“Take this coat to Bow Street,” said I to her, “for I am going down there, too.”
Mr. Bailey shook his head emphatically, unable to speak for the club in his mouth, yet I followed him down. I hooked the lantern with the thumb of my left hand; only so was I able to proceed with the pistol in my right. I went down as careful as could be, yet when I descended below the level of the ground, and the mephitic odor of the river rose about me, I was near overcome. Whether my hand or my foot slipp)ed, I know not, yet I landed with both feet and a splash into the water below. I held tight to the lantern, but in righting myself with my other arm, I wet the pistol.
It was quite like I had jumped into a chamber pot. Thank God, it was not over my head, but high enough. The water was well above my waist, nigh to my chest. To Mr. Bailey, who was much taller, it came only at waist level. He sloshed over to me, club and pistol now in each hand.
“Let’s be thankful you didn’t douse the lantern,” he whispered. “You’re down here, so let’s proceed. Before you hit the water, I heard splashing up in the direction of Holbourn. Come along. You hold the lantern high.”
There were now no sounds of splashing, no sounds of any sort except for the soft scurrying of rats. I looked about and detected movement on a kind of shelf that ran along the narrow course of the river on either side. We moved down its center w here it was deepest. Though the Fleet was a sewer, it was also a river, and we struggled somewhat against its current.
Along the way, at intervals of about three rods, there were large columns on either side, abutments which supported the arches overhead. It became evident that it was behind one of these that Mr. Bailey expected to find our quarry. He slowed at each one, and was most especially watchful, directing me silently to swing the lantern left and right to illuminate the dark shadows at the far side of each of these columns.
So we had come to ten or perhaps a dozen of these but, more importantly, had just left one behind us. when close to our rear I heard a sound, though not a great one. and I whirled about. There, no more than six feet away, was the figure of a man, rising from the water. He stumbled towards me. I got my pistol up and fired point-blank. It flashed weakly, misfiring from its dip in the water. Yet he faltered before he lunged at me with his hand forward — though I cannot say I saw it, I knew somehow that it must hold a knife. I leapt back and to my left, away from Mr. Bailey, and the blade did miss me. though by no more than the width of three fingers. At just that moment Mr. Bailey delivered him a great clout on the back of his neck: it should have laid him low. but it did not. He turned to the constable, and jabbed with the knife in his direction, which left his hand exposed. Mr. Bailey brought his club down upon his wrist, knocking the knife from his grasp down into the water. Still he came forward like the madman he was. seeking to overwhelm that much larger man with no more than his bare hands. His back was to me. I struggled forward against the current, thinking to bring down the pistol barrel upon him. Yet before I quite reached him, Mr. Bailey delivered one final, skull-crushing blow to his head. The man fell flat into the water and sank beneath it.
”Jeremy,” cried the constable, “are you safe? Did he cut you?”
“No, I’m right enough. He missed close, though.”
Mr. Bailey tucked away his club, still holding the unfired pistoclass="underline" then did he reach down to retrieve the body of our assailant. He felt about ‘He ain’t here.” said he.
“The current,” said I. “the current must have moved him. ‘
I went splashing back, searching with my feet and finally came in contact with the body about six feet or more from where he had fallen. I planted my foot firmly and held the body in place.
“Here he is.” I called.
Together we lifted him from the water. I held the lantern to his face, yet the wet hair that obscured his features made it impossible to make them out. Mr. Bailey put his hand to the chest for a long moment then shook his head We had no choice but to drag him back between us the way we had come.
As we pulled him along. Mr. Bailey remarked: T don’t know was it my blov^ to his head, or drowning that killed him.” After a bit he added: Think of drownmg in all this piss and shit”
‘He swam below in it to get behind us.”
‘Desperate men do desperate things. Or so Sir John says.”
Some minutes later. I made out the dim shaft of light from the open trap door through which we had descended into this hellish place.
“He went at you first Jeremy, because you had the lantern. The pistol misfired from the wetting I gave it falling off the ladder. All I could do was jump away from him.”
“Aye. but you kept hold the lantern. In the dark he might have cut me proper. I couldn’t have done without you, lad.”
Somehow, pushing and pulling, we managed to get the inert form up the ladder to the surface. I who had done the pushing, emerged last of all. To my surprise, a group had gathered m anticipation of our return, among them constables Cowley and Picker. They paid me little attention, for they had laid the body out upon the pavement and had pushed back the hair. Two good-sized Bow Street lanterns were held over him. Uneasily, I looked carefully at those peering down at the dead man and noted the absence of the woman to whom I had entrusted my beautiful bottle-green coat. Yet before I could worry overmuch about it, I heard the constables exclaiming.
“By God, Mr. Bailey,” said young Cowley, “look who you brought up. It’s the medico, that one who was an Army surgeon!”
“Damn me if it ain’t! See here, Jeremy, it’s Amos Carr!”
I pushed forward and saw, to my amazement, that Mr. Bailey was right. It was indeed Amos Carr.
TWELVE
There was great surprise and no little consternation when it was bruited about Covent Garden that Dr. Amos Carr was the perpetrator of those bloodiest homicides. Sir John Fielding himself was shocked quite beyond belief until he did order a search of the doctor’s apartment and surgery which resulted in grisly discoveries that incriminated the medico ex post facto. There were bloodied clothes discovered in his wardrobe, yet worse was found in a cabinet in his surgery: there in a glass of gin discolored slightly to a brown tint were found two eyeballs — the missing eyes of Libby Tribble, as Gabriel Donnelly attested.
Mr. Donnelly also helped Sir John gain some understanding of what had turned Amos Carr in such a devious direction. He explained that Dr. Carr had the pox, which Sir John had, of course, not known; and further, that in the last stages of that dreadful disease the brain is sometimes infected with results quite unpredictable. It could be, he suggested, that Dr. Carr, perhaps for good reason, believed himself to have been infected by a prostitute, and that his diseased brain urged him to take revenge upon this unfortunate class of women. Had he not been spied in the act of mutilating the corpus of his third victim, he would probably have continued upon his murderous course as long as he lived (which, considering the advanced state of his disease, might not have been so very long). As later quoted to me by Mr. Donnelly, Sir John’s comment upon all this was that, absent any other explanation for those otherwise incomprehensible crimes, he would have to accept Mr. Donnelly’s, for there could be no doubt that Amos Carr was the man hauled out of that sewer, nor of the incriminating nature of the gruesome evidence found in his place of dwelling.
As for me, save for the tribute paid me by Mr. Benjamin Bailey, I received little praise for accompanying him down into the Reet. Mr. Donnelly, who was among that group gathered round the body of Amos Carr, chastised me for having put myself in environs so insalubrious. And once the constables had done marveling at the identity of the corpus, they stood well away from it and from Mr. Bailey and me, for the odor of the sewer offended them. They were greatly dismayed when their captain ordered them to carry the body away.