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As they came into view, he saw Menders raise his arm, point hispistol at something, pull the trigger, and curse: “Jammed, damn thething!”
He looked to where the constable had aimed and saw Tamworthsprawled on the ground. The man's jacket and shirt had been rippedaside and his stomach torn open. Squatting over him, hands buriedin the policeman's intestines, was a thin, bearded, bespectacleddead man. The corpse looked up, moaned, and stood. Entrails oozedfrom his hands and fell to the cobbles. “My apologies,” he said. “Ineed life.”
“Mary, mother of God!” exclaimed Menders. He threw his pistoland it bounced off the bearded man's forehead.
Sergeant Piper whispered, “Useless. You can't kill a bloodystiff!”
“Piper, stay with me,” Honesty commanded. “The rest of you,behind the cordon, now. That's an order.”
Menders swallowed, gave a hesitant nod, and started to back awayfrom the bearded man, who stood swaying, as if uncertain whether ornot to collapse to the ground and admit his demise.
“A bloody stiff,” Piper repeated. “But still bleedin’ wellmovin’.”
A top-hatted, well-dressed cadaver suddenly emerged from thecloud beside them, grabbed Menders by the shoulders, and sank histeeth into the constable's throat before dragging him out ofsight.
Constable Carlyle saw his colleague die, let loose ahigh-pitched scream, panicked, fumbled for his police whistle,raised it to his lips, and started blowing long, loud, repetitiveblasts.
“That's the signal!” a constable named Lampwick a
“Impossible!” Trounce snapped. “It's too early.”
He and his men were close to the smoldering skeleton of Ye OldeCheshire Cheese, which had burned to the ground the day before. Therioters enjoyed setting fire to taverns as much as they enjoyeddrinking in them. Judging by the stench, on this occasion they'dmade the fatal misjudgement of combining the two activities.
“But listen to that whistle, sir! That can't be a mistake!”
“Constable Lampwick, we're expecting Mr. Swinburne to arrive viaWaterloo Bridge, so the signal should more or less come fromstraight ahead. It sounds to me like the whistle-blower is withDetective Inspector Honesty's team on Kingsway.”
Trounce shifted from one foot to the other uneasily. He took offhis bowler and gave it a hard slap.
Something wasn't right.
He shoved his hat back onto his head.
A decision had to be made.
What if he got it wrong?
The distant whistling stopped.
“Hell's bells,” he hissed under his breath.
What to do? What to do?
Trounce became very still for a moment.
He blinked.
The Scotland Yard man suddenly wheeled to face his men andbellowed: “Arm yourselves, lads. We're moving forward. Proceed withutmost caution. Do not, under any circumstances, mistake this forthe Charge of the blessed Light Brigade, is that understood?”
There came a great many, “Yes, sirs.”
A hundred and fifty uniformed men took out their police-issueAdams revolvers, unhooked their truncheons, and, following Trounce,advanced slowly into the fog.
“Did you hear that, Commander?” Sergeant Slaughter asked.
“Yes, but it was ahead of time, farther away than it should be,and from the wrong direction, to boot!” Krishnamurthy replied,puzzled.
“It's the fog, sir. You know how it distorts things.”
“Humph!”
The commander of the Flying Squad couldn't stop thinking aboutMilligan. The man was a personal friend and had a wife and child.Witnessing his life terminated so abruptly and so senselessly hadbeen shocking.
He sighed and forced the flier's death to the back of his mind.Duty first!
“Something must have happened,” he muttered. “So do we proceedinto the Strand now or do we wait until the pla
“Maybe this is the pla
Krishnamurthy clicked his tongue and considered a moment. Headdressed his men: “We're going to wait. Ready yourselves. I wantabsolute silence. Keep your ears to the ground. Be prepared to moveat a moment's notice!”
“Stop blowing that bloody whistle!”
Constable Carlyle stopped.
“You blithering idiot!” Detective Inspector Honesty growled. Hestamped over to his subordinate. “You just ruined the whole-” Hewas brought up short by the sight of a sword blade projecting fromthe constable's chest. It slid back into the man's uniform anddisappeared.
Blood spurted.
The whistle fell from Carlyle's mouth and tinked onto the road.The policeman followed it down.
From behind the body, a man shuffled out of the mist. He was aRake, plainly, but he was also at least three days dead. His lowerlimbs were saturated with fluids and bulged horribly against hisclothing. The swollen hands holding the sword, and the cane fromwhich it had been unsheathed, possessed the sickening appearance ofold uncooked sausages. His skin was the colour of earthworms, hissagging bottom lip dangled against his chin, and his eyes wereturned up and sunken into their sockets.
“Awfully thorry,” he lisped. “That mutht be a terribleinconvenienth!”
There and then, Thomas Manfred Honesty decided he wanted tospend a great deal more of his time tending to his garden.
“More pink dahlias,” he muttered to himself, thinking about thestate of his little plot's bottom border.
He drew his revolver.
“Yellow marigolds, perhaps.”
He aimed at the dead man's head.
“Blue geraniums.”
He squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. He sighed, pocketed it,and hefted his truncheon.
“Perhaps marigolds.”
He stepped forward, knocked the sword blade aside, andbludgeoned the corpse's head once, twice, thrice, four times, untilit flew apart in a spray of white bone, black clotted blood, andgrey brain tissue. The cadaver crumpled and lay twitching.
“Good mulch!” Honesty muttered. “That's the secret.”
“Sir!” cried a voice behind him. He turned and saw Piper andPatterson backing away as more bodies loomed out of the miasma.
“Everyone advance!” he shouted to his team behind the cordon.“Guns don't work. Use your truncheons! On their heads. As hard asyou can. Crush their skulls!”
Detective Inspector Honesty and Detective Inspector Trouncecautiously led their men toward the centre of the Strand, one teamproceeding from the north, the other from the east.
As they penetrated the thickening fog, the walking dead, withsword-sticks drawn, came staggering out of it to meet them. Theywere well dressed, debonair, and faultlessly polite.
“I'm mortified,” one of them confessed as he jammed his fingersinto a constable's eye sockets. “This really is despicablebehaviour and I offer my sincerest apologies.”
“I say!” another exclaimed, plunging his blade into a man'sabdomen. “What a terrible to-do!”
“It's all rather unseemly,” noted a third, urbanely, afterspitting a chunk of flesh from his mouth. He looked at thethroatless uniformed man he held slumped in his arms. “I do hopeyou won't consider me boorish.”
The constables swiped their truncheons, crunched skulls, andsplattered lifeless brains, but they were badly outnumbered and,furthermore, were distracted by swooping wraiths.
The seeming ghosts wafted in and out of sight, sometimes almostsolid, other times a mere suggestion, and every time one appeared,policemen nearby slumped and clutched their heads. More than a fewsuddenly turned, with the word “Tichborne” blurting out of theirlips, and attacked their colleagues.
Police truncheons smacked down onto police heads. The Rakesweren't the only ones apologising.
The battle intensified.
“Don't hold back, lads!” Trounce shouted. “Have at ’em!”
He stepped aside as a svelte and fashionable but sagging andbluish corpse minced out of the pall and said: “What ho! Would youmind awfully if I took your life, old thing? I seem to have mislaidmy own. Jolly careless of me, what!”