The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

‘And was your ploy successful?’

Doll pulled a face, and wrapped her shawl around her exposed flesh.

‘Nah. The bastard took me for that type of actress who is no better than a bawd. He groped me, and so I stuck my knee in his groin and beat a retreat.’ She sighed. ‘My days of being laced mutton are well and truly over.’

Malinferno burst out laughing, imagining the great tragedian turning an unusual shade of green and clutching his privates in agony. Perhaps the experience of exquisite pain could be drawn on when next he performed King Lear. But Doll Pocket was clearly in no mood to laugh.

‘And that’s my days as an actress over too. And before they’d even started. What am I going to do, Joe?’

Malinferno stifled his laughter and sympathised, stroking Doll’s shoulder.

‘There will be other parts, Doll.’

‘Yes, I suppose I could be a mountebank, and go bareback trick riding in Astley’s Amphitheatre.’

Picturing her in that famous circus bouncing along on the back of a horse, it was an image that Malinferno found irresistible. But he knew Doll was not of the same opinion. She so wanted to be a legitimate actress in one of the great theatres – either Drury Lane or Covent Garden. But it seemed the most she could hope for was to feature in one of the unlicensed theatres that had sprung up all around London.

Disconsolate, she idly leafed through the papyrus sheets that Malinferno had been poring over so unsuccessfully. She turned her head as though trying to see them another way than how Joe had been construing them. She stared, and then twisted the paper round.

‘Which way do you look at these, Joe?’

Malinferno’s stomach was beginning to rumble at the thought of a chop for breakfast, and tried to divert Doll’s attention from the puzzle on the papyrus.

‘Upside down, if you wish. Now, what about the chop-house?’

Doll airily waved her hand, and sat down in the chair Joe had been occupying.

‘You go, Joe. I am not at all hungry.’

He sighed, knowing that, when her attention had been captured by something, Doll Pocket would not be moved by simple considerations of food and drink. He decided to let her be distracted from her disappointment about play-acting for a while. He was ravenous, if she was not. So, leaving her to gaze at the hieroglyphs, he grabbed his garrick, pulled the shabby but serviceable overcoat on, and went in search of food.

He eventually found himself trudging past the stench of Billingsgate fish market, and over the river at London Bridge. He had in his mind that he might find his old friend Augustus Bromhead at an unpretentious chop-house in Unicorn Passage just off Tooley Street, south of the Thames. Bromhead lived in a rickety tenement house in Bermondsey, and knew all the best eating houses on the south bank of the mighty river. He had introduced Malinferno to this establishment a year or two ago, but Joe had not been back since. He would not have walked so far, but was suddenly eager to conjoin good food with stimulating conversation.

On entering the low-ceilinged, smoky chop-house, he saw he was in luck. A curiously shaped fellow, resembling a tadpole because of his large, leonine head and stubby body, was perched on a high stool at the back of the premises. Augustus Bromhead was apparently breaking his fast with a steaming plate of well-cooked chops and boiled potatoes. Malinferno shimmied his way through the crowded room without disturbing the stolid transfer of food to the mouths of the numerous diners, and slid on to the bench opposite to his friend. The little man acknowledged his arrival with just a nod of his oversize head. His jaw was occupied with the mastication of his meal. When he finally swallowed, he wiped his lips with a stained napkin, and spoke.

‘Giuseppe…’ he always used Joe’s proper name, reminding him of his Italian origins, ‘… dear boy, you look as though you have been burning the midnight oils. I have not seen such baleful, red eyes since I stared into the awful face of Ben Crouch of the Borough Gang.’

He was referring to the notorious resurrection man and leader of a gang of body-snatchers who had nearly done for him and Malinferno both. Malinferno shuddered at being reminded of the incident.

‘I have been working on the Egyptian hieroglyphs in my possession. All to no avail, I fear.’

‘Ah.’

Malinferno could hear in the brief monosyllable the sound of Bromhead’s disapproval. Augustus was an antiquarian of some repute, but his obsession was British history. He considered this unseemly fad for the artefacts and symbols of a far-distant land a temporary aberration and complete waste of time. He had told Malinferno so several times, attempting to bring him back to the right and proper course of study by pointing him in the direction of British history, particularly King Arthur and his putative bones, on more than one occasion. Bromhead was deprecating about the significance of the Egyptian pictorial images, and now said so.

‘Take it from me they are no more than a rebus. A puzzle in pictures.’

‘That is not what Champollion thinks.’

Bromhead snorted in derision.

‘That upstart Frenchie? He knows nothing. And besides, has he not gone quiet the last few years?’

Malinferno had to admit that Champollion did seem to have disappeared off the face of scholarship after a brief blaze of early glory. Most English scholars now thought he had gone down a blind alley and, having failed miserably, hidden himself away in shame. The torch was now being carried in England by Thomas Young.

A waiter in a dirty long white apron, which betrayed the signs of several lost battles with the gravy on the plates he served, came and took Malinferno’s order. Both men were silent as the waiter cleared Augustus’ empty plate from the table. After he had gone, Bromhead reached down from his high stool, on which he had to sit to reach the level of the table, and groped for a leather satchel on the floor. When his outstretched fingers failed to reach it, Malinferno took pity. He lifted it up, noting how heavy it was.

‘What do you have in there, Gus? It feels like a whole library of books.’

Bromhead ignored his companion’s deliberate shortening of his first name. He hated being called Gus, and Malinferno knew it. And he knew it was said just to provoke him, so he kept calm. He stroked the battered leather satchel.

‘You are not far wrong there, my friend. It is a whole series of plays in one, in fact.’

Bromhead lifted the flap of the satchel, and extracted a dusty tome from its interior. The leather was dry and cracked, and so old as to be of an indeterminate hue. He reverently tipped the book on its back and laid it on the table, carefully avoiding the wet ring left from the base of his ale mug. He brushed more dust from the book’s surface.

‘I found it in a poky little bookshop in a lane leading off Paternoster Row close by St Paul’s Cathedral. I had never seen the passage before as it was so narrow. And it was only out of curiosity that I ventured down it this time. The only shop open in the lane was a dingy affair that looked as though it had not changed since Jacobean times. The sign over the door read Dole’s Printers, and guessing that there might be some gems mouldering away inside the shop, I went in. The interior was a jumble of pamphlets and badly printed books, overseen by an old man who looked as antique as the shop itself. Indeed he blended so well into his surroundings that I did not see him until I had raised some dust by lifting a few tomes up. It caused him to cough like some diseased sheep. A sort of cross between a bleat and a death-rattle. I apologised and moved to the back of the shop, further away from his ink-stained desk. It was there I found this.’