him. I can’t be sure if he fathered any of us. Our lives took a turn when he… He wasn’t violent, not like others,who beat their wives and children. He mostly just dozed and mumbled and soiled himself. One day he swung a poker at a man who wasn’t there. A man he’d made up in his alcohol-addled mind. The hook got stuck in Mother’s temple. He snored as she died. I took my sisters and my brother away that day. My brother was only a babe. He was the first to die.’

  A muscle in McCurley’s temple bounced. ‘If we’d had someone like you, my siblings might have survived. So don’t let anyone — least of all a man like Hooper — tell you that what you are doing is hopeless.’

  He tore himself away and into the sweltering stink of Fleet Street.

  With a heavy heart, I stepped onto the pavement and looked up. Something…wasn’t…right. I stumbled to a halt. Dropped my bag.

  McCurley turned and watched me trying to make sense of my surroundings. The old woman sitting in a doorway mending a shirt. The scrawl of chalk on a window sash. The ball made of rags. It all felt strangely familiar, but…

  ‘I need to go home,’ I croaked.

  ‘Are you feeling unwell? You’re as white as a sheet.’

  ‘I… I don’t know where I am.’

  3

  McCurley was grinding his teeth all the way from Ward Six to City Hospital, and from there to Savin Hill. I didn’t need to turn my head to see it. Tension was rolling off him in waves, despite my repeated reassurances that my concussion wasn’t serious, that I definitely did not need to see a doctor, and that my sense of location had been muddled for only a few minutes.

  He ignored every single one of my protests.

  Still, I was shocked by my condition. I’d never experienced an entire loss of orientation before. My surroundings had felt familiar. Strongly so. But I had somehow…misplaced the map.

  ‘How is the boy?’ I asked by way of distraction.

  ‘He is well,’ he said, as he helped me climb out of the hansom cab.

  ‘You aren’t telling me something.’

  His expression shuttered.

  ‘Dammit, McCurley!’ I yanked my bag from his arm with a little too much force and teetered sideways. ‘Tell me how the boy is, or else I’ll imagine he is suffering horribly.’

  He scanned me with narrowed eyes. ‘If I was a doctor and all my patients were as pigheaded as you, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from shooting a hole in the knee of every one of them.’ He curled his arm around my waist. ‘Ten steps to your house, probably fifteen to your bed. Walk. Now.’

  ‘You are an ogre!’ I growled and put one foot in front of the other. It took some focus, but I managed to reach the house without tripping.

  McCurley pushed open the door, and called into the hallway, ‘Hello?’

  The clanking and bustling noises from the kitchen stopped. McCurley deposited me
in Margery’s capable hands with the words, ‘She has a concussion. The doctor ordered her to stay in bed for two days. Make sure she does.’

  ‘You’ve seen a doctor?’ Margery eyed me from head to toe. ‘Never thought I’d see the day.’

  ‘I insisted,’ McCurley supplied, and then turned to me. ‘I’ll tell you about the boy tomorrow.’ With that, he left.

  Margery pushed out her chin. ‘Did you run into another band of ruffians?’

  ‘No. I was arrested. And now I need a bath. I’m crawling with lice.’

  * * *

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t stay in bed,’ McCurley said when he found me the next afternoon sitting at the kitchen table, pitting plums with Klara. Margery was washing jars. Zach stirred a pot of simmering cranberries. Rather suspicious. Margery would never ask him to help with the cooking, or even light the range for her. I was sure she’d told him to stay nearby in case I needed to be hogtied and carried back to bed.

  I tipped an imaginary hat to McCurley. ‘I was bored out of my mind. And my head is perfectly well. Sit. There’s a knife. Pits go in here, plums over there.’

  Klara was giving him a toothy grin, pointing to knife, bowl with pits, and pot with plum halves as I spoke.

  He sat, and got to work.

  ‘Dare I ask what Hooper is doing?’ I said.

  ‘Suspended. How is the head?’

