The Curse of Christmas (11 page)

In a panic, Dr Watson crawled on
his hands and knees until he reached the perimeter where he ducked
down behind a clump of knee-high thistles. He had planned to park
himself midway along the fence so that he could check any human
traffic coming and going along Redcross Way but this was even
better. He was in the corner and had a clear view of both Redcross
Way and Union Street where the brothel was situated. The only
problem was that he didn’t have any cover behind him and felt
exposed to the rear.

Dr Gregory, in an equal panic,
threw himself flat to the muddy ground behind the headstone,
praying that the midnight intruder didn’t step on him.

Two men passed fairly close but
he kept his nerve and kept low to the ground. They were making
their way quickly toward the rear of the cemetery. The fact it was
two men hinted at the nefarious business afoot. Grave-robbers
always worked in pairs - one man to do the digging and a
lookout.

After a few tense moments, Dr
Watson decided to risk it. He poked his head above the thistle
patch. He thought the two trespassers might be the Joff and Crick.
The height and shape of them certainly suggested that to be the
case. Joff, the taller of the two, was carrying something in his
arms. It looked like a bundle of rags. Crick was balancing a shovel
over his shoulder.

Cocky and sure of themselves,
the grave-robbers didn’t even bother to check that no one was
about. They moved swiftly to the grave that had been recently
filled with the girl called Annie, and Crick began to dig. The
earth was damp and loose. It didn’t take long to move what amounted
to a small mound of wet clods.

The two men worked without
speaking, indicating they knew what they were doing, or had done
this sort of thing before, or had discussed things beforehand. They
worked with an economy of action, stealthy and silent.

The winter moon had been sailing
in and out of rivers of soot ever since the rain stopped. Spectral
light, blue and cold, cast queer shadows on the tall brick tenement
that hemmed them in on the east side. The gas-light on the corner
of Redcross Way and Union Street spluttered and burned dimmer and
every passer-by took on a ghostly quiver, haunted, hunted, afraid,
hurrying to their own private hell.

Joff and Crick could have been
Satan’s minions. No one looked. No one cared. These were the graves
of the outcast dead. Victims of misfortune from the day they were
born. Nameless, forgotten, unloved. Every one of them had their own
sad story. And every story was one of female woe.

Weeds, flattened and glistening
from the recent rain, began to dry-off and lift. They could have
been revenants rising from a misty grave. Clumps of clay began to
dry out. The earth moved a little, heaved a little, belched, and
settled itself back down.

The body-snatching demons
finished their sinister work and stretched to their full height.
They had a quick furtive look around and then jumped up and down on
the spot. Dr Watson wondered if he might be witnessing a weird
Satanic ritual.

From the amount of time spent
digging, the grave-diggers could not have possibly unearthed the
entire grave. It accorded with Dr Gregory’s theory of
tooth-robbing. Tooth-robbers only needed to get at the head of a
corpse. Bathed in bluish moonlight Joff appeared empty-handed, the
bundle of rags no longer in his arms. Crick was carting the shovel
over his shoulder. The two robbers had reached the gate when
something unexpected happened.

A tall man, top-hatted and
wearing a black evening cape lined with red silk, appeared as if
from nowhere and sprinted down Redcross Way. He was too
well-dressed to be a local and the speed at which he was moving
suggested something untoward, possibly illegal. Had he come out of
the brothel on Union Street? Was he the secret protagonist they
were after?

Dr Watson was torn between
chasing after the tall stranger and thus alerting Joff and Crick to
his whereabouts behind the patch of thistles, or staying put. It
only took a heartbeat for him to decide his most important duty was
to Mycroft Holmes and the heir to the crown. He leapt to his feet
and scaled the spiked fence, snagging the hem of his old coat. He
felt it catch and jerked hard, tearing the stitching to free
himself before taking off in pursuit of his quarry.

Joff and Crick, frightened out
of their wits, took off in the opposite direction toward Union Road
and the ale tavern full of men. Crick dropped the shovel inside the
gate so as not to be slowed down.

Startled, totally confused, Dr
Gregory was torn three ways – checking the grave, chasing the
grave-robbers to see what they had stolen, or chasing after his old
chum. The latter won. Fitter and healthier, despite his bung knee,
he threw himself over the fence and raced after Dr Watson,
wondering what the deuce had possessed his friend to take off as if
the devil was on his tail.

