The ground where I squatted was soft. Birds flitted from bush to grave looking for worms. They seemed interested in the pile that I had deposited. Wild teasel grew close to the hedge. Rainwater that gathers at the base of the plant’s leaves acquires the power to remove warts from a man’s hands. I stroked its wet leaves with my fingertips. ‘Seek peace, and pursue it,’ I said to myself, in an attempt to quell all that was disassembled in my mind and body.
‘An abundance of peace, so long as the moon endureth.’ I jumped up and around and found myself staring once more into the face of the butcher. How did such a big lump manage to stay so quiet? Standing with his arms folded, a calm smile upon his lips and eyebrows raised, he eyed the vomit on the ground.
‘Feel free to examine it.’ I stood up and brushed my jacket with my hands, checking that it stayed clean.
He grunted. ‘What do you suggest we do now?’ he asked.
Go to the nearest inn and have a breakfast of cleansing ale and a piece of beef pie is what I felt like doing, but I kept the thought to myself.
‘I suggest we take a look around the church,’ he answered himself.
‘Good idea. I’ll wait here.’ The cold, clean air was good for me.
‘No, sir. This is your game. If you have no appetite for it, then I will go back to my butcher’s shop and cut up cows.’ He stuck his thumbs into a broad, black leather belt and then stuck out his big lump of a chin. Godamercy — the temperament of a small child!
So we went for a walk through the cowquake and got very wet. We revealed nothing out in the graveyard — he poked about in the leaves a lot with his toe and we wasted an hour of our lives. Then he led us back into the dark, foul church where we walked slowly down the centre aisle, me casting a lazy eye down each pew as we went, he walking down each and every one. Though I walked as slow as I could I still reached the ancient pulpit first. Its surface was scratched, worn and unpolished and the base of it was stained black. Someone had been scrubbing at it. Although I gazed at it a while I couldn’t see anything much to note and my head began to cloud over with boredom and weariness. I sighed and sat myself down in the front pew. It was very quiet. All to be heard was a slow drip coming from some dark, green corner and the sound of the butcher poking around. At last he reached the pulpit, which seemed to fascinate him. He kept rubbing his forefinger up and down the grain of the wood.
‘What have you found?’ I asked when I could stand the tedium no longer.
‘Into Hell, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘The air in here is wicked and foul.’ On that we could agree.
He dropped his heavy frame onto the pew next to me then laid his legs out before him straight. Musing with his thumb and forefinger on either side of his nose, he at last answered the question properly. ‘I would venture that the man that did this planned it well. He killed her where you are sitting. There is a bloodstain just behind your left shoulder. New it is, you can tell by the colour and the texture of the wood.’
I looked slowly over my shoulder, with dreadful visions of blood dripping from the wood like the tears of an angel, praying silently that the red stain did not curse my jacket. I need not have worried, for all that was to be seen was a small circle that seemed a little darker than the rest. Who was to say it wasn’t a pattern of the grain? But then I wasn’t a butcher. ‘You’d know about blood,’ I muttered.
‘Aye,’ he growled. ‘I would say that she was hauled from here to the pulpit and tied to it. It was while she was bound to the pulpit that the man took her eyes out. You’ll have seen the big bloodstain on the floor where the wound dripped. No sign of it anywhere else. The rest of the church is clean.’
‘How did she die, then?’ I asked with foreboding.
‘She bled to death.’ He looked again to the pulpit. ‘Someone has been hard at work with a brush and pail.’
I felt ill again.
‘That’s the way it appears to me.’ Standing up, he turned to face me, looking down. ‘See, there are no marks on the door of the church.’
I stood up too, uncomfortable with him looming over me. You never knew what might fall off his head. ‘Why should there be?’
‘It means the murderer had a key to the door, else the door frame would have to be broken.’
‘How so?’
Waggling a finger, he explained. ‘No one leaves their doors unlocked these days, certainly not in these parts, and this killing was carefully planned. So the murderer had a key.’
‘Maybe they were just passing, in a carriage, and the man saw the door open.’
‘Call me cut if you would.’ Bending down he picked something up off the floor. A dead mouse.
I stepped away and folded my hands behind my back. ‘To take a person’s eyes out is surely madness. Why should madness not strike a man suddenly?’
‘The madness you are talking of is born of fury. The madness that happened here was cold and planned. Beside, it is too much to credit that the door was left unlocked, here near to Alsatia, off the road from Fleet Ditch. Too unlikely. The rector would never have left it so. The man had a key, which signifies that he was scheming ahead.’ He headed out back into the wintry graveyard. Out on the porch he stretched back his arm and threw the dead rodent into the bushes, then he wiped his hand on his backside. I made a mental note never to buy meat at his shop. Then he placed the same grisly hand upon my shoulder! My body went rigid.
‘Now, sir. Would you be so kind as to tell me what brings you here?’
A fair question. My father’s letter sat snug next to my chest, my ears still burnt from the shrill lecture I had received from Prynne and my courage was still recovering from the threats made to me by Shrewsbury and his henchmen. These were things I knew I would need to share with someone were I to make sense of them, but I didn’t at that time think that I wished to share them with him.
‘All I can tell ye is that Anne Giles is supposed to be my cousin, yet I only discovered it this morning. Before that I had never heard of her. Now I am asked by my father to find out who killed her.’
He looked down at me like he was my uncle, knowing that I didn’t lie; yet knowing also that there was more truth to be told. Given that my uncle had been a foolish man (that had been kicked to death by a cow) this did not endear me to him any the more.
‘And your name is really Harry Lytle?’
Also I did not want to talk about my name. I had spent most of my life listening to witty comments that compared my name to my lack of stature. ‘Aye.’
He mused, like he was weighing me up like an order of meat. Then he smiled a cheery grin and proffered the same dreaded hand. ‘David Dowling.’
I took his hand briefly. It was cold and clammy. I quickly let it drop, wondering whose blood I now carried upon me. I didn’t know what to say to him next — I think I was hoping that he would just tell me who had done it.
‘You speak well for yourself,’ for a butcher. ‘How do you come to know the Mayor?’
‘I served as constable, elected five years in a row. Not here, that wasn’t. That was when we lived out in the village. Stealing, vagrancy and drunkenness mostly. I helped out our local alderman a few times since coming to London. That’s how the Mayor knows of me.’
‘Most men would avoid such appointments.’ Men like me.
He puckered his lips like a woman, he showed no inclination to say more. ‘Aye, sir. That they would.’
‘I am supposed to find out who killed Anne Giles. A job best done swiftly, I think. Are you accomplished at such tasks?’
Dowling smiled again, though this time I thought I saw something prickly in his eye. ‘I don’t know, sir. I have never tried it.’
I grunted. So much for having the thing finished by Friday. ‘You must be able, else the Mayor would not have spoken for you.’
‘If not pleased, then put your hand in your pocket and please yourself.’