Cardington Crescent (33 page)

And there had been others—men he would not like to call to a witness stand, but nonetheless all helping to seal the certainty: a squint-eyed little fence who had been keeping an eye open for dealers, a pimp in a knife fight over one of his whores, and a burglar busy star-glazing a window to break into a house.

“Two,” the constable answered. He was good at his job and knew the crime, but he had not Pitt’s anger and had been more circumspect in his threats. He looked disappointed, feeling he had let down his superior. “Not much use in court. A rat-faced little magsman coming home after a night cheating at cards, and a twelve-year-old snakesman, thin as a wire, on his way to climb in through someone’s back windows and let his master in. I know where to find them both again.”

“What did they see?” Pitt was not disconcerted; no citizen would be about respectable business at that time of night in St. Giles, except perhaps a priest or a midwife, and the first was little wished for, the second little afforded. God knew how many children died at the moment of birth through dirt and ignorance, and their mothers with them.

“A spindly old man with scruffy hair under a shiny stovepipe hat, wheeling a handcart and hurrying,” the constable answered. “The snakesman certainly saw him coming out of the alley where the head was found.”

“Good. Then we’ll go and arrest Septimus Wigge,” Pitt replied decisively.

“But we can’t call them to a court!” the constable protested, running a step or two to keep up with him. “No judge in London will take their word.”

“Won’t need to,” Pitt replied. “I don’t think Wigge killed the woman, he simply disposed of the parcels. If we arrest him and frighten the living daylights out of him, he’ll tell us who did—although I’m pretty sure I know. But I want him to swear it.”

The constable understood little of what Pitt was referring to, but he was satisfied if Pitt was. They strode rapidly along the narrow, refuse-strewn streets past sweatshops, tenements, and huddles of collapsing houses. Beggars stood idle or sat in doorways; children labored in endless dreary jobs, picking rags, running errands, stealing from pockets or barrows; women begged, toiled, and drank.

Pitt made only one wrong turn before finding Septimus Wigge’s cellar again, with its piles of junk and its furnace. He told the constable to wait out of sight while he made sure the old man was in, and that there was no back way out for him to escape, through a warren of passages heaven knew where.

He walked smartly across the yard and down the steps, keeping as quiet as he could. He came upon the old man going through a box of spoons, his head bent to pore over them, a huge smile on his face.

“Glad to find you in, Mr. Wigge,” Pitt said softly, waiting till he was within a yard before he spoke.

Wigge jerked up, startled and amazed until he saw it was a customer. His face ironed out and he smiled with brown, irregular teeth, more missing than present.

“Well, sir, an’ wot can I do for yer this time? I got some luvly siller spoons ’ere.”

“I daresay, but I don’t want them at the moment.” He moved to stand between Wigge and the back of the shop; the constable should be at the top of the steps and would prevent escape that way.

“Wotcher want then? I got all kinds o’ fings.”

“Have you got any brown paper parcels with bits of a woman’s body in them?”

Wigge’s face went slack, bloodless with terror, so the gray dirt stood out on it in smears. He tried to speak and his voice failed. His throat contracted, his larynx bobbed up and down. He gulped, choked, and gulped again. The smell of sweat was strong in the close, hot air.

“That ain’t f-funny!” he said hoarsely, trying desperately to control the panic racing through him. “It ain’t f-funny at all!”

“I know,” Pitt agreed, “I found one of them. The upper half of the torso, to be precise. Soaked with blood. Did you have a mother, Mr. Wigge?”

Wigge wanted to take offense, but the power did not reach his lips.

“Course I did!” he said wretchedly. “No call f-fer ... I ...” He subsided, staring at Pitt in mesmerized horror.

“She had a child,” Pitt answered, gripping his skinny shoulder. “That woman whose body you hacked to pieces and dropped around.”

“I didn’t!” Wigge wriggled under Pitt’s hand and his voice rose so high and shrill it was painful to hear. “Swelpme Gawd I didn’t! You gotta b’lieve me, I didn’t kill ’er!”

“I don’t believe you,” Pitt lied badly. “If you didn’t kill her you wouldn’t have cut her up and distributed her round half of London.”

“I didn’t kill ’er! She were already dead, I swear!” Wigge was so terrified Pitt was afraid he might have a seizure and pass out altogether, even die. He modified his expression to one of dawning interest.

“Come on, Wigge. If she was dead and you didn’t kill her, why would you slash her to bits and wrap her up, and put the parcels round in the middle of the night? And don’t try to deny that—we’ve got at least seven people who saw you and will swear to it. Took us a little while, but we’ve got them now. I can arrest you this minute and take you to Newgate, or Coldbath Fields.”