It was not much more than one
hundred yards to the railway viaduct where, on the other side of
the track, Redcross Way was bisected by Southwark Street and the
quarry could run three ways. The stranger was fleet-footed and flew
over the filthy cobbles with ease, cape flapping and triangles of
red silk flashing like a danger sign. Dr Watson should have heeded
the warning but his legs had taken over from his brain. He had
ceased thinking rationally. When his heel caught the edge of a
cobblestone coated in excrement he thudded to the ground and landed
hard.

Dr Gregory caught up to him and
helped him to his feet. The exchange was brief and baffling. What
possessed him to take off like that? Who was he chasing? Was he all
right?

No bones appeared to be broken.
Dr Watson invented a story as best he could. The man in the top hat
was a notorious criminal. He recognized him at once. Wanted by
Scotland Yard and so on. Dr Gregory appeared skeptical but he
didn’t press his friend. He was ready to call it a night and was
all for hailing a hackney cab which they could probably get at the
Bear Gardens near the Globe theatre. Dr Watson nodded that was the
best thing but as soon as they reached the viaduct he paused and
appeared to study his surrounds with more than passing
interest.

Massive brick pillars supported
the railway track which ran above their heads. The construction
blocked out what murky light there was and made it seem like
standing in a pitch black tunnel. Just before Dr Watson thudded to
the ground he was certain the running footsteps had ceased. The
stranger had been swallowed up by the blackness of the viaduct but
so had his echoing feet. It didn’t make sense. The stranger could
have continued one of three ways to elude capture and yet he seemed
to stop suddenly.

Dr Watson wondered if the man
was standing in the shadows even now, perhaps behind a buttress, or
tucked back in a recess in one of the pillars. His eyes sieved the
darkness but it was no use. He thought he could hear someone
breathing but it might have been his own fast breath whooshing in
and out. The blood was still chugging in his ears.

“What is it?” said Dr Gregory,
more confused than ever, wondering why his friend had stopped
walking. How had he ever been talked into staking out a cemetery in
Southwark in winter? He had to be up at seven. He had patients to
see tomorrow. His medical practice was losing money. He couldn’t
afford to sleep in. He couldn’t afford to chase after tooth-robbers
and master criminals. He even wondered about the sanity of his old
chum. Tooth robbers! Really! Let Scotland Yard deal with it! That
was their job. They got paid to do it. He had enough on his plate
with the Ghost Club as it was. “Are you all right? Did you hit your
head?”

Dr Watson appeared to shake
himself out of trance. “I’m fine. I didn’t hit my head. Let’s get
going.”

But no sooner had they come out
of the velvety blackness and into the murk than Dr Watson stopped
again, looked back over his shoulder and got the fright of his
life.

Poised at the top of the viaduct
on the train track was wraith-like figure, spectral in the fog and
gloom. He could have sworn the apparition with long yellow hair was
real, though who in their right mind would go about at midnight
dressed in a bed-gown!

When Dr Gregory blasphemed
quietly under his breath, Dr Watson knew the strange vision was not
a figment of his over-wrought imagination.

“Hey you!” Dr Gregory called
out. “Get off the train track!”

Passenger trains didn’t run at
midnight, although a milk train might, or perhaps one of those
silent-going hand-carts operated by two men pumping a see-saw
handle, nevertheless, the strange figure heeded the warning,
stepped back from the edge of the track and melted into the murky
vapours.

“What did you make of that?”
asked Dr Watson.

“Sleepwalking perhaps.”

“Mmm, that would explain the
bed-gown – but damn cold!”

“Somnambulists don’t feel the
cold. They are in a state of suspended awareness. Some of them can
unlock doors and make cups of tea and so on and yet be oblivious to
all around them.”

“And still pay attention to good
advice?”

Dr Gregory shrugged. “Who can
say if they heard my voice or not?”

The two friends hailed a cab
sooner than expected on Southwark Street and settled back with a
heave, cold and weary and baffled by all that they had
witnessed.

“I’m sorry to have dragged you
into this,” began Dr Watson apologetically, after short but violent
burst of asthmatic coughing. “If there is any way I can make it up
to you, let me know.”

