Legion of the Dead (9 page)

Blindside Bailey was an old war veteran
.

‘Read all about it!’ Blindside Bailey’s gruff voice rang out. ‘Body of gangland boss taken! Read all about it! Graverobbers ransack gangland leader’s grave! Read all about it!’

Turning on my heels, I hurried back to the corner. I exchanged a copper penny for the latest edition of the
Daily Chronicle
, and a cold chill spread down my spine as I started to read.

B
ack in my attic rooms, I collapsed into my old armchair and studied the
Daily Chronicle
. I must admit, my hands were shaking as I scanned the column of small print. It seemed that Firejaw O’Rourke was merely the latest victim of a spate of outrages in cemeteries and graveyards all over town. Ada Gussage had said as much when I ran into her in Adelaide Graveyard, though I had been too spooked and full of lamprey venom to take it in. Now, here it was in front of me in black and white.

The
Chronicle
was of the firm belief that this was the work of graverobbers, or resurrection
men – a bunch of individuals so reviled and disreputable that not even the denizens of Gatling Quays would admit to having anything to do with them. Apparently, the corpses they stole ended up on marble slabs in underground dissecting theatres, where students of anatomy would pay handsomely to study them.

You could make a pretty penny from a recently buried corpse. The fresher the body, the higher the price the unscrupulous surgeon would be prepared to pay, no questions asked – and all in the interests of scientific enquiry, of course.

The account in the
Daily Chronicle
, so measured and plausible, seemed to confirm the professor’s theory, and I wanted to believe that the ghastly apparition I’d seen in the graveyard was indeed a figment of my imagination brought to vivid life by the venom of an exotic sea creature. Perhaps all I’d really seen was an empty grave, ransacked by graverobbers. The rest was simply a terrible
hallucination, just as he had said. Yes, I really did want to believe him – yet it had all seemed so real that doubt still gnawed at the back of my mind …

Just then, there came a light
tap-tap
at the window and I looked up to see Will Farmer peering through the grimy glass. I beckoned for him to come in. He pushed the window open and dropped down lightly to the floor.

‘Barnaby, where have you been?’ he said. ‘I was beginning to—’ His gaze fell on the sling and a look of concern crossed his face. ‘What happened?’

‘Pull up a chair, Will,’ I said, ‘it’s a long story.’ I shook my head. ‘A story which I’m still trying to get straight in my own mind. Some of it is pretty hard to believe …’

‘Try me,’ he said.

And so I recounted the strange events that had taken place over the previous couple of days. Will listened attentively, his eyes growing wider and wider as I described my trip out
into the harbour and the underwater battle with the black-scaled lamprey. And when I got to the incident in the graveyard, he jumped back so violently I thought he was going to tumble from his chair.

‘Unbelievable,’ he gasped.

‘I know, Will, I know,’ I said. ‘The professor says the poison from the lamprey’s bite affected my mind, made me see things.’

‘So Firejaw O’Rourke didn’t rise from the grave?’ asked Will, his voice little more than a whisper.

‘That’s what I keep telling myself,’ I said. ‘It was so real, and yet …’ I shook my head. The nagging doubts remained. ‘He
can’t
be alive, can he, Will? The pair of us saw him being buried two weeks ago.’ I looked down and tapped the newspaper folded on my lap. ‘Now I read that, according to the
Daily Chronicle
, O’Rourke was dug up by a gang of grave-robbers and his corpse sold for dissection.’

‘Dissection?’ Will repeated quietly. He frowned. ‘Sunday night you were in the graveyard, right?’

I nodded.

‘Well, that’s interesting,’ he said, ‘because I noticed something odd on Monday morning. In the early hours, it was.’

‘Go on,’ I said, leaning forward in my armchair.

‘I’d had a dawn drop to do for Mr Tilling the apothecary,’ Will went on. ‘There’d been an outbreak of damp-lung at St Jude’s Hospital and I had an emergency consignment of sulphur and morphia pillules to deliver. Old Mr Tilling had been working all through the night to complete them … Anyway, it’s half-four when I arrive at the hospital, and still pitch-black. Just as I get there, I see this old wagon pull up, and these two rough-looking types jump down and drag out a long wooden crate …’

‘A coffin?’ I asked.

‘Same size,’ said Will, ‘but not the same shape. Just a long box, really.’

I nodded. ‘And what did they do with it?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Will. ‘Instead of going in through the front entrance, they took it round the back, where Bentham was waiting for them.’

‘Bentham?’ I said.

‘The morgue attendant,’ said Will, his top lip curling. ‘Bulgy eyes and warty skin. None of the nurses can stand him … He’s a slippery character at the best of times, but he was looking more furtive than ever that morning. Kept glancing round, and I was sure he gave money to the men …’ Will looked up at me. ‘I didn’t give it much thought at the time, Barnaby, but it could well have been a body.’

‘Firejaw O’Rourke, perhaps?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ said Will. ‘The crate was big enough. And after all, it did arrive the morning after his body went missing …’

I nodded as a shiver ran down my spine. So
what exactly
had
I witnessed in Adelaide Graveyard in my feverish state? Was it a mere figment of my imagination, or not? I certainly hoped it was. The alternative, that Firejaw O’Rourke had indeed come back to life, was too gruesome to consider. Today was Tuesday. Even if the body had been bound for the dissection table, they couldn’t have finished with it already.

