Almost immediately he sees an arc of blood-splatters in the mud. Did Farzad recover enough to struggle? Or is this the place where he died?
To his relief, there are no obvious sign that a body was laid in the mud here. And by now, someone would have found the corpse. A public cry would have been raised.
Looking around, puzzled, but still clinging to hope, Nicholas notices a familiar tenement not far away. It is a house of no distinction whatsoever – certainly no grander than any of the others in a lane where grandiosity is measured by whether or not the sewer ditch outside has a step across it. It is a narrow two-storey timbered house, with little windows criss-crossed by cheap lead and shuttered on the inside. The studs and braces of the woodwork are cracked and faded. Nicholas walks towards it, resolving to speak to the owner. He may have heard something in the night. And being a regular at the Jackdaw – as Nicholas knows him to be – it would be best if he were forewarned.
Reaching the door, Nicholas sees that it bears the marks of numerous lock replacements, though apparently the owner is trusting enough to leave it slightly ajar. A small square of timber nailed above the latch shows the image of a hand, palm forward, the fingers together and pointing down. The once-bright paint is flaked and peeling. The sign is a talisman, Dr Shelby, he hears the owner telling him, a charm against evil. What a pity it doesn’t protect a fellow from the flux.
Nicholas remembers his last visit to this house. He had prescribed crushed cinnamon and pomegranate juice to ease the patient’s stomach pain, but had stopped short of drawing blood from the veins of the inner arm. ‘I think this has more to do with those oysters you ate yesterday than some imaginary imbalance of the humours,’ he recalls saying.
As Nicholas lifts his hand to knock, his head tilts downwards in a counter-movement to the raising of his arm. It is unintentional, but it brings into his direct view the dark smear at the foot of the door. He stares at it, an icy flood of disbelief racing through his thoughts.
Surely not here! Not by this man’s hand.
But when he kneels to get a better look, the nature of the stain is clear to him in all its sanguinary awfulness.
Nicholas pushes against the door. It swings inwards with a rasp of its hinges. He is inside before the wisdom of entering even registers.
A narrow wedge of daylight shows him a low-ceilinged chamber, its limits lost in darkness. The room is cold enough never to have been lived in, though Nicholas knows that not to be true. ‘Is anyone there?’ he calls softly. ‘It’s me, Nicholas.’
A moan of pain would tell him there was at least hope. He would settle for that; be grateful for it. But he hears nothing.
He seems to be walking on sand. He can feel his boots sliding on it. Looking down, the light from the half-open door shows him that the dirt floor is covered in a fine dark powder. The pungent smell of nutmeg rises from where his feet have trod.
They have smashed the little chamber as though it were a papist chapel and everything in it an abomination to them. The ash from the brick oven in the corner has been scooped out and cast onto the floor. The torn-up pages of books lie scattered everywhere. Sacks of spices that were once stacked neatly against one wall now loll about like the disembowelled victims of a massacre. The meagre contents of a clothes chest are strewn about, as if the men who did this abandoned their own shadows out of guilt.
Only the simple bed in the corner has been left intact, because they needed a platform on which to perform the more intricate and personal of their efforts.
Nicholas wonders how the neighbours could not have heard the killers going about their business. Then he remembers that many in this lane are regulars at the Jackdaw. They would have been at the celebrations. For the rest, perhaps they were at church. Or visiting friends. Or just so accustomed to the beating of servants, apprentices, dogs, children, whores and wives that a scream or two of torment here and there is nothing to get overly excited about.
In death, Solomon Mandel has a surprising grace about him. His old face bears the stoic certainty of a martyr’s, as if the agony of death was little more than a temporary trial to be endured and then forgotten. His beard, matted with blood, is the beard of an Old Testament prophet, not an elderly man with nostalgia for the bread of his childhood. He lies naked and bound, oddly straight, given how they have tortured him. Nicholas marvels at how he has not twisted himself into a posture reflective of the pain he has endured. His white arms are the limbs of an effigy carved in plaster on a tomb. The wrists – bound tightly with cords – lie meek and pious at the groin, as though protecting his modesty.
To Nicholas’s shame, the anger that surges in his breast is matched ounce for ounce by relief – relief that the ruined body on the bed isn’t Farzad’s.
6
Unusually for a public notice raised by the parish authorities on Bankside, the warning tacked to the door of Solomon Mandel’s house – within an hour of Nicholas discovering the body – is still there a day later. As warnings go, it is unequivocal. For attempting entry: confinement in the Clink and a forfeit of twenty shillings. For taking away souvenirs from the site of the murder, with intent to sell them to the morbidly curious: branding upon a part of the body to be decided by the magistrate.
‘Last murder we had on Bankside, I caught some fellow trying to hawk the victim’s boots for a half-angel outside the Tabard,’ says parish constable Willders. ‘Still had the blood on them. There’s some as would sell the corpse itself for an ornament, if they thought they could find a buyer.’
Constable Willders is a short, barrel-chested fellow in a leather jerkin. He wears a perpetual frown and carries his official cudgel slantwise across his chest with the solemnity of a monarch carrying a golden sceptre.
‘You know Bankside, Constable Willders,’ Nicholas says with a sigh of resignation, ‘where there’s money to be made…’
Willders points to the little square of wood with its painted hand, set just above the lock, the symbol Nicholas had noticed when the trail of blood led him here. ‘What do you make of this, Dr Shelby? Could it be devilish?’
‘It’s a talisman for protection, that’s all. Mandel told me so himself.’
Bianca looks closer. ‘I’ve seen these before, in Padua,’ she says, ‘on the front doors of the Jewish houses behind the Piazza delle Erbe. My father often took me with him when he went to see his customers there. I think they were mostly Jews who’d fled from Spain and Portugal.’
‘I wonder if that’s where Solomon Mandel came from.’
‘I don’t know; he never spoke much about himself,’ Bianca says. ‘And this being Southwark, no one asked.’
Willders tucks his cudgel under one arm and fishes a large key from his belt. ‘I’m not sure Mistress Merton should accompany us, Dr Shelby. The body has been removed, but what remains is not a meet sight for a woman. There’s rather a lot of blood.’
Before Nicholas can answer, Bianca says, ‘Do I recall rightly, Constable Willders, that last summer you came to Dr Shelby much troubled by an aposteme under your groin?’
Willders stares at his boots. He says nothing.
‘Dr Shelby prescribed a soothing plaister, which I applied after he had lanced the aposteme and let out the pus. Remember it?’
Willders permit himself the barest nod.
‘I can assure you, Constable Willders, compared to that experience, whatever is in there can hold absolutely no horrors for me whatsoever.’