“You can start by looking after
yourself better. That cough sounds dangerous.”

“It’s actually on the mend.” He
affected a casual tone before changing the subject. “I think you
were right about the tooth-robbing. Our two grave-robbers didn’t
dig up a cadaver. They worked fairly efficiently. I got the
impression they’d done it more than once.”

“What I don’t understand is what
the bundle of rags was for?”

“Oh, yes, the rags. Do you think
they buried them?”

“Well, they weren’t carrying
them when they left. If you hadn’t taken off after the phantom in
the top hat we could have cornered them and had all the answers,
probably some teeth as well.”

Dr Watson winced in the dark.
“Still, I think we proved something odd is going on in the
Crossbones Cemetery. Take that jumping up and down. Could it be a
Satanic ritual?”

Dr Gregory laughed. “Not so much
a Satanic ritual as a pragmatic one.”

“How do you mean?”

“In an unconsecrated cemetery
where the dead are too poor for a coffin, bodies are packed one on
top of another with a few planks of wood separating them, and
sometimes not even that, just a hessian sack between six or seven
or eight bodies. In other words, there is always more than one body
in a grave. Grave-diggers jump up and down on the latest burial to
pack the bodies in.”

“But they didn’t bury a
body.”

“Force of habit perhaps, or
because they had disturbed the grave and needed to tap it down
again. There was a case once where the loose earth on a grave had
been disturbed and the dead body poked through. The corpse had been
hastily buried - still full of flatulence and gas - and it sprang
up as if it was sitting up in bed.”

“It must have frightened the
living daylights out of whoever saw it.”

“Indeed it did. I still feel a
chill just thinking about it.”

There was no way Dr Watson could
sleep. His brain was whirring, his nerves were on edge, his legs
were jittery, and he felt as if he’d been plugged into a dynamo.
After dropping Dr Gregory outside his home in Camden, and thanking
him yet again for all his help, he directed the cabbie back to
Southwark.

It was now or never. He wanted
to examine the grave that had been disturbed. He was fairly certain
it was the same grave where the corpse known as Annie had been
interred during the day. What had the grave-diggers dug up or what
had they buried? He could hardly inspect it during the day with
Joff and Crick looking on. Better to do it now while he was still
wearing his old clobber.

He wanted to have a good look
around the viaduct too. He wondered if there might be a hiding
place tucked into the brick pillars. There was no point doing it in
broad daylight. The place would be crawling with vagrants, drunks
and pickpockets. He didn’t expect to find the mysterious stranger
lurking there. The man would be long gone. Still, he tapped the
reliable Webley revolver in his coat pocket and took some
comfort.

With his blood was on fire, he
was actually feeling quite clever and cunning. He directed the
cabbie to the front of the church on O’Meara Street and paid him in
advance to wait for him, giving the impression he would be paying a
visit to the brothel and would need transport in about half an hour
or so. The cabbie winked and seemed obliging. Being paid to sit and
wait was a pleasant change. The horse would appreciate the
rest.

Dr Watson slipped around the
corner and entered the cemetery. He almost tripped over the shovel
on the ground. That was a bit of luck. He scooped it up and noted
it was what Dr Gregory called a ‘soft shovel’ – one made of wood
that made less noise

Briars and straggly bushes
tugged at his coat as he zigzagged to the grave he thought belonged
to Annie. It was easy to spot because there were no weeds growing
on that particular mound. He began digging at the end he thought
would be the head where the soil appeared more friable.

Sweat was pouring down his face
despite the cold. He worked feverishly and kept looking over his
shoulder to make sure no one was about. As soon as he exposed the
corpse he bent down to examine it more closely, waiting for the
moon to sail out from behind a cloud. Dr Gregory was right. The
corpse of Annie was resting on planks of wood. They refused to
budge. The weight of the body, nine-tenths buried, proved too heavy
to shift. But he felt certain there were more bodies underneath.
The grave was too shallow otherwise. He was checking Annie’s teeth
– all intact – when he spotted something wedged under her head. It
was the bundle of rags. It made him shake his head in disbelief.
Had Joff and Crick gone to all that trouble merely to put a pillow
under the dead girl’s head? It seemed ridiculous but what other
explanation could there be?