The Broken Token (2 page)

But the law insisted he view every suspicious death, so Nottingham was going to take him to a filthy street where he’d complain constantly, cover his nose to try vainly to keep out the
overpowering stench of life and death, then leave as soon as he was able. It was going to be a grim pleasure.

“The bugger’ll live.”

Sedgwick gave a wheezing laugh, and strode away with his long, powerful lope. Richard Nottingham dressed in the clothes he’d worn the day before, grabbed the dry heel of a loaf for his
breakfast, and left the house soundlessly, to walk back into town.

There was a faint crispness under the dawn air, a sense of seasons beginning to change. Another month would probably see the first frost of the year. Wisps of smoke were already rising from a
few chimneys on Vicar Lane as servants lit the early fires in the grand houses, and in the distance he could hear the muted sound of weavers setting up their trestles for the Tuesday coloured cloth
market on Briggate.

Nottingham had lived on Briggate once, in a grand house near the top end where it met the Head Row. He still passed it every day. He’d been just eight when his father had discovered that
his wife had taken a lover. He didn’t understand it at the time, but he remembered the furore, his father yelling madly at his mother to get her body from his house and take her bastard son
with her. Afterwards came the confusion of where to go, how to live… and then the hunger that governed their lives.

He still remembered his father faintly, although he’d done everything he could to push the man from his mind. Charles Nottingham had been a gentleman of high pretension and loud airs, a
drinker and gambler who often stayed out all night – or all week, if the whim took him – with little regard for his wife and child. In his cups his temper would rise; he’d beat
the servants, and even thrash his son. And when it finally suited him to be outraged by his wife’s behaviour, he’d thrown out his family, even though she’d brought all the money
to the marriage. But she had no rights; they all rested with him. Someone had told him that his father had left the city not long after, gone with his new mistress to join rich London society. In
the sour tenements of Leeds, the boy and his mother had enjoyed no such choice.

He passed the grim face of the workhouse, took a deep breath and entered the maze of small alleys off Lady Lane.

Queen Charlotte’s Yard was a majestic name for the row of hovels cramped on top of each other behind a thin archway that led off another small, ruined street. The houses struggled out of
the mud as if they’d exhausted their strength, one, sometimes two, decrepit storeys tall, places of plunging, desperate poverty. The kind of places he knew all too clearly, where damp streams
coursed down the walls and sewage backed up on to the floors after a heavy rain.

A small crowd had gathered, brought together by the dire spectacle of death. Nottingham forced his way between them, and they shrank away as they recognised his face. The Constable was
authority, he was the city, and his presence never brought good news for them.

The bodies had been pushed face down against one of the houses, then roughly covered in rubbish and excrement so only the limbs showed. It was a man and a woman, the male on top in a splayed
parody of animal fornication. Nottingham reached down and touched the woman’s small hand for a moment, her flesh clammy and unyielding against his fingers. Dead a few hours, he decided.
He’d wait for the coroner before uncovering them.

“Who found these two?” Nottingham raised his voice and looked around the people.

A scrawny man with long, matted hair shuffled forward. He had a pale face under a unkempt beard, his coat torn, dark breeches baggy over his thin thighs. Mould was growing in the seams of his
coat, and dust, like beggars’ velvet, lay on the nap.

“I did, sir,” he answered, his eyes lowered deferentially.

“What’s your name?”

“John, sir, John Chapman.”

“You live here, John?” the Constable queried kindly.

“Over there.” He looked up, showing ruined teeth, and indicated a house where the glass had been broken from all the windows and the door hung perilously loose. “With my
brother and his family. I’m a potman at the Talbot Inn. I was leaving for work this morning and saw them there.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went and found one of your men,” he explained carefully. “He told me to come back here and wait for you.”

“Did you hear anything last night?” Nottingham wondered. He knew it was a pointless question, but he had to ask it. “A fight, shouting?”

“No more than usual,” Chapman demurred, and glanced quickly around the other faces in the crowd. “This isn’t a quiet place at night, sir.”