  ‘Fine. As I already said. How is the boy?’

  Zach cleared his throat and demonstratively knocked a wooden spoon against the side of the large cranberry pot. Margery set a clean jar down with a loud clonk. Both seemed a little…vexed? Puzzled, I regarded first them and then McCurley. ‘Er… Can I offer you tea or…something?’

  ‘No, thank you.’ He stuffed a plum into his mouth.

  I kept staring at him until he dropped his gaze and continued cutting plums in half.

  ‘The boy,’ I reminded him.

  He cleared his throat. ‘A teacher from the school for deaf children tried to communicate with him in sign language but told me that the boy doesn’t seem to know it. Nor can he write or read. There was nothing about him or his clothes that would tell us where he came from. I tried to show him a map, but he wouldn’t even look at it.’

  ‘What about the corpse?’

  ‘Unidentified white male, around forty-five years old. The post-mortem has been postponed to Friday. The medical examiners are still…’ McCurley threw a glance around the room, and lowered his voice, ‘…degassing him. With a lancet. He suffered extensive internal injuries.’

  ‘The post-mortem surgeon knows that without cutting him open? Was the man beaten to death?’

  McCurley shook his head. ‘It appears he fell from a great height. The gaping wound at the back of his head did him in. Most likely.’

  ‘Any signs he was pushed?’

  He shrugged. ‘The state of the body is…’

  Klara focused at McCurley with utmost interest.

  ‘Basically, he is one big bruise. And…rather…ripe.’

  ‘Maggots?’ I asked quietly, and received a nod. ‘He’s been dead for a week or two?’

  ‘A week, perhaps.’

  Zach cleared his throat again. Margery finished clonking the jars around, and said sharply, ‘There will be no such talk in my kitchen.’

  I couldn’t hide a grin. ‘My apologies.’ After risking a quick look at the back of her head, I added, ‘But decomposition is a natural process. Zachary’s compost heap is doing the exact same thing.’

  Zach froze. He threw me a glance that begged me to leave him out of this. Margery slapped a dishtowel against the edge of the sink, whirled around, and propped a fist on her hip. ‘Elizabeth Arlington, there are several natural processes I do not ever wish to have discussed in my kitchen.’

  The corner of Zach’s mouth curled. Hastily, he turned away to hide a smile from his wife.

  ‘All right,’ I said innocently, turned to McCurley and pointed at the plum in his hand. ‘That shouldn’t go into our preserve.’

  He frowned. ‘It’s only a worm. And it’s tiny.’

  ‘Actually, it’s a butterfly larva. And putting it into the preserve would be disgusting.’

  ‘You find this disgusting, but not a decomp—’ A glance from Margery shut him up. ‘Still only a worm,’ he muttered and flicked it expertly into the bowl with the pits.

  ‘It’s not a worm. It’s an arthropod, not an annelid. Those are two entirely different phyla.’

  McCurley placed down his knife, eyebrows tilted. ‘Are they now.’

  ‘It has been so for millennia. I am right and you are wrong, and you know it.’

  ‘It happens every once in a while.’ He calmly continued pitting plums.

  After several long moments of trying not to laugh, I said, ‘I assume an inspector of the Boston Police Department doesn’t offer his excellent plum-pitting skills merely to talk about a witness. You came here to ask me something.’

  Margery interrupted. ‘Hurry up over there. The cranberries are nearly ready to go into the jars.’

  I peeked into the large basket that stood on the table. The bottom was still covered with a layer or two of fruits. ‘Another ten minutes, I reckon.’ Then I turned to McCurley. ‘Am I right?’

