Bluegate Fields by Anne Perry
Scanned by Aristotle
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Inspector Pitt shivered a little and stared unhappily while Ser geant Froggatt lifted the manhole cover and exposed the open ing beneath. Iron rungs led downward into a hollow chasm of stone that echoed the distant slither and drip of water. Did Pitt imagine the scutter of clawed feet?
A breath of damp air drifted up, and immediately he tastec the sourness below. He sensed the labyrinth of tunnels anc steps, the myriad layers, and even more tunnels of slimy bricks that stretched out under the whole of London and carried awaj the waste and the unwanted, the lost.
'Down 'ere, sir,' Froggatt said dolefully. 'That's where they found 'im. Odd, I calls it-very odd.'
'Very,' Pitt agreed, pulling his scarf tighter around his neck. Though it was only early September, he felt cold. The streets of Bluegate Fields were dank and smelled of poverty and human filth. It had once been a prosperous area, with high, elegant houses, the homes of merchants. Now it was one of the most dangerous of all the portside slums in England, and Pitl was about to descend into its sewers to examine a corpse thai had been washed up against the great sluice gates that closed ofl the Thames' tides.
'Right!' Froggatt stood aside, determined not to go first into the gaping hole with its wet, dark caverns.
Pitt stepped resignedly backward over the edge, grasped hold of the rungs, and began his careful descent. As the gloom closed in on him, the coursing water below sounded louder. He could smell the stale, entombed old water.
Froggatt was also climbing down, his feet a rung or two beyond Pitt's hands.
Standing on the wet stones at the bottom, Pitt hunched his coat higher onto his shoulders and turned to look for the sewer cleaner who had reported the discovery; he was there, part of the shadows-the same colors, the same damp, blurred lines. He was a little sharp-nosed man. His trousers, cobbled together from several other pairs, were held up by rope. He carried a long pole with a hook on the end, and around his waist was a large sacking bag. He was used to the darkness, the incessantly dripping walls, the smell, and the distant scurrying of rats. Perhaps he had already seen so many signs of the tragic, the primitive, and the obscene in human life that nothing shocked him anymore. There was nothing in his face now but a natural wariness of the police and a certain sense of his own importance because the sewers were his domain.
'You come for the body, then?' He craned upward to stare at Pitt's height. 'Rum thing, that. Can't 'ave bin 'ere long, or the rats'd 'ave got it. Not bitten, it ain't. Now who'd want to do a thing like that, I ask yer?' Apparently, it was a rhetorical question, because he did not wait for an answer but turned and scurried along the great tunnel. He reminded Pitt of a busy little rodent, his feet clattering along the wet bricks. Froggatt followed behind them, his bowler hat jammed fiercely on his head, his galoshes squelching noisily.
Around the corner they came quite suddenly upon the great river sluice gates, shut against the rising tide.
'There!' the sewerman announced proprietarily, pointing to the white body that lay on its side as modestly as could be managed. It was completely naked on the dark stones at the side of the channel.
Pitt was startled. No one had told him the body was without the ordinary decency of clothes-or that it was so young. The skin was flawless, no more than a fine down on the cheeks. The stomach was lean, the shoulders slight. Pitt knelt down, momentarily forgetting the slimy bricks.
'Lantern, Froggatt,' he demanded. 'Bring it over here, man! Hold it still!'' It was unfair to be angry with Froggatt, but
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death-especially useless, pathetic death-always affected him this way.
Pitt turned the body over gently. The boy could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old, his features still soft. His hair, though wet and streaked with filth, must have been fair and wavy, a little longer than most. By twenty he might have been handsome, when his face had had time to mature. Now he was pallid, a little swollen with water, and his pale eyes were open.