Voices murmured assent.

“But none of you heard anything like murder?” Nottingham asked them.

They all shook their heads, as he knew they would. There was no sense in asking more.

Sedgwick strode through the archway, followed by the coroner. Brogden picked his way daintily through the filth and puddles. He’d taken the time to dress in clean hose and breeches and
there was a shine to his shoes. As expected, he had a scented handkerchief clamped to his nose. Nottingham greeted him noncommittally and turned to the bodies.

“I’ll need them uncovered,” Brodgen ordered brusquely, distaste in his voice. The Constable nodded to Sedgwick, who pulled and turned the male corpse.

Nottingham knew him immediately. Just three days earlier his men had helped rescue him from a mob by the Market Cross at the top of Briggate. Daniel Morton, his name was, a dissenting preacher
from Oxford who’d been invited to Leeds by one of the merchant families intent on saving the wicked souls of the poor. But from the way the poor had reacted on Saturday, they had no desire to
be saved. Now Morton’s expensive grey broadcloth coat had been ruined by bloodstains across the chest where a knife had ripped wounds and taken his life.

Then with a grunt Sedgwick heaved the woman over, and Nottingham felt his heart lurch. Hers was a face he knew far better than the preacher’s. For a while she’d been almost as close
as family to him. Now she was here, violently dead, humiliated, and beyond his protection.

“Christ.”

The word tore quietly from his mouth, although no one seemed to hear. He bunched his fists in his coat pockets and turned away as Brogden bent to look at the corpses. Nottingham bit down on his
lip and offered a silent prayer for her soul.

She’d been Pamela Watson when he first knew her, barely thirteen when she came to work for him as the serving girl. His daughters had been young and boisterous then, and Mary, struggling
desperately to recover from pneumonia, had needed plenty of help looking after them.

Pamela had come on the recommendation of her grandmother, Meg, a seamstress who’d raised the girl after her mother died. She’d soon learned the ways of the place and made herself
invaluable, always cheery and good-natured, even when the children were fractious.

She ended up staying for four years, sharing every hour of their lives, until she’d become like a third daughter. When she met Tom Malham, a farm labourer from Chapeltown, it had been
Nottingham who had vetted him and approved the match. And when she left for a new life with him, there had been a hole in their house for a long time.

So he couldn’t understand why she was here, stabbed and bloodied and left with the rubbish, beside a minister who’d only arrived in the city four days before.

He studied her face again, but there was no mistake; it was Pamela, beyond doubt. There had been no peace in her when she died; her lips were pushed back in a cruel rictus of pain. She was
clothed in a tattered dress of cheap homespun, ripped at the hem and mended many times, her legs and feet bare, the skin already pale and waxy. A broken scrap of blue ribbon hung round her neck, as
if someone had torn something off it.

“Definite murder, the pair of them,” Brogden announced, doing his duty and dragging the Constable sharply from his thoughts. The coroner replaced the handkerchief over his nose and
Nottingham caught the heavy smell of lavender.

“From his appearance, the man must have been of a little substance,” the coroner continued unnecessarily. “That coat and breeches didn’t come cheap. The woman was
probably a servant or a whore, though. A bit old for the tastes of most men, I’d have thought.”

“I know who they were.” There was a coldness in Nottingham’s tone that caused Brogden to glance warily at him for a moment.

“I’ll bid you good day, then,” he said, and tried to find a reasonably dry track out of the yard. Nottingham watched him leave, then turned to Sedgwick.

“You stay here and watch no one tries to strip this pair clean. I’ll send some men to bring them to the jail. After that I want you to talk to everyone you can find in the
court.” His deputy nodded, and Nottingham continued, “You can trust Brogden to miss the obvious. These two weren’t murdered here, there’s not enough blood. So they were
brought here, and it couldn’t have happened silently. Someone must have seen or heard something.”

“I’ll find out, boss.”