“No!” The little man shrieked and squirmed, glaring up at Pitt with a mixture of fury and impotence. “I’m an old man!—them places’d kill me! There ain’t no decent food, an’ the jail fever’d kill me, it would.”

“Maybe,” Pitt said dispassionately. “But they’ll probably top you before that. You don’t always get jail fever immediately, it’s only a few weeks before a hanging.”

“Gawd ’elp me, I didn’t kill ’er!”

“So why did you cut up the body and get rid of it?” Pitt persisted.

“I didn’t!” he squealed. “I didn’t cut ’er up! She come that way, I swear ter Gawd!”

“Why did you put her all round Bloomsbury and St. Giles?” Pitt glanced at the furnace. “Why didn’t you burn her? You must have known we’d find her. In a churchyard! Really, Wigge. Not very clever.”

“Course I knew yer’d find ’er, yer fool!” A shadow of his old contempt came back, quickly erased by the terror crawling in his belly. “But adult bones don’t burn away—not even in an ’ole ’ouse afire, let alone a furnace like mine.”

Pitt felt sick. “But infant bones do, of course,” he said very quietly. He gripped Wigge’s shoulder so hard he could feel the scrawny flesh crumple under his hands and the hard, flat old bones grind together underneath, but Wigge was too terrified to scream.

Wigge nodded. “I never took a live one, I swear ter Gawd! I just got rid o’ them as ’ad died, poor little things.”

“Suffocated. Or starved.” Pitt looked at him as one might the germs of some disease.

“I dunno, I just done it fer a favor. I’m innocent!”

“The word’s a blasphemy from you.” Pitt shook him till his feet lifted off the ground and his boots jittered on the floor. “You knew this wasn’t a child! Did you open the parcels to see?”

“No! Stop ’urtin’ me! Yer breakin’ me bones! Two o’ them parcels was all over blood when I went to put ’em in the fire. Fair gave me a turn, it did! Near killed me, wiv me ’eart! ’Twas then I knew as I ’ad ter get rid o’ them. Can’t bear things like that, and I don’t want nuffin ter do wiv ’em, not keepin’ ’em ’ere in my furnace for the pigs ter find, if they do me over fer loot. I gets some very good fings in ’ere, I do!” It was a grotesque moment for such perverse pride. “Real gold and siller, sometimes!”

“So you didn’t want to keep the bones in your furnace,” Pitt said viciously. “Very wise. We pigs take nastily to things like that—it needs a lot of explaining. In fact, as much as dumping bits of corpse round Blooms-bury.” His grip tightened so hard Wigge practically lifted himself off the ground again by his contortions to free himself without actually fighting back. “Where did they come from?”

“I ... I, er ...”

“I’m going to hang somebody for it,” Pitt said between his teeth. “If it isn’t whoever sent you those parcels, then you’ll do.”

“I didn’t kill ’er! It was Clarabelle Mapes! Swear ter Gawd! Number three, Tortoise Lane. She’s a baby farmer. Advertises fer infants to raise, illegitimate and the like. Says as she’ll raise ’em as ’er own, if she’s paid right fer their keep. Only sometimes they dies. Proper weakly, infants is. I jus’ get rid o’ the corpuses for ’er. Can’t afford no burials. We’re poor ’ere in St. Giles, you know that!”

“You’ll swear to that, before the judge? Clarabelle Mapes sent you those parcels?”

“Yeah! Yeah! I’ll swear. It’s Gawd’s truth, swelpme it is!”

“Good. I believe you. However, I wouldn’t want you disappearing when I need you. And it’s a crime to dispose of a human body, even if it is dead. So I’ll take you in charge anyway. Constable!”

The constable appeared down the steps, his face pale, rubbing the sweat off his hands on his trouser legs.

“Yes, Mr. Pitt, sir?”

“Take Mr. Septimus Wigge to the station and charge him with disposing of a corpse illegally, and see that you hold on to him tight. He’s a witness against a murderess—probably the murderess of a great many children, although we’ll never prove that. Be careful, constable, he’s a wriggly little bastard. You’d best cuff him.”

“I will, sir, I certainly will.” The constable pulled his manacles out from under his coat and fastened them on Wigge’s bony wrists. “Now you come along o’ me, an’ any trouble an’ I’ll ’ave ter be rough wiv yer, an we wouldn’t want that, now, would we, Mr. Wigge?”

Wigge gave a screech of alarm, and the constable hoisted him up the stairs with marked lack of gentleness, leaving Pitt alone in the cellar. The air suddenly seemed heavy, acrid with the smell of uncounted tiny bodies burning in the hot, gray furnace. He felt overpowered by it, sick.

