before when he’d tried to convince his superiors of someone’s guilt, only to have older heads say no.
“What happens if someone else dies, and we find out Carver was responsible?” Sedgwick asked bluntly. “What will you do then? It’ll be on your head.”
“I know,” the Constable acknowledged calmly. “And if he’s a murderer, I’ll arrest him, watch him hang, and live with being wrong for the rest of my life. But honestly, I don’t believe he is.”
In the meantime he’d pray he’d made the right decision in letting Carver go.
By the time he arrived home, Mary was putting the finishing touches to dinner, a pie of vegetables with a scant handful of meat to flavour it. He could hear the girls talking quietly in their room.
“Thank you for spending time with Meg after the funeral,” he told his wife. “I would have, but…”
She nodded her understanding.
“How was she when you left?”
“Sad, bitter and lonely,” Mary replied gently, shaking her head. “We did what we could.”
“What about Emily?”
“She sat by the window and sulked most of the time.”
Nottingham sighed. “I’d hoped we’d turned a corner when we talked yesterday,” he said ruefully. “Obviously we didn’t.”
“She’s not going to change overnight, Richard,” Mary said patiently. “Give her a little time.”
“You’re right.” He pulled her close and kissed her lightly.
“Have you found him?”
He didn’t need to ask who she meant.
“No,” he told her softly, stroking her hair. “Not yet.”
He almost started to tell her about Carver, but stopped. Like Sedgwick, he knew he could never make her see why he’d let the man go, and he was too weary to discuss it. He wanted to sleep. Please God all this would be over soon, and life could return to its usual pace. And please God he’d made the right decision.
Then there was another knock in the middle of the night.
14
The dream had been vivid, although he couldn’t remember it once he was awake. The hammering at the door was like Monday night all over again and immediately he knew what had happened. He pulled on a pair of breeches, took the cudgel from the bedside, and went to open the door.
Sedgwick was standing there, wild-eyed, hair streaming, his face flushed. “Another one,” he announced.
He was always the one they told first.
Nottingham blinked, trying to clear the sleep from his eyes and force himself to full wakefulness. Another murder. Dear Christ, he thought with sudden panic, had he been wrong about Carver?
“Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.” His mind was racing. “Where? Who?”
“A man and a girl again,” Sedgwick replied, breathless from running. “In Turk’s Head Yard.”
“Right, you know what to do. Get Brogden and I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
He dressed, pulling on waistcoat, stockings, coat and shoes, then set out at a fast walk through the darkness. By the time he’d cleared Timble Bridge his mind was focused. He prayed it might not be the same killer, a coincidence, but in his bones he knew it couldn’t be anyone else.
Turk’s Head Yard ran off Briggate, just a few yards down from the Moot Hall. Sedgwick had left a man with a torch to watch over the bodies, and he pulled at his forelock as Nottingham approached.
“Anyone been near them?”
“No one, sir. A few curious, like, but none of them wanted to get that close to the corpses.”
“Right. Start asking around. I want to know if anyone heard anything at all, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was the same scenario as before, the girl sprawled face down, legs apart, with the man on top as if taking her from behind. He couldn’t see their faces, but he could wait until the coroner had given them his cursory examination.
The Constable paused and looked around him. This yard was a far cleaner place than Queen Charlotte’s Court; its houses were cramped together around the Turk’s Head Inn, but carefully tended around a path of swept flagstones. It was the kind of place where artisans lived, joiners and masons, families with incomes and aspirations. For them a murder like this would be an affront. This time, he thought, it was possible that some houseproud folk had seen and heard something. For now, however, although he sensed they were awake, they were keeping behind their locked doors.
Sedgwick arrived with Brodgen. As the coroner bent to examine the bodies, Nottingham took his assistant aside.
“Who found them?”
“Our man there,” Sedgwick answered. “He was doing his rounds and came down here. As soon as he saw them he came to find me at home, and I ran for you.”
The Constable nodded and rubbed the stubble on his chin, looking at the shuttered windows around them.
“I want you to talk to everyone in the yard. Go house to house before it gets light. A place like this you’ll probably find them all at home. It’s small enough you should be able to cover it all. There must still have been someone awake at the Turk’s Head. Someone must be able to tell us something.”
“Right.”
He was considering his next course of action when Brogden approached.
“From the look of them, I’d say another whore and a farmer,” he said distastefully after a brief glance, his mouth pursing. Tonight his clothes looked dishevelled, hastily thrown on, and he’d left his wig at home. He bent over to give a rough examination of the corpses. “Killed by a knife, the same as the last two you dragged me out to see,” the coroner described impatiently. “But it can’t have been too long ago, they’re still fairly warm.”
“Anything else?” Nottingham asked.
Brogden rose and shook his head.
“Go ahead and look for yourself. They’re dead, Constable, that’s all you need me to say. And with that, I’m going back to my bed.” He put the hat on his head and walked out of the court.
Nottingham detailed men to carry the bodies to the jail, then examined the ground once they’d gone. There was very little blood. Once again they hadn’t been killed where they were found, although given the place, that didn’t surprise him. Whores and their clients wouldn’t dare use a respectable place like this for tupping.
But they hadn’t been dead long, and it had only been an hour at most since they were discovered. They couldn’t have been murdered far away. At first light he’d send men out combing the area. He realised that even if they found the site it might tell him nothing. Yet it was better than not knowing. Everything, or anything, could be important.
He sat at his desk, pinching the bridge of his nose and trying to summon up the will to face the corpses in the cold cell. It was barely dawn; a cloudy grey sky promised dull weather after yesterday’s sun.
Finally he sighed and stood to do his duty.
He was almost scared to gaze at their faces in case he saw someone else he knew. But both of these were strangers.
Brogden had been right about the man. He was in his mid-thirties, as far as Nottingham could judge. The clothes were better than any labourer could afford, but still country cut and stitched at home, the seams awkward and uneven, the breeches tight around stout, muscled thighs. Blood had turned the material to a rust colour from a pair of deep stab wounds in the chest. The dead man had a florid face, reddened by exposure to the weather, and his hands were well calloused, nails cracked and short, with dirt ingrained into the skin.
The girl couldn’t have been above eighteen. Even in life no one would have called her pretty; there were extensive pox marks on her cheeks and an old white scar on her chin. She’d been a scrawny reed of a thing with bones poking through her flesh: scarcely a decent meal in her life, he imagined. Her dress was a faded blue, cut low to expose most of her tiny breasts. She’d also received two cuts, one to her stomach and another between her
