The Devil's Ribbon by D. E. Meredith Read Free Book Online

fingerprinting?’
    ‘I couldn’t even see them presented on the table, such was the scattering of crumbs and coffee cups. But there you have it. Why expect more from that oaf? As a physician, he’s only interested in infectious diseases.’
    ‘Indeed. Well, that’s most disappointing, for it throws all our plans for forensics to the wall, unless I can think of some other way to raise money. At least we’re back in favour with The Yard. But, Adolphus, I must press you on Mr McCarthy. Is there not something strange about his face? Aside, that is, from the grimace of poison?’
    Hatton looked at the face with more attention. ‘It does lookunusually swollen, but we’ve already established, quite precisely, the cause of death from the gut samples. The hairline is never quite the same once the face is taken off.’
    ‘I think we only need to open his mouth, Professor.’
    Hatton looked at McCarthy again. Was Roumande right? It was normal for the visage to be puffy, but perhaps around the mouth there was something else? There was only one way to find out and he secretly chided himself for not noticing, unprompted, as this was his normal exacting approach. He hated to make excuses but he’d slept little and was still out of sorts.
    ‘The rigor is advanced because of the poison, and the jaw will be clamped like a vice …’
    Roumande already had the pliers ready. Hatton took them and pushed the tip through first, between the dead man’s lips, until he heard the click of metal on enamel. ‘Pass me the thinnest blade we have, Albert. Let me just see if I can push it through here.’ He leant under the chin and twisted the knife. The jaw snapped open, crocodile fashion.
    ‘You’re right, my friend. McCarthy’s had more than his breakfast it seems …’
    ‘What is it, Professor?’
    ‘It’s what I feared,’ Hatton said, pulling a long line of silk from the dead man’s mouth. ‘You know what this means, don’t you, Albert?’
    ‘That we must see it properly, Professor,’ said Roumande, telling Patrice to open the morgue door, quickly, so they could dry the ribbon in the sun. It was wet with mucus and old blood, disguising its true colour.
    ‘
Mon dieu
,’ Roumande gasped. It was boiling outside, the hottest part of the day. Hatton joined his friend to examine the silk, which began todry instantly and morph from black into a vibrant green, which was a calling card Hatton had seen before. Three years ago, when an off-duty English soldier had sauntered into a tavern, saying it was easy to get a fuck in Kerry, for a slice of toke, and my oh my, weren’t those colleens as beautiful as they were willing? Any orifice you damn well liked. Whatever was your pleasure, and they called themselves devout Christians. The soldier arrived on the slab an hour later, scalped, his ribs crushed, his heart cut out, and an emerald green ribbon in his mouth.
    Ribbonmen,
thought Hatton.
Fenians
. And he remembered the ribbons which he’d first seen in Edinburgh, ten years ago. Worn in the hats of the gangs of so-called Ribbonmen, who claimed to be political activists, but were nothing more than a band of felons, outlaws who ran things as they wanted in the Irish quarters of any city they came upon. The emerald ribbons, worn as a measure of solidarity with other groups of peasants across the sea, who ran roughshod the length and breadth of Ireland, attacking English troops with anything to hand – pickaxes, shovels, even boughs of hawthorn. Was it all now returning to the very heart of London? Were they here to break the Union, as they once threatened they would be?

FOUR

    LIMEHOUSE DOCKS
    Just past midday, and the sun shimmered on shards of steel. At this point, the river was a mercurial sea, choppy and brackish. At low tide, mudflats would stretch for miles towards the marshes of Kent, a squelching melee of whelks, fish heads, bits of old china, Venetian glass, Roman pennies, and, occasionally, bodies. Emerging from the wash,