He collected two more constables from the nearest station, just in case Mrs. Mapes were not alone and should put up some sort of struggle. She was a big woman and, Pitt judged, something of a fighter. It would be foolish to go to Tortoise Lane alone to search that large house, where there might well be male employees or dependents, as well as at least half a dozen girls that he knew of plus an unspecified number of infants.

It was after seven by the time he stood on the sloping pavement again and knocked on the heavy door. One constable was half hidden in an alley, a dozen feet away, another in the street roughly parallel, where Pitt judged the back entrance would open.

He lifted his hand and knocked once, then again. It was several minutes before it opened, at first only a crack. But as the child saw who it was and recognized him from the morning, it swung all the way back. It was the girl he had seen on the stairs with the infants.

“May I see Mrs. Mapes?” He stepped in, then stopped, remembering he must not show his anger or he would betray himself and perhaps lose her. “Please?”

“Yes, sir. Come this way, sir.” She turned and walked along the corridor, her feet bare and dirty. “We bin expectin’ yer.” She did not look back, or notice that the other constable had followed Pitt in and closed the door. At the end of the passage she came to the overfurnished sitting room where Pitt had been in the morning, and knocked tentatively.

“Come!” Mrs. Mapes’s voice called loudly. “Wot is it?”

“Mrs. Mapes, ma’am, there’s the gennelman wivva money ’ere ter see yer, ma’am.”

“Send ’im in!” Her voice softened noticeably. “Send ’im in, girl!”

“Thank you.” Pitt moved past the girl into the sitting room, closing the door so Mrs. Mapes would not see the constable pass on his way to the kitchen and the back door to let in his companion. They had orders to search the house.

Mrs. Mapes was in a puce dress stretched tight over her jutting bosom, and her voluminous skirts filled the entire chair with taffeta that rustled every time she breathed. That she corseted her flesh into such a relentlessly feminine shape was a monument to her vanity and her endurance of acute and persistent discomfort. Her fat fingers were bright with rings, and her ears dangled with gold under the black ringlets.

Her face gleamed with delight when she saw Pitt. He noticed there was a tray in a space cleared for it on the sideboard, a decanter of wine, Madeira from the depth of the color, and two glasses, the price of which, if they were as good as they looked, would have fed the entire house-hold for a fortnight on better than the gruel they were getting at the moment.

“Well, Mr. Pitt, sir, you were ’asty an’ no mistake,” she said with a broad smile. “Makes me think yer was awantin’ ter come back. Yer got my money, ’ave yer?”

She was so normal, so guilelessly greedy, he had to force to his mind the memory of the bloody parcels, the fact that she regularly wrapped in paper the corpses of infants taken in trust into her care, and sent them to Septimus Wigge to dispose of in his furnace. How many of them had died of natural causes, how many of starvation and disease brought about by neglect? How many had she actively murdered? He would never know, still less prove. But she was an abomination.

“I’ve just been to see a friend of yours,” he answered, sidestepping the question. “Or perhaps I should say an associate. In business.”

“I don’t ’ave no associates,” she said carefully, some of the glisten dying from her face. “Though there are some as’d like ter be.”

“This is one who does favors for you now and then—and no doubt you reward him for it.”

“I pays me way,” she agreed cautiously. “No time fer them as doesn’t. Life ain’t like that.”

“A Mr. Septimus Wigge.”

For a moment she was still as stone. Then she caught her breath and continued as though nothing had affected her. “Well, if I got suffin off ’im as was stolen, I bought it honest. I didn’t know the little weasel was bent.”

“I wasn’t thinking of goods, Mrs. Mapes, so much as services,” Pitt said distinctly.

“’E don’t do nobody no service!” Her mouth sloped downwards in disgust.

“He does you a considerable service,” he corrected her, still standing, and keeping himself carefully between her and the door. “He only failed you once.”

Her fat hands beside her monstrous skirt were clenched, but her eyes were still defiant. She stared up at him, her face heavy.

“He did not burn the body of the woman you sent him wrapped up in the usual parcels, which he expected to be babies who had died in your care. By the time he came to put the parcels in his furnace the blood had soaked through, so he undid one and discovered what it really was. Adult bones don’t burn that easily, Mrs. Mapes—not like those of a small child. It takes a very great heat to destroy a human thighbone, or a skull. Wigge knew that, and he didn’t want to be left with those in his furnace, so he dropped the parcels as far away from himself as he could carry them alone, in one night. He thought he would be safe, and he very nearly was.”