William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

again, the one who had been still alive in that dreadful place. The memory of it made him feel cold and sick. He was too tired to find the strength inside himself to overcome it.
    He said good-day to Shotts and walked briskly in the generaldirection of Regent Street, where he knew he could find a hansom.
    In St. Thomas’s Hospital he went straight to the morgue. He would look at the bodies and deduce what he could for himself and then ask Riley to explain to him what else there was to learn. He hated morgues, but everyone he knew felt the same. His clothes always seemed to smell of vinegar and lye afterwards, and he never felt as if the damp were out of them.
    “Yes sir,” the attendant said dutifully when Evan identified himself. “Doc Riley said you’d be ’ere some time, prob’ly today. I only got one body for yer. Other one in’t dead yet. Doc says as ’e might pull through. Never know. Poor devil. Still, I suppose yer want ter see the one I got.” It was not a question. He had been there long enough to know the answer. Young policemen like Evan never came for anything else.
    “Thank you,” Evan accepted, feeling a sudden surge of relief that the young man was still alive. He realized now how much he had been hoping he would be. And yet at the same time it meant he would wake up to so much pain, and a long, slow fight to recover, and Evan dreaded that, and his own necessity for being part of it.
    He followed the attendant along the rows of tables, all sheet covered, some with the stark outline of a corpse beneath, others empty. His feet rang in the silence on the stone floor. The light was harsh, beaming back from bare walls. It was as if no one but the dead inhabited the place. There were no concessions to the living. They were intruders here.
    The attendant stopped by one of the tables and pulled the sheet off slowly, uncovering the body of a middle-aged, slightly plump man of average height. Riley had cleaned him up very little, perhaps so Evan could make his own deductions. But with his clothes absent it was possible to see the terrible extent of his injuries. His entire torso was covered in contusions, black and dull purple where they had bled internally while he was still alive. On some the skin was torn. Several of the misshapen ribs were obviously broken.
    “Poor devil,” the attendant repeated between his teeth. “Put up one ’ell of a fight afore they got ’im.”
    Evan looked down at the hand nearest him. The knuckles were burst open and at least two fingers were dislocated. All but one of the nails were torn.
    “Other ’and’s the same,” the attendant offered.
    Evan leaned over and picked it up gently. The attendant was correct. That was the right hand, and if anything, it was worse.
    “Will you be wanting to see his clothes?” the attendant asked after a moment.
    “Yes, please.” They might tell him something, possibly something he could not already guess. Most of all he wanted to know the man’s name. He must have family, perhaps a wife, wondering what had happened to him. Would they have any idea where he had gone or why? Probably not. Evan would have the wretched duty not only of informing them of his death, and the dreadful manner in which it happened, but where he had been at the time.
    “ ’Ere they are, sir.” The attendant turned and walked towards a bench at the farther end of the room. “All kept for yer, but otherwise just as we took ’em orff ’im. Good quality, they are. But you’ll see that for yourself.” He picked up underwear, socks, then a shirt which had originally been white but was now heavily soiled with blood and mud and effluent from the gutter in the alley. The smell of it was noticeable, even there. The jacket and trousers were worse.
    Evan undid them and laid them out on the bench. He searched them carefully, taking his time. He explored pockets, folds, seams, cuffs. The fabric was wool, not the best quality, but one he would have been happy to wear himself. It was warm, a rather loose weave, a nondescript brown, just what a gentleman might have chosen in which to conduct an expedition into an unseemly quarter of the city—not, perhaps, one as dangerous as St. Giles. No doubt for his normal business he wore something better. The linen of the shirt would suggest that his taste and his pocket both allowed a greater indulgence.
    All that told him was that the man was exactly what he’d thought, from somewhere else, seeking either pleasure