Beneath London by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page B

off down the footpath, coming in sight of the cottage within a few minutes. The plank door stood open. He paused, hiding himself behind a tree trunk, listening to the wind through the branches, but hearing little else. Nothing moved. There was no smoke from the chimney of the slate-roofed cottage, which was built of stone and with windows of old bull’s-eye glass. He listened hard for sounds from within, and looked for an indication of someone lurking, but there was nothing visible, neither a wagon nor a horse. He stepped from his hiding place, crossing a board that lay over a deep, still brook, and he saw that a wagon track ran away west from the clearing where the cabin lay – the road past Hereafter Farm, no doubt. A white chicken hurried out through the open door now and ran off around the side of the house.
    He stopped just outside the open door, listening again to the silence, and then peered in past the low lintel. There was the unmistakable smell of a dead body on the warm air, and he could hear the buzzing of flies. The interior of the cottage – one room, very nearly square, and with a wooden floor – was dark, and it took him a moment to see that someone sat on a chair by the hearth, unmoving. It was a corpse, headless – a woman, no doubt Sarah Wright. Her gown was soaked with blood, and she was tied into the chair. There were several turns of rope about her body.
    He took in the rest of the room before going in: a tall cupboard set into a recess in the wall, the contents strewn on the floor – dishes, books, cooking implements. The cupboard itself had been pulled away so that the intruder could see behind it. The bed stood on its side, the torn mattress on the ground spilling out feathers. A loom near the hearth had been broken to pieces, a half-woven rug in the frame. Floorboards had been prised up, exposing the packed dirt beneath.
    Someone had pulled the place apart searching for something. Quite possibly they had murdered Sarah Wright because she wouldn’t give it up – the secret, perhaps, that Mother Laswell had mentioned, although to murder her in this horrific fashion… There was a necessary room in the corner, with a door that stood open, the small closet clearly empty.
    St. Ives looked carefully around himself at the trees that stretched away on all sides. The place had a lonesome air to it. A pair of squirrels scampered along beside the stream now and up the trunk of a beech, chattering to each other, and a rooster strode out from behind a pile of firewood and stood looking at him. He stepped into the interior of the cottage, where he set his shillelagh against the corner of the wall by the door. He saw now that holes had been dug into the dirt beneath sections of torn up floorboards. Had they found what they were looking for, he wondered, and he walked across to view the body, his eyes growing used to the dim light. From the charnel house smell it was likely that she had been murdered yesterday, the village boys discovering her this morning.
    A bunched square of cloth lay on the floor, which he picked up and held to his nose, immediately smelling the residue of chloroform, although it had dried by now. Whoever had committed the atrocity had done Sarah Wright the service of deadening her senses. Possibly she had simply been murdered with the chemical, although the ghastly quantity of spilled blood argued that her heart had pumped it out unto the very last moments. The incision appeared to be remarkably neat to him – the work of someone who was familiar with the use of a scalpel and saw.
    There was a rattling outside now – the sound of a wagon drawing up, having come along the road from the west. St. Ives stepped to the door and retrieved his shillelagh, before looking out at the wagon, and recognizing the driver – Dr. Lamont Pullman, the coroner, along with the village constable, a pleasant but slow-witted man named Brooke. With a deep sense of relief St. Ives went out under the now