‘Come on, Will,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘I’m not going to be happy until I’ve found out one way or the other.’

‘The hospital?’ he said.

‘The hospital.’

With my arm still bundled up in its sling, highstacking was out of the question. Instead, Will and I made our way across town down with all the other cobblestone-creepers. It was late afternoon by now, and the streets were thronging.

We dog-legged through the Laynes – ancient
cobbled alleys lined with tiny workshops that, each day, burst out of their cramped premises onto the street to display their wares. An elbowing crowd jostled one another as bargain-hunters picked their way through stacks and racks of produce, noisily haggling.

I squeezed past a portly dowager, her nose the colour of port-wine and her fleshy arms buried deep in a pile of tawdry lace antimacassars, who was stridently arguing over their price. A rickets-bowed gardener was inspecting a row of spades outside Guthrie’s Ironmongery next door. Further on, two grubby children were teasing a small bony dog with the toffee-apple they were sharing, making it leap up, before hiding the sweetmeat behind their backs – and leaving the dog yapping with frustration …

As we reached the corner of Marchant Lane and Croup End, the rank odour of the Tivoli Slaughterhouse curdled with the sharp eye-watering tang from Selsey’s vinegar factory,
filling the air with an unspeakable odour. Covering our noses, we entered Margolies Street, where a mist of pink and white dust filled the air. Sills, steps, kerbs, ledges; every surface in the narrow street was covered in a fine layer of powder.

Four shops along, the curved sign above a pair of wrought-iron gates announced in gothic lettering,
Algernon Mortimer & Company - Monumental Masons
. I peered inside as we passed.

Two stocky men in overalls stood at the centre of a yard, their bodies swathed in the billowing dust as they sawed at a large slab of veined stone. A third man – a red-and-black spotted kerchief tied round his head – was seated on a low stool to their right, chisel and mallet in hand, chipping away at an arch-shaped gravestone. He was whistling something bright and tuneful which rose up above the grinding noise of the stone-cutting, the perky melody at odds with
the sombre nature of his job.

Stacked about him in rows were finished headstones, each one awaiting their inscriptions. Black, white, pink and grey; some were extravagant, some modest. There were arched slabs and corniced oblongs. One was carved like a scroll, another like a book, its pages fixed for ever half-open, while several were simple yet elegant crosses made of granite or sandstone.

But it wasn’t the gravestones that made me stop and stare, open-mouthed, through the gates of the monumental mason’s. No, it was the sight of the carved figures perched above them – stone angels, wings spread wide, hands clasped and heads bowed, their sightless eyes staring down. I shivered uncontrollably as, for a fleeting moment, I was transported back to the horror of Adelaide Graveyard.

I felt a tug on my arm. ‘You all right, Barnaby?’ Will asked. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a—’

‘Don’t say it,’ I interrupted him. ‘Come on, St Jude’s is just up ahead.’

We rounded the corner of Bishops Walk and there it was, the tall imposing neoclassical frontage of St Jude’s Hospital.

Thirty years earlier, the place had been a scandal – little more than a fever pit from which patients were lucky to get out alive. Its doctors had been the worst kind of sawbones; its nurses gin-soaked drabs. But that had all changed during the last war, when a new kind of nurse had emerged from the army hospitals of the East. These angels of mercy had reformed the appalling conditions in which wounded soldiers had languished, and brought their new methods of sober cleanliness and meticulous order with them when they returned from the war. Now, St Jude’s was a model hospital, bringing relief and comfort to the city’s sick.

‘Busy as ever,’ Will commented, as we approached the forbidding entrance.

I nodded. The forecourt was teeming, with numerous horse-drawn carriages jostling for position at the foot of the circular entrance steps, and a constant stream of people going in and coming out of the great studded doors. Some were on crutches, some were on stretchers and, as we climbed the steps, I found myself making diagnoses of the people we passed.

A young child – his face grazed and legs mashed – who was being carried in by his father must have been the victim of a traffic accident. A woman with a gashed arm, the unfortunate target of a rabid dog. While a grey-skinned, sunken-cheeked old man, coughing violently behind a blood-flecked rag as he lay on a wooden stretcher, was clearly consumptive …

As Will and I entered the great entrance hall, the atmosphere changed. It was light, warm and pungent. The sooty smell of the lamps which were fixed to the walls mixed
with the unmistakable odour of carbolic soap. Nurses in crisp white aprons formed the shuffling patients into orderly lines in the great vaulted hall, and sent them off to various parts of the hospital to have their ailments tended to.

‘Broken bones, that way,’ snapped a tall nurse in wire-framed spectacles, eyeing my sling and pointing me down a long corridor to the right.

‘It’s all right, sister,’ said Will, stepping in. ‘He’s with me. We’re making a delivery.’

‘Oh, afternoon, Will,’ said the nurse with a smile. ‘Didn’t see you there.’ She raised her eyes to the vaulted ceiling. ‘Chaos it is, today. Absolute chaos … No, madam,’ she cried out, darting off in pursuit of a portly individual whose face was covered in a suppurating rash. ‘I’ve already told you, the sulphur baths are that way …’

We left her to it. Will steered me across the great hall, the floor tiled with pale grey and
green marble slabs and inlaid with a wonderful mosaic depicting the Rod of Asclepius; a single green snake, its venomous mouth agape, wrapped around its knotted length.