The relentless banging pulled Nottingham groggily from sleep. Once he’d identified the sound he slid uneasily from the bed, reaching across automatically to grab the short, thick cudgel from his coat pocket. The pearly light outside showed barely dawn and the floor was bitterly cold under his feet. A thin wind out of the west whistled through gaps in the window frame.
Wrapping a threadbare old cloak around himself, he wrenched the door open before the pounding roused the entire street. Standing before him, flushed and still panting, was John Sedgwick, the lanky, eager young man he’d made his deputy two years before.
“We’ve got a murder, boss,” he announced breathlessly. “Two bodies.”
“Two?” Nottingham asked, his mind coming rapidly awake as the air touched his face. “Where?”
“Queen Charlotte’s Yard, behind the workhouse.”
The Constable sighed. This was no way to start the day. He began issuing the necessary orders.
“Right,” he commanded. “Make sure someone’s looking after the body. Then go and wake the coroner. Ask him to meet me there.”
Sedgwick gave a wry grin. “He’s going to love that at this time of the morning.”
Nottingham smiled darkly. Edward Brogden, the coroner, was a fastidious little man who also served as the city’s Sergeant-at-Mace, preening in his self-importance, his wardrobe and the money his father had left him. He despised the poor, always ready to declaim that they were only in that state because they refused to work hard and better themselves.
But the law insisted he view every suspicious death, so Nottingham was going to take him to a filthy street where he’d complain constantly, cover his nose to try vainly to keep out the overpowering stench of life and death, then leave as soon as he was able. It was going to be a grim pleasure.
“The bugger’ll live.”
Sedgwick gave a wheezing laugh, and strode away with his long, powerful lope. Richard Nottingham dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before, grabbed the dry heel of a loaf for his breakfast, and left the house soundlessly, to walk back into town.
There was a faint crispness under the dawn air, a sense of seasons beginning to change. Another month would probably see the first frost of the year. Wisps of smoke were already rising from a few chimneys on Vicar Lane as servants lit the early fires in the grand houses, and in the distance he could hear the muted sound of weavers setting up their trestles for the Tuesday coloured cloth market on Briggate.
Nottingham had lived on Briggate once, in a grand house near the top end where it met the Head Row. He still passed it every day. He’d been just eight when his father had discovered that his wife had taken a lover. He didn’t understand it at the time, but he remembered the furore, his father yelling madly at his mother to get her body from his house and take her bastard son with her. Afterwards came the confusion of where to go, how to live… and then the hunger that governed their lives.
He still remembered his father faintly, although he’d done everything he could to push the man from his mind. Charles Nottingham had been a gentleman of high pretension and loud airs, a drinker and gambler who often stayed out all night — or all week, if the whim took him — with little regard for his wife and child. In his cups his temper would rise; he’d beat the servants, and even thrash his son. And when it finally suited him to be outraged by his wife’s behaviour, he’d thrown out his family, even though she’d brought all the money to the marriage. But she had no rights; they all rested with him. Someone had told him that his father had left the city not long after, gone with his new mistress to join rich London society. In the sour tenements of Leeds, the boy and his mother had enjoyed no such choice.
He passed the grim face of the workhouse, took a deep breath and entered the maze of small alleys off Lady Lane.
Queen Charlotte’s Yard was a majestic name for the row of hovels cramped on top of each other behind a thin archway that led off another small, ruined street. The houses struggled out of the mud as if they’d exhausted their strength, one, sometimes two, decrepit storeys tall, places of plunging, desperate poverty. The kind of places he knew all too clearly, where damp streams coursed down the walls and sewage backed up on to the floors after a heavy rain.
A small crowd had gathered, brought together by the dire spectacle of death. Nottingham forced his way between them, and they shrank away as they recognised his face. The Constable was authority, he was the city, and his presence never brought good news for them.
The bodies had been pushed face down against one of the houses, then roughly covered in rubbish and excrement so only the limbs showed. It was a man and a woman, the male on top in a splayed parody of animal fornication. Nottingham reached down and touched the woman’s small hand for a moment, her flesh clammy and unyielding against his fingers. Dead a few hours, he decided. He’d wait for the coroner before uncovering them.
“Who found these two?” Nottingham raised his voice and looked around the people.
A scrawny man with long, matted hair shuffled forward. He had a pale face under a unkempt beard, his coat torn, dark breeches baggy over his thin thighs. Mould was growing in the seams of his coat, and dust, like beggars’ velvet, lay on the nap.
“I did, sir,” he answered, his eyes lowered deferentially.
“What’s your name?”
“John, sir, John Chapman.”
“You live here, John?” the Constable queried kindly.
“Over there.” He looked up, showing ruined teeth, and indicated a house where the glass had been broken from all the windows and the door hung perilously loose. “With my brother and his family. I’m a potman at the Talbot Inn. I was leaving for work this morning and saw them there.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went and found one of your men,” he explained carefully. “He told me to come back here and wait for you.”
“Did you hear anything last night?” Nottingham wondered. He knew it was a pointless question, but he had to ask it. “A fight, shouting?”
“No more than usual,” Chapman demurred, and glanced quickly around the other faces in the crowd. “This isn’t a quiet place at night, sir.”
Voices murmured assent.
“But none of you heard anything like murder?” Nottingham asked them.
They all shook their heads, as he knew they would. There was no sense in asking more.
Sedgwick strode through the archway, followed by the coroner. Brogden picked his way daintily through the filth and puddles. He’d taken the time to dress in clean hose and breeches and there was a shine to his shoes. As expected, he had a scented handkerchief clamped to his nose. Nottingham greeted him noncommittally and turned to the bodies.
“I’ll need them uncovered,” Brodgen ordered brusquely, distaste in his voice. The Constable nodded to Sedgwick, who pulled and turned the male corpse.
Nottingham knew him immediately. Just three days earlier his men had helped rescue him from a mob by the Market Cross at the top of Briggate. Daniel Morton, his name was, a dissenting preacher from Oxford who’d been invited to Leeds by one of the merchant families intent on saving the wicked souls of the poor. But from the way the poor had reacted on Saturday, they had no desire to be saved. Now Morton’s expensive grey broadcloth coat had been ruined by bloodstains across the chest where a knife had ripped wounds and taken his life.
Then with a grunt Sedgwick heaved the woman over, and Nottingham felt his heart lurch. Hers was a face he knew far better than the preacher’s. For a while she’d been almost as close as family to him. Now she was here, violently dead, humiliated, and beyond his protection.
“Christ.”
The word tore quietly from his mouth, although no one seemed to hear. He bunched his fists in his coat pockets and turned away as Brogden bent to look at the corpses. Nottingham bit down on his lip and offered a silent prayer for her soul.
She’d been Pamela Watson when he first knew her, barely thirteen when she came to work for him as the serving girl. His daughters had been young and boisterous then, and Mary, struggling desperately to recover from pneumonia, had needed plenty of help looking after them.
