“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.”
EIGHT
Another day, another town, another playhouse. On their arrival, Whitlock and the actors had gone straight to their lodgings while Sayers had arranged the transfer of their stage properties to the Prince of Wales. They were to replace a show called
Things went rather better at the lodging house, where Whitlock had taken the master bedroom. The room above the bay window went to Ricks and his wife, a former soprano who now played mother roles and Shakespearean dames. Everyone else set their bags down in the rooms that Mrs. Mack, the landlady, had chosen to assign to them. The stagehands, by their own choice, were billeted in rooms above a public house closer to the theater.
There were several hours to be passed until the matinee, and the company chose to spend them in various ways. Some went out to look at the town. Some gathered in the sitting room for idle conversation, while others read alone. James Caspar, seemingly indifferent to his disgrace, went upstairs and threw himself on his bed and slept.
A few minutes after noon, he awoke, changed into a large and threadbare Oriental dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen to beg some hot tea from Mrs. Mack. Mrs. Mack was not easily charmed, but Caspar seemed to manage. Gulliford, the Low Comedian, heard him on the stairs as he was taking the tea back to his room. He went out to accost Caspar, but he was too late; Caspar was back in his room with the door already closed.
Gulliford went to the door and knocked. At Caspar’s response of “Come in, if you must,” he opened it and went inside.
It was a bare room, with an iron bedstead and a table and not much of anything else. Caspar’s stage clothes had been hung up to dry on the front of the wardrobe, before which stood his cabin trunk. Caspar was rummaging inside this, and as Gulliford closed the door behind him came up with a glass preserving jar. He appeared to have wrapped it in a sock, for safety during transit.
“She’s awake, then,” Gulliford said, as Caspar set his jar down on the table and pulled up a chair. He gave the Low Comedian a baleful glance and continued about his business, moving with painful slowness as if every part of him gave hurt. From the pocket of the dressing gown he took a fork, which he wiped up and down on his lapel.
Gulliford said, “I’ve only got one question I want to ask you.” He placed his hands on the table and positioned himself in front of Caspar, where he couldn’t be ignored.
“Why do you do it?” he said.
The jar contained something pickled in murky liquid. Caspar sprang open the clips that sealed on the lid, and poked around inside with his fork.
“Do what?” he said.
“We’re a humble company,” Gulliford said. “I can understand if you despise your place in it. But you act as if you despise the very profession we’re in.”
Caspar speared a morsel of something that resembled a small, dark sausage. “My head hurts,” he said. “Go away.”
