“Make way for a constable, damn it!” Then the constable pushed through, and Matthew recognized him as the little barrel-chested bully Dippen Nack, who carried a lantern in one hand and brandished a black billyclub in the other. He took one look at the corpse, his beady eyes in the rum-ruddy face grew twice their size, and he squirted away in a blur like any rabbit would run.
Matthew saw that with no control over this crowd the scene of the crime was being stomped to ruins. Now some people-perhaps those who’d been roused from their last round at the taverns-were daring to come in and look closer at the face, and in so doing they were stepping on the body as those behind them pushed forward to get a gander. Suddenly beside Matthew appeared Effrem Owles, wearing a coat over a long white nightshirt and his eyes huge behind his glasses. “You’d best move back!” he warned. “Come on!”
Just as Matthew was about to retreat he saw the boot of a staggering lout step right down upon the corpse’s head, and then the lout himself stumbled and fell across the body. “Get up from there!” Matthew shouted, anger flaming his cheeks. “Get back, everyone! It’s not a damned circus!”
A bell began to be rung steadily and deliberately, its high metallic sound piercing the uproar. Matthew saw someone pushing through the human shoals. The ringing of the bell caused people to come to their senses and make way. Then High Constable Lillehorne appeared, holding a small brass bell in one hand and a lantern in the other. He kept up the bell-ringing until the noise quietened to a dull murmur. “Step back!” he commanded. “Everyone step back now or you’ll spend the night behind bars!”
“We just wanted to see who it was got murdered, that’s all!” protested a woman in the crowd, and others shouted agreement.
“If you want to see so much, I’ll volunteer you to carry the body to the cold room! Anyone wish to make that trip?”
That shut everyone’s trap up good and proper. The cold room, in the basement of City Hall, was Ashton McCaggers’ territory and not a place citizens wished to go unless they required his services, at which point they would be beyond caring.
“Go on about your business!” Lillehorne said. “You’re making fools of yourselves!” He looked down at the corpse and then directly at Matthew. His eyes widened as he saw the bloody shirt. “What have you done, Corbett?”
“Nothing! Phillip Covey found the body. He ran into me and…got this all over me.”
“Did he also loot the corpse, or is that your own doing?”
Matthew realized he was still holding both the watch and the wallet together in one hand. “No, sir. Reverend Wade took this from the coat.”
“Reverend Wade? Where is the reverend, then?”
“He’s-” Matthew searched the faces around him for Wade and Dr. Vanderbrocken, but neither of them were anywhere in sight. “He was just here. Both he and-”
“Stop your yammering. Who is this?” Lillehorne aimed the light down. To his credit, his expression remained composed and emotionless.
“I don’t know, sir, but-” Matthew opened the watch’s case with his thumb. There was no scrollwork monogram inside, as he’d hoped. The time had stopped at seventeen minutes after ten, which might be an indication of when the spring had wound out or when the trauma of a falling body had broken the mechanism. Still, the watch was an indicator of lavish wealth. Matthew turned to Effrem. “Is your father here?”
“He’s right over there. Father!” Effrem called, and the elder Owles-who also wore round spectacles and had the silver hair that Effrem was soon to possess-came through the crowd.
“Are you giving the orders here, Corbett?” Lillehorne asked. “I might have a spot for you in the gaol tonight, too.”
Matthew chose to ignore him. “Sir?” he said to Benjamin Owles. “Would you examine the suit and tell us who made it?”
“The suit?” Owles distastefully regarded the bloody corpse for a moment, but then he hoisted his courage and nodded. “All right. If I can.”
A suit would bear the maker’s mark in its weave and structure, Matthew surmised. In New York there were two other professional tailors and a number of amateurs who did clothes work, but unless this suit had made the voyage from England, Owles ought to be able to identify the workmanship.
Owles had just bent down and examined the coat’s lining when he said, “I recognize this. It’s a new lightweight suit, made at the first of the summer. I know, because I made it. In fact, I made two of the same material.”
“Made them for whom?”
“Pennford and Robert Deverick. This has a pocket for a watch.” He stood up. “It’s Mr. Deverick’s suit.”
“It’s Penn Deverick!” someone called into the dark.
And on along the street went the news, more swift than any article of brutal murder in the Gazette might be passed: “Penn Deverick’s dead!”
“It’s Pennford Deverick been murdered!”
“Old Deverick’s a-layin’ there, God rest him!”
“God rest him, but the Devil’s got him!” some heartless scoundrel said, but not many might disagree.
Matthew kept quiet and decided to let the high constable find for himself what Matthew had already seen: the cuttings around Deverick’s eyes.
They were the same wounds Marmaduke Grigsby had remarked upon in his article on the murder of Dr. Julius Godwin in the Bedbug.
Dr. Godwin unfortunately also suffered cuttings around the eyes that Master Ashton McCaggers has mentioned in his professional opinion appeared to form the shape of a mask.
Matthew watched while Lillehorne bent over the body, taking care not to get his boots in the blood. Lillehorne waved away the flies with his bell-hand. It would just be a few seconds before…and yes, there it was.
Matthew saw the high constable’s head give a slight jerk, as if he’d been struck by a fist somewhere in the area of the upper chest.
He knew, as Matthew clearly did, that the Masker had claimed a second kill.
Seven
Tuesday night became Wednesday morning. Thirteen steps down, Matthew stood in the grim domain of Ashton McCaggers.
The cold room, reached by a door behind the City Hall’s central staircase, was lined with gray stone and had a floor of hard-packed brown clay. Originally an area to store foodstuffs in case of emergency, the chamber was deemed by McCaggers cool enough, even in the heat of midsummer, to delay the deterioration of a human body. However, no reckoning had yet been taken of how long a corpse might lie here on the wooden slab of a table before it broke down into the primordial ooze.
The table itself, at the center of the twenty-two-foot-wide chamber, had been prepared to host the body of Pennford Deverick by being covered with a sheet of burlap and then a layer of crushed chestnut hulls and flax and millet seeds so as to soak up the fluids. Matthew and the others commanded to be present by Gardner Lillehorne- including Effrem and Benjamin Owles, a still-woozy Phillip Covey, Felix Sudbury, and the onerous first-constable-on- the-scene Dippen Nack-had stood under a wrought-iron chandelier that held eight candles and watched as the corpse had slid down a metal chute from a square opening at the rear of the building. Then McCaggers’ slave, the formidable bald-headed and silent man known only as Zed, had come down the thirteen stone steps after his task of wheeling the body-cart along Smith Street and had proceeded to lift the dead man onto another wheeled table. After this, Zed then prepared the examination table, pushed the body over, and lifted Deverick-still fully clothed so that the master of investigation might see the corpse as it was discovered-onto the bed of hulls and seeds. Zed worked diligently and without even glancing at his audience. His physical strength was awesome and his silence absolute, for he had no tongue.
To say the least, it was disturbing to all to see Pennford Deverick in such condition. His body was stiffening, and beneath the yellow candlelight he looked to be no longer truly human but rather a wax effigy whose facial features had melted and been re-formed with a mallet.
