Alice held out her papers. “I’m a private detective, licensed by Scotland Yard. I’ve been asked to take a look at the body. Unofficial channels and such. It won’t take long.”
He’d been at work on a man with a long black mustache much like his own and there were tubes running into the cadaver’s arms. He kept going back and forth, checking the progress. There was a streak of something dark on the side of his face and Alice didn’t care to wonder what it was.
“It ain’t suitable for a lady’s sensibilities, now,” he warned, looking at Mrs. Harrogate.
“She’ll be all right,” said Alice dryly. “She’s the least sensible lady I ever met.”
Mrs. Harrogate stiffened with a silent dignity.
After a moment the night embalmer shrugged. “Suit yourself. But only for a moment now. My work don’t finish itself.”
He led them downstairs into a long cellar with rows of little doors along one wall and lit a lantern and proceeded past to a second, smaller room. Here on a steel table Alice saw what appeared to be a washbasin. Something was swimming in a stew inside it.
“Go on then, have your look,” he said.
And he hung the lantern on an iron ring from a rafter.
It wasn’t a body. Whatever it was, it wasn’t that. The smell was of ammonia and alcohol and under these a sweet, sickly, wrenching scent, like rotting vegetation. The bits were half-congealed in a mess but Alice could make out an elbow and forearm and crooked hand, also what appeared to be a foot with the bone sticking out, also a face with the eyes cut out.
“Them’s chew marks along the edges,” said the embalmer. He drew a slow, steady finger to show. “Here and here. What done this weren’t human.”
Just then the keywrasse, as if from nowhere, leaped noiselessly up onto the table and put its paws on the edge of the basin.
“Mother of God, what’s he doin in here? Get out, you!” And the man picked up a rag and snapped it at the keywrasse.
But the cat was already gone, in a flicker of darkness, out the door and through the long cellar and back up the stairs and gone. Alice looked at Mrs. Harrogate; the older woman nodded.
It was done.
Back outside, in the reek of Limehouse, the keywrasse was impatient. It led them swiftly through a warren of slick shadowy lanes, over courts and under arches, until it came to a sunken pier where several figures sat in the darkness, fishing lines slack. Alice held the bull’s-eye lantern high, to see where they were. The keywrasse was padding back and forth, its tail high, ears alert.
“This will be where they fished the body out,” murmured Mrs. Harrogate. “It’s taking the scent now.”
“Or maybe where the bastard went in,” said Alice.
And then the keywrasse was off, again, away from the river, winding back through the gloom and fog and racing between the legs of the crowds, untroubled by the filth and the horses and the roar of the high street. Alice found it hard going, keeping up. The fog descended, a sharp bitter taste to it, as if the vast lime kilns were poisoning the air.
The yellow fog thickened; and then, like a rolling curtain, it parted for only a moment and Alice caught a glimpse of a figure cutting past a bollard and sliding like a shadow around a building, a figure half-hunched, wearing a long black coat and a bowler hat. But even at that distance and in the dark she could see the unnaturally white skin of its neck, the long sharp fingers hanging from the cuffs, and she knew it was this that they were seeking.
The keywrasse had already poured silently across and into the mouth of the alley. It was a thief’s lane, so named for the hidden exits and sudden turnings, crooked and narrow and littered with the sprawled legs of the indigent poor. Alice shuttered the lantern and picked her way cautiously over the bodies. Half were children, half were barefoot. The keywrasse slid into the fog, reappeared, vanished. She could see the greasy panes of upper windows dully reflecting the mist. All were barred. Her nerves were steady.
The lane forked and she went left after the keywrasse and she heard Margaret softly follow. There were puddles of slime underfoot. A sound of dripping water.
She nearly tripped over the keywrasse. She could smell the river, nearby. The lane had come to a dead end. Mrs. Harrogate appeared like a ghost, eyes veiled.
But now ahead Alice could see it, the pale figure from High Street, the litch. It was standing raggedly with its lean arms at its sides and its hat doffed and hairless head bowed, almost as if it were listening for something. For a moment she feared they’d been sighted. But then it turned, peering around as if to be certain it was unobserved, and the fog thinned just at that moment, and Alice saw its features, and she froze. The auburn whiskers were gone, the thinning hair was gone, but still she knew that face.