By Christ, what had happened?
At the bottom, dressed in dirty chemise, an old woman with one flabby breast on display stopped him. “Oi, ye silly bastard, have ye seen me pig?”
There was straw stuck to her feet, and from her doorway, Kierney could smell rancid pig shit.
“He’s up the stairs, I think,” he said.
The old lady started up. “Piggy? Piggy? Where the fook are ye?”
Downstairs, the Widow Clow had already worked through half a bottle of gin, and this by noon. When she saw Mickey Kierney come down, nearly falling as he tried to pull on his muddy Hessian boots, she speared him with her remaining eye.
“Ye fat little gob,” she said, wiping drool from her greasy face with a coal-smudged hand. “Where’s me Sammy?”
Kierney grinned. “That be yer son, love?”
“Quit with yer sass, ye ripe shit… where is that silly worm?”
Kierney entered the parlor, bowed to a couple sailors making their way out the front door, and dropped into a chair across from her. He drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop. “What was the question, fine lady?”
“Where’s me son, ye bastard?”
“Why, he’s in the loo a-saying his prayers, I should think.”
Using a sharp deboning knife, the widow cut herself a wedge of chew from a block of rough-cut tobacco and worked it into her gums. “He is, is he? Well, ye can tell that rare bit of puss he can bloody well stay there with his own kind.”
“Yer in a rare mood, Widow Clow,” Kierney said.
“Shut yer thieving, lying mouth.”
“Certainly I will, lady. Thank you.”
Kierney made to help himself to her chew and that knife came slashing out, nearly taking off his thumb. “Oi, ye don’t be helping yerself to what’s mine, ye wee little sore. Sammy let ye have a room, but it were up to me, I’d throw yer foul ass into the street. Yer no good, Mickey Kierney, and ye never have been.”
Kierney smiled. “Aye, ’tis all true. I’ve tried to live up to your Christian ways, lady, but I lack your purity and virtue—”
The knife slashed out again, this time for his throat. The widow swore and shook with anger, wanting nothing better than to slit Kierney right open and dance a happy jig over his corpse.
Clow stepped into the room, seeing his obese mother on her feet, swollen ankles, goiter, and all, stumbling about and trying to stab Kierney, who was laughing and merrily dancing away from her.
“All right, knock it the fuck off,” he said.
They both stopped.
Swearing, the Widow Clow sank back into her chair with a thud that shook the table. Kierney acted like he could barely keep on his feet in the aftershock. “Like some great whale has dropped from the sky,” he said.
The Widow Clow snarled and threw the knife at him. It missed him but stuck right into the rotting woodwork, the handle quivering.
“Now, why ye got to go and get me mother all worked up,” Clow said, smiling. “Leave the fine, fat, murdering whore to her own devices.”
The widow scowled at her son. But with only two blackened teeth left in her gums, the effect was almost comical. “Ye randy shit, I shoulda drowned ye when I had the chance! Filthy grave-robbing scum! I gave me life for you! I ruined me mind and ruined me body trying to raise ye proper and this be me thanks! Turning me fine house into a graveyard! Me cellar into a morgue! And who washes them bodies ye fish from them dank holes, eh? I do! I wash away the grave dirt and worms, and this is how ye treat me, ye dirty buggering filth! I curse the day I lay with yer father! I curse the day I squeezed ye out! Had half a mind, I’d bring the police in here! Let ’em hang ye, I would!”
Clow was not smiling now.
Something dark and unforgiving had settled over his face. He stepped over to the Widow Clow, pulling a long skinning knife from his coat. “The police, Mother? Ye’d call them fucking peelers on me, would ye?” He brought the knife to within inches of her good eye. “Is that what ye’d do?”
“Sammy—” Kierney began.
“Family business, son, that’s all this is. See, me mother would sell her only son to them peelers and that gets me to thinking I’ve got room for one more down in me workshop.”
The Widow Clow was afraid of no one. She did not back down from man or woman or rabid dog. She ran a house for rough, desperate men in the dirtiest gutter of Edinburgh. But there was fear now in her one eye, and whether that was because her son was capable of matricide or she feared the very idea of him leaving her alone in the world, it was hard to say.
“But I was only rambling, son of mine,” she said. “Surely I’d not sell ye off.”
“There’s a girl,” Kierney said.
Clow put the knife away. “Ye be careful, Mother, speaking like that. Why, there’s resurrectionists in this town that kill for far less.”
The Widow Clow pulled off her gin. “I needed to talk to ye, son. Johnny Sherily was around to see ye early this morning. He said the peelers might be wanting to a-speak with ye.”
Clow glared at her. “And about what?”
“About Ian Slade and his brother, Andy the Piker. Word has it ye brandished yer knife at Slade over to the Grassmarket when they strung Leaky Baker. Threatened him like, they say.”
Clow remembered. But it had been only a defensive measure of sorts. Slade had been drunk and ugly and looking for a fight. “Aye, but it was nothing but a display amongst friends.”
The widow spit tobacco juice into a brass spittoon. “Mayhap it was, but folk in the crowd remembered, Johnny say’d, and they told them peelers all about it.”
Kierney sat forward now. “But there was no harm done… why would the police be interested in that? About Ian and his brother?”
“Because they’re gone, vanished into the night.” She looked from Clow to Kierney. “Johnny say’d there were no foul play, but something worse. He say’d they’d gone up to the North Burial Grounds to fish out a corpse… only they never came back out…”
“We’ll do it, Mickey, to prove to ourselves that we’ve not a lick to fear about,” Clow said later that night as he steered Old Clem down the sooty byways of Edinburgh.
“But the North Grounds…”
“Nothing to fear, friend, nothing to fear. Remember? It were the gas that made us see and hear that which were not there at all.”
Kierney nodded but did not look convinced.
The night was quiet. There was only the sound of Old Clem’s hooves on the wet cobblestones, the creak of the buckboard he towed. A few stray autumn leaves blew through the air. To either side, dark-gabled houses of stone and half-timber rose up, leaning out over the street until it seemed their sharp-peaked roofs would touch. They cast thick, reaching pools of shadow into the narrow, winding avenue. Lamps had been extinguished and shutters closed. Only drunks and dogs and rats prowled the lonely wynds now.
Other than grave robbers, that was.
It was November, and soon the ground would be like trying to dig through flint, so Clow figured it was best to lay in a supply of cadavers while they had the chance. Come winter and the snows, the digging was over. Bodies were stored in aboveground vaults and the competition to get at them could be fierce and often dangerous.
“But what of Ian Slade and his brother? Were no gas that made them disappear, Sammy Clow.”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Clow nodded. “I’m thinking it must be, Mickey. I told ye the story of me uncle Roy at Ramshorn Cemetery? How them rats had burrowed into that coffin from below?”
“Ye did.”