C Harris - Where Shadows Dance

“Sorry.”

Sebastian tossed the stained clothes aside. “Maybe Bow Street’s had some luck with him.”

“You could try them.”

Sir Henry was eating a quiet dinner in the Brown Bear across the street from the Bow Street Public Office when Sebastian walked up to him.

“My lord,” said the magistrate. “Please, sit down. You’re looking for me?”

Sebastian slid onto the opposite bench and ordered a tankard of ale. “I’m interested in the gentleman whose body was dumped out at Bethnal Green last Saturday.”

“You are?” said Sir Henry with obvious puzzlement. “Why?”

Sebastian leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “I think he was killed by the same man who killed Alexander Ross.”

Sir Henry took a bite of his pasty, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “You have a reason for this belief, my lord?”

“I do. Only, I’m afraid I can’t explain it to you just yet. Have you made any progress in identifying the body?”

“As a matter of fact, we have. It’s difficult to confirm, given the state of the corpse in question, but we have reason to believe he may be a Mr. Ezekiel Kincaid, who disappeared from an inn called the Bow and Ox on the Blue Anchor Road, near the Surrey Docks.”

“Ezekiel Kincaid?” Sebastian frowned. The name meant nothing to him. “Who was he?”

“As far as we can tell, he was an agent in the employ of the Rosehaven Trading Company.”

“Rosehaven? Now, why does that sound familiar?”

“Perhaps because it is owned by Mr. Jasper Cox, brother of Miss Sabrina Cox, the young lady who was betrothed to the late Mr. Alexander Ross.”

Sebastian stared at him. “The trading company reported Kincaid missing?”

“No, actually. They were under the impression he had sailed for the United States.”

The United States again. Sebastian said, “So what makes you think Mr. Kincaid didn’t sail?”

Sir Henry reached inside his coat. “It seems the young thatchgallows who reported the body to the constables first helped himself to this—” He laid a plain gold pocket watch on the table between them.

Sebastian flipped open the watch and read the inscription. To Ezekiel with love, Mahala. “It’s an uncommon name, I’ll grant you that. But if Mr. Kincaid wasn’t reported missing—”

“Ah, but you see, he was. He never retrieved his possessions from the Bow and Ox. I understand the ship he was set to sail on—the Baltimore Mary —waited as long as they dared. But they were finally forced to sail without him or miss the tide.” Sir Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve had a look at the man’s baggage; they were keeping it for him at the Bow and Ox. In it was a letter from his wife, Mahala.”

Sebastian was aware of a suspicion forming on the edges of his thoughts. “A letter from where?”

“Baltimore.”

“Kincaid was an American?”

“Oh, yes. Didn’t I say?”

The Surrey Docks lay on the south bank of the Thames, some two miles below London Bridge, in Rotherhithe. Once, this had been the center of the great Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London every April to return at the end of the season bearing blanket pieces of blubber that were then cut up and melted in vast iron pots. The stink of hot oil still permeated the district, mingling with the foul stench drifting downriver from the tanyards of nearby Bermondsey.

It was a squalid area of canals and basins lined with storehouses, of factories and artisans’ shops and reeking tidal ditches. The air rang with the pounding of hammers, the thwunk of axes biting into wood. Wagons loaded with iron and hemp, canvas and squawking chickens, clogged the mean, narrow lanes. “Place always gives me the willies, it does,” muttered Tom as they rattled over the uneven cobbles. “Too many foreigners, I s’pose.”

Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “That must be it.” He swung the chestnuts in through the arch of the Bow and Ox. “The inn at least appears respectable—and very English.”

An ancient, half-timbered inn with a lichen-covered tile roof and cantilevered galleries, the Bow and Ox catered to the company agents and factors whose business required them to frequent the nearby docks and their less than savory environs. “Water them,” said Sebastian, handing the horses’ reins to his tiger. Despite the lengthening shadows that told of the coming of evening, the afternoon sun was still brutal. “Just don’t let them get carried away. I shouldn’t be long.”

He found the landlady in the taproom. She was a short, rotund, grandmotherly-looking woman with a disarmingly beatific smile, who tsked sadly when asked about Ezekiel Kincaid.

“Aye, I remember Mr. Kincaid all right, poor lad,” she said, drawing Sebastian a pint of ale. “Said he had a wife and two sons, back in America. I keep thinking of them so far away, waiting for him to come home and never knowing what happened to him.”

“What do you think did happen to him?”

She set the tankard on the boards before him. “Footpads, if you ask me. Should’ve known better than to go off alone at night like that. And him so nervous, too.”

“Nervous? In what way?”

“Oh, just ever so anxious, if you know what I mean?” She reached for a towel. “I kept his things for him, in case he came back for them. But that magistrate from Bow Street carried it all away with him.”

Sebastian took a sip of the ale. “How many days was Mr. Kincaid here?”

“Never spent a night, poor man. Why, he’d only just docked that very morning. Took a room and ate a meat pie in the public room, he did, then went off for a good long while. If I recall, he said something about needing to see someone in the West End, but I could be wrong.”

“He never came back?”

“Oh, no; he did.” She ran the towel over the ancient dark wood of the bar. “Came back and had his dinner. But then he went off again, and that was the last anyone saw of him.”

“No idea where he went?”

“Well, he did come and ask how to get to the St. Helena tea gardens. It’s a lovely place, you know, with a brass band and dancing most every evening in summer.”

“Where is it?”

She nodded downriver. “You follow the Halfpenny Hatch there, through the market gardens, to Deptford Road. ’Tisn’t the best area to go walking through after dark, mind, seeing as how the top of Turndley’s Lane is known as something of a resort for footpads. That’s what we thought, when we realized he didn’t ever come back—that he’d run afoul of footpads.”

“You notified the constables?”

“The next day, yes. They checked along the pathway and all around St. Helena but never found a trace of him. No one at the tea gardens remembered seeing him, so we reckoned something must’ve happened to him before he got there.”

“Tell me, what did Mr. Kincaid look like?”

“Hmm ...” She paused, her face screwed up with thought. “He was in his thirties, I’d say. Hair the color of a haystack. Didn’t notice his eyes, I’m afraid. He was a nice lad, to be sure, but it was hard when you were talking to him to notice anything but his teeth.”

“His teeth?”

“Aye, poor lad. Could’ve eaten an apple through a picket fence, as the saying goes.”

Sebastian drained his ale. “What ship did you say he came in on?”

“The Baltimore Mary . She was at the Greenland Dock.” She gave him a considering look. “Going down there now, are you?”

“Yes. Why?”

She nodded toward the window, where the westering sun was casting long shadows across the road. “Best hurry, then. You don’t want to be anywhere around there when it starts getting dark.”