  He grinned and shook his head. ‘Indeed, M’lady, it is as you say.’ Then he turned somber. ‘I need to question the boy, but obviously, that’s…quite problematic. I was hoping you would help me. But what bothers me is… He needs a place to live until we find his family. I enquired at the Boston School for Deaf Children. They can only take in five boarders and are already full. But they agreed to put the boy up with the others for the time being. I left him there last night, but they returned him to Headquarters early this morning. At four o’clock, as the sergeant told me. The headmaster claimed the boy had misbehaved and would no longer be tolerated. I found him in a cell, curled up in the farthest corner, howling. It took me the best part of the morning to get him to my home. He can stay for a few days while I try to find an alternative. But since the recession…’ McCurley sank against the backrest. Groaning, he raked a hand through his hair. ‘Orphanages, asylums, almshouses, workhouses — everything is overcrowded.’

  ‘If you put him in any of those, he’ll never recover.’

  ‘I know that.’ McCurley went back to slicing plums. ‘The boy is terrified. Too terrified to give me the information I need to find out where he came from, what happened to him, and who the man is he was found with. There were no papers, no wallet, no valuables or anything else on the body, or on the boy, that could help identify them. And I need to know what he saw.’

  ‘Why can’t he stay at your place?’

  McCurley pulled in a breath, and methodically gutted plum after plum. ‘The landlord has increased the rent, and seeing that there’s another tenant, now he wants even more. I asked that the guardianship for the boy be transferred from the Boston Police Department to me. That helps with the budget, but it won’t be enough.

  ‘What’s up with that boy?’ Margery asked.

  ‘He was found next to a corpse,’ McCurley said. ‘He’s deaf, malnourished, and he’s experienced severe hardship. He’s scared of people. Not children, though. I got the feeling he wants to protect Billy and Líadáin from me.’

  ‘We will take him in.’

  I opened my mouth and clicked it shut. Margery’s stance was decisive. Spine straight, shoulders thrown back, chin up. Gooseflesh prickled across my body. She was not a woman who would randomly take in orphans. She wasn’t even good with children. Or people in general. She was a person who always stood high up on the battlements of her soul castle, scanning for threats. Ready to shoot whoever dared approach. And now she was practically rolling down her drawbridge for a stranger.

  Suddenly, all eyes were on me. Blinking, I sat back. ‘You want me to shelter the boy and interrogate on him?’

  McCurley held up a hand. ‘No. It wouldn’t cross my mind to ask that of you. I need your help just to ask him simple q
uestions. My plan was to… Well, I guess I ran out of plans. He can live with me for now. I’ll find a solution.’

  ‘The top floor is empty,’ Zachary murmured.

  I grunted. I had no problem with offering the boy a home. There was only one thing… ‘If we take in the boy, you must agree to share every bit of information with me. I’ll need to read your case notes. I’ll need to know your theories, even the wild ones you’d never write down. I’ll need to know how much the boy is involved in the death of that man, and whether I am putting my family in danger. You know what happened the last time I attracted the attention of a murderer.’

  ‘A small boy can’t be a murderer!’ Margery snapped.

  ‘Of course not. But what if the man was killed, and the boy saw it happen? We have to consider the risks.’

  ‘Officially, the boy is living with me. I won’t give anyone your address if you take him in.’

  ‘We did say that already, didn’t we?’ Margery snapped her apron straight and elbowed her husband.

  ‘We’ll take him,’ Zach said quickly.

  McCurley waited for my nod, then dipped his head. His shoulders sagged in relief. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘You could say something about the case. Share information.’ I suggested with a smile.

  He smiled back. ‘You and I will meet regularly to discuss the progress of the investigation. And I will inform Professor Goodman right away that you will be witnessing the upcoming examinations of the body.’

  Surprised, I lifted an eyebrow. That was fast. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.’

  That caused some consternation. ‘What?’

  I shrugged. ‘Postmortems are endlessly fascinating.’ Then I turned to Klara. ‘Looks like the boy from the police station might come to live with us. What do you think?’

  She beamed.

  I clapped my hands together. ‘All right, then. We take the boy until his family is found. Margery can use some help with the preserves anyway. Hum…’ I popped a plum into my mouth, planning the next steps.