“But listen to that whistle, sir! That can't be a mistake!”
“Constable Lampwick, we're expecting Mr. Swinburne to arrive via Waterloo Bridge, so the signal should more or less come from straight ahead. It sounds to me like the whistle-blower is with Detective Inspector Honesty's team on Kingsway.”
Trounce shifted from one foot to the other uneasily. He took off his bowler and gave it a hard slap.
Something wasn't right.
He shoved his hat back onto his head.
A decision had to be made.
What if he got it wrong?
The distant whistling stopped.
“Hell's bells,” he hissed under his breath.
What to do? What to do?
Trounce became very still for a moment.
He blinked.
The Scotland Yard man suddenly wheeled to face his men and bellowed: “Arm yourselves, lads. We're moving forward. Proceed with utmost caution. Do not, under any circumstances, mistake this for the Charge of the blessed Light Brigade, is that understood?”
There came a great many, “Yes, sirs.”
A hundred and fifty uniformed men took out their police-issue Adams revolvers, unhooked their truncheons, and, following Trounce, advanced slowly into the fog.
“Did you hear that, Commander?” Sergeant Slaughter asked.
“Yes, but it was ahead of time, farther away than it should be, and from the wrong direction, to boot!” Krishnamurthy replied, puzzled.
“It's the fog, sir. You know how it distorts things.”
“Humph!”
The commander of the Flying Squad couldn't stop thinking about Milligan. The man was a personal friend and had a wife and child. Witnessing his life terminated so abruptly and so senselessly had been shocking.
He sighed and forced the flier's death to the back of his mind. Duty first!
“Something must have happened,” he muttered. “So do we proceed into the Strand now or do we wait until the planned-for moment?”
“Maybe this is the planned-for moment, sir,” Slaughter suggested. “It's just come earlier than originally intended.”
Krishnamurthy clicked his tongue and considered a moment. He addressed his men: “We're going to wait. Ready yourselves. I want absolute silence. Keep your ears to the ground. Be prepared to move at a moment's notice!”
“Stop blowing that bloody whistle!”
Constable Carlyle stopped.
“You blithering idiot!” Detective Inspector Honesty growled. He stamped over to his subordinate. “You just ruined the whole-” He was brought up short by the sight of a sword blade projecting from the constable's chest. It slid back into the man's uniform and disappeared.
Blood spurted.
The whistle fell from Carlyle's mouth and tinked onto the road. The policeman followed it down.
From behind the body, a man shuffled out of the mist. He was a Rake, plainly, but he was also at least three days dead. His lower limbs were saturated with fluids and bulged horribly against his clothing. The swollen hands holding the sword, and the cane from which it had been unsheathed, possessed the sickening appearance of old uncooked sausages. His skin was the colour of earthworms, his sagging bottom lip dangled against his chin, and his eyes were turned up and sunken into their sockets.
“Awfully thorry,” he lisped. “That mutht be a terrible inconvenienth!”
There and then, Thomas Manfred Honesty decided he wanted to spend a great deal more of his time tending to his garden.
“More pink dahlias,” he muttered to himself, thinking about the state of his little plot's bottom border.
He drew his revolver.
“Yellow marigolds, perhaps.”
He aimed at the dead man's head.
“Blue geraniums.”
He squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. He sighed, pocketed it, and hefted his truncheon.
“Perhaps marigolds.”
He stepped forward, knocked the sword blade aside, and bludgeoned the corpse's head once, twice, thrice, four times, until it flew apart in a spray of white bone, black clotted blood, and grey brain tissue. The cadaver crumpled and lay twitching.
“Good mulch!” Honesty muttered. “That's the secret.”
“Sir!” cried a voice behind him. He turned and saw Piper and Patterson backing away as more bodies loomed out of the miasma.
“Everyone advance!” he shouted to his team behind the cordon. “Guns don't work. Use your truncheons! On their heads. As hard as you can. Crush their skulls!”
Detective Inspector Honesty and Detective Inspector Trounce cautiously led their men toward the centre of the Strand, one team proceeding from the north, the other from the east.
As they penetrated the thickening fog, the walking dead, with sword-sticks drawn, came staggering out of it to meet them. They were well dressed, debonair, and faultlessly polite.
“I'm mortified,” one of them confessed as he jammed his fingers into a constable's eye sockets. “This really is despicable behaviour and I offer my sincerest apologies.”
“I say!” another exclaimed, plunging his blade into a man's abdomen. “What a terrible to-do!”
“It's all rather unseemly,” noted a third, urbanely, after spitting a chunk of flesh from his mouth. He looked at the throatless uniformed man he held slumped in his arms. “I do hope you won't consider me boorish.”
The constables swiped their truncheons, crunched skulls, and splattered lifeless brains, but they were badly outnumbered and, furthermore, were distracted by swooping wraiths.
The seeming ghosts wafted in and out of sight, sometimes almost solid, other times a mere suggestion, and every time one appeared, policemen nearby slumped and clutched their heads. More than a few suddenly turned, with the word “Tichborne” blurting out of their lips, and attacked their colleagues.
Police truncheons smacked down onto police heads. The Rakes weren't the only ones apologising.
The battle intensified.
“Don't hold back, lads!” Trounce shouted. “Have at ’em!”
He stepped aside as a svelte and fashionable but sagging and bluish corpse minced out of the pall and said: “What ho! Would you mind awfully if I took your life, old thing? I seem to have mislaid my own. Jolly careless of me, what!”
“Oh, bugger off, you ridiculous ass,” the detective snarled. He dodged the Rake's blade and swung his truncheon into the side of the man's head.
The dandy staggered and protested: “Rotten show, old man!”
The detective hit him again, sending him to his knees.
“Really! This isn't at all cricket!”
“Shut the hell up,” Trounce hissed, and bashed his attacker's skull in. The Rake folded onto the cobbles and twitched weakly.
Detective Inspector Honesty emerged from the fog and nodded a greeting. Trounce returned it and warned: “Watch behind you!”
Honesty twisted and ducked under a blade. The Rake holding it was a badly moldering cadaver, perhaps one of the first to die. It stank, and when the Scotland Yard man punched it hard on the chin, its head simply fell off and split on the cobbles like an overripe melon. The body toppled after it.
Honesty turned away, his nose wrinkled in disgust.
“Where's Swinburne?” Trounce asked.
“I don't know.”
“Was the signal given early?”
“Yes. One of my men panicked.”
“Blast!”
“My fault.”
“I doubt it. Don't blame yourself. Can we hold them off until he arrives?”
“No choice. Burton's depending on it.”
Trounce grunted his agreement, stepped away from his fellow officer, gripped the handle of his truncheon with both hands, and swiped it into the ear of an attacking Rake. The corpse stumbled and fell. The detective stepped onto its chest, heaved himself over, and swung his weapon upward into the chin of another dead man. The head snapped back, came forward, and was met by a crushing blow to the forehead. The Rake grabbed at the detective's arm but missed, and the truncheon came arcing back and impacted against the carcass again. Bone shattered.