Heaven's Bones (7 page)

But
there
.

There, where a layer of dirt had washed into the alley. The print of a boot heel, clear as a picture, the semicircle showing that the owner had faced the precise spot where the girl had lain.

It must be from last night; any older and the traffic of the streets would have already obliterated it.

And it was unlike most heels that ever would leave their mark here, in this part of London. The print was crisp and new, and the heel mark showed little sign of wear, no scuffing from the cobblestones, no deterioration from the hard labor men of these parts, and women as well, endured.

It wasn't necessarily the murderer's.

But Artemis knew it was.

Or at least, it belonged to the man who brought the body here, who left it with money to bury it. And it was a sure bet it was the same man.

And that heel meant a man who was well shod, with little sign of the streets on his footwear.

A toff.

A rich man had come to the slums to kill a whore. Was it an accident, or had he planned it? Did he plan more? Were Whitechapel and Stepney his hunting grounds?

Artemis had no illusions about the wealthy. He didn't doubt their capacity for violence, although admittedly they had less opportunity and cause to use it.

He straightened and stretched his lower back. The morning was already warm. The day would be hot, and breezeless.

And this summer would be a bastard.

Dr. Sebastian Robarts stood shaking on the embankment, the canvas bag with its dreadful contents heavy in his hand. The filthy water was thick and turgid beneath him, and the quarter moon and a few flickering gas lamps cast a dull illumination on ripples so slow and solid it looked like the Thames was made of molasses.

It had gone wrong, as wrong as Margaret bleeding to death under his hands, under his impotent scalpel.

The girl hadn't noticed the drug, sipping thirstily at her tea, trying to pretend a gentility she didn't have. She hadn't had time to have more than a bite or two before her lids grew heavy, each blink longer and longer before finally her eyes stayed shut and her chin drooped to the tattered lace of her collar. Her hands lost their grip on the cup and saucer and he'd taken them swiftly before the dregs could slop out on her skirt. He set them aside and waited a few minutes to let the drug take full hold before he moved in, checking the pulse at her wrist and beneath her ear. As he bent over her, her chin lifted and her eyes opened wide, as if she was struggling for consciousness, and her startled light blue eyes looked straight into his. Her lips moved, as if she would protest. He froze, not daring to blink, waiting to see what she would do. There was a terrible awareness about her regard, as if she could look straight into his soul and root out his intentions, holding them up to blazing light.

Her eyes glazed over, and her pale blue gaze became opaque; her lids sank and she sagged against the wing of the chair like an exhausted child.

She was so light and frail in his arms as he carried her to the laboratory he'd prepared behind his examining rooms—under-nourished—her body was like a child's despite the hard living in her face.

The examining couch was equipped with thick leather straps with brass buckles. They were well padded; he had no intention of bruising his subjects. He had not come to bring them pain, but to release them from the bonds of the earthliness that kept them imprisoned, that kept them bound to the relentless fate of women since the fall, the deadly cycle of birth and pregnancy and the weakness of their own bodies that had trapped even his beloved.

He had to admit the thought excited him.

I will unbind Lilith …

And then …

Beneath the knife she had fallen apart; her vitals escaped him and he could not stop the blood from flowing. At one dreadful moment the blue eyes opened and she stared at him, uncomprehending, red spatters on her chalk-pale face. And he thought it must be a reflex, a galvanic reaction that a corpse makes when the still-vibrant nerves respond to unusual blood flow: eyelids switching open like an automaton's, no feeling or true life there. He'd seen it, sometimes, in his work; he'd read plenty of scholarly works about the phenomenon.

He prayed it was true, that she wasn't really
alive
at that moment.

When it was over and her body lay hollow before him and he knew he couldn't bring her back, that he had failed her as badly as he had failed Margaret, he slumped in a corner and covered his face with his hands, sticky with her blood, and wept like a child.

When his tears were spent he was sleepy, and felt he could curl up in his corner and doze until dawn. But he forced himself to his feet, forced himself to walk the few feet between them and contemplate his botched work.

