“At ease yourself, you little jumped-up poseur! Who are you to give me orders?”
“Your commanding officer!”
“No, mate. I'll follow no one but Tichborne!”
Honesty sighed and turned to another man. “Sergeant Piper,” he ordered. “Your truncheon. Back of Tamworth's head. Now!”
Piper nodded and unhooked his truncheon from his belt.
“Not bloody likely!” Tamworth said. He took to his heels and vanished into the fog.
The detective inspector yelled after him: “Constable Tamworth! Don't wander from the group, man!”
A bubbling wail of terror answered him.
Three policemen broke away from the cordon and ran toward the sound.
“No! Menders! Carlyle! Patterson! Come back!”
“He's in trouble, sir!” Carlyle protested before plunging into the pall.
Honesty turned to the main group and bellowed: “Stay here! Move and I'll have your guts for garters! Come with me, Piper.”
He gritted his teeth and, with the sergeant, hurried after his men.
As they came into view, he saw Menders raise his arm, point his pistol at something, pull the trigger, and curse: “Jammed, damn the thing!”
He looked to where the constable had aimed and saw Tamworth sprawled on the ground. The man's jacket and shirt had been ripped aside and his stomach torn open. Squatting over him, hands buried in the policeman's intestines, was a thin, bearded, bespectacled dead man. The corpse looked up, moaned, and stood. Entrails oozed from his hands and fell to the cobbles. “My apologies,” he said. “I need life.”
“Mary, mother of God!” exclaimed Menders. He threw his pistol and it bounced off the bearded man's forehead.
Sergeant Piper whispered, “Useless. You can't kill a bloody stiff!”
“Piper, stay with me,” Honesty commanded. “The rest of you, behind the cordon, now. That's an order.”
Menders swallowed, gave a hesitant nod, and started to back away from the bearded man, who stood swaying, as if uncertain whether or not to collapse to the ground and admit his demise.
“A bloody stiff,” Piper repeated. “But still bleedin’ well movin’.”
A top-hatted, well-dressed cadaver suddenly emerged from the cloud beside them, grabbed Menders by the shoulders, and sank his teeth into the constable's throat before dragging him out of sight.
Constable Carlyle saw his colleague die, let loose a high-pitched scream, panicked, fumbled for his police whistle, raised it to his lips, and started blowing long, loud, repetitive blasts.
“That's the signal!” a constable named Lampwick announced.
“Impossible!” Trounce snapped. “It's too early.”
He and his men were close to the smoldering skeleton of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, which had burned to the ground the day before. The rioters enjoyed setting fire to taverns as much as they enjoyed drinking in them. Judging by the stench, on this occasion they'd made the fatal misjudgement of combining the two activities.
“But listen to that whistle, sir! That can't be a mistake!”
“Constable Lampwick, we're expecting Mr. Swinburne to arrive via Waterloo Bridge, so the signal should more or less come from straight ahead. It sounds to me like the whistle-blower is with Detective Inspector Honesty's team on Kingsway.”
Trounce shifted from one foot to the other uneasily. He took off his bowler and gave it a hard slap.
Something wasn't right.
He shoved his hat back onto his head.
A decision had to be made.
What if he got it wrong?
The distant whistling stopped.
“Hell's bells,” he hissed under his breath.
What to do? What to do?
Trounce became very still for a moment.
He blinked.
The Scotland Yard man suddenly wheeled to face his men and bellowed: “Arm yourselves, lads. We're moving forward. Proceed with utmost caution. Do not, under any circumstances, mistake this for the Charge of the blessed Light Brigade, is that understood?”
There came a great many, “Yes, sirs.”
A hundred and fifty uniformed men took out their police-issue Adams revolvers, unhooked their truncheons, and, following Trounce, advanced slowly into the fog.
“Did you hear that, Commander?” Sergeant Slaughter asked.
“Yes, but it was ahead of time, farther away than it should be, and from the wrong direction, to boot!” Krishnamurthy replied, puzzled.
“It's the fog, sir. You know how it distorts things.”
“Humph!”
The commander of the Flying Squad couldn't stop thinking about Milligan. The man was a personal friend and had a wife and child. Witnessing his life terminated so abruptly and so senselessly had been shocking.
He sighed and forced the flier's death to the back of his mind. Duty first!
“Something must have happened,” he muttered. “So do we proceed into the Strand now or do we wait until the planned-for moment?”
“Maybe this is the planned-for moment, sir,” Slaughter suggested. “It's just come earlier than originally intended.”
Krishnamurthy clicked his tongue and considered a moment. He addressed his men: “We're going to wait. Ready yourselves. I want absolute silence. Keep your ears to the ground. Be prepared to move at a moment's notice!”
“Stop blowing that bloody whistle!”
Constable Carlyle stopped.
“You blithering idiot!” Detective Inspector Honesty growled. He stamped over to his subordinate. “You just ruined the whole-” He was brought up short by the sight of a sword blade projecting from the constable's chest. It slid back into the man's uniform and disappeared.
Blood spurted.
The whistle fell from Carlyle's mouth and tinked onto the road. The policeman followed it down.
From behind the body, a man shuffled out of the mist. He was a Rake, plainly, but he was also at least three days dead. His lower limbs were saturated with fluids and bulged horribly against his clothing. The swollen hands holding the sword, and the cane from which it had been unsheathed, possessed the sickening appearance of old uncooked sausages. His skin was the colour of earthworms, his sagging bottom lip dangled against his chin, and his eyes were turned up and sunken into their sockets.
“Awfully thorry,” he lisped. “That mutht be a terrible inconvenienth!”
There and then, Thomas Manfred Honesty decided he wanted to spend a great deal more of his time tending to his garden.
“More pink dahlias,” he muttered to himself, thinking about the state of his little plot's bottom border.
He drew his revolver.
“Yellow marigolds, perhaps.”
He aimed at the dead man's head.
“Blue geraniums.”
He squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. He sighed, pocketed it, and hefted his truncheon.
“Perhaps marigolds.”
He stepped forward, knocked the sword blade aside, and bludgeoned the corpse's head once, twice, thrice, four times, until it flew apart in a spray of white bone, black clotted blood, and grey brain tissue. The cadaver crumpled and lay twitching.
“Good mulch!” Honesty muttered. “That's the secret.”
“Sir!” cried a voice behind him. He turned and saw Piper and Patterson backing away as more bodies loomed
