Heaven's Bones (6 page)

The laughing and catcalls had stopped abruptly at the sound of his voice, but now started up again fresh at the sight of a little boy interfering in men's business.

Artemis ignored them all and pushed his way to the side of the policeman.

“Please, sir,” he said, tugging at the big man's coat. “He didn't do it, sir.”

The peeler looked down at him, caught between anger and amusement.

“Well then,” he said kindly enough. “Who did, then?”

Artemis glanced again at the bare space where the orange had been. Everything seemed to slow down as he squinted through the air, which gradually appeared to thicken, as if two times existed in the same place. He heard nothing except the sound of his heart beating in his ears. From the corner of his eye he could see the policeman's mouth opening, slowly. It was as if the entire marketplace was caught in treacle.

And then everything was normal again. And he knew.

“He did it,” he declared, pointing behind the orange vendor, who looked at him open-mouthed. The crowd quieted, and then, as the vendor moved aside, the laughter started. A boy, with a bulging belly and an unpleasant expression, stood behind him.

“That's my son, boy,” said the vendor. “And 'e's not going to be taking 'is own da's fruit.”

“But he did,” said Artemis, his mouth dry. His voice cracked but he continued. “He did take it. It's in his left pocket.”

He saw it again in his mind's eye, and prayed that he was right—the boy, looking hungrily at the fruit that was too precious for a child to eat, his father distracted. The small, chubby hand reaching for the sweet treasure. The same hand slipping it away into a trouser pocket. The panic when his father saw the orange gone; the relief when someone else was accused.

The peeler's heavy hand dropped to his shoulder.

“It's a serious business, accusing when you've no proof. Are you sure, boy?”

Artemis nodded, and tried to swallow.

“Didn't!” snapped the vendor's boy, staring at Artemis venomously.

“Check his pocket!” called some of the gathered market-goers, who were delighted to have this increasingly unexpected entertainment provided them for nothing.

“Shan't!” the vendor retorted. “ 'E's my own boy, in't he? 'E ain't gonna steal from me.”

Perhaps the policeman saw the same flicker pass across the boy's face that Artemis did, because Artemis felt the weight lift away.

“Let's check that pocket anyway, shall we?” he intoned. “Just to make sure.”

The boy backed away as his father turned to him. “Show us your pocket, Alf,” he said. “Show us it's empty so we can get on with the business.”

Alf looked down and pulled his hand from his pocket. His hand was empty, but the round bulge in his pocket was very obvious.

“It's a ball,” he said, low so only the bobby, the grocer, and Artemis could hear.

“Show us your ball, then, son,” said the peeler.

When the boy didn't move, his father gave a grunt of impatience and grabbed at his trousers, digging in the deep pocket.

He brought out the orange.

His eyes opened wide in astonishment, then narrowed in anger.

Artemis turned away before he could see the blow.

His mother was standing a little distance from him, her basket on her hip and her mouth quirked on one side.

“Had to speak up, didn't you?” she said. “Now you've made us late for your uncle's dinner.”

The crowd was ignoring them, some off about their delayed business, others craning forward curiously to see the beating.

“I did have to, Mum,” he said. “They would have transported him.”

“I know,” said his mother. “But it's always the wrong time, you know, Artemis? Although I suppose you can't help that.”

Artemis wanted to be nowhere but home; the sound of the boy sobbing was making him sick. But a large shadow fell on him, and he looked up into the red fleshy face of the peeler.

“You've a good eye, boy,” he said. “And a quick tongue for speaking up.”

Artemis could only stare.

“That he does, sir,” said his mother. “And he needs to get his good eye and quick tongue home now sir, begging your pardon.”

The officer ignored her.

“The city watch always appreciates a word from someone with a good eye. But I've a feeling you don't like the idea of snitching on your neighbors, do you, boy?”

Artemis shook his head.

“And I won't be saying you're wrong to feel that way. But I will tell you this: Keep watching, and learning, and speaking up when you've a mind to, not keeping mum when that's the right thing too. And when you've grown, you might find that working for Sir Robert Peel will suit you.”

He smiled. “You've a time to think it over, any road.”

He touched his hat and stepped smartly back to his patrol as Artemis' mother hurried him home.

Whitechapel, Summer 1867

Artemis Donovan smelled the bright tang of blood before he saw the body. It left a faint metallic trace in his mouth. Before he even entered the alley he knew what he'd see.

He spared a glance for the bobby who was vomiting, as inconspicuously as possible, into the gutter that drained from the alley. The thick sour smell mingled with the funk of urine from the brick walls and the cloying scent of rotted vegetables from the market cart down the street—but still it couldn't mask the thin reek of blood that permeated the air.

The pallid gray light of dawn had succeeded the darkness but the streetlights were not yet extinguished. The two policemen in the alley had been holding lamps but had just damped them, and there was another smell too, of burnt and dying wick.

He recognized one of them—Christian, who looked up from adjusting his bull's-eye and gave him a one-sided smile. The other was holding a grubby handkerchief over his nose, and Donovan couldn't make out the features.

“Nice piece of work to find of a morning, Detective,” said Christian. “You've been a bad boy, then, to earn the graveyard shift?”

“Not bad, just low man for now,” returned Donovan good-naturedly. “Let's have a look and then we can all get inside where it's warm.” He knew what the night patrol's feet felt like at the end of the shift—stiff and frozen. He'd had that duty often enough, and not so long ago either.

“Poor little bitch,” said Christian. He moved aside so that Donovan could access the scene. “Happens often enough, poor sods.”

Yes, it did, thought Donovan. Whoring was a rough life, and
those that couldn't shake off the game sometimes came to this end, although more often they drank themselves to death or died of the pox.

