I shook away the image, but the motion made my headache worse and brought on the nausea again. The air reeked of opium smoke—cheap, rotten, diluted, and polluted opium. I could not believe that for weeks I had come here for Opium Sal’s terrible product—sleeping the sleep of the drugged in these same filthy cots, all crawling with lice and vermin. What had I been thinking?
What had I been thinking last night—or however many nights ago it was—when I had descended beneath the crypt to join the Chinese mummies in that other opium den?
It had been Inspector Field who came with Hatchery to take me out of here so many months ago. It had been Inspector Field who suggested I go to King Lazaree’s den under Hatchery’s protection. Could it have been a plot all along? Could Field have murdered Hatchery—perhaps out of anger that the huge detective was working for me on the side?
I shook my aching head again. None of that made any sense at all.
Deep inside my skull, I could feel something move with six sharp legs and stag beetle pincers. I could not help it—I screamed in terror as much as in pain.
Inspector Charles Frederick Field and Detective Reginald Barris burst in.
“Hatchery’s dead,” I said through teeth that were chattering again.
“I know,” barked Inspector Field. He seized me by the upper arm in the same knowing grip that the other policeman had used that morning. “Come along. We’re going back there now.”
“Nothing can make me go back!”
I was wrong. Inspector Field’s powerful hand found a nerve in my arm that I did not know I had. I cried out in pain, rose, and stumbled along between Barris and the heavier, older man as I clattered—half-pushed, half-supported—down the stairs into a group of other men waiting in the street.
Altogether, counting the inspector and Barris, there were seven of the quiet, tough men, and although none were dressed in police uniform, I knew immediately that all had been policemen for the better part of their lives. Three of the men carried shotguns of some sort. One openly held a huge cavalry pistol at his side. Having never had any interest in things or people military, I was shocked at the sight of all this weaponry on a London city street.
But it was not really London, of course. It was Bluegate Fields. As we left New Court and passed a litany of dingy streets I had seen in all seasons for at least two years now—George Street, Rosemary Lane, Cable Street, Knock Fergus, Black Lane, New Road, and Royal Mint Street included—I noticed that the rag-wrapped bundles of misery in the courts and tenement doors, both male and female, shrank back into shadows or disappeared into darker doorways as we passed. They also recognised the seven deadly-serious men with firearms as policemen when they saw the grim knot stride past their awful hollows.
“What happened?” demanded Inspector Field. His iron grip was still hard on my quaking arm. I had brought a blanket with me to act as a sort of shawl over the filthy workman’s jacket, but the wool was cheap and the cold wind cut through it at once. It was snowing again.
“What happened?” prompted Field again, shaking me slightly. “Tell me everything.”
At that second I made one of the most fateful decisions of my life.
“I remember nothing,” I said.
“You’re lying,” snapped Inspector Field and shook me again. All pretext of his workingman detective status showing deference to my gentleman status was now gone. I might as well have been one of the Smithfield or Limehouse felons whom he had handled with such a similar iron grip over the decades.
“I remember nothing at all,” I lied again. “Nothing after taking my pipe last night in King Lazaree’s den at about midnight, as always. Then awakening in the dark some hours ago and finding my way out. And discovering… poor Hatchery.”
“You’re lying,” the inspector said again.
“They drugged me,” I said tonelessly as we entered the last of the alleys before reaching the cemetery. “Lazaree or someone put some drug in my opium pipe.”
Detective Barris barked a laugh at this, but Inspector Field silenced him with a glance.
There was another tall man wearing a topcoat and carrying a shotgun standing guard at the entrance to Ghastly Grim’s. He touched his cap as we approached. I pulled back as we came to the gate, but Inspector Field propelled me forward as if I were a child.
The snow had covered the headstones and statues and outlined the flat roofs and ledges on the crypts. The dead tree that brooded over the last crypt rose against the cloudy sky like a spill of black ink rimned with white chalk.
Three more men waited inside the crypt, their breath hovering over them like trapped souls in the cold. I looked away but not before seeing that they had covered Hatchery’s eviscerated body with some sort of canvas tarpaulin. The grey, glistening garlands were gone, but I noticed a second, smaller tarpaulin in the corner covering something other than Hatchery’s corpse. Even in the cold air, the small space smelled like an abattoir.
Most of the men who had accompanied us through the streets peered in at the crypt door and waited just outside. The crypt was small and seemed absurdly crowded now with six of us in it, since everyone avoided standing too near to Hatchery’s covered corpse.
I realised with a start that one of the three men waiting in the crypt was not a policeman or detective but was a giant Malay, his black hair hanging long, dirty, and lank down his neck, his arms behind his back and his wrists cruelly cuffed by iron manacles. For a confused second I thought him to be the Malay we had just left behind at Opium Sal’s, but I saw this man was older and his cheeks were unscarred. He stared at me without curiosity or passion, his eyes dulled in the way I had seen in condemned men before or after their hangings.
Inspector Field moved me towards the narrow entrance in the floor, but I pulled back with all of my will and energy. “I cannot go down there,” I gasped. “I shall not.”
“You shall,” said Inspector Field and shoved me forward.
One of the detectives guarding the tall Malay handed a bullseye lantern to the inspector; another was given to Barris. With the younger detective leading and Inspector Field holding me tight by the arm as he shoved me ahead of him, the three of us descended the narrow stairway. Only one other man—a detective who was a stranger to me and who carried a heavy shotgun—went down with us.
I CONFESS, DEAR Reader, that many elements of the next half-hour or so are lost to me still. My terror, fatigue, and pain were such that my state of consciousness was rather like that which we experience when hovering near the threshold of sleep—now aware of our surroundings, now dropping off to dreams, now jerked back to reality by some sound, sensation, or other stimulus.
The stimulus I remember most was Inspector Field’s insistent, incessant iron-grip on my arm pulling and pushing me this way and that in the lantern-lit darkness of the pit.
In the lantern light, the short descent and walk to King Lazaree’s den was as familiar as a recurring dream, holding nothing of the nightmare of my panicked flight in the darkness.
“Is this the opium den?” asked Inspector Field.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no. Yes. I don’t know.”
Instead of the red curtain hanging, there was a rusted grate just as on all the other loculi. The bullseye lanterns showed piles of coffins within rather than rows of three-tiered bunks and the bier with the ever-present Buddha figure of King Lazaree.
“This grate isn’t set in the wall like the others,” grunted Barris, grasping the rusty iron and shoving it in. It clanged like the bell of doom as it hit the stone floor. We entered the narrow space.