A memory: His first year learning surgical work, stitching the great wound in a corpse's neck for practice. The master, a corpulent fellow no one liked and who had the yellow skin of chronic jaundice, came over to watch. Robarts' hand shook under the gaze of the yellow-tinged eyeballs and the high hawk nose, hatchet-like in the fat face.

“ 'Strewth, Robarts,” came the unpleasant, coarse voice. “It's a damned good sight the poor bastard's dead. Wouldn't last long with you pulling him about like that.”

He mopped his brow with his rolled-up cuff. That was many years ago. He was Dr. Sebastian Robarts now, young and promising, a member of the Royal Society, inventor of the Robarts Spreader, whose technique for shifting breech babes still in the womb had the most success of any yet tried. He was a man of property. A family man.

Was
a family man.

Until he'd killed his wife and son.

That's insane. You didn't kill them
.

Robarts started and looked behind him, seeing nothing. Where had that voice come from? Had he imagined it?

She died because she was flawed. They all are flawed. But you can still fix them
.

No, I can't. I failed.

There will always be failures. But you can't give up now. You owe it to them
.

True. It was true. His work wasn't finished here, not by half.

Hastily he wet a cloth and mopped the blood from the girl's face. There was nothing to be done about the gore that soaked her dress.
He considered stripping her but dismissed the thought—he couldn't leave her naked, alone in the streets of Whitechapel. For he had to take her away, leave her where she could be found and buried—he could do nothing more for her here.

Her face was so peaceful. More than once he caught himself thinking that she was merely asleep, and touched the side of her face, only to feel the cold of her flesh, the spark of life fled. It seemed like hours he spent in the harsh light of the laboratory, cleaning her up as best he might.

And the mysterious mechanisms inside her—he spread them out on the dissection table, looking for a clue, the key that would tell him what had killed Margaret. Was it the size or configuration of the uterus? Something about the tiny, fishlike fetus, with its disproportionate eyes and primitive tail?

Nothing. They told him nothing. Years of education and practice, and he felt confused and ignorant as a neophyte.

If anyone saw him as he bundled the body through the streets they didn't say; perhaps the darkness and the cloth he'd wrapped her in hid her sufficiently, although any witnesses must think it odd to see a well-dressed man carrying a burden in the thin hours of the morning.

He walked blindly, barely feeling her weight across his shoulder. The alley appeared before him, its dark mouth like the entrance to a tomb, and he automatically turned inside. When he lowered her body to the ground he regretted the hard stones beneath her, but there was nothing to be done; he must not be caught, he must escape, he must continue … what?

His work? When he had failed so utterly? When he was so obviously incompetent?

He arranged the girl's limbs into a semblance of propriety. He might as well find the nearest policeman, walk into the nearest police station and confess.

Her hair was swept untidily across her face. He reached out to tuck it back neatly and paused as something rippled through his mind.

You didn't fail
.

Of course I did
, he answered automatically.
The girl died, didn't she?

She would have died hereafter
. The strange voice sounded amused.

What do you mean?
Robarts tucked the money and the note into the girl's hand—at least she wouldn't be tumbled into an unmarked grave, bereft even of a coffin. He could give her that much.

There will be losses. There will be consequences. Any man who has discovered anything of worth has found it so
.

Robarts stood beside the body. Something strange, something like hope sparked beneath his breast.

Yes. That's true. But …

Will you give up so easily? Wasn't your wife … your Margaret … worth more to you than that?

Robarts' fists clenched.

How dare you? She was
everything
to me
.

Then prove it
.

The voice, little more than a tickle in his brain, was gone, and he stood alone in the moonlit alley, the girl at his feet.

He had more work to do. Robarts turned and walked to his rooms, little caring who saw him. The night mists were beginning to form in the damp streets, and his feet stirred white wisps like ripples in a stream.