They wouldn’t talk to him but they might open up to Sedgwick, he thought. The man looked more like one of them, his shoes barely holding together and his coat the product of many better
years before it ever came into his possession. They wouldn’t fear him the way they did the Constable. Nottingham might have come up the hard way himself, from Constable’s man to deputy
to Constable, but now his authority scared people.

“When you’ve finished, come back and tell me what you’ve found.”

He just hoped the man could come up with something solid. Meanwhile, he had to go and break word of two deaths.

The chantry chapel bell on Leeds Bridge had tolled the end of the cloth market, and now other traders were setting out their wares on Briggate. Men were putting up chairs and
saucepans, knives and spoons, selling everything that any house might need, from the finest quality to roughly mended tinker goods. Isaac the Jew, the only one of his tribe in the city, had a
trestle filled with old clothes, from rags to the cast-offs of the rich. Up by the Market Cross others displayed the quality of their poultry, with chickens, ducks and geese locked in small wooden
cages, their frightened racket drowning out any hope of talk.

Nottingham walked by it all, scarcely noticing the chatter and gossip of the sellers as his mind raced. Unbidden, the picture of Pamela’s face as she lay there came into his mind.

A whore, just as his own mother had been. It made no sense to him. His mother had had little choice, cast out with no money and a young son after her husband learned of her love affair. With no
skills and a reputation as a fallen woman, no one would employ her. Her body was all she had to make money. It had been hard, living hand to mouth, especially as she grew older and less desirable.
Nottingham had helped, working when he could, stealing if the opportunity rose, but it was little enough. He’d watched his mother grow weaker, hating her life and herself, until she let death
claim her. But Pamela… as far as he knew, she was still happily married and living in the country. How could she have died in Leeds, dressed like a pauper, with a man she could barely have
met?

He had to find Meg, her grandmother, and tell her, to try to discover what had brought Pamela back to the city, and when.

He knew perfectly well what his first duty should be. He ought to be going to the merchant’s house to inform him that his minister guest had been murdered. Then he should be using all his
men to find Morton’s killer. In the eyes of Leeds Corporation, the men who ran the city, Pamela’s death would count for nothing.

But this time he couldn’t look through their eyes.

The last he’d heard of Meg, she’d found a place in Harrison’s almshouses, a series of neat cottages behind St John’s Church. She’d be seventy now, if she was even
still alive. When he knew her she’d been an optimistic, industrious soul, sewing every hour she could manage to provide for herself and her granddaughter. But she’d never missed a
Sunday in church, both morning service and evensong, singing the hymns with a heartfelt joy and belief.

Nottingham couldn’t stop the thoughts skittering through his mind like blown leaves. If Pamela had come back to Leeds, why in God’s name hadn’t she come to him? They
didn’t need a servant any more, that was true, now the girls were older and helping around the house. But he’d have found her a position with a decent family.

He kicked a stone and watched it rattle down the Head Row as he crossed and made his way through the grounds of St John’s, taking the winding path between the gravestones laid flat on the
earth. Nearby, girls from the charity school sat outside and learned politely under the eyes of a teacher. A teasing sun played down, tempting with the faint promise of warmth that might come later
in the day. The almshouses stood together in a small terrace, sheltered by the back wall of the churchyard. They were homes for the lucky pious few among the poor who could find places there, where
they could live out their days with a secure pension, free from the terrible spectre of the workhouse.

He walked curiously to the first of the houses, its stonework carefully pointed, the window glass clear and shining, door freshly painted, and knocked. There was a long pause before it was
answered by an ancient woman, bent so low with arthritis that she had to cock her head to look up at him.

“Good day, Mistress,” Nottingham said politely. “I’m looking for Meg. She used to live here.”

The woman breathed in gently, gave a smile that turned her wrinkled face beatific, and pointed down the row.

“She still does. Fourth door, just down there. The one with the window box. She’ll enjoy having a visitor, she doesn’t get many.”

“Thank you,” he replied, bowed courteously to her and made his way down. There was a tranquillity about the place, just far enough from the city proper to seem removed, although
merchants were beginning to build their mansions on nearby streets, and the sound of the boys over at the Free School carried across the field.