The Twelfth Night Murder by Anne Rutherford Page B

should save the willie for you?”
    He fell silent, embarrassed.
    Pepper said, “I thank you for your assistance, good man. You’ve done your duty as a Christian toward this unfortunate child.”
    The boatmen both nodded, but nevertheless were plainly disappointed.
    Suzanne addressed the others standing around. “Did anyone here see anything else? Did anyone see the boy when he was alive?” She knew there was a public room full of men and whores who had seen him alive the night before, including herself. She was going to have to get names from Young Dent and search down anyone who might know something. The crowd here on the quay knew nothing, and shook their heads. These were all more or less honest day dwellers, who rose with the sun and did their sleeping at night. It was the night folk who might have witnessed this murder, and they were the ones who would be the most reluctant to provide information even if they had it.
    She gazed at the bridge starlings once more, and the water rushing between them, and in her mind’s eye saw how the body had floated between them on the current. Perhaps it had gone beneath the waterwheel to be shot out the other side and caught in an eddy by the bank. The body might have fallen from the bridge. She looked upriver, at the stone banks of Bank Side that disappeared around a bend to the west. The body could have come from anywhere along there, or could have entered the water from any of the four stairs between it and the bridge. The victim may even have been killed on the other side of the river, a bank dotted with wharves, but she felt it unlikely. Had he entered the water from the north bank, the current would most likely have also deposited him on that side. Since the boy had been seen in Southwark that night, she felt strongly he must have entered the water there. That, at least, defined the area she was most likely to find witnesses. She would be able to concentrate her questioning on this section of Southwark, and wouldn’t have to go far afield unless she found nothing here.
    “Well, Constable,” she said, “I suppose we need to find a wagon in which to transport this poor fellow.”
    Pepper looked at the stairs leading upward to the alley that came to the river from Tooley Street, and sighed.
    Later that day, once a wagon had been found to move the murdered boy and the body carried up the stairs by the boatmen, Suzanne and Constable Pepper were able to make a leisurely examination in the back room of a hospital. There several oaken tables stood about, bearing two other unfortunates who had died in the area that day. Each was covered with a stained and worn linen bedsheet, and they made Suzanne take frequent glances from the corner of one eye, lest one of them move. The littlest one, who was either a dwarf or a child, looked as if it must be breathing. How could a child not be breathing? It was too terrible to contemplate, so her eyes insisted they saw the tiny chest rise and fall.
    A box filled with assorted medical tools sat on the table where the murdered boy lay. Pepper investigated the contents, and began laying out little knives, a thing that looked like a pair of tongs, a small hammer, an extremely sharp chisel . . . and some other things she couldn’t even guess at.
    The heavy, carved door at one end of the room stuttered open in its ill-fitting frame and in came Marcus White, the coroner. The man was tall, skeletally thin, and he walked with a long, lurching stride that quickly ate the space between the door and the table where Pepper and Suzanne stood. He dressed more richly than was appropriate for his station, and he barely glanced at the two living persons in the room. His attention was riveted on the boy, whose legs still splayed indecently and whose arm lay over his forehead. Out of the water and nearly dried, he almost appeared as if he were even at that moment under attack, and struggling to save himself.
    White took one of the victim’s knees in hand and