“I couldn’t do anything less,” he admitted.
“Do you think you can find the man who did it?” Meg asked, and he could hear the hope in her, barely daring to rise. After a lifetime of disappointments he sensed she was scared to even make the request. He waited a moment before answering.
“I don’t know, Meg,” Nottingham replied truthfully. “But I’m going to try.”
“And I’m going to weep like an old woman after that door closes. Please, Richard, come and see me again. Just bring me better news next time.”
4
John Sedgwick gazed around the hovels of Queen Charlotte’s Court. Looking up he could see the pale blue of the sky and the faded lemon colour of the sun, but the light barely seemed to penetrate between the buildings to offer hope here.
Now the bodies had been taken to the jail, people had shuffled back to their homes and the small street seemed suddenly bare. The doors were closed and unblinking in front of him.
The yard was like the one where he had a room with his wife and their baby son, like the place off Kirkgate where he’d grown up, like so many other courts crammed into every free space between streets and behind houses. It was all most people could afford. But one day he’d have better.
When the time eventually came for Nottingham to quit his post, he hoped the Corporation would make him Constable. He was twenty-five now, old enough for the responsibility. He’d been the Constable’s man for seven years and deputy for the last two, doing more than his share of the dirty work and the investigations. He didn’t read or write, but he knew he could learn those things, and he possessed a good memory. He knew the boss had faith in him and his abilities. In the meantime he worked long hours, every day of the week, just as Nottingham himself had once had to do. It was the way things went.
Sedgwick’s long legs took him over to the first door. He knocked on the thin wood. There was no answer and he moved along, working methodically. He felt comfortable with people like these, flirting with the women and joking with the men, cajoling them gently into opening up. That empathy was his skill, the small, subtle prods that released thoughts and images.
This morning, though, all his charm seemed to fail him. No one admitted to knowing anything. He knew there’d have been noise until late, the roaring drunks, the fights that let off frustration at having nothing. That was the music of their lives here. But anything more they’d have ignored, either from fear or just because it was so different.
He continued around the court. A few people offered snippets that might help, but he could tell there was no substance to them. Only one old man offered anything of value, and even that was vague, a sort of stifled scream and blow he believed he’d heard in the middle of the night that roused him briefly from his rest.
“What time was it?” Sedgwick asked.
“I haven’t a bloody clue,” the man admitted, idly scratching a wild thatch of hair. “It were pitch dark, that’s all I know. I went back to sleep.”
Sedgwick sighed silently. It was almost nothing, but it was a place to start, and from there he’d be able to find more.
He’d come back and try again in the evening. Persistence paid off; he’d discovered that in the past. The Constable had once called him a terrier, and he liked the image, knowing how true it was. Once he caught the right scent he followed it, digging and worrying at things until he uncovered the truth.
He hadn’t given much thought to the bodies. They were dead, beyond help. He remembered the preacher from Saturday, of course, another tosspot full of words and promises for the hereafter. Sedgwick had no patience for sermons. He’d watched how his father worked himself into the grave, dying young as he tried to keep his family clothed and fed. No god he wanted to believe in would have let that happen. The curate might have talked about a better place when he tossed a sod on the coffin, but what better place for his father than alive, with the people who loved him? Given his druthers, Sedgwick would have left this preacher to the fists and let him take his chances in the here and now. But he’d had his orders, so he’d hustled the man away. Roughly.
The girl had been unfamiliar. He’d realised immediately that the Constable knew her though, and that she meant something special to him. At first he thought she might have been an old lover, but he dismissed that. To his knowledge Nottingham didn’t stray; if he did he was very discreet. And if he’d wanted a whore there were plenty of younger, prettier girls who’d willingly oblige a man of his rank.
He’d wait. If Nottingham wanted to tell him, he would. Meanwhile, there were other, more urgent answers that he needed.
5
The market was in full spate as Nottingham walked back down Briggate. Servants gossiped as they crowded around the improvised stalls, and mistresses were halted by the cries of the sellers with their boastful promises of the best goods at the cheapest prices.
When he was a boy the twice-weekly market had been a treasure trove. At the end of the day, while the traders packed up, he and other lads would scavenge, picking up all the rotting pieces of fruit and vegetables no one wanted to buy. It looked like a childish game, but it was all done with deadly seriousness. It meant survival. The food tasted bad, but it filled the belly and staved off aching hunger for another night or two. It had kept Nottingham and his mother clinging to life through a few bad winters.
Children still did it; if anything, there seemed to be more of them now. He could pick them out easily, dressed in clothes that were dirty rags, their eyes darting everywhere as they tried to remain invisible. Some of them would grow up to be cutpurses. A few would grow up and have jobs and families. But most of them, he knew full well, wouldn’t live long enough to find out.
Just below the Moot Hall, the building where the business of the city was transacted, he turned into a gap between two houses that opened into a cleanswept flagstone court. A series of small, neat stone buildings were set around it, surprisingly quiet after the raucous bustle of the street. He opened the closest door and walked in.
Two clerks were working, the only sound in the room the careful scratching of quills on paper. One of the men glanced up as light came into the room, eyes squinting as if he were emerging from a dream.
“I’m looking for Mr Rawlinson,” Nottingham announced.
“He’ll be in t’ warehouse,” the man answered, obviously eager to rest for a moment. “I’ll take thee back there, sir.”
“I’ll go back myself.”
The warehouse stood at the rear of the court, built against a thick wall. It had no windows, and the stout wooden door, now open, was usually firmly double-locked to protect Rawlinson’s valuable inventory from thieves.
He was a merchant, making a good living buying cloth at the market then reselling it to the Continent. The wool trade was Leeds’s prosperity and its reputation, and Leo Rawlinson was one of the men who kept the tide of money rolling in.
Nottingham had little more than a nodding acquaintance with him, but as far as he knew the man was honest enough — as honest as any man in business could afford to be. There’d never been any gossip about his character. He took his family to service every Sunday at Holy Trinity Church on Boar Lane and lived on the other side of the River Aire in a large new house he’d had built the year before on Meadow Lane.
The Constable knocked on the open door but didn’t enter. This was a merchant’s premises; he’d wait for an invitation.
Instead the man came out. He was short and running heavily to fat, his face blotchy red and jowly under a freshly-powdered wig. Rawlinson’s coat was of expensive pale broadcloth, only the best, fashionably cut without being ostentatious, the lapels carefully pressed flat against his chest, cuffs fastened with discreet gold