Home in his rooms, he cleaned up the floor and wrapped the girl's insides with the rags, bundling all inside a canvas bag. And now he stood on the banks of the Thames, the bag dangling from his fingertips, and before he had time to think of it anymore, he let it drop.

It seemed to fall forever before it hit the turbid surface, where it slipped under with barely a splash. An instant, and it was gone.

Robarts flexed his cramped fingers, suddenly aware of the drying blood that soaked his coat and trousers. He couldn't let daylight find him like this.

The mist had thickened into fog, making a maze of the city streets, but he found his way home without thinking about it, picking his way surefooted across the cobblestones.

The fog rose to hide his passing.

St. Thomas Hospital Morgue

Southwark, Summer, 1867

“Beautiful job, it was,” said the surgeon, wiping his hands. “Someone who knew right well what they were doing. No slopping work here—cleaned out nice and neat. Someone took pride in what they were doing there.”

Artemis stifled his nausea at the surgeon's casual admiration for the man who had butchered the girl.

“What was taken, exactly?” he said. “I mean, from the inside …”

“Oh—uterus, of course, all the female organs. And intestine too, bowels, liver. Not a trace of feces, which is tricky to manage in such a case. The girl was basically cleaned out, like the butcher does a heifer.”

“Did it look like butcher's work?”

“Hmm.” The surgeon gave his hands a final wipe and drew from a drawer a neatly wrapped packet of greased paper. “You don't mind if I have my bit of supper, do you? Haven't had a chance for a bite all day.”

Artemis nodded, but even his hardened stomach twisted a bit as the surgeon produced a thick-cut slice of ham between rough bread and munched it happily, seeming unaffected by the smell of chemicals and death about him, not to mention the neatly split body of a drowning victim not ten feet away, yellow fat
bursting from his incised belly and a blank expression on his purple face.

“It would be a remarkably neat butcher,” he continued, talking around a mouthful of his sandwich. “Though I won't say they don't exist. But this was delicate work. One of them butchers the Jews use, p'raps, so that the meat's killed kosher.”

“Could it be a medical man?” Artemis wondered if the police surgeon would take offense, but he continued chewing blandly.

“Oh, aye. Most likely, to my way of thinking. The way the arteries were dissected, it was unlikely a layman's work.”

The man with the boot that left that clear print was coalescing in the detective's mind. A rich man, and a doctor or a surgeon at that.

Artemis felt a headache prickle behind his eyes.

“Oh, and another thing you might find interesting.” The surgeon displayed a well-masticated mouthful of sandwich as he gestured at the sheet-covered body. “I'm fairly sure your girl was pregnant.”

“Really? How can you tell?”

The surgeon gestured with the remaining half of his sandwich. “The breasts were swollen—I took a look and the milk was starting to come. Can't be too sure—it's possible she was nursing. But she didn't have the look of that to me.”

Silently Artemis walked to the girl's side and pulled the sheet from her face. It still retained its porcelain perfection, although the violet circles under her eyes were starting to spread to the rest of her face and a sweet smell spoke of the beginnings of decay.

Give her a day or less, and her face would be swollen and unrecognizable. Perhaps they could bury her before that happened, bury her decent with the money the murderer left.

Maybe it wasn't murder, after all. Maybe it was an abortion gone wrong.

But why would a doctor with those boots, a man of substance,
risk his practice, risk imprisonment to give a prostitute a back street abortion?

He drew the sheet back over her face.

Did the evisceration have anything to do with the pregnancy?

He thought of rooms in the British Museum, and apothecaries' shops with jarred, floating fetuses in various stages of development side-by-side on the shelves, and shuddered.

“Course, I'd have more information about him if I could have a go at another.”

“What?” Artemis turned from the corpse.

“Another body, I mean, if he tried it again. Gets a taste for it, you know. You find another of these beauties, you send her my way, right? I could spot this beggar's handiwork a mile off now.” The thinly disguised eagerness in the surgeon's voice curdled Artemis' stomach.