But this—this was different. He was aware of that queer feeling that sometimes came over him when he was presented with a puzzle that so often, if he trusted it, gave him the answer to the mystery.

The girl had been placed carefully on her back, hands folded demurely over her breast. Her limbs were arranged decorously, almost tenderly.

Most murder victims Artemis Donovan had encountered lay sprawled in the position where they first fell, discarded by their killers like an abandoned doll. This was not the case here.

At first it seemed as if she wore a richly colored gown, but the flounces around her ankles were a dingy, dirty white.

It was blood, he realized, with a dull shock. He was used to blood, of course, and had seen far more of it than he cared to in his life. But the quantity of it …

From neck to knee her dress was soaked dark burgundy. It contrasted horridly with the stark white of her face.

He kneeled by her side and frowned.

“We can't shift her yet, boys,” he said. “Leastways, not before I've got a good look at her.”

Christian began to make a coarse comment, but let it trail away.

Donovan studied the girl's hair—it was dirty, like the rest of her—but a rich brown with cornstalk highlights. She was—or had been, at least—pretty for all the squalor that surrounded her.

A parcel of rough fabric was folded in her hand. He touched it, cautiously. Her grip on it was loose—it must have been tucked in between her fingers, after she'd been placed here.

She'd certainly been killed elsewhere and brought to this place, everything spoke of that. Even if his experience had not told him
so, he could see it, in that strange mind's-eye that assisted or afflicted him sometimes, depending on how you looked at it.

He let his eyes unfocus and saw it: The dank dark of night, the figure bearing the girl in its arms, shambling along furtively. Venturing into the alley, aided perhaps by moonlight (for it was the full moon), placing the girl carefully on the ground.

Donovan saw the figure reach forward to tuck a wayward lock of hair behind the girl's ear.

Donovan opened his eyes. Indeed, the hair was tucked away as he had seen.

It almost had been a lover's gesture.

He pulled away the small cloth parcel and unwrapped it. Coins clinked inside, and more—a scrap of paper with writing on it.

The writing was clear, careful block lettering with nothing to show the personality behind it.

“To bury her decently,” it said.

Donovan rocked back on his heels, the paper in his right hand, the coins in his left, and considered this. Two gold sovereigns. Far more than sufficient to give the girl a respectable funeral, with a proper coffin and cemetery plot. No potters' field for this one.

He'd never seen anything quite like this. He'd seen prostitutes beaten to death by their pimps, or knifed by a rival in the rowdier taverns. He'd seen a man sitting, dazed and weeping, on a soiled bed beside the body of the woman he'd strangled.

But this girl, arranged neatly in a foul alley, with money left to bury her?

He wrapped the coins back in the paper and tucked it away in his waistcoat pocket, taking care that the bobbies could see him do it. He'd turn it in as evidence later—he'd never been like some who would nick a few loose coins from the pockets of the dead to supplement their admittedly inadequate salaries.

He shifted his weight to kneel beside her, knowing his landlady
would scold him for the state of his trousers. It was too late to worry about that now; the filthy ground had already left its mark.

“Come here a moment, Christian, and bring your bull's-eye,” he said. He didn't trust what the less-experienced officer would do when faced with what must lie beneath that gory dress.

He heard the man come up behind him, and a little circle of yellow light fell on the dead girl's breast. Donovan braced himself and reached for a corner of the fabric. The blood-soaked material was still slightly damp, and unpleasantly stiff beneath his fingers.

Donovan tugged experimentally. The cloth lifted away from the body, and he realized that the entire garment had been sliced neatly down the middle. The stiff fabric stuck to the body underneath slightly so that tugging it loose was not unlike pulling the bark away from a tree.

In the end he had to peel parts of the dress away as if he was skinning a rabbit.

Inside her dress she was surprisingly clean. Donovan wondered if the killer had bathed her and then replaced the dress as a kind of shroud.

He didn't have a chance to suppose much more, however, immersed in the shock of the girl's body. Christian gasped into his ear and the light of the bull's-eye shook.

From the bottom of the sternum, just beneath her breasts, to the top of the pubis, she had been sliced neatly open. Her belly gaped wide, and inside, where there should be lights and liver, stomach and kidneys and uterus, there was nothing.

Donovan felt an acid tickle at the back of his throat, and fought the urge to vomit.

Christian managed to control the shaking lantern, and once again a beam of light shone steadily on the eviscerated girl.

Inside her body, semicircular and polished as a bowl, Donovan
could see the stalk of the spine and the curving ribs. Between them were the red slabs of her back muscle.

“Now,” came Christian's voice, only a little shaky. “I wonder where he's gone and put them?”

That was exactly what Donovan was wondering.

Something else struck him as well. It wasn't as if the girl had been torn apart in a bestial rage. She'd been cleaned out with what he could only describe as care, almost the way a historian would excavate a barrow, as he'd seen sometimes in his boyhood. Excavated with the same care that she'd been laid out, with her ankles crossed and money to bury her.

There was evidence of brutality. But none, whatsoever, of hatred.

After the Crowner's men had come and taken her away, Donovan stayed a while at the scene of the crime, waiting for there to be enough light to examine the alley for any further evidence. Where the body had been was now a sticky red-black oblong. That would be the responsibility of the street cleaners soon enough.

As the wan morning sun struck down into the alley he studied the slimy bricks intently, looking for anything—a button, a cufflink, a scrap of fabric. There was nothing that didn't have the grime of the streets on it, nothing that was left last night, nothing that seemed to belong to that shadowy figure he'd seen, in his mind's eye, brushing the hair away from the girl's face.