I didn’t even know she had an aunt. No desire to meet her neither. Last thing I needed was Jane soliciting reinforcements.
My front door was wide open. When he saw it Dowling bid me wait and went straight inside. No thought for his own safety, I noted approvingly. His turn, I reckoned. While I waited I tipped my hat to the baker who I didn’t like much.
Dowling reappeared quickly, even paler than he’d been before. ‘Learn to do well. Plead for the widow,’ he whispered. What that meant, I had no idea — but something wasn’t right. I pushed open the door, stepped in and stood in my own front room with my hands on my hips. There was a funny yet familiar smell. I looked to Dowling who flicked a finger in the direction of my kitchen.
‘I could tell you what is in there, indeed it might be better for you. Else you may choose to look for yourself.’
‘I choose to look for myself.’ I pushed Dowling out the way and threw open the door. I stopped two paces in, just short of a wide, sticky pool of dark-red blood, smelling rich and foul like the waste bins of any abattoir. The blood formed a thick coagulation that covered most of the floor but congealed mainly around one leg of the kitchen table. On that table were two heads. One head was fat and bald with lots of chins and a thin moustache. Its eyes were rolled up and the mouth formed a small ‘o’. The lower chins were incomplete, ending in the ragged edge that marked where the head had been hacked from its body. The second head stared forward through narrow black eyes, its lips drawn and teeth bared, as if it blamed me for its predicament. This head was younger, hair thick, straight and brown. The lips were white, but from the corner of the mouth there trickled a still and stagnant line of dark blood. The heads had been cut savagely with some thick saw-edged knife, not very sharp.
‘I doubt that you recognise them,’ Dowling walked in quietly, ‘so I feel bound to introduce you to Mr Mottram and Mr Wilson. That is Mottram.’ He pointed to the fat head, ‘and that is Wilson.’ He pointed to the younger head.
‘The men that would have killed me?’ I pulled at the shirt about my neck. I felt hot and the room was stuffy.
‘Aye, Mottram and Wilson. We were looking for them. We didn’t find Mottram, but we found his wife. She gave us the name of the second man. She called him the weasel. That’s the weasel there.’ Dowling pointed at the second head again. ‘Wilson was well known, a thief and a bully. He ventured out with Mottram sometimes. He lived outside the city wall to the east, close to the Tower. We didn’t find him neither. Until now, that is.’
The table was thick with blood, soaked. It would never be clean again. What would Jane say? I would just have to get a new one. Dowling put an arm around my shoulder.
‘No sign of their bodies? Just the heads?’ My stomach contracted and my skin prickled. I turned and walked weakly out the kitchen.
‘Just heads. I think they were killed as punishment for failing to kill you. Their heads I think must be trophies, to scorn our own poor efforts to find them.’ He closed the kitchen door quietly.
‘Matthew Hewitt, then.’ I looked at the walls, and cursed the pervasive malodorous stink that clung to them so tenaciously. ‘I know it is Hewitt.’ Hewitt that invaded my home with the dead, stinking artefacts of life now extinguished. Too many heads today. I shook my own head and walked back out onto the street where the air was clean of the smell of human blood and gore. Cleaner, anyway.
Dowling sighed. ‘I fear that we have come to the end of it. John Giles dead, Joyce dead, now Mottram and Wilson.’
I looked into his big plain face, full of honesty and goodwill. ‘No.’
‘No?’ Dowling’s grin returned, faint.
I told him the idea that was taking form in my mind even as I spoke. My next great plan. Dowling’s grin disappeared and he started to protest. My soul was set, however. I was not going to let Hewitt go free. But first to Shoreditch to talk to Mottram’s wife myself.
Chapter Sixteen
See and consult.
Shoreditch was a little hamlet beyond the city walls to the east. The road that led there was long and winding through tenement after tenement over what had once been lush farmland. The countryside was being ravaged, now covered with house after house after house, a carpet of identical little timber buildings, each with tile roof, each one a small hovel of squalor, damp and pestilence.
I wasn’t a very good rider. My arse was sore and the insides of my thighs worn and raw. The rain began to fall, dripping down my back and soaking into my trousers. The rough road, soggy and wet already, churning up. The roads of little Shoreditch were narrow and uncobbled and the mud was inches thick, stirred and layered with refuse and sewage. Suspicious faces peered out at me from behind small, dark windows. Smoke curled upwards out of the roof holes and downwards into the houses. The government had a tax on chimneys; so poor people blocked them up and choked to death instead of starving.
Heading towards the church I called to a man who walked with a basket of what looked like onions, looking for directions to Mottram’s house. He looked at me blankly — no surprise there — then shot me a furtive glance and hurried on without saying anything useful in reply. I cursed him impatiently, for the wet weather meant that there were few others around to ask. I rode around a while longer before dismounting clumsily and landing awkwardly on my ankle. I limped towards one of the low houses, one with smoke coming out of its roof, and banged my fist on the top half of the split wooden door.
‘What do you want?’ shouted a deep, gruff voice from within.
‘I’m looking for Mrs Mottram, recently widowed. She lives around here.’ I pushed at the door, but it was bolted.
‘Aye, well if you knows that, then you should know where she lives.’
‘If I knew where she lived I wouldn’t be asking, would I?’ It was like playing guessing games with a monkey.
There was a silence. I took off my hat and shook it. From every window about me eyes watched. Like flies, they disappeared as I turned towards them, only to resettle once my attention was fixed elsewhere. I could feel them like lice on my body.
‘What do you be wanting with Mrs Mottram?’ the voice from inside shouted from behind a window across which was stretched a layer of paper soaked in oil. I tapped my finger on the tight paper.
‘If you open the door we can talk. Otherwise I’m going to have to cut a hole in your window.’
The top half of the door swung slowly inwards. A long, narrow face poked out, topped with an unruly tangle of rough, wiry, brown-grey hair, bottomed with a thin, unkempt small beard designed to mask a fiercely receding chin. The face stared at me with squinty eyes, both looking inwards, wrinkled nose and raised upper lip. Although it was pouring with rain he looked as if he was struggling with the glare from a tropical sun.
‘Who are you?’
‘Harry Lytle, and I want to help Mrs Mottram.’ I stood back, not wanting to alarm him.
‘Be a bit late to try and help her like, Harry Lytle. Her husband’s dead and she ain’t got no one to look out for her. Unless you intend to provide for her, which I doubt, looking at those fine clothes you got.’ I had changed out of the butcher’s clothes as quick as I could, so ruining another expensive outfit.
‘I want to find out who killed her husband.’
‘Not sure how that’s going to help her, Harry Lytle. He’s dead now and she ain’t got no provider. Could help her find his head, though, that’d be helpful. Mighty put out she is, not having his head.’
‘How did she find the rest of his body?’
‘Weren’t hard. It were sitting outside her front door yesterday mornin’. Back up against the wall, legs out straight. Looked very comfortable, by all account.’ The man leant forward and wrinkled his nose, smelling the air. ‘So what you be wanting with Mrs Mottram, then?’